Someone asked me the other day if we are a customer centric organization and my initial reply was “hell yeah!” That prompted the question though, “who are our customers?” Our company’s business is in connecting commercial property borrowers with lenders through an intuitive portal — making commercial, apartment building and business financing easier (sorry for the sales pitch, but… context). You may say, our customer is the borrower, and you’d be right. But you’d also be missing a significant part of the picture. Lenders are also our customers. So are our employees, and our shareholders. In thinking this through I thought (correct, I thought while thinking), “Hey, why not write it on this blog that nobody reads and create a little public accountability and maybe spark an idea in someone else that reads it.” So that’s what this is.
Who are our customers?
In no particular order:
Borrowers
We deliver value to borrowers by empowering them with free information online about multifamily, commercial property and business financing. No strings attached. Then, if they want to use us to get financing, we help them through the loan process via an easy to use tool that eliminates many of the legacy frictions and complications of getting commercial financing, ultimately matching them with the best lender for the job. In some cases we match them directly and in other cases, we add a concierge touch to help ensure the smoothest possible experience. The bigger our borrower ecosystem grows, the more enticing it is for lenders to join and compete, the more lenders there are on the platform, and so-on.
Being a customer-centric organization means optimizing the borrower experience from first touch, to closed loan, and back.
Lenders
Lenders don’t have an easy or scalable way to match with all the borrowers, all over the country, that are a fit for their “credit appetite.” They often have to compete for deals that lie outside their “box” or spend a lot of time searching for new opportunities. Once they find opportunities, qualification and getting someone signed up is painful. We solve this by matching the right opportunities to the right lenders. Delivering value to lenders is a key to building our lender ecosystem, thereby delivering value to borrowers through choice in a low-cost marketplace, thereby delivering more borrowers to lenders… and more lenders to borrowers.
Being a customer-centric organization means delivering value to lenders in the form of painless borrower acquisition and loan processing.
Employees
The true beating heart of any organization, I believe, are its people. The humans in the enterprise are the ones driving it forward and creating the mechanisms and experiences that deliver value to clients, in our case, borrowers and lenders. Hiring people that fit our core values and culture, then cultivating an environment that supports entrepreneurship within the company, ownership, accountability and a high level of autonomy; super-charges us in setting our people up for success.
Being a customer-centric organization means delivering a meaningful mission, exciting experience, and challenging work to our employees first; building a delighted community of humans who pass that glee on to borrowers and lenders.
Investors
Investors believed in us and invested in us and that is something I do not take lightly. It’s our job to deliver long term value by operating with integrity and with a focus on being long-sighted (opposite of short-sighted). By thinking in multi-year (not multi-week increments), we can build a path to greatness. That’s not to say we don’t have monthly and quarterly targets. We do. But with a grander picture in mind. It’s our duty to strive to build a scalable and sustainable organization; while being prudent stewards and allocators of capital. Some of our biggest shareholders and stakeholders are our employees and contractors as every full-timer (and some part-timers) participate in our employee equity incentive program. We’re all in this together.
Being a customer-centric organization means delivering value to all of our customers with the targeted byproduct being deep value for our investors and stakeholders.
By delivering value throughout our ecosystem to employees, lenders, and borrowers; we spin a flywheel that picks up momentum as we continue to lean into it. By being careful allocators of our capital (time, human and economic) we think we can separate ourselves from the pack over the long term.
Here’s my math:
More borrowers = more lenders = more borrowers
More borrowers & lenders = more closed loans = more capital to deploy into creating a better platform = more borrowers = more lenders.
Flywheel.