Twice as Hard, Twice as Long: Greg Cooke on Starting Simple Fin the Right Way

Plenty of bankers and BDMs daydream about the same maths: write $30 million a year at 65 basis points and pocket $190,000. Greg Cooke has spent years telling those people the uncomfortable truth, that's revenue, not profit, and everything will be twice as hard and take twice as long as they think.

Having worked as a broker and spent nearly a decade in aggregation before launching Simple Fin, Greg is uniquely placed to give new brokers an honest, numbers-first playbook. This episode of The Finance Operator is essential listening for anyone thinking about going out on their own. Press play above to hear it in full.

From hospitality to broking

Greg's start was almost accidental. Fresh off a business degree and a stint at a large hospitality company, unsure what to do next, he was nudged into the industry by a broker he knew through a sporting club. "We're not performing brain surgery," the broker told him. "You've done a business degree, I think you're smart enough to do it. We get to help people every day, is that interesting to you?"

He took the chance, joining a broking business on Sydney's Northern Beaches that worked closely with an integrated accounting practice, which is where most of the clients came from. He broked from 2014 to 2017, then moved into aggregation for about eight years across roles at NAB-aligned MLC Mortgage Solutions and later Loan Market, seeing the whole industry from the inside before ever going solo.

Why go solo now

After wrapping up his aggregation role in October 2024, Greg deliberately did nothing for a few months, a hockey tournament overseas, Christmas, a new baby in November, and time decompressing from a decade of corporate. By February he felt ready, spoke to people across lenders, aggregators and broking businesses, and realised aggregation felt like "same day, same stuff, rinse and repeat." What actually excited him was building something.

At some stage, the broking industry is going to change quite significantly, and maybe we're at the precipice of it now with tech, further regulation and the average age of brokers. Building a larger firm was the thing that excited me.

His thesis: the one-man-band model is fading, firms are getting more sophisticated, and the cost base for tech and compliance is only going to rise. "To keep up, you have to do that," he says. "You can't just keep doing things the old way." That belief, plus wanting control over his own time with a young family, is what turned a planned return to corporate into starting Simple Fin.

The numbers new brokers ignore

Greg's signature contribution is a reality check on the economics. He's watched countless people at lenders and aggregators do the rough sum, $30m at 65bps equals ~$190k, and mistake it for take-home pay.

That's just a fallacy. That's revenue. You haven't taken any of the costs into consideration. Everything's going to be twice as hard and take twice as long as you thought, that's probably pretty accurate.

He walks through the funnel most people skip. Say you want to make $80k, so you think you need 15 customers at ~$500k each. Double it for costs. Then factor a ~30% lead-to-deal conversion, so 30 customers actually means talking to 90-100 people. Then remember you're learning as you go and physically couldn't process 20 deals landing in one month. And the cash-flow lag is brutal: meet a client in January, submit in March, they buy in April, it settles in May, "you're not getting paid till June anyway." His conclusion: without 6-12 months of cash buffers, replacing your income quickly is unrealistic.

Where will your customers come from?

For Greg, the single most important question a new broker must answer is: where's my customer going to come from? A banker who has served 500 customers over recent years can drag a chunk of them across and do really well. "If you're a plumber last week and you want to be a broker now, this could be really tough, because you don't have a natural base of clients."

It was his own biggest concern leaving aggregation: "I know more brokers than I know customers. For the eight years prior, my whole world had been dealing with brokers, and none of those people were going to be my customer." So he had to reach back to his 2014 broking playbook, and stack several customer sources at once, to make the launch viable.

His advice to new brokers

Greg says he's "probably spent years talking people out of becoming brokers" who didn't have a strong enough plan, and just as often encouraging the ones who did. His framework for anyone starting from scratch: go work for someone, do the administrative side, get your diploma, and let a good business owner give you a pathway up to broking, and paid while you learn.

I know plenty of brokers who are extremely successful and making really great money, and they work for someone. You don't have to own the business just to make good money.

He's blunt about the 'do it on the side' plan: it only works in rare shift-work cases, because "credit's not calling you at 8pm and your client doesn't want to meet at 8pm." His advice to friends and family? They're unlikely to hand over three months of bank statements just to help you start, so assume your first clients come from elsewhere. If you don't have a strong plan, financial buffers and genuine self-belief, work for someone else first, you can always take the leap later.

The financial-planner referral model

The skill Greg didn't learn in that first mature broking business, where the phone just rang, was how to generate new business. He learned credit brilliantly there; he learned lead generation at MLC Mortgage Solutions, broking for MLC-aligned financial planners. Working with planners became his sweet spot, and the model he took out on his own.

The financial planner is a trusted advisor. If they endorse you and refer a client, it's really yours to stuff up. Treat those customers like they're the advisor's customers, deliver what you say, and one planner with hundreds of clients means those relationships grow and grow.

Having moved to a new geography with no local planner or accountant contacts, he simply hustled, LinkedIn messages, coffees, and turning up to the events they run. He treats it exactly like building a friendship: "the best part about being self-employed is I don't have to have a relationship with anyone I don't want to," so he only pursues referral partners he genuinely likes. The catch is patience: it can take 5-6 meetings over 6-12 months before a partner sends a single deal, then you do the best work you can, the client raves, and the next referral follows.

Buying a loan book to bridge the gap

Because referral pipelines take time to mature, Greg bought a small loan book to bridge the early months, using connections from his aggregation years to find and negotiate it. It gave him "immediate phone numbers to call and people to speak to" in months one, two and three, plus loans to potentially refinance for clients who weren't on a great deal, while he built out his own referral networks and organic base behind it.

That's the essence of his launch strategy: "a few irons in a few different fires." No single source had to carry the business, and each bought him time for the slower-burning relationships to pay off. He's candid that the reward is long-dated: "I probably won't replace my income for a couple of years," because he keeps reinvesting in marketing, referral partners and staff, with the real payoff "maybe five years off, not the end of 12 months."

Customer before the deal, always

Greg's retention philosophy is simple and costly in the short term: put the customer before the deal in every instance. He points to a bridging loan he's doing right now with no end debt, meaning he won't get paid, purely to honour a referral partner relationship. "Some people would say that's silly, charge a fee. But I value the relationship, I'm putting the customer's and the referral partner's need above my own."

He sees clients as long plays, people he met over a year ago who he speaks to every couple of months until their pay rise or savings goal lands, and insists on giving holistic, both-sides-of-the-coin advice even though brokers only provide lending assistance. Winking at the bad advice he sees on Reddit forums, his point is that a broker is a trusted advisor who should flag 'what happens if this happens' scenarios, not just push through anything that fits policy. His view on the churn-and-burn crowd: it doesn't last, "you lose that customer 6 or 12 months later, you did the work and didn't get paid anyway."

The compounding payoff is real. He describes a separating client worried about capital gains tax on an investment sale, Greg couldn't give the tax advice, but became the facilitator, sending them to an accountant and a financial planner. "That person might refer you to 20 people, because they say: I came to work out what I could borrow, and you opened three other doors and saved me a huge amount of tax."

Marketing as resource allocation

Greg runs marketing "mathematically rather than emotionally," treating capital as a resource, roughly 5% of revenue, then asking which allocation gives the best bang for buck across SEO, Meta, Google Ads, social content, and sponsoring local teams or events. He's done local SEO and digital presence work, sponsored a local sporting team and a Wollongong University nursing-alumni event, and taught himself Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads to test what converts.

Once you find something with a sustainable, fairly predictable ROI, you just double down on it. If Google Ads is returning 5-to-1, let's double our spend and see if we can maintain the same output.

But the highest-ROI channel, he stresses, is almost free: referral partners cost "$3.50 for a coffee or 25 bucks for lunch." If he could generate unlimited leads that way, he'd stop paying for SEO and ads entirely. Existing clients are the other great source, stay in touch, do something memorable, and they refer. He's honest that social media video is the piece he struggles to stay consistent with, because when he's busy he'll always take the call or write the deal over filming content.

Simple Fin as a platform

Greg's 3-to-5-year vision isn't about a specific headcount, "whether it's three of us doing good numbers or twenty of us doing good numbers,", it's about surrounding himself with like-minded people who genuinely care and share his moral compass. The goal is to build an infrastructure that lets passionate brokers do big numbers, properly, without drowning in the back end.

Where most businesses fail is they can't spend enough time on the part that really drives the thing, seeing customers, doing deals, engaging referral partners, because they get bogged down managing teams and the back end.

He imagines several verticals: newcomers keen to enter the industry, mid-volume brokers who'd do more with time, capacity and positivity around them, and mature brokers who want their last five years to be "less stress, not more stress", for whom partnering with Simple Fin becomes a transition-to-retirement and exit plan, integrating their book into his. Whatever the shape, the fundamentals stay: see customers, write deals, have coffees with referral partners, and keep the content going.

AI, the '$5 jobs' and the broker's art

Greg is measured on AI: it has its place. He uses it as a research and policy tool, and aggregators use it for compliance and file notes. He loves it for the "$5 jobs", document renaming, identifying documents, admin. "If they can get done by a computer, then happy days."

But he's a self-described "bit anti-AI" on the core work, and his reasoning is the case for brokers themselves. People would be surprised how many client scenarios aren't vanilla, he points to digital-only lenders like Unloan and Athena reportedly only being able to write ~20% of the leads that came to them, not because the deals were bad, but because they didn't fit a rigid policy box. He's submitted a policy exception today on a great deal that will likely get approved because it makes sense; he doubts AI can argue an exception. He also cheerfully notes AI's limits, a language model insisting 'December' contains an X, since "it's not a math problem model."

There's so much nuance in getting an application done, things not in the pay slips or bank statements, that only come out through probing questions with the customer. That's really the art of the broker. If everything was vanilla and fit policy, you wouldn't need brokers.

The Finance Operator's playbook

If you're weighing up starting your own brokerage, here's Greg's playbook distilled from building Simple Fin:

1. 1Assume everything is twice as hard and takes twice as long. Treat the $30m-at-65bps number as revenue, not profit, and build in bank-style buffers.
2. 2Answer 'where will my customers come from?' first. A natural client base (bankers, BDMs) can thrive solo; without one, think hard before leaping.
3. 3Work for someone if you're starting from scratch. Do admin, get your diploma, earn a pathway up, and get paid while you learn the craft.
4. 4Run the full funnel, not the fantasy. ~30% conversion means talking to 90-100 people for 30 deals, and you can't process 20 deals in one month anyway.
5. 5Stack several lead sources ('irons in fires'). Don't rely on one channel while the slow-burn relationships mature.
6. 6Build financial-planner and accountant referrals like friendships. Only pursue partners you genuinely like; expect 5-6 meetings before the first deal.
7. 7Buy a loan book to bridge the gap. It gives you real clients to call in months one to three while your organic base builds.
8. 8Put the customer before the deal, every time. Do the unpaid work, give holistic advice, and the referrals compound, sometimes one client refers 20.
9. 9Treat marketing as resource allocation. Budget ~5% of revenue, test channels mathematically, and double down on whatever delivers a predictable ROI.
10. 10Use AI for the '$5 jobs', not the art. Great for admin, notes and research; the nuance of getting non-vanilla deals approved is still the broker's edge.

Greg's honest that going solo is "a bit of sink or swim", there's a window where you either do it early before kids and debt, or later once you've got surplus cash, but at some point you take the leap. His long game is a platform business built with people who care as much as he does. You can learn more about the firm at Simple Fin.