Despite stiff competition, Frontrunner Consulting Group took home an AMA for Best Industry Service this year. MPA catches up with the company’s founder Doug Mathlin…
If Doug Mathlin is doing his job eventually his clients will leave him.
The head of Frontrunner Consulting Group has been helping brokers reach their goals since he opened doors in May 2004. And while he has a handful of clients who still use his services for guidance, he recognises that it’s healthy for many to eventually fly on their own.
“I think turnover is quite healthy when it comes to coaching – we don’t want to kid ourselves that someone that signs up for a coaching program is going to be there forever. To be a successful coach you have to come to an end.” He adds, “We want them to reach their goals.”
Mathlin’s company specialises in business coaching for the mortgage industry. While his background is in adult education, corporate communications and marketing, Mathlin got his first taste of the mortgage industry in 1995, when he joined Aussie Home Loans as their national training manager. When he started there, Aussie was about 200 strong in numbers, but was on the path toward massive expansion. By the time Mathlin left three years later its numbers swelled to 1,000.
Mathlin says it was a great place to meet many prominent industry leaders – as so many high profile players came from the same feeding ground.
At Aussie, Mathlin helped expand the instruction for brokers from a two-day program to a week and trained close to 2,000 brokers on their way through.
“Aussie was a fantastic education ground for me too,” he adds.
After three years, Mathlin left for a career at BT Funds Management, which he says was not the best career progression move.
He hit the milestone of 30 and decided life was too short to be unsatisfied with his career.
So he joined forces with a couple of former Aussie colleagues – Anne-Marie Syme (founder of FAST) and Dave Agena (international mortgage consultant) to start their own business. The threesome toyed with a number of names, but settled on Frontrunner as they felt it reflected their client base – big corporate clients and top brokers.
At the time, consultants in the mortgage broking space were few and far between. But Mathlin says Frontrunner differentiated itself from its competition by being more of a boardroom consultant, than advising clients from the big stage.
They also choose to tailor their services to the mortgage industry.
“When we started out we wanted to be very specific and just work in the mortgage industry. We wanted people to choose us because we’re specialists.”
The problem many brokers face with business coaches is that they’ll spend valuable time bringing the coach up to speed on how mortgage brokers work and the specifics of the job. With Frontrunners, no time is wasted in that regard.
“Normal business planning templates don’t fit well with mortgage broking. We know a lot about what mortgage brokers have to go through,” Mathlin says.
The experience within the Frontrunner organisation also sets it apart. Between original founders Mathlin, Syme and Agena more than a century of combined experience was utilised to shape the company’s coaching programs.
While the trio parted ways amicably 18 months ago because of distance issue (Syme is in Perth and Agena is in the US), Mathlin counts himself lucky to have had the opportunity to “sponge” off such prominent industry personalities.
And the hole wasn’t vacant for long. Former CEO of the National Brokers Group Graham Bennett joined the company more than a year and a half ago to lend his 40-plus years of experience to the consulting group.
GFC
Mathlin has been steering the company through the GFC, which has affected his business as much as any one else in mortgage broking.
Tighter spending budgets have meant several of his corporate clients have reined in their coaching and PD expenditures and the pool of brokers looking for coaches has gotten smaller.
“We’ve survived and I think we’ve come out of it now and are looking quite healthy. But it was tough to find corporates and brokers with discretionary income, particularly as the GFC coincided with commission cuts.”
Mathlin has recently seen an uptick in the number of brokers looking to break their “glass ceiling” and climb to a new plateau.
Most brokers come to Frontrunner with a volume-based goal, which the consultants help them achieve by breaking showing them the steps they need to take to achieve it.
For instance, a broker (located in Manly, NSW) recently came to Mathlin looking to up his yearly settlements to $36m. His average loan size is around $500k, so that means he has to make $3m a month in six settlements, or 1.5 loans per week.
The broker, whom Mathlin considers to be an astute businessman, probably needed to have 10 appointments on a month to month basis to achieve 1.5 loans per week. And to get 10 appointments he needed from 15-20 leads.
“So you break it down like that. And most people can see that it’s really achievable.”
But the problem with this equation is no one really wants to work 12 months a year. So if you consider that a second goal of the broker is to take two months vacation, then the numbers need to be readjusted.
“One of the reasons brokers get into the business is to meet some financial goals, but for most businesses we’ve worked with it’s easy to write down a number and forget about it,” he says.
Mathlin says he likes to steer brokers away from a volume-based goal and turn it into a transaction goal. That way if a broker gets a $1.5m loan from a customer they don’t take their foot off the gas because they feel like they’re halfway to achieving their volume goal for the month.
“When they get a big settlement it can create laziness. They think I don’t need to do anything this month. So it’s a good way to keep people motivated. If they meet their transaction goal, their volume goal looks after itself.”
Frontrunner Consulting Group doesn’t offer remedial help for failing brokers, but rather it targets brokers who have hit a plateau, yet feel they could do better.
“We’d love to help newbies, but the people we coach are people who most others would consider to be brokers that don’t need coaching. Many are in the MPA top 100. But even top producers say ‘I can do better’. And there is a cost involved, so for newbies, every dollar counts and it’s a discretionary spend that generally people are reluctant to do at first.”
Frontrunner Consulting Group offers a standard program, which is open-ended and a three-month “Performance Boost” course, that’s really an intro to coaching.
Mathlin says the Performance Boost covers six modules aimed to help brokers kick the GFC blues and costs about a quarter of the annual program.
He describes it as “a bit like going to a personal trainer in the lead up to a big event”.
Mathlin says that he suspects most brokers are doing the same things they’ve been doing since they started in the business and really haven’t evolved, but getting coaching is a good way to advance.
“That’s what we do as coaches, we give them the good, back and the ugly – but in a nice way.”
Words of advice
Mathlin has a lot to share with brokers from the tips jar. But one free word of advice for brokers would be ‘don’t get complacent’.
When brokers start doing well, they tend to ignore customers who they think are ‘kicking their tires’.
“The problem with that is that once you fob someone off, they’re going to hang up the phone and say well ‘he gave me absolutely no value’, but also someone else is going to look like a hero.”
Mathlin advises people to try and harness the enthusiasm and behaviour they had when they first started.
“Your referral rate per client in your first 20 clients will be a lot higher than the referral rate for your last 20 clients,” he says.
The trick is to look at exceeding those customers’ needs, rather than just meeting their needs – the rest falls into place.
Tips: New Year’s resolutions
December is the perfect time of year to look at what you’ve achieved to date and what your goals are for the upcoming year. Frontrunner Consulting Group’s director Doug Mathlin suggest brokers review their KPIs and operational results for the calendar/financial year to date, by tallying the number of the following for each month:
- Leads & source
- Appointments
- Applications
- Approvals
- Settlements
- Client reviews
- Referrals from clients
“This will identify actual efficiency measures for the year to date. This way they can measure their lead to settlement ratio and every other aspect of their business that they control. From there, they should write a business plan that includes more than goals and measures – they should address each weakness identified in the scorecard above (or call FrontRunner!)”