42% of brokers are solo operators. Your first hire will make or break you.

If you are a solo broker making your first hire, hire support before you hire production. The instinct is to bring in another broker who can write loans from day one, but what most solo operators actually need first is someone to take the admin, file work and lender follow-ups off the desk. Get that first hire wrong and it can set you back further than staying solo.

The bottom line: More than half of Australian brokerages run on one or two people, and the first hire is the hardest one to get right. FinTalent’s experience is that the solo operator who hires for support before production, and for cultural fit above all, is the one whose business compounds instead of stalls.

There are roughly 10,762 brokerage businesses in Australia, and almost half of them have one person doing everything.

That number keeps pulling me back. Not because it is surprising, most people in this industry know it skews small, but because it is growing. The MFAA’s latest Industry Intelligence Service report puts sole operator brokerages at 42% of all broker businesses, up a point year on year. Add the 14% running with just two people and you have 56% of the entire industry operating with one or two humans.

Meanwhile broker market share just hit 77.6% and settlements are at record highs. The average broker settled $9.15 million in the six months to September 2024, up 13.6% on the prior period. Demand is not the problem. The problem is what happens when a solo operator hits the ceiling they cannot see coming.

What is the solo broker capacity ceiling?

A broker builds a solid book over three or four years. Referrals compound, repeat clients come back, and MFAA data shows 72% of broker business now comes from repeat clients and referrals. Great for revenue, brutal for capacity. Every new conversation, every follow up, every compliance task and lender chase lands on one desk.

At some point the phone rings and you do not want to answer it. Not because you stopped caring, but because you physically cannot take on more without something dropping. That is the ceiling, and it does not announce itself. The brokers who push through it either hire and grow, or cap their volume and accept the trade off. The ones who try to do everything themselves for too long are often the ones who end up in the 15% of brokers who settled zero loans in the last six months. Burnout does not always look like quitting. Sometimes it looks like quietly stopping.

Why is a solo operator’s first hire the hardest to get right?

I have placed brokers into businesses of every size: top 25 brokerages with structured pipelines and HR teams, mid tier firms scaling from five to fifteen, and solo operators making their very first hire. The solo operator hire is the hardest to get right, and it is not close.

At scale, hiring is systematic. There are job descriptions, onboarding processes and someone whose job it is to make the new person productive. At a solo operation, the broker is the business: the culture, the systems, the client relationships, the brand. Bringing someone into that is not just operational, it changes how the whole business works.

The most common mistake is hiring a mini version of yourself. The pain point is volume, so the instinct is to hire another broker who can write loans from day one. But what most solo operators actually need first is support: someone to handle the admin, the file preparation and the lender follow ups, the work that keeps you from the work only you can do. The production hire and the operations hire both come later, once there is a business for them to plug into.

What should candidates joining a small brokerage expect?

If you are a banker considering the move to broking, there is a good chance your first role will be inside one of these small operations. More than half the industry runs this way, so your experience will look nothing like a graduate program at a big four bank. There will not be a six week induction or, often, a dedicated mentor. You learn by doing, and the quality of that learning depends almost entirely on the principal you join.

This is where cultural fit matters more than anything on your CV. The brokerages with the lowest turnover, Victoria at 6.9% against a national average of 8.1%, are not necessarily hiring the most experienced people. They are hiring for alignment and investing in development. That matters even more at the solo to duo scale, where there is nowhere to hide if the fit is wrong.

Can a solo broker afford to hire?

If you are a solo operator weighing up your first hire, the question is not “can I afford to hire someone?” It is “can I afford not to?” Loan books run off constantly. If you are settling $9 million every six months and your book is running off at typical rates, you are working hard just to stand still. Growth needs either more hours or more people, and there are only so many hours. If the worry is getting it wrong, it is worth running the real cost of a bad hire and weighing it against the cost of staying stuck.

Some of the 42% are not choosing to stay solo. They are stuck. They know they need help, but hiring, training and managing someone on top of a full workload feels impossible, so they push it off another quarter, then another. The ones who make the jump tend to hire for support before production, accept that the first three to six months feel like more work not less, and stay honest about what they actually need, which is rarely a copy of themselves.

Where this leaves us

Australia’s broker channel is growing faster than almost anyone predicted, and market share records keep falling. But more than half the businesses in the industry are still one or two person operations working out what comes next. The first hire will not solve everything. Get it wrong and it can set you back further than staying solo. Get it right and it is the difference between a business that compounds and one that quietly stalls.