Know Your BDM: Richard Pugh, Pepper Money

What locations and how many advisers and broker firms do you cover in your role?

I cover the North West of England, from Carlisle down to Wolverhampton and across to Anglesey in North Wales. Covering more than 800 firms and 2,000 brokers.

What personal talent/skill is most valuable in doing your job?

Organisation is key due to the number of different jobs that form the role each and every day. Also, people skills – understanding and engaging with all personality types.

What personal talent/skill would you most like to improve on?

Forming positive habits is a big thing I have started working on in 2024, to create more consistency in both work and personal life. This leads to more consistent outcomes and better all round performance.

What’s the hardest part of your job?

The planning involved. Covering such a large portion of the UK, it’s important to plan travel carefully.

What do you love most about your job?

The travel is the best part, meeting different people every day in different locations means that no two days are the same. It never gets repetitive or boring.

What’s the best bit of career-related advice you’ve ever been given? Who gave it to you?

Be true to yourself and show people who you really are. Personality is everything and trying to be something or someone else is impossible to keep up long term. The second piece of advice is the importance of a team. A great team drives you to be better and can carry you further. That’s definitely true at Pepper.

How do you keep up to date with developments in the market?

A lot of it is word of mouth and we often discuss market developments in broker meetings. Also, with trade press and following the news.

What is the most quirky/unique property deal you’ve been involved in?

In a previous role before Pepper, I received a phone call from a broker who needed a mortgage for a first-time buyer whose parents were making him move his 48 cows with him, so was looking for small house with enough land for his cattle. Definitely the most bizarre phone call I ever received.

Tell us about your trickiest case – what happened and how did you resolve the problem(s)?

They have some complexity when they come to Pepper, but the hardest ones are always where the customer has been let down by a vendor, or estate agent or another lender and the case is really time sensitive. When you come across these it’s just understanding the issue and then working with the team to ease the pressure on the customer, remembering their emotional involvement and not just treating it as another mortgage. These types of cases just need you to keep in touch with the broker more than you normally would.

What was your motivation for choosing this career?

Being honest I never chose this career, I stumbled across mortgages and fell in love with the business development role. I’ve embraced it ever since.

If you could do any other job in the property sector, what would it be and why?

I’m a big fan of the luxury real estate TV shows and would love to give that a go. Selling luxury property in a warm climate wouldn’t be a bad swap – especially this time of year.

What did you want to be growing up?

I always wanted to be a policeman as a child, but being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes quite young put a stop to that.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

Time travel. I love history so being able to visit other periods in time would be superb.

What is your strategy for tackling challenges?

Listen to the challenge, try to understand where it came from and the cause of the challenge and always provide a solution. I’m a big believer that there is no point raising a problem or challenge if you haven’t thought about a potential solution.

And finally, what’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked?

A broker asked if we could lend to their customer who was a plumber pre-Covid and, during the pandemic, started their own bakery via Instagram. The customer had been trading for 12 months and the bakery had taken off so well that it went from a hobby to a full-time job. The broker didn’t think anyone would be able to help the customer, but we were able to use the first year’s accounts to provide a remortgage with capital raise for business purposes to help the business grow.