‘Working as a broker has given me more empathy as a BDM’

“If a lender has to pull rates at short notice, sometimes that’s unavoidable, sometimes it is avoidable and the lender could have done better,” he commented. “The mini-budget was special circumstances, let’s say. As a direct result of the mini-budget, our products had to go without notice because they were loss-making within the space of an afternoon. However, in the months that followed that, we didn’t repeat that same treatment of the brokers, if you will. We made sure because then we were back to a relatively new normal. While things were going up and down, we could afford to give them 24 hours’ notice.”

He added: “A good relationship with your BDM is key. There’s no such thing as an easy case anymore. Clients are becoming more diverse. One of the things I find really rewarding about this job is when a broker calls me about a case they’re really struggling with and I help a fellow professional out of what they think is a dead end.”

When he left school at 16, Heavens would love to have become a professional football player. But, realising that his soccer skills weren’t quite up to it, he set on becoming a sports physio instead, with hopes of working within his favourite sport.  He took a job at Nationwide as a stop gap, and stayed almost eight years, working his way up from customer service to intermediary sales support.

He took a detour in his career, to work as a mortgage consultant, before returning to lending at Leeds Building Society, and then latterly at Family Building Society, from 2022. Having worked as a mortgage adviser, he holds the role in a higher regard.

“There was definitely an increased level of respect,” he said. “I guess my understanding of the role fundamentally changed, when originally I’d thought that people would seek out advisers to get that advice, and then realised actually how hard brokers have to work to find business. It’s harder than you think, the challenges involved with trying to win the business in the first place. I think that was something I massively underestimated before I got into it. It really opened my eyes.”