Chief executive of Melbourne-based brokerage Cinch Loans, Suvidh Arora, recently sat down for the Elite Broker podcast to talk about how he’s grown his business in just a few short years.
In this Q&A, we find out how and when Mr Arora became a broker and what motivated him, the route he took to get to where he is now, the story behind his brokerage’s name, the types of loans Cinch writes, and his top tips for other brokers.
Here’s what he had to say:
How and when did you get into broking?
I think around six years ago now. I was going through my own mortgage process at the time and I found myself getting frustrated by the lack of knowledge within the people who were trying to get my mortgage done.
They weren’t telling me much about how the process works, what the different products were, and were unable to answer a lot of my questions.
This was through the bank system and I thought, “There has to be a better way of doing this”. I spoke to a few brokers and found out what they do and I thought to myself that this was an industry I could get into.
Coming from a background in investment banking and strategy consulting, I thought it was a perfect fit for me. I had the finance knowledge and the drive to help people, so I just jumped right in.
What route did you take to get to where you are now?
I started out as an independent broker. I was a sole broker for 18 months and it got a bit lonely, I didn’t really have any mentors in the industry at the time and I didn’t know many people.
It was tough because I had just moved to Australia, but I thought I’d just try my luck and spoke to as many people as possible. I started out as a broker in 2016 and I didn’t write my first loan until April of 2017, it took a long time.
But from April 2017 to March 2018, business picked up and I’d written $38 million in loans.
How did you come up with ‘Cinch’ as the company name?
Well, there are two reasons. I wanted it to be something that was basically telling people that we can make everything easy for you.
We don’t use a lot of jargon with our clients and we try to make everything as simple as possible. As such, we try to make it a “cinch”.
My name also means “easy”, so that’s another reason that it just happened, it wasn’t planned, it just worked out that way.
What sort of loans are you writing?
When we started, there was a clear focus. The strategy was that we would primarily deal with first home buyers only, purely because most of our client base is high-salaried, white-collar workers and if we could get in at the ground level with them when they were buying their first property while giving them a good experience, we could help them scale that property ladder and buy their second, third, fourth property.
That’s how we originally started. From there, we grew exponentially in a sense, we brought in a commercial team where we started doing commercial deals. Although we never really marketed doing commercial, auto, or asset finance, clients always asked.
We’ve gotten to a point where now, if we want to do something, we just send out an email newsletter to our existing client base of over 3,000 people and we get plenty of business through that.
What are your top tips for other brokers?
I think one thing is that they need to become a sponge. They should be absorbing everything. They should try to be the best version of themselves and set targets for what they want to achieve in the next four weeks to six months and so on. Then it’s a matter of holding themselves accountable for it.
I don’t think you need anyone else to tell you what you should be doing, you just have to hold yourself to a standard and tell yourself, “If I have to be successful, I owe it to myself to…”
Whether it means reading, following, and talking to people, getting guidance from someone, whatever it takes, use that time because once you start getting busy, you won’t have the time.
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That foundation is what helps you grow in this industry. It’s not the number of loans you write. It’s the knowledge, the wealth of knowledge that you create, how good you are at what you do because the actual loan writing is not that complicated.
It’s fairly straightforward. It’s how you think about the loans. It’s how you think about the process, about a mortgage as a whole, that’s what defines how good a broker you can be.
If you would like to find out more about Suvidh Arora and Cinch Loans, tune in to the Elite Broker episode How this broker has been rapidly growing his team below:
