The Broker Who Grew a Nationwide Client Base From Her Phone: Ellie King on Content, Consistency and Caring Less

When Ellie King started as a mortgage broker, she did what every new broker is told to do: she went to referral-partner meetings. The problem was obvious the moment she walked in.

"I'm a brand new business, I don't have a ton of clients under my belt, and so I'm kind of walking in begging with nothing to return," she told us. So she stopped begging and picked up her phone instead. Today Ellie the Broker has served clients in effectively every state in the country, built almost entirely on content she films herself. This is how she did it. Press play above to hear the full conversation.

From Big Four to broking

Ellie spent four years in accounting before switching sides. Straight out of school she did a broad commerce degree "with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do," landed on accounting because she'd always been good with numbers, and worked her way up from bookkeeping at a car dealership group into a Big Four firm.

Then COVID hit and she was made redundant. She calls it "a blessing in disguise." She was unfulfilled and wanted numbers work that helped people hit a real goal in their life, and the accounting-and-tax route wasn't it. A couple of finance roles later she moved into mortgages and never looked back.

I wanted to feel like I was helping people, that I was contributing a little bit more to their success, or them achieving some sort of a goal in their life.

The new-broker referral problem

Here is the trap almost every new broker falls into. The old-school model says your business comes from referral partners: accountants, financial planners, conveyancers. So that's where you're sent.

But a referral relationship is a trade. The accountant sends you a client, and they expect you to send clients back. A brand-new broker has none to give. "I'm kind of walking in begging with nothing to return," Ellie said. The strategy that works for established brokers is precisely the one a beginner can't run.

Social media flipped that on its head. "I can post a piece of content and get tens of thousands of views on it," she said, "a piece of content that might take me 5 minutes to film and half an hour to edit." Instead of borrowing someone else's audience one referral at a time, she built her own.

The every-single-day content engine

The mechanism behind Ellie the Broker is not a clever hack. It's volume and consistency, sustained past the point most people quit.

She started this year in earnest and posted every single week from January, including a 100-day content streak (broken only when she got sick, then resumed immediately). Her rule is blunt: "It's a non-negotiable for me, every day. Something has to go up." That includes weekends. If she doesn't have a face-to-camera video banked, she posts a lifestyle reel with text over the top, or a carousel. The format flexes; the consistency doesn't.

Her editing is deliberately simple, mostly just cutting dead space to keep things flowing and engaging. And the content flows outward: everything from Instagram pushes to Facebook, and TikTok runs alongside, so a five-minute video reaches people across multiple platforms and turns a local broker into a national one.

The client journey, from scroll to settlement

Content doesn't just generate leads, it pre-qualifies them. By the time someone reaches out, they've usually followed along for a while, liked a few posts, maybe asked a question in a story box. They arrive warm.

By the time people are actually making that first contact with a broker, they're, like, 95% of the way to being like, okay, let's do it, let's do the thing.

From there the path is simple: people either book straight into her calendar or DM her, they move to a call to properly work through the situation, then into the loan steps, documentation, lender options, pre-approval, and off to the races. Ellie positions herself squarely in the first-home-buyer market and calls herself a "single source of truth": even when something's outside her scope, she'll point clients to the right person, because for most of them this is the first time they've ever done this.

Tracking is refreshingly unglamorous. Client and loan data lives in the CRM she accesses through her licensee, and she still runs a spreadsheet on the side to watch volumes. Post-settlement, she does regular check-ins on rates and life changes, and the daily content quietly does the rest, keeping her front of mind so clients don't forget she exists.

Her advice: just care less

The honest barrier to content isn't time or skill. It's the fear of being judged. Ellie's answer is her favourite piece of advice, and it's liberating.

Show up on social media and people will judge you. Don't post at all, and people will still judge you and think that you're too private. No matter what you do, someone's gonna have an opinion on it. So who really cares?

She's candid that she hated filming herself at the start. She used to wait until her husband left his office so nobody would see her, spent half an hour making a 90-second video, and still thinks the early stuff was cringe. Now? "Nine times out of ten I've got no makeup on." One of her biggest TikToks, 100,000 views, was filmed with unwashed hair in activewear. Nobody commented on how she looked. They engaged because she explained how children affect your borrowing capacity.

The lesson: the audience cares about the value, not the polish. Trolls are just trying to get a rise. Post anyway.

Broker, creator, wife and mum

Ellie runs all of this while raising two young daughters. When we asked how, she didn't pretend it was balanced. "I thrive in chaos," she said. "I need to have a lot of things going at one time."

The example says it all: she went independent when she was three months pregnant with her second daughter, already had an 18-month-old at home, had the baby, and signed the contract on the land they're now building on about seven days after giving birth. Too much idle time, she says, and she'll delay things for lack of urgency. Keep her moving and she's far more productive.

The trade-off she's clear-eyed about: the phone becomes the key to your life and work meshing together, and she works from the moment she wakes until she sleeps. But the flip side is real flexibility, desk work while the kids are at daycare, then a hard stop at 4 to pick them up, cook dinner and do bedtime, before the laptop comes back out at night. It's not for everyone, and she knows it. For her, it works.

Why she still says earn your stripes

For all her go-out-on-your-own energy, Ellie is careful on one point: new brokers should learn under someone first. In Australia you need a mentor for your first two years anyway, and she worked under her old boss on a contractor's agreement before backing herself.

Her reasoning is practical. Brokers have access to something like 70-plus lenders, each with different policies, contacts and ways of looking at a deal, and knowing how to structure lending so it makes sense for the client (and even their accountant) is something you only learn by doing it a few times. Coming in as a "green broker" and starting from scratch with no grounding, she says, is a big, big learning curve, and she thinks some mentoring programs need closer monitoring than they currently get.

From Ellie the Broker to Elevate

The business name is actually Elevate Financial Lending. Ellie the Broker is the personal platform she built to own something that was hers rather than growing equity in someone else's business. She's conscious that there will come a point where the business is bigger than her as a person, and that's when she'll lean into the Elevate brand and let it take on its own character.

Her ambition is deliberately grounded. She's not chasing the biggest brokerage in the country. She'd love to hire a couple of staff, ideally her first by year's end, to buy back some balance and free herself to work on the business instead of only in it. On team structure she sees three roles, broker, credit analyst and processor, and expects her first offshore hire to handle process-driven processing work, while keeping a client-facing credit person onshore so she doesn't become the bottleneck everything funnels through.

The Finance Operator's playbook

If you want to model what Ellie built at Ellie the Broker, here's the distilled version:

1. 1If you're new, don't rely on referral partners you can't reciprocate with. Build your own audience instead.
2. 2Post every day and treat it as non-negotiable, weekends included. Flex the format (reel, carousel, lifestyle clip) but never skip.
3. 3Keep editing simple. Cut the dead space, keep it moving. Value beats polish.
4. 4Show your actual face. Canva templates and stock photos no longer build trust; people want to know who you are.
5. 5Let content pre-qualify leads, so most people arrive 95% ready and warm.
6. 6Pick a lane (Ellie chose first-home buyers) and be the single source of truth who points clients onward when needed.
7. 7Stay consistent post-settlement, so the daily presence keeps you front of mind for check-ins and referrals.
8. 8Earn your stripes under a mentor first, then back yourself.

It isn't a shortcut. It's a daily habit most brokers won't sustain, which is exactly why it works for the ones who do. You can find Ellie and follow the journey at Ellie the Broker.