Brenden Lowbridge first spoke to The Adviser in 2017 when he talked about his journey into broking, the loans he was writing, and shared his thoughts on the current lending landscape at the time.
Now coming off his win at last year’s Better Business Awards NSW where he picked up the award for Best Regional Broker, Brenden Lowbridge has returned to talk about how he’s built his brokerage over the years, what his current client base looks like, what he’d change about the industry, and his top tips for new brokers.
What were the biggest changes you’ve made over your broking career?
If anything it’s really been growing the team and establishing Money Links as a brokerage that extends beyond myself. I’ve been lucky enough to have some fantastic members join my team who are still with us today.
Now with a team of multiple brokers and excellent support staff, we’ve been able to grow the business and achieve much better results as a team. I’d say that’s been the primary change.
I think as a broker, it’s challenging knowing that you’re going to have to step back a little from the limelight, you can’t take every inquiry from a client, and you might not win every award, but it’s for the greater good of the business and we’ve been able to serve more clients due to having a fantastic team.
How many brokers work alongside you now?
There are three brokers and myself, so four in the team. Overall, we’re a team of 11, the four of us obviously do the customer-facing and recommendation work.
There are some young guys in the team who also have the ambition of becoming brokers and our goal for them is to help them progress through mentoring.
Where they are at the moment is sitting in a client file manager role where they’re essentially doing the processing on behalf of the brokers, but over time they’ll learn credit policy and we’ll help them with more strategic knowledge and develop their sales skills to ultimately move them into a broking role.
How would you describe your current client base?
Our target client would be someone who has high joint income, which is normally a young family with equity already in their house and they’re looking to try and optimise that and create wealth for their family.
While we will finance first-time buyers, we also do bridging loans for retirees. We have a broad spectrum of who we’ll deal with, we’ll do car loans, asset finance, commercial loans, etc.
To really narrow it done though, our ideal clients are investors. We’ve got clients with up to 19 properties and we’ve had great results working with them so far.
What are some challenges you’ve faced as a broker and business owner?
When you’re just a broker, probably the biggest challenge is your time management and managing your stress levels. When you don’t have extra support, you’re consistently piling on a workload on yourself.
As an owner of a brokerage, I think the hard part for me and probably others that I’ve spoken to is how and when to step back and what that means financially. If you’re a broker and you’ve been doing good volume, that’s obviously very good to the bottom line.
But when you start bringing in other brokers, revenue is being shared and then you’re doing business planning off the back of that and you need to make sure you’re across the numbers. This is something I’m continually working on, making sure that we’re across the numbers and what that means.
What would you like to see fixed in the broking industry?
Clawbacks. For me, they’re horrible along with the fact that banks are passing that cost onto a broker. They’ll bring in incentives to attract new clients but at the same time they’re encouraging churn and penalising the brokers.
Now under the new legislation, to have no comeback and recovery, it just creates more business risk for us as an industry in a time where there is all this incentive to switch lenders.
Do you have any top tips for new brokers out there?
I really do believe proximity is power. The more proximity a great broker has, the better off they are.
I admire those who break out in the industry and want to do things for themselves, but for me, I think having had the time to work in an office with fantastic brokers and also being able to maintain those relationships allows me to be good at what I do, which helps me share all of this with the team that I have.
If you’d like to find out more about Brenden and his Newcastle-based brokerage, Money Links, tune in to the Elite Broker episode Addressing the elephant in the room, below:
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