5 tips to increase your personal effectiveness

You’re here because you operate an established mortgage broking practice, already experienced success and wondering if you could or should take your practice to the next level.

The knowledge, skills and tools that you’ve accumulated to get to this point will not necessarily get you to where you’d like to be. If you truly want to grow, the journey ahead does take effort, and on occasion, it can be a testing or character-building experience.

With a host of different variables that influence deal flow, profitability, settlement volumes, asset value, work-life balance and your own sense of accomplishment, Ultimate Broker Insights will look at and discuss these variables so you can level up your broking practice.

Each article has been influenced by the pragmatic experience of working with mortgage brokers in Australia for over 9 years combined with the insights gained from having conducted over 8,500 one-on-one?coaching sessions.

Hopefully they inspire you to realise your own potential so you too can operate a broking practice that provides a sense continued professional and personal reward.?

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As you have likely seen or noticed when speaking with peers @ PD Days, some brokers can get stuck doing menial tasks to keep clients happy, but have little to show for it.?

Why?

Because over the years, they've cultivated a mindset that associates work with 'quantity of tasks'.?Frankly, the thinking stems from the industrial era when working on the production line was all about the quantity of tasks completed during a shift.??

As a practice owner, however, being busy doesn’t always correlate to more impact.

That's why in this message, I'd like to outline some tweaks to mindset, structure and strategy that can help you yield a greater return on time & effort in running your broking practice.?

The 5 Tips

Tip #1 - Upgrade The Thinking

Brokers who have the employee mindset tend to fill the silence with something.??Sometimes they’ll check emails before they’ve even gotten out of bed, and essentially from the first moment of the day, they’re in reactive mode and letting their inbox dictate their focus.

And they'll repeat this pattern most days.??

If you’re busy doing things that don’t matter, you won’t be anywhere near as impactful or effective as you could be.?

You might consider placing greater value on your time and expertise and steering your practice in the right direction.?Whether it's a micro-practice or it's a more mature firm, having clarity of intent and purpose will allow you to determine if tasks that come through align with your mission whether they are a 'now or later' task and if they should be completed by you or your team.

With clear, focused and purposeful thinking, you'll?derive a higher return on your time and effort.

Tip #2 - Redefine Your Definition of Work??

As an extension of point # 1, the way you see things determines your attitude towards them and how you feel about them.

Do you see yourself as a 'broker', 'practice owner' or both???Your answer could unconsciously influence how you define and prioritise your work, which influences?the responsibilities you gravitate toward and those you repel.

Tip #3 - Specialise?

Most brokers tend to specialise in a lending segment (e.g., resi or asset), but few niches down in terms of a sub-set of that market.

Of the few that do, it tends to be an exceptionally high likelihood that they will be in the top 3% of brokers who settled $25M or more per 6-month period (source: MFAA Industry Intelligence Service 5th Edition)

While some brokers can and do diversify their service, it is most common to build momentum in a core offering (e.g, resi lending), and then extend their service from there.?

Further, I occasionally speak with brokers who "love" to get deals approved that other brokers can’t write."?No doubt these brokers are highly capable, though, with the research, time and effort in getting an approval, the cost is not writing another 2, or 3 or more loans that were simpler, and invariably, more profitable.

As a rule of thumb (not rule of law), for most metro brokers, the broader the offering, the slower the service when factoring in researching per file if oscillating between residential, commercial and asset.

Tip #4 - Empower and Delegate?

When you started your mortgage broking practice, you might have done everything yourself. But you then placed greater value on your time and realised that to keep up with demand, you needed some help.

That help comes in the form of leveraging other people's time to ensure the service maintains consistent standards even when volumes grow.?

So, up-skill employees who show promise so are given opportunities to master their roles and expand their impact.

This way, you can have continuity of service without it being reliant on your personal output.??

And as a suggestion, based on my own experience of delegating poorly, it helps to communicate the 'why', not just the 'what'.?Or, as one of our clients recently said, he's been communicating to his offshore team about 'completing goals' to upgrade their thinking from being 'task centric', so that they see the tasks as an inter-related and dependent set of actions that need to be completed to achieve a goal.?

Tip #5 - Systemise Your Operations?

As a broker, there are three major ways to grow your practice’s revenue:

• Have more clients
• Have more revenue per transaction
• Have more transactions per client

Identify which one of these you can leverage more effectively to grow your revenues. After this, build processes and systems around them.?

This way, you won’t have to spend time doing what isn’t necessary for your practice’s growth.?

Work Less, Earn More?

The main reason why many brokers establish their practice is to help clients live better lives and in doing so, help themselves to also enjoy a better quality of life.?

But sometimes along the journey there can be challenging roadblocks that cause people to feel stuck or overworked. This impacts productivity and can make them less efficient and effective.?

To leave that state, take the five tips mentioned in this article to heart so you can truly picture yourself as a proficient and confident operator.??When you do this, you will build more of a rhythm around your operations in a way that is efficient, effective and more rewarding.

Continue the conversation below by commenting below on what tips, tools or techniques have helped you be more productive.

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I’m James McCracken, Broker Growth Strategist, where for the past 9 years, I've coached brokers to grow their practices with structure and consistency.

Here are further resources and options you might find helpful:

Deal Flow Plan: Download a personalised plan that pinpoints growth inhibitors and options for operating with more structure, efficiency and consistency.?thesuccessfuladviser.com/dfp/

Ultimate Broker: For established mortgage brokers only, this service provides guided support to accelerate settlement volumes, improve operational efficiency and reduce worth hours.?

Book an initial call?to see if there is potentially a fit.

Speaking & presenting: Would you like a tailored presentation for your conference or PD Day from an industry specialist??

Send me a LinkedIn message with event details or to request my speaker kit.

To your continued success!

James