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My entrepreneurial journey began with a digital marketing agency, and one of my initial clients was a mortgage broker back in 2005. We placed ads in the Australian Property Investor print magazine, steering readers to a direct response website. Old school!
The campaign proved to be a hit. Consequently, my agency began to attract an increasing number of mortgage brokers. In 2016, one of my then clients, Craig Vaughan from MAP Home Loans, approached me with the concept for a new type of mortgage broker CRM and workflow software. We partnered up, and BrokerEngine was born!
I love working in the mortgage broking industry and it’s wild to think that ~18,000 mortgage professionals are involved in 70%+ of Australian loan transactions. We are collectively ensuring a level of quality, service and competition that we can be proud of.
Building software is very challenging, but one thing I’ve learned is that it’s crucial to listen to your customers and develop solutions they actually want to use.
Our weekly team meetings cover customer feedback, feature requests and bugs to solve. What is different from other organisations I’ve been involved in, is that it’s everyone’s job to serve customer needs. We try to ensure our marketing and sales functions are making promises that our customer success and product functions can deliver on. “Cross-functional communication and alignment” is one buzz-phrase we take seriously!
We frequently take on board broker requests to develop or refine new features. We also involve our users in the development process. Customers review early prototypes and we incorporate feedback as we build.
When you build software, you also soon find out that customer desires are infinite, but resources are not. So we often have to make hard decisions and prioritise features that will deliver the greatest good to the greatest number. We can’t always build what everyone wants, but we try to do a good job of allocating capital where it will be most impactful.
Over the years we’ve had our wins and challenges. We often say we could do a much faster, better and cheaper job if we had our time over again!
For example, when we started, BrokerEngine was built as a “layer” on top of Microsoft Dynamics. This sounded good at the time, but we quickly discovered we could never realise our vision while being hamstrung by the constraints and underlying cost structure of a third-party system.
So, we made the tough decision to do a complete rebuild from the ground up. That was not only very expensive, but it effectively placed the business on hold for 12 to 18 months. Nevertheless, that ended up being the right decision.
On the flip side, a lot of our product development has been accelerated by how well we know the industry. My co-founder Craig Vaughan is a successful mortgage broker himself. He has lived and breathed the problems and challenges that brokers face every day. That means we can often get to a solution faster. When potential customers check out our demo, they frequently comment, “It’s clear you know the industry very well.”
Looking into the future, I’m excited about the new features we’re working on. These include full loan lodgement capability, flexible API connectors, a UX/UI design overhaul, and integration of emerging technologies such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and AI.
The list of ideas is so long that we’ll never run out of problems to solve and solutions to create. We plan to continue evolving and growing with the industry.
BrokerEngine is specialised workflow and productivity software for mortgage broking teams.
Register for a free demo at https://brokerengine.
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