What makes My Virtual Mentor such a special coaching platform, and what can mortgage brokers gain from connecting with it? CEO Sylvia MacFarlaine shares her insights and strategies for increasing pipelines, tightening processes and improving credit skills.
With over 26 years experience in Financial Services, Sylvia has a wealth of experience across the broader finance industry, with particular emphasis in mortgage broking and accounting.
Sylvia’s latest venture – My Virtual Mentor is an online coaching and mentoring service designed to provide new to industry, and existing mortgage and finance brokers ongoing and evergreen knowledge-based training, facilitated by experienced industry experts, mentors and coaches.
With the programs recent accreditation by both the MFAA and the FBAA, the Finni team took some time to speak with Sylvia about the her experience in the industry that drove the genesis for My Virtual Mentor, and the plans for the future.
My Virtual Mentor
What does My Virtual Mentor do?
MVM is like a silent partner in your broking business. Our collective team of transformational coaches, mentor and experts provide step by step blueprints to map out the future of your business. We teach you how to build a professional practise and turn it into a business and exit on your terms. We can support any broker regardless if they are new to industry, a veteran or somewhere in between.
Support for brokers in the industry
How much support do mortgage brokers have right now?
There’s a lot of what I call traditional support. In terms of education, coaching or mentoring. This includes PD Days, Webinars, Conferences, one day intense workshops, high level masterclasses, online short courses etc. They are just not that effective.
hy are these methods ineffective?
The biggest issue with the current level of support is that its heavily geared toward the transaction – eg technical competency to write a loan. Whilst this is important there is so much more to running a business and being a business owner.
In terms of the content, how its delivered and its effectiveness, its impacted by:
- Content being too high level – a lot of the what but not the how
- Content being confusing or overwhelming – too much too soon
- There can be further costs to implement
- There’s no accountability and therefore no on-going support – therefore brokers fail to take action because its “too hard”
- Often content is one off and cannot be accessed again
- There’s little to no blueprints or resources supplied
- It can be time consuming to travel and spend a whole day out of the office
- Its not convenient or available on demand.
The My Virtual Mentor approach
How does My Virtual Mentor help brokers?
We really want to change the traditional approach. We are agile and flexible enough to respond to broker needs and support each broker regardless of where they are in their business journey. Most importantly we want to make self-education, support and business growth affordable and accessible.
My Virtual Mentor has been constructed to help transition mortgage brokers from working a job, to running a business. We do this by coaching brokers through proven processes, systems and methodologies. Then we mentor and take them on an exponential learning journey to fast track results. We stick by our Brokers every day and keep them focused on keeping the needle moving closer toward their definition of success. We are all about a culture of progress.
- Mindset:Every business owner needs to start with themselves. They should understand why they there, what they want to achieve and what capabilities they’re missing. Its all about their attitude, building resilience and being able to cope when things get tough.
- Sales Strategy:There’s a new way to do business in todays market and being transaction driven will no longer cut it. Brokers are in the game of relationships, so we teach brokers the true meaning of this, how to track the customers lifecycle and respond to their ever changing needs. The true meaning behind knowing your customer.
- Marketing:Mortgage brokers need to get business in through the door and keep their customers for the long-term. So marketing is a big module, and we focus on the four pillars of marketing, branding, niche markets and points of difference.
- Process & Operations: We help brokers build system automations with end-to-end processes that are seamless and easy to apply. Standard operating procedures are the achillies heal for most mortgage and broking businesses. You cant scale or grow without them. But you cant run a business if you don’t know your numbers or have a strategy either.
- Tech competency:The final module is to get the application submission quality up to the required standard, to make sure the loans convert to settlement instead of falling over for silly reasons. We also help brokers who are ready to diversify to get onboard and skill up.
Industry challenges
How challenging is the broking industry – especially for new entrants?
Currently the industry is going through the ringer and its a constant revolving door of changes. Compliance obligations are confusing. Furthermore, and this is not just the broking industry, people go into business alone and don’t know how to be resourceful. So we are bridging this gap.
Out of 3,000 products, knowing which one best fits your customer can be difficult. I’ve seen people still struggling and looking for best practice after being in the business for 15 years.
What’s next
Check out My Virtual Mentor’s industry first Broker Business Blueprint, the training and mentoring program specifically tailored for both new and existing brokers. Or visit www.myvirtualmentor.com.au for more.
