People ask me why we train the way we do. Why does our whole business come down to teaching brokers and their support staff the technical side of putting a loan together? The short answer is that nobody else does.
To operate, you do your Cert IV in finance and mortgage broking, then your diploma. Those teach you a lot about compliance, a little about financials and structuring, and not much at all about the rest of the job. So you finish, you’re qualified, and you sit there thinking: now what?
That “now what” is the gap I’ve spent 25 years watching people fall into. And it catches three very different people, for three different reasons.
The broker who’s just started
New-to-industry brokers come to us all the time, and it’s almost always the same story. They’ve done the Cert IV, they’ve done the diploma, and they’ve had good coaching on the front end. An aggregator or a business coach has shown them how to find a lead, how to talk to a client, how to put a solution in front of someone.
Then the client says “yes, let’s go ahead”, and everything goes quiet.
How do you send out a client portal? How do you get your compliance documents signed? What do you actually collect from the client, and what do you do with it once it comes back? And if that client isn’t vanilla, if they’ve got a credit default, a messy pay structure, or they’ve only been in their job three months, what then?
That knowledge changes how you submit the deal and where you submit it. But it also changes the conversation you have with the client in front of you. If you don’t know what you’re going to do with someone, they can hear it. Part of getting a client to trust you is sounding like you’ve got them. Knowing their options. Being able to explain those options back to them plainly enough that they understand it too. When a client doesn’t feel that, they don’t proceed with you. And a deal you can’t confidently steer is a deal that tends to fall apart before it ever gets started.
If you’re the broker, you are the face of the business. When clients can’t hear confidence in your voice, you struggle to get business through the door, and a business that can’t get work through the door doesn’t last. The only other way to learn this is to learn it live, on real clients, while you’re still figuring it out. Training first just gives you a basis to work from before the stakes are real.
The broker who’s grown and hired help
Now picture the other end. You’re established, the leads are coming in, you know exactly what you’re doing. You started on your own, the business grew, and now you can’t carry it solo anymore.
Fair enough, because it’s a big process. Putting a loan application together and getting it to a bank isn’t a ten-minute job. It’s hours: the compliance side, the aggregator side, the apply-online side, submitting, following it through, clearing the MIRs, getting it to settlement. One person can only hold so many clients at once. So you hire.
Say you bring on a loan processor, maybe offshore. What you’ve actually hired is somebody else’s interpretation of how the job should be done. Someone already taught them, and rightly or wrongly, that’s how they work now. If it’s the wrong way, you’ve got a problem from day one.
So when they tell you “I already know what I’m doing”, why would you still train them? Because you want it done your way, the compliant way, the way that gets deals into the system fast and approved first go, instead of deals that crawl to the lender and then crawl through assessment, if they clear at all.
It’s the same with admin. Traditionally admin receives and files, and that’s it. But if they don’t understand what they’re filing or what they’re sending out, how much of that work are they quietly making for you instead of taking off you? A loan processor’s job is to assess the documents, make sure the file is complete, and get it ready for a broker or a credit analyst to check and submit. If they can’t read what’s in front of them, they’re not clearing your plate. They’re adding to it.
Here’s the test. A file your processor has built should be one you can check, tick, flick, and submit, the same way you’d want the credit analyst on the lender’s side to be able to. If you can’t do that, your processor needs training. If you’re stepping into a broker support role and you’re not sure how to work servicing, read financials, or read a pay slip, you need training. Otherwise you’re handing your broker headaches dressed up as help.
The broker who says they don’t need it
Then there’s the person listening to all this thinking, “I’ve been doing this for years, I don’t need training.” Genuinely, good. If every one of your deals sails through to formal approval and you pick the right lender first time, that’s a great position to be in.
But what about your staff? What happens when you’re not in the room? Can they do what you do? And the real question, the one I’d actually ask you: do you have the time to get them there?
Because in 25 years I’ve trained every version of this. New brokers, loan processors, admin assistants, brokers five and ten years in. I’ve trained bank staff who’d been at a lender 20-plus years, changed roles, and suddenly had to assess self-employed clients they’d never had to touch before. And trust me, you can spend a long time inside a bank and still not know the ins and outs of every self-employed structure. I’ve seen it up close.
Most of the people who come to us are already working for a broker. They don’t arrive through their broker. They come on their own, because their broker doesn’t have the time to train them. They know where they fall short. They know they’re not confident on self-employed, or on a complicated pay slip. But their broker needs them to be, because their broker is flat out generating business and looking after long-standing clients.
The intention was always there. When you take on a processor, a support person, a second broker, you fully mean to sit with them and teach them everything you know. But day to day, with a business to run, that is genuinely hard to follow through on. There’s no blame in it. It’s just how a busy business works.
So stop putting yourself through it
You already outsource the things that aren’t the best use of your time. Your IT. Your phone system. Your document processing. Training belongs on that list.
You can still polish people your way where it matters. But if a loan processor, a broker support person, or a credit analyst can’t read a pay slip, a credit report, or a valuation, that’s basic craft, and someone else can teach it. You don’t need to spend your hours on it.
Keep your time for the things only you can teach: how you handle your clients, what your internal process is, how your compliance runs. The basics are the same across every deal, every lender, the whole industry. Let someone else carry that part, and carry it properly, so that when it’s done you actually know your people were trained the right way, and can come back and be trained again if it doesn’t land first time.
That’s the trade. You get your time back for your clients and your business, and your support staff get taught what they need to actually support you.