We catch up with Queensland’s Thought Leader of the Year 2022 to find out how he built his brokerage and his tips for brokers who want to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack.
Ewan Ramsey, director and head of property strategy and mortgage advice at Ramsey Property Wealth, took home the award of Thought Leader of the Year at the Queensland Better Business Awards earlier this year.
The Brisbane-based broker spoke with host Annie Kane on the Elite Broker podcast about his philosophy behind being a thought leader, how he built his team, and some of his top tips for success.
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How long have you been broking?
Our business will be going on about four years, as of October this year. I started up originally as a one-man band, just by myself in a little office in a chicken shed in Brisbane at the time.
How long was it before you started to grow your team?
Within the first six months, I very quickly identified things that added value to me and things that didn’t. Things such as loan processing and file administration weren’t my forte, so eventually we decided to utilise an outsourcing team, which I call “employees.” In that team, we had three set up to do all the submission tracking, follow-ups, and managing client expectations.
We’ve now got a team of seven now, soon to be eight, we’ve been actively growing. That’s a mix of brokers (or mortgage advice specialists, as we call them) who are in the market, finding opportunity and working with clients and a support crew (or pit crew, as we call them, as we’re all fans of the F1).
How did you go about hiring the right people?
Recruitment is a particularly challenging thing. If you get it right, you’re a winner. If you get it wrong, it’s really expensive and costs you a lot of money.
It’s been a trial-and-learn process for us, particularly as our business evolved and matured. The right person needs to very clearly align to our value proposition, our core belief, and our values.
The person we want needs to meet our client type, they need to be in line with our strategy and they need to understand our core values and beliefs as far as who we are as an organisation, and personally. That’s really been a big teaching moment for us in terms of recruitment over the years.
What kind of clients do you service?
Our clients are usually time-poor industry professionals who understand the importance of advice and also recognise the value of that advice. It’s quite a niche market for us, as a result. So, we typically look after clients who have already bought or invested in a property or two but they don’t know how to unlock the equity, increase their borrowing capacity, how to improve their cash flow or move forward.
So, we tend to look after long-term clients and as such our employees, our team, align to that. We’re very clear about who we do business with and who we don’t do business with, and we don’t mean that in any other way.
What kind of technology do you use to help you in your business?
For us, our USP has always been about providing a seamless digital experience to time-poor professionals.
Any piece of technology that made it simple for our client while enabling us to work quickly and efficiently at the same time is really important to us.
We used the Salestrekker CRM system very early on and that was a great platform as far as integrating a lot of the core functionality of what we were looking for, rather than trying to operate off multiple different platforms simultaneously.
Some of the more recent technology pieces that we’ve had a look at are Quickli, which is a fantastic piece of technology that we’ve been using in the servicing space. We’ve worked out that gives us productivity gains around two hours per week per broker, so it makes a big difference to the number of applications that you can be doing in a year.
Sherlok would be another one that is a great piece of technology.
You were crowned Queensland Thought Leader of the Year this year. How have you been providing thought leadership to clients?
Deepening the client experience is something that we’ve worked really hard on over the last two years. It’s about asking those simple questions such as “why are they buying a property in the first place?”, “what’s their strategy?”, “what’s the long-term plan?” When you start unpacking those questions with clients, it leads to clients coming back for more help, loyal customers and larger loan balances getting settled.
So there’s been a degree of education in that space very early on with a lot of the clients that’ve been talking to… so that we can ultimately set our clients up for success for the next move.
What are your top tips for new brokers wanting to become thought leaders?
Identify what you’re doing differently to other people in the business or to have a look at where your opportunity is to shine that’s unique to you and your values, as well as your customer proposition.
Get it together, get it in writing, and just go do it.
You can find out more about Ewan Ramsey and how he runs his brokerage in The Adviser’s Elite Broker podcast.
Tune in to the episode with Ewan Ramsey, How Qld’s Thought Leader of the Year builds his presence, below:
