Ash Borland: The Mortgage Brokers, Coaches and Businesses I've Helped Build.

I'm Ash Borland, a UK business coach for self-employed mortgage brokers and the people who serve them. Over the last seven and a half years I've coached around 362 advisers one-to-one, helped build some of the best known brands in UK mortgage and protection, and trained several of the coaches I now compete with. This is the record of that work.

I've never written it down before. That's exactly why I'm doing it now.

A while ago Matthew Chapman said something to me that stuck. He told me I'm like the puppet master with all the strings, and no one knows I'm there. He's right, and for a long time I was fine with it. I've worked in the background for years and been happy to let other people stand in the light. But I've started to worry that if none of this is written down anywhere, it just disappears. So this is me putting it down. Not a sales page. Not a wall of testimonials. A genuine record of what I've done in this industry, and where I learned how to do it, while I can still remember most of it.

Where this actually comes from

I didn't appear from nowhere. Almost everything I teach, I picked up somewhere that had nothing to do with mortgages. My dad spent his career as a training and development director in financial services, building the sales and compliance processes for big names like Just Mortgages and Connells. He taught me one thing that never left me. You've nothing to fear in any room if you genuinely know your stuff, because valuable people get kept. I took the craft he'd built for the corporates and handed it to the independents.

Before that I was a performer, a real career with an agent and a scholarship, not a hobby. Performing taught me the single most useful thing I know, and I build whole businesses on it now. Visibility beats ability. The most gifted people in my year often didn't get the work, and the ones who got remembered did. Then came estate agency, and a branch manager called Tony Green who became a father figure and taught me that you don't sell property, you sell yourself, and that people are never as rational as you'd hope. And then broking, at Connells, where I was dropped into a team containing five of the top ten performers in the whole group, took top newcomer in my first year, and watched every one of those top performers burn out. That's where the lifestyle-business conviction started. The corporate path would make me money and cost me my family, and I wasn't willing to make that trade.

The last piece arrived in the hardest year of my life, out on my own and failing to generate my own leads, when I met a behavioural economist called Mark. Mark showed me why all the things I'd been doing on instinct actually worked, and once you have the why, you can teach it to anyone. When COVID hit, my wife and I bet the house on it, literally, remortgaging to go all in on coaching while she was pregnant with our first child. The moment I knew it had worked was a five-hundred-pound cheque to spend a day helping someone with their brand, something I'd happily have done for free. That's the kit I brought to this work. A respect for real expertise, a performer's eye for visibility, an understanding that people don't run on logic, a front-row view of how top brokers break, and the why behind why any of it sells.

What I actually do

I help mortgage brokers, and the businesses around them, build something that lasts.

It starts with a brand that brings the right people to you, so you stop chasing leads and they start choosing you. Then it's the sales and the offering, getting more clients over the line and more value from each one. For a broker that means protection premiums going up, closing rates going up, general insurance, solicitors, wills, all the cross-services most brokers leave on the table. Then it's retention, the part almost everyone ignores. Remortgages, newsletters, clients coming back every two to five years and bringing other people with them. Get those three right and the business compounds on itself instead of starting from zero every January.

After that it's structure. The right people in the right seats at the right time, so you can run a proper lifestyle business or scale it if you want to. And then it's evolution, widening the advice from mortgages into full financial planning, so a mortgage adviser becomes a wealth adviser and the client bank comes with them.

I'm not a marketing coach, even though that's the label that stuck to me. I started in social media and video, so people filed me under marketing and never refiled me. I'm a business coach. I help advisers fix their sales, their retention, their structure and their hiring, and I help them through whatever real-life problem is in the way this week. I've also spent a lot of time doing the same thing for other coaches and service providers, which means I've coached a fair few of my own competitors. I've always believed a high tide lifts every ship, and that there's more than enough business to go round. I still believe it.

Over about seven and a half years I've coached roughly 362 people one-to-one. Add the group work and cohorts I've done along the way and it's closer to 500. The lion's share are mortgage brokers. Twenty or thirty are from outside the industry.

The coaches and industry names I helped build

Before I name anyone, one thing needs saying plainly. I don't take credit for what these people do. They are the experts at their own craft. I was the business coach and the brand strategist. My job is to take what someone already has and package it so the right people find it, trust it and buy it. The talent is theirs. The positioning is often the bit I had a hand in.

Craig Skelton. Years ago Craig came to me as a successful mortgage broker who wanted to build a brand to recruit advisers into his network. Barely anyone was doing this kind of coaching at the time. We landed on the idea that becoming a mortgage broker coach could be the recruitment engine itself. We built the brand, launched a podcast called The Mortgage Broker Broadcast, which I produced for two years, and built out his framework and positioning. He went on to become one of the top-ranking broker coaches you'll find today.

Matthew Chapman. Matt is the protection coach. When we started, he'd done a little business protection coaching but hadn't thought about building a brand around it. We sat down and packaged the whole thing, the offering, the structure, the pricing, the frameworks underneath it, and built the protection coach as a brand. That grew into large contracts with financial institutions and mortgage networks. I produced the first version of his digital products, and later trained his daughter to take over as his brand manager, a proper succession plan. Matt becoming a figurehead of the protection industry is one of the things I'm proudest of.

Gary Waters. Matt introduced me to Gary, who runs the Protection Academy. They were competitors, and Matt still told him to come and talk to me, which tells you something about both of them. Gary had a great idea and was struggling to get it off the ground. Within about six weeks we'd taken him from the odd client here and there to a six-figure business with a steady flow. Same work as Matt, branding, positioning, packaging, pricing. For years afterwards Gary and I sent clients back and forth. He'd handle the protection side, then send them to me for the wider business coaching.

Louis Adkins. I mentored Louis from his university days through to building Lead Gen FS. He's now a firebrand in the financial planning space for LinkedIn lead generation. We spent years troubleshooting ideas, packaging the offer and working out where he actually thrived, which turned out to be LinkedIn coaching. He's smashing it.

Ifthikar Mohamed and Mortgage X. Ifthikar is one of the founders of Mortgage X, an AI mortgage company. The brief was to position him as the go-to AI voice in mortgage services. He's been featured in Mortgage Strategy and Financial Reporter and speaks at events. We've worked on that for years, and it keeps growing.

Charlotte Hemmingway. Charlotte runs Future in Finance and is, in my opinion, the best CeMAP coach out there. She was already doing brilliantly when we worked together. We spent about six months on brand positioning, social media strategy and back-end marketing, getting clarity on what came next. She's gone from strength to strength.

Jonny Palmer. Jonny runs a legal and conveyancing packaging business. I work with him as his business coach and brand strategist to establish them as the go-to legal and referral brand for mortgage brokers, tightening the marketing, the positioning, the packaging and the sales pitches.

I've also worked across the wider industry. I've been a speaker and trainer for Gary Das, on his Systemise and Scale and Leads to Lifestyle days, teaching brokers how to generate leads and sell more protection, and I trained his network's advisers on sales psychology. Gary is one of my biggest competitors and a good friend, one of the originals in this space. I've spoken several times for the Income Protection Task Force during Income Protection Awareness Week and advised them on positioning and strategy. I've been on podcasts like L&G's Just Covered. I write a monthly column for Cover Magazine and for Financial Reporter on protection and mortgage sales. And I've coached and consulted Alex Kerr of Mortgage Chain, one of the top YouTube mortgage brokers, on and off for five or six years.

None of these people owe their talent to me. But I had a hand in how a lot of them are seen, and that part doesn't show up anywhere. So I'm showing it here.

The brokers whose businesses changed

The coaches are one half of it. The other half is the brokers, the solo advisers and small firms whose businesses, and lives, changed. These are the ones I do this for.

Karla Edwards, The Protection Parent. Karla came to me as a protection adviser inside a large firm, doing well, somewhere around £70k to £120k, but feeling out of step with where she was. We worked on her brand and got her online, being the face of it, and it took off on LinkedIn. It took off so much that it became obvious she had to become her own brand. So we had the hard conversation about leaving and setting up on her own. We'd already been running a podcast we built and produced together called Money Making Mothers, which my wife even recorded the intro for. Out of that came The Protection Parent. She left the firm, and I walked her through all of it, the FCA side, the network side, what to expect. She went from strength to strength, became one of the most award-winning insurance advisers in the country, and set her sights on banking over a million. It all started with the two of us talking while she sat in the spare room of her old house. She now lives in Dubai with a team of advisers under her. She once bought me a little Gandalf statue, because after we read StoryBrand together she started calling me Gandalf, the wise old man behind the scenes. It still sits in my office. She's younger than me, for the record.

Anish Patel. When Anish and I met he was running a high five-figure mortgage business, nearly six. He had one goal, and he said it so plainly it's stuck with me ever since. He lived in London, and he wanted to buy a house with a garden where his young daughter could ride a bike. That was it. That was the whole goal, and it became mine too. We pulled his business apart, the marketing, the sales, all of it, and rebuilt it. What made Anish different is that he did everything. When I said upload every day, he uploaded every day. When I said change how you sell, he changed it. The goal was big enough that he never argued with the work. He got the house. His daughter, and later his son, got the garden. He's now one of the most recognised brokers in the space for branding and sheer consistency, a freight train. We worked together five or six years. That one still means a lot to me.

David. David was nervous about going on camera. Properly nervous. So we sat down and I asked him how much he needed to provide for his family. He told me the figure, and I said, then you can't afford to not be on camera. This is your moment to prove to them, and to yourself, that you can be the provider you want to be. He went for it, and became one of the best content creators I've worked with. That taught me something I've used ever since. Nearly every broker I meet is camera shy. The shift is almost never about technique. It's about asking who you're actually doing this for, and getting an answer big enough to make the fear beside the point.

Hannah, Worthy Financial. Hannah is one of my rare weekly clients, and we've worked together for years. She even does my own mortgages. The long-haul relationships are different from the rest. Once the basics are in, you build something much deeper, and the work starts compounding. You go back a year later and say, there's a better way to do this now, and you watch them climb to a ceiling neither of you could see at the start. Hannah recently came 77th out of around 1,500 advisers in her network for protection, as more or less a one-woman band. In one network, in one year, my clients won best individual, best small firm, best medium firm and best large firm. All of them, first place, all mine. Almost nobody knows that. That's the kind of thing I've kept too quiet about.

The adviser who chose patience. One client, who'd rather not be named, did something most people can't. Instead of taking his insurance commission up front, he took it on the trail, a smaller amount every month for years. It takes real discipline, because the money builds slowly while you watch other people bank theirs in one go. He stuck with it. The target was a few hundred pounds a month of recurring income. He blew past it. He's now sitting on close to £288,000 a year of guaranteed income from insurance trail alone, before a single mortgage or anything else, and it's effectively semi-retired him. It's just him and a power planner. That one genuinely changed how I think about this work.

The broker who was making himself ill. This one is recent, and it's the one I think about most. I worked with a broker for the best part of a year who was running himself into the ground. Overworked, overwhelmed, properly unwell. Migraines, headaches, trips to A&E. Every other week I'd tell him the same thing, and every other week it wouldn't land, because he was too busy being a busy fool to make the change. He had plenty of time. He just had no control over it. Eventually we did the simplest thing imaginable. We built him a default diary and he stuck to it. He messaged me the next day, and again a week later, to say I'd changed his life. All we did was block out time and protect it. A year of work, and the thing that finally turned it was guardrails. People always think the answer has to be some big dramatic move. Most of the time it's one small change that you actually hold to.

The client who nearly quit on day one. I'll own this one, because I caused it. On an early call I let something come out sounding salesy, which is the last thing I am, and a client pulled me up on it sharply. I'd told her there were only a couple of coaching spaces left, which was true at the time, and then my diary opened up and I took on more people, and from the outside that looked like a cheap sales tactic. She nearly walked. I spent the next few sessions trying too hard to prove I wasn't that guy, which probably made it worse. Six months later she told me that working with me was one of the top three decisions she'd ever made for her business. I keep that story close, because I'm trained to know better, and it's a reminder that you can do everything else right and still nearly lose someone with one careless line.

Those are the ones I can tell at length. The pattern shows up just as plainly in the numbers, and since people always ask, here are a few. One broker doubled her written business in six months and lifted her protection penetration by half. Another grew his protection sales by more than 230 percent and got shortlisted for awards. One did four times the protection business in a year that he'd managed the year before. One added 150 percent to his organic leads in a single twelve months. One started out on his own and, five years on, runs a small team and barely recognises the business he began with. Mark Finch, who runs a new-build brokerage called Mulbridge Pathways, had poured thousands into marketing agencies and kept attracting the wrong clients. We cut the agencies out, got him comfortable on camera, and changed how he spoke to buyers. He's written around £60,000 of business off the back of it, and now controls his own lead flow, turning the tap on and off as he needs it. I could fill pages with these. The figures aren't really the point. The point is that they keep happening, to different people, in different niches, all running the same process.

What's the same every single time

I've done this long enough now to tell you that almost every broker who comes to me arrives with the same three problems. I call them the three Cs.

Clarity. They have no clear direction in the marketing, the brand, the process or the sales. They're reactive, bouncing around, and it's quietly stressing them out.

Consistency. They can't hold the line. They start and stop on the marketing, the follow-up, the retention, the scripts. Good ideas, no sticking power.

Creativity. The business is beige. Mortgages is a regulated industry, so on paper everyone looks the same. The only real USP you have is you, and most brokers hide it behind a safe blue-and-white website that nobody remembers.

The individual obstacles vary. I've helped people show their faith on camera when they were scared to. I've helped people drop the suit and just be themselves. I've helped people build a business around the school run. But underneath, it's always clarity, consistency and creativity. Always.

There's a bigger lie sitting under all of it, and it's the one I spend most of my time killing. Brokers think they have a lead problem. They almost never do. They have a leaky bucket. They aren't getting full value out of the clients they already have. In my view most brokers could write £150,000 a year off about four mortgages a month with the right systems around them. If the leads are already coming in, more leads won't fix anything. Better process will. What's usually missing is simpler than people expect. They've never actually been taught how. They're making decent money, so they sit in a reactive state, keeping everything ticking over, never stepping back to build the thing properly. Breaking that habit takes about six months of me gently, and sometimes not so gently, pushing.

The conviction that gets me into trouble

There's one thing I argue about more than any other, and it's protection.

Our job, when we put a client into a mortgage, is to put them into a serious amount of debt. That debt brings real risk, to their income and to their home, from things both known and unknown. So our job has to be to eliminate that risk, not to tiptoe around it. Roughly speaking it costs about five percent of someone's income to wipe out their financial risk almost entirely. Sometimes it's more, usually because of a medical rating, sometimes less because they're young and healthy. But the principle holds.

I get pushback on this, regularly. Someone will tell me that a fifty-pound-a-month policy might be the right thing for a client, and that I'm being unfair by holding it up against a two-hundred-pound one. On the surface, fine, of course the client decides, and of course there are cases where less cover is the right call. But I think the phrase "do what's right for the client" gets used, a lot, to cover for not actually presenting the client with the real picture. A fifty-pound policy rarely eliminates the risk, on the mortgage and on the income, in death and in illness. My position is simple. The client has every right to accept risk, reduce it or eliminate it. That's their decision and it always should be. But it's the adviser's job to put the full elimination of risk on the table and let them choose from there, rather than quietly deciding on the client's behalf that the proper premium is too expensive. That's not your call to make for them. It's also more or less what the FCA is getting at with consumer duty, and the protection gap in this country is enormous. Changing how advisers handle that one conversation is the single biggest shift I make in most businesses I work with.

How the work actually runs

I nearly always start with protection and the sales frameworks, the prequalification, the discovery call, the research and the submission call. I don't start there because protection is the headline. I start there because it has the biggest financial impact fastest, and because it tells me everything about whether someone will actually do the work. Within six months a client should be writing protection premiums of £150 to £250 consistently. If that's landing, the rest will follow. If it isn't by around ten months, we have an honest conversation about whether to carry on.

Here's something I'd bet my house on. Run the discovery call and the submission call properly and you'll write premiums over £100 almost every time. Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of clients take protection, and most of them are over £100, plenty over £200. It happens like clockwork. After all these years it still slightly amazes me how reliable it is.

The clients who get the biggest results fall into two groups. There are the ones I call rockstars, people who were always going to win, who work relentlessly and who others naturally warm to. Karla is one of those. She'd have succeeded with or without me. Then there are the ones who simply follow the process to the letter and never deviate. They might not be naturals, but they do brilliantly, because they stay out of their own way.

The whole thing runs on systems, and that's not an accident. I'm dyslexic, and a few years ago, after my son started showing the signs, I was diagnosed with ADHD as well. I don't treat either as a problem to be accommodated. They're how my brain is wired, and managing that is my job, not anyone else's. The way I manage it is guardrails. I describe it as riding the dragon. My attention is going to bounce around no matter what, so I build rails it can crash against, and it still hits the pins. Decision fatigue is real for me, so I stack habits and run my days on rules I treat as non-negotiable. Systems are the single biggest reason I'm successful, full stop. That's why I'm so insistent on them with clients. I'm not handing you something I read in a book. I'm handing you the thing that personally keeps me from throwing gutter balls all day.

Week to week with a client, it's two one-hour Zoom calls a fortnight. We train, coach or consult, depending on what's needed. Across all my clients that's about 25 one-to-one calls a week. Between calls there's homework, and you can reach me on WhatsApp. I'm the bat phone if something comes up. It runs on progressive overload, little and often. People trip up by rushing. I'll set one small task, they'll do it once and call it done, and I have to remind them the job is to keep doing that one thing until we next speak, so it embeds. An old teacher of mine used to say don't practise until you get it right, practise until you can't get it wrong. That's the whole game.

The framework is there from day one. The Mortgage Business Mastery system, the bucket, and everything that sits on top of it. We're always on the rail, heading somewhere specific. But when real life happens, and it always does, I'm there to help you through it before we get back on track. Some clients joke it's part therapy. That's the point of a business coach. It isn't a checklist you tick off. It's human, and it's real, in a controlled environment.

Why I cap it at fifty, one-to-one

I could run a group programme tomorrow. I've got a waiting list as long as my arm. I don't, and it's a deliberate choice.

I don't believe group coaching works for brokers, and I've seen why. Brokers don't need community in the way the industry tells them they do. Community comes from your friends and your family, not from a room of competitors all fighting for the same business. In group settings I watched people say one thing and do another, because being honest felt like showing weakness in front of rivals. That's a rational fear, and it makes the whole thing hollow. Group courses are also average by design. They have to be, because they're built to suit everyone at once. The value was never the information anyway. It's implementation and accountability, and you don't get real accountability from a community. You get it from someone in the trenches with you, the way you would from a good personal trainer.

I'll go further, and it'll annoy some people. I think anything other than one-to-one coaching in financial services is mostly a waste of time. Not because the people delivering it are bad. I like nearly all of my competitors, I've coached some of them, and they've built things worth listening to. It's the delivery mechanism I think is broken, not the person. What I can say is that I have the most consistent results per client I know of. It's genuinely rare for someone to work with me, follow the process, and not make more money. That's the trade I've chosen. Fewer people, run properly.

So I stay hands-on with around fifty people. I'm bought in past the point of sense. I care too much, if I'm honest, and it's my biggest strength and my weakest link at the same time. You're not a number to me. I'm also not interested in moving people up a value ladder until I finally hand over some secret. If you want to work with me, I'll get in the trenches and I'll be there. That's the offer.

And to be clear about who I'm in this for, I stand against the Goliaths of this industry. The big players, the empire builders, the ones who'd have you believe you need to become a large firm to be a success. I back the one-man and one-woman bands, the small independent businesses people actually want to deal with. We can't beat the big firms at their own game, so I teach brokers to fight a different way. I've watched a lot of brokers with teams quietly come to terms with the fact that, once the overheads and the staff and the office are paid for, they're not really making much, far less than the solo advisers I work with who clear six figures, sometimes multiple. There's no shame in it, and it's fixable, but the fix is usually to trim back, get lean, and be the face of your own business again. Almost nobody needs the empire.

The thread through all of it

When I look back at everyone I've worked with, they have one thing in common. They were all slightly on the fringes. Mavericks, in their own way. They never wanted to build a monster. They wanted a lifestyle business and a more intentional life, and they could see it was within reach. Working with them has pushed me to live more like that myself.

I can say that with a straight face because I've lived it. When the business took off, my wife and I didn't change a thing. We stayed in our two-bed mid-terrace with two kids and a big Samoyed and slept on a sofa bed for five years. We weren't skint. We did it on purpose. We kept living on what we'd always lived on, I drove a 25-year-old Toyota Yaris, and we put everything towards owning our life outright. COVID taught me that if I owned things, I could protect my family from whatever came next, known or unknown. So we paid the mortgage off and kept saving, and in January 2026 we bought our forever home, a four-bed, practically without a mortgage. My wife is a director in the business and homeschools our children, we've a third on the way, and I work out of a recording studio in the garden. That's the lifestyle business I teach, and I'm not selling anyone a version of it I haven't built myself.

I'll say the part I've spent years not saying. Several of the coaches this industry now turns to were built, at least in part, in rooms with me. Hundreds of advisers have changed their businesses, and their lives, doing the work we figured out together. I've kept quiet about nearly all of it, partly because I'm someone who needs proof before he'll claim anything, and partly because it felt easier to be the puppet master with the strings than the man out front.

So this is me out front. I want to be the standard this industry gets measured against, and I care as much about doing that right, about being a guardian of what's good in this industry, as I do about being good at it. I still get on calls half-expecting to be called a fraud, which is its own kind of joke after seven and a half years and several hundred clients. The proof is in. I'm just finally willing to say so.

If you're a broker reading this and you're on the fence, I don't want to sell you anything. I just want you to choose the right thing for you, whatever that turns out to be.

Where to find me

Work with me. My one-to-one coaching for established brokers. No courses, no group programmes. Just the two of us fixing the structure underneath your business.

Follow me on Instagram. Daily content for brokers, and the fastest way to reach me. My DMs are open and I answer them myself.

The Mortgage Business Mastery Show. My weekly show for brokers. A new episode every Monday, around fifteen minutes, one idea worth your week.

The FREE 14 Day Mortgage Business Boost. One small task in your inbox every day for fourteen days. Do them and your business is in better shape by the end. Costs nothing.

The Broker Book Club. One book a month, chosen so you read less and apply more. The thinking behind a stronger business, without the wading through.