I can recall one Mortgage Broker saying to me upon exiting the business after less than four years, “I can only conclude that people do not like me.”

This was a person paying not just an economic toll, but clearly an emotional one as well. On paper this Broker had every reason to have been a roaring success, yet they could not pull all the pieces together to make it happen.

The Broker expended enormous amounts of time, energy and dollars on grand plans for nationwide mortgage domination. With less than five transactions under their belt they were lining up meetings with national companies and large unions and pitching plans, which, had they gotten traction would have taken a staff of 50 trained Brokers to deal with.

This lack of focus on the task at hand, on the client at hand, was a critical error.

This individual was chasing what appeared to be a massive pot of gold perpetually just across the horizon. The biggest mistake was running so fast towards it, instead of slowing down and focusing all that time and energy on being the very best Broker they could be for those first few clients.

They failed to turn those first few clients into raving fans, or even into a referral of one more file. Their eye was not on the ball; their head was not in the game. They were in a completely different space — a space with no immediate compensation — and thus they could not survive.

Becoming a Mortgage Broker is not about building a multimillion-dollar business with a huge staff. This is largely an industry where you play a very important, skilled and rewarding role inside a much larger picture. Yes you will be running your own business, and you will run it like a business, but it is not about scaling up to serve thousands of clients per year. If you find yourself serving 100 clients per year you will have built a remarkable career for yourself, rewarding on all levels.

Attempts to reinvent the wheel in this industry are all too common and completely unnecessary in my opinion. If Brokers simply mastered all that is currently available to them, they would succeed far beyond their expectations. I am living proof of this.