Chris Acret

Franchisors thought that rising unemployment might create a few opportunities for recruitment as people get out of business with big redundancies cheques. But it never really happened. Has it suddenly become hard again?

You’re spot on. That’s what we had. I remember what we had in our business plan – opportunity: recruitment.

But actually we’re seeing this year our enquiries are up quite a lot. This has been the most positive environment for recruitment for quite awhile and I think during those uncertain GFC times, people are less inclined to take risks and they are less inclined to move. So we found recruitment over the last couple of years particularly difficult because Australia was still in close to full employment. Bt this year, even though employment is very high, there’s more confidence around so it’s that confidence that I think is more of a driver of recruitment.

And just looking forward I guess over the next 12 months, what sort of things will you be focussing on?

We need to keep focussing on our culture post-merger and it’s just an ongoing challenge, you never take that for granted. We want to introduce a white labelled or our own line as an alternative. So that’s something we’re investigating and we really want to introduce risk insurance, being able to offer our clients mortgage protection, life insurance at a time that’s pivotal to them. We’re organising their debt so it makes sense to try and do that. But there’s not a great track record of companies doing both those things, so we’re also mindful that that will be a real challenge for the business.

Is it difficult to get a white labelled product up in terms of securing funding channels?

We were looking at it very closely prior to the GFC and then with the GFC it was really not an option, but it seems now funding is starting to come back so there’s more options. So really we’re just in the exploratory stage. We’re not any further than that but we see that as something we should be looking at.