MD tells how he repositioned the brokerage to support sports professionals
With his baby son about to be born and the mortgage company he worked for going under, Gaurav Shukla (pictured) faced a big decision. He could walk away and look for a new job or he could take over the business and reposition it for success.
Shukla chose the latter and, as managing director, has re-established Home Me Mortgages as a thriving brokerage that helps sports professionals and high net worth individuals – particularly footballers - with their finance and insurance solutions. Now, he is looking to the future and expanding the business.
In the autumn of 2022, things came to a head for what was then a failing concern. Shukla had been sales director for 11 months when the owners said they wanted out and offered him the chance to take over, just as his son was due to be born. “It didn’t make sense for me to go looking for another job,” he told Mortgage Introducer. “I had done so much work around this project and this company, it just made sense for me to continue it. I thought, ‘I might as well take this over, we've got leads in the pipeline, see what happens.’”
Home Me Mortgages was originally built around boosting first-time buyers’ borrowing power. It needed to refocus in a rapidly changing economy following the short-lived Liz Truss tenure in Downing Street and her disastrous mini-budget. “It didn't make sense to focus on first-time buyers when they were pushed back by how rates had gone up,” said Shukla. “We also didn’t want to be known as a remortgage broker, which at that point a lot of other companies did.”
Based in Maidenhead, Shukla decided to move the business focus away from London. As a big sports enthusiast and dedicated Liverpool FC fan, he decided to sponsor his local football club to raise the company’s profile. “We sponsored Maidenhead and got quite a lot of business just from the local public,” he explained. “Then Wycombe Wanderers came knocking on the door about doing partnership stuff with them.”
Work with other clubs followed, and although Home Me Mortgages is now mainly aimed at sporting professionals, with three club partnerships currently, it won’t turn down work with other borrowers. So what are the particular needs of the footballers it typically supports? “Their contracts change, their income changes, they go out on loan quite a lot, so they have inconsistencies in their footballing careers,” Shukla said. “Also, not every lender will take on a sports player, just because their contracts are so short. It's also about making sure they've got the right insurances in place - income protection, but also career ending injury insurance as well, which is a big one.”
He added: “The only thing is, the communication times are different. They'll message you before training. They'll message you after, they'll message on the way back from an away game at 11pm or something, so it's just about understanding their job and working around it.”
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How footballer players are becoming mortgage brokers
Such is the bond that Home Me Mortgages has established with the football profession that players who are due to retire are being encouraged to do CeMAP training with the company, to establish subsequent careers as mortgage brokers. “We hired a trainee adviser who is coming towards the end of his footballing career, and we are training him to become a broker,” noted Shukla. “He helped us understand a lot more about the football players firsthand because he's been in their position, but he'll be one of the guys who will also give advice to the football players once he's qualified. He also goes into football clubs to do talks with the youth team around his journey, but also mortgages and finance, and we do the financial education with the players, which is a massive hit with them.”
Having started his career in financial services with Santander, over a decade ago, and with the experience of various mortgage broker roles since, Shukla is clearly pleased with what he’s achieved with Home Me Mortgages in just a few years. “I took over, and did everything from scratch again,” he reflected. “We are still here - it's good. It's a massive market, there's so many more things we can do.”
