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A mentor can impart the wisdom gained over a lifetime of experiences, including mistakes, and provide guidance for future decisions. Tas Bindi speaks to award-winning mentor and mortgage broker Sue Hayter of Quality Financial Group about how mentorship can accelerate a nascent broker’s learning and career.
Adelaide Bank is proud to sponsor The Adviser’s Meet the Mentor series. As a lender solely dedicated to third-party distribution, our passion is supporting brokers while ensuring our industry continues to thrive well into the future.
A willingness to adapt underpins ongoing success. This is something we’ve grown to understand since pioneering the distribution of lending products via intermediaries in the ’90s.
We trust you’ll find the knowledge shared by our mentors valuable, and we look forward to partnering with you as our industry continues to evolve.
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An experienced mentor can be a new broker’s “secret weapon”, helping them get ahead quickly and smartly by sharing strategies on marketing, navigating complex home loan scenarios, and being compliant, according to Sue Hayter, founder of Quality Financial Group (QFG).
“Most new brokers are overcome with fear because they can’t answer all the customers’ questions at the first interview,” she says.
“Good, experienced mentors can teach the broker how to build rapport with the customer… and give them a proven agenda to follow, which includes tools and checklists to impress the customers.”
Ms Hayter, who took home the award for Mentor of the Year at the Better Business Awards 2019 in Victoria, says she has mentored more than 100 brokers across Australia and enjoys reflecting on the progress her mentees have made since day one.
“I find it a rewarding experience to upskill and empower the mentees and see them become good brokers and community leaders,” she adds.
However, she observes that many new brokers “fail to realise that mentorship is a two-way street”.
“I believe there should be skin in the game from both sides. In my opinion, [this] means the mentee pays for having a tour guide for [their] career who gives [them] a detailed roadmap and their valuable time,” Ms Hayter says.
Ms Hayter also believes that, while there are many credible mentors helping raise professionalism and foster collaborative learning in the broking industry, mentoring still needs to be regulated.
“Many brokers are not being assisted correctly and, consequently, learn bad habits from mentors who have not been trained correctly and are out of touch with the correct processes and procedures and compliance requirements, therefore disadvantaging the broker and, ultimately in many cases, the customer,” she says.
As such, when it comes to choosing a mentor, Ms Hayter advises brokers to seek one who’s presently writing home loans because they would be “in touch with the real life experiences [and] pain points of dealing with the banks’ changing policies and procedures, [as well as] know how to submit a good application that will get an immediate conditional approval”.
In the face of significant change, Ms Hayter’s top pieces of advice for brokers are to:
- surround yourself with positive people with strong values to remain motivated and focused
- have an open mindset and be adaptable to change
- attend events with motivational speakers to stay upbeat and resilient
- learn from keynote speakers about how to go about implementing change strategies to remain successful
- stay true to yourself
- act with professionalism, honesty and integrity.
