Redefining Information Technology

Continued

It started small enough, with the four selling insurance and financial planning products. "We didn't dream about being the largest mortgage broker. We just saw an opportunity for a new type of business and we believed in that opportunity," says Watkins. "We didn't aspire to have hundreds of employees; it was more that we wanted to work for ourselves and build a viable business. We've just worked very, very hard and have ended up as Australia's largest mortgage brokerage group."

Watkins and his friends pursued that goal with passion. The four had different and complementary skill sets and an urge to work for themselves. However, along the way, Watkins and his friends found that working for themselves was harder than any other job they had ever held. Like most entrepreneurs, they ended up working 60- to 80-hour weeks across Australia, trying to sell their dream.

"We had no lifestyle and very little income for the first four years. Whatever we had managed to set aside and save disintegrated into the passion of building a business," notes Watkins.

Creating Competitive Advantages

Watkins continues to radiate his passion for growing the business to meet new and changing demands. As an executive director at AFG, he works closely with his team to ensure that AFG's marketing and IT strategies are fundamentally linked together as well as linked to AFG's business goals. Like many entrepreneurial companies, AFG grew organically. But it wasn't long before unplanned growth was taking a toll on the business—some records were kept manually, customer and business data were scattered across five different Microsoft Excel spreadsheet-based databases, and the company had no centralized view of the customer.

"Our biggest challenge was to jump from a mishmash of incompatible systems to something that would enable our business to grow efficiently," says Watkins. However, instead of trying to make what they had work, or invest in a slightly better solution, AFG decided to jump ahead and make a commitment to an enterprise-class implementation of Siebel CRM.

"We wouldn't be here now if we hadn't made a decision five years ago to move to Siebel," says Watkins. "I think we're three years ahead of anyone else because we made what many people said was a crisis decision, to invest what was three times our annual profit in a technology solution. They even said it was madness. But now, no one in the marketplace is positioned with a platform like we have."

The results of their investment have paid off handsomely. "We were 1.5 percent of the mortgage market; now we're closing in on nearly 10 percent of the whole Australian mortgage market," says Watkins. "It's an enormous gain that would have been impossible without a technology platform that allowed us to grow without having to scale our resources exponentially."

For AFG, success comes from efficiently and effectively connecting brokers and customers to products from financial services institutions, and creating new opportunities for all parties to benefit. "Our whole strategy is focused on customer retention. We need to be able to effectively manage the margins between our brokers and the financial institutions, as well as create a true value proposition so we can actually maintain the relationships," notes Watkins.