2025 Strategic Planning [Voice Note]

Hello, my friend Jeff Zimfer coming at you with another voice note, these are just some things that I'm going through thinking of sharing and wanting to bring this conversation to you before you head into the weekend. What I'm focused on today having just wrapped our community coaching call with my gene classes is focusing on 2025. Obviously, as I record this, it's Friday, January 10th. And an exercise that I often like to do for myself and some of the folks in our community is we do a performance review, a look back. This is a great way to get some clarity and direction in moving into the new year and in a couple specific areas. So I just want to briefly go through some suggestions you might want to consider utilizing when you're evaluating your goals right for 2025 and the activities systems and habits that are going to hopefully get you there carry you there. So there's two things to look at. Number one is top performing activities. Ask yourself, take a moment right down which activities drove the most revenue and clients in 2024. And it's important to get clear on what those activities are. Because I'm sure there's a lot of different things you do, right? There's a lot of there's potential in everything, but not equal potential. And an important thing if we're going to make real progress, build momentum, not get burnt out. If you want to have a better year perhaps than you did last year or you know at a minimum, duplicated, but most people I talk to are wanting to add to their production volume transaction units. Clearly not every activity you do has the same return on effort. And so it's important to get clear and focus on which of those activities actually did drive the most revenue for you and then make a decision. Do you need to do more of it? Are you simply not doing enough of that activity? It's an area that we find that is easy to get some quick wins in and simply because a lot of people are spread too thin trying to do too many things. And they're not actually quite sure what's truly moved the needle in a significant way. So that'd be the first exercise I give for you is evaluate all the activities you did on a consistent basis. I don't mean just what that you did once, but things that you do consistently. What is it? Are you doing outbound calls to realtors? Are you running ads? Are you doing agents events and classes? Are you doing social media posting videos? Email marketing, database marketing, right? Are you doing calls? You know, you have themed it like whatever it is, right? There should be obviously some consistency in certain key cornerstone activities that you do. And identify which of those drove the most revenue in customer acquisition. That's part one. And then identify. Do you need to remove any of those while this leads into part two of the question, which is underperforming and then underperforming initiatives, which activities and systems didn't meet expectations. Didn't perform at the level you had hoped. Perhaps we're a drain, a drag on your system, you. Which of those activities didn't meet expectations and do you streamline them? See, because it's like if they didn't meet expectations, then what do you what do you left to do? You left to either figure out a way to operationalize those, put them into a process. Because if they're producing enough ROI for it to continue right to be smart to do, then you don't necessarily want to eliminate it per se. You may want to look at is how do you do that more efficiently? So do you streamline it? Do you delegate it or do eliminate it? And spend some time figuring this out. Are you trying to do too much? Very often a case. And so go deeper, identify the top client sources for revenue, percentage of contribution, identify, take a look at also your lead to close ratios. Sometimes it's not that you need to do something brand new or different. It's that you need to simply get better at the thing that actually produces a result. Kind of the two more do better, right? Do the thing that's working more and do it better. And especially in this market that we're in in a transaction recession, there's less transactions over all deals are spread thin. Like if you're if you're a batter and you step into the batter box. Are you trying to get a home run every time? Probably not. Are you trying to get base hits? Probably. Well, what would be the one thing you could do? To be more successful in getting base hits at a minimum. You work on you, you work on your swing, your stance, your right hand-eye coordination, you work on your responsiveness. So in the business context of you listening to this, analyze your conversion rates, identify the bottlenecks and optimize your lead generation process. Otherwise said what needs attention in your business? Is it top of the funnel lead flow? Great. That goes back to question one. The activities that generated the most results for you. And there's probably other things within that activity that also will get you incremental if not sometimes significant leaps in improvement and very simply it could be your conversion process. It could be your talk track, your dialogue, your scripts, your client intake process. If you're already working with clients, I virtually guarantee you you can deliver a better experience for them. One that creates better trust, connection, referrals, both directly with your clients and your referral partners and sources. System and process optimization can reap huge rewards. And then lastly, take a look at your key referral partners. Like if you're listening to this, you probably work with real estate agents to some degree, I want you to take a look back, do an audit of your sources of deals from real to referrals and discuss strategies evaluate ways you can maximize those relationships and minimize the drag from unproductive partners. On our coaching call this morning, Liz, shout out to you, opened up with this concept of bold conversations. Have you ever worked with agents and you're scratching your head, wondering when are you going to get a deal? Like maybe you guys like each other, you got a great connection. It's just that the vibe is there, but the deals aren't coming. Because they don't have the deals or it's because of something else. And look at we're in business. Yes, this business is largely built on relationships. But bottom line, it comes down to you have a family to feed and support so do they. And it's important to get clear on your productive relationships and opportunities. And how do you separate yourself? Right, right, essentially not get dragged down by unproductive partners. You've got to have bold conversations sometimes. Sometimes you just kind of like, you know, disappear, walk away, you know, at an arms length. I mean, I've interviewed lots of loan officers on this podcast who do, you know, 100, 200 or more loans a year. And if you look at their unit count in MMI redder, you'll see that in almost all of those cases, the 200 plus loans, the hundred loans are oftentimes, except for the builder account, right, are oftentimes spread across many, many real estate agents. The thing you've got to be protective of for yourself is the right amount of attention and time given to those ones, you choose the relationships. And do you need more real estate agents or better the answer both transaction recession overall volume of deals are down less to go around. A lot of fluctuation of, you know, coming in and out of the business on the real estate agent side, you need to scale your reach, you need to reach more real estate agents. And it's okay if you have a large percentage of real estate agents where you're only getting a couple of three deals from them over the course of the year. So long as there's no significant drag on you pulling you down right from a time and attention and energy standpoint. So that's why it's important to evaluate your list, but I would say if anything, the one key takeaway from this is top of the funnel opportunity prospect generation lead generation. If we're talking about real estate agents as the source for this conversation, you need more, you need to scale your reach, you need to put a lot more in the top of the funnel, you need to become five mile famous, you need to get your personal brand out there. Another thing we talked about on the podcast is somebody mentioned, you know, Coca-Cola. Like does anybody not know what Coca-Cola is, how it tastes, you know, all those different things, everybody knows Coca-Cola, but why do they still advertise? Because you've got to be top of mind consistency over time. If I don't know you exist, I can't choose you. So what is your method systems and process for becoming quote five mile famous well known? A bunch of different opportunities you can use for that, as you probably know by now, we lead with educational content and classes to attract real estate agents at scale to have conversations at scale that position us in a way that we're not seen as a vendor or solicitor, but more as a partner and appear. So we can have meaningful conversations that scale. One of our members on today's coaching call, Benjamin, what's up, shout out to you, Benjamin's great contribution to today's call said that he's on track to do three million for the month. Most of that coming from leading top of the funnel agent classes, we also talked about on the call about time to lead. Lonnie talked about how, you know, why does it take so long for the realtor to actually give you a lead? Well, some of that is due to because of the market conditions, some of that is due to they just don't have the business. Right, if you look at the stats of the average production of of of of of realtors, right, we know that it's not lots and lots of units. Therefore, you've got to scale your reach. And understand it takes what it takes and more importantly, what are you doing to be top of minus day in front of them so that you're there at the right time, right place when they do have those three deals that they can actually direct your way. You're getting looped in. If you like Coca Coca Cola, if you're not quote advertising. You're not a real business. Oh, but I'm referral, but yeah, so, but how did you get those referrals originally, right? I guarantee you that even if you are largely referral based, you're still staying top of mind in front of those referral partners. Out of sight, out of mind, right? And for many of you listening right now, it's time to double down on your advertising strategy by that I don't necessarily mean paid ads. That's further down the list. The first advertising strategy you have is to think of this concept of running for office running for mayor. If you're going to run for office, be the local mayor, whatever, right, what do you want to do? You want to become known, right? You want to become well known and trusted. You want to have a platform to run on. You want to have constituents. You want to have people that want to vote for you that believe in what you stand for. And too many originators are shrinking. They're hiding behind their desks and their computers and their mobile phones. I say this year, 2025, it's time to step up, rise up. Time to become well known to build your platform, reach more people so that you can get elected, get chosen. Does that make sense? I hope so. Now the question is just a matter of by what means you're going to do it. Okay, that's it for today's episode. Before we wrap up, I just wanted to remind you about my agent classes. You're proven system to double your agent referrals in just 90 days. Imagine never having to call call again, instead building real lasting relationships with top producing agents who want to send you business. With done for your presentations, marketing automation, weekly coaching, it's all designed to make growing your business easier and fun. So if you're ready to take control of your agent referrals and grow your income, visit mortgagemarketing.pro or check the link in the show notes and why you're there. Don't forget to check out the success stories from other mortgage pros who've already seen incredible results. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next episode.