Closing 38 Loans From Posting Videos

Hey, listeners, Jeff Zimper, welcome to another edition of the Mortgage Marketing Radio episode. Thanks for tuning in. Good to see in here you in this episode once again, before I get started. Listen, this episode is brought to you by the my agent classes platform in the Mortgage Marketing Pro membership. And I've got another testimonial hot off the presses coming in right here right now. Carmella and this came in just literally four hours ago, taught the open house class. See what we do is we go into the local market guys and gals and we attract instead of Chase agents. We do that by leading with education, right? We position ourselves not as a solicitor or vendor, but as a partner in peer helping agents and self problems, becoming part of their business if we expect to earn their business. And the tip of the spear for us to reach agents at scale with impact and attract versus Chase is educational classes in person over zoom, both Carmella, one of her superstar peeps. What's up Carmella? She was on the podcast a few episodes ago. Anyway, she just taught our ultimate guide to open houses. This is a proven blueprint system to have profitable open houses. Carmella's results 15 agents registered 10 showed up four agents attended for the first time. Everyone loved the class was very interactive. I got a deal on the spot and three appointments scheduled immediately. The best thing about these classes are sometimes it's not about the quantity, but the quality. So Carmella shout out to you. Thanks for leading from the front as you always do. Listen, you want to learn more? You've heard me talk about this long enough. What are you waiting for? Go to mortgagemarketing.pro, book your call and let's see if we're fit for each other because we're definitely not right for everybody. So go check us out. All right. This week's episode long time coming in in the making. I'm having a fantastic conversation with Travis Newton and James Swift out of Oregon, affectionately known themselves on Instagram as the mortgage dads. And what I wanted to talk about with these two fine gentlemen is how fast they've been able to leverage their presence online with video. And you're going to hear some of the stats. But if you want a couple of highlights, I mean, they've only literally been on Instagram with video for 11 months. And I believe what he said in those in the 11 months, they have closed 38 loans. That's not just loans, you know, that's closed, not including loans under contract. That's not including their other business they get from other sources. That is an ad on that is icing on the cake. 38 loans in the last 11 months since they've pushed the go button. So what we do is we unpack their content strategy, how they're attracting agents. As a matter of fact, 60% of the agents they're working with right now. They've attracted over the last eight months. And you can hear some pretty cool stories about attracting $100 billion producer and how they're leveraging their presence online, their brand, their content online. To actually also surprise, surprise, teach agent classes. That's right. They're leading with education just like you heard me talk about in the promo piece a minute ago. But I think you get a lot of good nuggets from these two guys and I definitely encourage you to follow them. And because in the show notes, Instagram handle is James dot and dot Travis on Instagram. You can also find them on the TikTok, same handle and all the other fine places you get your social media content. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Travis and James, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks. Let's do this housekeeping. First of all, we need to know who's who because most of these people are listening. They want to know whose voice is who. So Travis, why don't you kick it off? Who are you? What do you do? Kind of how long in the biz? All that. Yeah, Travis Newton on the one with the gray hair. That's what I've been known by. I've been in the business for about about 23 years now, but go on 24. James, I both work for synergy one lending. I'm the VP of production, one of the VP's production for synergy. And yeah, I just love doing loans. It's there's nothing better than that. Awesome. James. Hey, yep, I'm James. So just the condensed version of who I am. I served in the military for 20 years. During that time, Travis and I were great friends, be coached sports as our kids were growing up together on the same sports teams. And during my time in the military, I was always sending all my veteran friends to Travis to get their VA loans. So when I was coming up on military retirement, Travis was like, hey, why don't you come into this business with me? So I've been doing this for about two and a half years now post military career. Awesome. Thank you very much for setting the context of that. All right. So you guys are referred to on Instagram as the mortgage dads. We're going to put links to all your stuff in the show notes and everything like that. That's kind of a personal title. Did you give much thought to choosing that? No, it kind of morph. We were just James and Travis. That's what we've been kind of known as. But we just started making hashtags and we just decided to start to just do the mortgage dads. And then that kind of morphed up to the top of our bio. And so now we're just James and Travis, the mortgage dads. Well, I mean, I read that. And as you guys know, when people look at your Instagram bio, you know, that's a mini billboard. And that's a chance to learn some things about you or make some type of a connection by having some uniqueness up to your bio there. So I think that calls out is pretty cool because, you know, as a fellow dad, number one, number two, you know that, you know, your vibe attracts your tribe. Right? Right. Well, and, you know, one of the things that Travis and I talked about, like, this is a relationship's business. Right? And so, you know, we're putting in our content and in our titles, like, who we are. And so really, if we are to be like factual about what's important to us and putting out first, we'd be the dad's mortgage, but it just doesn't flow well that way. Right? So it's the mortgage dads because we're putting ourselves out there as, you know, this is, this is who we are. People who haven't met us know when they watch our videos, like what you get. And we put a lot of our family in our stories and all that kind of stuff because we're building relationships with potential clients through social media. So. And I think that is the first teaching point of this discussion today, which is, you do not need to put mortgage loan officer. Right? Right. We do later. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. We try to keep to keep our family and all the things we do outside of work as part of our bio. You know, James and I have coached together for a long time. And like you mentioned, we've probably coached together for, I don't know, 13 years or so. And so, you know, we do a lot of stuff together. Like now we're, now we're going to go referee games together. There's this fall for some junior high steps because they're short on referees. And we thought, you know, we can still give back and our kids are done with schools. So we can get back and do some refereeing. But, and so we'll make some content out of that and do some fun stuff with it. Yeah. We just try to make keep everything fun. I mean, the mortgage business and the real estate business as a whole is just, it's stressful at times. We all know that. And we'll get into more details on this. But I was just tired of doing business the old way. I'm grinding and going home and just feeling drained all the time. So James, I partnered up. It just rejuvenated me for sure. Yeah. We're going to get into that for sure. But I don't want to leave like the bio. I just noticed it says, we make the home buying process fun, upping buyers, sellers and real estate win. That has some personality. So if I'm, you know, I don't know what, do you have any sense of like your average age of your client? Are you trending a little younger, 30, 40-ish? Well, James, you can answer that. Well, it depends. Yeah, yeah. So it really depends on what audience we're talking about, right? Right now we're working with a lot of her time home buyers. So a lot of our clients on the buyer direct side is a little bit younger. But we also track the metrics and the performance of our videos. And we're also seeing that the, that our primary target viewer is like 40 to 55 year old women. So, you know, we're just, uh, we're posting content that appeals to all sorts of people, I guess. And so yeah, so we're working with a lot of real estate agents that, you know, and the, um, kind of in those categories. Getting a lot of DMs, right? Right. Sometimes they're interesting, right? All right. That's good. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So we just been, I mean, Jay, we've been on there with our personal sites and tried to do our own behind for a while. But, but the James and Travis page, we started that basically October, first October, second. And I went all in on video that day. Like we posted a, a lame picture with both of us up on the top of the stratosphere. And we were there for mortgage mastermind. And that was the first post we made. And then I just went off from there. But yeah, we told it's only been roughly 10 months of content. Okay. So that was kind of like you're coming out party or your commitment. You're sticking the ground of like, damn it. We're doing video. Yeah. Yeah. That was it. What convinced you to finally make that leap? Yeah. Well, like Travis said, we went to a mortgage mastermind event in Vegas in the end of September. And going there, we had discussed on the way they're like, okay, we're going to take away one nugget, right? There's going to be a lot of great speakers there. They're all going to have a great strategy. But if we take every single one of the strategies that we hear about when we go home, we try to implement them, then we're going to become the master of nothing. Right. We were like, we're going to take away one thing. So on the first day, there was a guy by the name of Neil there that runs forward academy. And he gave a talk on video. And we had, you know, we've been hearing the videos is the way to go for a long time. And it was, it was mesmerizing because not only was he sharing his success and that we needed to get started in video. Because that's what people already know, right? You already know we need to get started in video. He shared the how and that, that's what was powerful is he is, he took away that hurdle of how to get started. So we essentially got done with that. Well, we signed up for his, for, for his program during that class. And, and once that class was over, we went back up to our hotel room. We spent the rest of the conference didn't even go back to listen to another speaker because we knew that that was our one nugget. And we had put together our plan. We had ordered all of our lighting and microphones, you know, they were, they were at our doorstep at home before we even got back from Vegas. We took a selfie at the top of the stratosphere to get our page started and we started right then zero followers, zero following zero posts. We are all in on this. Let's go. So that's, that's how it all started. Okay, so that was 11 months ago. And what have you loans, you were telling me to have us closed so far directly from that your presence with video. Yeah, just the video alone, we're about 38 loans. Closed and a lot more under contract. Just in that amount of time, just from video alone, I'm not talking our regular sphere or, you know, repeat the real business. These are just new relationships that were built from video. And again, we went in with the mindset of, you know, because we've all had bad experiences with real, real estate agents. And there's some really great agents. There's some that you'd rather not work with, right? And so during my time, I had, you know, I was getting business from some people. I just, it wasn't jiving. It wasn't, it wasn't fun, right? And so I thought, James, let's go all in on consumer direct. And then we can give these, these loans or these, you know, these leads to the agents we want to work with, right? So that was our mindset going in. But then it didn't take very long for us to realize that, you know, there are, there are still some incredible agents out there that have the same mindset, same vision we do that we want to work with, right? And that want to work with us. And so this really morphed into a real estate lead generation where we go teach classes to a lot of folks. It still still does generate, you know, some consumer direct to us. But I mean, I'd say 90% of our pages just relationship based with real estate agents. Yeah. So let's unpack this a little bit because there's a lot of people are wondering, how does that, how does you posting your content, your videos? Obviously, you got to go to your page, which we'll link in the show notes. It's, uh, it's James dot and Travis is your Instagram page, right? Yeah, James dot and dot Travis, correct. Sorry. Uh, and so it's interesting the content because I don't see, now this is, this is where I kind of go. All right, let's talk about this because there's different types of content you can put out there. There's the educational financial literacy type stuff. There's the entertaining. Are you trying to do a blend of both or do you have a strategy? Yeah, I'll jump on that a little bit and then Travis, if you want to chime in. So when we first started out, it was all educational, right? What we call them are talking head videos, right? It's just like you had like, hey, here's, here's information about, you know, how to invest in real estate, how to buy your first house, you know, different, different stuff like that. And then after we got comfortable and we started to develop our own brand, right? We were following a program and it was to get started program. And then once we kind of started to get started, like, okay, we need to start putting our own, like flare on this. Like who are we? Well, we're going to be with a couple of, you know, dads that we have fun in the office. We have a, you know, a funny sense of humor. And we want to attract clientele that wants to work with us based on who we are. And so we decided to really just start kind of dabbling at first into kind of what we refer to as the funny stuff we think we're funny. And, you know, at the risk of, you know, pushing people away and not maybe liking in the content. But, you know, not to say it hasn't pushed people away, there might be some people out there that don't think we're as funny as we think we do. But that we've had an overwhelming response from, you know, putting out comedic stuff or stuff that we, you know, share with other, you know, content creators and as well as our own educational stuff. So that we're putting variety in there. And what besides just having working with people who have the kind of same sense of humor that we do and that kind of stuff. It also creates, like you said, variety in our page so that when we do post something, it's like, oh, okay, well, here's, here's just another info, commercial from James and Travis, right? So we're educating, but we're also like reaching people by, you know, kind of showing our sense of humor side. You're being yourselves, I think. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I like that. And it's okay to, to, to, you know, if you're going to be yourself, you're going to repel some people, by the way. Yeah. You know, I'm reminded of a friend of mine in San Diego, Sean Kayhan, who I've had on the show a couple of times, he's the mortgage geek. And if you guys have heard of him, but follow him on, on instant, everywhere else. And he definitely alienated a lot of people when this is going back four or five years. When he came out with this little, literal character with glasses and tape on the, and just was, you know, obscenely goofy. And it gets that we're borderline like, you know, look him up yourself. But anyway, both things happen. You repel some and you attract others, which leads me to the next question is, Travis, you were telling me beforehand, what's now happened? So, so you mentioned 38 loans closed in 11 months because of your video presence. But the other thing that's happening is people are like reaching out to you. Tell me the real T1 story. Yeah, we just got, we just got a message this morning. It's probably an owner of a real T1 franchise. And he said, hey, we, again, I think the most important thing to think about here is, is you don't know the impact you're making on somebody until they finally let you know. You don't, and again, we're doing all those videos. Someone's not going to reach out until they need your service, whether it be a consumer or a pro partner, right? In this case, this, this owner of this brokerage has been sitting back watching us for 11 months and just messes me and James today and saying, hey, I love what you guys are doing. You have some variety and your stuff is great educational stuff. I love for you guys to come teach a class for us, you know, later this fall when they're getting their, they're getting their classes step now. And so we had two of those today, you know, from, from broker owners who are asked us to come, come teach their, teach social media, teach reels to their agents, right? And, and you know, with the classes that all the classes that you teach Jeff are incredible. And I think that's what, that's what loan options don't understand right now is that agents don't want us to call on 25 times a year and ask them to go to coffee. Like they're getting that same phone call from 50 other loan officers who are starving for loans, right? What they want us to do is help them provide, we need to provide value to them that helps put food on their table, not ours, right? And so that's what these classes, that's what your whole program is about. That's what James and I have been about before we joined your program, of course. But, but we're just teaching adding value. If you go back and look at all our videos, there aren't called actions on any of them. We don't, I mean, which is, which goes against everything we've ever been taught and sells people, right? But we don't do called actions, we just provide value, provide value and win. And if they need us, we're top of mind. And if I could add to that, just a tiny bit. Also, when we go out and we teach these classes, we're not, it's not a this for that deal, right? We're going out and we're going to teach them, we're going to educate them and show them how this has been successful for us. And then we leave. We're not saying, hey, by the way, you know, we love to be your preferred lender, that relationship builds itself because we are giving. And so we've really adopted the give, give, give, give mentality because you will receive from that. And it's been, it's been outstanding. Jeff, for example, right before this, for about an hour and 45 minutes, we just had an agent from a different Realty One office come into the office. And James spent an hour and 45 minutes with us showing her how to edit her own video on CapCut. That's it. And not one time do we talk about loans? Do we ask for business or just providing value? Yeah, I love that this conversation. And I had a call actually yesterday with a guy who I've had two conversations with about my platform specifically. And he was trying to connect the dots of like, well, so what do you mean? Are you saying you don't like how do you get business? He's like, you don't ask. Well, look, there's different bird like you could ask if you want elegantly. But you just illustrated that if you just reciprocation, you're adding so much tremendous value that is so fresh and new for them. They can't help but feel compelled to want to give back, right? And now work with a lender like you guys who's like, I'm not just a place to get alone anymore. As I often say, I love this saying, which is if you want to earn their business, you need to become part of their business. This is one way you're doing that. You also mentioned something earlier, Travis, if I wrote down 60% of the agents you're working with right now are new over the last eight months. Yeah, yeah. So James is doing the math today before we jump on the call that we have some good relationships already, right? But again, 60% of our business right now is coming from agents that are new to us in the last, you know, really probably the last six months really hit everything pretty hard. So, and that's only beginning. For example, and again, I think again, what loans have to understand and what people who are doing social media understand is that the number one thing you can do on social media to gain followers and to add value is to engage with their content. Not ask them to engage with your content, but you go engage outwardly with their content, right? And, and that always comes back to, you know, two, threefold. So, the other day, I, we've been, I've been there's that there's an agent about an hour north of us who I've been trying to, to get a coffee appointment for 20 years with her incredible Asian $100 million producer. You know, incredibly sweet, but never gave me the time that I didn't know who I was. So, I started last eight months, I've been coming on her stuff. She, she turned around a common on ours and vice versa. And then about a month and a half ago, she asked us to, to teach a Zoom class to all her folks. We did that. It was incredible. And, uh, before we taught that, she gave us a referral. So, we, we, we got, we could, we've actually just closed today. So, this is somebody who's a $100 million producer who, uh, to now loves us because we came and provided value to her, to her team. And we, after that Zoom call, a week and a half later and so we went back up to her office and then recorded her a few of her agents recorded and helped them edit some stuff. And so now they have content that they're putting out. And, uh, she's super appreciative of that. And, and that's again, we didn't ask for any business. It just, it came to the body value. And what, is this the same agent you were telling me about? She said you guys were talking about like other allos hitting on her. And she was like, you know, she's like the most attractive girl at the dance or whatever. That's a different one. But, yeah. The different one. The other story is that that's a gallery where we, we, we had, uh, something an event with yesterday. But, uh, it's funny. She, when she started posting about us, how she's got her new lending team and because she doesn't want to refer to people anymore. She's just done with that. She goes, I want a team that I trust. And she goes, and I trust you guys. And again, that all came from video. She didn't know us. Um, we, we met, and we met up in, uh, Wilsonville for lunch. And, and she was, I want you guys to be my team. The first time in a matter. And so, and she goes, but now that she's mentioning us on, she's tagging us and everything. Now all the, all the low noses are coming out of the web work saying, Hey, you know, we, we didn't actually together. She goes, Nope, I'm good. So again, it all comes down to just us creating that value through video because once we meet them, they already know us. They've watched, they've watched us do stupid stuff and just stupid dances for the last 10 months. Well, um, okay. So look at this isn't the first time that people listening have heard about, like, do video and all that kind of stuff. Obviously you guys heard about it before you made your decision. What, what advice or suggestions do you give people that, like, what are the hurdles that you discovered when you got started? And what could you share with them that maybe shorten their learning curve? You may jump on that one. Okay. Well, a couple things. And some of the things I'll say we also heard before, but I'm just going to echo them because they're true. Get started. You look like what you look like. You sound like what you sound like. Quit waiting to lose that extra five pounds. Quit waiting to get your hair done. You know, one of the examples that we give to real estate agents when we go talk to them. We say, Hey, your phone rings right now. And you have a client that says, I want to go see this house and make an offer. Are you going to say, Hey, can we, can we connect in like a couple of weeks after I lose a couple of pounds? Or are you going to say, let's go, right? And so you have to adopt that same mentality with video. Just get over it. Um, and, uh, and then the other thing that we, that we, um, we do is we, besides saying, Hey, just get started is we help them remove some of the hurdles that we had. Again, that's why Nils program was so powerful and why we decided to get started with it is we teach them the how they already know the why we don't need to, we don't need to teach them the why they've already been hearing for years that they need to get started on video. So we teach them the how we talk about, you know, the algorithms of the different social media platforms. We talk about how to move past people's kind of short attention spans and how to grab their attention right away. And then try to keep their attention and then get out before they're bored with your content, right? And so really we teach them the how and, and we show them how easy it is. And, and that's the sort of removing is like, I just don't know how to get started or I feel like I look silly on video or I, I feel like I sound, you know, funny. Those are the main things that we're tackling when we're trying to like show them how to get started, I guess, and what was removed for us to get started. And do you ever, I mean, how do you draw the or where do you draw the line in terms of, you know, not becoming a social media coach, right, and a video editor and all that kind of stuff for these agents. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, honestly, we will show them kind of how to edit in the beginning so that we can teach them how to be self sufficient because one of the, you know, again, we want to remove the hurdle. So if they're not ready to hire an editor and they just want to get started on content on their own, we want to provide that how so we do show them how to edit in some pretty basic. Software like CapCut so that they can be self sufficient, but then then we also let them know about some editing services that are available and we tell them our story about how we started out editing our videos and how our business has grown from that. But because we know that our business has grown from video, we don't want to stop doing videos. So now we had to scale our team now we have an editor now we have, you know, so to keep all those things going. So to kind of bring it back to finishing answering your question, being being a social media coach per se is actually what we want to do. We want to be the one that is on the tip of the spear and just kind of like, you know, just a couple of months ahead of the of the next person so that we continue to add that value. Now staying video editors, we're not going to we're not going to do that because that's not in our will house. There's plenty of places to outsource that so what you're ultimately you're giving people the direction like if they need help with the sport. Yeah, and that's why the way not to sound over the self promotional you guys have now joined our program, but that's like in our classes when it comes to reels, whatever. Right. It's like, okay, here's your choices. Do it yourself. Yeah, outsource it five or upwork, whatever, right. And so you give them the direction and then that's like then they're grateful for that alone. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Very nice, very nice. Okay, so what is your tell me about how you actually schedule your content in terms of filming, posting, all that stuff. Well, we have our 15 or 20, you know, maybe 15 or 18 talking head videos that we do every month, right. And again, we get a lot of those scripts from Neil, right, and his program, which is incredible and you're on those calls all the time, Jeff. But not all the scripts are great. We make our own scripts through chat GPT, right. For example, we have a guy at our work, named Scott Groves. Scott does console owns consolidate coaching and. And so Scott made an awesome post the other day about, you know, loan officers in the business, the realtors and. And I told Scott I called him say, hey, I'm taking your exact script and I'm making a video out of it, unless you're going to do it because no, go ahead. So I recorded the, I just went to, went in there and recorded the video on pretty much everything he said. And it was a great video course. So I look for content in different ways. And so we do, we do a ton of that. When it comes to our funny things, like we have two to record this week, because I'm going to be gone next week. We have to record a couple in the next couple days. We don't know what we're going to do. Like, like we will sit down for about five minutes, look at a couple things and we, okay, let's do this. And then we, as we're recording it, we just add things to it. So all the funny videos that we send out every Friday to our real estate partners. Those are the kind of outlets and we just kind of, they kind of morph into something as we're doing them. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you, you said, you said Friday videos, we sent out to our realtor partners are those ones that don't go on your social or. They eventually go on the social social. Okay. Now, why are you sending it to them ahead of time? What's the idea there? Well, we want to want that to be a more personal touch, right? So every Friday, we use the reach app, R E A C H, great app. I think it's like eight bucks a month. Because it's an app that comes from our own phone, right? It's our own phone number, right? And so, and it looks like it's coming just specifically to them because we can put their name on there and it's it's genuine and unique. But again, we're just the nice, the nice, funny video that we do every Friday and they're accustomed to it now. So we'll get, you know, five or six agents every Friday. If it's not out by noon, they start text us like, hey, where's the video today? And I guess we'll really wait about an hour before James ends up posting it to Instagram anyway because, you know, we want everybody to see it because we do spend, you know, some time. Again, we think we're really funny in some of those. So we want, we want to share it. Yeah, you know, so, so really it started out this group, right, from just the text, right? Every Friday, we would send out to all of our real partners that we're working with or want to work with just saying, hey, we hope you have a great weekend. We know you're out there showing homes to clients this weekend. If you need anything from us, we're available, right? So every Friday, we were sending that out. Then once we started adopting video, it didn't stop with posting to Instagram. We're like, hey, video is powerful. Let's add video to everything we do. So we started adding a video to these text messages, right? And so, and so we started putting our sending them our funny stuff, you know, that was a funny mortgage related in a way video, along with the message of like, by the way, we're available all weekend if you need us. And so we've grown our, the power of video in our minds from not just posting on social media, but when we get a new application from a client, we're sending a video saying, hey, this is, hey, you, this is me. Like, here's my face when our clients put an offer on a home or sending a video to listening agent saying, you know, hey, let me tell you a little bit about our client, why they'd be a strong offer. Video is so powerful beyond social media, and we've applied that to every aspect of our business. Yeah, for example, I also sent one today, Jeff, when we had the funding with that big agent today, I sent her a video just just let her know how much heart felt appreciation that we are for her trustiness to help with these clients. So what's in the video for everything now, so all we do, but, but one of the things I want to mention that James kind of touched on was, was agents don't have weekends off. If you're a good agent, I mean, you work, you're working, you're working weekend. So in the verbiage of that text, I always say, as always, James and I will be available all weekend, because we work the hours that you work. So I think, and again, that speaks to all different agents and the hours that they work, we're going to be available whether whether you're whether you cut it off at noon on Saturday or you're working till five on Sunday, like James and I are available to help with a pretty approval to answer some questions. Again, in this market, if you're a loan officer who's not, you may want to rethink that because we've gotten deals from that, we've got a phone calls on a Saturday night and said, hey, my client is putting in an offer right now, they need to pre-approval, they can't get a whole little lender, can you approve them right now? Yep, we're on it. Yeah. A choice you got to make. On those video emails that go out to real estate agents, you know, before Instagram, how many of those are on that list? How many agents received that video? Roughly. We have 140 people that received that list or received that text on Fridays. 140 agents on a weekly basis, you're able to create engagement with, make an impact with, make laugh, create a connection with. And I'm highlighting this for you, the listener right now, because I talk to a lot of loan officers every week and they fill out a form and I ask them, how many agents do you have in your database? And you guys would not be surprised how many people in this business 10 plus years have zero agent database. And I'm like, how the heck are you able to stay top of mind and stay engaged over the long term? You know, so that one strategy, even of itself, even if you're not sending video, if you're still not ready to do video, something of, quote unquote, value, even if it's just a message you guys had, hey, I'm available weekends. You know, it's funny. Like that's nothing new, we just need to be reminded sometimes. Yeah. What simply we could do and you leveled it up with a video. And you'd be surprised at what response rate we get back on that. So out of the 140 and it's started with 60 and we just grown as most classes, right? So we've had one person opt out. Only because they. Right. Good. That person has actually sent us transaction since. Oh, no, they don't, they just don't work, they don't like. Whatever, whatever. So we're good. We have one person, but we, our response rate, when we send out a video, it ranges from about 30 to 60% of those 140 will send us a heart back or that's awesome or guys that was funny or that with my favorite one yet. I mean, every Friday afternoon, I'm constantly returning, you know, engagement back and forth. And so that's the coolest part is that I spend Friday afternoon just engaging with these agents. And it morphs into talking about what they're doing this weekend or they're showing some clients or whatnot, right? So it's been huge for us. And I think you've mentioned briefly there how you get agents on that list partly is some of the classes. Yeah. So the registering or whatever and they're capturing emails. Yes, this would be huge for, I mean, anybody who's, you know, following, you know, your success in your classes. I mean, again, anybody who signs up for that class that tens of these classes were teaching. We will add them to our, our focus 40, right, which is now a focus 140, right? And so if they've been to a class or signed up for something, now they're going to be part of this. And if they want to opt out great, but, but now they're getting something of value. And again, I sent it out, I sent it, I usually sent something on Monday or Tuesday as well, just a kind of a motivation. Like it's either a video or, or sometimes it's a text or just something to keep them engaged love. No, we're here for one and two, I just think that in the market, we're in loan officers, you know, coaches like yourself, real stages, they need. We all need just some action motivation and someone to let us know, dude, it's going to be okay. We're going to get through it, right? Well, it, you know, it really makes me think is, you know, we have different types of loan officers. We've got the very analytical loan officer who loves loans and freaking it out, you know, all that kind of stuff. I'm, I'm, that was never me. I'm sensing that's probably not so much you guys are. No, no, okay. No. And I think that's hard for a lot of the people that are like, you know, I love structuring loans, you know, and doing freaking you and all that. And I think the problem is, is that, yes, we're looking for a knowledgeable expert. But, you know, that's not what's going to get you to the dance, right? It's the, the mantra we've played out at nauseam, the connection, the engagement. And I'm thinking of the Michael Gerber thing from the emith, which is like the system is the solution. So it's all about client attraction, engagement, and conversion. And the system is the solution. You don't have a system for those three things. And you're, one of your clients is realtors. You're going to struggle consistently. So the fact that you've taken that from 40 to 140 and then you'll take it to 240, 340. You will have, you know, this buffet of sources of business, right? The realtor says one example, Instagram, socialism, et cetera, et cetera. You keep building these additional pillars of business. So you mitigate or minimize your risk exposure with market cycles. Absolutely, you know, talk about his favorite ability now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Travis, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what you're talking about. But one of the first things that we talk to agents about when we go out and talk to them about the power of social media is that your, your, your disability is more important than your ability. It does not matter if you are a walk, walk in psychopedia with the knowledge of real estate for the last 30 years. Or if you're a lender and you know the regulations in and out and someone can ask you any question on the spot and you're spitting it out. It doesn't matter if you can't get in front of people, right? And so you got to be visible. And if someone asks you a really tough question, is that of the ordinary? Well, I know where to go get the answer, right? But you got to get, you got to be in front of people or your ability doesn't mean anything. There you go. It's the old secret agent thing, right? Yes, we always talk about that with agents like your visibility is much more important than your ability. And again, it comes with video you've got to be visible to people. And we always talk about, you know, in our videos about teaching and reaching. You know, and that those are those two things are completely different, but they're equally important. You got to teach them, but you got to be able to reach them. What we mean by reach them is with your own face with your own brand. Like you can, you can't just just put a keeping current matters, you know, stagnant photo on there and expect that to get traction and get people to call you, right? I mean, to throw a green screen up and now your face is on there talking about that. Right. Because of stagnant picture, right? Or whatever it is, but you need to be the face of everything you're doing. Right. That's how you reach people. That's how you get engagement. 100%. And that's, I think, part of what's playing for your success is, you know, when people view your content, they immediately get a sense of who you are. And that is what that's the game in today's world. Like I want to be able to like, when you go to Instagram page, the worst thing is that it's private. Number one, I'm out of all of that page. And then number two, I guess you mentioned the keeping current matters. If the Instagram, now this is specific to our industry. I understand travel and everything is something different. But if we're talking about a person, you know what I mean, you, me, insurance, real estate, whatever. If I can't personally connect, see that person, I can't build trust with that person. So that's why you do need to start putting some images and video out there. Damn. All right. So lastly, what are you trying to finish this year strong in what lane or what category? Yeah, I can answer that. I just think we want to get, we want to get better at all aspects. So right now we're dialing in our procedures with our team because we're going to, we're going to be about 14, 15 loans for about 5.7 or so or 5.5 this month. And, and we've noticed some deficiencies on our end, too. Like not to start team is like it's like we are not keeping track of certain things we need to be really on top of, right. But again, it's a fine line because we want to make sure we can still do these types of things that bring in the loans, right. So we're dialing those things in. But the one thing I want to make sure it understands it's not about having a video go viral or getting a tons of likes on it because I could care less if my, if we have a, we had one that went for 90 hundred thousand something like that. I don't care about that because half the views were in Russia or India. I'm not licensed there. We're not helping them, right. So we care more about the, the DMs and the engagement that comes from it than anything else. So don't get caught up when you see another loan officer who has 150,000 followers. Like that was, they got all those followers before the algorithm changed on on Instagram and, and now it's a lot different, right. If we would have started our page about seven months prior, we'd probably be 60, 70,000 now. We have like 2,500, but 2,300 of them are all local real estate agents in Oregon. And that's, that's all we care about. Yeah, local celebrity, that's the goal. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. It's like when, you know, when people think of mortgage, right, are you one of the first people they think about. Yeah. That's the game you're playing. That's awesome. All right. Well, listen, guys, you've shared a lot of value. You're doing an amazing job. We're going to put links into the show notes for so people can follow you on Instagram. DM you, make comments, all that kind of jazz. Can't, can't say I appreciate. Look at, I know you're busy, busy, busy. Thank you for making time. This is only what 10 years into making Travis for you and me to have a conversation together. I'll have to, I'll just share that story on, on the, on the private Facebook group, about how we really kind of met. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm a big fan and appreciate you guys being part of our pro member group as well. And looking forward to, you know, helping you guys get further results with your classes. So thank you to both of you. Yeah. Thank you. All right, listeners, you know what to do if you like this episode. And I know you do. So go ahead and leave us a review and check the resources in the show notes. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey guys, what's up? Real quick. You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before. And I just want to quickly remind you if that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchase loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling. Done for you agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you. Everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market. Attract and convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug-and-play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seats, partnering with affiliates real easy. But that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top L.O.'s authors, speakers, and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time, for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere from 8 to 50 transactions in the last 12 months. And we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you so you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at mortgagemarketing.pro, see more of the success stories there. And if you feel compelled to do so, book a call. We'll have a chat. We'll see if it's a fit. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now. Head over to mortgagemarketing.pro.