Brazilian-born broker Fabio De Castro went from being a bank BDM to writing more than $200 million a year in a multidisciplinary financial services business. He joined The Adviser’s Elite Broker podcast to share how he built his broking business and handles such a high volume in a growing business, without compromising on service.
Q. Before becoming a broker, you worked in banking. What drew you to finance?
When I came to Australia, I was on my own. I was 17, couldn’t speak English and needed to find a path for residency. I literally just went through whatever colleges at the time that were giving sponsorships. So, it went through commerce and economics.
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I was then a teller at a Bondi Junction branch, and that’s when I started learning how to do car loans, credit cards and then moved into mortgages and I worked at AMP as a BDM after that.
I was the type of BDM that wanted to understand a business just so I could really sell my product. I became friends with a few brokers and - when you see good businesses and, let’s say, bad businesses, and you see opportunity.
When I was doing that, I wanted to give it a crack myself and try to build my own thing.
Q. Do you think new brokers should specialise or be generalists?
When you start broking, everyone tells you to do everything because you have to protect your book and have to write asset finance and write personal loans. I don’t think that’s the case. I was very against the grain of that.
I think if you look at my business and what worked for me – it was being very good at one thing, which is residential lending.
We did start some diversification into different areas, but I did it in a way where I’d partner myself with people that were doing certain things.
I always wanted to be the best residential broker. If a commercial lead comes in, it gets referred. If an asset finance lead comes, it gets referred. I wanted to master that craft. Once you do that and you build that environment, then it allows you to diversify your business to other areas.
Q: At what point is it unsustainable to be doing everything on your own?
I think a $100 million broke me (and my average loan size is always around $500,000).
So when I was donig 200 loans, I was broken and that's when the wheels start falling off.
The more loans you're writing, the bigger your book gets and the bigger your book gets, the more inquiries you have to fulfill and the more customer service you have to invest in.
I now have a team of eight people to ensure we can handle our volumes.
Q. What does the makeup of your business look like today?
The majority [of staff are] onshore. We were always big on being in Australia.
When you're a single broker, you keep a lot of that margin so you can invest in Australia, have credit here and then you have the support overseas to do all the tasks.
As we scale and take ourselves to the next journey in the business, we need to even that number out a little bit and go a little bit more overseas to keep it sustainable.
Q. How do you see the industry evolving?
As an industry, we’re just getting better. We’re getting better at our craft, we’re getting better at servicing our clients. It's really more solutions-driven than what’s the cheapest interest rate.
Q. What advice would you share with new-to-industry brokers?
Honestly, just be true to what you wanted to achieve.
When I started out, I used to hear other brokers speak and they’re all doing these crazy numbers. We’re competitive people – otherwise you’re not in sales…
But I feel like [it’s important] to be true to yourself. Know what you want to do. When I started, I knew what I wanted to do, which was to run a business, and I stayed true to that.
If you want to be a one man band – if that's what you truly want to find a work-life balance that you want to work really hard but then provide to your family – just do that.
Block out some of the noise out there and then just stay true to who you want to be as a broker. If you want to be a broker, just stick to that. There’s no right or wrong.
Find out more about how Fabio has scaled his business in the Elite Broker podcast episode, ‘How this elite broker doubled his team in a year’ here or watch the full interview below.
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