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Leading WA broker Sarah Wells has revealed her top tips for new brokers and has warned them not to let their businesses “become bigger than them”.
Ms Wells, the self-described “solutionist” from Perth-based finance company Sarah Wells, spoke to The Adviser to share her top tips for new brokers and what she would advise her younger self in hindsight.
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According to the seasoned broker, she would advise new entrants to the broking industry to “look at where they would like their business to be in five years’ time”.
Drawing on her 20 years of experience in the broking industry, Ms Wells told The Adviser’s Elite Broker podcast: “Whether that be employing staff, whether that be that they want to employ other brokers, really take the opportunity. While you’re in your infancy, you have the opportunity to design it. Because if you don’t design it, it will overtake you. It will become whatever it needs to be. And then you will be a passenger along for the ride,” she warned.
Ms Wells went on to say that one of the most common pieces of feedback she had received from her peers over the years was that their businesses had started to become “bigger than them”.
She explained: “If you want a big business and you want to run 20 or 30 brokers [and] have an incredibly big team, then that’s great, but it may mean that you need to make different choices when you start out, around aggregation groups [for example].
“It may be that you have to have a greater focus on marketing. It may be that you need to really look at how you set up the structure of your business in order to make sure that it’s not the cheapest option that you choose now, but it’s really setting you up so that you do have that scale and growth,” Ms Wells advised.
Adding a second suggestion to freshman brokers, Ms Wells recommended that they think about the types of clients they would like to work with.
“Our job is to facilitate and assist clients in obtaining debt. But apart from dealing with lenders and our teams, the greatest amount of time we spend is with our clients. So, if I look back then to what I know now, what I find really valuable for me is to deal with people that I enjoy working with. I want to make a meaningful difference in their lives,” Ms Wells told Elite Broker.
She added: “I would probably put some emphasis around what are the types of personalities and types of people I would like to deal with… or what particular sections of the market [you want to target].”
Building on her advice, she concluded with a series of questions a new broker may want to consider: “Do you want to be a generalist or do you want to be a specialist? What work/life balance would you like? Are you willing to work incredibly hard for 10 years and then be in a position where you’ve got a business that can fund itself and you can take a step back? Or do you want to have quality of life along the way?”
Ms Wells stressed: “Take some time to think about where you want your business to be, and then work it backwards.”
“That’s a principle you can do with everything, whether it’s lead generation, whether it’s volumes, whether it’s processing staff.
“If you start with the end in mind and reverse engineer it back, it’s going to give you an idea of what the activities you need to do today will get you to where you want to be.
“Because there’s nothing worse than starting out in an industry and looking back in five years and not being where you hoped to be or where you wanted to be,” concluded Ms Wells.
You can listen to the full episode of Elite Broker with Sarah Wells, here:
You can also find our more top tips for new brokers in The Adviser’s Knowledge Centre, which includes the video sessions from The Adviser’s New Broker Academy 2020.
[Related: Why this broker is choosing sustainability over growth]
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