Louisa Sanghera puts women ahead of profits. Over seven years, Zippy Financial has helped several thousand women achieve financial independence and literacy by developing a tailored plan towards home ownership. Her work helped cement her win as the Women in Finance Award’s Mortgage Broker of the Year 2022 for the second consecutive year. We catch up with the NSW-based broker to find out more
Congratulations on being named the Mortgage Broker of the Year at the Women in Finance Awards 2022! What does winning this award mean to you?
The women in finance forum means a lot to me because I am in the female space. I went into the female space to help women.
I want to help young, single girls get a house. I want to help single mums that have been left on their own. I want to help divorced women. That is just something I wanted to do — they’re the people that really need the help. It’s very difficult for divorced single mums to get finance and to get into the housing market.
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[Zippy] works really, really hard to get the volumes that we get. We spend a lot of time with our clients. [For example] we spend years working on a plan to get people where they want to be. And that’s a key difference with Zippy compared to other brokerages. But I find it very satisfying. I’m not saying it’s the most profitable area, but that’s the area I wanted to work in.
Why have you chosen to focus on female clients (and divorcees in particular)?
Because, divorce rates are through the roof, and over my 30 years in finance, I’ve seen divorced women struggling to get back on their feet.
For single mums, it’s also very difficult… the cash flow is difficult, [getting] out of a rental into a property, [is difficult]. They’re the ones really struggling and they’re the people that need more help than somebody earning $250,000 a year in a secure job. They’re the people that I was really passionate about so that’s how I set up my business.
Also, we’re all female mums working from home [at Zippy Financial] because I wanted to give women the flexibility so they could look after the family.
How do you work with clients to achieve their financial goals?
I’ve got a whole team of people around me. We’ve got four financial planners, I’ve got somebody doing will and estate planning, I’ve got a divorce coach, we’ve got buyer’s agents, real estate agents, and we’ve got someone doing stocks and sharing advice.
We’ve got people covering everything financially within a team. I will do a joint meeting, it might be me, my financial planner, and the accountant as well. We’ll have a Zoom meeting together with the client so she’s speaking to us all at once and then we work as a team to get that person where they need to be.
I want these clients to come in and stay with us for life, so we give them excellent customer service. We really build close relationships. We get to bring in as many of the team as possible to look after these clients. That helps the client, but it also keeps the client with us for life and they are just the best referrers. We get a lot of business referred in now.
We don’t advertise anywhere, it’s all word of mouth. And that’s because we look after people and I feel like I’m their financial mum.
And then I have bought various Facebook groups and we educate women in those spaces and get business from those spaces.
You’ve also started the group Mum CFOs Money Masterclass. What is that about?
We must have supported thousands of women over the last seven years. But we’ve educated a lot more than that. I already do live streams and webinars [and] face-to-face little conferences and we try to share and educate.
But I just spent two years and just under $100,000 working with the whole team to put everything they know down on paper and in videos and now we’re getting that out to educate people [through the Mum CFOs Money Masterclass].
It launched a few months ago and while we are selling it to people, we’re giving it away, too.
[For example] when women have been abused and gone through shelters they’re not in the right state of mind to go through an education program, but when they come out of there, they are. And a lot of women [who have been] financially abused need [financial] education. So we’re looking to see where we can put the course out for free to help as many people as possible.
I always said that the cost was going to be a fortune — and $100,000 is a significant figure — we’ll never get that money back… but it was what I wanted to do; I wanted to get it out there to try and help as many people as possible. That’s just a feel-good thing for me.
