Interview with Business Founder Joanna James – The Successful Woman

Every now and then you come across someone so inspirational that fills you with the urge to grow and expand in your own pursuit. Well, it just so happened that we caught up with Joanna James – the legendary lady who has driven change in the mortgage management sector for over two decades.

She’s also the Chief Ambassador at The Successful Women, a global community that empowers women to learn more about themselves and use those lessons to enable them to succeed on their own terms. 

Read on to learn more about her works and how she navigated through some big challenges in life while excelling in her career.

Hi Joanna, can you talk us through your career to date?

Well, my career to date has been a very varied and exciting one. I started my career as Australia's youngest female architect and builder with a love of designing and creating amazing spaces, particularly residential architecture homes. 

When I was in my mid 20s, I met my husband and we started a mortgage broking business together. My life changed very dramatically from that point on. I started to learn all things about home loans and what it required to be a mortgage broker. However, we realised that we weren't getting the level of service that we really wanted and began to dream up something new. In 2001, Mortgage Ezy was born. From that period until the end of last year was 20 years of building and developing a mortgage management business. We grew Mortgage Ezy from a team of two to a very substantial team processing over $1.5 billion of home loans a year. That was a very exciting and dynamic time in my life. 

Intermittent throughout that, I was able to weave my passion for creating homes and environments that are healthy for people to live and work into what I was doing. I won ‘The Sustainability Awards’ for our office design in Queensland. Our home was featured on ‘I Own Australia's Best Home’ as the Byron beachfront home. During that time, I also developed a beachfront holiday resort in Byron Bay called Shambhala@Byron and ran that as a very successful holiday accommodation business.

Recently, I have embarked on the passion of supporting women. Throughout my life, I've had a history of working in very male dominated environments from construction sites to the boardroom. Particularly, in the early days of finance, there were not a lot of female business owners. Now it’s really important for me to make sure women are supported the whole way through. That's where my career is now heading in the development and the empowerment of