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Don’t underestimate the power that critical self-reflection can have on the development of your business and accelerating its growth, writes Phil Quin-Conroy, CEO at PLAN Australia.
Professional athletes and their coaches spend hours each week assessing and analysing performance– reviewing technique, body scans and nutritional intake, as well as keeping a careful watch on the competition.
While it may seem that broking and sport are worlds apart, there is much that can be learned from our athletic friends. In addition to perseverance and motivation, there is no doubt that to perform at your best, you have got to self-assess and self-analyse.
Self-reflection is an important way for brokers to ‘health-check’ their business and ensure they are on a path for growth and success. In an increasingly competitive market, ensuring you’re on the right path is more important than ever. Here are my top suggestions for how you can best assess and analyse your business.
Establish and use KPIs
For athletes, establishing key performance indicators is simple: it could be to beat a personal best, achieve a world record, or just to beat the competition. These KPIs can be tracked through keeping an eye on your time, your score, or even the number of medals you win.
For individual business owners, the focus might be quite different, but the principles of KPIs are the same: establish KPIs and you can measure your business performance and track its growth. Without these indicators and timeframes, you won’t be able to pinpoint where you are performing well, and the areas for improvement. Plus, without a KPI to work towards, where is the motivation?
Of course, KPIs need to be adapted to reflect the stage of your business. If your brokerage is relatively new, your initial focus will be to get new customers in the door, so you will want to monitor things like new client numbers and conversions. Further down the line, you might want to measure retention levels and your overall growth in writing mortgages.
If you are not sure where to start, your aggregator should be able to give you some advice on some of the key performance indicators to put in place.
Once you have these indicators down, you will need to build regular reviews into your calendar to assess how your business is tracking and where you need further assistance and training to improve.
Seek feedback
Measuring the quality of your customer service is just as important as measuring your bottom line. Your success as a broker is highly dependent on your customers’ experiences so you will want to include their feedback as part of your reflection process.
It alarms me that so many businesses are too afraid to ask their customers how they found their service. What they are forgetting is that feedback can be one of the greatest tools to improve and grow.
A great way to seek feedback is through a regular client survey. It’s also a good idea to ask clients to complete a quick questionnaire following settlement – real time feedback can ensure you rectify any potential issues in good time.
Use technology as a tool
Digital advancements can make business analysis easier and more efficient. There are a number of tools at your disposal which can help you assess and analyse performance, whether it’s looking back at your performance or looking at the industry as a whole.
Do you have access to online benchmarking tools? It’s no good going about your business without looking to see what the competition is up to and benchmarking is a powerful way to get a top line view.
A quality, technology driven CRM can also help you to analyse your business. Use your database to analyse you clients, your client conversion times and processes to help you identify any inefficiencies or opportunities for improvement.
Of course, there is no one single way to beat the competition, but with critical self-analysis you will be on the right path for success.
Phil Quin-Conroy will continue to explore how brokers can achieve long-term success with a winning mindset in this blog series.
