You may be wondering if you can earn a competitive mortgage branch manager salary by starting your own lending business. The answer is a resounding “yes”—with some effort and the right approach.

The question is: Do you have the traits you need to run a successful mortgage P&L?

Even if you aren’t sure yet, there’s good news. Learning to thrive in mortgage branch manager jobs isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Once you understand the characteristics of success in lending, you can develop many of these traits in yourself and build your roadmap to career freedom.

Lenders at the top of their organizations question if they should leave their positions and work for themselves using a platform like MortgageRight. And many may wonder if they have what it takes in the first place.

Here are the traits we see in the most successful P&L branch managers, inside and outside the MortgageRight organization.

Personality Traits to Succeed in a Mortgage Branch Manager Job

Sure, successful lenders may be born with certain traits that give them a leg up as industry leaders. Yet many of the skills you’ll need to thrive in your own branch can be sharpened and honed. Here are some of the most important personality traits and soft skills we see in our best branch managers.

Leadership Qualities

The term “leadership” can be construed in many ways, to the point where effective leadership may look totally different to one lender as it does to another. Yet, when it comes down to it, those who see the most success in mortgage branch manager jobs show they’re capable of leading others.

Good leaders know that their business is only as good as their least successful team member. You must be able to identify strengths and weaknesses in your team and in potential hires, and then assign work accordingly. In other words, it’s up to you to figure out where the puzzle pieces of your mortgage branch fit best.

Willingness to Delegate

Let’s say you’ve made the jump to being your own P&L mortgage firm branch manager. You’ve assembled your dream team. Yet, being your own boss also means letting go of the need to micromanage every task your team takes on, or worse, trying to handle too many of these tasks yourself.

Delegate to your team. Trust your team members to do what they’re best at. You brought them on to work for you because you trusted their talents, so the best thing you can do is get out of their way and allow them to succeed. When you delegate, both you and your team can thrive.

Delegate to MortgageRight. Using the MortgageRight system lets you focus on big-ticket tasks that improve your business and build client relationships by taking on many of your day-to-day administrative needs. Let MortgageRight handle jobs like payroll, licensing, audits, compliance, legal, and marketing.

A Winning Personality

To weather the ups and downs of a dynamic housing market, a positive and results-driven personality can have a huge impact on success in mortgage branch manager jobs.

A strong leader with a positive personality can keep current employees, clients, and referral partners happy. They can also better recruit new staff and prospect for new clients.

You’ll be navigating some of the toughest and biggest decisions your clients ever make. Can you do it while communicating effectively?

The Entrepreneurial Spirit

If you’re a fan of superheroes, you’ll know that with great power comes great responsibility. Sure, being your own branch manager gives you more freedom over factors such as markets, products, and staff. Yet it also comes with the challenges of running a business, and it takes a true entrepreneur to build a successful lending firm.

Will you attack each day and continuously seek improvements in your branch? Do you have the drive to make that leap from being an employee to being a boss, and live in the uncomfortable tension of change?

A Hunger to Score Big

The first thing you’ll learn when you start your own lending branch is that business is not guaranteed. You have to go find it.

The challenge comes in building your client list as a new branch, as you’ll be competing with established branches in the P&L mortgage industry. Do you have that hunger to compete for and close business?

Do You Truly Care?

If you don’t care about your business, it won’t thrive. If you don’t care about your clients’ financial health, they won’t succeed. If you don’t care about your employees, they won’t grow. Sure, mortgage branch manager jobs might offer the ability to improve your salary and offer newfound freedom in lending. But the only chance of success is to truly care about your business and the impact it has—and embody that attitude in the decisions you make whether the market is good, bad, or ugly.

Book of Business

When you work for an established bank or financial institution, one of the biggest assets at your disposal is brand equity. For young lenders and veterans alike, being associated with a known lending institution helps generate business through name recognition alone.

When you’re building your own lending branch from the ground up, that’s no longer the case. Few people walk into a random lender’s office when they have financial questions. Start with a pretty full client funnel to ensure your ability to grow.

You can have all the right traits to be a lender, but it takes time, effort, and resilience to become a known quantity in the marketplace with experience and success stories.

Want a Mortgage Branch Manager Job? First Get Rid of Barriers and Misconceptions

Wondering if you could do a better job as a lender if you went off on your own? Want to know if you could earn a competitive mortgage branch manager salary?

Running your own branch comes with challenges, from startup and recurring costs of running a lending business to securing an NMLS license, finding the right office space, building a tech stack, and hiring staff.

You’re also contending with a housing market that’s still on the rebound, and you must be prepared for potential market shifts.

You can take steps to future-proof your branch against market pitfalls by partnering with a reputable mortgage company. A known entity in mortgaging can offer benefits such as:

• Attractive benefits and a fair income structure
• Access to industry resources like tech platforms, marketing and accounting support, and training and HR programs
• A bigger range of loan and mortgage programs
• Help managing compliance, leveraging knowledge and experience navigating mortgage regulations

The MortgageRight platform offers unparalleled freedom and next-level support.

With MortgageRight, you have the freedom to make the business decisions that help your branch thrive, including compensation, pricing, and other financial decisions. We put you in charge while offering a wide range of tools and support.

You don’t have to build your own tech stack. MortgageRight offers our partners access to a variety of software and technology tools vital to success in the modern lending economy. These include tools such as Encompass360 – Bankers version LOS for automating the loan origination process; a CRM client management platform; and Homebot for post-closing market retention.

You don’t need a full back office staff. MortgageRight helps manage your business by offering 24/7 underwriting, accounting, HR, recruiting, and employee training programs.

You don’t have to be a marketing wiz. We offer a variety of high-level marketing resources, such as a specialized design team, access to promotional tools, data-driven marketing reports and analytics, branded promotional items like pamphlets and videos, web and print marketing support, and more.

Are you ready to make the smartest business decision of your life? Schedule a live demo of the MortgageRight platform today. You’ll get a first-hand look at everything this tech-forward solution offers. And a proper understanding of how we deliver on our mission—to give customers sincere guidance on their financial needs and provide a low-stress mortgage process for clients.