Growth & Innovation Programme for agents is launched

• A Coach will make you focus on the game and your long-term strategies.

• A Coach will make you run more laps while making each round easier and more efficient.

• A Coach will help you develop long-term plans that will allow your business to function more efficiently and make more profit.

The best sports athletes in the world have multiple coaches even though they are already at the top of their game and it is no secret that some of the greatest business men and women of the past 20 years also rely heavily on Coaching and Mentors.

Strangely though, most of those coaches have never reached the dizzy heights of those they coach. Can you imagine teaching Roger Federer how to improve his backhand shot for instance? Who is qualified to tell the Worlds Greatest ever male tennis player how to do that? The answer is Severin Lüthi, who won a mere £400 during his playing career and his world ranking went no higher than 622.

So how does coaching work if the coach is not better at the job than the coached? The answer is that it is about focus not the transfer of skills. Many of us are so caught up in the day to day of running our business that we fail to find the time to focus on the specific things that will improve our businesses exponentially, just as a world class tennis player may get carried away with playing tennis but not focus on the small things that his coach can see from the side lines.

For agents it is not so simple, which coach out there understands not only where the world is going in terms of innovation but equally the everyday challenges they face as a Sales or Letting Agency? Will they spend more time explaining ‘how it works in agency’ to their coach than time actually focusing?

It is for these reasons that Iceberg Digital have spent the time and effort required to build the Innovation & Growth Programme for agents.

As CEO of Iceberg Digital, Mark Burgess was perfectly positioned to help shape and form the course. Iceberg Digital are responsible for the world’s most innovative estate agency software called Lifesycle and Mark himself is also the author of 2 best selling business books, has had a TV show on Sky helping entrepreneurs, has been featured on Forbes.com as one of the entrepreneurs in the world making a difference, voted one of the 30 most influential people in property and has been nominated for a lifetime achievement to the Proptech industry. So he knows a thing or two about where agents need to be heading in order to innovate and grow through the next decade.

But for coaching to work both the coach and the coached must have a huge hunger to succeed, which is why Burgess, specifically chose Rob Brady to lead this new Innovation & Growth Programme for agents. Rob Brady has over 15 year's experience within innovation in both finance and property, and is also the co author of a number 1 best selling business book.

Rob's background is in helping transform companies having worked for one of the biggest banks in the world, transforming one of their worst performing branches into one of their best. Rob then moved into the property industry and was responsible for developing an existing ageing agency brand reinventing their entire systems and processes, building a modern, data driven business, and winning multiple awards along the way. Increasing their managed properties from 300 to 700 and increasing their turnover to over £1m out of just one office. Not only that Rob is the CEO of 'Fight Train Clothing', a non profit fitness clothing brand dedicated to mental health and regularly undertakes extreme challenges in order to raise money and awareness for mental health such as his recent 4x4x48 Challenge, inspired by ex-navy seal David Goggins. The 4x4x48 challenge involves running 4 miles, every 4 hours, for 48 hours. That’s 4 miles, 12 times. Over a 48 hour period. So, 48 miles in total (or 77 kilometers).

Burgess said of Brady: “If a guy can drag himself up every 4 hours for 48 hours straight to run 4 miles without giving up I think Agents can be safe in the knowledge that this guy is going to turn up, after that it is down to them and their want to change. As the saying goes, you can’t coach the un-coachable. We have always had the technology with Lifesycle to transform an Estate Agency but now we have the plan and people in place to help agents navigate this period of unprecedented change in terms of technology, customer service and where the world is going.”

Brady added: “No one likes change, it is hard, it is easier to leave things as they are but what fires me up about this role is the idea of allow Agents all over the UK to really see what a huge difference these focus sessions and planning make around the way their companies run. I have experienced first-hand the transformation that a system like Lifesycle can make to a business and was lucky enough to work with Mark closely on the ins and outs of the finer details. To now be able to roll that out and help agents move forward with a clear direction is a huge passion for me and I am excited to help in this transformation of our industry.”