Last Friday night, we held a gathering in Adelaide with all our staff from around South Australia to officially launch our new brand, Eckermann Conveyancers.
In fact, we launched renewed branding for our sister companies (Eckermann Lawyers and Eckermann Forms, formerly Eckermann Vendor Statements) and our umbrella entity, the Eckermann Group.
While some of you might see this as a simple name change, we have taken the opportunity to regroup and bring our teams together for the next chapter of our South Australian enterprise, started by Colin Steinert in 1976.
In today’s article, I’d like to highlight some of the key points my brother, Jarrod Eckermann, outlined from the podium on Friday.
Once a Steinert, always a Steinert
An obvious change in the branding is the absence of Steinert from our conveyancing business name.
Steinert has been synonymous with conveyancing in South Australia since 1976, and you can read more of Colin’s reflections on 40 years of conveyancing in South Australia, which I published earlier this week.
On Friday night, Jarrod took time to honour Colin’s work as founder and said:
We are very happy to have Colin continue as a major client of our firm, and I suspect the only thing better for Colin than being his own boss of his conveyancing firm, is being a client of his old conveyancing firm.
We are very proud to continue with Colin’s legacy and attitude of “get in and get it done” into the future.
Better than our competitors, better than we were yesterday
We are seizing this opportunity for a restart to hone in on our ‘why’:
- Why do we go the extra mile for clients and chase banks and make extra calls to get settlements across the line?
- Why do we keep referrers updated on files and assist with difficult contract clauses?
- Why do we treat suppliers as if they were clients, and so on?
Even though our business has been growing for 40 years and now employs around 40 staff across three separate but interlinked businesses, we have applied the mindset of not resting on our laurels.
In fact, the clearest glimpse into our thinking behind this change can be best summed up by our ‘why’:
We exist to provide as many people as possible, the opportunity to experience something better.
While that does sound a little nebulous, all of us have been working through a process of reflection and planning and we intend to live by these two maxims in relation to ourselves, our businesses, our clients and our suppliers, so we can:
- Be better than the competition; and
- Be better than we were yesterday.
We are well advanced in articulating these ideals and will continue to develop the themes in conjuction with all the stakeholders in the Eckermann Group because you will be the ultimate judge of whether we are living up to these enduring standards.
Eckermann Conveyancers launch: The rubber is already hitting the road
We are still a family-owned and run business and have Colin’s ‘can do’ attitude pulsing through our veins, which is why we have already applied our thinking directly to business needs, resulting in us:
- Installing new IT systems including phones and servers so we can respond to your needs more efficient and offer all the new advances of e-conveyancing as they become available;
- Employing a new Human Resources leader to help our team get better and better at serving you and those who refer clients to us;
- Implementing a middle management structure so our team has better development opportunities and faster access to feedback and assistance.
Change is hard work but rewarding and we have a major announcement to make in the next few weeks that will harvest the fruit of our thinking around how to do ‘conveyancing’ and ‘real estate’ documentation better.
Thank you for indulging me on this introspective article about Eckermann Conveyancers. I’m very excited by what we have in store and look forward to sharing the benefits of our advances and responsiveness with you in the months and years ahead.
Next week I’ll return to more externally-focused tips and advice relating to conveyancing.
