It’s Boxing day, and some of us are out shopping. But what are we spending our money on? Will it be something truly useful?

Will it be an investment in yourself?

A modified excerpt from Volume 1 of Be The Better Broker.

Too many new Mortgage Brokers view a commission cheque as their paycheque. It is not their paycheque. It is the gross sales revenue of their business.

The commission cheque belongs to their personal business, an important differentiation to live by. A Broker is running a small business. This is a big mental shift for a lot of us to make if we are coming into brokering from a previously held position as an employee.

That commission cheque is not yours personally; it represents your business’s gross sales. A business has overhead and expenses. It cannot put 100 percent of revenue back in the owner’s pockets and still survive, let alone thrive. You have to reinvest in your business — your baby — to keep it progressing and growing. And one of your best investments is learning.

Don’t look to your Brokerage house to teach you what you need to know. They no longer have the budget for high-end, in-depth training. (There are notable exceptions to the “sink or swim” methodology that is all too common, and the Dominion Lending Centre’s pre-licensing and post-licensing mentor programs are brilliant examples of rookie-focused support systems.) The problem boils down to Broker commissions and how they’re split. Twenty years ago, the split was 50/50 — half for the broker and half for the brokerage. When I began in 2008, an opening split of 60/40 was relatively common. Today, most Brokers are getting more than 80 percent of the split or better.

If you are a brand-new Broker and have signed on at a split of 80/20 or better, you need to recognize that you must be the one to invest in yourself. If you commit to invest 10 cents of every dollar you earn in bettering yourself, you will advance beyond every other Broker around you. That is a fact.

I am a huge proponent of attending any and all industry-related events, and our industry truly puts on some excellent ones. Every Broker should be a member of their provincial association and at least one of the national associations as well. Yet each year I hear Brokers complain about a few hundred dollars charged for a fantastic event put on by our own provincial association, the MBABC. The opportunities are there to meet your peers, to meet your lenders, to hear great speakers. Embrace every one of them that you reasonably can.

It is up to you!

Make. It. Happen.

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Dustan Woodhouse