From Fighter Jets to a Fully Offshore Brokerage: Jason Hare on Building Open Plan Financial to Run Without Him

Most brokers are the bottleneck in their own business, the person every file, every call and every crisis runs through. Jason Hare built Open Plan Financial to be the opposite: a brokerage that recently ran flawlessly for two full weeks while he was on a family holiday, powered by a fully offshore team he spent years systemising.

In this episode of The Finance Operator, Jason traces the path from the military and Boeing's Hornet fighter jets to a lean, remote-first lending business built on specialisation, relentless communication and hard-won processes. Press play above to hear the full conversation.

From fighter jets to finance

Jason's career started nowhere near mortgages. "I used to work in defence, so after almost a decade in the military, and then 10 years working for Boeing," he said, "I used to work on the old Hornet fighter jets." When everyone could see the Hornets being phased out, people split into two camps: hang on as long as possible, or retrain. Jason retrained.

An avid property investor, he wanted a career that involved property, so he trained and got his education as a broker, then landed with a Melbourne-based brokerage. The military left him with tools most new brokers lack: "I could self-motivate, no worries. I could work with schedule, my time management was really good, so there were some things in that regard that really helped."

Going solo in 2.5 years

After about two and a half years, feeling he wasn't getting paid what he was worth, Jason left and started his own business, a fast turnaround by industry standards. He got the experience by doing everything himself as a one-man band, plus six months of training beforehand: heavy self-study and shadowing another broker, even travelling to Sydney to watch him work.

The change wasn't hard. Coming from a military background, I could self-motivate, no worries, and my time management was really good. Some things in that regard really helped.

Building a fully offshore team

Jason started solo with one Australian PA doing ~20 hours a week, but the cost and inconsistent hours pushed him to look for a model where he could still make a profit and someone could still get paid well to do the job properly. Offshoring, a staple topic at every aggregator event, was the answer. He found his first offshore PA through an agency, and she's still with him.

From there the team grew to four. When two of his PAs were poached with better offers, he didn't let them walk, he roughly doubled their pay to bring them back. "They knew what they were worth," he said, "but it's still extremely profitable compared to if you were paying an Australian wage." He's proud they're "probably four of the best paid PAs in the Philippines."

The specialise-and-delegate system

The core of Jason's operation is a deliberate rejection of the all-rounder PA. Most broker assistants do the application, the conditions, the settlement, "the entire thing, so they become average at the entire thing." Jason structured his loan process so each PA only has to be good at one small portion, and does it over and over.

My settlements manager has been doing it for five and a half years now, and I don't think there's anyone in Australia that's as good at settlements as what she is. She's better than most solicitors I know.

Roles were assigned on a need basis and by preference. The first PA took over gathering applications and data entry, the part Jason hated most. As the business grew he'd ask each new hire which part of the process they wanted to own. The result is depth: his settlements manager routinely chases solicitors and banks back and forth five or six times to hit a settlement date, work that fills end-of-day reports "a mile long."

Training that replicates itself

Jason cracked the problem that traps most delegators, retraining every new hire from scratch. His fix is a chain: do the training once, record lots of videos explaining everything, run through it with the first PA, and then have that PA train the next one.

You do the training the first time, then you let that PA train up your next one, and the second PA trains up your third, and your third one trains up your fourth. I don't have to retrain.

He's candid that getting the team set up, structured and running smoothly "took years". The proof it worked came recently: a two-week family holiday during which, for the first time ever, nothing went wrong. A second unlock was software, he singles out Quickli, a servicing calculator spanning ~45 lenders, that turned a 4-5 hour job into 20 minutes and "changed the broking industry," freeing hours from his day.

Communication as a core philosophy

With no physical office and an offshore team, Jason manages reputation through communication, which he elevated to a core philosophy with military insistence. Clients are told upfront that the specialists they'll deal with are "way more expert in this particular part of the process than what I am," and that Jason himself is always the last-resort escalation line, reachable anytime.

The non-negotiable rule: contact every 24 to 48 hours. "You can not get the client what they want," he explains, if the borrowing capacity or timeline slips, "that can be much more easily accepted if you're communicating every 24 to 48 hours. It's if you don't communicate for 10 days, and then they get a bad result, that's a real big shock, and no one likes that." He manages the team the same way, via daily Teams calls and detailed end-of-day reports, and he's clear that owning his own mistakes publicly is what earns him the right to hold the team accountable across a cultural barrier.

The content-and-newsletter lead engine

Because Jason isn't meeting clients in person, content is how they see his face and get to know him. He credits broker coach Sam Panetta and went hard on organic content over paid, which he found generated too many low-intent leads that ate his phone time. Alongside video, a monthly newsletter (through Your Client Matters) delivers 12 touchpoints a year, sometimes with mid-month sends, and he jokes clients praise articles he didn't even write.

The newsletter doubles as a data-gathering machine: a monthly competition with a four-question survey surfaces exactly who plans to refinance or renovate in the next six months, or needs a good accountant, quietly building his network and pipeline. On discoverability, he's leaned into Reddit, since Google now surfaces Reddit threads prominently, a few good reviews there feed his SEO. His overall stance now: "I don't hunt the leads nearly as much. Just do a good job, and it'll come back to you. It might take 2 years."

The 'plan' for clients who can't buy yet

A defining part of Jason's model is the work that doesn't pay off now. When a client can't be helped today, he builds them a 12-to-24-month plan and stays with them, "you do a lot of work that doesn't pay off now, but it pays off in the future."

The plans are brutally honest and specific: pay down the credit-card debt that's dragging borrowing capacity (with the exact dollar impact spelled out); wait for a default to drop off the credit file; hit an income threshold; or, for business owners, deliberately show higher income by claiming fewer deductions to qualify, then revert afterward to minimise tax. On portfolios, he's contrarian, he doesn't map four properties ahead the way brokers did in the low-rate era, because "your total life situation changes, so you have to change the strategy." He takes it one property at a time.

Construction, first-home buyers and bad assets

Jason breaks the one-niche rule with three: investors (especially new construction and duplex builds), first-home buyers, and the 5% deposit schemes. New builds are his personal specialty and, crucially, one of the few areas the recent budget didn't hurt, "you still get negative gearing on new builds, and still get the capital gains tax if you want it."

Negative equity is only an issue if you need to get equity out, or you need to sell. As long as you can afford the repayments and it's short-lived, it isn't an issue. For 90% of people it only lasts a short period.

His strongest warning is on asset selection: avoid high-density apartments, anything over three storeys or more than ~12 units. When a whole building tries to sell or rent at once, "it's just a race to the bottom," whoever accepts the lowest price or rent wins. A standalone house or townhouse, he argues, holds and grows value in a way those apartments simply don't.

Looking after the team

For all the early years of "ripping shreds off a few people" on Teams calls, Jason's retention story is about generosity. He offers the team family insurance and has never once refused leave, for a christening, a funeral, anything. The standout: when his credit analyst wanted to start a family, he offered to pay her maternity leave (which PAs in the Philippines don't get) at full pay for three months, until his wife, in the background, told him to make it six.

She was in tears when I made that offer. She got to spend six months with her bub and then come back into the same role. I try to look after them, to get them to where they are now.

He's also introduced long service leave to incentivise the ten-year haul ("they're like, wow, that's unreal!"), matches personalities to roles, his conditions manager stays calm with difficult assessors where he'd get frustrated, and plans, on exit, to make sure each PA lands well with a strong reference or a similar job.

Why he thinks AI will take over

Jason is unusually direct about AI: he thinks it will eventually take over much of the industry, and part of his 5-to-6-year runway to selling his book is timed around that. Today the firm uses AI cautiously, cleaning up team emails for clarity and credibility and helping with marketing content, but never running personal client information through it.

The tipping point, in his view, is multi-system data entry. AI can already enter data into one system, but broking requires entering it across several, the aggregator's CRM and bank platforms like ApplyOnline, and that integration is the current sticking point. Once solved, he says, "that takes one PA off my hands." If AI can take a client scenario, match policy across 45 lenders, run pricings and order valuations, "I'll have a two-minute day." He notes some systems already use AI for policy lookups, instantly answering which lender fits a scenario instead of chasing BDMs for days. He doubts ASIC will allow fully AI-recommended loans soon, so a broker stays in the loop, but he's clear about the direction: "I'm just hoping I can sell the book before it does."

The Finance Operator's playbook

If you want to model how Jason built Open Plan Financial to run without him, here's the distilled version:

1. 1Specialise every role. Make each PA elite at one narrow part of the process instead of average at all of it.
2. 2Offshore for margin and quality. A well-paid Philippines-based team can do ~90% of the work profitably, pay the best and they'll stay.
3. 3Build training that replicates. Record it once, train PA #1, then have each PA train the next, so you never retrain from scratch.
4. 4Communicate every 24-48 hours. Regular contact makes even bad outcomes acceptable; silence turns them into shocks.
5. 5Be the last resort, not the bottleneck. Tell clients your specialists are the experts, and you're always reachable if something breaks.
6. 6Use content as the long game. Go organic, run a value-packed newsletter, and use surveys to surface who's ready to act.
7. 7Do the work that pays off later. Build 12-24 month plans for clients who can't buy yet; the payoff comes back, sometimes in two years.
8. 8Take it one property at a time. Life situations change, so don't over-map a portfolio; and steer clients away from high-density apartments.
9. 9Adopt the tools that free hours. Servicing calculators like Quickli turned 4-5 hour jobs into 20 minutes, invest in what removes grunt work.
10. 10Look after your people. Generous leave, insurance, paid maternity and long service leave buy the loyalty that lets the system run itself.

Jason's honest about how much was timing, going solo just as COVID sent rates to near zero and a bestselling buyer's agent flooded him with leads, but his line is that you create your own luck: "put yourself in the right position, with the right people, at the right time," and always put clients before yourself. You can learn more about the firm at Open Plan Financial.