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Deslie Taylor always had ambitions to settle a billion dollars, but she achieved the milestone sooner than expected. We find out how Ms Taylor defied her own expectations and became a billion dollar broker
DESLIE TAYLOR
MORTGAGE CHOICE, ORMEAU
QUEENSLAND
When and why did you become a broker?
I purchased my Mortgage Choice franchise in 2007, so I’ve been doing it for about 15 years.
Prior to that, I was in banking. When I left the bank, I wanted to stay within the industry and moving into broking was a transition that seemed organic. But broking has always been at “my core”.
It’s just about being there and being able to offer a service to our clients.
What kind of loans are you writing?
I’m in Ormeau, which is almost immediately between Gold Coast and Brisbane.
It’s not the Northern Beaches of Sydney, so we are looking at average loan sizes around $300,000 to $360,000. So we need to write a lot of business to get where we’re at.
We do write large volumes of smaller loans. We write, on average, roughly 70 loans a month.
How long did it take you to get to $1 billion in settled loans?
I hit the billion-dollar milestone 13 years in, which would’ve been 2020.
I started it from nothing. So, there’s been a lot of hard work, a lot of long hours and lots of tears and tantrums along the way.
But I did expect it to take a lot longer. When I first started, I had an expectation that to get to a billion dollars, I’d either have to write really, really big loans, or I’d have to buy other businesses to amalgamate my book.
I had a 20-year goal, and I just got there a hell of a lot quicker than I anticipated.
How do you ensure a good customer experience while writing large volumes?
Systems, processes, following up, and tasks. I am so task-driven. Every single night, I look at what I have personally got on for the following day. I also get everything done in the morning so if anything comes about throughout the day that needs my attention, I’m not blindsided or overwhelmed by having to juggle all these balls.
We also have systems through Mortgage Choice that enable us to set tasks, to follow up on a daily basis for clients and whatever their needs are.
What processes or techniques have you put in place that have enabled you to write such a large volume of business?
We follow the exact same system for every single loan application. It is tracked in exactly the same format, and the clients are updated at exactly the same milestone for each and every application. That way, if I did a loan for customer A and they referred customer C to me, then at the end of the day, they could be reassured that they would both get exactly the same service from our office.
It’s important for my team to come in every day knowing exactly what they’ve got with the systems that we’ve got in place and the processes that I’ve structured.
Do you think you could have achieved your success on your own?
Never. And I mean, in reality, who are we without our team? My team is the backbone, every single person within my team plays a crucial role in the success of this business. I could only do one-tenth of it without the other nine people behind me. That little corny saying of, “There’s no I in the word team” – it is so true. These girls are everything to me. My team are first and foremost, and then my clients come thereafter. As long as my team is happy, content and feel supported, great service is relayed back to our clients.
How does Mortgage Choice help you succeed as a Billion Dollar Broker?
Mortgage Choice have been there to support me during this entire journey, from having IT assist me in a matter of minutes to help me navigate through any issues that I had, to marketing, lending support, and structuring back in the beginning.
Sometimes, as a business owner, you just need someone that you can actually just bounce things off. You don’t want them to actually do anything for you, you just want them to say, “That’s a great idea”, or “Maybe that’s not such a great idea right now”.
What do you attribute to your success as a broker?
It’s actually helping people realise their financial dreams.
When you’ve got someone sitting in front of you and they say that they don’t think it’s possible, and you put them on a savings plan… you could be following up with them for three years [before they’re mortgage ready]. But when you eventually ensure that they’re ready, you take the home loan application, and they settle into a home, and they ring you, and they are just beside themselves because they never thought that it would be possible there is no feeling like it.
HOW MORTGAGE CHOICE SUPPORTS BROKERS
HOW DO YOU HELP BROKERS WRITE HIGH VOLUMES WHILE RETAINING GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE?
The part that brokers love about the job is dealing with clients; having the client conversations, educating clients, helping them get into their new home, their first home, their investment property, whatever it may be.
With the landscape that broking has gone through over the past five to 10 years, the impetus around operational efficiency and all of the work that needs to go in behind the scenes to do that efficiently, and at scale, that’s really where the challenge is to drive scale to get to that billion-dollar mark.
And so, really, that’s where we come in as the aggregator. We carry a lot of the work at the back end in terms of making sure that the systems are designed to be efficient, help design the right office, back-office structures so that brokers’ submissions can get processed as effectively as possible.
We help our brokers do what they love and what they’re good at.
WHAT MAKES THE COMPANY ATTRACTIVE TO HIGH-VOLUME BROKERS?
Mortgage Choice was acquired by REA Group, which owns realestate.com.au, in the middle of last year and they’re investing heavily to make sure that they’re supporting the broking network.
With nearly 13 million people coming through that website every single month – building scale in the broker network is absolutely key to looking after those potential clients.
We’ve got over 900 brokers in the network now. And all the successful performers always ask what someone better than them is doing and learning and evolving and trying to build their business from there. So we’re sharing their success in our Mortgage Choice Playbook, where we are taking successful practices across our network, and we’re distilling that into a digital online experience, which our brokers can access.
It’s a really an end-to-end proposition to try and get that success sharing across the network out to the overall group.
IS THERE A RECIPE FOR SUCCESS FOR BEING A TOP-PERFORMING BROKER?
What we found when we were going through the process of building out the playbook was that the businesses that significantly outperformed the others all had a very strict process – and all of the members of the team knew exactly what their function was.
But there was also enjoyment. The high-performing businesses have a flavour of making sure that the environment was enjoyable for their teams and recognised for the success that they had.
David Zammit
director of national sales
Mortgage Choice
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