Broker Confidential

I am so lucky to have such a great team, they keep the office organised and all of the borrower applications tracking along smoothly.

I returned to the office full of vigour and optimism. I had learnt so many things during my time in LA. I had spoken to so many wonderful brokers and heard about the different techniques they use in their business.

With so many ideas buzzing around my head, I immediately set about putting them in place, and within a few days I started to see dividends.

I am starting to see the spring season gathering pace and that is just what we need coming into the last quarter of 2012 – lots of activity, high clearance rates, low interest rates and lots of borrower enquiries.

But, to give me and my team that final push along I have decided to call on the services at CBA after being inspired by one of the presentations at the AFG conference.

Within the next week, a team from CBA will come into the Smart Lending office and “Kaizen” the business.

For those of you who don’t know what Kaizen is – it is a practice that focuses upon continuous improvement of processes in business management.

My primary goal this financial year was to hugely increase our volumes, which is why it is so important for me to work on my business rather than just in the business.

As such, I decided to undertake the “Visual Management Board” Kaizen business module.

There are five modules to chose from, all of which ultimately help a business to run more efficiently.

The VMB module is designed to help us, map out our targets and then work out exactly how we will achieve these goals.

I’m very excited because it is most definitely an area in my business that I could improve on.

Don't get me wrong, my team and I have and set targets, but I think we could do with a little more structure sometimes.

Of course, I am not happy to just complete one Kaizen module. Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to complete a property course, which is run by Property Planning Australia.

I'm a firm believer that education and knowledge are everything.

The more I can learn, the more I bring to the table in my business and the more value I can offer my clients.

So, I plan to do all of this and cope with what will be a pretty exciting November in terms of industry events.

We have the very fun Spring Carnival coming up (giddy up!) and the AFG Victorian Awards night.

So much fun to come.

Till next month

Melissa ;-)

Melissa Gielnik is the director of Smart Lending.