By Ruan Burger | Success & Broker
A broker building a reliable flow of enquiries has a different problem from an owner whose team brings every decision back to them. Both might tell us they want to grow. We need to understand what that means in each business before deciding what to work on.
That's why we talk about Growth, Scale and Established coaching at Success & Broker. The stages help us have a more targeted conversation about the support an owner needs and what should happen next.
A settlement target gives us part of the picture. We also want to understand how the work gets done, where the next client comes from and what the owner wants their life to look like. A bigger business will ask more of you in some areas and, if you build it well, give you more choice in others.
In the Growth stage, the owner is usually close to everything. You're finding clients, having appointments and keeping the work moving, often while trying to learn how to run the business around it.
We want you to understand what produces an enquiry and what helps that person become a client. If you have a good month, can you explain why? Can you see the conversations and activities that contributed to it, or does it feel like a few things happened to land together?
This is where lead flow and the diary belong in the same conversation. You need room to do the work you've won and room to keep finding business. If every busy period wipes out your prospecting, you're making the following period more difficult.
Client conversations matter too. Can you explain your service clearly? Does someone know what will happen next and how you'll support them after settlement? Your ability to articulate the service gives clients something useful to remember and share.
The work at this stage is practical. Get clearer about your activity, improve the conversations and build a rhythm you can repeat. Then look ahead to the support you'll need to keep up this rhythm, before hiring becomes an emergency.
Once you have people around you, doing more yourself can start to work against the business. The team needs to understand what belongs to them and where they have the confidence to act.
We like to start with the work. Write down what happens across a week, including the tasks that keep drifting back to the owner. Which parts should you keep? Which parts could sit with someone else if the role and the training were clear?
We don't hire people, we hire roles. It's a useful discipline because being busy isn't a job description. Someone needs to know what they're responsible for, how their work connects to the next person and what a good outcome looks like.
Training also requires more than giving someone your checklist. An experienced broker can move through a conversation without noticing all the decisions they're making. The person watching doesn't have that experience yet.
Let them observe the work and make time to discuss it. What confused them? What impressed them? What would they do differently? Those questions help you understand what they're taking from the experience, rather than assuming they've learned what you intended.
Your role as an owner starts to change here. You're still accountable for the standard, but you're building other people's ability to deliver it. For more on this stage, read how to scale a mortgage broking business.
An established business brings a different set of questions. You may have a capable team and reliable activity, but how much still relies on you personally?
Think about the relationships only you manage, the decisions only you can make and the knowledge other people have to ask you for. Those dependencies matter whether your next step is expansion, less time writing or an eventual handover.
We want an owner to have choices. That means thinking about succession while there's time to prepare people, share knowledge and make the business easier to understand.
It also means keeping an eye on how the business is performing as a whole. More volume creates more work and can bring more cost. The team structure, client experience and financial position need attention alongside the production numbers.
Support at this stage becomes more about the owner's decisions, while the people coming through the business may still need training. You can have an established company and a new broker who needs the foundations. Both deserve appropriate support.
The stages are a way to focus the conversation, rather than a reason to compare yourself with everyone else. Two businesses writing similar volumes can require different support.
One owner might need better lead flow. Another might need to stop being the only person who can move a file forward. A third might have built a business that works well but no longer fits the life they want.
Start by being honest about where the work is getting difficult and what you want to change. We can then look at the next step with some clarity, instead of trying to build every version of the business at once.
