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EXPERT SPOTLIGHT: BUSINESS GROWTH
Specialist Finance Group: Taking care of business Although COVID-19 has come with challenges, it’s also been a blessing in that it has allowed brokers to concentrate on their businesses. Specialist Finance Group head of aggregation Blake Buchanan says he has seen a lot of brokers become better businesspeople over the last 18 months MPA: How have you seen COVID-19 affect the way brokers are looking at their businesses? Blake Buchanan, head of aggregation, Specialist Finance Group: Since March 2020, there have been multiple stages of concern, development and evolution that many brokers have been through. Thankfully, one of them was brokers being urged to focus on their systems and processes to allow them to continue to trade compliantly and digitally. In this way, COVID has been a bit of a blessing as it’s been the catalyst for brokers and lenders to sooner embrace digital efficiencies and focus on a number of areas, including marketing, use of systems, business structure and processes. SFG deployed our new CRM called SFGconnect in 2018, which even back then was COVID-ready. We didn’t have to scramble to work out solutions for things like approved video conferencing, workflow tasks, customer portals or identification processes, as they were already in-built and available to our network.
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We’ve seen brokers in record numbers who are keen to upskill so they can exploit the system to make them more efficient than ever. Being a ‘one-stop shop’, SFGconnect has all the tools a broker would need to apply their trade and more, like property reporting,
Pleasingly, between myself, William Lockett and our management team, we have run more individual strategic and training sessions than ever before. This points to record numbers of our brokers not just working in their business but on it.
“We’ve seen brokers in record numbers who are keen to upskill so they can exploit the system to make them more efficient than ever” credit checks, marketing, referrer and client portals, digital signatures, bank statement scraping tools, and so much more, which means there is a lot to explore and learn.
MPA: Why is now a good time for brokers to think about working on their businesses? BB: The best time to think about your business was yesterday, and the very next best time is today and then every day thereafter.
Being an amazing broker does not always mean that you are excellent at running a company. You should always seek to learn, look at what you are doing and adjust as needed for now and the future. Due to the high and extraordinary volumes that brokers are writing, along with excessive turnaround times, it’s more difficult than ever to step back, look at your business and evaluate how it’s going, what your customer experience is like, and look for macro and micro efficiency.
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20/09/2021 2:17:21 pm
