Boothy Bites - The importance of building your Global Team with Andrew Rocks
Release Date: 03/21/2023
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Follow us: Website: Facebook: LinkedIn: Instagram: Watch on YouTube: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:06:31 [Jackie] Hi everyone, and welcome to Boothyโs Bites, the monthly update with the man himself, Mr. Chris Booth. How are you today? 00:00:06:32 - 00:00:14:12 [Chris] Good, Jackie. Good. Really good. It's a bit of a wet and miserable May a bit of a mouthful trying to get it out. 00:00:14:16 - 00:00:17:22 [Jackie] You have to come out to Queensland. It's beautiful here. Sunny. 00:00:17:27 - 00:00:20:08 [Chris] Okay. That's an invite. Okay. I'm coming. 00:00:20:13 -...
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Follow us: Website: Facebook: LinkedIn: Instagram: Watch on YouTube: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:08:51 [Jackie] Hi everyone, and welcome to Boothyโs Bites for April. Of course, we can't do this without the man himself, so. Hi Boothy, how are you? How was your Easter break? 00:00:08:56 - 00:00:29:00 [Chris] Oh, I just told you that. I said it wasn't very good. Jackie and I have been talking about the emotional connection to technology. And sadly, on the Thursday before the Easter break, Jackie, my computer wouldn't want to start. obviously we've been I've been...
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Follow us: Website: Facebook: LinkedIn: Instagram: Watch on YouTube: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:07:27 [Jackie] Hi, everyone, and welcome to Boothyโs Bites with the man himself, Mr. Chris Booth. How are you, Boothy, on this Monday morning? 00:00:07:31 - 00:00:09:02 [Chris] Hey, Jackie, are you doing all right? Happy March. 00:00:09:03 - 00:00:31:18 [Jackie] Happy March. My goodness. The March installment of Boothyโs Bites. Yikes! Anyway, let's jump straight into it. So usually we open with an update on interest rates, but I want to do that second. And first of...
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Follow us: Website: Facebook: LinkedIn: Instagram: Watch on YouTube: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;09 [Jackie] Hi everyone, and welcome to Boothyโs Bites for February. Hey, Boothy. How's things? 00;00;05;15 - 00;00;12;29 [Chris] Hey, Jackie. Yeah, happy February to everybody. And yeah, look, another episode. It seems to be flying by already. 2024, huh? 00;00;13;02 - 00;00;17;08 [Jackie] Well, we're not. We have Santa hats on again for December. (laughs) 00;00;17;10 - 00;00;29;11 [Chris] It's funny. I was looking at the Lydian beanies there, so, you know, if you if...
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Transcript:
Andrew Rocks:
For all the brokers out there, you can have all the energy in the world, but nothing gets done unless you have the ability to execute. And it's the boring, repetitive part of the job that actually is the difference between being successful in any career, but in particular mortgage breaking or not. And the journey that we've taken is, yes, we started off in financial services, but we always had a real affinity with lending Australians net debt that I just loved it.
Andrew Rocks:
They need debt at various stages. They need a roof over their head when they're young to grow with them as they grow in a family.
Chris Booth:
Welcome to Booty Bite. So I'm very fortunate today to have Andrew Ross, my business partner, great friend and business partner for many, many years actually with us today. And what we wanted to talk about really is I want to provide some content and feedback to all the brokers, mortgage brokers. That is, they were looking to, you know, looking at that problem, which is, you know, trying to kind of build an operations team.
Chris Booth:
It's tough. But, you know, we do have a lot of experience in building a sustainable global operations team for mortgage broking. So today really is tapping into Andrew's vast amount of knowledge about doing it as a business owner, but also more recently doing it. VPI So welcome Andrew Rocks to Boogie board. There you go. The cash flows it goes.
Andrew Rocks:
Thanks, Chris. A.K.A. Booty. Happy to be here. And I'm looking forward to, you know, imparting a fair bit of knowledge today. So let's drop in.
Chris Booth:
Perfect. So for those who don't know, anyway, Andrew and I work together. Well, firstly, I met Andrew buying at his office spot. This is the George Bank post that we work together at the announced group, which was a multifaceted financial services business specializing in financial planning but other services. And then more recently, Andrew's now the senior person, also shareholder Virtual Business Partners, which is a very large global, very large global team of assistance for financial planners and more specialized in financial planning side of things.
Chris Booth:
But Andrew, tell us a little bit about that sort of journey, getting involved with it, sort of building global teams and, you know, where did that start for you in particular with your businesses?
Andrew Rocks:
Well, I think everyone who's met you understands that you're very enthusiastic, and I share that as well. But for all the brokers out there, you can have all the energy in the world, but nothing gets done unless you have the ability to execute. And it's the boring, repetitive part of the job that actually is the difference between being successful in any career, but in particular mortgage broking or not.
Andrew Rocks:
And the journey that we've taken is yes, we started off in financial services, but we always had a real affinity with lending Australians nay debt and I just loved it. They need debt at various stages. They need a roof over their head when they're young and then to grow with them as they grow in a family, they need to move closer to schools.
Andrew Rocks:
They need to sometimes help their parents out, their grandparents, and then they might even need to help their children get into property as well. And some of us are fortunate enough and some of our clients differently to invest in property as an asset. So so debt is a constant partner in your life. And the reality of when we're working with people to achieve that is a lot of brokers have access to a significant volume of clients.
Andrew Rocks:
So why is it what is the difference between their ambition and the ability to work with clients and their settlement numbers or being able to execute and that is building a back office? 30 years ago, when I started my mortgage broking and financial planning career, a back office just meant literally the office out the back, you know, as a petition.
Andrew Rocks:
And they might have been typically someone younger than you. They might be looking for a break in the industry or they might be related to you or Lord knows. But it worked very, very well. What's happened is, as our country over the last 30 years has become more successful, roles such as that just aren't that appealing for people who are university educated.
Andrew Rocks:
They aren't that appealing for people to stay in. And what we see very often is even the best quality firms who have great coaches still need to be able to provide the back office people with internal promotions. So why I go jumping.
Chris Booth:
In quickly.
Andrew Rocks:
Just to go for it.
Chris Booth:
Chris, tell me tell me about you know, so speaking with Dave Carney aspirationally wants to begin this business and he happens to be our business coach at the time. You know, what were some of the things that you were thinking about then to support Davin and his vision for this greater group?
Andrew Rocks:
Yeah, that's right. Well, I got involved in building a global team was very simple. In the noughties, I had a successful business in Sydney CBD, and a lot of the people who came to work was who were doing the back office were aspirational graduates, you know, young guys, young girls. They dressed up in their suits, their dresses. They were here to take the world on.
Andrew Rocks:
And the reality is, is that, oh, sorry, the the difference of what what actually they had to do, being on hold to a bank for 45 minutes to try and get something that should be easy, you know?
Chris Booth:
Sorry, Jenny, really?
Andrew Rocks:
Oh, correct. All of the reality of the job of that there just meant that that we weren't facilitating good quality career paths for people. And that kept me awake at night. At the time, my business coach, David Carney, he said, we've got to we have to solve this problem. And where I am now is not the first incarnation of that.
Andrew Rocks:
When we first started and we were we were novices and I look back now and I'm horrified is that we thought that that you could just do a paper job. So what that meant was that, you know, if you're an accountant, you'd pay for someone in another country, for instance, who are quite skilled, might be Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India to do a piece of work.
Andrew Rocks:
And they would send it back to you in financial planning. Quite often that's done with power planning and in mortgage broking. Quite often there are people who pay per job and we did initially, which is a great first step, but it has its limitations as well. And if anyone's listening here and they're doing that, the hard thing is you don't keep the same person.
Andrew Rocks:
They don't get to build a bond with how you do things and they don't get to understand the types of clients you've got, which is very important. If you've got clients that are a niche or geographically located or sophisticated, so you're missing out on being to train them on the way that you want them done. So we decided that we needed to have a dedicated model where, although the team member might be located in a different country, in this particular country, we chose was the Philippines.
Andrew Rocks:
Due to many reasons they are still in your team. You know, they can have the Lydian t shirt, they could be part of your team. And I can get excited when people settle and get disappointed when they get knocked back. You know, they can be part of that whole ethos which promotes better team culture, fire retention of your team, and also just more discretionary effort being in mortgage broking.
Andrew Rocks:
We all know that it takes a discretionary effort sometimes to get settlements done today and not be bullied into making it in a week's time.
Chris Booth:
Two quick things I really like about that. Firstly, the consideration, obviously we all thought that thinking like, how can I save a book? Okay, I get it. It's expensive to recruit locally. You know, domestic office space is expensive to place that labor as well and that sort of saving of a dollar is obviously very important. And, you know, silly not to consider that.
Chris Booth:
But the the biggest thing you mentioned, though, about that is that you're not only just considering that cost factor, but you want people to participate in the culture of the fund, the benefits of, you know, of the business that they're working for, which I think is really important. And I think some of the things which definitely resonate with me in the early days I saw that person is a bit of a, you know, your hand them, the work that's got to be done quickly, get it back to me.
Chris Booth:
And I probably failed at that time too, to recognize that it was a person at the end of that sort of workflow of process and that they generally wanted to find out more about me, what I did at home, you know, where I hung out on the weekends and things like that, you know, and becoming more sort of attuned to that.
Chris Booth:
Hopefully we've we've kind of captured that DNA issue 2.0 of, of using the virtual business partner services book definitely resonates with me. So, you know, as you said before, if you were doing it today, what would be some of the key elements you'd want to focus on more than.
Andrew Rocks:
The number one element is, is the the threat your perception and preconceptions out the window? These are people that are going to be working for you at the other end of a zoom or or EMS teams. They have exactly the same aspirations as any of your Australian talent. And let me just start with saying that the building a global team does not mean reducing the size of your Australian team.
Andrew Rocks:
Okay, so what I would ask anyone listening to this say you've got someone in in loan packaging or loan administration, I would sit them down into the whiteboard and I would ask three questions because this needs to be a positive journey for them to buy into the process or else you're just going to go in circles. So where there's at the whiteboard, question number one, you might ask, What are the five not?
Andrew Rocks:
Chris, why don't I do this? If you say so. Chris You're working as an administration person in a mortgage broking practice. Successful one. What are the five most repetitive, time consuming activities that you're currently doing that you'd love to never do again? Go for it.
Chris Booth:
Saving documents into the safe place where I'm supposed to be saving my documents. That's number one, rather than in my data entry of that. Extracting that data from those sets up again to.
Andrew Rocks:
Sound like into the CRM or apply online. All that stuff. Yep.
Chris Booth:
Yep, yep. Telephone call on hold to the lender. Yeah, for sure. That was a massive bugbear, you know.
Andrew Rocks:
And the genesis of why we started that business.
Chris Booth:
So what else? I think the biggest one for me is at the end of the journey of the loan transaction, just making sure that all of those key files being the compliance documents, but also the, you know, the tick, the boxes for your aggregates were all in place in that fall at the end of June as well. So someone basically mopping up behind me, picking the first piece of the paper and making sure it's in the right place.
Chris Booth:
I say keeping me in business. I think that's the biggest thing.
Andrew Rocks:
Yeah, that's right. And compliance isn't going away. So thanks, Chris. And so we write those lists down. We write those, those key things down. And I've been doing this many times and, and just for the people listening who don't know me, I have 1500 employees and a reasonable cohort are working in this role. Some are supporting financial planning, some are supporting payroll planning, some are supporting accounting.
Andrew Rocks:
But the reality is those five things for the average mortgage broking office or assistant, what percentage of your day would be associated with the five things that you've just mentioned?
Chris Booth:
Chris Oh, he's from our labor. I don't know if you're doing that. It's an operations business, so the data entry pricing process takes over an hour, but maybe more and more complex skills. Yeah, And I think, you know, if you're aspirational, you want to be speaking to clients, having relationships with clients and doing the the fun things. So yeah, what's centage?
Chris Booth:
Oh, 50, 60% of the time did something well done.
Andrew Rocks:
So for those listening, oh, so clearly we didn't speak about these questions before, you've got a pretty broad answer. I get 40 to 60% all the time. Okay. So what that means is 40 to 60% of the time taken from your back office team who are helping you write credit is in roles that they would love to never do again.
Andrew Rocks:
Okay, so just think about that. So think about that hopefully before they resign. And in addition, what we then would encourage you to do is sit down with them and say, if you didn't have to do 50% of your role, what would you like to do? And then crucially, you've got to shut up and take notes. So, Chris, if you put your hat on again, if you didn't have to do those roles in your Australian office as that the per head of credit or whatnot for them broking firm, what would you like to do with your time?
Chris Booth:
Oh, you know, aspiration. For me it's all about meeting clients, meeting more referral partners, basically, you know, doing the things that I enjoy, just talking to people, providing advice, helping more people do more reviews, do more positive things. With the time I've got on hand in building maintaining relationships. So yes, keep keeping busy that perfect on that natural.
Andrew Rocks:
And yet again, no matter how many times I run through the scenario, there's really two broad, broad sort of topics that come out. The first one is the operations team want to buy time for their brokers. They want to do things that directly mean that their broker or their brokers have more time. Now, why that is, is because quite often they see them being overworked.
Andrew Rocks:
But in addition, if they're part of the team, they know that the brokers got more time with the clients. There's going to be more revenue, more revenue into a business that I get paid by and potentially I'm part of on a commercial basis means more bonuses, better valuation of the firm, etc.. So so it's really heading in the right direction.
Andrew Rocks:
Yeah, but the other part of what they're very interested in is they want to do things that's closer to the client, okay? They don't want to be on hold to Bank X, Y and Z for 37 minutes. The clients don't know. They don't care. What they care about is the communique to them, keeping them up to speed. Okay.
Andrew Rocks:
Every single negative and positive outcome in mortgage broking has got to do with communicating. So if they had more time, they would communicate more. So what I would impose upon people is when you're looking to build a global team, it's not to replace your existing team, it's to leverage them potentially. You might leverage them all the way up to business writing.
Andrew Rocks:
I mean, that's an objective and that's what happens in financial advice and also in mortgage broking as well. But but but what that also means is that as they then build out a team, your office manager has a vested interest in making this effectively your middle office learns to outsource. So that's a key pillar of why you should do it.
Andrew Rocks:
And it's getting your current Australian based team members to be their better selves, because if you do, you'll reap lots of rewards and if you don't, they will just leave. We've got record low unemployment and if you're not providing them a in farm with which they can succeed.
Chris Booth:
So I like the fact that you kept mentioning key themes theme. So the big thing for us, you know, we've unfortunately didn't take a little while now to to not just have one person supporting an operations person locally. We've actually built out, you know, ten people doing it and they've got their own little team within our team, which I think is very important.
Chris Booth:
But if you're a mortgage broker out there who is now, this is a few of you you're building that, trying to build that business. You've got one administration person, you know, given that operations person in your domestic office, the ability to help them build out a bigger team, that's pretty important to look. I think we all understand, you know, the financial metrics and, you know, the time they're building out, you know, a global team in this fashion.
Chris Booth:
And talk a little bit about the culture and things like that. You know, and I know there's been a swag of people coming through to me personally to say, yeah, you know, have you got a problem with administration? Would you like to help and things like that. Let's focus on virtual business partners for a while, because you and I know we're very passionate about that business and I think Dave party, Dave Deacon, great group have done that.
Chris Booth:
You know, tell us a bit about that DNA. And obviously so far we have the new big contributors that we have to you know, why is it different and what's the point of difference for VB? You have to hear your thoughts on them.
Andrew Rocks:
So the first point I'll make is that if and this is specific to the Philippines and probably correct for other countries where Australia partners, if these people who work in these businesses aspire to work in these businesses, they're educated, they've probably done an undergraduate degree in accounting or finance or commerce. They might have done a master's. The universities are equivalent when they come out and they graduate.
Andrew Rocks:
There's no unemployment for these people. Okay. Gets worse. As Australians, we're the lowest payers because as great English speaking sort of graduates, they can work for American firms or European firms. So there's only two key reasons why they work, first, for Australian firms. And when I tell you this, this is the answer to your question. The first one very mechanical is that they're in the Western Australian time zone, but they come to work at 7:00, so they're working when your brokers are working.
Andrew Rocks:
Okay, we're three years into or out of COVID. Every broker knows how to use Slack teams. Zoom, there's constant chat, right? So, so what that means is you're only Nanny's second away from fixing a problem or answering a question or escalation, and that's how they get their learnings. So that sounds really good from the perspective of the clients and the brokers, but it's actually really awesome for the Filipinos as well, because if they work for American or European, they work shift work.
Andrew Rocks:
Okay? So when they work for us and it just reverse that, they're very similar to the types of people that you would employ in Australia. They're typically 25 to 30 years old, 70% of them are women, and a lot of them have either got families or aspirational to it. So by working along these lines at VPI, they can do pick up or drop off.
Andrew Rocks:
They can grab their kids for basketball or violin, they can live a normal lifestyle without having to infringe on their family time and families critical in the Philippines as it is with most other countries. So the second reason is when I look back, there's no unemployment. So when they're coming out and they can work for anyone, they can work for Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs or Deloitte, or they can work for, you know, X, Y or Z mortgage brokers in Tarago, New South Wales.
Andrew Rocks:
Now, I can tell you their parents want them to work for for the big for the big ticket items. But if the reality is if they're working for Mary and Greg at Terrigal, the two founders, the two key brokers and they work with them and they've spoken with the CEO, the head broker, etc., that carries massive credibility in the family structure.
Andrew Rocks:
So and especially so, the more human you can be with them, the more you can share what you're doing, you know, your family, what you're eating, you know what you're into, the more they feel that they didn't convey that to their family. And critically and this is also going to, I suppose, dispel myths in the Philippines. If you're university educated, your parents have probably paid full fees for a private school and for everyone who's sending their kids to private schools in Australia, you know, that's a lot.
Andrew Rocks:
You then have to pay full fees to send them to university and there's no old age pension effectively. So when your children graduate, I call children 25 to 35 year old. When they graduate, it's assumed that 20 to 30% of their income will go directly to their parents. So if in life you should interview the parents until the children, if they've got their job.
Andrew Rocks:
So what that ultimately means is that we need something that's going to bond with the hierarchy. So at the beginning I went through why you get your Australian team to buy into this. If your back office in Australia says, say, for instance, you're a couple of brokers, you might have one or two people in Australia by doing this exercise and by actually getting a global team together, you're actually ticking the big box with them.
Andrew Rocks:
Remember, they've got the extra time, they can do the aspirational things. They're they're going to be motivated to teach your team as fast as possible. How did you guys repetitive tasks? Okay, now our team are not going to mind doing those repetitive tasks because they're going home to their parents saying, Mary and Greg from Terrigal, Has you sent me an Instagram or Facebook saying have a good time?
Andrew Rocks:
Their parents are probably showing it one in the village and dropping them like, okay, because I doubt their friends are getting text messages from Jeff Bezos or someone like that. Right? So, so that that's it. And you know what I might do, Chris, is I might provide some way we've written a culture book. So that's the first thing.
Andrew Rocks:
The second thing is people in other countries want exactly the same. It's not just about an income. They want to feel like they belong and they want a career path. They want to learn at be part of an auction where we do the search for mortgage. Is that a primer of property? We're doing continual professional development points. If you ask a millennial or a Jen while well, Gen Z money is one part, they want to know their career progression.
Andrew Rocks:
They want to know where they're going. They also want to have a purpose. What charities are you doing? Okay. How are you giving back? What's your purpose as a company? So what I'm imparting upon you is that exactly the same rationale for building an Australian team is why you would build a global team. And if you get that and VB Peter only gets it.
Andrew Rocks:
We're a certified great place to work in the Philippines and you're going to partner up with people who share your vision.
Chris Booth:
That's pretty cool. I think a personally is a lot of passion in the way you tell that story. And I think, look, I've seen pictures of you in the Philippines with, you know, people who've kind of walked over to you with little cutout pictures of Roxy on their faces. And, you know, they're a beautiful bunch of guys and girls and they love it and they can't wait to see, you know, their Australian employees or senior team or managers come out from Australia, but vice versa.
Chris Booth:
I think one of the greatest things that happened for us was when they Lonnie, who's one of our first staff members for announced it actually was able to come to Australia, visit us in our office the day she even took my dog for a walk down the beach, which is a privilege. I think if you know me, I don't share my dog time with many people, so it's great to have them as part of the family and and that that's a big point of difference, I think, for virtual business partners and definitely the enthusiasm that you've got for the for the team over there is pretty huge.
Chris Booth:
Right? So, yeah, well done. Well done.
Andrew Rocks:
Thanks, Chris. And look, you did flick me a night, maybe just a text halfway through the session saying What are your.
Chris Booth:
Tips.
Andrew Rocks:
For people looking for outsourced operations? Okay, now many people listening here. More thought about it. Yes, we are virtual business partners. You can look us up and we're very proud of what we do. And we're one of the industry's largest and leading ones. But the other tips that I would give is that there's no point going and building a global team if you don't have an infrastructure for learning and development.
Andrew Rocks:
If you're just paying two and a half or $3,000 per month instead of six or $10,000 per month, but those people in your Australian office are spending all their time teaching other people. It makes no sense. It's actually negative for five people. You need to go with a group. It's a specialist, not a generalist. Okay. So and why that means is that they have they've taken the time to map out, you know, the mercury's the sales track at the point line.
Andrew Rocks:
It might CRM. They've actually someone else has done that job for you. And by coming on, you've benefited from the economies of scale. Okay? They've taken the time to build in learning and development plan. So all these things you do and addition additions that you want to be how to build out your operational back office now coming from financial planning as well.
Andrew Rocks:
We've gone through ten years of regulatory tightening and mortgage broking probably will go through something like that at some stage. The reality is, is that what that means is that that business is will move potentially from a recurring income as a valuation to an EBITDA. They'll become proper businesses, they'll grow up. And the only way that you can run proper businesses that kick out profit for your shareholders who might not be part of your business is by making sure that you've got great capacity and capability.
Andrew Rocks:
So don't go somewhere. Who hasn't done it before? I'm not necessarily saying that virtual business partners is the be all and end all, but you definitely need to do your homework and just see if they've done all of that sunk cost. Because if the sunk cost is not going down, guess who's sinking the cost?
Chris Booth:
You know.
Andrew Rocks:
That would be my advice.
Chris Booth:
I think the quick take on that for me is that virtual business partners have been around for nearly eight years and used to tell you.
Andrew Rocks:
Low cost ten.
Chris Booth:
Chris Yes, and that maturity in the services that they're providing not only as a generalist but it's a specialist is is building incremental layers in there. And you know, more recently, you know, we've been very fortunate in Lydian to have some senior expertise with their over two years tenure. We've even got a subject matter expert in the team now with someone who's got not only the the tenure being five years but VP, but also has got a lot of experience and is actually doing some of the technical parts of the application.
Chris Booth:
They're like serviceability calculators, they have structuring some of the debt. Obviously the brokers got the oversight and provided the advice, but removing some of the more technical components of the work, it's been important process and you can only do that with time and maturity, but also that incremental learning and development. So I want to congratulate good for business partners for the one, you know, embracing the third floor as an elementary qualification, but more importantly, on a monthly basis, we get the lenders to do training and development, which is recorded, and then we do sort of process around that.
Chris Booth:
And also having a strong hierarchy of mentor and embody system within the group, which really makes a difference not only for leadership and the and the businesses which are engaging those guys, but for me as a business owner, you know, we can certainly benefit from that platform of education. The other thing I just want to quickly touch on before we close, because I think it's important when people step over I just had a telephone call from Mark II before, which he's one of our SFD guys about our cybersecurity.
Chris Booth:
Many of the people that call me to say, okay, you can, you know, do you want to use of one? The first thing I ask them is about cyber security purely for the fact I know EVP So like, tell me a little bit about that.
Andrew Rocks:
Andrew Yeah, well, I think it's now a pretty relevant topic for what's going on. Well, the reality is, is that like building out your learning and development? Virtual Business Partners has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars US per year in obtaining and retaining ISO 2701 data security quality assurance. Okay, things like your aggregate needs to approve, right? So we need to work with your aggregator.
Andrew Rocks:
We have got approvals with the aggregators to operate. We've got password management where our team members never see a password. They're able to use your thing. There's a whole ecosystem around it. Plus we've all got also got cyber security insurance and various payoffs. But the key is that you really need to involve whether you're a financial planner or a mortgage broker or account, you need to involve your licensee, whether it being aggregator or financial services license in this decision making.
Andrew Rocks:
Okay. Because they're the ones that have the liability. They're the ones fronting up to court. If there's a problem. But guess what? That problem cascades to you, right? So so at Virtual Business Partners and indeed Lydian and Lydian has I know a lot of financial planning firms and a lot of officials as authorized and virtual business partners authorized for a lot of aggregators.
Andrew Rocks:
They've done the hard yards. And as you know, with corporates, these things take time. So they could take six months to a year to get these through the compliance and governance. But critically, if you're cutting that corner and something happens, your professional indemnity insurance, you're aggregators, they've got no time for people you're going to bring down, not just end, but the overall industry.
Andrew Rocks:
So look for ISO 2701 is minimum benchmark, Okay. And virtual business partners also taking the step too. We subscribe and we do the modern slavery audit, which we do for businesses that are quite big globally, and that's a global initiative to ensure that people's livelihoods are not being exploited. And it definitely wouldn't be a great place to work if that was the case.
Andrew Rocks:
But this is all about working with people for them to achieve their goals and at the same time they put a fire underneath your business. Let me tell you which one of your team members can work 35 hours a week and you're either a one man broker, two, three, four, whatever. Just imagine what you would do if you could get off like 35 hours of what you're currently doing.
Andrew Rocks:
Okay. It's actually scary. And, you know, we're not Robinson Crusoe. There are a lot of brokers doing it. It's a difference between people who sell 8 to $10 million each month and people who settle 1 to 2. And that's it. That's it. I think everyone's got the same passion and intent and skills can be learned, but if you haven't got time, it doesn't matter how smart you are, you don't get around to it.
Andrew Rocks:
And mortgage settlements don't wait for brokers. You don't have time. If you've got time and you can do turnarounds and you work with partners, you get that great reputation. The business will just keep flowing it.
Chris Booth:
I love it. I've written so many notes and I'll tell you, I sold the textbook when we were thinking about Lydian back then. But for me, even recruiting staff members to be put on a pretty rigid learning development course, you know, celebrating together with celebrating successes, Virtual Business Partners is a partner for the services is very important because they've got the fundamentals and that platform in place.
Chris Booth:
For us to do that, we're then putting our our DNA of our heart and soul and our culture and our sort of energy and vibe onto it, which I think is important. And I think more importantly, that these guys and girls who are working for us, they're building out a sustainable, long term, scalable operations team for our brokers to plug into.
Chris Booth:
Now, it takes a lot of effort to do that. You and I know I've spent quite a long time training and putting these things together for the big guys when they first joined, but we're now reaping the benefits of that because our guys are now actually mentoring and training the next person coming in and the next person coming in.
Chris Booth:
So we're building that sort of reflective DNA system which I think is is huge. And that's been a big thanks to VP to, you know, put the effort in the time into that service. And thank you for sharing your thoughts about not only virtual business partners but your back story. So how did people get in contact with you for virtual business partners to talk about, you know, building an operation, a global a global team for operations?
Andrew Rocks:
Well, the great thing about having a pretty interesting surname is Andrew Rocks. You can grab me on LinkedIn and you can reach out to me there. Or alternatively, you can go to virtual business partners dot com that are you and follow the bouncing ball. But before I finish up Chris it's been one way traffic as far as thanks and praise but I'm here to tell you that what Lydian has done in the brief period of time in the couple of years that it has done to build out Lydian is best of breed within even within our cohort.
Andrew Rocks:
It's the most efficient, the most efficient and highest producing back office in our mortgage broking ecosystem across dozens and dozens and dozens of quality practices. So you drank from the Kool-Aid, you listened, you learned, you put your human hat on, and you deserve everything that you're reaping. So well done.
Chris Booth:
Chris Pepper And obviously, if a broker wants to join Lydian, you know, we're here to share that pursuit of excellence with what we've built and created for brokers. But if you just want to speak to me and talk about, you know, how we got started, what our thought process was, and I'm happy to share a bit of that Kool-Aid at the Pit Street office some time.
Chris Booth:
Yeah, more than happy to catch up, but it's been really interesting to chat. Andrew I know we probably have these chats a thousand times a day, but to capture in this format for me is wonderful and to share with no updates and things in the industry is also wonderful. So thank you so much for your time. I will go grab a two laid now.
Chris Booth:
Have a great night please.
Andrew Rocks:
Chris Have a great day.
Chris Booth:
Yeah. Bye.