Last week I helped host two events. The first in Calgary and the second in Edmonton. The events were held in conjunction with The Alberta Mortgage Brokers Association in an effort to help launch AMBA’s new ongoing professional development workshops. I wanted to spend some time discussing some of the challenges that we face as …
For the past 18 months The Mortgage Revolution have been working to call attention to the need for us to raise the bar as an industry. Since 1975 The Alberta Mortgage Brokers Association has worked with it’s members to achieve the same goal. Now The Mortgage Revolution and AMBA have joined forces to raise awareness …
My friend Gord McCallum recently shared an article from the Harvard Business Revue that I found quite thought provoking. It suggests that we stop competing to ‘be the best’ and that in business the pursuit of ‘being the best’ will ultimately lead to mediocrity. You can read the full article here. My initial reaction to this …
So we have been hearing a lot of chatter recently on a couple of different fronts. Rate buy-downs have been a big topic as well as the potential sale of Firstline Mortgages leading to the possibility of CIBC cutting ties with the broker channel. I have written about my thoughts on fighting the rate war …
Have you seen this movie yet? I watched it on the weekend and really enjoyed it. I am not a huge baseball fan but the parallels in the movie with what Brad Pitt did with his ball team and our business was quite interesting. The central premise of Moneyball is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders …
When most of us think of industry regulators traditionally it has usually been accompanied with a deep sense of foreboding and dread. I know at least one regulator that is working hard to change that and I wanted to make sure they received the acknowledgement they were due. I know that many of the provincial …
For those of you that live in Calgary, this headline may sound a little familiar. On October 21, 2011 Calgary Mayor Nenshi launched an initiative called 3 things for Calgary. It is essentially a challenge to all Calgary residents to come up with ways to improve their city. I think this is a fabulous idea …
So if you have been following my posts for any length of time you will know that I am extremely passionate about affecting change in our channel. I know some will question my motives and the reasoning for making so much noise. One of the things that I continue to work at improving is my …
In a time when our market share is shrinking and we have seen the banks mobile sales force gaining market share, it is extremely counter productive for our national organizations to be aggressively recruiting agents from one another. We hear a lot of lip service about it “being time to work together”, yet the same …
So we have talked alot about the concept of raising the level of professionalism in our channel. So the obvious question is “What exactly does professionalism look like?” This is an important question and one that I think we really need to take a hard look at. Professionalism means a lot of different things to …
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