Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello. Welcome to another episode of Mike Dot. This one, season three, episode eight. We talk about rebounding from failures and we appreciate everybody who comes to see us live on LinkedIn so that they can contribute and ask questions. It's typically at 02:00 p.m. eastern and.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Of course I'm at 11:00 a.m. pacific time in currently study San Diego topic.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: Today is really rebounding through failure.
So we are a little bit later today because we did, we purposely failed our show right at 02:00 p.m. eastern.
And now we're rebounding here at 220. So interesting timing for us to talk about this. And we thought this was important. We didn't have any guest schedule today. We do have a strong lineup coming up.
George, CEO of City lending is coming up next week. Michael Brady, CIO of leader one. I believe the week after we have a gentleman who's been very high up in the real estate industry will be joining our show, Russ, more information on him. Bill Loman at 08:00 p.m. will be on here. And then we have a very jam packed September with some capital markets people. I keep thinking that's far out, but we are already in August, so it's right around the corner here.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Should be a good month considering we got western secondary coming up in a week and a half over in Rachel Palos Verdes in Los Angeles, part of California western secondary. I'm excited to see our colleagues out there at western secondary with appointments I have set up to meet and greet. Maybe we'll get some snippets for our show.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Yeah. But we should have more following from secondary. We're talking about innovation in the future and product is going to be a big part of that. And always a well attended event out there. Yeah.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: By the way, don't, didn't you know we out here in San Diego?
I'm not an official attendee, but I'm planning at least on checking out who's going to be showing up for digital mortgage in San Diego. So I'm going to come. That's also in September too, by the way.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that one's really close to the New England mortgage bankers, which, you know, I'm very involved when. So if it was in Vegas like last year, it put me down as a maybe six hour cross country flight to get back in time. Um, just much harder to do. Especially time zones going forward are always harder than backwards.
So you put me in a conference out there, I can leave here at twelve and I can still be there for the morning session coming back.
You know, you leave it six and you won't be until you won't make it that day. Maybe the evening event. Right. So very difficult. But the digital mortgage conference always attracts the larger players trying to do big changes, I think, in customer service because they actually have the money to invest in not just software but teams to handle that software.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Yeah. This year should be really interesting. AI seems to be a topic, artificial intelligence seems to be a topic that not just in the mortgage industry. It's on so many people's minds when it comes to what is it that we can use it for? To mitigate risk, to create better marketing, to do more business.
It's on the forefront of so, so much change and that I find that this year should be pretty interesting, at least getting a gauge of what people are going to be talking about and so on. I think that theres going to be some change in the corporate structure of how certain companies are working because it moves so fast. Jason?
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Ill give you an example. So I have a really cool client, sapiens decision that allows you to take decision models and have them live within a place where you can no code. I mean, it builds the code, but in an environment where you don't need coding experience to begin to take your flows, charts and also your decision checklists and put them in a place that can create a decision tree in a mortgage language that somebody can look at and say, oh, we have a problem here because we still need to have exceptions or not for this part of the product or this part of our process.
What its taught me, and I think what youre hinting at is none of these companies have a role of whos in charge of the decisioning at the company or a plan around the fact that decisioning models are becoming assets because you can go and call them. So when we asked this really, really large lender, an IMB was actually in the process of acquiring others. So you're putting together a lot of checklists that sit in cubicles put up there. Right. But all go up to the one piece, which is how do you identify risk within a product so that you can have more opportunity? Oh, this person handles those rules and encompass secondary, really does a lot of those rules in PPE. So they'll shut off that program if they don't want it. Our underwriter sometimes helps with those rules. There's nobody in charge of a rule governance and I find it interesting and I think it will be a big shift because it's an iPhone moment for everybody. I've introduced it to like everything I do, it's harder to get somebody on the initial meeting and then when they get on any of my meetings they see why most of the adopt the brand stuff is oh well I never, and even that CEO said I dont think we do have any decision in governance really in our. Its all relied upon by a mixture of each vendor is in charge of that governance and why its relevant is its going to be easy to call that decision and bring it back to where you need to bring it and let the software either make the right decision or prevent you from making the wrong decision. But its just very interesting to make whether its your condo rules, LTV rules, buy down rules, right pass when you should pull credit because it's so costly now to pull credit. Can you make decisions, better decisions during the process of when you should be pulling credit? All of these are decisions that can become decision models. And this is what the Gses do. That whole EU LPD is to, they're calling out to decision modelers what company they use one thing, but that's just one big taking binders and turning them into decision models. Back to your point though, things are going to change on who's in charge of what.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Yep, I was and I consider, you know, the topic of today's show rebounding from failure. Considering what has happened over the course of the last two years from seeing a really low interest rate environment. And then all of a sudden the fed raising rates, mortgage rates going up, layoffs and dropped incomes and dropped commissions and dropped units per sale and so on and so forth.
I feel like that back in the nineties when we first started using decision making processes like FICO, scores were being introduced and then Du and LP got introduced. It went from everybody was handwriting ten o three s to all of a sudden brokers were using point and then countrywide had each, they didn't have h two l, I forget what it was called, but that's plaza. But it was just like you had all these different loses and they're still out there right now. So I feel like right now we are in like the first grade level of the mortgage industry right now. And the reason I say that is because as we try and discuss, and I always use the word try because try means that you have this willingness and understanding of failure, that we're not really rebounding from failure per se, we just keep growing. I think if we have the willingness to reframe where we're at, that is really where we have the ability to rebound. For what is perceived failure to just the aspect of business and sales growth. And I think that when we're doing this, so over the course of your career, Mike, I want to segue into talking about you, and if you want, we can talk about me as well.
It's a little bit scary talking about the beginning part, when you're at the beginning stages, is because you're like, oh, I didn't produce enough sales. Oh, I didn't make any phone calls. Oh, I didn't have an appointment. Da da da da. But I think, you know, how do you think you defined. How do you define failure? I want to ask you that question. Do you. Do you consider, like, failure truly failure, or is it just.
Is it a black swan event every single time, or is it something that you think that you can. You could get something from?
[00:09:25] Speaker A: So I'm able to motivate myself. Bye. Using failure as a motivation to keep pushing on and addressing to myself, you have learned so much through that failure. You are a better person. You are a better person for this obstacle in front of you. Because of those failures. I believe I've done a good job over the years, especially because failure, to me, has always trickled in. It wasn't overnight a big black swan event happened. The rates went way up. This happened at least for the last decade. I mean, I've had. Where the whole world sort of turned upside down. But I'm always able to say, we got to wake up the next day. We got to move on. And there's two ways to handle it. We can either look at us and say, yeah, in the mirror, you're a failure. You could have done it differently, or I like to think I am now better than my competitors or better than my peers in this area, because that process of failing, I put in hundreds of hours, or maybe not a lot more hours than the average person in that journey. And so, therefore, I am a lot more hours of real world experience, uh, better off than most of the people I'm going to run into. And that's been how I've. I've really been able to handle this piece of being innovative, entrepreneurial, pushing ahead, sacrificing short term wealth for long term gains, and then betting the farm, as you will, on pieces that. That really didn't pay off.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Right. So, for our listeners that are out there right now, last week, we talked about podcasts and the maintain the. If you could get one thing from that from last week's episode, just. I'm going to say the Nike mantra to just do it. And so what Mike is saying right here that I'm leaning from is from the past two seasons of shows. As we've interviewed various leaders of the mortgage industry, one thing that they have consistently done is consistently work and consistently achieve, and consistently manifest the type of things they need to do in order to achieve that position of leadership, either in sales or the development of business or the creation of, and you don't get to that point of the creation of or the manifestation or the, or the doing without doing multiple, without doing multiple tasks, without doing multiple calls, without making multiple meetings, without making multiple and multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple. Greg Cardone talks about annexing everything. And that's just not ten xing your business, your income, and your life. It's also ten xing the activities that you have to go through as well. So, knowing that, Mike, what are you can touch the topic of mindset on changing yourself, but what are some of the things that you thought, hey, you weren't doing before, and you needed to either two x, three x or ten x in order to rebound from what wasn't working, to turn it to something that does work.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: If I'm hearing the question, I think the toughest part about failing is not ending up in that casino like mindset where you are so far in the hole that you need to win double or nothing, triple or nothing, and you make wrong decisions. If anything, I look at failure now as the great reset, and if I could start again, just try not to make those mistakes. So, with easy mortgage apps, there was so many mistakes that I learned as a loan officer turned into running and creating an industry, uh, and not by myself. Like, w we had peers, but we were always undermanned in, I believe, what we were trying to tackle. And pride sometimes gets in the way, sometimes you can fuel off of it, but it also leads to areas where it prevents you from delegating. So that would be the first failure. At easy mortgage abs, it was very difficult to find, find the drive to scale, because it was always that next obstacle, or I should say, next sale in front of us that needed to be made to survive the week, the month. But we were like holding sand or grabbing more sand, and it just kept going through our hands. In hindsight, at the time, we were grabbing more sand than everybody else. And pride had it, you know, had us happy. I'd say on the other side of pride, that was one of the tougher parts of failure. I think the failure of easy mortgage apps is one perception of metrics that other people put upon it. That it did not or just put upon any tech startup. And it never hit the metrics that people call success. And then I started to buy into, okay, it wasn't a success and never really marketed it as the success it was. So it had 32,000 loan officers on it. It had $500 billion of loans go through it.
That is something to be proud of. Right. But it did not exit. And the lenders that I, on the pride side that I said as I was forming this market, you're going to regret it. You're not going to, you know, another vendor really took the baton and took it there and it's, it's the pride of, like, they were right. They, they rode my wave and then went on to that wave and then did just fine. And I was wrong, um, in telling them that. I should have never said to them, but I wholeheartedly believe and at that time we were ahead and I don't think the other company would have gotten done half the stuff they did if we didn't motivate them. Like the old WCW WWF rivalry. Like when you have a challenger doing well, you start to step it up.
Yeah, I think those and then letting down. And I'm sure the mortgage industry went through this a lot in the recent downturn, but those people that work for you, if you're somebody that leads from the front with motivating them and, you know, they're the, I guess the biggest difference is a lot of people sacrificed a lot because they saw in me sacrificing a lot at this vision that we were really going to do that, do it and we did it from what I just explained. But the reason they joined was obviously, and I'm guessing a monetary outcome, the reason that I am now at the table down, have to double up is the monetary outcome.
Yeah. Maybe the biggest failure is not knowing when to pull that parachute. But innovators and thought leaders and people that push the barrier and create, create categories like mobile app, they typically aren't the ones that pull the parachute too early.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: So do you think that you ever saw during that time period, even with all the good, some of the good stuff they had, you know, and completing closed sales and then maybe, I don't know, in dark times like we've been over the course of the last two years, did you ever look there and go, yes, it's bad, or you know what, we don't have as much as we want. However, however, I'm going to motivate myself to do this, but I can see where the end is. And if you were to ask yourself that question and then answer it and say, I know where the end is, and say, it's going to happen. When rates go down, employment gets better, housing listings go listings are increasing, and as a result, there may be more possibility for purchase transactions versus refinance transactions. Did you ever sit there and go, these are not black swan events, but these are the events that could cause us to get more business?
[00:17:53] Speaker A: I'll say I'm a little different in.
We did not have any a round angel investing VC. You know, we certainly would go out with Dex and certainly put a nice salary in there, but because we never had it, I personally never had any successes that would cause me to even take a vacation. So not only was it personal that we are going to win, and I think that was probably part of the failure, is I had goals, but the goals were sales metrics more than they were SaaS based here. Up metrics. Where are we going? I guess is the problem. The other problem we had is we had multiple partners in the company. So at different points, as the journey got longer, what each person saw was the next step created some noise and confusion for potential investors. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I lived and felt that failure every month, looking at my own p and L, and you could tell at times, almost every time, we were going to need help. It's just, how can you separate yourself from the business to go out there and find the right help? Because when you're dealing with equity, you're worried about that failure, too. Like, you worked so hard for all this, you're only gonna be able to give away the slices so much.
What if you give it to the wrong person? And so you end up not giving it to anybody and failing. So that's another area.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: And we talked to a lot of leaders, and one of the few times I've mentioned in a few shows that some of these presidents or leaders have stayed in their lane.
Whether it was concentrated on USDA loans, whether it was concentrated on a certain type of loan officer productivity, or the leader would stay in their lane, but he would allow his, he would delegate the duties to those who know what they're doing.
And I think that it's hard for us to be able to either delegate or even stay in our la. I think there's too many timer salespeople. They're like, add all over the place. We're just like, oh, look at this. Oh, look at the shiny object syndrome comes into play. And so on and so forth.
What is one or two things that you might be able to say that helps you stay in your lane when it comes to either the delegation of duties or be staying focused on behalf of your clients?
[00:20:42] Speaker A: Most of the easy mortgage app story that failure was not staying in our lane. Like, we built a servicing app that actually fics users, which is typically somebody that has like 12,000 people paying their mortgage.
They could go in and give a code. It worked. And why we built that is as big a part of a failure as it is a cool success story. We built street links app for them, which was part of assurant at the time. And so we really built it for assurance, which was the only external piece they did since 1962, Dow 500 company and it was because mobile was so difficult, contract sort of went to where it was not beneficial, and again, just a pure distraction from that retail play that now, looking back, that's all we want to be, right? So we were the darlings of the prom in the sense of we could make mobile apps and nobody else even had a plan around it, and we got distracted from who we were or our best pathway forward. And, yeah, I mean, I always look, I think that was the best lesson I've learned out of here. It's not some MBA workbook on, in our industry, I should say, not some business review workbook on, like, that's the right answer. I lived it and learned the hard way. Like the. The slap on the wrist. Don't do that again. Don't do that again. So I try and just stay focused on not picking up any new clients in my.
At least I'd adopt the brand until all, I feel like all my clients are ROI positive. Like, that's my goal with them, is, can I roi positive them on their meetings, their sales? And I spend my free time figuring out how to scale and delegate, um, through automation. Like, I'm always been bullish on auto outreach, and I wish I wasn't bootstrap and could just pay somebody to help me sort of build that. But until then, most of my extra time, if we're not working on this, is on YouTube trying to figure out how to auto outreach, because whether I'm trying to get new clients, whether loan officers are trying to create new connections, whether our podcast is trying to create new subscribers, it typically starts with while you sleep, engagements occurring. Right. So.
And we failed there. Like, I think it's not as it's. It's always on the top of my mind.
If you don't have a marketing data strategy.
And if you can't afford it, you should constantly refresh it in your book and just have it like the to do list. But I don't know how any mortgage vendor or any mortgage lender trying to reach customers is doing it without a real hard look at how they're going to automate and analyze their metrics on outbound outreach. And I wouldn't just keep it to marketing because those metrics everybody in every business are going to ask for. And the more polished you are, Adam, and the more you have them, the more opportunity is going to come to you. But at the same time, the less you'll be distracted, because you can look at those numbers and decide where your distraction is. Not just go on gut instinct, because when things start moving fast, you do a lot of gut instinct. And, and I.
And if you're successful, you're like, you're right a lot on your gut. So you follow it, and then you accidentally follow it into a dead end. You follow it into a valley, and you, your competitor took a ladder over it, and so now you had the lead, and now you're playing catch up. Did a lot of that.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: So to summarize all of that, if you are in sales, if you're an originator or even a leader, there's two lessons and everything that mike just broke down. Number one, know when you're in your own way and know when to get out of your own way and then accept that you got in your own way so that you know how to step aside and allow those who are in your circle of influence or in your employment, or those who may be in ancillary service to say, you know what? This is how I'm going to get out of my way so that I can move forward. Because if, you know, we don't know what we don't know, meaning that we're always, we're so geared into what we've already done successfully, that's when we get our own way and we're stuck. And, you know, we could be here, but we're stuck here, and this, and this could be comfortable, but in order to get here, there's that discomfort in between. And in order for us to be able to move from one point to another, we can see what's going up here, but yet we don't get out of our own way. Why? Because we're so comfortable here. And I think one of the things I'm hearing from you is that the lessons that you're learning is that you're able to you're not, you were not just able to understand what's going on. You're also able to currently translate that in seeing what you've already done in some of the learning lessons. You can call them failures if you want, Mike, but really, learning lessons, the preschool, the preschool learning lessons, translate that into the service providers that you're, that we're working with, sapiens or silverworks or any number of some of the adoptive brand clients that you're working with right now, and then say, okay, if you're here and you want to get to here, can you see the noise that's stopping you from going from here to here? Can you hear it? Can you see it? And are you willing to get uncomfortable with some change in order to reach that level? And so with that, Mike, what are some of the things that you had to commit to to get uncomfortable to create that change? Because it's one thing to motivate yourself, but like, what are some of the most uncomfortable things?
Is it okay if I ask you that question?
[00:27:07] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Yeah. What is some. Or name one thing that you think was so uncomfortable. Tell me a story of when you felt uncomfortable about doing something, but you committed to doing anything. And whether you, whether it was successful or not, it was irrelevant, but you decided to make maneuver.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: I mean, early on, one of my partners was my boss and a mentor to me, Paul, and just a strong figure. And I was the one making the outbound calls and I was the one going to the conferences and he was handling the operations of the company.
And he was always at the old company. We were at the president, right. And I was a young loan officer trying to make a name in town. So at some point I realized these lenders, like we're talking to CEO's of top 300 lenders. They really need to see me as president or CEO of this company if I'm going out there and meeting with them. So that was an example of an uncomfortable conversation that I probably put off, you know, a couple months and then creates more opportunity for failure. Because it wasn't, you know, it wasn't just the title that came with it. It was like the, the lenders had to believe that I was running it because the what I was telling them out there was a vision. I was selling more of a vision than a result. Like easy mortgage apps was a better way for a better customer experience. For example, we created the Domino's Pizza tracker before Domino's pizza tracker created, so.
And now everybody raves about, you know, in mortgage, earlier podcasts we called it the Domino's Pizza tracker.
We actually had it in mortgage and easy mortgage apps had it before Domino's had it. So it's telling them that's a better customer experience. Customers would prefer that them saying no, they would prefer hearing from our loan officers me saying, look, I have a vision that when I started in 2013, I remember saying the average person looked at their phone about 60 to 90 minutes a day.
By like 2015, the average person was already up to 2 hours and 40 minutes. And I had snippets and I, so I knew we were onto something. Like, people are spending 2 hours of their day looking at this now.
We weren't wrong, just quick plug. Still think the mobile strategies, like everybody should be reaching out to me at a lender because the average person's looking at it about 9 hours a day.
That should, like, that's a pretty insane phenomenon. That did not happen twelve years ago. Nobody looked at anything for 9 hours a day. Now they're pulling out of their pockets, staring at it. They had to believe that my vision was, okay, I'm going to make everything on this phone, whether my partners were part of it or not. They had to believe I was the one doing it, because I'm the one shaking their hand, I'm the one calling them. And so that was an uncomfortable conversation, saying, look, I need to be president now. And, you know, Paul was, was good with it, but it was, it was also a really successful company at that point. Like, we were signing up three people a month. So it wasn't like, hey, it's a, it's a dead dog. So we're going to try, instead of you being president, me being president. So that made it uncomfortable too.
A lot of it was, was uncomfortable when we started, like losing money, right?
You know, you borrow money when you're in a tech startup, and when you borrow it from amateurs, they believed in why they lent it to you, but they don't understand that there is a chance you might lose it. So going back to those people and not getting the same response that you read in those tech magazines, like, oh, they're just going to say, four out of ten fail and the other six make it, no, they're like, that's my money. What do you mean it's not working? And it's like, I tried everything in my power, I spent. I think that you said, just do work, show up. I always was able to justify failure because I outworked how, what I would expect out of somebody if I gave up my work or gave up a couple of years of my career if I gave up money. This, to me, is like somebody that definitely didn't take it for granted, worked their butt off, and I don't know if I can fault them. If anything, I, you know, maybe the investors should have reached out more and said, how can we get? What I still feel is missing is the people. So, like, to me, that was where the failure was, was our inability to bring on more the right people to get it to where it was supposed to go. And I say it's a money thing, but it's. I will say we didn't have enough money to prove it wasn't just me wanting more control. But I think I've always loved mentors. I think I would have taken on more.
But when you start doing well, everybody, the bad ones, know how to inch their way in and be around you and warm up to you, hoping you choose them as their mentor. But they really just want this cushy, consultant like job. So you gotta be. You'll get a lot of those, too, when you create something great.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: So when I hear the story of your event, of what you experience was and some of the things you think you may have failed at, I see a lot. I see a lot of reaching out. I see a lot of talking, I see a lot of kind of visualizing, seeing where you're going.
And I would say that for any, whether you are an originator, attempting to talk to realtors, financial advisors, trust attorneys, or whoever your ancillary referral source would be, whether you're an ancillary service like title, escrow appraisal, or AMC or some other service, there's a common thread in all of that, right? It's on one side of all of our fears of failure is one thing, but when we get to the other side, it wasn't the success of getting the meeting, and it wasn't the success of just closing the sale. It actually became the success of creating connection.
And I can not only do I see it, and not only can I visualize it, but I hear it in the social media posts, because people begin to recognize you, Mike, at the shows, and that's because you create a connection.
And through those connections is how we can create closed business. And I think the visualization we have is instead of having this, you know, we just were just coming out of this pandemic where 50% of american citizens that are out there right now, they're talking about being lonely, being depressed, being in a hybrid environment. We even see hybrid environments right now. You could be a doctor, you could be an underwriter. You can be in, you can be even an originator. And you're doing everything by telephone, right? But you're looking at the money because you're desperate for money, but that was just the vehicle and not realizing that you're really looking to create connection. And when you, and then when you create more sales, not only does it create the connection, it also creates that success. And that with that comes with, comes that money. And with that connection, also has the potential of creating not only a connection in your business and with your ancillary sources, but maybe if creating connection with your family would be part of it. That's all part of the deal, because that all. Because everybody's on the train with you in success.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I would say the hardest part about failure might be the fact that the best part of what I did at easy mortgage apps and what other people will do when they actually truly create something, they're building something. So if you're a loan officer, that's, that's one thing. If you're building your own.
Before the app, I created my own networking groups because I couldn't afford B and I, and I loved Rotary, so I said, why don't I take b and I? But we will do service above self type items. And we build it up to like eleven chapters in Massachusetts of ten. So we had about 110 members that met in similar format. That's building something like, if you can get up and build, then the actual process is what I'm saying becomes more fun than when you actually reach the goal. Because when you look back on it, because all your memories are while you were building less of them, are that one day where you celebrate that you, you accomplished it. The problem with failure is when you're all done and you have twelve years worth of stories, it's hard to find somebody that wants to hear them, that has a. Especially in a niche world like loan officer or mortgage tech vendor. Um, you know, I'm not a forced firefighter. Where the stories are, are that fascinating, except to people like me, they are beyond fascinating. And when it's. When the end is the failure, the audience is just harder to find. Where the end is a success. It's like, oh, tell me how you created a billion dollar company.
You might say no. I mean, maybe on podcasts people want to listen, but around a Thanksgiving day table, it's, uh, it's, it'll put people to sleep faster than trip a fan. So it's, it's people, people. My grandfather. Oh, my dad always said, my grandfather always said, everybody loves a winner, Michael. So you gotta show where you won. And then they'll love to hear the stories. And that's the hard part about failure, too. It's like you have this bottled full of great milestones and accomplishments that you did with your, your coworkers and everything. And ill say one more thing. I understand the journey and how many valuable pieces we could take out of it to apply it to different areas. I have seen people that worked for me over the years that just, and obviously, theyre made a little different, but bottle it up as just a failure. And I try to tell them, no, you have learned more than any business school.
These, you were hands on. You were talking to some of the most CEO's of people that put 10,000 people in a home a year, was just talking to you directly. You were doing project management, you were doing this. They relied on all their customers, were touching something that you were in charge of every day. Um, this is what you got to take out of the journey. The failure is just most failures are like, I guess, two things, money driven and two in relationship to competitors. So, yes, we didn't have the exit people expect out of a piece, and therefore, yes, we owe, oh, you know, the investors still waiting to, you know, for that exit. And then two is, yeah, oh, so and so. I mean, people know who I would say, but so and so is who everybody uses today. They don't use you anymore. That's really the only two failures. Everything else was a giant success. Now, that's how I look at it. Obviously, it's, you have to look at it that way, otherwise why'd you keep doing it? So that's, I mean, that's some of.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: My takeaway there, Mike. I sent you a text earlier this morning, and it said, when we share our joy, it multiplies. And when we share our burden, the weight divides.
And I love that. When we have conversations, you're telling me, oh, yeah, talk to this person, talk to this person, shared this and da da success.
And then sometimes when we have conversations about, oh, well, I didn't get, I didn't talk to this other person or this person didn't want to do, ended up not doing something or whatever. You know, it's not that we're commiserating with each other, but we realize and we understand that we can share our joy, we can share our failures or our lack of, uh, we didn't get the appointment, we didn't get the meeting, or we didn't close the business or whatever, but the what? But the burden becomes released. And I think if you're. If you're an originator and you're sitting there going, wow. Yeah, I, you know, I don't have enough realtor connections. I don't have enough financial advisor connections. I don't have. I didn't do a podcast, I didn't do marketing, or I don't know how I did it, but it didn't work. And I think that it's, you know, it's just like when you said, I didn't have the money for b, and I decided to go to rotary, and all of a sudden, boom. You know, you're. You're with other people that are sharing your successes there.
It's not this business of real estate, whether it's in mortgage originations or ancillary services, title, escrow, appraisal, we all share the same burdens on a financial level, on a business level, on a units produced level.
I think it's the perspective of knowing, do we have the willingness to go to the other side? And I think that when I, last week, we talked about the podcast and just doing it, the other side is just having these types of conversations and knowing that it doesn't have to cost a ton of money. But what you do have to do is you have to go do it. And then, number two, you have to be consistent in creating more opportunities so that it's not about creating just failure experiences. It's also about creating your experience and your story so that you can actually create tools to divide the burdens of weight that are on your shoulders financially and having the type of connections that we have on our show in the way that we've been able to network with people and produce business. I think a lot of ways are. I mean, of course, they say that more units, more deals, more calls, close deals.
That eliminates all the problems. But we have to be able to share our burdens and put a little bit of weight on it.
But as we continue the sales journey that we're on, whether you're a leader of an IMB or whether you are a salesperson, we just know that we're just moving on these experiences so that we can move forward. I appreciate that we do this on our podcast.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
I mean, just to take it to the loan officer world, because it's clear that's where you want this to go. This message for loan officers.
What you were saying is now is the time to create groups, find, I would use eventbrite or believe there's another meetup. There's another one like that meetup, yeah. And you just, on meetup there are people that are passionate about what they do. And if you can create groups, be consistent like you heard last week on our podcast, you need to get in front of people and you need to almost be the most consistent out of all of them and find people that you can be around weekly that are relevant. Even if they're loan officers and they're somewhat competitive, go in knowing you're going to outlast them.
And that is where a lot of the business I believe will come from in the future. And when I look back on what I did, it was like at night I planted the seeds, at night I softened the sand, if you will. And then during the day I would do the behaviors, the activities needed to win. So it's like if you have these groups at night, you got to bring more people to these groups. If you're a loan officer, do a group about sustainable housing. But just make sure the people that are there are good at email marketing, like things that you know will contribute to your scalability. You don't want somebody there that is you feel draining the room and making the walls come in. I suppose you want everybody there that is bursting sunlight out those windows and is building more windows and the light can go as far as you can see at night. You should be trying to recruit those no matter what they do. Maybe they are into computers, that's fine. Their skill set might be the ability to use clay and smart lead and teach them how that can, how you guys can work together in mortgage and get that out there. To me that's there's too much information out there to find these people. If you're stuck in a rut, I mean, start putting together these little groups, start leading these little groups and know it's going to be a consistency game and watch this time next year what happens or you can do. I mean, it's the same thing applies to call ten more realtors and ten more of this. The problem is everybody's doing that right now. Sometimes you have to be a little bit different in order to get the passion fire in here and believe in it. And you'll find just, I think through osmosis, if you're out there doing it, more good things happen. And that's what I always did with easy mortgage apps. That's part of how adopt the brand all of a sudden is where it is, is continuing to talk and be there. And at the same time you know, the failure of last time, Washington, I think not bringing in more people because people make the business right, people that would win. And so this time it's how can I start making enough to save enough to bring in the people to do whatever that is the next time. But it's certainly not going back to something where I am just limited to nine to five. And I think that's how I cope with failure. It's if I now lost and now I have to just cope with nine to five to have a retirement, it would hurt. But the fact that I'm still able to keep building, I just say, look, you learn this and now look at your skillset. You should be able to build something bigger and better. Now go do it.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: Can you believe it's almost been an hour?
No, I, you know, this has been this really great. I think this, I think this type of show just isn't just for originators, it's also for anybody. That's mortgage services sales too. And even more importantly, it's for when you are the leader of an operation. I'm not just going to say that you're a CEO of a more of an IMB, but also going to say if you're the CEO of a mortgage team, meaning that you're a team of one.
One originator or one salesperson is to just know that number one, that there are other salespeople that are in here. So I think that when we're getting out, that's week is what western secondary or week after. I'm sorry. And you're going to be at New England, there's a digital mortgage and then mortgage coming up around the same time. And there's a lot of events and I think that sometimes we just go out there and we're looking to get business.
Sometimes we just want to see what's going on. But I think the most important part is to find out and start meeting people instead of looking for the business. I mean that of course is going to be the main goal, but it's also looking to ask questions to find success and inclusion and that success because it might be that you'll be getting referral business from the most unlikely of sources because as a salesperson you were willing to do a little bit more. There's a lot of captains of industry that are willing to do a little bit more. Mike and I see it in the LinkedIn videos. I'm super happy that we did able to have conversations with them on your end.
[00:47:20] Speaker A: As we come here to the top of the hour, the end of the hour, when youre a loan officer and youre switching from company to company, do you think that do you fail? Is there a feeling of failure often that you failed that company in what youre able to do? Or do you think most people leaving, or in your case, do you feel the company kind of changed or you changed and that it's not a sign of, are there any failure remorse at that triggering of changing companies on either side? Like the company failed me or I failed the company?
[00:47:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Most of the time I act, I want to say it this way. I act like it's always the company's fault when leaving a company. But deep in my heart, I feel like I failed because, I mean, I remember multiple times, I remember I was back in the heydays of the early two thousands when everybody was doing 2030 loans a month, or it seemed like everybody was doing 2030 loans about, I was getting recruited and so on and so forth. I felt like if I were to leave whichever organization I was at right now or when I did leave an organization, I felt like, you know, I was angry they didn't processing or whatever, ancillary services or not enough leads or whatever. But it was really like I didn't do enough. I didn't do enough lead origination. I didn't do enough introspection, self discovery to make everybody's position better so that I didn't have to leave.
And, and I would say it, I would still say that even in my current position, it, I would still feel the same way, that I might be angry at other people or the perception may be that I may be angry with other people or disappointed or whatever the situation could be.
But I still take it personally that maybe I just didn't do adopt in leadership, in activities, or in attitude.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: Jeff, thank you for sharing that. And I think that's very normal. And usually, especially in sales, it is going to come down to when things are going really well, you're almost too busy to reflect on if it's going good or bad. So when it starts to slow down, that's usually when somebody leaves a company. And naturally they think the slowdown is not the market but somehow something their employer did. Do you find the industry has failed loan officers by not offering pathways for careers or career enhancements and just making them believe, like in the tech world? I said the outcomes were either you have an exit or your competitor is, you know, you beat your competitor, you, your competitor beat you. Is that similar to loan officers? And they're so sales driven that it's you made President's club or you're the better loan officer in the town. Is there a way to feel like it isn't a failure? Uh, or have they done anything in the career to where you could feel like your journey with that company isn't a failure if, if you didn't sell well?
[00:50:42] Speaker B: Oh, you're, you're on a slippery, slippery rope there, Mike.
I honestly believe right now, every company.
[00:50:50] Speaker A: But the ones that employed you, oh, my goodness.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: I honestly believe that half the originators that are out there, and this is a reduced bunch of originators out there across the United States, we're down, what, 60 or 70% of where we were a few years ago.
I honestly believe half of them are in the wrong spot, whether they're a broker and they should be retail. Whether they're retail, they should be a broker, or whether they're retail and they're in the wrong retail organization.
Whether they're a broker and they're in the Ron broker organization.
I don't really think over half of them know themselves well enough to be at the right company.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: I could see that the industry doesn't really have a strategy around. Slow down. Like, Michael, you're really good with first responders, and you're doing twelve deals a month. We'd rather you do six. You're going to love the culture over here. Do six and treat them really, really good. And we're going to have these new incentive packages for these firehouses and these police stations, and we're really just going to lean in on being a culture play.
If you're doing twelve, you're not the person they're going to pick, right? They're like, we need you at. How can we get you to 16? Can we give you an loa? You know, what can we do? Fast forward six months, the 1214 16 are your metrics for success or failure? Not if you had taken the blue pill and went the other way. Not that that exists, but I think.
[00:52:18] Speaker B: I think the culture, the lie that originators who are in retail, or brokers, too, by the way, the lie that originators tell themselves is that their employer, the broker of record, or their managers that have capital markets and so on, the lie they tell themselves is that the company is earning more and they're not earning enough.
That is when we, a few weeks ago when we had the rep from NARAP.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Jason.
[00:52:52] Speaker B: Jason Rivera. I said, and the comment I said to him, I said, it's so funny that the average originator, the really good ones, they're not earning 80% or 125 basis points because they get it right away. Because with their loas and their systems and their marketing, they're back at 40 bps. Yes, they're doing maybe 1015, 20 units a month, but they're not earning 80% or 125 because after all, they're expensive. They're like at 45% or 45 dips. And he laughed and goes, that's so true.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: I have a kind of a bomb I can drop here. For those that listen to the whole episode I've been holding on to for about two weeks. I just haven't had a chance to tell. Maybe I told you, Mike, I forgot, but I didn't tell you on the show.
Very well informed source, very influential in the industry on the lender side, inform me that the CFPB is having conversations about a universal lo comp piece. And that is a possibility more than I haven't heard anybody reported out there in LinkedIn world. Or it could be behind closed doors.
I won't give up my sources, but something to think about, not something for us to have a show on yet, because we don't want to put it into.
[00:54:10] Speaker B: No, not yet.
[00:54:12] Speaker A: I.
[00:54:13] Speaker B: Boy, I would disagree so hard with that. I mean, it's bad enough that Nar has a settlement and, you know, whatever compensation buyer's agents are supposed to be getting, so on and so forth, I mean, that's kind of a whole bunch of whatever buyers agents are going to get paid no matter what anyway. But to completely socialize. Oh man. Okay, let's not go down that road. But to completely like make everything uniform. Well, it went absolutely clear that a smaller independent mortgage banker, because of the less volume that they do, right Costco is going to buy at a cheaper price versus mom and pop smart shop. And I think that because the larger organizations have cheaper accessibility or less costly opportunity to sources of money, also they have an opportunity of scalability when it comes to processing doc jars and ancillary sources and vendors and so on and so forth, it becomes somewhat of an uneven playing field. Although. And at that point, would it still be fair to say one company is earning more than another? Still not fair to say that only because the originator is not maybe at the right shop.
But boy, when we, when we get there and we talk about the CFPB and we, and we can have a show about that, Mike, hopefully we have a guest to have some discussion about that.
[00:55:34] Speaker A: Yeah, we won't touch that. We have some good guests from the foreseeable future. I think everybody's worried about NAR for the foreseeable future.
The CFPB has to go maybe through an administration change, maybe not with their independents, but they are highly focused on junk fees and I. Some of what they're doing is good.
Some of what they're doing is classic CFPB, you know, blog about it and just throw people in a whirlwind and words against the wall.
We'll see. But they're clearly cutting down junk fees and if they think it's a junk.
[00:56:15] Speaker B: Bee, I want to have an anonymous poll on LinkedIn.
Would you like to see Mark Calabria as head of the CFPB.
[00:56:25] Speaker A: After listening to him on real Talk Fridays?
[00:56:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:56:30] Speaker A: I liked him a lot more after the, after that conversation. I mean, I mean, I. Sorry, I shouldn't.
I felt he was much more human after listening to that than just a regulator. Right. Like he talked about how he has seen 2008 firsthand, how he had the two cooks, I think that were at where he was working come in and show they own four homes and what they were supposed to do and like, you're going to lose all four. He, he has a good heart or it's coming from the right place. He just believes, um, the other piece was just how much he believes that gses should be profitable because they're in bankruptcy. And those LLPas, um, you know, if that's what they need to be profitable, then that's they should have them. So I think that's a little bit where it's differed, but he thinks, you know, that it shouldn't be a handout. And that was, I just, I'd listen to it almost again and take notes. Like that's how good that interview was.
[00:57:24] Speaker B: And yeah, maybe we should do like what they do on social media where, you know, he's talking on the real talk and then we're kind of, we just put our little comments on the side. Oh yeah, by the way, keep pointing.
[00:57:36] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe, maybe we'll get there.
Thank you.
[00:57:41] Speaker B: Great show, by the way.
[00:57:42] Speaker A: Yeah, great show.
[00:57:43] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:57:45] Speaker A: Tune in next week.
We have some great guests coming up. I still can't believe Bill Loman now is in two weeks, August 22 felt so far out, so long. And now it's right around the corner. Thank you again for tuning into miked up show. Please visit us at mike upshow.com miked up show.com to follow us on Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Apple Podcasts. Now if you can give us a review, not just five stars, if you give us a review and I see out there we'll send you some swag. We'll feature you on our LinkedIn, we'll give you a thank you, we'll feature on our mic'd up show. We'll give you a big, big five, five star treatment if you give us a five star thank you, Dan.
[00:58:30] Speaker B: Maybe you might give him a hug too, baby.
