Quite often when a person establishes themselves as incorporated, they see the benefits of being able to cut their taxes paid via the method of taking “share holder loans”. They would do this rather than paying themselves a salary or hourly wage and declaring taxes on those funds earned.

This is a great way to avoid paying higher taxes, however can be extremely harmful to your dreams of buying a home or investment property. The reason this becomes such a detriment is because now, that income earned no longer looks like income, rather a debt that now needs to be paid back, hence, share holder LOAN.

For those individuals that have taken this route, they are now in a place where they need save a much larger down payment than they would have had to as someone who declares all of their income. That self employed person now has to save 20-30% (depending on country of origin) in order to qualify for a “stated income” product. If they had just declared their income and paid the taxes that go with it, they could then qualify for a mortgage with a much lower down payment.

Moral of the story, before you make the step of incorporating to save on taxes, please…PLEASE check your motives and look at where you want to be in 5 years…if owning a home is in the picture you may want to consider declaring a little more income.

The old mantra of “Fake It ‘Til You Make It” appears to be an attitude that is accepted among many business new-comers.

But as they break into the business and stumble their way through until they are miraculously bombarded with more clients than they can handle, they must know that they should provide value to their industry, offering knowledge and a positive attitude.

I’m not saying that unless these young professionals have experience, they cannot effectively take care of their potential client base. I believe youthful zest and an ability to create a contagious, positive business environment with peers and clients will bring people to them.

However, young professionals need to use the tools they have at their fingertips to ensure they hit desired targets and serve their clients properly.

To do this, young business people must pool their knowledge with others in their chosen field and swallow their pride to be able to ask for assistance from those with more experience. They should not pass their clients on to their more experienced colleagues. They should make the effort to gain the knowledge and provide an acceptable standard of service.

By treating their businesses and clients not just as a money-making propositions, but as a forum of respect and information-sharing, young professionals will instill a culture that is hard to resist among co-workers and the target market.

The most difficult part to come to grips with in this business-building process is the time it takes. Rarely does business success just fall out of the sky. And young business professionals cannot assume it will.

Hard work is the key to business success. When newbies reach a point where they feel they cannot muster any more strength, my advice is to dig deep inside themselves and find it.

It’s there. When young people go beyond their perceived comfort zones they will discover they have the potential to reach far beyond what they ever could have imagined.

When I first made the decision to break into the mortgage business I was lured by the romanticism of dressing fancy, having big time sales meetings and living the life of the time-honoured “closer”. I watched every movie about successful business types, from Glengarry Glen Ross to Wall Street and I bought in hard to what I felt would be the best way to do business. The other day I had two separate people, both relatively established in two different industries, regurgitate the previously mentioned quote. At that moment, I realized how far I had come in the evolution of my career.

While always having a certain number of deals closing is not just a nice thing but a requirement in my industry, I find the types that feel the need to live by credos such as “Always Be Closing” tend to have misplaced motives. It is paramount in any client driven industry to never lose touch of the fact that it is just that, CLIENT DRIVEN! The moment you live by the monthly numbers and the rush of closing “X” amount of deals you have now removed yourself from the reason you should be doing your job, to insure your clients have now and will forever know that they have had their best interests taken care of!

It is often forgotten that if your clients leave happy, and if they are now in a place of security in what ever situation you have assisted them with, that they will indeed encourage the growth of your business. That being said, I will never understand the need of some self employed individuals to focus on the monthly numbers rather than the core source that helped you achieve those numbers, the client.

I would love to hear from anybody who has had an experience along those lines or anyone who has any fantastic tools with which they maintain “true customer service”

Cheers,

Kaerus Group

If you try and explain to someone the concepts of social media, and there are many, you will often find blank stares and confusion after your feeble attempts have resulted in nothing more than a contorted “Huh?” Thankfully it is not my job to educate on the wonders of Social Media. I will leave that up to the Peter Geisheker’s and Shane Gibson’s of the world among many others. My job is to take social media or whatever the hell you want to call it and introduce it effectively into our business without becoming overbearing or intrusive, annoying or looking uneducated.

Our shift towards establishing a prominent footprint in this area began only a very short time ago, I would say no more than 6 months ago actually. We were completely aware that it was a forward thinking way of doing things, we knew that the benefits were endless and nameless, but for some reason we still took our sweet ass time breaking our way into the realm of “online presence”. This may have had to do with the fact that we were uneducated on the matter, or just had a pre-conceived notion of what “computer people” were supposed to be like, but I am extremely happy to say we have found our way out of what ever limiting doldrums we had found ourselves into. We are now being recognized (relatively) as a group that has welcomed the social media lifestyle.

While it has been the largest factor in our recent business successes, I can not speak more fondly or passionately about the people we have met and friendships that have been fostered because of the giant “chat room” that is the internet. This in itself will end up being what keeps the movement of “social media” alive. There will never be a lack of people wanting to be accepted and meet new people with who they can relate and this is the biggest miracle of the internet.

Whether it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or whatever, this has been a benefit to not only our business lives but our personal and social lives, something we appreciate and will continue to grow. It was our next step!

Desiree Dupuis and Kelly Strongitharm, not only stand for everything that is important in the insurance field but also represent the ideal people we love to work with. They hold value in all the same things that our team at Kaerus Group does, providing our clients and many others with first class treatment every step of the way through their insurance process.

I recently asked Desiree if she would mind putting together a little blog that may give you an idea as to who Three Sixty Financial is and why they are who they are. She graciously took time out of her busy day to do that for us and I encourage you to keep reading and see why it is that we feel the absolute NEED to introduce our clients to these awesome ladies!

Cheers,
Kaerus Group

The Top 5 Reasons We Love Being Brokers

As Life Insurance brokers, we work the same way as Mortgage Brokers. We work directly for our clients at no cost to them and are compensated by the insurance company based on the plan we put in force. We have access to 20 different insurance companies including: Empire Life, Equitable Life, Manulife, Sun Life, Desjardins Financial, Canada Life, RBC Insurance, and many more.

Here are the top 5 reasons why I love working as a Broker:

1. Freedom to choose
As I mentioned, we have access to many different companies that offer many different products. Therefore, we have the freedom to match our clients with the best plan, the best price, and the best company that suits their individual needs.

2. No Sales Pressure
Kelly spent 3 years working directly for one of the big guys and was under constant pressure to maintain sales levels and reach new targets. This pressure interfered with her ability to make the best choices for her clients. As brokers, we are completely independent and are under no pressure to sell certain products or maintain specific levels.

3. Better Service
With the freedom to choose comes better service. This is especially true for clients with specific medical complications, as we can usually find a company that will accept and insure them. For example, people with Diabetes may have a hard time getting insurance. There are certain companies that will accept this risk and certain companies that won’t. If the client applies with the wrong one, there is a good chance they will be declined. As brokers, we have a very low decline rate, meaning in almost all cases we are able to find a company that will insure each and every one of our clients. Furthermore, for clients that are in a hurry – we can choose a company with the fastest underwriting.

4. Saving you time and money
Since we do all of the work for our clients by researching the market ourselves, we are able to save our clients a lot of time and money. We are constantly attending education seminars and kept at the fore front of what is happening in the insurance industry. This makes us experts in what we do and we are able to pass our expertise along to our clients, free of charge.

5. Working for you 24/7
Running our own business means that we work on your schedule. Our office hours are never closed and you can call us at any time. We realize that our clients are extremely busy and the hours of free time during the week are very limited. We make it easy for you to get your business done, by being there for you during the evenings and on the weekends, as well as coming to meet you in your home, office, or local coffee shop/restaurant.

Desirée Dupuis, Partner
Insurance Specialist
Three Sixty Financial Group
tel: 778 245 2262
www.threesixtyfg.ca

http://twitter.com/threesixtyfg

http://tinyurl.com/c4sb7v

It’s your world, let us protect it.

From an idea that originally started as a quaint yet debauchery filled wine night to the massive success that happened last night was a pretty big expectation exceeder. We at Kaerus Group, and speaking on behalf of Angie and her amazing team of ladies want to say a huge thank you to all that came out, all that “retweeted” the event and everyone that contributed to making it a great evening!

Cheers,

Kaerus Group

Taylor’s life long dream has been to move in the direction of a political appointment. Brenda Eaton just so happens to have followed the exact same path on her way to an award winning political career that Taylor herself is taking. Brenda Eaton while being the chair of the BC Housing commission also carries directorship and board membership titles in countless other organizations and will undoubtedly be able to give Taylor some excellent information on the path best suited to a life long political career.

It should be an education for everyone; in how some of our best political minds think, what fuels the goals of today’s younger generation and most importantly how the two very different groups can come together over lunch in our province’s capital and talk about what ever comes up…

Good times!

Cheers,

Kaerus Group

The process of building our business and more specifically our brand, as mentioned in our last post, was to show our group as one united entity that you, the mortgage seeker, could take pride in using. After establishing that we had all the right people in place we embarked on the process that we feel to date was by far the hardest part.

NAMING OUR BRAND

Now I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to come up with a unique, smooth flowing name that encompasses everything that is important to you, and about the people you serve as well as being something catchy and easy to advertise…but it’s fricken IMPOSSIBLE!! Okay, not exactly impossible but pretty damn close!

So how, you ask, did we manage to come up with a name as sexy as Kaerus Group? We drank wine! I kid you not! We drank wine, listened to music and opened up the laptops for a brainstorm-athon. That didn’t work! So we tried it again, but this time with more clarity as to the vision we had about who we were and how we wanted to be perceived. (I still think we just wanted two nights of wine drinking)

After many different name variations and ideas we stumbled across the name “Caerus”. The Greek God of Opportunity, Prosperity and Making Things Happen at the Opportune Time. First thought out of our collective mind….very cool! But although we loved the sound and what it stood for, the spelling screamed Caesar and forthcoming “Google searches” about mortgages in Rome. So after further digging, we found that there was an alternate spelling of the word with a slightly different pronunciation….Kairos. But Kairos just didn’t have the same sound or look that we were aiming for, so what did we decide to do….bastardize the two names and come up with one significant “super” name….Kaerus Group.

Kaerus Group to us not only sounds awesome, but has all the meaning that we could ever ask for and in a way explains how we took three very different personalities and “bastardized” them into one significant “super” team! That’s what we like to think anyways 

Cheers,

Kaerus Group

THE CHOICE

A history as to why we felt the need to re-brand into Kaerus Group. We were originally only one person…Jamie Gale (that’s me). I had broken into the business and was doing pretty well for myself but felt that my business would be much better served if I were to admit to myself that I can’t always do things on my own! Once you do reach a certain point in your career, you begin finding that giving the service that you really want to give to your clients can at times be impossible because there is not enough time in the day. So what do many people do…hire assistants. I think that’s a bad idea. Why hire someone who really doesn’t have a truly vested interest in your business, someone that will eventually want to leave your business and move on to start their own, and as selfishly as this may sound, become your competition.

I say, find people that you truly love working with and people that motivate you. Find people that you know, you trust and you truly want to see succeed. Find people you would rather see as family than co-workers, and once you have you know at that point that you can have a partnership. I was lucky…check….stupid lucky, to find the two people that I did. I was fortunate enough to know two people that fit the exact criteria I just mentioned. The first, an amazing lady I knew from before my time in the mortgage industry, who I knew would bring the energy and drive to make any partnership work. The lovely Caree Bray. The second was a no-brainer as well, one of my closest friends. Rich Vaughan-Smith has the perfect mentality to offset my over the top personality and keep the keel even with the company and his clients. I also figure he knows enough incriminating stuff about me that it’s probably best we work together (he was my room mate in our early years)

So the reason we rebranded; when you have 3 extremely different personalities all working towards one common goal, it is most definitely in your best interest to re-brand yourself and establish to everyone what it is exactly that your collective team represent! That is why we re-branded!

P.S. (Our team continued to grow and we’ll introduce your to Taylor “The Hammer” Lukacin in a later blog)
Cheers,

Kaerus Group