In the new Optus ‘Things I look for…’ series, I talk to Vincent Turner, founder and CEO of uno Home Loans, about startup recruitment strategies and the qualities he values most when building a winning team.
Entrepreneur Vincent Turner has an ambitious goal for his latest startup uno Home Loans – an online mortgage broker which lets customers see all their home loan options from a single digital platform, and is backed by seven-day service from a team of experts. Within 10 years he hopes to see uno capture a 10% share of the Australian mortgage market.
“Yes, that’s one in 10, in 10,” he says quite matter-of-factly. At the last count, 630,000 Australians get a home loan each year, generating an estimated $2 billion in revenue for the mortgage brokers who help them.
Just two years in since uno’s official launch, and Turner says the business is tracking well. “We grew 600% in the first year, and we’re averaging around 13% month on month.” uno has 24 lenders on its panel representing 95% of the Australian home loan lending market by market share, and each month more than 15,000 customers are signing up for an account.
Having a strong, cross-functional team in place from the get go, and bringing in the right talent at the right time has been critical to success, he says. Unusually for a startup, and thanks to substantial funding from Westpac, Turner had a staff of 30 just two months after forming the business. This number now sits at 72 and is set to rise to around 80-85 by the end of the year.
Here, he draws on his experiences to share what he’s learned about recruiting in this context and why he believes having the requisite skills to do the job is only a very small part of the puzzle.
Are there steps you can take in the early stages to help you attract the right talent?
I think it’s advisable to get strategic about who you’re going to need and when and, parallel with that, it helps to build structure into your hiring process, for instance, asking every candidate the same set of questions and being meticulous about taking notes. Too often when you’re at that early stage you have more casual coffee conversations, but this approach won’t get you the right results.
I think we did a good job of attracting talent early on because we were easily able to articulate our vision and tell people what they’d have ownership over – high performers like responsibility and being able to have an impact.
Also, don’t be afraid to invest early in building an employer brand. If you want to attract great talent, you need to recognise that they want to work with great people in a great work environment. When you’ve got three or four people onboard, go and find your own place and create an environment that speaks to what it’s like to work there and the kind of people you want to attract.
What are your absolute must-have criteria when building a team?
Beyond simply having the skills, cultural fit is critical. If you have an individual who’s an absolute rock star but other people don’t want to work with them, or having them in the business makes it hard for others to shine, then you’re sub-optimising. It’s no good having a great marketer or engineer if you don’t have diversity of thought – that’s where the value is: seven people contributing, not one person leading the conversation.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is also key – we’re looking for people who can read others, who are empathetic and can acknowledge when someone’s having a bad day. When you have someone who just blindly runs over people, you have to deal with that as an issue as opposed to the customer problem.
What other key qualities do you look for, particularly in your core players; those individuals who will help you drive growth?
Very early on it actually works quite well to have star players, people who can just go and hustle, or build amazing things, and who can do that in a degree of isolation. But over time you need to work out how to do things that scale, and that includes your team. People who have been really solid players, who are great at delivering stuff, may not always be the right people to manage stuff, or to manage or lead people.
In my experience, the people who are good at leading others tend to lead from behind. They know when to charge forward and provide inspiration, but a lot of the time they’re setting others up for success – they recognise that people are most engaged when they have autonomy.
The other skill that’s absolutely critical is knowing when to be decisive with someone; when to hold them to account and say something wasn’t up to standard. Those conversations aren’t pleasant, but you need to be direct and nice at the same time, while acting in the best interests of the problem we’re trying to solve – and that’s a skill I’m constantly pushing for all of us to improve on.
Are there skills that particularly come into play in a high-growth environment?
By definition, you’re under an extreme amount of pressure and you’re going to be putting other people under pressure. This requires resilience and strength of character, as well as the ability to engage others in the challenge ahead – you want them to come in with a sense of urgency and responsibility, but without feeling paralysed with stress.
In this kind of business, the role that you’re in today may not be relevant, or required to achieve the same thing tomorrow. So the ability to adapt and get other people to adapt is critical – and with that, understanding that if you make a change to a role or reporting line, that this has an emotional impact, and that’s where EQ comes into play. If you’ve got leaders who don’t have good EQ, it’s incredibly hard to be good at managing and promoting change. And if your organisation is going to survive, it must adapt as it grows and as it faces different challenges.
This article was first published on the Optus Yes Business hub in June, 2018.
