Business coach-turned conveyancer Trent Taylor reveals his success secrets

TRENT Taylor is the managing director and CEO of fast-growing Victoria-based Skilled Conveyancing, having taken over the family-run business in 2023.

Entering the sector after more than a decade running a successful in business coaching and training organisation, Trent brings a unique perspective to leading the company.    

Since Trent took the reins, Skilled Conveyancing has notched impressive growth, and Australian Conveyancer sat down with the highly-motivated leader for his take on growing a conveyancing business and what he sees as the challenges and opportunities in the sector.

AUSTRALIAN CONVEYANCER: How did you get into conveyancing?

TRENT TAYLOR: I bought Skilled Conveyancing from Dawn Barry, a legend in the Victorian Conveyancing industry – she also happens to be my mother. 

Before taking the helm at Skilled Conveyancing, I was in the business coaching and mentoring businesses since 2004. I’ve bought and sold other businesses along the way.  

On taking over Skilled Conveyancing, I actually had never thought of buying Dawn’s business as it was entirely her thing, but I came to see how much she loved it and realised that she was interested in creating a family legacy. That really appealed to me.  

So the idea of continuing the legacy, keeping it in the family was there – it enamoured me -and that’s what I’ve done. I took over in January 2023 and we had three employees at that time. We now have a team of around 10.the tgeam treble in size

AC: What was the focus of your coaching work?

TT: I specialised in working with the accounting industry. Predominantly what it became was about helping them with how to communicate, structure, and organise businesses.

At the same time, during that period I had a bit of a life epiphany. Me and my family sold, threw out or gave everything in our life away, bought a car and caravan and travelled Australia for two years. We were exploring simplicity and just had an amazing time. 

Even so, my business grew 13 per cent every year and I inspired so many other people. I also discovered the ‘triple three’ lifestyle which is to work three days a week, 33 weeks a year and make 333,000 after tax. I then help other people generate that type of lifestyle.

AC: Coming from coaching, what key principles have you brought to conveyancing?

TT: One key thing is that people tend to make business too personal. We fall in love with our own business – it’s why a lot of people find it hard to retire from business. In essence, people often over identify themselves with the business and lose their objectivity. 

It’s why I emphasise not getting too personal with a business and always trying to keep an objective perspective on it. Here, an attitude of kaizen – a Japanese business principle – can help. The term means constant and never-ending improvement. You’re never going to get perfection so focus on progression, just get better at something every week.

Another factor is business owners are often like shadow boxers, jumping at shadows without actually knowing what the real problem is. You’ve got to make things transparent because it’s problematic if you can’t see what the real facts are. Always test and measure, don’t just use your gut feel – sometimes our feelings get in the way of the facts.

Also remember, there’s only three levers in a business that we can control. There’s people – who we hire and what we get them to do, technology – what we subscribe to and how we use it, and systems – which is the underlying element for both people and technology. 

If you focus on those areas – people, technology, systems – and you keep improving kaizen, and make them transparent so you can test and measure, you’ll win the game.

AC: How can you embed these principles into the daily operations of the business?

TT: My number one key performance indicator as CEO at Skilled Conveyancing is to grow the people. So I need to understand what I need my team to do, document it, communicate it, and provide the infrastructure for them to best succeed.

On this front, staff become team when a leader does three things – acknowledge them, include them and appreciate them – which is what we do in our weekly meets and our monthly performance reviews. We look for what they’re doing that’s great and identify one area to focus on improvement.

How this looked in practice, when I took over Skilled Conveyancing, is that I broke my first 18 months into three blocks. First, I had to look inside the business, understand it from the roots up, clean up any holes and enhance our strengths.

Second, it was necessary to look outside the business and understand ‘who is who in the zoo’ – what are others doing well, who we need to build relationships with and learn from. Third, we looked to entities we can expand with and make a transition ahead with them.

AC: You’ve grown quickly since entering the industry, what do you put your success down to?
TT:  While I don’t have decades of experience as a conveyancer, I do have fresh eyes on the sector, as well as more than 20 years working with other professional service industries.

The way I see it fundamentally the biggest factor is right under my nose – our team and our client base. I love my team and I truly understand I cannot achieve anything without their amazing commitment and work ethic. 

So I’m always looking for ways I can do things better as a leader for them – what tools we can introduce or enhance to make their job easier and where I can provide opportunities to build their confidence. 

I believe ‘confidence is king and cashflow is queen’. They’re married, so to speak, but cash does not flow sustainably without a confident and cared-for team.

On the client-side, our clients, like most conveyancers, come back to us and where I see opportunity is how do we show gratitude for this? How do we recognise their contribution to our business apart from doing a great job? How can we have their friends to come to us, and who else do they know that can support our vision for the future.

AC: What do you see as major challenges for your peers in the sector?

TT: What I see as the challenges at many conveyancing firms is that they’re not running their businesses as a business, they’ve in effect bought themselves a job. 

What I mean by that is they’re so busy doing conveyancing work they don’t time to do the things I’ve talked about – they haven’t got time to look at the numbers, understand what’s going on with people and marketing, or look at whether they’re using technology efficiently.

Critically, many operators are just holding on. They’re doing the work and they don’t have time to lead the business. For me, I’m not a conveyancer, I don’t know how to do that work, but I have time to look into the people, into the technology and to systemise the business. 

Another problem I see in the industry is that there seems to be a scarcity mentality that’s widespread. That means operators are making decisions and taking action based on a belief that there’s not enough work – in essence it’s a fear mentality. 

By contrast, you’ll find successful businesses have an abundance mentality. There’s so much work for everybody and if we collaborate, as opposed to compete, I think we’ll have a much stronger industry as there’s a lot of wisdom there.

AC: Given the challenges, what advice do you have for others in the sector?

TT: For conveyancing firms to be run more effectively, owners can’t work in them 100 per cent of the time. They need to have time off and leverage through stronger structure and team balance. Otherwise you get reaction-based management versus proactive leadership.

If owners can learn how to run a business, even if they can get themselves back five hours a week away from doing the conveyancing, that’s will make a difference.

I also advocate a model or way we can work with real estate agents and mortgage brokers as a true ‘trilogy’. The strongest shape on the planet is a triangle, and businesses and industries that embrace this worldly truism always succeed. 

Under this model, we value and respect each other’s role in our clients transaction, stick to our strengths and have faith the other parties will do their part. I know It’s fanciful that this will happen Australia wide with every conveyancer, but it’d be great to have this happen at least with 20 per cent of our conveyancing businesses.

Also, embrace tech and look to work with companies like triSearch to improve what we do every day. I challenge them to stop my team having to double-touch parts of a file, to stop us having to do work arounds and to make it simpler to integrate other software.

AC: What macro issues should be on the radar for conveyancers right now?
TT: I think we should be keeping the wisdom of the more experienced operators in the industry as a priority, as well as boosting our ability to bring young workers in.

Many firms find it so difficult to find new staff or team, so we need to improve our education system for young people wanting to enter our industry with real practical solutions, and graduates ready to impact their employing business from the get-go.

There’s also consolidation to consider. It’s been happening across all industries for the last two decades in a serious way, including in conveyancing. When larger players outside this industry infiltrate out industry, there’s a danger the personal touch and care is not as valued, and the pricing of our services becomes a race to the bottom as they chase scale.

We need conveyancing businesses to value themselves – not just as service providers, but as confident people who charge what they’re worth. This may not be headline news but it’s foundational for this industry to continue to be an amazing and sustainable one to be in.

AC: What does the future look like at your firm?

TT: We’re looking to expand and recently bought a great little firm and took on the principal and their owner – it’s just gone awesomely well. I’m working on a model where people can merge with us and be part of our family.

Looking ahead, the whole focus is just to build the business. I want to serve those regional communities, I’m regionally based so I would like to do more of serving the local people. I want to build the business, serve the local communities and grow the value of owners shares while working together – the better we do, the better everyone wins.

* The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity