Technology-driven benchmarking is empowering brokers to improve their businesses, by giving them the numbers they need. MPA has partnered with PLAN Australia to find out how it works.
2015 saw the end of an era, with the demise of a much-loved industry institution, the MFAA’s national convention. It will be replaced by a selection of statebased one-day conferences, labelled the MFAA Broker 2020 Roadshow.
For many, the demise of the national convention has been a long time coming. Its extensive demands on brokers’ time, the preponderance of lenders and its reputation as a booze-up all come to mind. Yet the convention was not only becoming increasingly inconvenient, but also increasingly redundant. Brokers’ approach to training and development is changing, and the driver is technology.
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The challenge of isolation
Brokers are small businesspeople, and their primary demand of training is that it should suggest ways they could run their business better.
This is particularly important to the highest performers, according to Phil Quin-Conroy of aggregator PLAN Australia. “It’s often the top performers, we find, that are the first to embrace new opportunities,” he says. “You could argue maybe they need them the least.”
Successful businesses, paradoxically, are therefore the least inclined to ‘business as usual’. “They see taking responsibility for investing in their own development as a key differentiator and a key attribute to staying successful,” says Quin-Conroy.
The main constraint on that appetite for ideas is time and, to a lesser extent, money. PLAN’s BDM for WA, Simon Munkelt, has been in the business for over 12 years and insists time has always been an issue. “The ongoing battle with brokers is they always have so much to do, like the juggler in the middle of the circle with all the balls in the air, and every now and then, with the NCCP, or whatever is happening, someone throws an extra ball,” says Munkelt.
In addition to just being a broker, the demands of compliance, running a business, marketing and social media mean that attending a four-day conference is far less attractive than it might have been.
That’s not to say that brokers can’t get anything out of conferences, but that a conference may not be the best way of providing business intelligence. For years, conferences provided a way for isolated brokers to compare themselves to their peers. They needed a benchmark.
“Brokers – despite all the networks we have and the alliances we may form – still tend to work in a fairly solo environment,” notes James Angus of FINWEB Home Loans in Victoria. Unfortunately, this islolation means, “we really don’t have a lot of benchmarks whereby we can measure our performance.”
A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
Growth-oriented brokers understand that to evolve their business and provide a market-leading offering to their customers, they need to stand out from their peers and deliver unparalleled service.
PLAN Australia strongly believes in the power of education and training to fuel a broker’s development and business growth. Advancements in technology in recent years have drastically improved training opportunities – and brokers now have unprecedented access to sophisticated data analysis tools, online, on-demand training seminars and a greater range of educational and training tools.
One particular benefit of these tools is the greater accessibility of training, as even the most regional brokers can join in with online training webinars. Another exciting benefit is the deeper analysis a broker can get by using sophisticated technology to critically review their business practices.
At PLAN Australia we have invested heavily in creating a unique and highly innovative training and education program, including business analysis tools, sophisticated client surveys, digital PD days and more. We combine all of this with one of the biggest networks of BDMs in Australia – so we are always available to help our brokers.
As a firm advocate of the power of training as a tool to drive business growth, we are proud to partner with MPA to bring you this feature. We hope you find it valuable.
Phil Quin-Conroy
CEO
PLAN Australia
Modern benchmarking technology
It’s because of this need for a benchmark that Angus signed up to PLAN’s BEAT report. The BEAT report is a survey of brokers businesses, covering issues including location, support staff, and client relationships. But, as BDM Munkelt explains, its biggest innovation is in how it presents its results.
“The BEAT report gives us a trend line against brokers’ peers – single operators, dual partnerships, larger businesses,” says Munkelt. That includes separate trend lines for the average brokers and high performers.
Even before the BEAT report, Munkelt interviewed top performers, and wrote his insights in a diary. What technology has done is add hard data to his arguments. Munkelt will start a meeting with a broker by asking them what their ambitions are, and whether they want to grow the business, move into new areas or achieve a better work-life balance. He’ll then ask about their business’ current performance – such as its proportion of referrals – and refer to the brokers’ BEAT report. Munkelt then uses his experience and the trend lines to provide practical and reliable strategies for the broker to reach their target.
For brokers who don’t yet have specific ambitions, the BEAT report can provide an impetus for action. One of Munkelt’s brokers, based in Perth, was already writing an impressive $60m when he did the report in 2015. To the broker’s surprise, it showed several areas of weakness, including staff processes and marketing strategies, prompting him to make changes to his business. The payoff was astounding – a 30% increase in volumes (despite WA’s faltering housing market), an additional $50,000 from cross-selling and more time to focus on finding new clients.
Victoria broker Angus got feedback from the BEAT report and also PLAN’s CATscan, which asks clients for their feedback. The results were primarily positive, he recalls. “We have support staff and an office, and those two factors alone meant we were seen as high performing… Where we were falling down was the client feedback. We weren’t getting enough.”
FINWEB had always looked for feedback, through their own client surveys, but the CATscan was able to go further, Angus explains, because it wasn’t so visibly connected with the brokerage, as with previous in-house surveys. “Sometimes we weren’t getting completely honest feedback from clients.”
Many clients with good relationships with the brokerage “were fairly reluctant to give us full details of anything that did bother them.” And by outsourcing the surveying, these clients felt comfortable giving frank replies.
In response to the report, FINWEB have “stepped up a notch with the client feedback”.
"We are taking PLAN’s services in terms of obtaining the feedback for our brokers, and are expanding our digital marketing and social media strategy to ensure we’re raising our game as far as regular communication with clients through Facebook and Twitter and our old-fashioned newsletter.”
In fact, Angus is trying to replicate the CATscan’s advantages in his mentoring and support of the 25 brokers under the FINWEB banner, and this year will be centralising the collecting of feedback, creating that separation from the individual broker.
Beyond technological innovation
Technology driven benchmarking isn’t, however, a magic button for business success. For a start, as FINWEB’s Angus explains, “For most people, these kind of reports and tools don’t tell you anything you don’t know. What they do is highlight just how important it is if you’re not doing that.”
For him, the point of the BEAT report is in “actually seeing [those gaps] quantified, and seeing how much improvement you can achieve in the same working week, just by embracing these extra measures. That’s where the value of the strategy PLAN encourages really appears.”
PLAN chief Quin-Conroy has made the BEAT report and CATscan a core part of PLAN’s proposition, but he warns against viewing them in isolation.
“By no means do I want to communicate that we’re becoming a digital or online aggregator,” he says. “It’s all about looking at opportunities to leverage technology to compliment face-to-face.” He believes benchmarking tools need to be accompanied by one-on-one BDM meetings, group sessions and personal development days.
Nevertheless, even these more traditional approaches to learning are also being changed by technology. The use of trend lines for specific groups, such as mobile brokers and overall categories, aligns with the current vogue for peer-to-peer learning, in that it provides meaningful comparisons that can become subjects for discussion at meetings. Taking part in a physical peer-to-peer session is still important however, because data analysis can only capture certain aspects of a broker’s business, which is, of course, far more than a collection of numbers.
Benchmarking also goes hand in hand with the growing broker appetite for webinars. Broadcasting learning to a broker’s desk clearly has time-saving advantages for all concerned, but becomes a necessity for rural brokers, notes BDM Munkelt. “They can’t come down and see the speakers, which is why we’ve now moved in to digital space and we can start getting more information out to all the people in rural areas. The numbers we got for our commercial summit were almost double from the year before when it was face to face, because people can log in from anywhere in the country.”
Webinars also allow for the cost-efficient training of support staff, which Quin-Conroy insists is essential. “You’ve got to invest in your people. Good people with good attitudes want to be better at their job. You’re potentially making them more employable to others, but you’ve just got to live with that. You can’t afford not to have your people perform to the best of their ability, and training and development is a core part of that.”
Coming full circle, benchmarking and technology more generally is transforming the humble conference and making them, once again, worth brokers’ time. At PLAN’s PD days, they now discuss BEAT report results in aggregate, so all brokers can identify common areas in need of improvement. The coming year will see dedicated residential and commercial summits, again drawing on the extensive data PLAN now has relating to its brokers’ businesses.
Making the data count
Ultimately, the feedback provided by benchmarking only counts if you implement the changes in your business. Filling out the BEAT report takes less than an hour, but putting changes into practice takes many months of hard work.
Encouragingly, PLAN BDM Munkelt finds that changes driven by the BEAT report tend to have immediate benefi ts. “Even the brokers who get halfway through get so busy and their volumes go up so much … it might be a year or so later that they think, ‘I’m ready now to come back and revisit where I left off.’ With others, we do a nine- to 12-month business transformation. At the end of the period, if the broker is really committed to it, the transformation is amazing.”
Benchmarking allows the rewards of implementing changes to be quantified, for example, an increase in touchpoints leading to referrals, leading to higher volumes.
Nevertheless, the main reason to transform your business is still long term, according to FINWEB’s Angus. “If you really want to reach new heights... then you need to implement measures to gauge the experience of your clients and further improve your service offering.”
For many, the demise of the national convention has been a long time coming. Its extensive demands on brokers’ time, the preponderance of lenders and its reputation as a booze-up all come to mind. Yet the convention was not only becoming increasingly inconvenient, but also increasingly redundant. Brokers’ approach to training and development is changing, and the driver is technology.
The challenge of isolationBrokers are small businesspeople, and their primary demand of training is that it should suggest ways they could run their business better.
This is particularly important to the highest performers, according to Phil Quin-Conroy of aggregator PLAN Australia. “It’s often the top performers, we find, that are the first to embrace new opportunities,” he says. “You could argue maybe they need them the least.”
Successful businesses, paradoxically, are therefore the least inclined to ‘business as usual’. “They see taking responsibility for investing in their own development as a key differentiator and a key attribute to staying successful,” says Quin-Conroy.
The main constraint on that appetite for ideas is time and, to a lesser extent, money. PLAN’s BDM for WA, Simon Munkelt, has been in the business for over 12 years and insists time has always been an issue. “The ongoing battle with brokers is they always have so much to do, like the juggler in the middle of the circle with all the balls in the air, and every now and then, with the NCCP, or whatever is happening, someone throws an extra ball,” says Munkelt.
In addition to just being a broker, the demands of compliance, running a business, marketing and social media mean that attending a four-day conference is far less attractive than it might have been.
That’s not to say that brokers can’t get anything out of conferences, but that a conference may not be the best way of providing business intelligence. For years, conferences provided a way for isolated brokers to compare themselves to their peers. They needed a benchmark.
“Brokers – despite all the networks we have and the alliances we may form – still tend to work in a fairly solo environment,” notes James Angus of FINWEB Home Loans in Victoria. Unfortunately, this islolation means, “we really don’t have a lot of benchmarks whereby we can measure our performance.”
A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
Growth-oriented brokers understand that to evolve their business and provide a market-leading offering to their customers, they need to stand out from their peers and deliver unparalleled service.
PLAN Australia strongly believes in the power of education and training to fuel a broker’s development and business growth. Advancements in technology in recent years have drastically improved training opportunities – and brokers now have unprecedented access to sophisticated data analysis tools, online, on-demand training seminars and a greater range of educational and training tools.
One particular benefit of these tools is the greater accessibility of training, as even the most regional brokers can join in with online training webinars. Another exciting benefit is the deeper analysis a broker can get by using sophisticated technology to critically review their business practices.
At PLAN Australia we have invested heavily in creating a unique and highly innovative training and education program, including business analysis tools, sophisticated client surveys, digital PD days and more. We combine all of this with one of the biggest networks of BDMs in Australia – so we are always available to help our brokers.
As a firm advocate of the power of training as a tool to drive business growth, we are proud to partner with MPA to bring you this feature. We hope you find it valuable.
Phil Quin-Conroy
CEO
PLAN Australia
Modern benchmarking technology
It’s because of this need for a benchmark that Angus signed up to PLAN’s BEAT report. The BEAT report is a survey of brokers businesses, covering issues including location, support staff, and client relationships. But, as BDM Munkelt explains, its biggest innovation is in how it presents its results.
“The BEAT report gives us a trend line against brokers’ peers – single operators, dual partnerships, larger businesses,” says Munkelt. That includes separate trend lines for the average brokers and high performers.
Even before the BEAT report, Munkelt interviewed top performers, and wrote his insights in a diary. What technology has done is add hard data to his arguments. Munkelt will start a meeting with a broker by asking them what their ambitions are, and whether they want to grow the business, move into new areas or achieve a better work-life balance. He’ll then ask about their business’ current performance – such as its proportion of referrals – and refer to the brokers’ BEAT report. Munkelt then uses his experience and the trend lines to provide practical and reliable strategies for the broker to reach their target.
For brokers who don’t yet have specific ambitions, the BEAT report can provide an impetus for action. One of Munkelt’s brokers, based in Perth, was already writing an impressive $60m when he did the report in 2015. To the broker’s surprise, it showed several areas of weakness, including staff processes and marketing strategies, prompting him to make changes to his business. The payoff was astounding – a 30% increase in volumes (despite WA’s faltering housing market), an additional $50,000 from cross-selling and more time to focus on finding new clients.
Victoria broker Angus got feedback from the BEAT report and also PLAN’s CATscan, which asks clients for their feedback. The results were primarily positive, he recalls. “We have support staff and an office, and those two factors alone meant we were seen as high performing… Where we were falling down was the client feedback. We weren’t getting enough.”
FINWEB had always looked for feedback, through their own client surveys, but the CATscan was able to go further, Angus explains, because it wasn’t so visibly connected with the brokerage, as with previous in-house surveys. “Sometimes we weren’t getting completely honest feedback from clients.”
Many clients with good relationships with the brokerage “were fairly reluctant to give us full details of anything that did bother them.” And by outsourcing the surveying, these clients felt comfortable giving frank replies.
In response to the report, FINWEB have “stepped up a notch with the client feedback”.
"We are taking PLAN’s services in terms of obtaining the feedback for our brokers, and are expanding our digital marketing and social media strategy to ensure we’re raising our game as far as regular communication with clients through Facebook and Twitter and our old-fashioned newsletter.”
In fact, Angus is trying to replicate the CATscan’s advantages in his mentoring and support of the 25 brokers under the FINWEB banner, and this year will be centralising the collecting of feedback, creating that separation from the individual broker.
Beyond technological innovation
Technology driven benchmarking isn’t, however, a magic button for business success. For a start, as FINWEB’s Angus explains, “For most people, these kind of reports and tools don’t tell you anything you don’t know. What they do is highlight just how important it is if you’re not doing that.”
For him, the point of the BEAT report is in “actually seeing [those gaps] quantified, and seeing how much improvement you can achieve in the same working week, just by embracing these extra measures. That’s where the value of the strategy PLAN encourages really appears.”
PLAN chief Quin-Conroy has made the BEAT report and CATscan a core part of PLAN’s proposition, but he warns against viewing them in isolation.
“By no means do I want to communicate that we’re becoming a digital or online aggregator,” he says. “It’s all about looking at opportunities to leverage technology to compliment face-to-face.” He believes benchmarking tools need to be accompanied by one-on-one BDM meetings, group sessions and personal development days.
Nevertheless, even these more traditional approaches to learning are also being changed by technology. The use of trend lines for specific groups, such as mobile brokers and overall categories, aligns with the current vogue for peer-to-peer learning, in that it provides meaningful comparisons that can become subjects for discussion at meetings. Taking part in a physical peer-to-peer session is still important however, because data analysis can only capture certain aspects of a broker’s business, which is, of course, far more than a collection of numbers.
Benchmarking also goes hand in hand with the growing broker appetite for webinars. Broadcasting learning to a broker’s desk clearly has time-saving advantages for all concerned, but becomes a necessity for rural brokers, notes BDM Munkelt. “They can’t come down and see the speakers, which is why we’ve now moved in to digital space and we can start getting more information out to all the people in rural areas. The numbers we got for our commercial summit were almost double from the year before when it was face to face, because people can log in from anywhere in the country.”
Webinars also allow for the cost-efficient training of support staff, which Quin-Conroy insists is essential. “You’ve got to invest in your people. Good people with good attitudes want to be better at their job. You’re potentially making them more employable to others, but you’ve just got to live with that. You can’t afford not to have your people perform to the best of their ability, and training and development is a core part of that.”
Coming full circle, benchmarking and technology more generally is transforming the humble conference and making them, once again, worth brokers’ time. At PLAN’s PD days, they now discuss BEAT report results in aggregate, so all brokers can identify common areas in need of improvement. The coming year will see dedicated residential and commercial summits, again drawing on the extensive data PLAN now has relating to its brokers’ businesses.
Making the data count
Ultimately, the feedback provided by benchmarking only counts if you implement the changes in your business. Filling out the BEAT report takes less than an hour, but putting changes into practice takes many months of hard work.
Encouragingly, PLAN BDM Munkelt finds that changes driven by the BEAT report tend to have immediate benefi ts. “Even the brokers who get halfway through get so busy and their volumes go up so much … it might be a year or so later that they think, ‘I’m ready now to come back and revisit where I left off.’ With others, we do a nine- to 12-month business transformation. At the end of the period, if the broker is really committed to it, the transformation is amazing.”
Benchmarking allows the rewards of implementing changes to be quantified, for example, an increase in touchpoints leading to referrals, leading to higher volumes.
Nevertheless, the main reason to transform your business is still long term, according to FINWEB’s Angus. “If you really want to reach new heights... then you need to implement measures to gauge the experience of your clients and further improve your service offering.”
