Today, Manchester Mortgage Brokers Mortgage Success Ltd, turn 5 years old!
On the 1st October 2013 I started this business as Manchester Mortgage Broker, just one person, 6 months experience, a mobile phone and a laptop and not much else. Yet here we are, some 5 years and too many mortgages to count later…
Where has the time gone?!
2013 was just a case of doing what I could, there was only 3 months of the year left and it was the quiet part of the year. We were just coming out of the big recession so a lot of those 3 months was spent twiddling my thumbs asking friends and family if I could do their remortgage and posting flyers, hitting facebook and not much else really. What a time to set up a business!
2014 was a little better, the first couple of months of the year were slow. I was beginning to think becoming a mortgage broker was a massive mistake. I was wondering how I would pay my bills next month! As the year went on I started to get more customers and a couple of referrals from those customers also meant that 2014 ended up being ok by the end of the year and I was able to pay my bills – just about.
2015 was busier. It seemed that referrals were coming through thick and fast, the recession was behind us and I was struggling to cope – The phrase Feast or Famine springs to mind.
Manchester Mortgage Broker to Mortgage Success
I decided to take on another Mortgage Broker to help me out. He was from Liverpool, it was at this point I decided to change the name from Manchester Mortgage Broker to Mortgage Success – I did not want him walking around Liverpool with Manchester Mortgage Broker on his business cards, I can not imagine that going down well. As it happens he never came on board in the end but the name was changed and so I stuck with it. It was also around this time that we went limited.
It was 2015 that really got us on our feet and where I started writing a lot of Mortgages and and gaining a reputation as a specialist mortgage broker for adverse and complex cases. This was when I decided to start to concentrate and specialise in that part of the market.
2016 carried on much like 2015, we were still growing and I realised I would definitely need another mortgage broker to keep up the volume of business I was doing. I was working 7 day weeks, 12 hour days and even when I took a 2 week holiday (the first in 5 years!) I was still working at the airport, on the plane and checking emails in the mornings and evenings.
2017 – This was another big year for us. On a personal note, my partner gave birth to my little girl – I took a few months out for that as I did not want to leave my little girls side…Now, I cant get out in the mornings soon enough (joking, we love her really – just not so much at 3am).
She is also my chief shredding assistant when we are getting rid of confidential paperwork, she will hold them and pass them to me.
I took on a new mortgage broker (Dawn) in January 2017. I started to look at a back office system that would allow us to be slicker and offer a few extra benefits to our customers (more on this in 2018), business was up again although only slightly despite me taking 3-4 months out, it was nice to know we had hit a level that we would could hit consistently. 2013-14 seemed like a distant memory at this point.
2018 – so here we are. I am writing this at the beginning of September. We have already smashed through what we wrote in 2017. We are around £600,000 up on last year in terms of Mortgages written, we will probably end around £2m up on 2017 which is a massive jump and really appreciated that people keep coming back to us for their remortgages.
Our new back office system is more or less ready to launch properly, it has taken a lot longer to get to a place where I am happy with it than expected. Going forward, our customers will be able to upload their paperwork to this system or email them – giving you more options to make your life easier.
All of your important documents will be available on our customer portal 24/7, 365 days a year. There will be an online tracker so you can see where your application is up to and you will receive emails at important stages with updates. So if you want an update but feel like you are pestering us (you never are btw), you can log on to see the stage of your application – but call us, we love having a chat.
In summary…
I am over the moon with where we are at the minute and a lot of it is down to our customers. I work to the ethos that if we look after our customers and everything else sorts itself out. If we do our best by you, you will think highly of us and recommend us to your friends and family, that in turn means we always have new customers and can continue to thrive.
You are not a number, nor a target, you are/will be our customer. There are hundreds of Mortgage brokers out there. You can use any of them, so it is important to me that we look after you. We do not want you use our competitors. As cheesy as it sounds, we genuinely care about you and getting you your Mortgage.