The Mortgage Broker Who Writes 5x the Loans: Tony Bice on Diversification, Teams and Leads

Most mortgage brokers live loan to loan. They chase a settlement, celebrate it, and wake up the next morning back at zero. Tony Bice built the opposite: a business that writes four to five times the volume of a typical solo broker, earns recurring income from two products on every client, and keeps those clients for fifteen years and longer.

Tony is the founder of First Choice Mortgage Brokers, a multi-award-winning firm and a repeat Finance Broker of the Year. He is also one of the very few brokers who has genuinely cracked the risk-insurance side of the business, and that single fact has reshaped everything else.

In the debut episode of The Finance Operator, he walked us through the whole machine: how he diversified, how he built a team that scales, how he still wins cold internet leads twenty years in, and how he keeps clients for decades. This is that playbook, start to finish. Press play above to hear it in his own words.

The leap: from a 20-year bank career to his own firm

Tony spent 20 years at the Commonwealth Bank, working his way up to a junior executive marketing role at head office. Then CBA merged with Colonial, and at 40 he took a redundancy.

He jumped into an industry that, at the time, wrote just 2% of all home loans in Australia. Today brokers write around 80%. He was early, but it did not feel safe.

I just knew that if I was going to make anything of it, it was then, rather than doing the 9 to 5 and retiring at 65 with a gold watch. So I made the jump. Scary. I had a wife and two little girls, so the pressure was on.

How he made the jump is the first lesson. He did not start cold. He took a salaried job as national sales manager at an aggregator, and used it to study how the best brokers in the country actually worked.

He wrote loans quietly after hours, built up a trailing income, and only moved across to his own business once it was already producing cash flow. By the time he went out on his own, the risk was mostly gone.

The one decision that changed the business

Ask Tony what actually separates him from the broker up the road, or the three brokers ranked above and below him on Google, and his answer never changes.

Every broker claims great service. Every broker has 40 lenders on their panel and strong relationships with the banks. None of that is a difference a client can feel. So Tony went looking for something that was.

The only way you can set yourself apart from a typical mortgage broker is to differentiate yourself. You've got to find something a client sees in you that says, 'I feel more comfortable with this guy, he's got this unique thing about his model.' And that's risk.

Risk insurance became the difference. In the early days his book was roughly 80% mortgages and 20% risk. As the model matured, the risk trail kept compounding until the two sides hit a 50/50 split.

Read that again: risk insurance now generates as much recurring revenue as his entire mortgage business. That is the line between owning a job and owning an asset.

The pitch to the client is disarmingly simple, and it never mentions the word 'insurance' first.

We're going to do two things: create wealth through the purchase of your home, and behind the scenes protect that wealth with a risk plan, structured inside your super so it doesn't hit your cash flow. Create wealth, protect wealth, no impact on the budget. What's not to like?

What 'diversification' actually means (and what it doesn't)

Here is where most brokers get it wrong. When they hear 'diversify,' they think commercial lending, asset and equipment finance, car loans, personal loans, or SMSF lending.

Tony doesn't count any of that as diversification. To him, those are just the things a complete mortgage broker should already offer. Adding another type of loan is not a new revenue line, it is the same revenue line with more products.

Real diversification means adding a genuinely different stream of income that behaves differently to your loan book. For Tony, that stream is risk insurance, and it is the reason his revenue holds up even when lending slows.

How any broker can add risk, without a planning degree

The most common objection Tony hears is that adding insurance is 'all too hard,' buried under diplomas, degrees and compliance. He understands why brokers think that. He was a full-advice financial planner for nearly 20 years.

But that experience is exactly what showed him the shortcut: the general advice model. Under general advice, a broker can offer risk insurance that complements a mortgage without giving full personal financial advice, and without the planning qualifications that scare everyone off.

The secret is ruthless focus. Tony doesn't touch managed funds, annuities, hedge funds or SMSF strategy. He offers one thing that sits naturally beside a home loan: risk insurance. One product, kept simple, so the client never feels overwhelmed and never shuts down.

I don't give advice. I simply provide the client an opportunity to consider something that goes hand in hand with their mortgage. If you fuse a general advice model into your broking business, you'll double the value of your business in years to come, and double your cash flow right now.

Owning your leads (and adapting to the AI era)

Tony is blunt about the foundation everything else sits on.

If you don't have leads, you don't have a business.

He saw the power of search engine optimisation around 20 years ago, and being on the front page of Google has compounded ever since. At times he has had more leads coming in than his team could physically write.

But he knows the game is changing, and he is not pretending otherwise. Today's first-home buyers, mostly Gen Y and Gen Z, are far more informed than they were two decades ago.

Twenty years ago, an internet lead effectively said 'please, can you give me a loan?' Now they say 'why should I go with you?' The sale is won or lost before affordability or product ever comes up.

I've had to change my whole strategy around lead generation, to be more about recommendations in the AI space than it was about keywords in the old Google space.

So he rebuilt the channel. He shifted from chasing keywords to earning recommendations and reputation, the signals AI tools and modern Google increasingly surface, and narrowed his focus to his local Hawkesbury region instead of spreading thin nationally. Those 200-plus five-star reviews on the First Choice Mortgage profile aren't vanity metrics, they are the fuel for this new, recommendation-led way of being found.

The team that writes five times the loans

A typical broker is a jack of all trades, doing every job in the process adequately. Tony's team of nine to ten does the opposite. The client journey is broken into four stages, and each one is owned by a specialist who does only that job.

1. 1Consultation. Tony wins the client and sets the 'create wealth, protect wealth' frame.
2. 2Loan structuring. An expert whose entire role is structuring the deal correctly.
3. 3Processing. A senior processor who does nothing but package and settle loans.
4. 4Onboarding and risk. A specialist handling risk plans, onboarding, gift baskets, reviews and referrals.

The client feels a smooth handover at every step, supported by four experts instead of one generalist. And here is the part most brokers miss: the model pays for itself.

The client gets the support of four people rather than one. We write four or five times the amount of loans a typical broker would, and because everybody does their own role, I generate five times the revenue on home loans, which pays all my staff.

Two more structural choices keep it resilient. First, almost everyone is a contractor, with only his senior loan writer salaried, so capacity flexes up and down with volume instead of locking him into fixed cost.

When leads outstrip capacity, he simply onboards another experienced loan packager, often a semi-retired broker who wants to structure deals without running a business, and trains them on the process in a week or two.

Second, he built the team around experienced women returning to the industry after having children, offering genuine work-from-home flexibility in exchange for long-term loyalty. Many have been with him well over 15 years.

Why his clients stay for decades

Most of Tony's internet leads arrive completely cold. He rarely loses them, and he almost never loses them once they settle. That is not luck, it is a nurture system that runs from the first phone call to a lifelong relationship.

It starts by removing friction. Everything is done over the phone and remotely. No sitting in a lounge room at 7pm, no client taking a day off work. He explains the simple behind-the-scenes process, and clients love how easy it feels.

From there, the relationship is reinforced with a stack of deliberate touch-points:

• Two newsletters a month, one home-loan focused and one risk focused, so he stays permanently top of mind.
• A free, value-added risk plan alongside every mortgage, so clients get more than they expected.
• A gift basket at settlement to put the icing on the cake.
• A structured review request, which clients happily fulfil because they received more than they paid for.
• 12-month risk and rate reviews, driven off the CRM, that reopen conversations about investment properties, cars and new goals.

If they're with me at the start, they're with me for the long haul. Two products under one roof puts a ring around the client. They think, 'why would I split my home loan and my risk between two people?' So they stay.

That newsletter cadence quietly prints money. A client who bought their first home six years ago reads an article about equity, realises they can now buy an investment property, and the whole cycle starts again.

And when lending softens, even at tricky times like end of financial year, Tony pivots to risk. He works back through his files and offers existing clients protection at no cost to them, because he is paid by the insurer, not the client. The revenue keeps coming even when the market goes quiet.

The Finance Operator's playbook

Strip 25 years down to what a broker can act on this quarter, and Tony's model comes down to seven moves:

1. 1Differentiate structurally, not with slogans. Add a genuinely different revenue line, like risk insurance under a general advice model, instead of competing on service claims everyone makes.
2. 2Protect the relationship, not just the transaction. Two products under one roof dramatically cut clawbacks and churn.
3. 3Own a lead channel. Tony owns search, and is actively rebuilding it for the AI and recommendation era with reviews and local focus.
4. 4Specialise your team. Break the journey into stages owned by experts, and fund it with diversified cash flow.
5. 5Systemise nurture. Newsletters, gift baskets, review requests and CRM-driven 12-month reviews keep you top of mind for decades.
6. 6Outsource as cash flow allows. Add each new building block, SEO, newsletters, packaging, processing, when the revenue appears to support it.
7. 7Learn to sell. Product knowledge is a given. Making a client feel comfortable is what actually wins the deal.

You can see the model in action at First Choice Mortgage Brokers, and hear the full conversation, including Tony's take on end-of-financial-year pivots and the future of AI in broking, on the episode above.