Blog / Leadership


Leading Velocity with Bradley Brown


There’s a war going on. In the last ten years, much blood has been shed. The likes of Borders, Sanity, Nokia and Blackberry are just some of the global names that have been slayed by digital disruption.

Now more than ever, the way that real estate leaders deal with the wave of digital disruption is critical. Maintaining the status quo will not be enough and ignoring change will most certainly lead to extinction - but dealing with it requires a particular mindset as well.

Innovation for innovation’s sake will not cut it either. Innovation must be cradled in well-run businesses. Nokia, Kodak and General Motors were all innovators but failed to sustain and capitalise. Almost 20 years ago, General Motors produced the first commercial electric car but stopped its rollout, and the company is now playing catch up and may never recover.

Sarv Girn from the Reserve Bank of Australia recently outlined three golden rules business leaders needed to engage with to thrive in the new context:

1. Conscious and clear business strategy on whether you will be a leader of change, a fast follower that adopts innovation from others, or someone who will maintain a religious focus on incremental continuous improvement

2. A culture that fosters innovation. Businesses need a culture of experimentation, and an approach which ‘fast fails’ projects in well-run risk averse organisations

3. Collaboration. Digital disruption and innovation requires partnerships with the leaders, particularly the technology firms and those in the supply chain. Who you work with matters more than who you work for in this space.

Industry legend, Bradley Brown is the type of leader Girn would see as one who is successfully engaging with the new context. The CEO from Fletchers has adopted a conscious and clear business strategy to be a leader of change, created a business culture that fosters innovation that collaborates with partners in the cradle of a watertight business. The business has withstood digital disruption and has thrived as a consequence.

When Brown joined the group in 2002, there were three offices and fifty staff. Since then the brand has grown in a revenue sense by over 1,200% and there are now 18 offices (with 4 more already confirmed but not yet opened. Bradley says, “We own eight of those, and we started franchising in 2010, which is an integral part of our strategy - We have 14 offices in Victoria, two on the Gold Coast, one in Wollongong and one in China with another not far off opening.” During the last 5 years, Fletchers have won the REIA, Large Residential Agent of the Year in Australia; twice have won Residential Salesperson of the Year in Australia with Tim Heavyside. In Victoria over that same period of time, Fletchers have won, Best Large Residential Agent of the Year twice, best Residential Sales Person as Director and Non Director, 5 times, Best Website 4 of the last 5 years, Best Auctioneer, Best Property Manager, Best Young Agent and was judged best Customer Service Company in Victoria for the Real Estate Sector through another awards group.

Now in their 96th year, Fletchers has become one of the most influential and award winning real estate organisations in Australasia.

Bradley and his team have not only taken on digital disruption but have overcome some of the toughest social and economic conditions and have held off challenging local competitors, formidable franchise brands and global players.

Bradley says, “The only way you continue to survive, let alone advance yourself, is by innovation” and to accept realities and truths about being in business. He explains, “Look, you can’t just curl up in a ball. You have to keep growing, you have to keep improving, you have to keep showing the market place that you deserve your place. The market is always relentless at shaking out yesterday’s problem. They don’t care. Nobody cares whether your brand survives. Nobody cares whether you make a profit. The consumers don’t care.”

He continues, “Unless you are protected by the government in some industry, then it's survival of the fittest, and that’s what keeps us evolving as a society. We have to have the attitude that it's a matter of survival of the fittest. We have to keep growing, improving,getting better at what we do. We have to be a viable solution.”

How to Lead

A conscious and clear business strategy to be a leader of change

It’s a burden, but to survive in real estate Bradley understands that change is a necessity. He explains, “You’ve got to realise that everything keeps changing. Look at Airbnb - I heard by next year they’ll have more room nights sold than the entire hotel chains combined. Uber’s taking over the taxi industry in city after city and being fought legally to try to stop them, but you get a better experience, a quicker, easier cheaper experience than the cab industry.”

Bradley was with his son and daughter recently and there was a queue for cabs. He explains, “I would never stand in a queue of 100 people to catch a cab. I’m not like that, so I said, ‘Come on guys, let’s walk to a train. Let’s walk a kilometre to a train. I'm not standing in this queue where there's a hundred people and no taxis’. I'm not a sheep. I can’t do it. It’s not me. My son jumps on his phone and in two seconds he goes, ‘Uber will be here in three minutes’. And we walked across the street and we got into our Uber and we were home in fifteen. It was like, ‘Oh my god, really?’ We've got to be open to it. It’s happening. There are all these third party people trying to grab leads and trying to do internet real estate cheap, and big suppliers as we know in the market trying to take more and more of the fees, and become more dominant and that’s our challenge.”

The market is tough. Bradley explains, “We’ve got competitors that are pushing at us every single day and vice versa. It’s a tough market, it’s a tough world. Leadership is just critical, and whether it’s at a macro or micro level, you’ve got to deliver, you've got to have that and that’s what people look for.”

Understanding that change is part of the every day, Bradley has made a clear and conscious decision to be a leader of change. He therefore fiercely protects the representation of the brand and he leads the organisation into the oncoming economic and cultural headwinds. Bradley says, “I think it’s really important for leaders to have a micro focus where necessary, but a macro focus overall. I do sit back and I think of strategy for Fletchers and where we’re heading and what we’re needing to do, but fortunately I also have a lot of good people around me, and leadership is about creating these ripples of effect.”

He explains, “We have 165 staff in my offices, and 270 or 280 in the group, and yet I still see every single profile that goes live. I edit every one of those before it hits the internet and our hard copy. I interview firstly every salesperson in fact every person entering our offices - very few would get a gig without seeing me. As we’ve expanded in franchise offices I don’t see all engaged in those offices, but still when they have somebody they want to second guess, it’s either myself or Sales and Franchise Manager who will see them.”

He continues, “Every promotional ad that hits the print for Fletchers, I see and participate in. You might say, ‘Well why is an individual profile of an agent important enough for the CEO to look at and spend time on?’ It might take me two - three minutes to look at and edit it, I track it and I send back the edits to my marketing team. I believe to that individual salesperson that profile is critical. It’s really important what it says, and each individual salesperson at a micro level ends up being the macro picture of our sales teams profiles. Each ad we run might have a very small influence on the overall, but if I’m looking at all of them, then I’m influencing what the market sees as Fletchers.”

In terms of the bigger picture and the broader market conditions, Bradley says, “I think we are being influenced from outside our own control now, probably for the first time in the Australian real estate industry history, where suppliers and third party people are trying to take our industry. Whether they would be big providers of online space, or whether they are these lead generation companies, whatever they may be. It's getting harder and harder to fend off big companies that might be raising $6m, $10m, $12m, $50m to attack the market. What real estate brand can do that? I think we’re at the precipice of the next big change happening. It would be interesting to see how it all plays out, and how resolute the real estate industry is to fight what's going on and to be part of it. I think we are in for big changes as the world is seeing. The internet and its power have affected industry after industry after industry. The reality for us to date, goes back even 24 months ago, the online space hasn’t really changed our industry. It's changed the way we market a little bit, but basically we’re all still the same.”

Create a culture that fosters innovation within a strong organisation

In addition to a clear and conscious strategy, what separates Fletchers from the competition is their willingness to be better at invention and implementation. Bradley understands that his innovations will be copied. That’s just the way it goes. Transparency is also part of real estate. Bradley says, “Everything we do is visible essentially to the competitors. They see our advertising, they get their hands on our stage ones and twos and threes, and it forces you to constantly re-evaluate and look out and extend what you do. It’s the constant challenge I find in this industry that keeps it exciting and fresh, and when you are in a market such as the one we are in, we are all innovators in different ways.”

Fiscal and market power are used to drive innovation. Bradley says, “We have more focus. We have the resources, we have the people, we innovate massively - particularly if we look in the online space, and we look at the top ten or fifteen innovations in the online space over the last decade, I guarantee you Fletchers were leaders in almost every one of those. We continue right now, where we are first in two or three that nobody is doing, and it will take two or three years before it’s mainstream. Then we hopefully have moved on again. The amount of online presence we have in so many different ways is incredibly strong, and that’s just one example - there are so many of them. It's what keeps us growing, just last year we had a 32% growth in revenue in my offices. 32% on our base is pretty amazing. It wasn’t just in volume per se, it was in everything. The rises in prices, the improvement in commissions, taking more market share and the increase in volume as well.”

Innovation however, is not possible without the right infrastructure and attitude. Bradley believes, “You can't get change to be sustained and effective without positive work on your infrastructure and attitude. You must have the vision and knowledge to actually lead the change that's necessary.” Success means employing the best people and providing the best training and support. He says, “You have to be relevant; you have to provide excellent service and excellent value for what you do. You have to prove to the market that you are worthy of what you do. What do we do? We keep skilling up our people to be better marketers, better negotiators, better communicators and better relationship people. We continue to convince our educated market that we are who they should go to when they are wanting to sell or manage their property.”

Bradley implores strong leaders to, “Get educated - go out, and see competitors that are doing well or non-competitors in other markets. Go to the conferences and seminars and learn how to do it. Learn through doing.”

 


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