Company director shares his tips for scaling up a brokerage
Establishing a successful mortgage firm can be daunting enough, but scaling it up is another level of business challenge.
As managing director of the brokerage YesCanDo Money, Matthew Roberts (pictured left) has strived with his adviser father Steve (centre), the firm’s founder, and his brother Sam (right), its marketing director, to take the venture to new heights. He admits it hasn’t all been plain sailing, but some valuable business lessons have been learned along the way.
Roberts senior launched the business over 20 years ago, initially aiming to build the largest fee-free mortgage brokers in Hampshire. With his sons aboard, the family responded to the challenges of the pandemic by using online tools to spread their offering across the UK. YesCanDo managed to adapt and double its company size, hiring several new advisers. Now it’s recruiting again, imminently taking its team of brokers to nine.
“It's interesting, it’s like there’s an adolescent stage of a business, where you've got to go somewhere,” Matthew Roberts told Mortgage Introducer. “It was only a couple of years ago that it was me and my dad as advisers, pre-COVID. So yes, we've moved out of that adolescent stage into being a bit more grown up. We're looking at going into a growth stage again now.”
With more advisers on the team, Roberts has learned the value of buying in leads to keep them busy. “Up until quite recently, we were 100% organically fed by leads, we didn't buy any leads of any kind,” he explained. “I was always really proud of that when I sat in front of BDMs or anyone who was asking about our business, and it was good, but we could never grow out of that. Everything was going well and then all of a sudden the market kind of collapsed, at the Liz Truss point or thereabouts, and we realised we were in this bubble and we didn't have control of those leads that were coming in.”
He continued: “We've got a really good lead plan now to ensure we've got the right amount of leads coming into the business. You needs lots of legs of the table when it comes to marketing – for example one’s our website, one’s our relationships with estate agents that feed us leads, and then there’s other lead generation websites. So all of a sudden you've got a really strong table - if one lead source disappears, you’ve got others. We've got a full time lead person that is taking all the raw leads in and feeding them to advisers. We're making sure that every single lead source has the right conversion, and if there's any issues, we tweak them, ensuring that the advisers have got the right amount.”
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The cost of recruiting mortgage advisers
While growing a business is potentially lucrative long term, it is also expensive, Roberts observes, taking into account the recruitment cost to find additional advisers, and the associated equipment they need to do their job. The brokerage has also hired protection advisers to boost the firm’s income. “Our goal isn't to take more money from the business as directors, it's about putting everything back in,” he noted.
YesCanDo has opted for a business model which it believes supports customer retention. “We're completely fee free, which is really, really difficult to remain profitable as you're growing, but we know that is the right thing to do for our business plan of retaining clients over the longer term,” said Roberts. “We keep just under 80% of our clients.”
Though several of its staff enjoy hybrid working, most prefer an office environment, and YesCanDo invested in larger premises as it initially grew. “We were too quick to get a bigger office, bigger than we needed, and that's a massive lesson that we learned,” Roberts reflected, adding that it has since downsized a little. “It's also a balancing act because you want a really nice place for people to work,” he said. “There's a really great feeling and camaraderie. We can share experiences and best practices. I wanted to bring in some changes into the sales process and thought I’ll do it myself. Every single job within the company right now I've done myself at some point, but I soon decided to pull back from that because I'm not Superman and cannot run a company and also deal with customers as well.”
Now, the business is ranking highly on the review site TrustPilot, among the top mortgage businesses in the country. So what, then, would be Roberts’ advice for any other brokerages seeking to grow? “I would 100% say get a business coach, or multiple coaches,” he said. “Ours holds a mirror up to me and my dad because all we think about and all we do all day, every day, is the business, and by sitting with him, he just enables us to question ourselves. If you can't afford to pay for a business coach, find someone that's done it. Understand your numbers and get the right people.”
As a businessman, Matthew Roberts is keen on self-development and holds the business strategist and entrepreneur Tony Robbins in high esteem, regularly reading his books and also attending one of his live events. He admits that the family could have opted for a simpler life, if they had stayed small, but the alternative was clearly too tempting. “It would have been easier, less stressful, and by and large, we'd be personally earning more money than we are if we'd stayed as two advisers - and there's nothing wrong with that,” Roberts shared. “We're a really good team in that respect, but we want something more, to build this to something that's incredible, to get to a point where it's either self-sustaining or ready to sell, years and years down the line.
