Mortgage broker growth plan

Most brokerage growth plans are a list of marketing activities with a revenue target on top. They fail because they assume the constraint is demand, when for a large proportion of firms it is capacity, conversion or retention, and adding enquiries to a firm that cannot service the ones it has makes everything worse.

A useful plan starts by finding the constraint. This is a twelve-month structure for doing that and then acting on it.

Find the binding constraint first

Work through the pipeline in order and find the first place it breaks.

Enquiries. How many arrived last quarter, from where, and is the number stable or falling?

Contact. What proportion of enquiries were actually spoken to? Firms are routinely shocked here. Enquiries arriving on a Friday afternoon and contacted on Monday are frequently gone.

Appointments. Of those spoken to, how many booked, and how many attended?

Advice to application. Of those advised, how many applied? A low figure usually means either the wrong enquiries or a fee conversation happening too late.

Application to completion. Where fallthrough happens and why.

Retention. Of the clients whose products ended in the last year, what proportion refinanced through you?

Adviser capacity. How many cases can each adviser genuinely hold at once before quality slips, and how close are they to that number?

One of these will be visibly worse than the others. That is your plan for the next two quarters. If contact rate is sixty per cent, no amount of additional marketing spend will help, and fixing the phone is far cheaper than fixing the funnel.

Do the arithmetic in cases, not revenue

Revenue targets are motivating and useless for planning. Convert the target into cases and then into the inputs required.

Take your desired annual income, divide by your average income per completed case including procuration fee, client fee and any protection income. That gives completions needed. Divide by your completion rate from enquiry to arrive at enquiries needed. Divide by twelve for a monthly figure, then adjust for seasonality, because UK activity is not flat: purchase enquiries build after New Year and through spring, the summer is disrupted by holidays and chains, and remortgage volume clusters around the maturity dates of the fixes written two, three and five years ago.

Now check the result against capacity. If the plan requires four hundred completions and your advisers can handle two hundred and eighty, the plan is a recruitment plan whether or not you meant it to be.

Sequence the year

A plan that starts everything in January finishes nothing. Order the work so each phase makes the next one possible.

The first quarter should be the cheapest fixes: response times, the booking process, the fee conversation, and the maturity contact process for existing clients. These require no spend, and retention improvements compound because they raise the value of every client you have already acquired.

The second quarter is where you address the constraint you identified, whether that is a referral channel, a specialism, a hire or a systems change.

The third quarter is capacity. If the earlier work succeeded, the pressure will now be on adviser and administrator time, and a hire made in the third quarter is productive for the following spring.

The fourth quarter is measurement and planning, plus the preparation of anything that needs to be live in January.

Hire in the right order

The instinct is to hire advisers. Frequently the better first hire is an administrator, because an adviser spending a third of their week on document chasing and lender follow-up is an expensive administrator. Removing that work can add meaningful capacity for a fraction of the cost of a new adviser, and it works immediately rather than after a ramp-up period.

When you do hire advisers, plan for the ramp. A new adviser needs enquiry flow from day one, and putting one into a firm with no surplus demand produces a demotivated hire and a cost you cannot recover. The demand has to exist before the adviser starts, which is why the sequencing above matters.

Model the cost properly: salary or draw, employer costs, licences, supervision time, competence oversight and the period before they are contributing. Then decide what monthly case volume makes them viable and review against it honestly.

Keep the growth compatible with the obligations

Growth changes your regulatory shape. More advisers means more supervision and more file checking. More volume means the complaints and quality signals you monitor become harder to see. Under Consumer Duty you are expected to be able to evidence the outcomes your clients receive, and that gets harder, not easier, as the firm expands.

Build the oversight into the plan rather than treating it as an overhead to be added later. A firm that doubles its advisers without changing its supervision arrangements has created a problem that will surface at the worst possible moment.

Review quarterly against the numbers you started with

Set the review dates now. At each one, recalculate the same pipeline figures you measured at the start and ask which have moved.

Expect the constraint to shift. Fix the contact rate and the pressure moves to appointment capacity. Fix that and it moves to administration. That is what progress looks like, and it is why a twelve-month plan written in January and not revisited until December is worth very little.

The plans that work are short, specific about the constraint, and revisited often enough to follow it as it moves.