He recommends all brokers automate
In an interview with the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia (MFAA), Adam Grocke shared his journey from being a broker, to hiring brokers on salaries, to creating solutions to help brokers retain customers. The last leg of his journey led him to found Sherlok, an automated repricing and refinancing retention tool Grocke developed to help solve the perennial problem of client retention.
Grocke shared that being a sole operator had never been sustainable for him. “[It] was hard to scale the business, and if I took a holiday I would lose clients,” he said. So he took a risk and flipped the business model, becoming a BDM while hiring brokers on a pay-as-you-go model to write loans. “It was a hard decision with a much larger hit to profits and significant investment at the beginning, but it paid off long-term,” Grocke told MFAA.
Grocke hit another roadblock with the drawn-out processes he experienced refinancing clients’ loans, which in turn impacted client retention. Upon investigating, Grocke found that most clients had simply realised their current lender’s rate wasn’t competitive anymore and “took the path of least resistance” – to go to the closest broker or one they had recently heard of. “And now people are shopping around online before going to a broker,” Grocke added.
Sensing the gap in the market he could potentially fill for brokers, Grocke and his team developed Sherlok. Available to all brokers, it automatically reprices clients’ rates with their current lender and detects quality refinancing opportunities, sending those leads to the broker.
Grocke now recommends all brokers use technology to take away the “low dollar productive tasks” and automate. He imparted three tips for brokers:
- Understand where in the lifecycle your business is.
- Prioritise technology appropriate for where your business is at in the lifecycle.
- Don’t do everything at once. Start with the two or three technology tools that will give the business the highest impact for the lowest effort.
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Grocke admitted that knowing which technology to use can be confusing. “[But] brokers need to continually question if there a better way of doing this and what is the effort required to make the change,” he said.
