The new guard

Like many industry veterans, Chris Turcotte initially cut his teeth at a big bank. But after stints in both financial planning and lending, Turcotte found himself disillusioned with the bank atmosphere.

“I was being trained to push the bank’s agenda and not necessarily the advice,” he says. “You weren’t there to educate them. It was: ‘Do they qualify or not? And they also qualify for three other products? Jam them down their throat.’”

That didn’t sit well Turcotte. So when he was offered a branch manager position at the age of 24, it forced him to do some soul-searching.

“I was entrepreneurial from the start, and I was thinking: ‘Is this really it? Is this the ceiling?’” he recalls. “At the time, I wasn’t willing to leave Manitoba, so I wondered if I had hit the glass ceiling. The alignment of wanting to spend time with these people and give them financial advice and help them, and also thinking, ‘Oh crap, I think I’ve peaked already’ – the combination of those two happening at the same time [forced me to look outside the bank].”

And when he did, he found the mortgage broker channel. He started as a junior mortgage broker, with no industry experience but a thorough knowledge of mortgages. Within a year, Turcotte was out-producing all the other agents in his office combined; six months later, he was out-producing the broker of record and his entire office combined.

However, he soon found himself looking for something new after not getting paid on time. “[The broker made excuses], but finally I cornered him after a few weeks of not being paid,” Turcotte says. “He said, ‘Fine, go get the deal sheet off the printer.’ On my way back, I looked down and asked, ‘By the way, what’s this volume bonus thing with a lot of fairly large numbers with my name beside them? I don’t get paid a volume bonus. What is this?’ He turned white as a ghost. I thought he was ripping me off, so I wanted to find something new. I opened my eyes and asked what was out there.”

Eventually, Turcotte was approached by a Centum brokerage across the street – but not for the job he thought he’d be taking.

“The owner of the Centum [franchise] took me out for lunch one day,” Turcotte recalls. “His email said, ‘If you come to this lunch, I think I have an opportunity that will change your life forever.’ I thought, ‘He can’t make that statement. That’s not fair.’”

But as it turned out, the owner was right – he was getting on in years and wanted to hand the brokerage off to a young gun. Turcotte accepted his buyout offer and took over the brokerage – an older office in rural Brandon, Manitoba, with orange shag carpet and cedar-panelled walls – in 2010.

“I think we did about 50 deals a year when I started in 2010,” Turcotte says. “By 2011, we had five people and had doubled our size. When I left, we were 18 people across three locations doing almost $100 million in a farming community of 35,000 people.”

In December 2016, at the ripe old age of 35, Turcotte bid his brokerage good-bye and took on his current role as Centum’s president and COO. “It’s been a hell of a ride,” he says.

“Technology was hugely lagging behind at Centum,” he says, adding that the network had previously made a habit of over-promising and under-delivering on its technological updates. As a franchisee, it bothered him; he wanted to make good on those promises. With that in mind, the company recently launched Centum University.

“It’s a major undertaking because of how many products and how many income scenarios [there are],” Turcotte says. “I’m going to be able to confidently say we’re the only brand that teaches you how to do the role. Kudos to a lot of other brands that bring in big-name speakers … but in my opinion, getting people into a room and spending half a million dollars and revving everybody up for three days [isn’t the best way to teach brokers]. We’re putting all our efforts instead into teaching them how to actually get deals done – teaching them how to fund more deals, how to find more financing. We just launched the marketing division of Centum University. We’re taking them step-by-step through how to properly set up a Facebook business page and then how to market effectively. That’s how I built my entire business and brand.”

“I think if we invest in making each broker more profitable, that means more royalty, and then you don’t have to worry about nickeland- diming them,” he says. “Maybe that’s naive, but it worked in Brandon, [Manitoba]. We invested in people and made sure they knew how to do more deals and get more referrals. That builds loyalty.”

Along those lines, Turcotte names “the buying, selling and trading of mortgage brokers like they’re cattle” as the biggest issue facing the industry today.

“Sadly, the ones who are aware of this, who have been in the business for a long time, are strapped down by contracts,” he says. “It’s the most satisfying yet frustrating experience for me right now. I have very well respected and very successful offices in the industry reaching out to me. They love everything we’re doing, they love everything they’re seeing, but they’re strapped down by contracts.

“[The industry] focuses more on how we can own some of these brokers for as long as possible, rather than how we can actually deliver for these guys,” he adds. “The ironic part is, if you just put all your effort into delivering, why would they want to go anywhere?”