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The deal I kept chasing
that had already
gone through

I spent three days calling and emailing a lender for an update on a deal they’d already approved. I only found out because the customer wrote to say thank you. Here’s what that taught me about chasing the wrong things.

I submitted a case on a Monday. Clean application — employed customer, decent deposit, straightforward motor, good credit history. I knew it was a strong one. By Thursday, with no word from the lender, I felt that familiar pull. Had I missed something? Was it sat in a stack because of a problem nobody had surfaced?

I started pushing.

Friday: email to the lender’s BDM. “Quick update on 47-3821 when you get a moment.”

Monday: follow-up call. Left a voicemail.

Tuesday: called again. Got through to someone who said they’d look into it.

Wednesday: radio silence. Fired off another email.

On Thursday — day ten since submission — the customer messaged me. Not asking for news. Thanking me. The deal had approved on day two. It had been sitting in the funding queue since day three. The lender hadn’t told me because from their side there was nothing to report. The case was done. It just hadn’t paid out yet.

I’d spent a week chasing a deal that was already won. Meanwhile, two other applications that actually needed attention that week — one waiting on a document from the customer, one stuck at underwriting with a query — got the thin end of my energy. Not because I didn’t care about them. Because I was focused on the wrong thing and I didn’t have a way to know it.

This happens more than brokers admit. The deals that need your action sit quietly — a document to supply, a customer to call, a decision to push. They don’t make noise. The ones you’re worried about are either fine, or already gone, and chasing won’t fix either outcome.

I’ve thought about this a lot since, because it’s not a time problem. I had time that week. I just spent it on the wrong deals. What I needed wasn’t more hours. It was a clearer picture of which deals actually needed my input and which ones were moving without me.

Why I was chasing the wrong deals

Looking back, I can see what was happening. My brain treated all silence the same. If a deal was quiet, I assumed it needed attention. That assumption came from experience — plenty of deals go quiet because they’re stuck. But plenty go quiet because they’re flowing exactly as they should. The silence sounds identical either way, and my inbox wasn’t going to tell me the difference.

The other factor was ego. I’d submitted a case I was proud of. Its silence felt personal. I wanted closure. I wanted to know it had landed well. That’s a human reaction, and it’s a terrible reason to pick up the phone.

Between the noise of the anxious deals and the silence of the stuck ones, I was operating on gut feel, and my gut was biased toward the deals that made me nervous. That’s a useful instinct in some contexts — if a customer hasn’t returned a signed agreement, anxiety is appropriate. But applied to every quiet deal, it just scatters your energy.

What I changed

The fix wasn’t a new process. I didn’t add more columns to my spreadsheet or set up another calendar reminder. I just needed a way to separate two categories of deal:

Deals where I’m the blocker. I’m waiting for something from the customer. I need to supply a document. I need to make a call. These need my action, and they stay visible until I do something.

Deals where someone else is the blocker. Lender has the application. Customer is reviewing the documents. Introducer is gathering payslips. These don’t need my action right now — but they do need a gentle timer so that if nothing happens for N days, they surface back into view.

Within that second group, the system flags the ones that have been waiting past a reasonable threshold with a simple marker: how many days since the last movement. If a deal has been “with lender” for two weeks with no contact, that’s a different category from “with lender” for two days. Both are “not my problem right now,” but one needs a scheduled check-in and the other doesn’t.

The effect is subtle but real. I chase less often, but when I do chase, it’s on a deal that genuinely needs me. Most weeks I have one or two deals that need a genuine push. The rest are moving at their own pace. My job is to know the difference, not to treat every quiet moment as an emergency.

The broader lesson

I keep coming back to the same thought. A good system doesn’t help you work harder. It helps you stop working on the wrong things.

Most of the AI tools I see marketed to brokers are pitched as ways to do more — write more messages, follow up more often, process more leads. That’s useful up to a point. But the bigger gain for me has been the opposite: doing less, better. Having a view that tells me what actually needs my attention, so I can leave everything else alone.

The week I chased a deal that had already gone through, I wasn’t lazy. I wasn’t disorganised. I was busy being busy on the wrong thing. That’s a harder problem to solve than “work harder,” and it’s the one that’s made the real difference to my numbers.