It was a struggle for one woman to break into the mortgage industry, but now she’s standing strong
When Helen Ferneyhough (pictured) left university with an accountancy degree to her name and ambitions of becoming a mortgage broker she applied to the brokerage where her father worked. If she was expecting a warm reception due to the familial connection, she was about to learn her first short, sharp lesson about the world of work.
“They originally didn't really want to give me a job,” Ferneyhough told Mortgage Introducer. “I was a 22-year-old girl and at that time it was still very much a man's industry. It's moved a lot in the last 20 years. There's still an element of that, but it's definitely much, much better than it was.”
Ferneyhough proved her doubters wrong, achieving the second highest amount of business written by the firm’s brokers in her first year. “They never looked back,” she said.
Today, as the managing director of her own brokerage – Helen Ferneyhough Associates – based in Wigan and with 15 advisers covering the north west, what would she advise young women coming into the business now?
“Stand your ground,” Ferneyhough said. “We are just as good, if not better than our male colleagues. Certainly from a protection point of view, sometimes I think female brokers are better – we have more empathy.”
What does it take to set up a successful brokerage?
The success of Ferneyhough’s business is a tale of triumph over adversity, certainly in its earliest days. Having successfully established herself in the industry – including working with Mortgage Advice Bureau and Just Mortgages – Ferneyhough decided to go it alone at the beginning of March 2020. What could go wrong?
And then COVID happened…
“I didn't believe it was going to happen,” she said. “I thought, it will be fine. I believed Boris when he said it would take three weeks to flatten the curve and then we'd all be back to normal. For the first three weeks, I was still incredibly busy. I'd been a broker for so long, I was in the very fortunate position that my phone would ring and my clients would find me so it was almost business as usual, and then obviously it wasn't. I sat down, and said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve just quit my job.’ At the time, my husband had just quit his job as well and I was trying to home school two children. So, it was quite stressful.”
Nevertheless, Ferneyhough held her nerve, and when estate agents opened up a few months later, she was ready to go again.
“We offered clients the option: do you want to come in or do you want to do a Teams meeting, and the vast majority of our clients wanted to come in,” she recalled. “So we saw them, and I think that helped us - a lot of other brokers weren't doing it. You have got to get on with your life, haven't you? 2020 ended up being a very busy year. I took on my first additional broker and thought, ‘yes, if we can do it now, we can do it any time.’
“I am very much of the school of thought - as long as you work hard and put the effort in, you'll be OK, and certainly in this industry, as long as you look after your clients, you'll be fine. It's all about the clients at the end of the day - as long as you are doing a good job for your client, that client will be happy and they will tell their friends. If you've also got the tenacity to just keep going, it's very hard to not succeed.”
Read more: International Women’s Day 2024: Taking stock of mortgage’s progress on equality
The importance of your reputation as a mortgage broker
There is another key reason why Ferneyhough overcame the challenges – and it is a valuable lesson for any mortgage broker.
“I think the reason we succeeded is because I didn't understand the strength of my reputation until I tested it,” she shared. “There are a lot of brokers out there who do a very, very good job in their employed roles for a corporate firm and the clients aren't with that corporate firm because it's a corporate firm. They're with that firm because of the individual broker within it – it’s a people industry.”
She added: “Trust yourself, trust your reputation, trust that you can do it for yourself and that you don’t necessarily have to do it for somebody else.”
While Ferneyhough acknowledges that making money is a motivation for many to become mortgage brokers, she believes it’s the wrong reason.
“It shouldn't be about money,” she said. “It should be about the client, and as long as it's about the client, everything else just falls into place.”
