Legal Home Loans broker and director Cullen Haynes talks about his unconventional journey into broking, building a niche firm, and mastering social media.
You were originally a radiographer - how and why did you make the move into broking?
I was X-raying an 80-year-old cancer patient. She said: ‘Colin, make sure you do everything while you can because when you get older you might not have the time’. And I thought, what am I doing? I'm not living an inspired life… So I decided I wanted to do my MBA in finance.
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When I finished my MBA… I did a few years at Macquarie bank in leasing and working with the private bank there as well.
My [now] business partner, Andrew Johnson, used to work with me at the Four Seasons and then he went to BoQ Specialist. [One day] he gave me a call and said: ’Let's grab a coffee. I've got an idea that I'd love to run by you’. And it was the inception of Legal Home Loans!
Your brokerage now specialises in providing mortgages to those in the legal profession. Why did you choose to focus specifically on lawyers and how did you find them?
They're really time poor. They don't know much about finance… There's an under-serviced population of legal professionals out there that just need help and guidance because they're so busy.
When we started, we had no contacts and no money for marketing. But the one thing we did have was LinkedIn. Which all lawyers are on. And we thought, how can we really tap into that and not just sell?
We wanted to do it through education… I just put Andrew in front of a camera and said, let's talk about Lenders Mortgage Insurance (LMI). So the first video is (a heretical!) seven minutes, he's holding up a whiteboard, the light's shining in his eyes, he's talking about LMI and how lawyers can save [money]. But that got us started and then we started to realise that you can make short, punchy videos.
We started putting out regular content… We started to build our following on LinkedIn. And I think that was a really low-cost, low-risk way to get our name out there.
What’s your advice for brokerages looking to boost their brand awareness when starting out?
Make sure you make it known what you do because it's not who you know, it's who knows you. And so they'll only know what you tell them.
You need to actually go out there and put yourself out there: circulate to percolate! If you want things to happen, it’s like if you want coffee to become a great tasting drink; you have to be out there and move. So, you can't be behind your desk…
If you're someone who's a little bit of an introvert or someone who doesn't like meeting people, maybe get out of your comfort zone.
What are you hoping to achieve in 2025?
We've just fired up Accounting Home Loans (AHL), as well. So, we're branching off into a new division. While we’re still adding value to lawyers, we are also now doing so to accountants, who are very different to lawyers (but also very similar!).
We cannot wait to see where we take that.
Tune in to hear more!
Find out more about how Cullen Haynes has built a thriving brokerage on a huge social following on the Elite Broker podcast episode, ‘How this broker utilises the Laws of LinkedIn to build his book’ here:
