November 2023
Chris Slack, founder and broker at The Finance Consultancy, was crowned Australia’s Finance Broker of the Year at the Australian Broking Awards 2023 earlier this year. In this Elite Broker profile, we catch up with the finance broker to learn how he developed his company in the world of business finance solutions and his top tips for writing business finance
Q. How did you get into broking?
I did a commerce degree and started those career-style roles, working at a bank as a financial planner.
Eventually, I had the opportunity to work alongside Barry Lambert at Count Financial as national asset
finance manager and that was a fairly formative part of my career.
I then worked as national BDM in asset finance and though I really loved my job, I was working incredibly hard. I was working 80 hours a week and I wasn’t really present for my family at the time. I went to my employer at the time and said: ‘Look, this isn’t working, what can I do?’ And we worked out a solution.
Q. How did you find making the transition to broking?
The first six months of being a broker truly is scary stuff. Being self-employed is scary.
Luckily, I made a lot of decisions early on and those decisions were very much about long-game thinking. It was certainly not about how to get a quick dollar or how to get a quick client.
By investing the time and making sure my brand was out there the right way and by having the reputation I wanted to build throughout from day one, those little decisions have really paid off.
Q. Your brokerage is called The Finance Consultancy. How did you come up with that
name?
There is this perception that a broker is a transactional person … but it’s not just about property
loans.
It’s not just about working capital. It’s about other things like foreign exchange, transaction banking,
all
these other areas lead to an understanding of a client by a lender for different reasons.
So it was a conscious thing, setting myself up as a consultancy rather than a broker. I think people look for our advice around a transaction.
We see the client as the quarterback of their own business. They have all sorts of people advising them and giving them information. Our whole business purpose was around wanting to be that extra phone call – whether it be by a client, lawyer, accountant, adviser, or another finance broker – to make sure that a client’s optimised their product, their solution, [and] their strategy. And by working with all these different people, we were able to deal with more complex transactions. And that’s kind of what gets me out of bed every day. I love the difficult.
Q. What’s the wackiest or weirdest thing you have funded?
Over my career I’ve helped finance some bitcoin mining gear.
And one of the accounting firms I did some work had a principal who was an aerobatic pilot. So, I did a lot of $60,000–$80,000 Cessnas. Financing 30 or 40-year-old planes with banks was soul-destroyingly hard work!
Q. How did it feel to be named Australia’s Finance Broker of the Year at the Australian
Broking Awards?
It was great recognition for what we do. We’re incredibly proud because we got some amazing outcomes for
our
clients last year and to be able to have my team around me, too, was incredible.
It was so rewarding to get up there and to be able to thank so many people on such a big stage. Though I certainly didn’t prepare anything and it was very daunting!
There’s not a lot of brokers that focus outside property and have our skill set of looking at working capital and business acquisitions and asset finance. So, while I found it was really great for myself, it was great to acknowledge brokers like myself that focus on non-residential lending.
It’s also been incredibly flattering to see the reaction from so many of our stakeholders and clients. And it’s been quite overwhelming. But it’s also something for us to aim for because now we’ve won the award – we need to work to keep it! Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Q. What tips do you have for people entering the finance broker space?
There’s a lot of people that come from different industries who have managed to come to finance broking
with
a sense of relationship building. They’ve understood what’s important to different business owners and
they’ve been able to relate.
I don’t think it particularly matters how you’ve come to finance broking, so long as you spend the time knowing the types people you want to work with. Money will come, so just focus on the people you want to work with.
