There have been two key factors that have carried him through
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From handling life’s smallest day-to-day purchases – such as tins of baked beans and boxes of soap powder on the shelves of a supermarket – to overseeing some of the biggest purchases people will ever make, Michael Welton has been on quite a career journey.
Welton (pictured) switched from a role as deputy manager in a supermarket in the early 90s, to the mortgage broker that he is today – with a few steps in between. Property finance isn’t so far removed from the retail world, it seems.
“There's things that I learned doing that job that I apply now and I have done since I left there,” Welton told Mortgage Introducer. “It's customer service, it's manners, and the hard work and graft they make you do in these supermarkets. You don't probably realise that, behind the scenes, getting the food on the shelves is a lot harder than you may believe. We used to have to work very, very hard.
“I was number three in a relatively large turnover, probably about £700,000-a-week-supermarket and that was a job I fell into after leaving school. I wanted to get straight into the workplace. In my early 20s, I happened to be walking past a local recruitment consultant’s and it had an advertisement for an assistant manager for a branch of Woolwich building society. I thought, ‘I can do that’.”
The career switch meant an initial pay cut for Welton, but financial services offered better long-term prospects. He moved to a branch of Barclays after it bought out the building society, and latterly, landed a role in the City working for the bank, in commercial finance.
“I ended up managing a portfolio of hedge fund managers and their banking requirements, and this where the hard work ethic again came in, because they wanted everything yesterday,” Welton recalled.
He worked in the City for ten years, before taking a self-employed role as a business development manager with a local independent financial adviser, to enable him to spend more time with his baby son. Further career moves followed and, having trained as a mortgage adviser, in 2016 he set up his own business, WPP Financial Services, an authorised representative of Rosemount IFA.
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Why communication matters in mortgages
His career experience has taught him the importance of communicating properly with clients – a skill that was lacking in some of the personnel he previously worked alongside over the years, he explained.
“They were rubbish at returning phone calls and they never followed up with a customer or a client,” he said. “A lot of these wealth guys had too much ego and they thought they were more important than the client. For me, the client is the most important person, because without them I don't have a job. So my biggest thing when I started was what’s my contact strategy?
“If it means doing a late appointment, yes, I can be flexible. If it means doing an early appointment, I can be flexible. My other half hates it but I do respond to emails and messages in the evening. I send physical birthday cards to clients, I send physical cards for home movers and first-time buyers. I've managed to retain so many customers over the years.”
He added: “Every year, I ask them for a review, so I build up those Google reviews - we're pushing for 150 this year - and I've built my own CRM. So it's all about contact strategy, great service, being flexible, putting the customer first and don't be scared to work hard - it's paid off.”
Today, with three advisers, WPP Financial Services turns over around £350,000 of business a year, and Welton writes up 200 mortgage and protection cases every 12 months. He has coached a number of advisers at the firm and the team works remotely.
“The idea was at one stage I’d step back from advising and let those guys do it, but I always felt myself get pulled back in,” Welton shared, and money doesn’t drive him, it seems. “It's not a motivation at all,” he said. “If anything, I get told by colleagues and people within my network to spend money.”
So what qualities does a broker need to achieve success, in his view?
“You need to be thick skinned, when you're dealing with solicitors and estate agents,” Welton said. “You need to be methodical with your process. If you do that consistently, you'll get consistent results.”