Growing by Not Writing Loans: Tracey Franco on Building FinanceCorp Around Her Brokers

Most brokerage owners grow by writing more loans themselves. Tracey Franco grew FinanceCorp by doing the opposite, deliberately taking herself off the tools so she could spend every hour building the brokers around her. It's an unusual model, and it's made her one of Connective's top-3 brokerages.

In this episode of The Finance Operator, Tracey walks host Daniel Rasmus through 26 years in broking: buying the company four years after she started, engineering referral sources so she's never dependent on one, the systems stack that lets her post at 5am and 9pm without burning out, and the AI that already answers her phones. Press play above to hear it in full.

From solo broker to buying the company

Tracey's path was fast and opportunistic. She started as a mortgage broker in 2005 and, in her words, "networked my little butt off for the first 12 months." That effort got noticed: within a year she was offered a FinanceCorp franchise, then another the year after. In 2009 came the offer that changed everything, the chance to buy the company itself.

2009, I got offered to buy the company, so I said, hey, why not? Might as well do that. So I took ownership, closed all the other offices we had, and built up FinanceCorp on my own, obviously with my husband's help.

Going from start-up broker to business owner in four years is, as Daniel noted, "definitely not the usual path." Tracey simply rolled with how it turned out, and then set about rebuilding the company deliberately.

What made her successful

Ask Tracey what drove the growth and the answer is immediate: networking and getting yourself out there. "Pounding the pavement," as she puts it, working the target market of real estate agents, builders, settlement agents, anyone who can send a referral. But the differentiator wasn't the meeting, it was what happened after.

Once I started to build up a database from those referrals, I made sure I kept in contact with them. Having a CRM is really important, and keeping in touch with all those clients, that's how you get the referral business. It's not sitting in your office on your butt, it's actually getting yourself out there.

Her biggest single move was social: she runs 75 local community Facebook groups all over Australia, and as the only mortgage broker permitted to advertise inside them, she has a marketing channel no competitor can touch. "I do upset some of the mortgage broking people," she laughs, "but it works well."

Engineering referral sources

The core lesson Tracey drills into new brokers is that you cannot lean on a single referral source. Real estate agents and builders matter, but they can't be the whole picture.

You can't just have real estate agents or builders, you've got to have lots of other things going. Social media, Google Ads, Facebook ads, a mix of all those things. If you're doing a little bit of everything, I find that's always worked for me.

It's diversification applied to lead generation: the more independent sources you cultivate, the less any single quiet month can hurt you. At the moment the firm runs Facebook ads for first-home buyers and debt consolidation, keeps every real estate relationship warm, and still gets new agents approaching Tracey directly, often because she can help them with their own Facebook presence. "It's a win-win."

The top-of-mind discipline

Plenty of brokers write off real estate agents as a waste of time, and Tracey knows exactly why they fail: they visit once and expect a flood of referrals. Her model is built on repetition instead.

If you just go and see them once, they're not going to remember you. But we send text messages every month, we go and visit them, we drop off gifts. It's being top of mind all the time. If you're not doing that, you will not get the referrals, unfortunately.

The same discipline runs through the database: regular calls, repricing reviews that keep the firm front of mind, anniversary texts and emails, monthly newsletters and the monthly RBA update. Even the giveaways are strategic. At fetes and spring fairs she'd rather hand out a branded magnet than a business card, "a magnet, you've got more of a chance of that getting on the fridge; a business card, they'll just chuck it in the bin." Clients they don't see in person get a posted gift, branded merchandise plus chocolates, for the sake of a $20 postage cost that keeps FinanceCorp the name they call next time.

The non-writing principal model

Here is where Tracey diverges most sharply from the brokers Daniel usually interviews. Most principals are writing principals, still carrying their own loan book. Tracey deliberately doesn't, and she's blunt about why: the moment she takes on even one or two loans, the service she gives clients is so hands-on that everything she does for her team falls over.

Every so often I think I'm Wonder Woman again and take one or two on, and then all the other things I do in my day, and how much I help my staff, just fall to the wayside, and I don't get any sleep. So it's better for me not to be Wonder Woman.

When a client insists on seeing her, she joins the Zoom or the face-to-face, does the talking with one of her brokers, and then the broker does everything and keeps their normal commission. Her actual job is mentor, coach and non-writing principal, doing her brokers' marketing, running one-on-ones, and encouraging them. The pay-off is counter-intuitive but real:

If you want to grow your brokers and help them, you just can't write. It's not possible. I can get more staff and write more loans by not writing loans, if that makes sense.

Her 16 brokers are all self-employed, each running "a business within my business." She gives them leads, but insists they generate their own too, she doesn't want order-takers, she wants brokers building strong trail books of their own. It's currently her smallest team in years, and she says it's the best she's ever had, because the quality is there.

The systems that run the business

People constantly ask Tracey whether she ever sleeps, given she's posting at 9 at night and 5 in the morning. The answer isn't superhuman energy, it's infrastructure.

I've set up systems, and there's procedures to everything that help me do all those things. I've been a broker for 26 years, I know what I'm doing. Setting up the processes and the systems is what makes you successful.

Her advice to brokers who get busy is to employ people to do the things you don't like, "I've got to remind myself I'm one woman, not many." As she's grown, she's added great support staff precisely so the basics never slip.

GoHighLevel, Mercury and AI calls

The tooling is deliberately split. RecurPost handles social media scheduling. For CRM and marketing the firm runs its own GoHighLevel instance rather than the generic system every Connective broker shares, "I like to be different", while Connective's Mercury remains the finance system. Keeping them separate is more work for Tracey, but none for the brokers, because she manages the join herself.

That join is a genuinely clever piece of engineering. Rather than use the off-the-shelf fact-find, she worked with developers to build her own online fact-find in GoHighLevel that integrates straight into Mercury and creates the opportunity automatically.

When you're on the road and you ring a client and say I'm driving, can I send you a link for our fact find? They fill it in, upload payslips, and when the broker gets home it's all there in Mercury, the opportunity's created. I want my brokers writing business, not doing admin.

Every lead, without exception, is entered into the CRM, a discipline she says too many brokers skip. Automations run from there: birthday messages and anniversary texts go out at 9am, and she had developers route replies to LeadConnect on the brokers' phones so a client can be answered personally rather than lost in an app. And AI is already live, not theoretical: 'Sophie' has answered all of FinanceCorp's calls for about 18 months, and Tracey is now working to integrate an AI caller into the website so an inbound call flows through GoHighLevel and lands as a lead in Mercury.

The support team behind her

None of this works without people. Tracey has built a deep support layer so her brokers can stay on the tools:

• A full-time in-house PA (Sonia) who runs office follow-ups and sees clients for document signing, WA is always last to get digital signatures.
• Contract PAs the brokers use for follow-ups and admin tasks.
• Three to four long-serving VAs in the Philippines split across admin, sales-meeting support and compliance.
• A sales manager who trains and mentors new brokers and does joint servicing.
• Social media staff who moderate the 75 community groups and run daily posting.
• A bookkeeper and accountant, the first two people she hired, plus marketing help for Facebook advertising.

Notably, Tracey holds her own credit licence rather than operating as a credit representative of Connective, so she also carries extra compliance checks herself. It's a bigger burden, but it's the level of control the model demands.

How she onboards a new broker

Because the model lives or dies on broker quality, onboarding is rigorous. It starts at the interview, she's screening for go-getters who understand they likely won't earn an income for three to six months. From there it's a documented, four-page onboarding checklist.

1. 1Get the credentials sorted. For the rare green broker, help them through their Cert IV, ASIC, MFAA or FBAA requirements.
2. 2Kit them out. Organise a professional photo, pay for business cards and refer-a-friend marketing material, and set them up on the Connective marketing system.
3. 3Mentor the first 10 deals. The sales manager sits on every single call for their first ten leads while accreditations are finalised.
4. 4Graduate gradually. Once the sales manager judges them ready, they run meetings but still get servicing support.
5. 5Keep them learning. Future Champs on the third Thursday each month, monthly sales meetings with bank BDMs for CPD points, and a team group chat where scenarios and lender experiences are shared.
6. 6Coach to goals. Monthly one-on-ones where Tracey works out each broker's goals and helps them hit them, then takes them to meet agents and builders with a marketing box to learn the lingo.

It's a lengthy process, which is exactly why Tracey is now so selective, she wants brokers who will start well and stay long-term. When a broker does eventually move on, they take their clients, and if they've been with the firm long enough (typically three years) they keep their trails. "I don't see anyone as a competitor," she says; proper contracts written at the start keep everyone on the same page.

Surviving the downturn

With the market cooling and plenty of brokers and agents feeling it, Tracey's plan is unglamorous: go back to basics. The spring fairs, the fetes, the face-to-face real estate agent visits, the fundamentals that quietly lapsed when everyone was too busy writing loans.

They should be doing all those basic things every day anyway. It's not difficult. Go back to seeing the real estate agents face-to-face that went by the wayside when we were really busy.

Her broader read on the downturn is that single brokers who are struggling should join a bigger brokerage with a real database. "You've got better morale, you've got the team, you've got more leads. Yes, they take a cut, but as long as they're doing the work for you, that's okay." It's a view she notes the aggregators increasingly share.

Where FinanceCorp goes next

The growth engine has flipped. Where Tracey once had to chase brokers, she now sits and waits for them to approach her, and spends her energy on lead generation and making her existing brokers busier. This week she opened a sister company, FinanceCorp Asset Finance, and wants to build its leads and broker base up to match the mortgage side.

I'd like to write probably 40 or 50 mil a month, we're currently writing 30 to 40, so we're not far off. And I'd like to get back up to around 20 brokers, but people who want to work full-time. If you're writing less than a million a month, don't waste your time.

For all the numbers, her stated goal is refreshingly human: grow the business, add a few more staff, and make sure everybody's happy and making enough money to survive. "I just help people grow their business, and then it comes back. I guess it's good karma."

The Finance Operator's playbook

If you want to model how Tracey built FinanceCorp, here's the distilled version:

1. 1Consider not writing loans at all. If your real job is growing brokers, being on the tools will cannibalise the time that actually scales the business.
2. 2Build brokers, not order-takers. Give leads, but insist each broker generates their own and builds a real trail book inside your business.
3. 3Diversify every referral source. Agents, builders, settlement agents, social, Google and Facebook ads, never let one channel carry you.
4. 4Win the repetition game. Monthly texts, regular visits and gifts keep you top-of-mind; one visit gets you forgotten.
5. 5Own a channel nobody else can. Tracey's 75 community groups are a moat, find the equivalent in your market.
6. 6Enter every single lead into the CRM. No exceptions; the leads you don't record are the referrals you'll never get.
7. 7Wire marketing into your finance system. A custom fact-find feeding Mercury means brokers write business instead of doing admin.
8. 8Adopt AI where it already works. An AI phone assistant answering every call is live technology, not a someday project.
9. 9Put people around you early. PAs, VAs, a sales manager, compliance and a bookkeeper let one person run like many.
10. 10Onboard slowly and selectively. A documented checklist and a mentored first 10 deals produce brokers who stay long-term.

Tracey's throughline is that success is built, not improvised, systems, processes and the right people, wrapped around a principal willing to give up writing loans so everyone else can write more. You can learn more about the firm at FinanceCorp.