Prospa Groundbreakers: Huy Truong of ALI Group – Part 2

Huy Truong of ALI is not your ordinary Australian businessman or MFAA Prospa Groundbreaker.

As a young child in 1978, Huy and his family boarded a fishing trawler with 24 others to escape the oppressive aftermath of the Vietnam War and start a new life in Melbourne, Australia.

Just over four decades later Huy, now the CEO & Co-owner of ALI Group, Co-founder and Chairman of Thrive Refugee Enterprise and Member of the Federal Government’s Refugee and Migrant Services Advisory Council, is one of the country’s greatest success stories.

Inspired by his parents’ sacrifice and imbued with an ambition and energy that Huy says is not uncommon amongst refugees, the industry leader has achieved on multiple stages.

In this MFAA Prospa Groundbreakers, Huy Truong discusses his beginnings in business, his belief in refugees, his love for Australia, and his hopes for the future.

Part 2: Responding to challenges & looking ahead

MFAA: Obviously, this year has been full of challenges. Have you seen through Thrive and ALI any increase in hardship and how are you responding to that?

Huy Truong (HT): The bush fires impacted ALI more so than Thrive because a big portion of our business is regional brokers and regional policy holders. We saw some of that flow through in January and February. We’re not a lender so we’re obviously not seeking $1,500 or $2,000 a month from people, which is a big part of someone’s budget. Our policies tend to be more like $50 or $60 a month. Nonetheless we did see some of that come through and we did see some of the struggles regional brokers were having as they saw their communities and their families and friends decimated.

I think we were one of the first organisations if not the first in the industry to come out with a support package for the volunteer firefighters in early January, which I am really proud of. We are a small company, but we still ultimately ended up with $60,000 or $70,000 raised and donated towards various appeals. Now with COVID-19, I think ALI has come much more front and centre and in the brokers and customers minds, because all of a sudden life’s uncertainties are really weighing down on people, particularly job and income security. Our team is very focused right now on serving our policy holders as we’ve seen unemployment claims increase probably ten-fold in the last two or three weeks. But that’s what we’re here for and we’re really pleased to be able to be there for brokers and their clients during this anxious period of time.

As you can imagine insurance is not always top of mind for people until they actually need it. Unfortunately for a lot of people, trying to get insurance after the event is too late. To use the bush fire analogy, there is no point trying to get building or contents insurance when the bush fire is at your doorstop. So that’s the impact on ALI. With Thrive, we are the lender, we provide unsecured small business loans to clients and a lot of them are in personal service. So whether it be domestic cleaning, food and beverages, personal transport, all of that has been shut down – obviously with everyone social distancing. So, we’re just providing immediate relief for all of those clients, no repayments for three or six months. We’ll work to refinance their loans and, in the meantime, help them gain access to whatever Government support packages there are.

The really good news is Australians and the refugees in Thrive are really resilient people So you often give them a call and say, ‘How are you going? We can see your cash flow has come to a standstill’ and they’ll say, ‘It’s not great, but I’ve dealt with a lot worse. This will pass and I’ll rebuild, and we’ll be onwards and upwards again’. When someone asked me once, ‘Why do you think these refugee businesses will do well?’ It’s because when you think about it, when we’re recruiting, you have two candidates in front of you. There’s one that has been immaculately trained in that particular content or subject matter, but with poor attitude, versus someone else where you see the drive, the energy, the hunger, the initiative, and maybe they’re not quite as well trained in the subject matter, who would you hire? Nine out of 10 times you’ll hire the person with a great attitude, because you can’t train attitude, it’s there particularly by the time they’re in their late 20’s to mid-30’s. They’ve either got that attitude or not, but the stuff you can train on is content. So I think that’s why refugees who have taken the risk to come out to Australia, many of them have that really dynamic, positive attitude. There’s the odd exception, that happens, but generally they have this drive and hunger to rebuild their lives. You just really want to tap into that, leverage off that, and over time they’ll contribute back to Australia in far more ways than what Treasury would ever cost in terms of the initial investment we make in them arriving.

MFAA: Once we come out the other side of the pandemic, what are you looking forward to most both personally and professionally?

HT: Well, there’s a quote, “Never waste a good crisis”. That’s because anytime there’s a life changing event, it should force us to completely re-evaluate what’s important, and also re-engineer ourselves so that we can actually be better post-crisis. I think about the multiple hats I wear. Firstly at ALI, I’m really excited about the fact that brokers hopefully coming out of this will realise that they have a really important role to play in offering the right insurance to their customers and not just seeing themselves as loan writers.*

Between February and March, we saw our active broker numbers double. It really highlighted for them that ‘I can’t ignore this part of the service offering because if I don’t believe in it or I’m not doing it myself, my customers are asking about it’. Our BDMs were just bombarded with calls from brokers saying, ‘OK, I know I didn’t take the time to learn about it, but I really need to now’. And we want to see a really resilient, diversified broker industry which means that you ultimately need to take the client’s interest first and have all the relevant services available to them. I’m excited about that because I think it will be a real game changer for the industry and for us.

On the Thrive side, I think that it will give a lot of people involved with Thrive including the clients and refugees themselves, a lot of confidence when we get through this. They will rebound and when they do so quickly with the nature of the business they have, it will show the model works, and we do have a resilient people. On RAMSAC, we are very keen to prioritise refugee economic participation by looking again at the whole settlement program to see how employment and self-employment can actually be the centrepiece to a more successful settlement experience. The insights Thrive is generating will be helpful to this policy development.

And as individuals, I am excited about new business models in the future, how we as human beings work, because it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to do a three way video interview and discussion like this with you and Emma Flanagan (ALI Group Marketing and Communications Executive). We probably would have met in Sydney and it wouldn’t have been quite as easy to bring Emma in. So this is just one example of how you can use technology in the way we’ve been forced to do to find connections in a broader way. And, I wouldn’t have been to as many homes of colleagues and partners through Zoom, and you certainly wouldn’t have been to my caravan, if this didn’t all happen. So, it’s an example of using technology to build more personal relationships in some respects. COVID-19 will have created new technology, social and work norms that will mean less physical contact and travel … and in the long run, it will be better for work life balance and the environment …

At this point in the interview, as Huy was discussing the promise of a digital future, the interviewer’s internet dropped out and we lost connection.

(Connection restored) HT: We’re back online The irony there is I was just saying one of the great things I’m really looking forward to is using technology to be able to work differently, and then right at that point you froze (laughs). But yes, we got the gist of that, and there is an exciting future there that I am really looking forward to experiencing.

*Mortgage and finance brokers must ensure that they are appropriately authorised to recommend and/or distribute insurance products.