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Pepper’s Mario Rehayem explains how the group’s extraordinary growth has been aligned with a strong focus on helping brokers grow their own business
Pepper launched its own ‘Better Business’ program in 2013, geared towards helping brokers grow their business. Why has broker education been an important focus for Pepper?
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For Pepper, broker education is crucial because our whole business revolves around brokers – the broker market and the whole third-party channel – and because of that it’s crucial to ensure we give a value-add to our brokers so they see us as more than just a lender. We want to be part of a broker’s business in any way we can, so we have asked the brokers – through our survey – what they want.
We were actually surprised that a majority of brokers said they wanted training tools that best suit their businesses. So we took that seriously, we went out to an external body and found a company called Sales DNA and incorporated that. We brought broker businesses in and derived from them what they actually wanted. It has been a success because everything we’ve done over the past three years with Pepper has all been off the back of broker feedback. It has been an exceptional story for us.
How many brokers do you have on the Better Business program? How many would you like to see take it up?
We currently have 600 brokers nationally using the program. This is made up of regional, metro and city-based brokers. The spectrum of brokers is the surprising part – we’ve got new entrants that want to understand the best way to build relationships and the basic characteristics of a broker, then you’ve got the brokers who just need a refresher, and then you’ve got the old guys who are looking at the content and forwarding it onto their staff. We’ve actually been able to touch every area of the broker market and it has been a really good story – especially for the regional guys who don’t get a chance to come to many facilitated courses; our training is at their leisure.
We have also seen that our brokers are signing in for training at least once a month, which tells us that the content is useful.
What is Pepper’s goal for the Better Business education program in 2014?
We expect that number of participants to double in 2014. We are introducing an extra four modules. The first will be about developing an essential business plan, which will be great for brokers at the start of 2014. The second will be on specialist lending – for the first time we will roll out a module relevant to Pepper and it will be about how to offer a specialist product to the market, to the customer. We will also provide tips about how to tackle those sticky questions, like ‘But that rate is too high,’ or ‘What are these fees about?’. The last two modules will be based around the broker feedback. These are yet to be finalised, but there will be four new modules available across the year.
What are the most popular areas of Pepper’s Better Business program – what modules do you see brokers interacting with most?
All the modules have had a great uptake, but we definitely see a lot of action on the relationship building module and the CVP module. What I think we found was that when you derive the content from broker feedback, it means they want to consume it, they want to watch it. It isn’t created from our agenda or Pepper’s point of view, so I think the reason all the modules and topics we have come out with have been popular is because it is what they want.
Pepper is partnering with The Adviser for its 2014 initiative, the Better Business Summit. what is it about the summit that Pepper aligns with?
The summit is pretty much a perfect roll-on effect to what we have already done in 2013. I think The Adviser has seen the value in education, and the way in which it has rolled out the summit – bringing it to the different states – has really changed the ‘you need to come to us’ attitude. I think the summit really shows that everyone is important in this sector. The summit by itself has a great line of speakers; the whole agenda is structured just the way Pepper would probably do it. It is going to be an exceptional value-add for every broker – regardless of whether you have been in the industry for a day or 10 years. The program is tailored to offer effective learning for the whole market.
