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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.
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