Customer Experience, Personalized Service Makes Small Business Finance Brokerage One of the Fastest Growing in the Nation

“I would say 90% of all of our interactions we send out a Zoom link, and we do a video call,” said Edward DeAngelis, CEO of QualiFi, “We call it our discovery call. It’s typically a 30 minute, very in depth discovery call with every one of our clients.”

In an era when hyper-growth has become increasingly dependent on automation and AI, QualiFi is finding opportunity by honing in on the human experience. That approach has helped the company generate 658% growth over the past three years and become the ninth-fastest-growing company in Pennsylvania. The Inc. 5000 also ranked QualiFi as the 528th fastest-growing company nationally and second overall among companies that would describe themselves as small business finance brokerages.

QualiFi invests heavily in technology as well, but uses it to make its processes better and more efficient rather than replace crucial elements such as customer service.

“Sometimes if you’re just on a phone call and the business owner’s busy, they got you in one ear and three employees in the other ear, and they might not be paying attention on some of our discovery calls,” DeAngelis said. “We have the CEO on the [Zoom] call. We have their CFO. They might have one of their operations managers. Sometimes we have Zoom calls with three or four members from the business owner’s company. So we feel like it’s much more personable.”

DeAngelis said the objective of the call is to understand clients’ needs and then set a path to meet them, whether immediately or further down the line. From there, the company uses whatever method of communication gets the job done.

“We use all forms of communication after we have a relationship built, it could be a quick text if we just need something, an email, a phone call, there’s definitely several phone calls that happen throughout,” DeAngelis said.

Suffice it to say, Zoom alone has not led to QualiFi’s success. This past June, DeAngelis was on the big stage at Broker Fair, where he presented to hundreds of brokers in New York City about his company’s history and its journey toward 10xing a broker shop. There, he attributed the company’s success to ingredients including company culture, the client experience, proper hiring, onboarding, and training, among other things.

In a clip that circulated across social media from his presentation, DeAngelis said of culture, “It’s not about posters and ping pong tables.”

“Your team’s on the front lines. And if you really take care of your team, your team’s taking care of your clients, and it kind of snowballs if they feel good about their company, they feel good about their leaders, they’re going to feel good about their products and their services that they’re offering,” he told deBanked. “It just trickles down.”

DeAngelis largely credited his team for QualiFi’s Inc. 5000 placement as well. “I have to pass all the credit back to our team that’s in the trenches every day, our management team, our sales reps, our processing team,” he said.

About 60-65% of QualiFi clients’ first transactions are lines of credit. The company offers unsecured and secured financing, term loans, SBA loans, MCAs, and more.

DeAngelis and his business partner, Jason Maury, set out from the beginning to build a $100 million company. While they have not reached that milestone yet, QualiFi has already experienced tremendous growth.

“We’re going to continue every day, ‘1% better every day,’ that’s our motto,” DeAngelis said, “and we’re just going to try to do good in the world and continue to make everything a better place at QualiFi.”

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.