First Complete itself is leading this trend as we have just broken our highest ever volumes of both mortgage and protection business and it is the same for almost every broker we speak to.
This rise in business is a great story for everyone and many adviser businesses are looking at ways to expand to take advantage of it.
My key message however is to grow with caution and to run your business as carefully now as you did in the depths of the credit crunch to ensure you are still putting profit ahead of turnover whilst always doing the right thing for your client of course.
I read an article the other day which said more small businesses go bust coming out of a recession than they do going into it. The reasons for this were sensible ones: sometimes businesses take on more business than they can cope with and either can’t service it or they hit cash flow problems if they are doing the work before they are getting paid for it.
It’s great that work is now plentiful again and good to see firms recruiting and expanding, especially as it looks like this will continue throughout next year with the latest lender forecasts for mortgage lending ranging between £170bn and £210bn for 2014.
With market expectation that brokers will be writing 60% of all mortgage business by next year too it’s a very positive picture all round. Just be careful when gearing up that you still have the profit in the business and your business model is sustainable. It makes sense to keep hold of the tight business practices that helped us all to weather the credit crunch.
Now more than ever we need to take notice of the old adage that ‘turnover is vanity, profit is sanity’.
Toni Smith is sales operations director at First Complete
