'This is just the start', says director, as he eyes expansion
In a business populated by public relations teams, who often want to carefully vet and check every quote or detail, broker David Brown is a breath of fresh air. “I'm just blunt…direct,” Brown told Mortgage Introducer. “I tell people what I think, even if they don't want to hear it. This is why clients like using me. But a lot of the time it's just me being honest. I'm not going to waste my time researching deals for hours on end when I know they don't work.” Not that Brown will be easily put off, it seems. “I get satisfaction out of someone saying I've spoken to another broker, and they couldn't help,” he shared. “Straight away… my brain starts thinking of ways to make it work. And there's just been a handful of occasions where I haven't been able to, because it's just not possible.”
Brown is the director of Surrey-based Curzon Financial – which he runs with his wife Stacie (pictured with him) as office manager, as well as employing a small but highly experienced team of brokers and paraplanners. Spend more than a few minutes in his presence and it’s hard not to be impressed by his straight-talking approach, or his unapologetic ambition. “This is just the start,” he declared. “I want to build the most successful brokerage in the UK, and I will do it. We don’t need hundreds of employees; we just need to build a carefully selected team of experts. We've got space for five more people in our current office, have reserved the office next door, which has space for another 10, giving us a 20 headcount, which I want to achieve by the end of 2026”
Brown’s success is particularly striking given his admission that he underachieved as a teenager. “Let's just say, I didn't do as well at school as I should have,” he said. “That's the honest truth. After an unsuccessful stint as a plumbing apprentice, I took a careers meeting and they told me to go and work in a bank, and the rest is history. I’ve always enjoying working with numbers and I work with numbers day in, day out. So, the careers test was really the best decision I've made for my career.”
Frustrated over time that he was tied to just offering the bank’s products and - to his mind - losing out on potential business, Brown made the move to work out of an estate agency. “I did quite well there, but I felt that I needed to broaden my knowledge,” he explained. “So, I worked in London for a couple of firms - high net worth mortgages, ultra-high net worth mortgages, bridging finance, development finance, and then came back locally. I got tired of commuting to London and wanted to be nearer home when we were expecting our first child. I could just find fault with something at every place that I worked, and I thought. ‘Do you know what? I'm going to do it my way’, and that's how Curzon came about.”
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Excited by complex cases
Founded in 2018, Curzon Financial gives advice on residential and buy-to-let mortgages, secured loans, bridging loans, development finance, and equity release. “If a client asks me to do a residential mortgage, three times income, at 60% loan-to-value, real straight forward borrowing, I'll do it,” he said. “It's my job and I want to help people, but it doesn't get me excited, I find the more complex borrowing far more interesting.”
Did Brown think he was always destined to be his own boss? “Yes, 100%,” he said. “I hate being told what to do - I'm very headstrong. However, it's not easy, and it's harder now that the company's growing because there's added responsibility, there's employees to manage, there's HR responsibilities, FCA responsibilities, tax returns etc, and growing a team is far from easy.”
Brown believes that running his own brokerage has changed him. “I’ve grown up,” he reflected. “I was cock-sure, working in London in my late 20s, thinking I knew everything, when I didn’t. I’m still learning now. I think having kids and setting up a company has grounded me. I have to deliver. If I don't deliver and operate the company successfully each month, I can't pay my bills, I can't feed my kids. I've got other people's salaries to pay. Luckily, I don't worry about it, because we're fortunate enough to be incredibly busy and people want our help.”
Recruitment, it seems, has been his biggest challenge. “I'm being far more particular now in who I will recruit - finding good talent to allow us to do even more,” Brown said. “In the past, I thought, ‘Just get people in - the more people, the more business.’ Now, it's find the right brokers, get a very good relationship with a broker and an administrator working, and then the broker can write more business. You don't need more employees, you need quality employees working more efficiently, and that's what I've learned.”
Brown remains optimistic about the future – assured that the specialist finance, which is his passion, will be an enduring source of income. “The mainstream stuff, in my opinion, will eventually go completely computer-based,” he suggested. “The specialist stuff, I don't care what anyone says, it’s too complex, so a computer can’t replace a quality broker.”
