Are the high performers, making loads of money, the right ones for your brand?
Ben Perks believes he can tell very quickly if a broker is going to be the right fit with his business – he can sense how much they care about a client.
“We've turned a fair few away,” Perks (pictured), of Orchard Financial Advisers, told Mortgage Introducer. “I'll only have advisers work here who genuinely care about the client. There are lots of advisers who say they do, but when you cut beneath it, do they really? The high performers, the ones who make loads and loads of money rattling through loads of applications and clients - all fantastic - but are they the best people for your brand? There are some people who use a stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap approach - conveyor belt-style advice. Well, that's great, and you'll do very well, but in a couple of years’ time will those clients remember you?”
Perks, who is founder and managing director of Orchard Financial Advisers, clearly places a lot of store on the people he picks to join his business, a directly authorised, whole of market brokerage in Stourbridge, West Midlands, that specialises in mortgages, insurance and equity release. He has built up a team of 11 self-employed contractors since it launched at the end of 2020. "Some advisers you'll speak to and they start bragging about turnover and how many cases they've done,” he shared. “If you've got somebody who's bragging about what they do early in the conversation, they're usually in it for themselves rather than the client, and that's not to say they're bad advisers.
“But there are lots of advisers you'll speak to, and their point of difference will be that they'll say, ‘oh, I've had this nightmare case, I've tried this and I've tried that’, and you can tell when they're talking about it, that they're more bothered about the success that they've had in helping someone rather than the volumes of business that they've done. The key focus is getting the right advisers whose approach is customer-centric and aligns with the ethics of the company, which is to do whatever you can to help the borrower first and foremost.”
Read more: 'Becoming a mortgage broker was an eye opener – it's not an easy job'
How does a broker build a strong client base?
The client engagement that Perks evidently values plays a key part in building a strong client base too, he noted.
“There are two ways to do it really,” he said, “One is that you spend a load of money and buy leads, and I am not fan of that approach, necessarily. I try to grow the business on a more organic basis. It just comes down to hard work, and looking after people. It doesn't happen overnight, unfortunately. When anybody joins the industry, their first three years, I would say, are pretty intense. You’ve really got to work your socks off to get in front of as many people as you possibly can. But, on top of that, you've got to be as diligent as you can, as friendly as you can and build rapport as well as you can. You've got to be confident and believe in yourself, though not braggy, and you’ve really got to graft and show a bit of work ethic.”
Perks joined the industry nearly 20 years ago and, while he now has a managerial role, he still advises on mortgages himself. He acknowledges that for those brokers starting out in the industry recently it hasn’t been the easiest time. “We've got a few that we're training up and it’s been tricky for them, to be honest, because it's been a quiet a few years,” he said. “So to try to build up a client bank when there's fewer clients out there, it's been a tough old start. If they've had the tenacity and the resolve to do it over the last couple of years, I think the future is pretty bright for them, as the market becomes more buoyant over the coming years.”
