Q: How and why did you become a broker?
My journey started nine years ago in the aggregation space. I worked as an aggregator BDM [and then as] head of partnerships. I got to learn both sides of the fence, on the lending side as well as the importance of finance for our clients and trying to feed our broking network with opportunities.
I always had [a] dream of having my own brand. I got a little bit of a nudge from a fellow mortgage broker Fabio De Castro at Simplify Finance.
Q: What kind of loans are you writing?
Asset finance and a lot of them at the moment are cars. That is a big element of what we do.
Typical loan sizes are around that, $45,000–$55,000. We do cars, caravans, and a bit of debt consolidation, too. But each month there’s nearly always a chunkier type of application, whether it’s a $500,000 Scania or a $1 million boat.
Q: How do you find new business?
Even though I was fortunate enough to have been in the industry for so long and have a lot of relationships with people, it definitely didn’t come easy.
New business for us is about getting out there, talking to people, understanding the journey of our clients, and what their next transaction looks like [to] hopefully [get] a referral from that.
Or it’s going out and meeting brokers or accountants and setting up relationships that way. It’s just getting out there, picking up the phone, and talking to people.
Q: What top tips do you have to accelerate the loan process?
We set ourselves an SLA for five minutes to get in contact with our client as that inquiry comes through. You’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot! We run a soft credit check. I think that’s really important. It’s really interesting that brokers don’t do soft credit checks on their clients. For the times that we haven’t, it has bit us in the bum so it’s definitely a really important part of what we do!
We use time-based tasks out of our CRM that plug into our calendar so that we’re having really timely conversations with our clients [to] make sure [we’re] not forgetting anything.
