Back in January we were nominated for a Financial Reporter Award by a customer. The award was Mortgage Adviser of the year 2023. It brought a smile to our face just to be nominated! I was proud to have been nominated as it was not something we had ever thought of. For one of our customers to go and do that off their own back, it felt like we had won already! (I know it sounds cheesy!).
The application process
The nomination was the first step. We were then invited to complete an application. Within the application we had to write about why we thought we deserved to win. This does not come easy in all honesty as I take the view that we are just doing our job. It is not like we are not doing anything different to any other broker, we enjoy what we do and take pride in our work but so do most brokers I imagine.
We took a bit of time on this and had a think. We ended up going down the route of explaining the type of customers we help. That is in the main people who struggle to get a mortgage. People who have had a rough period and want to get back on track. We provided a couple of examples of customers we have helped and in all honesty that can range from things like illness/and divorce through to the worst thing I can imagine which is a couple who have lost a child.
I really struggled with that example as I had to weigh up giving someones heartbreaking personal story in order to try to win an award… It took some discussion between ourselves. However, in the end I did do it because the couple had previously given me permission to share their story as a Success Story on our blog. We were not giving any personal details out and it was more of a brief overview of the situation.
Deciding on the winner
Our award was then voted on by a panel of judges. The judges were people who work for mortgage lenders, conveyancers, insurers etc. They reviewed the applications received and put forward their 3 preferred applications. The 4 applications with the highest scores were put forward to become finalists.
Amazingly, we were then drawn in to a group of finalists which was announced back in March. All of the finalists were invited down to an Alexandra park in London for the awards evening in May. The winner being announced on the night. I was a little surprised at being drawn as a finalist as you are unsure if every application gets reviewed, how many people we were up against and so on. So again, to make it as a finalist felt amazing.
On the night
Unfortunately we were unable to make the event due to a number of things – train strikes being one of them. But the finalist was announced on the night. It was quite funny as I was checking on twitter for updates but there was not much about the awards. However all of a sudden my phone was pinging at around 10pm to say we had won!
What a feeling that was! To find out we had won an award we had been put forward for by a customer and completely unexpectedly was really very special and a lovely feeling.
Summary
I know the done thing to say here is that we did not think we would win as I am sure everyone was deserving.
Whilst we were not sure we would win the award at the same time I thought we put forward a good application. Rather than talking about sheer volume of business we do I thought it was important to put across that many of the people we speak to is shortly after a very low period in their lives. We spend a lot of our time speaking to people who just want to unload all of the pain they have had. They hope that we can help them draw a line in the sand and move forward.
We are not a brokerage that goes after numbers it is just not the way we work. I feel like with our customers everything is a lot more personal.
But to end this post, here is a photo of the award!
