“If you’ve had the chance to go to a rather dysfunctional aggregator PD day, it’s really horrendous,” said Ross Laurenson.
In an interview with
Australian Broker, the mortgage veteran and
newly appointed national sales manager for My Local Aggregator, spoke of how some aggregator personal development days can be a waste of time for brokers.
“You’ll go and sit in a room for four to five hours. A banker will get up for 15 minutes and talk generically about why you should give all your business to them. Then after he sits down, someone else gets up and replicates exactly the same thing.”
Bringing his experience of running the Rosco Academy for mortgage brokers to his new role at My Local Aggregator, Laurenson hopes to provide a better alternative to the typical PD day by implementing better training methods.
“As you remember back in your school days, only the dorks ask questions while the cool guys sit up the back and think they know everything. So we’re trying to break that barrier down.
“Instead of just having training where we get half a dozen bankers to prattle on about their own products, we will identify a need and we will bring those brokers in to train them in that specific space.”
For the suburban broker with access to 600 products, the chances they will know everything about each one of those is pretty minimal, Laurenson said, since just keeping up-to-date about each loan is a fulltime job.
“The really skilled broker decides to drill down and become an expert in a specific space. That takes a lot of guts and courage for the broker to do that, and they’ll struggle to identify how to do that.”
The important thing for the industry is to help brokers understand how to create a sustainable business through the right processes and resources, he said.
“I don’t want to see 20,000 brokers diminished to only 12,000 brokers in three years because 8,000 people walked away due to lack of input, motivation or revenue. These people are good enough to invest their time and effort into the industry so someone’s got to take them by the hand and help them.”
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