26-year-old George Samios of My Address Finance is building a broking brand to rival the big players
My Address Finance (MADD Finance) has a website that positively screams ‘confidence’.
On a lime-green background you’ll find professionally produced advertising videos, and a simple yet slick interface. Websites like this don’t come cheap, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that MADD, based in Brisbane, was part of a major franchise or leading independent brokerage. But in fact, it’s the work of just one individual, George Samios, a young broker with a conviction that his business “will be the next Aussie”.
On a lime-green background you’ll find professionally produced advertising videos, and a simple yet slick interface. Websites like this don’t come cheap, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that MADD, based in Brisbane, was part of a major franchise or leading independent brokerage. But in fact, it’s the work of just one individual, George Samios, a young broker with a conviction that his business “will be the next Aussie”.
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These are big words – words that we’ve become accustomed to taking with a pinch of salt, as they all too often come from inexperienced young brokers riding a booming market. And indeed Samios doesn’t have a great deal of experience, moving from being a real estate agent to a Bankwest Mobile Banking manager at the age of just 20, before starting MADD in January 2012.
However, Samios – a former MPA Young Gun back in 2013 – has genuinely made the leap from promise and potential to writing serious loan volumes. In last year’s MPA Top 100 Brokers, Samios came 50th, with a total loan value of just under $86m. So, what has Samios got up his sleeve, besides youthful exuberance?
A band of brothers
A formidable referral network is crucial, Samios explains. “I catch up with my [real estate] agents every quarter; take them to lunch.” Drawing on his real estate days, he’s amassed a group of Brisbane agents from across the brands. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got a really good connection with each other; we give each other advice, and I brought them all together.”
For Samios, business is personal. “The wrong way to go about it is asking for referrals. For years I opened every Saturday, helping them out, helping them build their business, giving them advice. They train with me; we go to the gym together, we bike together, we box together. Your friends should be your referrers. You should become good friends with your referrers because you deal with them every single day.
“When I go down to the coffee shop I’m a nice guy to everyone, not just to my customers,” Samios exclaims. “You’ve got to change your way of thinking; you’ve got to be helpful to everyone, not just in your own business, all the time.” Samios likens his holistic approach to a complete lifestyle: “You need to become that guy.”
Branding and culture at MADD
It’s ironic, therefore, that MADD Finance’s director seems uninterested in building ‘brand Samios’. MADD’s website promises a “MADD experience”; a “MADD loan”that will truly be a “MADD deal”. If somewhat clichéd, Samios’ website is a textbook example of constructing a brand identity, as done by far larger businesses. “There’s nothing wrong with having a small, personalised brand,” explains Samios. “That’s cool, but I wanted to create something bigger. I want everyone in Australia to have the same experience we’re having … we think so differently; it’s the next level the way we do things.”
MADD is still a very small company, with Samios being the primary broker. Yet Samios runs a marketing campaign typical of a much larger brokerage, with everything from TV commercials to branded cars. How does he justify the presumably considerable expense? “I love marketing; I love having fun. So I’m not necessarily too concerned about the price,” Samios replies, adding that “you need to spend money to make money in business”.
Thinking big, believing MADD will become a major national player, justifies for Samios his marketing spend. “I see the value immensely; whatever I put in, the business is going to get 10 times more, because I’m growing the business. I don’t mind spending money on advertising campaigns. TV commercials, radio advertising, home shows, print media – we do everything. And it’s not necessarily to [directly] get new business; it’s to show people we’re around … it shows people what our vision is.”
Leaving clients without questions
Clearly Samios’ marketing is getting new business, and he maintains that it brings in all sorts of clients. MADD’s youthful approach unsurprisingly pulls in first home buyers, and Samios believes in such situations his age becomes an asset. “I’m only 26 now, so I can really help first home buyers go through the whole process. This is what you’re in for in this red-hot market; I’m going to train you to negotiate, to deal with real estate agents, give you reports, get you pre-approval.” However, he also caters for Brisbane’s medical professionals, a lucrative niche, but has a number of customers “who just want to save money”.
MADD’s light-hearted marketing brings customers in the door, but Samios has paired with it a highly organised processing operation (see boxout) in order to keep them there. The objective is to make clients’ interactions with Samios as high-quality as possible, by shifting more rudimentary tasks to earlier in the process.
“You don’t want to spend the first 20 minutes of your meeting asking ‘what’s your birthday?’ or ‘where have you been living for the last 20 years?’,” insists Samios. Instead, his personal assistant gets that information in a preliminary assessment on the phone, and requests client documents. His credit assistant goes through those documents, calculating serviceability and LVRs so Samios can begin the search for the right product and lender, all before he sets eyes on the client.
It all comes down to the meeting. “I have 45 minutes to talk with the customer about recommendations for loan set-up, loan proposal; how I want to structure the loan in order for them to pay it off as fast as possible … offset accounts, credit cards, paying off the loan faster; and educate them on what’s the difference between fixed and variable, interest only, or P&I.”
Samios ensures his meetings aren’t interrupted by calls on his mobile, and has a highly visual presentation style, using a whiteboard. He aims to finalise plans at his meeting, by leaving clients feeling confident to make decisions. “It does make our life easier, but it’s [primarily] to make sure the client has a good meeting, and they leave after 45 minutes without any questions.”
Following the loan application submissions, clients are kept updated at every step by automated texts and emails, a system Samios set up with help from his aggregator, Connective, but he admits that nevertheless it required “a lot of effort”. Finally, all customers are given film tickets on loan settlement, and asked to fill in a satisfaction survey.
Expanding MADD nationally
It’s clear that Samios has built My Address Finance on more than bluster; he has developed a brand and approach that he believes can travel. By the end of the year he wants to set up an office in Sydney, to service MADD’s existing client base there, followed by another in Melbourne. But first, Samios notes, he needs to start hiring. “I want to have offices all over Australia, but I need to find other people who believe in my brand and want to jump on board.”
Behind Samios’ ambition is a sincere belief that his approach works, and can be passed on to other brokers. “When we do expand in Australia, we’re not going to have 10 brokers per office like other franchises; I’m one broker, but can write more than one broker. How can I do that? Well, the MADD franchise … if you have one broker, with once PA and one CA, you will write $15m a month.
“I haven’t really changed since the start,” Samios concludes. “I’m the same guy as I was three years ago … the only thing that’s changed is that people say, ‘George Samios, he does the right thing’.”
Yet change is coming, and MADD’s expansion will answer a question for the entire broking community: Can you go beyond the nice-guy approach, when the nice guy isn’t around? It all depends, essentially, on Samios finding brokers as MADD as he is.
