6 GREEN FINANCE GROUP

Green Finance Group is the 6th placer in this year's Top 10 Independent Brokerages.

6 GREEN FINANCE  GROUP
GREEN FINANCE GROUP
Established in 2010
Based in Hawthorne, QLD
Director: Daniel Green

Green Finance Group and its founder, Daniel Green, have appeared in MPA before, but usually as commercial broking specialists. This was the first time they’ve entered a general broking report, Green says. “I didn’t realise how big our figures had got … for the first few years, Green Finance was basically me working from my house.”

Understanding Green Finance’s success means understanding its construction. It started from a common challenge for new brokers: “I realised you can’t write 30 loans a month without support, and that’s when I started branching out into specialist areas: the residential division, the specialist division,” Green says. In short, his strategy is built upon diversification
through specialisation – he’s a specialist in pub and hotel and childcare finance, and all his brokers and support staff are also specialists.

Customers do know the difference between a jack-of-all-trades and a
specialist, Green insists, and this shows in Green Finance’s success over
the past 12 months. “Clients are still looking for a one-stop shop,” Green
says, which is why the brokerage has been constantly expanding and hiring more specialists – in financial planning, general insurance, even introducing
a car-buying service for individual clients.

Overall they have three arms of the business – finance, insurance and wealth – which operate out of their single Queensland office but have a national reach. These services make a real difference, Green says. “That’s where a lot of other brokers are falling down. They might be providing the client’s home loan, but for financial planning, the client talks to a planner with affiliations to other brokers, and before you know it, that relationship has been diluted.”

Having many brokers in different areas of finance means internal referrals are absolutely crucial for Green Finance Group. Therefore, the brokerage proactively encourages these. “At the end of the month, we’ll meet, look at different parts of the business and their draw-downs, and ask what opportunities there are to cross-sell,” Green says. One initiative has been going to the offices of business clients and offering to review staff members’ home loans. A lot of approvals are subject to getting insurance, which means Green Finance’s in-house insurers can provide a value-add by saving clients’ time. Green Finance Group isn’t going to stop expanding – they’ll be hiring new support staff and opening a new office in Sydney’s Pyrmont district before the end of the year. Green is undoubtedly optimistic about the brokerage’s future. “My view is, I would rather put on staff with a view to growing the business than growing the business and panicking about timeframes.”