• Not investing in themselves

“Work hard at your job and you can make a living. Work hard on yourself and you can make a fortune.”

Jim Rohn

Most Mortgage Brokers come from a finance background. The difficulty is, in my opinion, Mortgage Broking is mainly a marketing business, secondly a sales business and then thirdly a finance business. It’s all about finding clients. We are the outsourced sales force of the banks and we don’t even produce the products we sell, so we really are at the pointy end of marketing and sales.

You need to accept that the business you are really in is the business of marketing the benefits your business provides to others.

As such, I definitely think learning as much as you can about marketing a small business is where you should be spending your time and money – reading books, doing courses and programs around marketing and sales. Personally that is what I have been doing for as long as I have been a Broker.

At Mortgage Australia, we provide at our expense to all our new Brokers, a full Mortgage Broking Lead Generation and Sales Mastery course that follows on from the concepts in this book with practical learning.

The 9 module program includes over 13 hours of audio and 8 workbooks, covering the areas critical to every successful broking business, including Lead Generation, Creating Leveraged Referral Systems, Direct Response Marketing, Business Systemisation, Income Diversification, Client Database Management and creating your own Ultimate Personal Sales and Marketing tools.

It covers the marketing systems already provided by Mortgage Australia for its Brokers ready for them to apply to their business, and further systems they can create for themselves.

  • Spending time on low dollar value activities

As soon as you have the level of business to justify it, you want to be outsourcing your administration and loan processing. The high value work in your business will always be getting new clients in the door and looking after the old ones so they keep coming back and referring to you. As much as possible you need to focus on the marketing of your business and push the operational side of your business down the line.

Once you start doing a million dollars in loans a month consistently you should be spending your time learning and implementing what you need to do to get to two million dollars a month. In fact, once you are consistently at one million dollars a month I’d recommend taking on a mortgage specific business coach to work directly with you on how you will get to two million a month, then four million, and so one. This requires letting go of the back office part of your business and focussing on two key things — direct contact with your existing and new clients and learning how to systematically get more of them.