Adam Hawryluk started his brokering career at the height of financial crisis, and that prepared him to run his own team
Adam Hawryluk was managing a restaurant when a colleague asked him how he could best put his Bachelor of Business Administration degree to good use. It wasn’t long before his colleague’s husband, a mortgage broker, took Hawryluk under his wing.
Fast forward nine years and Hawryluk, a broker with Dominion Lending Centres Canadian Mortgage Experts and head of The Adam Hawryluk Mortgage Team, is a high-producer in Nanaimo, British Columbia, who has fulfilled the aspirations he had all those years ago when he earned his degree.
“I realized that I didn’t want to just have a good-paying job, I wanted to run a business,” said Hawryluk. “With a good-paying job, as soon I would want to go on holidays, it would get neglected, so I wanted to get some help. It came with time, when I realized that I needed administrative help because I shouldn’t be doing all the paperwork, and when I realized I wanted a coach to help give me direction and keep the pieces moving in lockstep for building the team that I wanted, as well as with what we needed to look at as a business.”
Hawryluk entered the mortgage industry at a turbulent time; it was 2009 and the industry was being upended by fallout from the Great Recession. However, learning in times of turmoil prepares tyro brokers for future bumps in the road, and Hawryluk encourages new agents to use B-20 as a learning experience.
“The hardest part was trying to get the right documents, because different lenders would ask for different documents and clients don’t always know what you’re talking about when you ask for certain things,” said Hawryluk. “But it was a struggle in the beginning when I started in 2009, which is when the regulations were tightening because we’d just gone through the financial crisis.
“The three-year mark was when I got that comfort knowing I could go to that lender and talk to them, or even make a small mistake and know they’d still be understanding and willing to work with me.”
These days, Haryluk is a seasoned veteran and head of a team of three, not just maintaining an impressive pace of volume but also ensuring operating procedures run smoothly. Much of The Adam Hawryluk Mortgage Team’s success spurs from investing in his hires.
“Everybody complains about making bad hires, but that’s because they made a bad hire and not because employees are something to be feared. For me, it was about putting time in and figuring out who I wanted, why they wanted to be here, and what motivated them. One piece of advice I have is not to hire someone motivated purely by money. I want people who want to be part of a team. The industry sells itself on making a lot of money, and that can sometimes bite us in the butt.”
