Achieving success with Mercury

Broker profile: Nathan Vecchio, Hunter Galloway

This month, we’d like to introduce you to Nathan Vecchio of Hunter Galloway in Queensland. Nathan has just won both the QLD Better Business Awards’ Broker of The Year and Best Residential Broker awards, was one of our Connective Excellence Award Finalists last year and winner of the 2018 FBAA Awards of Supremacy Finance Broker of the Year in Queensland.

Nathan is one of our younger business owners, together with his brother Joshua. Even though they have only joined Connective in the past year, their business Hunter Galloway is going from strength to strength and is growing rapidly.

Nathan believes a large part of this success and growth has been attributable to Mercury’s functionality, so we had a chat with him to find out more.

Tell us about yourself. How did you get into the mortgage broking business?

I started in mortgage broking in 2015, joining my brother Josh who had recently started Hunter Galloway. I was fortunate to have Josh and a few other experienced brokers as mentors, so I could quickly learn from others what works and what doesn’t work in the mortgage broking industry.

Tell us about your marketing strategy. What advice would you give others?

Like most brokers, at Hunter Galloway we rely heavily on professional referral partners like accountants and financial advisers for new business. But our single largest source of referrals is from our existing customers. Instead of spending money on traditional marketing and advertising, we invest our budget into nurturing our existing customers.

We believe you need to be in front of your customers at least 15 times throughout the year, to service them well. For us, this usually includes our monthly newsletter and automated birthday SMS’s but we also give our customers interest rate and market updates throughout the year – all via Mercury. This helps us to continue to add value to our database (and keep our customers thinking of us).

What achievements are you most proud of?

The Better Business Awards Broker of the Year and the FBAA Awards of Supremacy National Broker of the Year awards were real highlights and very humbling for me, but I’d say my greatest achievement in the past 12 months has been paying it back to the industry. I do this by contributing to the Top Broker site, which allows me to share my knowledge and experience with other brokers.

How has Mercury helped you increase your success?

Within the business, I’m very proud of using Mercury to automate a lot of manual tasks and to refine our processes. For me, refining our business processes has been an ongoing project, and I think the single biggest contributor to our growth. It’s helped us build a more effective team and deliver a better service to our customers.

We spend time each week reviewing our various business processes with the team, looking at ways to reduce waste and double handling. In a short period of time, we’ve been able to drastically increase our approval conversion rates by making lots of small changes.

For example, we have established strict criteria for the type of customers we look to help. More importantly, we’ve developed a process to identify prospects that aren’t a fit for our business, like owner builders or SMSF lending. We simply refer these customers to other brokers to save our time.

The knock-on effect of this has been freeing up my own time. It’s taken me away from endless hours of administration and given me more time for relationship building and networking. I believe I have found myself an extra day every week that I can now dedicate to customers and networking!

What is your top tip for a successful business?

Be consistent. As the saying goes, it takes 10 years to make an overnight success and it’s true for me. Consistency takes a lot of self-discipline. It all starts with the small things. Simple rules like making 11 calls before 11am to new customers and prospects.

Even as the business has grown, I still use this same consistent approach to stay in touch with my important referral partners and customers each and every day.