Dream Achiever
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09/08/2010 2:07:00 AM
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When you meet Michael Beckette for the first time, you can’t help but instantly like him. It’s a Monday afternoon, and at the Mortgage Alliance head office in a bustling suburb of Toronto, Beckette is sporting a baseball cap and casual wear rather than the typical business suit you’d expect from a mortgage broker, let alone the president of one of Canada’s largest brokerages.
His presence is warm and congenial and, at the same time, he possesses authority and confidence. You are eager to please and he is eager to encourage. “You want me to tell you the thing that I like most?” he asks, as we settle around the coffee table in his office, and he talks to me about creating and building the Mortgage Alliance business for over 10 years. “The thing I like the most is seeing someone who has never been a mortgage broker before come into this industry, learn how to be a broker, become one of our franchise owners and build their company into hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The gratification I get now is the success of other people.”
Beckette began his own success in the real estate industry. Prior to starting Mortgage Alliance in September 1998, he was the vice-president of operations at Coldwell Banker Canada for seven years. “I started as a young man in the real estate business,” says Beckette, who earned his bachelor of business at the University of Michigan and returned to Toronto shortly after completing his degree. “I had a real job for four months and ever since then, I was an entrepreneur.” This intrinsic entrepreneurial spirit and keen business acumen is what led Beckette to enter the mortgage business, which he saw was underserviced at the time.
At that time, a large brokerage was made up of 100 or 200 people, says Melissa Rizzi, vice-president of operations at Mortgage Alliance, who has known Beckette for 12 years and worked with him for 10. “So back then Mike was talking to various lenders about having 1,000 brokers and they laughed at him,” she says, “but he is a brave, innovative thinker.” Mortgage Alliance now has approximately 1,900 brokers within its multiple networks across the country, and was the first super-brokerage to be licensed in every province.
The company’s mission has always been to provide the best environment for mortgage professionals, whether it’s someone completely new who requires daily hands-on training and support, or an experienced professional who wants to plug into resources that would otherwise be too expensive to recreate on one’s own. Beckette believes this is the greatest service he can offer to help grow others into success.
“It’s very important brokers recognize they’re not in the mortgage industry,” says Beckette. “Mortgages is what you do but you’re in the industry of helping people achieve what they want. Nobody wants a mortgage. What they want is the lifestyle, the home ownership, the opportunities a mortgage creates for them.” Beckette excels at creating opportunities for Mortgage Alliance brokers and his senior team to help them achieve their goals and live their dreams.
One of the team members is Joe Pinheiro, vice-president of sales. “I am the luckiest person in the world because I get to talk to Mike every day,” says Pinheiro. “He brings the best out of everybody. He’s the kind of person you really want to work hard for and he inspires you to think in new ways.”
The Mortgage Alliance senior management team, which includes Pinheiro, Rizzi and Laura MacLennan, vice-president of business development, have all been working with Beckette at the company for 10 years—a testament to Beckette who says what he loves about his job is the people he works with. “When I first met Mike, what struck me about him was his passion, his vision, his willingness to take risks,” says MacLennan, who’s personally known Beckette for more than 25 years. “He’s very focused and results-oriented and knows how to execute.”
One of Beckette’s long-standing focuses since entering the business is to establish mortgage brokers, and particularly Mortgage Alliance, as a recognizable consumer brand. When he started, mortgage brokers had an eight per cent share in Canada’s market of financing mortgages. It has grown to nearly 30 per cent but has been stalled there for a few years now. “In Quebec, Multi-Prêts has 45 per cent market share. It’s a recognized brand,” says Beckette, referring to Mortgage Alliance’s sister company based in the francophone province. “People in Quebec, they say if you want a mortgage, you have to go to a bank or you have to go to Multi-Prêts. It’s that level of trust we need to build in the rest of Canada.”
It requires a lot of money to build that level of trust, and brokerages don’t have nearly as many advertising dollars as the big banks do. Currently, Mortgage Alliance spends $2.5 to $3 million each year across Canada, but Beckette says it needs to double that spending.
In the meantime, as Beckette and the Mortgage Alliance team work toward brand trust, they’re also planning a motorcycle ride across Canada, called the Mac Rally of Hope, to raise money for breast cancer research. In 2008, Beckette, a motorcycle rider himself, and three others from Mortgage Alliance travelled from Vancouver to Halifax on their bikes over 10 days and raised more than $77,000.
This year (they couldn’t attempt it again in 2009 because they were too sore, laughs Beckette), they are riding from Vancouver to St. John’s, Nfld. in segments over 16 days and anyone can participate, as long as they raise some money.
“My favourite experience had nothing to do with riding a motorcycle,” says Beckette, echoing his sentiments about what it means to be a mortgage broker. “It was the people we met across the country. Everybody we ran into had an inspirational story about breast cancer or breast cancer survivors in their family.” The reason Mortgage Alliance chose to support this particular cause is because the mother of one of the senior management team was inflicted with breast cancer.
In a rush to get to downtown Toronto, Beckette interrupts me but not without first attributing Mortgage Alliance’s success to his senior team. “It’s not about me,” he says, as I notice his baseball cap reads the Mac Rally of Hope, “it’s about them.” Even as he’s out the door in an obvious hurry, he introduces me to his management team in a flourish and offers up his office for me to talk to them. I watch him give one last hug and smile to another employee, and understand quite thoroughly, what Michael Beckette enjoys most about working in mortgages is helping people achieve their dreams.