Returning to employment after running your own brokerage

A broker who has run their own business can go back to employment, and plenty of them want to. Returning to employment after self-employment works when both fears are said out loud: the broker’s, that they will be read as someone who could not hack it alone, and the principal’s, that they will leave and start another one.

The bottom line: The broker coming back and the principal hiring them are worried about the same thing from opposite ends, whether the seat will hold. FinTalent hears both sides in its searches, and our view is that a return holds when the seat gives the broker something they could not build alone: a team, lead flow, or a share of the trail in writing.

What do the MFAA numbers say about going it alone?

The MFAA’s first State of Mortgage and Finance Broking report covers 2025, using data from nine aggregators. It counted 24,116 brokers, up 9.1%. Brokers working in multi-broker offices rose 17% while sole-operator numbers stayed broadly flat, which took multi-broker offices from 52.9% to 56.8% of classified brokers, as MPA reported.

MFAA chief executive Anja Pannek added that a single broker can have 20 support staff, so being a sole operator does not mean working alone. Pannek also told Australian Broker that part-time broking will get harder, because a broker needs support around them to succeed.

Brokers wrote a record 81.6% of new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter, according to the MFAA. The headcount growth is going into offices with more than one broker, so a broker who closes their own shop and joins a team is moving the same way as the channel.

Why do brokers who ran their own book want a seat again?

None of the brokers below said they had run out of ability.

A broker of eighteen years, still running their own book, told us the work was “so isolating”. They remembered sitting in an aggregator’s reception while two staff talked about where some boxes should go, and thinking: “I’d love someone to tell me what to do. I’d love to be in that office environment again.”

A broker who had run their own business for just over four years listed the jobs they were holding at once: “I’m the originator, I’m the marketer, I’m the cybersecurity agent, I’m the computer specialist.” What they wanted was a business “scaled a bit larger”.

A broker a year into their own book said there is no one to talk to when a tough deal lands, and described “spending 90% of my time marketing” because the business is new. Six months into their own brokerage, another found that the referral partners they approached, planners, accountants and real estate agents, already sent work to three or four brokers each.

Two senior brokers weighing up closing their brokerage told us writing a loan takes them 20 minutes. The problem was a steady flow of qualified leads, the gap a seat advertising leads provided claims to fill.

Money is not always the gap. One broker, two years on their own, said they were making more than at any point in their career. “Main thing is I really miss being part of a team.” They had weighed hiring someone instead, and would rather grow inside a team.

In a McCrindle survey of 1,059 sole traders for MYOB, 77% said they feel lonely or isolated, and 27% spend more than ten hours a week on admin. It is a vendor’s survey of every trade, and brokers tell us the same. What ran out for these brokers was a team, lead flow and hours spent broking.

What does the broker coming back fear?

Being read as someone who could not hack it. Two field experiments say the fear is reasonable.

Tristan Botelho and Melody Chang sent 2,400 applications to entry-level US software engineering jobs, varying whether the candidate had founded a company and whether it had worked. Former founders got 43% fewer callbacks than non-founders, and successful founders got 33% fewer than failed ones (Organization Science, 2023). A UK experiment by Philipp Koellinger and colleagues across 98 HR vacancies pointed the same way: fewer than 1% of the self-employed applicants got a positive reply, against 6% of equally qualified employees (Erasmus Research Institute of Management).

Neither study is about broking. Joe has written on LinkedIn about the same bias against brokers who owned and exited a business, and the feedback he hears is “they’ll be hard to manage” and “they’ll struggle not doing things their way”.

The failure half of the fear is the weaker half. The Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 375,331 businesses that stopped trading in 2025-26, a 13.8% exit rate (ABS). Closing a business is ordinary. In the US study the successful founders did worst, and the recruiters interviewed alongside it said why: they feared a successful founder would leave after a few months (Yale Insights). That is the principal’s fear, and in that study success cost founders more callbacks than failure did.

Will a former owner leave to start again?

This is the fear principals say out loud. One founder put it on a discovery call with us: “They come here for three years and they say, I want to go and start my own.” The principal of a boutique brokerage went further: “Good, really good brokers who write good volume, they always go out on their own,” unless the business has “structured it in a way that they actually own the trail and they get recurring income.”

One principal holds the wider view that a really good broker would be their own broker, with the principal’s own caveat that finding customers and broking are different skills. Another started from the same place and talked themselves out of it: larger businesses had told this principal they had “a whole bunch of brokers”, so “we just perhaps aren’t searching them the right way.”

A broker who has gone out and come back has already run that experiment. One founder launching a remote brokerage named that person when asked about their ideal hire: “I love the idea of getting someone who tried to go out on their own but then realised that they couldn’t.” The founder wanted someone who would not “disappear after two, three, four, five, six months”.

The search we ran for that founder screened out anyone planning their own brokerage, and the founder agreed to write a trail share into the contract, so staying earns the broker something. Planning a brokerage and having closed one are different histories, and a principal who screens on the first can still hire the second.

The contract is also set to lose one of its old tools. Treasury’s draft bill, released in September 2026, would ban non-compete clauses for employees whose earnings are at or under the $190,100 high-income threshold, with most commission left out of the count (Baker McKenzie). Co-worker non-solicitation clauses would go too, reasonable client non-solicitation clauses would survive, and the government intends it to start in 2027 (Allens). Every broker base band in our salary guide sits under that line, and the threshold has moved since we wrote about the end of non-competes. A restraint will not keep a former owner in the seat. Something in it they own will, which is what the boutique principal said.

Can someone who ran their own business take direction?

The second fear is about management. Our senior broker hiring guide carries it as a red flag, raised by a candidate against themselves: businesses see someone on their own too long as set in their ways. The guide says to probe it rather than screen on it, push back once on a structure at the practical stage, and watch what they do with it.

Some want the direction. The eighteen-year broker in the aggregator’s reception remembered wishing someone would tell them what to do.

The terms a former owner asks for are the better test. Two founders setting up a broking arm turned down one broker who already ran their own business and wanted to come in as an equal partner from day one. Another broker they met wanted to start their own business. A former owner asking for a seat and a former owner asking for a partnership are different hires.

Who should not come back?

Some should stay out. A broker of eleven years on their own heard Joe make the case for a bigger business with leads and support, and said no. They wanted “ownership in the business and the autonomy that comes with it”, and a PAYG role was “too far for me now”. Joe has told another broker the same thing from our side: once being self-employed is your lifestyle and your identity, a seat without the same freedoms is going to be hard.

Coming back does not have to mean PAYG either. The broker six months into their own brokerage said that, had they known, they “would have just gone straight to contracting”. One of the two senior brokers weighing up closing their business said a lot of smaller brokerages are joining bigger groups, bringing their loan books for a slice of base pay and maybe some commission, depending on the size of the book.

That gives a returning broker three seats to weigh: PAYG with a base, a contractor or credit rep seat under a bigger licence, or a group that takes the book. The contractor seat keeps more independence, closer to the small business inside someone else’s we described in the case for commission-only broking. Whichever it is, get clear on whose book it is before signing, and put a number on the book first with the trail book calculator.

What makes the return hold?

The seat has to give back what the broker closed their own business to get. For the brokers above, that was a team, someone to take a tough deal to, and leads they did not have to generate. What a principal gives up to provide it is the trade our guide what your split is really buying prices out.

Some principals are building the seat for returners on purpose. One founder hiring their first broker planned to let a broker who had tried their own business bring their existing book and keep 100% of what it wrote. The founder was clear they did not want the broker spending all their time chasing their own business, and said that was quick to monitor.

Joe runs every FinTalent search himself, and in these searches he hears both fears, one from each chair. If you are a principal weighing a former owner for a broker seat, our mortgage broker recruitment page sets out what we look for, starting with a track record we can verify.