A lot of Mortgage Brokers consider themselves to be business owners. Perhaps they even have several Brokers who work for them.
A ‘Self-Employed’ Broker may own their broking business and may even employ others in it, but if they earn their income working in it, even in a management capacity, they are self-employed. A ‘Business Owner, on the other hand, is someone who owns a business but does not involve themselves in the day-to-day operations.
To move from Self-Employed to being a Business Owner requires developing your business into a system so others can operate and manage it for you.
The most obvious example of this is McDonalds. They are the poster child for business systems. I’m not suggesting you will ever get to the same level of systemisation as them, but they are a great case study.
If you were to try and come up with a single reason why McDonalds is the biggest fast food chain in the world and the second largest private employer in the world, would you say that McDonalds has the best tasting fast-food and customer service experience?
Not really. I’d say it would be that they systemised their business such that teenagers across almost every country in the world can run things in an orderly and completely predictable way. This allows them to replicate themselves very easily and keep their running costs down.
“Systems are the essential building blocks of your organization—the better your systems the better your business.” – Ron Carroll
And just as importantly, these systems make us trust that McDonalds is going to give us what we expect. I’m not saying I trust that McDonalds is going to give me great tasting, healthy food, but I do know what it will look and taste like and that I will have it quickly and at the price I expect. I certainly don’t think I am going to give them my money and they will then refuse to give me what I’ve paid for. So I have a lot of ability trust in McDonalds that they are going to do what I expect of them. What I don’t have is a such a high level of personal trust that they have my best interests at heart. But that is why they spend a great deal of effort in advertising and charity initiatives like their Ronald McDonald House.
In marketing a broking business, this means the more exactly you can define the steps taken to secure a new client and provide quality marketing assets to support them, the more likely different people will get the same results. The more people will trust that they will get from you what they expect. Then it just becomes a case of continuously testing and improving the marketing system.
The reason people go to a bank to get a home loan is not necessarily because they think they will get a better home loan that way. They just know what to expect from the bank, and they know whichever branch they go into they will get much the same experience. People do not like unpredictability, so you need to remove that from your business.