Creating Residual Income in Your Mortgage Business

Hey, what's up, everybody? Jeff Zimper. Of course, your humble host for the mortgage marketing radio podcast. Thank you for tuning in to this episode. As always, we appreciate you listening and even appreciate you taking a moment to leave a review. That helps us reach more people. And we've got some ambitious goals coming up for the year end of this year and new year. As we approach our 300th episode, if you haven't yet taken time to leave us a review, sure we'd appreciate that right now. Wherever you're listening, Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you do listen, feel free to leave us where you thank you for very much for being a listener. However long you've been here. Okay, so before we get into my special guest this week, I want to give a shout out to one of our mortgage marketing pro, my agent class members, Eric Carson out of Florida, shout out to Jeff and this platform. Eric hosted a chat GPT class yesterday for a team who reached out to him after seeing a post for the class that he had hosted last month after they were finished with the class. One of the agents shared with me how last month was her best month with over six million in sales and said she's looking forward to working with us in the future. That's the agent telling Eric who just sold six million dollars for the month. She's looking forward to working with him. The post class feedback was excellent and so much better than doing open houses or cold calling. So what is Eric doing? Eric is doubling down. He's repeating this exact same class off to host another chat GPT class today for an insurance agent and her realtors. Eric closes out by saying having lots of fun providing value, helping agents increase their reach and not just quoting rates. Here's to continued success and collaboration. Eric, here's to you for being an action taker and just want to acknowledge you for being one of the bright spots of our community. For sure, congratulations on executing this you've demonstrated here by your success story that this is the most efficient highly leveraged way to scale your agent engagement and referrals as compared to other methods out there. So shout out to you, my man. Okay, this week my special guest, oh, by the way, if I forgot, you know what to do, you want to learn more? Check out mortgagemarketing.pro, go there, learn more about how you can achieve the same results as Eric, mortgagemarketing.pro or see the link in the show notes. Okay, now on to my special guest. See, we just do it right from the hip here folks, no fancy editing, none of that kind of stuff coming at you raw and real. My special guest this week. It's been a long time coming for this conversation. My who I will I will refer to now as a friend as we've gotten into each other over the past year or so. Kevin Ducey who is with comma insurance and Kevin and I are talking about your future wealth, your future as an investor as a business owner. And depending on where you are in your career trajectory, where you are in terms of your financial situation, your available assets for investing. Look, I think the bottom line is this is after you've been in this business for some time, you're looking to probably build scale, you're looking to build some autonomy, you're looking to build some margin, you're looking to build systems and or teams in place so that everything is not solely dependent upon you, right? And so there's a few different ways to do that, right? Obviously you can build a team, you know, right? You could become kind of a branch manager and make overrides, right? There's all these different options. And then if you want to actually invest, right, become a business owner, if you will, well, there's different ways to invest. You can buy real estate, you can buy different businesses and laundromats and whatnot franchises and all that kind of stuff. However, perhaps it makes sense to consider investing in something that is a, you know, a dotted line from your already current area of expertise invest in something that you already have a certain level of familiarity with, but invest in a business that doesn't demand, right? Your time, right? But allows to leverage off of the goodwill off of the results you've delivered for your clients and partners over the years and to capitalize on that. And of course that's why today we're talking with Kevin about you potentially investing in your own insurance agency. Now before you freak out and make a bunch of assumptions, hold your judgment, listen to this conversation because what if you could invest in a business that didn't require your time, that didn't require hiring, right? That didn't require you securing a location or taking care of all the legalities in the paperwork and all that, but simply build a recurring residual income for you over the long term. So when, so you're building for the future, so there's, you know, kind of this exit out strategy for you down the road instead of having to redo, right? Repeat every year all on you, all on your back. Maybe that's a picture to you, maybe not. Maybe this is right for you, maybe not, but hey, maybe it is. There's only one way to find out. Listen to this episode and if you find it intriguing and you think you might be a fit for it, well, then I definitely encourage you to chat with Kevin. You go to the link in the show notes and the link is y, comma, why, comma, comma.com. And that's where you can go learn more about that. Read some of the success stories. Learn a little bit more about comma and then schedule a call with Kevin. And maybe it's a fit. So that's it. I think this conversation will be very insightful for you guys and hopefully get you thinking about, you know, your long term strategy here for the future because that's what I want you to do is succeed and have all the wealth and success and happiness and fulfillment that you deserve. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Kevin, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Jeff. It's been a pleasure and to know you and finally get on the show excited. And thank you. Yeah, and it's been a journey to get here. I know you and I've been talking about doing this for what a year. It's been, it's been a while. I mean, when you constantly see the same people with the conferences all the time and you become friends over time and just try to find the time on the schedule. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad to be able to do it as well, because I think this is a very interesting conversation because it's one, like I remember when I was an originator, I wasn't thinking about being a business owner, right? I was thinking about where's my next loan coming from, right? In a lot of ways. And, and, and you know, the, the, the, the hamster wheel of just that month after month after month of like, you know, and then at the end of the year, you're like, oh, look back. Here's what I did. And you're like, okay, January, time to do it again. You know, and at some point for those who've been in this industry for a while, that gets, I think you start to ask yourself, hey, man, you know, like ownership. Can I build some equity? Can I build some residual recurring income? That's not so dependent upon my efforts. And so that's why I think I, first of all, thank you for your persistence in having this conversation. But I think for those who find themselves in that situation, listening right now, who maybe are somewhat seasoned and, you know, they have a certain amount of success in all the, all the means and ways that this could be interesting for them. So, with that setup, brief background, or who are you? What are you doing? Yeah, right on. So I'll start with how I got involved in the mortgage industry. So December of 2018, had a great opportunity to jump on with whiteboard CRM, strictly mortgage-faced CRM, built by loan officers, for loan officers. I thought we had a really great product. We were really catered to the individual, individual lender. Had some hamstrings that, like, just some issues that weren't going to, wasn't going to allow us to ever take that to enterprise. And I led that organization for just shy of three years. We over tripled our growth in that timeframe. We were eventually acquired. It was a fantastic merger and acquisition there for us. Daily AI, which is now ADM, took over and left me with a new opportunity that led me into comma insurance. Now, and I've been with comma insurance since May of 21, the VP of Business Development here. And we were built with that exact mine frame that you just talked about, Jeff. So our founders were leading a really high origination team in Oklahoma City. And he was looking at it just like that. He's like, am I going to have to grind every day of my life until I'm 65? And will I ever be able to retire and keep the same lifestyle? There is no residual component. There is no wealth generating asset. So everything that I'm building for my life and the way that we live is going to come to an abrupt end when I no longer want to write mortgages. And writing mortgages means taking phone calls on Saturdays a lot of times for a lot of people. And it's this constant grind. It's I mean, every mortgage loan officer that I know worth their salt has put in the 60, 70 hours a week at times. And what made sense in the transaction? What was there? What was available that you could utilize the mortgage transaction to create some residual income and even more importantly, a wealth generating asset. And the light came on. And the light came on has come on for a lot of people. But that was insurance. And Brian Beaumart, the founder of comma, is a master at execution. I mean, it is one of the things that Brian is so phenomenal at. And so Brian started to work with his network. He found Timothy Harlan, who at one point in time, I think was the youngest CFO in the state of Oklahoma. He was a CFO at 24 years old. And they put together some ideas and they created trust point insurance originally here in Oklahoma City. And it was built just for Brian and his origination team. But as time went on, it started to, you know, Brian spent a lot of money, a lot of blood sweat and tears to get things stood up, started building the carrier network. And by, you know, year three, four, five started really making some money on this deal. And his friends in the business, you know, Brian is one of Todd Duncan's lifetime achievement award winners. They started asking, Brian, hey, what are you doing for, you know, what, what are you doing for your side hustle? What's the, what's the ancillary forms of income that you're doing? He told them about insurance and it shocked them. Like, whoa, can you stand this up? Can you scale it? And so Brian and Timothy put their heads together and sure enough, and March of 2020, what a phenomenal month that was for everyone. Cama insurance was born. And so now that's our goal is to really help loan officers have that opportunity to retire, maintain that lifestyle, create a residual form of income in a well-generated asset. And really the biggest part of it is that, you know, it's their asset. They own it. You know, we have, we dabble in real estate investments and things like that. And yes, I look at the residual income like rent over your mortgage. Rent over your mortgage is great when you're in out of property. But the real value there is that tangible asset that you can sell, the property. And that's kind of the same way here with with Cama when they own the agency. It's theirs that they can own it and they could sell it. Okay. Great ROI on that. All right. Well, that's a good kind of setup. Let's dive a little bit deeper on that and get some additional focus around this because, you know, what we're talking about is, you know, being a business owner, right, building something that isn't solely dependent upon you and and not to get all cliche here and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, if you think about, I'm thinking about quotes from from Warren Buffett and those types of people like, you know, you need to develop the ability to make money where it's not solely dependent upon your own efforts. You know, and that's where becoming a business owner, that's the idea behind owning a business. Now people succeed at various levels of that. But what you made me think about was the other ways for you listening right now, I know there are some of you out there who have invested in different types of vehicles to address this issue we're talking about. Maybe you've bought a real estate, right, single family homes. I know our buddy Wally out in Texas, right? He's got a great portfolio of rental properties. Other people have Airbnb's. And so I wrote down this little kind of wheel on my piece of paper here of the other investments people alone originators can make, right, to to be able to backfill that, you know, kind of income real estate one, buying a business, you know, all these different things. And all of them come with different obviously overhead risks, demands, bandwidth attention and things like that. Why so let's just make it clear what you're proposing here with comma, what you're doing is you're standing up, use your term, right? And this isn't right for everybody. It depends on where they are in their career trajectory and other things. However, what you're doing is allowing them to become an owner of their own insurance agency. Simply said. Yes, correct. And you know, the first question I was getting, what do I have to get licensed? And it's absolutely not. The really the beautiful, like we are an insurance agency, like there's, there's no way around it. We are an insurance brokerage and we are the conduit to that. So really the secret to our sauce is kind of like McDonald's if anybody's, you know, the founder, right? Yeah. McDonald's got wealthy off owning real estate, not making hamburgers, making hamburgers was the conduit to have the real estate. Writing insurance is really the conduit for us. We're a manager big company in essence. So when you buy in and you invest in you own your own insurance agency through comma, we manage every aspect of that business on their behalf. Because we understand that our ideal client is a high volume mortgage originator, a high volume real estate brokerage, a high, they're, they're way too busy and they're experts in their field. We don't want to ask anybody to diversify their expertise. We want to diversify their income streams. So we're going to stand that thing up. We're going to build the agency for you. We're going to go out and hire an insurance agent for you. We're going to manage the P and L for you. We're going to set up rent for you. We're going to take care of every aspect of that business for you. With the exception of you, the mortgage advisor, and this is really critical here, referring your clients to your own insurance agency. And it sounds really simple on the surface in an essence it is. But there's a fallacy that mortgage loan officers think they refer more insurance business than they actually do because they always remember that first time home buyer or the person that asks for insurance and they send it to their guy Bob Smith down the street and Bob Smith gets $3,000, $8,000 in lifetime value from that 30-second referral you made. But when they own their own insurance agency, they'll be a little bit more forceful about the client that says, no, I'm good. They say, hey, listen, let's just have a, have a look at this. You know, we have a brokerage of carriers and that's really, I mean, we can get into that when I have individual conversations with people. That's nothing insectsy about insurance except if you're getting some checks from it. Sure. How does this work if you're, you know, work retail lender W2 versus broker? Does that make a difference? It really doesn't. So one of the aspects that we really wanted to dive in here and we believe that we are the only insurance agency set up like this that is strictly focused in the real estate space. So we made a lot of investments in lawyers to be, you know, attorney fees, specifically Mitch Keiter, right? One of the best well-known respo attorneys that's out there and Mitch, you know, signed off on everything that we were doing to make sure that we were completely respo compliant. So the fact that we didn't, we didn't use to not comp our agencies on FHA before the December publication that came out that said that insurance was not a dual comp situation there. So, you know, we really, we understand that the value here is associated with the mortgage loan transaction. So we can't put anybody's license and jeopardy. That would be, that would be cutting off our notes to spiderface, right? That just wouldn't make a lot of sense. So we've, we've made extra efforts to ensure that we are above board on everything there so that we can stay focused in this space. All right. So I'm on the website. We're going to put a, by the way, for anybody who wants to learn more, we'll keep talking about is ycoma.com. That's why, ycoma.com. There'll be a link in the show notes. But right now I'm reading the division of duties and the role of the mortgage originator, let's say, right, who's listening to this and think they might be at a point in their career where this might make sense or be of interest to them. So obviously, you're investing in a business like we talked about, right? So there's that aspect of it. The mortgage resonator approves hiring termination of an agency employees. Right. It's all the reporting and everything allows you to stay focused on your current business. So are you saying that I'm basically investing in this insurance brokerage, but my primary role is to just keep originating and, and, you know, to the degree I can have clients choose my brokerage, comma versus another and I'm building my recurring revenue over time. Absolutely. And it gets back to like, you know, some of the things I want to think about with where folks are at in the mortgage industry today is, I think too many of us are saying, yeah, but instead of yes and I hear a lot of these coaches that are talking about how you need to invest in technology, you need to invest in social, you need to do video, you need to do all these things. And then I hear other coaches talk about you need to get back to old school ways of picking up the phone. And I would say that's, that's yes to all of that, right? Because, hey, listen, when we go back to the stats in 2019, I believe it was, man did the study. 85% of Americans did not know who their loan originator was, right? 85% didn't know who they were. What, where did that number go in the next three years of the refibration? I bet you that number got into the single digits of percentages of people who knew who their originator was, right? So, and 30% of Americans answered the phone. This is really like, I'm getting into this because I do, I want to add some value here to the originators that are out here to the listening, right? And so I've heard people say, well, I don't want to pick up the phone. Well, I'm sorry, you know, if only 30% of the people answer the phone and only 15% know who your originators are, like you still have a chance to say, increase the fact that they're going to come back to you in the next refibration that we're going to see. And it's kind of the same way here with insurance is if you're going to refer your clients, refer your clients, like if I'm going to refer Jeff, you know, I'm not going to say, whatever the name of your podcast is, if I'm going to refer him or his loan officer, loan officer, I'm not going to say go to movement, I'm going to share somebody's actual name, right? I don't care where they work. And I'm going to have a conversation with that person about insurance. And I think it's a huge way to add value in today's climate. Insurance premiums are skyrocketing across the board. Insurance lags behind inflation, because by the time that insurance companies start to get claims, they realize they need to raise rates. And it's such a rate competitive market that insurance is that they really kind of want to ease off that a bit. Well, we're seeing it now insurance premiums are skyrocketing. So there's a huge opportunity to not only reach out to your current client base that's coming through for a loan to refer them to a brokerage as a network of carriers that they can shop in one stop, but also to reach out to your pass on the database, have a conversation with them about where their insurance needs are, potentially save them some money as opposed to an annual mortgage review. An annual mortgage review right now is a, unless you have a lot of unsecured debt, I don't know what you're going to do for somebody at 7.3% on a 30 year fix right now. So there's just huge opportunities there to really provide value to your client. So a long-winded way of saying it's really highly effective when that mortgage advisor truly is an advisor to their client and all aspects of their finance and insurance is a big part of that, right? And so just hey, simply have the conversation with them about where they need to go and it works wonders. I mean the ROI on this thing could be phenomenal and we're talking about, well like I said, three to eight thousand dollars for a 30 second conversation. You do the math on what the hourly rate is. Now are you going to capture every one of those? Absolutely not. That'd be a fallacy for me to say that yes, you're going to capture all those, but it's still the math works out a whole lot better than your most hourly rates for the folks. Are you saying that three to eight thousand dollars that is the annual value of that client? It's a lifetime value. So and that's actually just putting them in and it's probably even low because insurance agencies are valued off the total premium that's written and the income that they're getting, but I'm basing that strictly off the income and the fact that most Americans stick with their insurance agency, their insurance policy with their companies for about eight and a half years. Here's the other thing like loan officers don't really realize this in my opinion, is that Americans are just as stupid about insurance as they are mortgage. I shouldn't say stupid, they're just as uneducated about insurance as they are mortgage. And there's that opportunity. You really do have to coach and educate them. We've seen it, right? Home prices have escalated and the thing about it, if you had one policy for eight and a half years, what's the value of your home in 2015 compared to now? And do you have the RC reconstruction cost estimates built in your insurance that would actually allow you for a catastrophic loss to replace your home? There's a lot of people who don't have that. So it's multifaceted here where that loan officer can be of real value to their clients, create better relationships, change that number from the 15% of your clients that know you to the 30, 40, 50% and with the decrease in number of MLSs that we're having from the beginning of 2022 to what will be in the beginning of 2024 and to capitalize on that market share is a huge opportunity for those folks that are going to stick this out. And that's really our ideal client. Is there physical office space required for setting up an agency? It's not required. It's, I would say it's probably about 50-50. So in this post-COVID world that we live in, we set up a lot of virtual offices, like let people work from home. There's still some folks that work for lack of a better term old school, like come into a office. And if you want your insurance advisor right there in your office, we will set that up, set it up with fair market value rents, stay rest of a compliant. But for the most part, we set something up through a region's virtual office space. Interesting. And so once again, just to reiterate, you are doing the quote-unquote lifting. Obtaining state licenses, leasing office space if that's even needed, as we just said, recruiting training and coaching your producer. That's a lot of heavy lifting there. How do you do that? Are you just doing the usual traditional recruiting type stuff that would occur in any industry? Yes, typically we're going to utilize the job boards, web-based job boards, to try and find somebody in the certain locations that we need. I do make an ask, and most of our loan officers now, in real estate agencies that we work with, have a little bit more bandwidth to maybe send us a name, email, phone number. I love to tell them, hey, listen, if you've had somebody that's shown up in your inbox, every first Tuesday of the month or six months trying to get your insurance business, that'd be a great candidate for us to go recruit. And the recruiting pitch there is, hey, listen, you're going to get 75% of your business is going to be driven in from your ownership group. You can count on immediately this amount of referrals every month, and that's very enticing to them. And how does the opportunity compare, because I'm thinking of the other insurance companies or individuals out there that I know of, right? The all-state people, the various other insurance agents are out there. So recruiting, obviously, you've got your own game to play there with making it attractive to them. Any comments around that? Yeah, I mean, that's the challenge. Brian Bomer likes to say one of the biggest challenges with coming in and owning your own insurance agency with commas, you have to divorce your insurance agent, and that can be a challenge for some folks. I've had folks who said they won't do it, and I actually really respect that. The challenge also is that, listen, you've got Bob Smith all-state who's been in business in your town for 35 years or whatever. We're not going to get Bob. Bob's driving the Mazza Roddy and has seven country club memberships, man. He doesn't need to come on and do this, but we could get Bob's underling. We can get Bob's, you know, somebody who's been with him for, you know, 18 months and has realized that the premise of owning Bob's book is for like a better term of pipe dream. So that's there. Is there an opportunity for the L.O. and an insurance agent to team up as co-owners? Yes, we've done that in some small instances. It's got to be the right agents, got to be the right opportunity, but it's not something that we're going to just shy away from. And you're saying you're also working with some real estate agencies or brokerages? Yes. And obviously the independence, of course, not the big brands. Right. I don't have Keller Williams. I've got the exp setting this up, all of that piece. Right. Exactly. Pretty cool win. And that's a that's a non-compete issue for them. No issues there around, press for or anything. No, we're good. They're actually a little bit more stringent on the mortgage side, but it's, you know, we're completely in alignment there. I will say there's some techniques and some tricks and some things that we would look at for a real estate brokerage differently than a mortgage loan shop. The client's a little bit more captive in the loan process to refer to insurance. So there's there's steps and processes that we've put in with our real estate agencies to have a higher capture rate. And we typically look for a a little bit more volume from that shop than I would from a mortgage shop. Because we're going to have a lower closing percentage because they're just not as captive to the needs of insurance at that time. Do you have any success stories you want to mention? I mean, looking at a couple of the folks on your page, you got Sam, you got Cody, you got Tom. Anybody want to highlight? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of one of our agencies, obviously we're going through some of the roughest times in the history of mortgage. Arguably, I mean, we could make the argument, this is harder than 2008. I've heard from a lot of my my owners that this is harder than a 2008. Well, at least there was homes for sale in 2008. It's mine. So one of the things that we were able to do with one of our one of our agencies have been around for a long time is they were actually able to do a cash out refile on their agency and get a pretty significant return out to their loan officers. So they're actually basically able to take a loan against future earnings on that and distribute it to their owners, which is really which is great for them in this environment, right? It would be interesting in people who have been 50, 60, 70% decline in volumes year over year. We've already started the conversation on this about like lifestyles and where people are at. So that was a huge opportunity there. And then I've got to, you know, we've got quite a few of these, but I want to share one. I've got a gentleman in Georgia. I love the guy. He hasn't given me permission to share his name, so I won't. And I respect the heck out of the guy. You and I never see him at conferences, Jeff. That's not his deal. He's not out there. But the guy's writing 400 loans a year. He wrote 400 loans in 2022. And he gets he gets 90% of his clients in front of his insurance agent. And I asked him, like, can you give me an advice to talk to our owners on how to do this? Because this agent is an agency is extremely profitable. He's getting residual income every month. As a matter of fact, Q4, I think we the his return on his is a quarterly distribution in Q4 actually aligned with what he didn't make year over a year from the decrease in mortgage value, the decrease in mortgage volume. Excuse me. And I, this is where I get the, I asked him, what do you do? He says, I just talked to the client. I said, what do you mean you wrote 400 loans last year? What do you mean you talked to client? I said, I talked to 398 of my 400 loans last year. I was like, you talked to 398 of your clients. It's like, yep, I absolutely did. And I think that's one of the reasons why he's so successful. Not only with his insurance business, but with his mortgage businesses that he has that effort. And he says now his conversation with his clients is like, hey, yeah, congratulations. You know, we're getting through the process. But let's make sure you get your insurance. It's 90% about insurance. It's kind of, it's kind of funny. I was using that as the conduit for an individual one-to-one conversation for his clients. And I guarantee that do you go poll their his client base that that numbers way higher than 15% who remember who their loan officer is? Well, there's a great lesson in there. You know, the whole advice versus price line comes, comes to mind, shout out, Mr. Savage. But there's, there's multiple ways to add value, right? To educate your clients and the loan side of things is just one. The insurance side is another. It's multiple opportunities. You know, escrow accounts are not in pounds. You know, all that stuff, homestead. Like, and it's funny, you bring that up because all this talk about AI and stuff. And I've been doing a lot of work on AI. And I remember somebody, I don't know who said this quote. So I usually like to give credit. But anyway, it's, you know, the quote was when when everyone's doubling down on AI and tech, right? This real estate outfit is doubling down on the human connection because that's going to be a stark difference of those people who just try to automate and, you know, tech everything and lose the personal touch to your point about your friend in Georgia. That's partly why he's winning is that personal engagement connection. I'm smarter because I spoke with, so all of a sudden resistance goes down, trust goes up. And man, they'll just take every piece of advice you have. I really think it goes back to that. Yes. And like, do you need to look into AI and invest in the technology? Yes. Way. You can't lose the human touch. Right. Still very important. And I think we got it's to no fault of their own. It's human nature. When you, when you see your, your volume of loans, double, triple, and in such a short time with the read by boom, it's human nature to think that this thing is just never going to shut off. But we know that those folks who, I mean, think about the real estate. I mean, that's the number one referral source for loan officers. Those folks who state purchase focus, those folks who stayed and built their relationships with those realtors and those realtor companies and their financial advisors and whoever else that they're sourcing their referral base from. They're not sourcing the referral base by AI. They're, they're doing it a little bit, but it's the human connection that trust that they built with that person. Those folks who made those investments are literally forest gump who walked out into hurricane. And, and once those hurricane clears are coming back with all the shrimp, they're going to survive. They're not the NMLS's that went away. And I still think there's time now, even in this hard season, which we don't know how much longer we're going to be in it. They focused on all of those things. Yeah. Reminds me, I watched the video yesterday by somebody I interviewed on the podcast, Matt Weaver out of Florida. If you know who he is, should probably talk to him, but he's. I know I'm mad. I never spoke, but I know I'm mad. Well, see if I can make a connection. He's the the number one purchase originator in the country. I think he did 1500 loans, purchase loans in 2022. Okay. And he it's so funny. Obviously, his number one customer is is the real estate agent for those who are listening to podcasts. You remember that very clearly in the interview, but the the one thing he said on the video clip that I was just watching an Instagram reel, he said he was talking to a room full of real estate agents. He said, Hey, guys, good news. For all of you are getting a lot of calls from loan officers right now. The good news is those are going away. Because when 2024 comes and rates go back down, all those people are calling on you are going to now go chase the refi business. And he said, and guess where I'm going to be right here. I am where I've always been. And he gets this round of applause from 100 agents in the room. I mean, I go back to my whiteboard days. So our biggest customer in my whiteboard days was Brian Beaumar and his team of cornerstone and these high volume loan officers. I mean, to be on his team, you needed to be doing 150 transactions plus. And I had one of them come to me and say, Hey, Kevin, can we turn on a refi kind of thing through whiteboard? We had a beautiful refi campaign. Pretty built ready to go click a button thing with fire out tall your pass funded database. And I had to get approval from Brian before he and that stuff went out. He's like, absolutely not. Absolutely not. He said, we will take the refi as well. We get him. We will not turn clients away. But we are going to stay purchase focused. And that's why that team continues to win. Right. Exactly. All right. So we've talked about all sunshine and rainbows. What's the what's the downside or the things that people should be aware of if they're considering investing in a business like this? Oh, there's a couple things. Number one is it's the antithesis of mortgage, right? So you go and you build a relationship with realtor. We're going to stay focused there. You start to receive some referrals from that realtor. You can automatically see an ROI on that investment in that relationship. It's almost, I mean, it's within six to eight weeks. You can see some real ROI. You can see thousands of dollars coming back to you immediately. Insurance is not that way. Insurance is literally and standing up a insurance agency brand new, especially is not that way. It's going to take time. And what I mean by time is it's really going to take 18 months from the time that you hire an insurance agent to you start to see that the insurance agency is starting to make some money. And it's going to take a little past two years before you start to see some returns on that investment actually coming back to you. And that's really hard for loan officers, right? And I mean, this respectfully, you show me a patient loan officer. I'll show you one out of business, right? That's not the way to win as a loan officer is to be patient. You have to be patient when you own your insurance agency. The other aspect is you have to change your process, right? So we're, I'm dealing with the best of the best, right? We exclusively deal with high volume mortgage shops because no offense to the folks that are doing two transactions a month, it just doesn't make sense. There's not enough insurance to write to make it work. Those folks, so when you're asking, you talked about Wally. He loved the guys, the phenomenal human being think think the world of him. When you're asking Wally and his team to change their process, the process that has shown to work and win for them for years, that's really challenging. You have to be willing to say, listen, I'm going to make this investment and standing up my own business and to do that, I'm going to change not only the process in which out the way that I handle my clients when it comes to insurance, but everybody on my team is going to have to change that process because this is something that's going to give me that retirement, that ability to step away from this business and still live the lifestyle that I have, you've got to make sure that that's on the forefront of your mind. You know, a good friend of ours, Mark Green, who owned top of mine sold it, and Mark's phenomenal human being, Mark talked about this all the time with me, he says Kevin, you have to talk to the loan officer who thinks about 2038, not 2024, because the loan officers that think in about 2038 are the clients that you want, because those folks understand the processes and steps that they're putting in and the return on investments that they're going to get in 15 years is what's truly important. Wow, that, that thing's to hurt a little bit right there. It doesn't mix a little challenging, but, but again, of being a business owner isn't an investor, right, a savvy investor, right, isn't necessarily right for everybody, or it's about timing, right? So if you're listening to this right now, you probably know, you're saying to yourself, this isn't probably right for me, but some of you are saying, hmm, this is interesting. You might have, you might be in a place where, you know, you're sitting on some cash after the run that we've had with Refries or whatever, you might be in a place where you're 10 years in, and you're like, yeah, where is that? Where is my exit? My out, you know? So for those that are thinking about that, they want to learn a little bit more, I'm looking at your map right now, your license in 48 states. That's correct. Yeah. And so you're pretty much everywhere. So for those who, once again, what would be the process for people who want to learn more? What do they do? So this is another aspect that doesn't move very quickly, but because we are going to make a significant investment into this thing, and it is for the future, right? So we're going to have to vet all that out. So the first step is just to get in contact with me. Let's have a conversation. Let's, and typically I have the conversation that I've already shared with you. We're going to go through exactly what this is. What we're about what we do for you. And then if that sounds enticing, we don't set up a pro-former review where we can look at some mock numbers and see what kind of return on investments that work for folks. And then we go through the process of standing up the LLC and creating the agency form. Now, typically when somebody from first call to stand up with somebody who was, yes, I want to do this, it's going to take probably about six months before the agency is really up, running with an agent in place. I'm looking at this. It's September 2023. I don't pretend to be Barry Habib, but I do think we will see some relaxation in the rates by 2024. It could be a perfect time to time that market. Furthermore, there's an opportunity if you have a large database that you have written a ton of loans for that you want to stay present with, and then you want to give real value. We can work with you to set up some campaigns through your CRM based on funded dates to reach out to them and start driving and business immediately for your agency. And creating value for your clients so that when that re-fi boom happens, when the purchase boom happens, when things start to move in this world that has been stagnant for 18 months, you are winning, especially with the thinning of the herd, if you will, of the NMLS as they're leaving the business. Absolutely. That's good stuff. For people who are after hearing that, still are curious to learn more and see if this is a fit for you. We're going to link it in the show notes, but once again, it's they go to ycomawhycoma.com. The other thing is I'm very active on Facebook. There's probably hardly a loan officer in the country that we don't have a mutual friend so they can find me there or reach out to me there. I'd love to talk there. I'm on Instagram. I'm the LO Insurance Guy on Instagram. Whatever you need, I'm here for you. It's not a high pressure sale. We can't do that. Can't high pressure sale somebody into this. You have to show them the real ROI on the steel. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I'm actually going to pull you up on Instagram here as well right now. LO Insurance Guy. I believe it's LO underscore insurance guy. Okay. Got it. I want to make sure I got that right. It's probably really cheesy and done, Jeff, but hey, I'm not the most creative guy when it comes to that stuff. That's fine, man. I know I'm connected to you. I just don't know the actual handle. Okay. Got it. LO underscore insurance underscore guy. That's what it actually is. Okay. Oh, great. It's just straight up, one-on-one with Kevin over there on Instagram. That's another way to connect with you, man. That's cool. It's funny, but you get in people's Instagram feed. I see your one where you get the hair all done up. You got daughters? Yes, I do. Listen, I'm learning this whole thing as well. I was that forward academy in the Eldingers event recently. I did Kyle Draper's 31 videos in August. I'm learning how to show more of yourself than it's right. My daughter, my daughter, my daughter really wanted to play with me that day, but we had taken them to get ice cream and I foolishly got ice cream with them. She wanted to, I promised her I'd wrestle and I was so full from the stupid ice cream. She's like, fine, I'm doing your hair, daddy. And after she did my hair, she's like, now you have to show this to everybody you know. And I'm like, well, I know the quickest place to do that. I'm going to put it on my side. Awesome. Good to see. That's what it's about. Courage war. Just put it out there. Yes, sir. Okay. Cool, man. Well, this has been educational for me for sure. I've learned a lot. And so if you're curious, you know what to do. Follow the link and show notes. Ycoma.com. Get connected with the Kevin and learn more. Hey, man. Thank you once again. It shouldn't take a year to do this. But let's let's definitely circle back as you guys get more success stories under your belt and we'll bring this conversation back to the folks maybe next year. Absolutely. And I look forward to seeing you on the road show though. I'm sure we're embarking on here in the next few months. All right. Well, listeners, I want to say goodbye to you. Thanks for tuning in. You know what to do if you like this episode, leave us a review. And we'll see you on the next one. 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 purchased 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, attracting 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 seeds, 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 to from eight 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.