How Katie Thomas Writes $1B/yr in Home Loans

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Broker Capital Podcast. Today we're very lucky to be joined by Katie Thomas, who is the founder and director of Focus Finance, which was ranked as the number one brokerage in the country by the advisor and by AMA. So that's pretty impressive, Katie. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks. Appreciate it. I feel very lucky to have you here. So how did you make your way into mortgage broken? Well, I started banking at 18. I started as a teller in the bank and really lending is what I wanted to do always. So I kind of just went through the corporate career first, doing all things in banking, then six years ago, then moved it into the broken space once. I kind of worked out that banking is limited options for clients. 100%. Wow, only six years in business. It's amazing how quickly things can happen in broken. Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah, focus itself has existed since 2023. So Focus Finance has been three years. Yeah. That's incredible. And what sort of loan volume are you writing now? individually or the business? As a business. Business wise, we'll settle, so we'll do over 100 million roughly a month in apps and settling sort of, you know, the 80 to 100. Yeah, wow. So a billion in a year is achievable. Yes, yes, very impressive. And what's the split between Rezzy and commercial? Largely, Rezzy. The commercial that we would do at this point is still, it might be a commercial asset, but it's more for the purpose of being part of a investment portfolio, not necessarily straight up commercial, you know, vendor financing and that sort of thing. Nice. Is there a typical profile of client that you go for or that ends up finding you? Yeah. So any again, we've got different brokers in the business with different skill levels. But largely, I've always dealt more in that complex phase. So complex, self-employed, complex investor is really more of what we would do in my natural affinity with that client type, landed me with a lot of them. Love it. Would you say that most of the clients have multiple loans or multiple properties? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Nice. And what's the size and structure of the team? How do you how do you run focus finance? Yep. So there's five brokers, including myself, so for other brokers outside me. Yep. And then there is now 30 people in the team, but there is a mix of what those roles are. So five brokers all told, and then an amount of support roles, operations, etc. Wow. And are you still on the tools writing loans? Yeah. Nice. And do you think that, I mean, you're at a scale now where I would have thought if you wanted to, you could totally step back. So it sounds like it's a choice. Can you talk to me about that the logic behind that? Yeah. I love being a broker. And some of these clients, I have had for more than a decade. Okay. So when you're at the bank, there we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. One of them now works here. So you kind of really just build this affinity with people and you start just being part of their life in such an integrated way. And you forget really that you're their broker and that relationship evolves into quite a friendship. So if you're away from that is probably a little difficult to do. And I genuinely love the lending. I love the strategy. I love the complexity. I love all of that side of it. This year, I definitely do less of it. And it's kind of distilled down to clients from a skillset perspective. I really do need to be on. Whilst we coach up the team to be able to be on that high level of file, which will absolutely do. So I'll be needed less and less and less. And then I can just, you know, square all my way around the office and annoy everybody and integrate myself wherever I want to on their own bones anyway. Because I love it. But I don't need to be writing the same sort of volume on the entry level investor. You know, the team is very skilled. Love it. Sounds like you have an office. Does everybody come into the office? What's the approach there? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We have two locations, but not necessarily for quite demographic, just more wearing Newcastle and the Hannah Valley. So my team kind of is a mix of Newcastle, mainland and Hunter Valley. So just really for the dynamic of their home life and their families, we have one office closer to them. And then one Newcastle based office just so they've got a better commute really. But our client demographic is all over Australia. So their physical location really is less important. But then twice a week we will all work in the same office together just because we're like hanging out with each other and go on to the pub on Friday, largely. Amazing. What are you mainly in the Newcastle or the Hunter Valley office? I'm a real mix. Okay. And my days are totally different to the rest of the team between business meetings, podcasts, going to Sydney for meetings, doing around table, whatever. So I could be traveling. I could be doing that. I could be in the office. I could work from home that day if I'm kind of split between a location that I'm going to I can be in a lot of different locations. The team way more structured. So they tend to have their set Newcastle and Barrisfield days or mainland days. And then they all tend to have a work from home day thrown in there somewhere else as well, just to really hone in because it is a very bad tough field environment within the office. So sometimes it's nice for them to have their day hyper focusing. As in there's so much banter in the office that it's kind of like if you need to do that deep work, you've got to step away. For sure. Oh, that's I love that. And so what was it like making the transition from working in the bank to going out as a broker? Well, mine's probably a bit unique because I happened to jagged the year that I thought this was going to be a good idea in COVID. So mine. Yeah. Well, it turned out amazing. But certainly that was you one. So for me, January, I left in December 19. So I started just January 20. And then within months, the world is ending. So it was a little bit of that early days of going. This could go terribly. It obviously didn't. The industry knows how well it went. But so my my first year probably would look nothing like anybody else's would ever happen again. But also well, because surely they hopefully don't have to deal with a global pandemic in their business. So it was a pretty quiet first year. No, it was hectic. No, because the the rates plummeted. So everybody now had borrowing capacity. So the ramp at that point was enormous. Um, yeah. So no, no, no, it was very, very busy. And I also had because I had been in that community and had relationships for such a long time. So my transition was quite easy in that regard. What was difficult straight out the gate was really more managing. Firstly, the expectation around what did we think the industry was going to do as a reaction to COVID. Then of course, we had all of the changes from policy perspectives that happened to navigate in that first year. So I not only had to come out of one policy, one valetel, all of all of what that looked like. And then moving in as a connective and at that stage, they don't have the CRM that everybody now sees with connective. It was quite an outdated CRM at that stage. So moving into banking being a higher level of tech into breaking lower level of tech at that stage, more comparable now. And navigating that then with the ever changing policies that happened to land in that particular year, we had the super cash out that you could do when then people trying to use those for deposits. We had lots of different stuff that happened in that year. So my first year is probably not going to be comparable to anybody else's. It landed absolutely fine in the end. But we were, I already had relationships. I already had people that knew me from a lending perspective. I had a lot of people that I knew. So I hadn't volume out the gate and then rates plummeted. So it was quite chaotic. And I think I have nearly spent six years trying to catch it. Wow. Geez. In the end, it was a blessing. I suppose for the business. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. No, it definitely was. But there were a few moments there early on where you're like, okay, you've chosen to leave a reasonably well-paying role to get paid nothing, currently. And now we are very uncertain around what this climate is going to do. Maybe no one's going to be able to land. It didn't go that way. But there was a couple of months there where no one really knew when you were working at the bank. Did you ever think you could build a brokerage that wrote a billion dollars a year? Yeah. Wow. I love it. Yeah. Well, I wrote volume at the bank too. Okay. So I didn't have, I guess the I already knew relationship building, it was fine. I knew my commitment to what I do and I knew my own personality type from a level of growth and expansion and growth mindset. So I never really intended to come out and do anything in a small way, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, I love it, ambitious from the start. And when you said that focus has only been around for three years. So what were you before that when you first went out on your own? Yeah, so when I initially left the bank, I went into another brokerage at that stage. Yeah. And then we had a business separation in 2023. And that's when I created focus at that point by myself. Okay, I love it. How important is it to you being part of this Hunter Valley, mate, then Newcastle community as because at the same time you're saying that your clients are from all over Australia. So how does that fit in together that sort of local plus Australia wide? Just a little bit of both is the local base of people that I've known forever and have those relationships. And then the national expansion of that was the best thing from COVID to be honest, because prior to COVID, we had a real tech limitation around how to ID people. We, the team's meetings were complicated. There was still a lot of emphasis on meeting face to face. And that was a real limiter. COVID was actually the instigator for going, okay, well, we can do this nationally. We don't need, you know, I can't see you anyway. So it doesn't matter if you're a street over from me or to states away. So that really set the scene for that. And because I had real estate relationships in the Hunter Valley where a lot of Sydney sideers would buy their investment properties in their weekend does in the Hunter Valley, which, you know, are quite sizable estate in there and they're lovely and the vineyard. Very, very, very fortunate to live there. That network very quickly expands. People are buying in my location, but don't live in my location. But then the ripple effect of that going, okay, well, you're from Sydney, but these are highly affluent people that are buying those styles of properties. So the ripple effect of your network when we're all just sitting at home anyway is quite broad. That makes a lot of sense. How do you think about multiplying your personality as in you have this lovely personality that I can see you just instantly connect with the clients who are your borrowers? How do you then multiply that and build a culture within the company where that's going to, that's going to still remain true, even though you can't be involved in every single conversation? Well, I would say, and I think the team would tend to agree, we don't need more of one of my personality. They, they, everyone in the team, all the brokers, I would, we have client brokers in the team and we have five different personalities. We don't need to replicate mine at all. We, all we need to do, and this is what we do from a lead funnel perspective as well, because I supply all the leads to the business. So as we do a lead intake perspective, we have someone, we have a process around how this happens, but we're really aligning the client to the broker from a skill set and from a personality perspective where that rapport is going to work really well. There are a lot of clients that my personality does not work well with at all, because I am at a different interest level, or I guess from a civil security investor. None of that skill set that I have is at this stage beneficial at all to a first home buyer. So everything that I know is not going to help them with their first home buyer deal. Now, however, there is somebody else in the business that is beautiful for that. So it's more just aligning the people that make sense to be together in the way society works anyway, and it's no different in a business. Love it. And along your journey, have you done any acquisitions, have you bought trail books or businesses? No. All organic. Yeah. Yeah. No, we don't do. I've never bought another book. We've never done an acquisition. It's not to say in the future we won't do acquisitions, and we likely will. But all of our lead source and everything that's come in has just been through relationships that have been built and held over years and years and years. And I've never done paid referrals that the businesses that kind of give you pay for your leads. We've never done that. We've never done paid marketing. We've really never done anything at all from a marketing or lead source front other than just relationships and then the compounding effect of a self-propagating book. Amazing. So talk to me about how you build these relationships. I don't think there is a mystery to this. It's as simple as getting to know other human beings. It isn't. I think the only thing that is a limiter for anybody is them not getting outside their comfort zone likely and being afraid of any level of rejection. And if you remove any of that VR, then you're pretty limitless as to who you can then integrate yourself with. And if you're worried about a no or I don't have time or whatever that looks like and you're not grafting in those early years to kind of build out those relationships, then that would be quite complicated I think. Some of the closest friendships I have now would have been from places that historically other people were a little bit intimidated to approach to build relationships with. They're very busy, people very sophisticated people and they may present I guess out of reach. And I just didn't have a belief system that we couldn't still get to know each other as human beings. And just genuinely, I'm so curious about you and your life. And if we don't do any business together, I really don't care. Let's just sit down and get to know one another. It's almost like dating these people really isn't it? And then you just end up finding the people that your personality aligns with and you form very deep relationships. And they end up being personal friendships instead of professional relationships, but it really just comes off the back of genuinely getting to know people as other human beings and not a commercial lead source. And once those relationships are embedded and you're you know built out friendships with them, the ripple effect of that again is difficult to contain. They end up going you're an amazing person. We love hanging out. I want to introduce you to this person and then it just grows naturally. And then your network starts meeting their network and you just end up in this bubble of all the best humans that you want to hang out with every day and talk to every day. How cool is that? I mean, we're talking about thousands of people really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a little bit frame breaking, I think, because I totally agree with you that having genuine relationships, actually liking the people, remembering things about them, they remember things about you. And then you want to do business together. But I think some of us myself included have a limiting thought that well, maybe you can only do that with 10 people or 20 people. But you're doing that with a thousand. So I mean, are you do you just remember their birthdays? Do you just naturally check in with them? Or it's not that weird stuff. It's just genuinely. No, no, not at all. No, God, I can't remember a birthday to save my life. No, it's it's none of that. It is just you might meet. It doesn't need to be thousands of referral parties. It just needs to be a handful of initially potentially targeted lead sources that have a good multiplier. So you could, you know, let's say an account and see if you know, and we've got the same relationships, any other brokerage would be expected to have. We know accounts, we know planners, we know real estate agents, we know buyers agents, like we know all of the same things. So it's really just from the outset kind of going, okay, well, this business or entity makes sense initially because the multiplier of that isn't just going to be one or two, you know, there is there is the you have a sophisticated business, but there is more than one of those. There is plenty of those. What doesn't make that for me personally worthwhile is if I don't get along with that person as just a, you know, actual human. So then it's just working out, okay, well, you have a brilliant business and there is an enormous amount of client and lead funneling your business. Do we get along as individual people? Yes. Oh no, great. Let's get to know each other. And then then the conversations are just easy. It's no different to any other friendship that you have really in your life. It's exactly the same. There's none of that, you know, dissing genuine, I'm going to send them a birthday cake and a bunch of donuts every year. I don't do any of those things. And the closest lead sources that would be to us would say, I'm actually exactly the opposite at this point. We are such good friends that they're like, I can kind of get you on the phone. You won't answer me. But so it's exactly the opposite of that. It is a genuine relationship between people not trying to manufacture a decent genuine interaction. - Very well said. And I suppose in turn, you are the sort of person who naturally has that multiplier as well. So if somebody has a relationship with you, you come across so many people that you can think of them for natural referrals. Yeah, I think that's such a nice and normal way to put it rather than thinking, you need this formula, you need to talk like this, blah, blah, blah. So, okay, so am I right in saying that you don't use a marketing agency? - No, we don't. - You don't do any paid ads? - We don't. - What did you do on social? So you acted on socials? - I do. I've probably started sharing a little bit more about off the back of last year, last year's the only year where we've ever participated in any level of awards. We've never submitted our numbers prior to that. And some of it, we didn't submit anyway. It was done on our bar, so some of it, so last year's the first year we've done any of that prior to that, I really didn't do anything on socials at all. Once that started to happen, I then started to become really transparent around our numbers and what we do actually do, so I will talk about the numbers and the breakdown of what we're doing. - Yeah. - And a little bit of that, and if there's a level of team success or team whatever, but that's really all I'm talking about. I'm not talking, I'm not on socials in any way, talking about quality updates or whatever. There's no kind of marketing for the purpose of client intake. We don't have capacity. Our books are shut more than not. So now that you're a number one broker in Australia, first of all, why did you decide to share that information? And then secondly, is that impacting, is that having a positive impact? Now that people know how successful you are? - For recruitment. So we. - Oh, gotcha. - Not legend. - Yeah, all about exactly good brokers. - Yeah. - Love it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we have a capacity problem. So we need to recruit heavily and it's much easier to do that if people know you exist. - 100% and if they know you're successful. - Yes, yeah. So yeah, it was really for the purpose of recruitment. And great. - Awesome. - Yeah, not leads because we still haven't got to a point of recruiting enough to leverage that outcome for the purpose of lead gen. - Okay, love it. All right, let's talk a bit about how you run your business like with the tech stack. You mentioned Connective before. Have you been with Connective since you started? - Excellent. - And you mentioned the Connective CRM. Mercury, are you a big user? - Yeah, we currently do have everything inside Mercury. We use, I guess, Boltons to that to optimize what we can within Mercury through automations and we'll continue to do that. And then I guess really, yeah, obviously, quickly, everybody uses quickly. So we're going through just another whole wave of, I guess, reinventing the tech side of it. Just again, from a scale perspective, 'cause anything that we do given the volume that we're writing has quite a decent ripple effect around outcome on efficiencies. So the compounding side of that is important. One percent margins of movement really do make a big difference fast. So we really are optimizing a lot of that. But we use a lot of automations that assist to make that more efficient currently. - Like what other software do you use? - We are, Microsoft based. So anything that we're kind of doing in there, we power automate, APR, we'll use all of that AI, obviously, within the co-pilot space, we'll use agents. We, you know, anything that we're, that we're kind of utilizing in there to optimize the external part of it. You know, that could be emails, information, business information. We have digital agents within the business that we would use and can talk to for the purpose of upskilling training and coaching. Lots of tech in that insight there that we've built organically within the business. - So those when you talk about the AI agents, do they live within the Microsoft ecosystem? - Yes. - And can you talk to me exactly about, you know, how you guys use them? - In the same way that probably anybody would use any other team member in the business is how we utilize them. - So you're asking the AI agent to do things for you? Like what are we talking? Can you give me the example of what it can do for you? - Yeah. - Really anything that agent AI can do, we have a level of capability. And the limiter at the moment is actually less the capability and more terms and conditions and being mindful of the external parties and how that works. The limit of really isn't the capability of what it can do. The limiter is the breach of terms and conditions around portals. So there are a lot of AI agents out there now for instance, where you can go do pricing for you. You know, that is absolutely a possibility. But the way that it needs to do that is to work around logins to get into systems for broker portals. There are in a lot of the broker portals to be able to use synthetic logins to do it is then a breach of the terms and conditions. So that's impossible to do. So it's not impossible, it's quite possible to do. But you know, it's not within the scope of appetite currently for the portal on the other side. So then we need to bolster and have really good APIs that do integrate really well in that way. So there is a limiter of what can be done based on the risk appetite of the end user and we would maximize everything to the point prior to that. - Who's driving the AI adoption within your business? - Well, I'm the nosiest person in the world. So that was really initiated by me. I started that really much last year was kind of the point that I really embedded a lot of that stuff and getting curious about how we're going to bring that in. And once I really wanted to drive home how we're going to build out that space, then I hired somebody last year into our operations team that also has great skill in this area. And she continues to drive this really heavily as well. And she comes from a space that is very important I think from a risk in governance and compliance perspective to make sure that this is something that you want to play with without good understanding and capability over security parameters. You need to have very good, very good broad understanding of risk in governance. And if you don't have that, given the level of PII, you're holding, you want to make sure that you're doing it safely. - Cool, so what's her title within the company? Or her role? - Had a business operation. - Nice. Okay, so you mentioned that there's 30 in the team, there are five brokers including yourself. There's also a head of business operations. What else is there in the mix? What are the roles? So the support roles are the bulk of the team. So within those five brokers, each of those brokers then have a support team beneath them. So they'll have a strategist which is similar to a credit analyst in everybody else's business, I suppose. - I'm sure, I'm sure. - Onshore, so we've got seven offshore. So yeah, the bulk is onshore, the credit is onshore. And yep, yep, so strategy is onshore. So anything at that level, we hold that onshore is sitting literally next to the brokers. So the efficiency there from how we're communicating, they might see the non-client meetings, they're very much across these client files and both parties are, which enables them to write volume because more than one person knows intimately those files at any given time. And then we would have broker associates at different levels. So they come in at different levels and based on their skill set and how they're tracking through their career progression. And then we have a post approval team that does all of the settlements and then post settlement team. - Amazing. And so the people who are, so the offshore team, are first of all, where are they based? - Philippines. - Okay, cool. And are they doing the settlements function, did you say? Or what would you say there? - Mix, yeah, they're the mix. They kind of, yeah, now they sit sort of everywhere really. So everywhere of the breadth of the business, whoever is aligned based on where they need to sit is where they sit offshore. It doesn't need to be relegated. And again, same as onshore, you know, from an upskilling perspective, we'll cycle them through into different parts of the business as well to upskill them. - How did you find your offshore team? Did you go through an agency or how did you do it? - Yeah, initially when I first started and was looking offshore at that time, just purely based on capacity, we. engage Karuna they were speaking to everybody really but at that point I had a capacity problem pretty quickly and it was really just based on who had who had people at the time and that's really how that started. Cool. If we rewind three years back to when focus finance the brand started, did you have a team from day one? Who were your first initial hires? How did you know it was time to hire? Can you can you taught me through what happened there? Yeah no I didn't at that point because we're obviously just gone through disbanding the businesses. So really I had one person at that stage three years ago so one role when they're doing that just like an associate. Well yeah yeah a lot of hat. Oh yeah so just sort of a broker associate role then yeah so from a hiring perspective the answer to that is always really for us and I don't think we've stopped hiring for three years. Amazing. Do you have any thoughts on loan volume versus hiring a team? I've been interested to hear if there's something that kind of ticks along in your mind because you're at like 80 million months as a framework yeah. Yeah yes and no it's the reason that's difficult to answer is because of the multiplier of the client themselves. For instance I could from a diary management perspective I don't really need to see that many clients because of the volume of lending that they hold. So my requirement for support if I'm doing 300 loans a year at a high deal size or I'm doing you know one 300 clients but those 300 clients let's say then have I don't do 300 clients it would be more like I would do a hundred. Yeah that have three properties versus the addressing 300 clients with one property. So it's just niching out I suppose what maximizes your time and it is much more effective to chat to one person that has 20 properties than chatting to 20 people. Absolutely. Do you happen to know what your average average loan size in your book is and/or average new loan sizes? Yeah yeah as a business we would be no different to any other across the grounds that we would sit at about that 750k average deal size mark businesses a whole. And again some of that comes from in the more mature businesses you have to consider as well that you've got established clients in there that you might do a 50k cash out on or you might do a hundred k cash out on but then you might do two three million dollar loans in there as well. But then your average is going to come back to like your 750k average deal size when you've got a more mature book that you're living your back book talking to those clients all the time. So your average is always going to come back down when you're doing 50 hundred and 150k top ups as well. So true. And across the industry we see exactly that about 700k as an average new loan size and the average loan size within the book is about 50 maybe 500 or 550 which sounds like Sam it's pretty pretty bad. Yeah we're really we're really no different there that that's more business perspective I have a more niche client base we do that me personally but the business as a whole is really no different to any other. Okay cool but as you were saying I'm sure that there are some clients who have let's say four loans and you know that their total exposure might be five million dollars plus or something yeah excellent which if you have good relationships with people you get you get exposure to that and then as you say you're only talking to one person but you've got your earning trail and up fronts on this really large amount. Absolutely and again if we consider for sophisticated clients that might be sending base let's say you know and their owner occupied property and debt is quite large and then you're really just building out the additional properties outside that so your first deal with there might be their five million dollar sending property and then and then you might be doing at that point the five six seven hundred k purchases for that but for them you might have done quite a sizeable loan industry and you're just involved in one the rest yeah awesome okay something that stands out about when speaking with you is that you would be a pleasure to deal with and you're very very normal and enthusiastic yeah and transparent yeah it's it's kind of not rocket science right if you're somebody who relate to and you're not trying too hard yeah people want to do business with you yeah it shouldn't be hard yeah anything that you're doing I don't have a philosophy of going there's a level of crafting your early years absolutely but if you just show up and enjoy the relationships that you're holding with your team with your referral parties with your clients with whoever there shouldn't be difficulty in that really if you're you know now obviously there's different personality types in there and some I've got to render different results to others and there is a level of having gears and going up and down your gears based on your client base for sure we can all do that any skilled broken can do that absolutely there's party personality that you might leave out of that conversation this part of it you'll blend others but everybody has the diversity of their own character that you can lean into for one conversation or another and there is a there is that all of it is still very genuine they are still all parts of your personality you're just leaning into some parts more than others for particular clients and they're still all genuine authentic interactions and you're building out great relationships with these people and they are skilled people they and I think that's another thing as a business owner too that people probably don't leverage as much as they could learn from your client base you know they have great roles they have great businesses they have families and I you know I'm a I'm a I'm a mum I you know I'm a I'm a single mum so you know I have other single mum's with businesses in my client book so whenever I'm chatting to them I'm like how are you navigating this tell me about your life so I will get to know them and be curious about things that I'm going through so the bonding I suppose from that is going all right well you've got a great business that's amazing you know tell me how you got from decided to decide what did you do and then we have that conversation and again it's not thinking as linear or as closed down as my role here is just your mortgage broker and that's all we're going to talk about like you have a really interesting role tell me what a day in the life of your role is and then I get to know them and what their days look like how sustainable is your role what were you difficulties in your role I know these people very very well that's brilliant Katie what do you think about they you know we're in 2026 now from your experience in your career what do you think about 2026 relative to the past as far as opportunities in broken think opportunity is kind of in the eye of the beholder and the opportunists will always find an opportunity regardless of climate or market and that is no different now to 10 or 15 years ago response how do you how do you find your stuff how are you building this team are you listing ads on seek is it word of mouth social media how are you doing it there is a mix here we really don't have that many in here from seek it would be largely some of them have known me for a very long time and like I said one of them that works here Jordan that works here he I think I might have done Jordan's first investment property maybe 12 years ago so it's just some of them are relationships that you've kind of built out of all of the years of being in the industry so there's a little bit of that we have a couple that are from seek and then there is a little bit from other brokerages that know us and have recommended somebody that they're not in a position higher at that time so then there's been a bit of that it's a combination of kind of everything to be honest there isn't kind of one linear source of going this this is just a pool of talent over here you know we're going to find a little into that it's a combination okay no silver bullet bit of a mix and it's really just the silver bullet is being open to the conversations everywhere okay yeah and imagine your personality is naturally a filter there are certain people who are gonna be sort of drawn to you and there'll be other people who might think you know what Katie's too much she is not for me yeah yeah absolutely and that's there is no right or wrong in that you know there there is absolutely no right or wrong we don't want to work together if that is not a natural fit you know and same with the broader teams we have many diverse personalities in this team they're a whole spectrum of personalities but the core truth of it is we all get along as actual human beings we all hang out together socially so it's not like there is this kind of a team and be team and you know some sections of it everyone hangs out together Friday morning Friday morning tomorrow morning this week we'll go on a beach walk together and then we'll do that you're just hanging out with people you like but you don't need be the same type of person. You can be respectful of differences in personality and still be aligned. Fantastic. And the brokers that you employ, are they P.A.Y.G employees or some of them commission only? How does that work? All P.A.Y.G., they have their P.A.Y.G. Now, something that I'm interested in is, do you have a theory or sort of an approach for broker remuneration? How do you think about it? I suppose as the brokerage owner, you want people to succeed and write as much as they can, which you need to us in front of us? How do you do it? Hey, I think there needs to be an element of my initial, I've always done P.A.Y.G. And that really wears my mindset of coming out of the bank, because there are people that absolutely brilliant and would probably be a very good broker and great for this industry, but their lifestyle or home life or whatever is not capable of being able to just go straight into commission only and make that leap. That's very hard to do for a lot of people, but more so than ever, the economy is insane. So for me, I just really wanted to back in the people that I was hiring, because it plays a long game, right? With that kind of model, there is a lag going the profitability if you're shelling out the salaries straight out the gate. There is quite a lag when you're upskilling people into those roles before there really is any level of commission that's coming in from the lending. You've got to hire well and back in who you're hiring, then that eventually catches itself, but there is a lag, which is why so many people do go the common link, because there's a lot less risk, you know, you haven't had to put the salary on the table for a potential result. I think my situation is somewhat different in that because I supply or believe anyway. So I don't need to hire somebody that I know is going to bring in the business and back that. I just need to know that they're a great human being that is going to do brilliant things with the client and a sharp enough operator to process them through. Totally. It's sort of short-term pain, long-term game, I think. 100%. Well, often with mission only scenarios, people can get a little bit confused about who owns the trail and who owns the client. Yeah. Well, as we play OIG, it's subunantly clear. Katie brings the clients in. You write the loans. Everyone gets paid well. And I'm very, I guess passionate about making sure that the brokers, anybody that's working extraordinarily hard, they deserve a good outcome for that. They absolutely do. Regardless of who brings in the lead, I can't write it all myself. I can't write a billion by myself. I mean, you probably can, in different models, you can write a billion yourself, but it's absolutely possible to do. There is enough efficiencies in there. There is, again, I'm talking about a client base where potentially you might see a couple, you know, a few hundred clients, but the multiplier of the lending that's out of it, you could absolutely do it. Why? So, you know, there are, high-times rise all boats. The journey is so much better doing it with people. It's not how you did it. So, you did it with. So, I would much rather not be the center of that. And I've supported multiple people to write several hundred million than me write a billion myself. Love it. Love it, Katie. How do you think about reinvesting in the business versus taking profits for yourself? Reinvest. Reinvest. Reinvest. Reinvest. Yeah, yeah, yeah, double down. Yeah, yeah, all I'm like. Yeah, nah, reinvest. I reinvested the whole way through. So, and again, because I believe in a P.A.Y. G model necessarily growth, so you're reinvesting at that point. I also believe in growing into the broker roles. So, I coach them into their roles. So, I'll hire them from out of industry, or with a lower level of skill at that point, and all of them are coached through into broker. So, they are not picking a broker off the shelf and bringing them in and calling a broker. They start in the support roles and they're coached into a broker role. So, I, that model does require reinvestment because there is, again, a lot of the skill set coming through. And then scale, anybody that any business, anywhere, if you're scaling rapidly requires reinvestment. What's the most one of your brokers has ever written in a year? Any year. Well, Maddie wrote 25.5 million this month. I know. Yeah, no, Maddie's doing amazing. So, she, yeah, she's been a broker. She come back in his broker March last year. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, she's now at the 12-month month backing role. She did start as a broker at the break of year, but then she went on a trip to Europe and say she was out for a little bit, but yeah, she come back in swinging March last year. So, are you back in full? I know. They're really, you know, ash in my team. She's not far behind of this month either. She's going to write 20 million as well this month. So, you know, they're all sort of trending all to be at around that same level. Incredible. Yeah. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started? I think more broadly, if I go all the way back from a whole career perspective, which is a long time ago, there was especially at that stage. And I mean, again, industry wise, we are still heavily male dominated. And it's even more so when I started any anyone in high level roles tend to be all men. And I think there was a level of at that stage leadership had to look a certain way. You had to be an elevated leader. You had to be separate from your team and had to be all very professional there. You had to anything that was determined as a weak skill that women possessed generally, empathy and care. And we're all kind of had this perception in leadership that had no place. And it's easy when you're very young to go well, they're all successful leaders. This is how that's supposed to be. You know, there isn't any variance to this that that's just if you're going to be a leader, you need all these heavy, you'll an aggressive go power quality. And that's how we we do leadership. And there was a pocket of my career early on where I go, well, you know, and I do have a bolder personality any way. But for women, if you're like that, you can then be intimidating and and then you're too much. And and then you're painful, especially to senior leadership and all of these things. And we're getting to a point that all of the other qualities that tend to be more innately female, you know, that that want the nurture and protection and passion in that space from an empathetic leadership model is absolutely fine and almost a catalyst to success. It is some of the best things to drive an outcome because you actually give a shit. And that is completely fine to be that way. And it took me a little longer because of the industry at that point in time. It's correcting. But at that time when I started, you are, you don't be like that. You don't be like that. Don't don't let anyone know that you really give a shit about your team. Don't give a shit about your team because they're too hard to cut them. So there's that was very much a corporate leadership style. And any females, especially powerful voices in the room, we're just annoying. And I got comfortable pretty quickly being annoying, but you've got to really push through those barriers at that point in time and go, if I'm too much, go find less, it's and I'm okay with it. That's fantastic. Last one, what is the future of which breaking in Australia? Oh, a lot of diversity in that. I think we'll go through a few waves of this. So I think we'll definitely more and more embrace synthetic outcomes from digital lending that will continue to have a driver. And it's kind of the same as every industry and everything we've ever done where we chased the new and shiny thing, which right now is AI and maximizing to the nth degree of how that how that works. So you can have a completely digital experience and we've no human interaction whatsoever. And we have a pocket of people that find a level of comfort in that. They would much rather order Uber Eats than ring the restaurant. So there is a wave of generation coming through that is much more comfortable to have that level of interaction. and they're finding face-to-face human interaction or even a phone call more uncomfortable. So there is a pocket of that and enabling for that generation. And then we're gonna go through a process of realising we've lost a little bit of authenticity in our interactions day to day. And I think we're gonna be able to cut away so much of the grunt and the grind and then come back to more and more and more actual human interactions for this landing. And a broker will end up looking a little bit more like a BDM style portfolio manager or a lot more clients because there's digital being supported rather than the broker is kind of end to end on the file. But I think we'll see this in a couple of different ways and depending on how accurate conspiracy theories are about AI shutting the world down and how that goes because we may just end up all the way back to paper-based settlements and we write in it all on bits and paper if AI completely shuts the world down anyway. So there is a lot of iterations of how that's gonna look over the coming years. And again, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what that is. It doesn't matter how that's gonna evolve. All that matters is that you're willing to evolve with it and capitalizing on your opportunities as they come through. And enjoying what you're doing while you're doing it. That's really the core of what it is anyway. You don't need to worry about it. Don't stress about things that aren't here yet. - Extremely well said. Katie Thomas, thank you so much. That's Katie from Focus Finance. I really appreciate you a great. - No way. So don't thank you so much.