Love of research gives the expert edge

BY ERIC FRYKBERG

Aformer international rower, Mike Whittaker attacks business with the same diligence as he did sport, powering through the reading and research in order to provide customers with the best possible information on economic trends.

He divides his time between Parnell and Waipu, serving clients in Auckland and up north.

I started in the business selling life insurance. I had just moved on from a job when my mate rang me one day and said, 'Can you do cold calls?'

I said I had done cold calls all my life - and he replied that he had a mate who would be calling me.

I got a call from Apex (Advice) and was offered a job. I started selling life insurance there as well as mortgages - we did both - and then I switched to mortgages about a year later.

There’s more customer contact and more positive responses. Selling life insurance is about when you are going to die, and how you are going to get ill, whereas mortgages are more about getting people further in their life, helping them move forward, and hopefully making them wealthier.

It is more positive; there are more phone calls; there is more customer connection.

The reason I do the job is for the tough ones, which is most mortgage applications now.

The easy ones are dead easy; it's the marginal customers, the ones you have to fight for to get across the line, that I enjoy - along with challenging the rules of the banks.

I did a mortgage for a guy in Auckland recently: the house had a code of compliance, but a retaining wall behind it did not.

It was a massive retaining wall, and no bank would take it because it did not have a code of compliance, so the house was sitting there empty.

I worked with the Earthquake Commission, I worked with insurers, I pushed it through the banks and they took it on, and the guy made about $400,000.

We had to wait for the wall to be signed off, and once that happened the house was worth double what he had paid for it.

Banks and their rules and regulations.

The world has too many rules, there are too many regulations, and that’s why some people don't work anymore, because they’ve had enough of rules. Especially silly rules.

I had one the other day from a bank about a document from the council; the whole thing was absolutely silly. Fewer rules and more common sense would be good.

Money. The pay was poor.

At the time, you would be pretty much doing it for nothing; sometimes you might make a bit, you might make $10,000, sometimes $40,000.

But now international sports coaches around the world are paid about $300,000 a year or more.

So, if I was not an adviser, I would be a professional sports coach because they get paid reasonably well now.

I was a rower – a coxswain. I rowed for New Zealand: World Championships, the Olympic Games. I got second in the world once, in Finland.

I ended competitions in about 2000, and then I went coaching at Sacred Heart. I got into business in 2005.

Married, no kids, most weekends in Waipu and we hang out in the city during the week.

I do lots of work up here, like mowing lawns and gardening. Weeding is quite satisfying, and it’s good physical activity. I also play golf.

What

I normally start work very early: I try to get in at about 7am and work all day until I’ve done all the things I need to do.

It is not as busy now as it has been previously, but I normally finish at about 5pm or 6pm. I don't really stop for lunch; I just keep going.

And I don't go to the gym at lunchtime, like a lot of brokers do.

I don't generally work in the weekends, though occasionally I do some mortgages on Saturday morning.

Because of living in Waipu, I do a lot of mortgages from the North, as well as Auckland, so I will meet people up there and talk about their loans from there.

Moneywise, yes, it definitely really pays. You get rewarded for the stress you get put under.

But ideally, probably no.

My first goal was to be an international sports coach. When I decided not to take that path, I went into business and put the same philosophy into business as I had put into high-level sport.

What’s your favourite book, favourite type of music or pastime, such as watching sport on TV?

I don't watch TV, at all; I virtually don't even watch rugby.

I do research and I read. I’m a numbers person, so I will follow the statistics of the country – for example, inflation statistics - and I try to follow trends, so I can pick things better than the economists do.

I get asked that a lot in my job: what do you think the future holds? How is the economy going to do? That’s the number one question people ask.

I don't really have a favourite movie or anything like that, no.

But the unusual thing about me is that I have ducks. Pet ducks.

At our place in Waipu, we have 15 Indian Runner ducks. They do their own foraging, but we feed them whenever they feel like getting fed.

They swim in the pond, they live here, they’re like our pets.

What is your favourite type of food?

I would say a meat pie. ✚

Excuse the dramatic headline, but some are touting ChatGPT that way.

It appeared from out of nowhere, and now almost everything you read about it says it will have an impact as great as the internet itself. Maybe.

In its latest iteration, ChatGPT-4, it now has the ability to create humanspeaklike texts, generate images from text, generate coding, and a lot more.

One instance of its immense power was a hand-drawn layout of a website, which GPT-4 then used to produce the computer code needed to build that website.

This was done as a demonstration of the ability to handle images as inputs to the AI (Artificial Intelligence).

Another use is that it can write an entire book for you.

I watched a YouTube video on how to do this and tried it. It gave me 10 chapter headings for a 100-page non-fiction book on a specific subject.

Then, putting each chapter heading into ChatGPT, with a relevant supporting question, it gave me the bulk of the text for each chapter.

While it still took a while to tidy up the text with edits and put my ‘voice’ into the book, best guess it saved me 80% of the time it would otherwise have taken to write the book.