By Ruan Burger | Success & Broker
When a broker asks us how to scale a mortgage broking business, we want to know how the current business works. Where do enquiries come from? Who looks after the work? What happens when the owner isn't available?
Those questions help us see what the next stage will ask of the business. If you're already struggling to make time for clients or train your team, adding volume will put more pressure on the same problems.
I've built businesses in a regional market and a metropolitan one. The circumstances were different, but both taught me to respect the foundations. Structure saves you, process makes you. You need something dependable underneath you, and you need to keep improving the way the work gets done.
A production target is easy to say. It's worth spending longer understanding what achieving it would require and whether you want the business that comes with it.
Do you want to keep writing, lead other brokers or eventually reduce your involvement? How much time do you want to give the business, and what do you need to protect outside it?
We talk about a family plan before a business plan because the decisions are connected. A business can be successful by someone else's measure and still ask more of you than you wanted to give.
Being clear about the outcome helps you make practical choices. The role you hire, the work you retain and the way you build your diary should support the direction you've chosen.
Before setting a bigger target, look at what brings business in now. Record the source of enquiries and what happens as they move through appointments, applications and settlement.
That gives you a way to question the target. Will reaching it require more suitable enquiries, better follow-up or more capacity to handle work you're already attracting? Each answer leads to a different decision.
A quiet source that regularly introduces suitable clients may deserve more attention than a busy one that creates a lot of work without progressing. You need enough information to see that distinction.
Lead flow deserves a place in the working week. If prospecting only happens when files are quiet, the business will keep asking you to start it up again from a standing position.
We use the idea of fighting days and recovery days when talking about the diary. You need time for the client-facing work and time to prepare, follow through and regain control of what those conversations create.
The point is to make an intentional decision about how the week works. If appointments can land anywhere and every task interrupts every other task, it's difficult to know where your capacity has gone.
Start by looking at the activity the business needs and the work it creates afterwards. Protect enough space for both, including time to support your people.
A diary can feel like a chore early on. But when you use it properly, it helps create the choices you wanted when you started the business.
Write down the work you're doing and identify what you want to retain and what tasks you want to offload. Examine the tasks you want to offload closely enough to turn it into a role someone can understand.
Consider the experience needed, the amount of work available and your capacity to train. Someone with potential still needs time and guidance. Someone with experience still needs to learn your business.
Your first hire doesn't have to copy another broker's structure. My first two staff were part-time and worked school hours. What mattered was making the arrangement useful for the business and workable for the people.
Recruitment takes attention before the person starts and after they arrive. Build that into the plan, rather than assuming the new hire will immediately remove the pressure that caused you to advertise.
As a broker, you may know why you asked a particular question or changed direction in a client conversation. A team member watching you may only see that you did it.
Shadowing gives you a way to bring those decisions into the open. Let someone observe, then discuss what they noticed and where they were unsure. The conversation afterwards is part of the training.
We like asking what confused them, what impressed them and what they'd do differently. You get a better sense of their understanding, and they get permission to think about the work.
The aim is to develop judgement alongside the process. Otherwise, you can hand over the tasks and still find that every decision comes back to you.
Bringing people into the business can create more work for the owner initially before it creates more capacity. There's training, checking and adjustment to do, and the existing clients still need looking after.
Plan for that period. Be realistic about what the person will take on first, who will support them and how you'll tell whether the arrangement is improving.
The same applies when you change a process. A new system needs people to understand it and use it consistently. Process is progress because you're prepared to keep examining it. The day you decide the process is perfect is the day you risk overlooking what the business now needs.
As the team develops, keep asking what stops when you step away. That will show you where the next piece of work belongs.
It might be a relationship someone else needs to understand, a decision that needs clearer boundaries or a process that still lives mostly in your head. Work through those dependencies while you have time to support the handover.
Scaling asks the owner to keep changing how they contribute. Early on, doing more yourself may be necessary. Later, helping other people take responsibility becomes central to the business moving forward.
Build the next stage properly. You can stay ambitious about where you're going while being quite disciplined about what needs to happen first. If you want support with that, explore our Growth, Scale and Established coaching.
