Balwant Dhaliwal, mortgage and protection adviser and founder of Wolverhampton-based firm The Mortgage Mogul, launched in 2023 with him and his administrator working remotely.
Dhaliwal saw what his peers, Gemma Cuff of Gemstone Mortgages and Kate McTernan of Redditch Mortgage Advice, were doing and decided he needed to grow his business to have the work/life balance he desired.
He said he “always wanted a high street presence” to become more visible, make his brand better known and gain a reputation as a “community-based business”.
“Last January, I got my first office premises, which was just a room within a serviced office with seven or eight other businesses. I hired my first administrator that April and she stayed for around two months before I hired my current administrator in June.
“Then the business started to grow organically, through Google reviews, referrals, Facebook and Instagram. I then started to slowly establish a local presence in Wolverhampton; then, at the turn of the year, I started looking for a high street location,” he said.
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Dhaliwal was inspired by looking at his local competition online and realising they were mainly home-based.
“There was nobody that had that professional presence except for one practice that closed its office and went remote. Based on five-star Google reviews, I was already ranking number two in the city, but if we looked at the number of reviews, I would be number one in Wolverhampton,” he said.
Around May this year, Dhaliwal began actively seeking high street premises, before settling on one situated near other businesses such as an accountant, cafe and hairdresser, where he has now been for less than a month.
He continued: “It has a massive footfall, particularly around the start and end of the school days. From a cost perspective, what I was paying at my last office compared to what I pay can be covered by doing one extra case. But in terms of potential growth, the comparison is chalk and cheese.
“Anyone driving past – and in the last 20 seconds or so, there have been 10 cars – will have seen my logo. If just one extra person calls each month, the week I have been here pays for itself.”
The business has now reached a point where Dhaliwal wants to recruit to handle the volume of cases coming through and avoid the reputational damage that comes with not giving each client sufficient attention.
“I’ve always wanted this; I’ve always had a vision of having a shop floor. What’s next is building that strong foothold within the community and become known as the go-to mortgage broker within the city, and I don’t think that’s too far away,” he said.
