Yellow Brick Road's announcement yesterday that it was reducing its headcount, cutting costs and moving to a franchise distribution model is an overdue acknowledgement that the company's strategy of growth at any cost has not paid off.The mortgage broking and investment advisory company said it was consolidating after reaching the end of its "build phase".The truth is the build phase finished a long time ago. Yellow Brick Road's two big acquisitions were mortgage aggregator Vow Financial in May 2014 and mortgage manager Resi Mortgage Corp in July of the same year.Those acquisitions took the company's loans under administration from around A$1 billion to more than $20 billion.The more recent acquisitions - online investment company brightday and mortgage manager Loan Avenue - are very small in comparison.Instead of consolidating after the Vow and Resi deals, Yellow Brick Road executive chairman Mark Bouris bet that the mortgage market would continue to grow strongly and he could pick up share by blitzing the market with a big marketing spend.The company picked up business but at the cost of a very unhealthy bottom line. And now mortgage market growth is slowing.Yellow Brick Road made a loss of $4.05 million for the December half, despite doubling revenue, increasing loan settlements by 41 per cent and increasing funds under management in the wealth division by 35 per cent.It made a loss of $2.5 million in the 2014/15 financial year and would have reported a much bigger loss except for a tax benefit of $6.8 million.Its latest quarterly report shows a cash outflow of $2.4 million from operating activities over the 12 months to June, which suggests that the company is on track to report another loss when it releases its result for the 2015/16 year.Earlier this year Bouris said that, in the face of mounting losses, the company had increased its marketing budget to take advantage of what it saw as an opportunity to build market share.Bouris said: "The decision to invest in future growth, rather than short-term return, is an integral part of the company's strategy to become Australia's leading non-bank financial services company by 2020."Now the company is looking for efficiencies and productivity gains. Advertising costs have been cut. Much of that spend was focused on Bouris's role hosting Celebrity Apprentice on the Nine Network.Yellow Brick Road investors will be looking forward to the business being less of a vanity project for the executive chairman.