Should we be aiming for perfection?

“She’ll be right mate”, “Near enough is good enough”, “Just lodge it anyway”.

As a new mortgage broker you are keen to get going, and for the experienced ones, you just want to get things done. I get it. But I have to ask, is the reason we don’t strive for perfection masking the emotion of fear to fail?

A quick re-cap on my Last Thursday. A PD day in Brisbane and I live on the Gold Coast. Just ask any local about the M1. It’s hell. A contributing factor is a section that goes from 4 lanes to 2, back to 4. In both directions. I guess the planners thought “near enough is good enough” and as a result, 100,000’s of motorists are frustrated daily, road rage with accidents costing consumers and insurers millions of dollars because someone could not take the time or have the courage to get it right.

So I caught the train this Thursday Gone.

I arranged to meet a colleague at 8.20am, 6 minutes after the train was due to arrive at Brisbane Central. (PD day was at the Sofitel, right above the station). I don’t catch trains often so I assumed they would be on time. There was an error with the signal on the way, train 15 minutes late. I thought this would rarely happen in Japan, how come they can get it right?

All trivial, so time to get coffee and thank you to the coffee cart partner, but it was my morning coffee. Is it that hard to steam the milk that little bit longer to make the coffee hot. “Near enough is good enough” … led to an ordinary experience.

Every day of our lives, in our Aussie laid-back culture we are accepting “Sub-Standard, everything”.

So let’s enter lending, banks and brokers. Do we have a culture of excellence, perfection or do we just accept the status quo? Why should a broker try harder, when the only real measure of what could be an excellent application is not receiving a missing info request. And lenders, you are not off the hook either, many times asking for info already provided.

It gets fun when a doc checklist is a guide. I feel for new brokers, like are you are supposed to absorb what the lenders are thinking and their appetite via osmosis over an internet connection? Now with mentors, it is easier, but even we get blindsided. I have never seen a structured training session by a lender on how to package a perfect application and to also show a broker the entire credit analysis process. The closest I have experienced is CBA. You go to Brisbane, the session is t