Grand Union Financial Recruitment Process

If I’m moving from employed to self-employed or to a new firm, there’s a worry about cash flow. How does Grand Union support this?

As soon as commission comes in, it goes out. We are on a 24 hour turnaround. As soon as the commission hits the bank account, we pass it on.

That’s always been there from day one. We don’t sit on anyone’s money or commission. I’ve been self-employed, and you have to put food on the table. You’ve got bills to pay. You want your money quicker and faster. You can do all this work and be a fantastic advisor, but we’ve all got bills to pay.

When you’re making the jump from employee to self-employed, there are many different factors to consider. People do it for different reasons – the flexibility, or the opportunity to maximise their income without an employment contract.

Some people just don’t want to be managed and want the freedom to be their own person. But one thing is a certainty – that cash flow needs to be considered and that’s always dependent on one’s current financial situation.

My advice is to make sure you have enough behind you to cover your fixed and variable bills for at least six months. However, we can mitigate this – because we’re not just a mortgage and protection firm. Some products are quicker and easier to advise on, that can get you remunerated quicker.

On a mortgage it could take four to six weeks to get your commission in. But an invoice financing facility can have you remunerated by the end of the month, and an asset finance case can pay you in two or three days.

So whatever your current financial position, we can advise. If cash flow is an issue, you may want to start looking at these types of products first, for that financial buffer. Then you can also look at mortgages and protection, or bridging or development finance, which usually take a lot longer to come in. I’ll sit down with all my new recruits and we’ll roadmap that out.

Is there any admin support here?

This really comes down to the style and the business model from brokerage to brokerage. Some have admin support, some have semi-support or case checking.

I am a true believer that if you are an advisor, whether you’re employed or self-employed, you must own the process from start to finish. A good advisor starts the enquiry, does the fact-find, the sourcing, the criteria check, the application and sees out the process.

Even knowing that process thoroughly and doing it over a hundred times, things go wrong.
And I usually find that brokers who don’t do their own admin are the ones that can’t fix the problem themselves. They have to rely on someone else to fix it.

So my advisors do not have admin support. But when there’s a problem in the process, they’re able to backtrack, go through things step by step and rectify the problem. And that strengthens your competence. It makes you an all-round good advisor.

You know which parts of the process you need to dedicate your time to most, and if something falls down, you know where to fix it. An admin support wouldn’t necessarily know where to start.

Not offering admin support isn’t about the cost. It’s simply that my advisors are competent. More brokerages are offering admin support for ‘efficiency’ and maybe compliance, but there’s no substitute for an advisor who can do it from start to finish.

Is there any help with marketing myself as an advisor?

Yes, we help with marketing. Every advisor who comes into Grand Union has their own strengths and weaknesses. Some people love social media – we have one advisor who’s big on Instagram. Another advisor that loves to network and barely has a digital footprint. It’s what comes naturally.

You can’t advise or talk to a client in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable. And we’re not good at everything – that’s quite natural. We’re not built like that.

So for every advisor joining the firm, we sit down and explore what they feel comfortable in doing? Do you like talking to people? Do you like being face to face? Do you enjoy going to coffee mornings? Do you like social media and that digital exposure? Can you invest the time into that?

Whatever that choice or preference, we will tailor our advisors’ marketing strategy. Someone once told me that I’m really bad at podcasts – and here we are. It wasn’t natural to me, but it has helped doing it over and over again.

What other training is there?

In terms of product training, have a look at our website. We go from regulated mortgages and advising on life insurance, all the way to invoice financing and unsecured loans. You’ll be able to see the range of all the products that we can offer. As an advisor, you have the choice to learn all of the products yourself, or just learn a select few that complement the areas you feel comfortable advising in.

Apart from product training, we have something that can’t really be articulated as a programme or training materials. It’s about business coaching, in a way. We’re all self-employed and we’ve got admin to keep up. So we explore how to carry yourself and where to invest your time as a self-employed advisor. We share our best practices with each other as a company.

One advisor will say that something works for them, and someone else says the complete opposite – but learning how to handle, maintain and future proof your own pipeline is paramount, and we will be able to train you there.

Do you supply any leads?

Straight off the bat, we don’t supply leads. We’ve tried lead generation a long time ago and there are a lot of services out there, but there’s wide variation in quality.

Some of my advisors have also looked at buying leads in and again, quality varies. My advice to any self-employed advisor is to look at it as a business case. You want maximum return for minimal effort.

For me, the most rewarding and successful way of generating leads is actually sitting down and talking to someone over a coffee. If they’re a professional introducer, for example, like a solicitor or an accountant, getting to know them and selling yourself is key. People buy from people.

You may not walk away with a lead right there and then, but if you can convey yourself as the right person for the job, who’s trustworthy, that professional introducer is going to like you and eventually they will start referring clients to you. That’s how I build my business today, by talking to people.

The conversion is higher, the leads are warmer, and you get to have great conversations with people and get to know more about them and their business.

What products and lenders will I have access to?

Certainly for mortgage and protection, we’re whole-of-market. With commercial financing it’s quite vast and we have contracts up and running. Sometimes a lender is not on the panel and offers something different. If my advisors have wanted to transact with them, they’ve done their due diligence and got what they need from that lender.

The last piece of the puzzle is always signing contracts, and those are usually no big hurdles. So we’re whole-of-market in its truest meaning.

Is there a minimum volume of business I need to write each month?

No. We’re not that type of company or network. With self-employment, you get out what you put in. If what you put in is enough to sustain you, fantastic. If it’s enough to exceed your expectations, fantastic.

Our proposition maximises your income. I think we have the best proposition on the market today. Every recruiter I speak to about this says it’s fantastic – and it is definitely unusual.

If you want to know more, by all means send me an email. But there’s no minimum business. I don’t believe a self-employed advisor should be held to minimum business. There’s no contract there telling you what to do.

There’s regulation, of course, and safeguards and best practice, but minimum business isn’t something that should be dictated by anyone. We’re there to help people grow. I detest any brokerages that say you have to write minimum volumes.

If I wanted to join, what’s the process? How should people reach out to you?

I’m on LinkedIn or email – just drop me a note. Our process is very short – the fastest we’ve onboarded an advisor has been two weeks, coming from another firm. The longest we’ve ever taken is five weeks.

That’s because we have a very flat hierarchy – it’s me, all the advisors and my compliance officer. It’s relatively straightforward – we’ll have two interviews and join all the dots. Some people say they will contact me in a couple of months’ time and we will arrange another call. It’s an ad hoc process. We move as quickly as you move, but it’s a relatively quick decision making process.

What else do we need to know about the recruitment process at Grand Union?

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to many people that have enquired about Grand Union Financial. Some have chosen a different path and some have joined us, and that makes me happy.

Whatever your reason is for going self-employed or getting into this industry, you need to learn one product. You must come into this with an open mind. You might aim to be a mortgage and protection advisor to start with, but chances are, you’re going to have to learn a lot more products to be able to sustain yourself and become impervious to market trends.

Nothing disheartens me more than when there’s a downward spiral in the property market. I see on LinkedIn all these advisors that are ‘open to work’ because their cash flow or pipeline is dried up. It’s because they haven’t had the right brokerage or the right principle behind them to mitigate that risk.

My guys have been with me for a long time and we’ve had downturns in the property market and they’ve stayed afloat pretty well. Yes, you can get leads in any brokerage, and you might get admin support. But if you’re still going down the same track as everybody else, it’s only a matter of time before you go bust.