Co-Founder and Head of Lending
Departmentat Aureus Financial
Sam Panetta is a co-founder and the head of the lending department at Aureus Financial. His business helps clients get the funding that they need to grow their business, acquire their dream home and build wealth through property.
Sam and the rest of the Aureus Financial team have been working with Koruna Assist since the day Aureus Financial launched. Before that, Sam was a finance broker who had no team, so he had to do everything himself, from fact find sessions, follow up calls, to settlements. It was unbearable so when he left his previous role and started Aureus Financial, he knew from day one that he needed a team.
“Anyone who understands the amount of work that goes into the loan process knows how demanding and time-consuming it is. So when I left my previous role and started Aureus Financial, I knew from day one that I wanted to have a team. So we built the systems, and processes, and had your guys come on board to start with and we built the entire lending business and the bigger Aureus business completely around having an offshore team.”
Anyone who has worked in the mortgage broking industry knows how demanding and consuming the loan process is. It involves long hours of filling in paperwork, sitting on the phone with lenders, and follow-ups. Your number enemy is the time constraint when you’re doing everything yourself. Sam knew this before Aureus Financial, so he reached out to Petra, Koruna Assist’s founder and the rest is history.
“When you’re trying to do everything yourself, and you don’t have a team, there are two big issues. Number one is the time constraint when you’re only one man or one woman, you can only do so much work on any given day and you only get so many hours in a day. The second aspect of it is when you’re working by yourself, you obviously have systems and processes in your mind. The systems and processes in your mind are next to useless. You can’t scale that. Having the offshore team gives you the time back and forces you to systemize and improve your business.”
Other than freeing up Sam’s and his other finance broker’s time off time-consuming repetitive tasks, Sam sees the opportunity to scale the systems and processes he built by having onshore and offshore staff.
“Once I start to hire onshore brokers, I can train them in the systems and the processes that are built and then they can get their own offshore staff to help them build their business up. That’s infinitely scalable. I can continue to hire more onshore brokers to be the head honchos and can hire more and more offshore staff to continue to support the brokers that we have onshore. And it gets to a point where the business doesn’t even need me anymore. You’ve got all the implementation taken care of the back end, you’ve got brokers taking care of the front end. And that’s the end goal.”
“If you got the business to the point where you’re tapping out., the only way for you to cross that hurdle is to continue to get help. I personally believe that you could build a team of probably five offshore staff to improve efficiencies in one broker’s life before it made more sense to hire other brokers to train in your office. So when you run the numbers it’s just a matter of if that’s where you’re at in business. You have to have a crack at it and you need to do it. Otherwise, you just keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re just gonna get the same results.
And when you do outsource, understand why you’re doing it. And then to be prepared to invest the time and the energy to build it out and then to keep pushing forward with it and reap the results of it.”