Mortgage Mastery: How One Broker Built a 20,000 Loan Empire
The UnNoticed Entrepreneur June 27, 202400:34:0423.44 MB

Mortgage Mastery: How One Broker Built a 20,000 Loan Empire

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Struggling to build a brand that resonates directly with customers? Discover how Chris Schutrups, founder of Mortgage Hut, overcame cash flow challenges and saturated ad markets to convert over 20,000 mortgage loans. In this insightful episode, Chris shares his journey from knocking on estate agents' doors to managing 150 daily leads through a blend of SEO, content marketing, and niche targeting.

Gain invaluable tips on filtering quality leads, nurturing the customer journey, and pivoting strategies when circumstances change. Hear Chris's candid story of nearly going bust and his top advice for unnoticed entrepreneurs looking to emulate his success. Discover the importance of continually upskilling your team, acknowledging competitors' strengths, and buying back your time as a busy business owner.
Tune in for an inspiring masterclass in resilience, brand-building, and customer-centric growth from one of the UK's leading mortgage brokers.

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The UnNoticed Entrepreneur is hosted & produced by Jim James.

[00:00:02] Welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur with me, your host Jim James. Now if you are building a business and you're finding you're giving a lot of margin away to intermediaries and brokers,

[00:00:16] you probably want to go direct. You probably want to go direct to the customers and have the relationships reduce cost of acquisition, better loyalty, better customer service and all the things that go with that.

[00:00:27] But of course, building a brand that gets customers come directly to you is not easy. So we're very lucky that today we've got a guest who's built a business from a small loan from his mum and dad just 10K

[00:00:40] and he's built that into a business that's now converted over 20,000 mortgage loans for customers here in the UK. We're going to Southampton and we're going to talk to the founder and CEO of a company called Mortgage Art, Chris Shutropes. Chris, welcome to the show.

[00:00:56] Thank you for having me. What an honour. My honour and you know, first of all, have I pronounced your surname correctly? You said it perfectly. You did me proud for sure. Okay, great. Thank you, Chris.

[00:01:08] So you're in Southampton but tell us about the Mortgage Art because you've built a business without funding from the ground up

[00:01:18] in a very, very competitive business and also one that's subject to regulation and interest rates, a lot of external variables that must make or break a business too.

[00:01:28] So I'd love for you to share with us how you've been building this brand and maybe some challenges you faced and maybe a mistake that you might have made on the way

[00:01:36] and sort of a key tip and a key learning for those of us who would like to emulate your success. So a little bit first about Mortgage Art. So the Mortgage Art as it stands today is a B2C mortgage advice brand. It's regulated.

[00:01:52] We have somewhere in the region between 70 and 150 customers a day contact us looking to discuss about their circumstances. I have a team of qualified regulated advisors who offer advice to the customers from over 110 lenders and 12,000 mortgage products for most of the UK mortgage market

[00:02:12] and they're able to look at customers' individual circumstances which normally are relatively complicated and individual to themselves, offer them advice and then take them through the mortgage journey and hopefully either help them get their dream home

[00:02:28] or if they already have a home make sure that they get the best deal possible in this rising interest or what has been a rising interest rate market.

[00:02:37] Is it must have been very, very competitive because we've seen the number of transactions reduce but the number of brokers presumably has not reduced. So it must have made it even more competitive for companies like Mortgage Hut. Chris?

[00:02:52] I was going to say actually I think brokers have had a very good time for a long time and so it was a bit of a shock for them because if you think through COVID people were buying properties still up sizing because they wanted that extra bedroom.

[00:03:07] So actually it was a relatively resilient industry compared to others. So when in as the interest rates started to hike up I think there were definitely some people that found the new world was one that they weren't necessarily used.

[00:03:21] Well, and presumably that's where scale and brand really create some business continuity and sustainability. So you started mortgage in 2012 so you're well past those initial speed bumps. Tell us some of the obstacles that you face though because to build a company with that much infrastructure that many agents,

[00:03:45] presumably a lot of tech as well enabling those agents to give custom and real time updates on those I think you said 12,000 products, a lot of information management required isn't it Chris? Yeah. What were some of the obstacles from a brand building perspective that you faced?

[00:04:03] I guess to start with it's the capital is a real challenge because personally I have a lot of investments across a lot of industries. Financial services is one of the most challenging for cash flow because unlike say if I own the restaurant,

[00:04:18] you come in and you eat steak today in my restaurant anything that was great. I'm going to pay the 30, 40 pounds for your meal tomorrow that money's in my bank account.

[00:04:29] But if you come today Jim and you talk to me about a mortgage that you're looking to buy a new house somewhere generally speaking if we take an average, I don't see any income for up to nine months.

[00:04:39] So if I am looking to scale a business from just me for example when I started it to you know now we have most of our advisors are employed which is actually relatively rare in financial services

[00:04:53] is how people overcome this challenge of cash flow is they will self employ the advisors and so they will pay the advisors as they get paid.

[00:05:01] The challenge with that model and we started like this is that you have little control because a self employed advisors to say you know I want to go on the golf course on Friday or you know I'm planning to take a long weekend

[00:05:14] and actually as you get scale and as you get busier you need your colleagues to be sat there all of the time and you need to be able to resource plan to create that resilience.

[00:05:23] So you know cash flow is a challenge to be able to scale in financial services. Lead getting quality leads is a challenge as well and you know when I started remember you know Google marketing was just starting PPC Facebook marketing wasn't a thing you know Instagram didn't exist.

[00:05:43] Tiktok was there you know definitely not there and so you know we started that journey by going I would say on the conventional path that people tread where we went to local estate agents you know it was literally me in a suit walking up the sort of slightly dirtier

[00:06:00] ends of town knocking on the door saying to the estate agents look I'll do your mortgages and finding the ones that no one else wanted to start that journey.

[00:06:08] And as we grew that and got more estate agents we were able to get more advisors at the benefit of for example real estate agents is that you generally pay them when the deal completes.

[00:06:20] So that creates a little bit less burden on your cash flow but the downside to it is that you pay them a large proportion of the pie in income terms so an estate agent may want somewhere between 25 and 40% of your gross income to give you that name and number.

[00:06:38] Which is obviously a fairly sizable amount and sometimes if you think about individual branches or units or real estate agency offices if the legalists are in the states they do only have an element of scale themselves because they might only sell 10 houses 10 properties a month.

[00:06:55] So that's the journey that we started on and I would say lead acquisition and cash flow are definitely the two hardest.

[00:07:04] The two initial hurdles should we say that you have to overcome and like all businesses I suppose this was my first big business and I guess probably what I achieved in the first five years if I did it again I could probably achieve it in a year but you don't know what you don't know at the time.

[00:07:22] That's for sure and later on Chris hope you're going to give us a number one marketing tip about what you would do in those five months instead of five years.

[00:07:33] When you went in to see those estate agents presumably they already had brokers Chris I know this is a 2011 you say there wasn't the prevalence of Google and the internet but they'll have had relationships presumably with existing mortgage companies the bank side of thought as well.

[00:07:51] Would probably have their own products to sell how did you overcome their objections because you're presumably creating an element of risk for them that if you can't create the mortgage and get it funded for their client.

[00:08:06] They lose the transaction the whole chain falls down so it's a very mission critical role isn't it the mortgage broker actually.

[00:08:12] Yes and you know I think it's like all marketing is being in the right place at the right time and playing the numbers game you know if you knock on my uncle way before the internet was a sales director in the Netherlands for an encyclopedia company.

[00:08:27] Okay they used to sell them door to door and he said the hardest door for the sales people was their own front door and you know that was very similar on my journey of trying to get real estate agents where I just had to knock on enough doors and the.

[00:08:41] The chance of probability was one of them at that point in time was a bit annoyed with the current broker you know and it was that numbers game of just being right place right time understanding your sales pitch you know my picture is pretty simple because as we've all people brokers are sales people.

[00:08:57] And as sales people get fatter and less hungry and less agile they start to slip in their behaviors start to go and so I used to say to the real estate agents it was a very simple picture I'd say what first of all.

[00:09:10] I will actually call the leads that you give me because some bro some of the brokers just didn't bother they would cherry pick the good ones they were the second thing is I promise I'll give you feedback.

[00:09:21] On how that lead goes because as a the real estate agents in that journey and that transaction it's important they know can the customers afford to buy that house are we going to submit an application what are they going to offer.

[00:09:33] You know all of the information and if they pass the lead and one you don't call it but two maybe you do call it but you don't give them feedback that doesn't allow them to achieve their their main objective and actually the mortgage income as.

[00:09:47] As large as the split is for the broker is still a very small proportion of the real estate agents income you know maybe hundreds of pounds rather than a thousand pounds so.

[00:09:58] Still their primary objective is to sell some houses and so if the broker can enable that then that's great and the third point I used to say to them was I'll actually pay you your commission because you would have brokers who would be slow at paying or who would quibble about money or you know when I used to in the UK we.

[00:10:16] As you know Jim you will exchange on a property which means you're legally bound to buy the house but you then complete a week later generally speaking and then the brokers normally get paid sort of four to eight weeks later well I used to pay all of the real estate agents when it exchanged because I was guaranteed the money so for me it was.

[00:10:35] You know I got paid out maybe up to eight weeks before I received the money but again for cash hungry real estate businesses I was able to say look I'm gonna pay you quicker than anyone else it knows free things normally if there was someone who was unhappy with a broker that hit 90% of the pain points.

[00:10:54] That's great Chris and in a way you were doing as you say doing all the right things but in the right way.

[00:10:59] Yes that other brokers may have done but in the same pre maybe more and more lackadaisical way if they didn't need the business if everyone's making money then those people that have made the most as you say that creates an opportunity doesn't it for the young and the hungry which.

[00:11:13] You were and still are a course I was very hungry at that time you know I come from a job that was paying me 30 odd thousand and this is quite a while ago and I was young 30 odd thousand pounds to I was earning 200 pound a month with a.

[00:11:26] Pregnant partner and a rental property to pay so I was pretty damn hungry for sure yeah there's nothing like the motivation is there that a bit of hunger and children to feed yes you come along way plainly so you got to that.

[00:11:42] First number of customers but what about the reflection point where you've now got a brand and where you're no longer doing the sales yourself Chris how did you then go from.

[00:11:52] You know those knocking on doors to where you are now with a hundred fifty two hundred leads per day which is a lot a lot of leads isn't in the market.

[00:12:00] Yeah it's you know is an awful lot of leads and it's a journey you know as a business owner you have to at some point take I would say growth of businesses like staircases.

[00:12:11] You'll go forward and then you have to take that step up and take the pain to grow to the next level and he got to a point relatively early on probably about 2014 15 where I realized that if I was going to really scale the business and step away from the business because ultimately what I wanted to do was have a team who earned me money.

[00:12:30] Rather than being at the Colface all of the time so I took that step back which was an expensive step because I generated about 20% of the overall turnover of the business still even when we had six people.

[00:12:42] And so for me to stop was a pretty big step back and you know I don't think we were making 20% profit put it this way so yeah you know it was a bit of a risk but I knew that had to go there and.

[00:12:54] You know in 2016 I reached probably my peak number of advisors I've ever had about 30 advisors and I grown it too quickly. And I would say the quality of the people that I had I had some great people but I also had some people who weren't amazing.

[00:13:11] And one business leader taught me a lesson and he said if you wouldn't let your mum deal with them then you can't have them work for you and that's very true and you're only as good as your weakest team member and that's really important to know as a leader because.

[00:13:26] You know no one's going to judge you based or well they will but people are going to judge you based on that worst team member and if you can't be proud of them then you need to you either need to up skill them or off for them really is the truth.

[00:13:38] Yeah it's also really interesting the impact that a bad player has on the rest of the team and no one tells you that until you've let that person go and then everyone says yeah we should you're done that earlier right.

[00:13:52] Yeah well they either bring down the quality and the expectations or we've all had in businesses the mood Hoover you know the one person who can change the whole dynamic just sometimes not without even speaking.

[00:14:04] You know they can ruin the vibe and so you know it's a team morale and building a good team and you know it's all one you know a business leader once taught me he said Chris your job is to be the chief storyteller of this business and that is it and once you get the right team and you have that vision and you have that dream it's really important

[00:14:26] that your whole team understand where you're going and what you're trying to achieve.

[00:14:30] Chris you've mentioned story which is great because I was going to come on to that next because as you build the brand and you have people work for you then as you say you go from being the person who's kind of the actor in the story to being the storyteller to get other people to play their parts.

[00:14:45] What's the mortgage hut story how do you pitch mortgage hut to be different to the other brokers I mean you've taught from a tactical point of view about the selling but.

[00:14:56] What's your story you know I guess we try and have a positive time with our customers a lot of our customers who come to us will have complicated circumstances that might be self employed they might have adverse credit it could be foreign nationals on visas they could be attached.

[00:15:11] You know they're generally are a bit downtrodden sometime if I'm honest and our job is to have a really positive outlook and I try and motivate the team and show them that our number one at the hub of the wheel on number one outcome that we're trying to achieve.

[00:15:26] Is an incredible customer experience because actually from one from a marketing point of view but who from a business point of view because our customers do come back they do need to refix their rates it's important that we stand up above everyone else you know and really really show them that we care.

[00:15:42] And you know that goes from everything from the way ourselves processes out the way we target our team members you know all of our customers get an email from me during the process and how they were able to reach out speak to me directly.

[00:15:57] And you know so those say hundred and fifty leads a day will at some point in the first week actually get an email from me and although that is an automated process.

[00:16:08] And the replies that I get I read personally and I reply to personally and so you know that when you're a customer in that journey and the advisors are motivated to have amazing customer outcomes.

[00:16:21] And you've got the founder emailing you and checking in everything's OK and knowing that that's there I guess the story is you know we just want to be the best.

[00:16:30] Have the right outcomes to ensure that the customers get absolutely the best experience and that we are the ones in reality that can place the mortgages others can't in the right way. We'll be back after a quick break.

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[00:17:16] Chris and I think you know you mentioned there about going after people that may be off-piste a little bit and you had a background as an expatriate yourself didn't you so.

[00:17:30] Is that a niche strategy that you've got to go for if you like the not distressed mortgage I've met people that do sort of distressed loans and so on. Yeah, yeah.

[00:17:42] But is that a strategy to go after the niche that maybe the more traditional conventional loan companies are not interested is that part of the strategy.

[00:17:53] Well I guess if you look at the larger brokers in the UK okay most of them will go what I after what I would call the vanilla customers okay the sort of two doctors.

[00:18:02] Normally relatively high incomes large deposit no adverse credit and that's what they're trying to chase down but the cost of quality customers very high.

[00:18:10] And you know part of our challenge I guess as a brand is to try and get our customers to buy because actually sometimes online we can appear like a larger company than we are.

[00:18:19] And you know what we try and do in our marketing during customer journey is to sort of make it highlighted that we have family owned privately owned.

[00:18:29] You know all of those things were not a large corporate when I'm by credit reference agency and so and so to answer your question we try and go for the customers who maybe aren't vanilla and that's because you know as a I and other technology.

[00:18:43] And 15 years ago I was telling people in 10 years time I wouldn't have a job because of technology and I've survived a little bit longer than I deserve maybe.

[00:18:52] But you know actually mortgage lending hasn't changed a lot because we deal with a lot of legacy bank systems that are very old that are very complicated and mortgage criteria is complex and so as technology evolves forward I guess to maybe.

[00:19:05] More customers will transact for automation there is regulation that means that you know it's hard for a I to guarantee a great customer outcome every time you know how it hallucinates and stuff.

[00:19:19] Yeah well that's right it could be quite dangerous couldn't I wouldn't mind hallucinating my credit score. Yeah well exactly. A couple of zeros on to the end but I think you know there is a benefit in marketing in having niches so we have two brands.

[00:19:32] We have the mortgage up but we have two smaller brands one being police mortgages where we deal with 23 of the UK's police forces or federations and help police officers with their mortgages which is a very successful brand that we have.

[00:19:45] And we have another brand called airline mortgage shop where we deal with some of the UK's leading airlines in helping their staff get mortgages and you know if we touch on that pain point of what for example a pilot's pain point might be is their income could be say 120,000 pounds.

[00:20:02] But half of that could be flight pay which is non taxable so most UK lenders will not take that pay into account because there's a rule of thumb generally a lender will not take into account money that you haven't paid tax on because they don't want a reputational risk of the tax issue.

[00:20:19] So if you went to a normal bank you might be able in the example of 60,000 you might be able to borrow 300,000 pounds if you come twice you may be able to borrow up to 600,000 pounds.

[00:20:29] So those types of niches we've not just from a branding point of view identified a niche that we can target easily because we know the companies that they work on their job roles but we've also identified a pain point of a problem that we can help self.

[00:20:43] Yeah, that's really interesting as you say each niche has got its own particular profile Chris you've got all these leads coming in I've got to ask you how how has that happened I mean you've been going now for what 1314 years so you've got some organic word of mouth but what about brand building and sort of like

[00:20:59] what have you been doing to get those. Well I suppose you know first of all it's just about anything across all of the business not just marketing it's about trying to be consistent you know and what we've done with our marketing approach is we've been consistent.

[00:21:13] We generate we at some point we went from generating more leads off of our website and we did via our introduced business and you know you touched on it at the start of the show in that you know when you start when you rely on for example real estate agents to introduce you to

[00:21:29] the majority of your leads you do not control your own destiny.

[00:21:32] It's an expensive way to do it you don't control your own destiny and you can't control or improve quality easily because those decisions are outside of your hands as you pivot across for example to SEO organically generation and what you're able to do is to define a process to filter out

[00:21:48] and to get the customers at the right point in the funnel you're able to you know nurture those in that journey create the right systems and processes then to be able to track them to understand what converts how it converts.

[00:22:00] You know we're lucky enough that we over time and it is just I'm being consistent you know one of my personal goals is I try and introduce one quality system into business a week that will allow generally I want all the systems to not have me involved because I'm being consistent one in the business.

[00:22:18] But what the amount of data we now have allows me to make really good decisions so for example say I am work with a police federation for example I'm able to track the number of leads come through what converts how engaged they are you know and then I'm able to make decisions on you know who I focus on how I support them stuff like that and having that data and understanding.

[00:22:41] You know not just where the leads come from but what type of leads they are we talked you know I mentioned expense I mentioned you know. And customers on visas understanding okay well we might have 150 leads of those 30 of them will create 50% of the mortgages for example maybe.

[00:22:59] Yes understanding those and knowing so investment you know we've invested a long time in SEO we invest a lot in being able to.

[00:23:09] Generate more leads I guess it's also about just going out there and trying things out you know testing and measuring and giving things go I would say that has been the secret to our success is just going you know what will give that a go and if it works great if it doesn't work.

[00:23:22] We're not going to be embarrassed we're not going to worry you know because that's the part of discovering what really does work for us because most people chase the same broken methods.

[00:23:32] And you've mentioned that you know you've been doing SEO and is that then largely a sort of a content lead or are you doing advertising and outbound marketing as well then Chris.

[00:23:42] So we do the SEO is predominantly content led you know because we'll look at a long tail search terms will understand what people are searching for and create the content based on that.

[00:23:53] We use different outreach so we obviously have a lot of data that we hold ourselves about 100,000 subscribed potential customers that we'll market to and we will use some PPC and we use email outreach like instantly is the new big thing.

[00:24:12] And you know and and marketing really as you know more than anyone Jim marketing is about blending. You know because I always knew when I looked at businesses when I was just that guy with the briefcase with no money.

[00:24:23] You know and a sandwich in my pocket and you know I look at the bigger companies and I think I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket so we still deal with real estate agents.

[00:24:32] I'll deal with real estate agents that could provide quality to me that can provide consistent to see to me you know I'm able to pick and choose house builders.

[00:24:40] You know house developers house builders house developers in the UK we deal with them but I will only deal with ones that I perceive build quality homes because if I'm going to have to deal with customers.

[00:24:50] I'm not going to deal with them whilst I know that I'm putting them into a substandard product and I'm not going to sell myself to the devil for it so you know that blend of where the customers come from if you think about like the police.

[00:25:01] I talk about you know about the airline all very different industries different types of customers at different points in their careers so it's really about blending the marketing for sure.

[00:25:12] And is is and and you know the secret with being ahead of the curve is just listening out listening to what people are doing I spent a month in Chiang Mai in Thailand at the start of the year.

[00:25:23] And I surrounded by some incredible young marketers all digital nomads and I just went around and asked them what they were doing for the cloud clients what was working well what wasn't working well.

[00:25:33] And you know sometimes I know from this podcast you think he never shuts up but it's about listening and understanding and trying to work out what may work.

[00:25:42] I try because once everyone is telling you you know when I was a stockbroker in the city my boss said to me when the postman gives you tips on shares you know you're screwed.

[00:25:55] And it's similar with marketing if everyone's telling you to do something you're too late to the party.

[00:26:00] That's right but it sounds like you got the party nice and nice and early you've built it and you've got sort of sustainable business but I do like how you are going into the different niches and really staying very personally involved as well in the company and in the products you're offering.

[00:26:16] Chris. You know I do like to ask successful entrepreneurs like you that maybe a little bit unnoticed or they know you've got a great profile. Any anything that you've done from marketing point of view that you might consider to be a mistake.

[00:26:31] That you wouldn't recommend anyone to try at home.

[00:26:35] Yes I had a very tough lesson which nearly resulted in this company failing and so I in 2014 I discovered I still had the police niche and where that came from was I had been a volunteer police officer here in the UK special constable and I'd work with amazing police officers and then every time I went to the police station people tell you know the other guy that does the

[00:27:00] police and it was a great lead generation strategy for me there as well. Yeah.

[00:27:04] But as I 2014 I discovered Facebook marketing and the marketers were not talking to me about and at the time you could really tightly demographically target credit which can't do anymore in the UK and so I was able to scale my leads up very very quickly at a very low cost.

[00:27:22] I mean a very very low cost and I did say and and I said that's what allowed me to scale the team up to where I was in 2016.

[00:27:32] Now the challenge that I had and through you know inexperienced naivety I'm not sure and I didn't necessarily see this coming which was that at some point Facebook reached saturation of advertisers. And so what started to happen was the cost of acquiring the customer significantly.

[00:27:52] I mean significantly it cost me single digit pounds to generate a lead prior and by the time that I was screwed it was costing me like 25 pound.

[00:28:02] And you know and it really was hitting me straight in the nuts and it got to the point where I had two choices because I had a load of advisors who were on salaries and I had to pay their wages and I needed to pay them.

[00:28:14] But I the leads that I would buy that I was buying at the price I was buying I was losing money.

[00:28:20] But I had to essentially keep buying the leads because otherwise I definitely had zero income and so I got to a cliff edge in 2016 where I had a 50 K a month cash flow gap and no money.

[00:28:36] And you know that so at that point you know I look back and I thought to myself you know I don't want to put myself in this position again where I've got.

[00:28:47] I still had a diverse lead source but I was heavily weighted on Facebook marketing and you know that really caused a big problem for me and it was only because I was able to raise finance that the business didn't go bus so that would be you know my number one would be.

[00:29:03] I guess plan as if those leads either you can't afford them tomorrow or they're not there because there is disruption in markets and you know in general especially when you're an earlier doctor and stuff you know you've got to realize people do. Catch on to what you're doing.

[00:29:20] Yeah I think that idea that you become overly reliant on one source of anything that's not under your control whether it's staff or sales or any factor of production. And congratulations to you for soldering on there that must be a fairly heady moment.

[00:29:36] Chris what about the successes that you've had have also taught you many lessons. It is one piece of advice one tip you'd give to an unnoticed entrepreneur what would that be.

[00:29:49] You know I think one of the things I did relatively early on was I worked out who did well in my industry and if I could get on sleep to my wood you know and you know I was very unintimidating as a one man broke a 21 year old.

[00:30:05] And you know sitting there and saying how do you do this and how do you do that but I listened to what they did and I took just one bit from it and it's a little bit like listening to a podcast if you can just take one thing from it.

[00:30:17] You're moving forward and so you know if you get out there understand your competitors understand how they do stuff what they do what they do well and acknowledge that don't be you know ignorant acknowledge what they do well but also acknowledge where you can do better.

[00:30:34] Getting out and speaking and understanding competitors understanding their models speaking to people is definitely the number one thing that you can do when you're scaling business up and understanding the market around you.

[00:30:46] Chris shoot up that's great advice and you have mentioned podcasts as well and you know I like to ask if there's a podcast or a book that you found inspirational that you'd like to share.

[00:30:57] So I have recently actually read a book by Dan Martell I think his name is called buy back your time.

[00:31:03] And so one of the challenges that I faced was I am actually a very good delegate as my team will test with all the stuff that I pass across but you know I got to a point a couple of months ago where I was still getting three and a half thousand what's apps and emails today and it was sort of disrupting my brainwave.

[00:31:21] And although I could delegate them and I could have a great PA who works alongside me. I was there I was going to visit my auntie in Rotterdam and I was driving there from the UK which is about an eight nine hour drive.

[00:31:35] And so I listened to I met someone else and they said you should listen to this call buy back your time. And so I did and I now don't do any emails.

[00:31:45] So I employed a full time assistant to do my emails for me I set up the processes and you know I set up lots of different processes. So if you're a busy entrepreneur and you know we're all busy from that first day because you wear multiple hats.

[00:32:01] But I would definitely recommend taking some time out to listen to the book it's a really good book read it listen to it. Obviously I'm a fan of your books as well. You're too kind. Thank you.

[00:32:14] Because you know that I have have I'm looking forward to your third one coming out shortly so yeah that was a very enjoyable book that helped me actually you know a lot of the time you will listen to all the books and podcasts.

[00:32:25] And there's a lot of theory that is sometimes harder to apply to business than them to make it seem but that is that that I would say the books well written for that first solo entrepreneur all the way up to the CEO with the book.

[00:32:38] The three thousand person business for sure Chris shoot up that's fantastic advice and I'll put the course that book buy back your time in the show notes Chris if you want to get hold of you where can they do that.

[00:32:50] So I'm on LinkedIn I'm very very active on LinkedIn so Chris shoot up some LinkedIn you know feel free to reach out connect if there's anything that I can help with I'm always you know I'm super passionate about business I enjoy getting out there and speaking to people so yeah.

[00:33:07] Get me up on LinkedIn.

[00:33:09] Just for anyone listening to shoot up this is C H U T R U P S and it's the mortgage so I'm sure you better find Chris very easily Chris thank you for coming in you've had such a long and varied career we've had to kind of squeeze such a long journey into just short time thank you so much for sharing with me.

[00:33:29] It's my pleasure thank you for having me Jim. It's wonderful so. You know what I've loved about Chris stories the humility and the success the attention to detail and yet the desire to get away from the detail which is really the hallmarks of.

[00:33:45] Of a great entrepreneur and someone who really cares about the clients as much as about the business.

[00:33:49] If you've enjoyed this show as much as I have them do forward it to a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur Chris's wisdom is well worth sharing and until we meet again I just encourage you to keep on communicating.