Ep #109: Using Agent Classes, Video, and Personal Branding to Close 160 Loans

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Mortgage Marketing Radio Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. You're holding yourself accountable. The shift is a gift, so how well you do in a given environment, given market is determined by your mindset and how you look at this market that we're in and entering and how this market continues to evolve. One thing you know is that there are certain people, you can take them and put them in any situation, any environment, and they will succeed. Why? Because they have the mindset. They've got the right mindset, so if you're concerned about this shift, perhaps change your perception of a change of beliefs about it and start looking to it as a gift. So remember, the shift is a gift. All right, speaking of a gift, how about giving yourself a gift, right? How about adjusting the mindset? How about learning some of the skills and strategies that you need to survive and thrive during the shift? What am I talking about? Well, I'm talking about our Mortgage Marketing Pro membership, if you haven't checked that out yet, you can do so at MortgageMarketing.pro. Look, if you're interested in getting more successful, more efficient, more productive, getting more agents to notice you, respond to your message, agree to meet with you, and develop relationships and send you referrals. Check out the Mortgage Marketing Pro membership because we've got a system in there that's been proven to do this for hundreds of loan officers across the country. And it's built on the foundation of teaching agent classes, not your boring old lunch and learns, but actually compelling classes that get agents' butts and seats and the loans in your pipeline. And you don't need to be an expert on the topics you're presenting. We help you with all that. So we give you the done-for-you PowerPoints and speaker notes and handouts and the video of tutorial teaching you how to give the class. We give you the custom flyers, right? Keep the nuts. You just take the keys, put it inside the car, turn the engine over, and bam, you have got agents you're in front of consistently, getting relationships, meetings, and referrals. Don't believe me? Go read some of the testimonials at MortgageMarketing.pro and you'll see what else is included in there also. All right, so let's talk about my special guest on this session of Mortgage Marketing Radio, Katherine Peterson, out of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. That tiny little town, I believe about only 12,000 people, there's 340 agents in town and Katherine knows all of them. What's interesting is that, it's funny, I talk about Katherine, she's a big fish and a little pond and she's very humble in accepting that, but she is because her next closest competitor does 50% of the volume she does in her area. It was her volume in 2017, 50 million, 160 units, and her expectation is that she's going to grow in 2019 as well. I don't have a 2018 volume yet, but she's going to close out at more than that. The point is that she's got the right mindset. She looks to the shift as a gift and she's putting in the right strategies to succeed in the coming year. We talk about, on this episode, a key foundations of her success, low and behold, classes. She does a lot of classes for real estate agents, so you'll hear about how she does those in average of once a month. She also does pop-by consistently every single month. She does video, she's building out her brand, when you search Steamboat Springs Mortgage in Google, she comes up in the first three, depending on the day you search it. When I searched it during this recording, she came up number two and number three, I believe. Pretty cool, pretty strong. How does she do that? She does that because she's getting serious about content marketing, video and content that she's sharing online, so I put a link in the show notes to her Facebook page so you can see the video content that she's doing out there. She's a veteran. She's been in the business 15 years and just really just a phenomenal, great person, awesome human being. She cares a lot about her clients and she's passionate about this business, so I wanted to have her on to share best practices of what she's doing and how you can take some ideas from that and learn more about it. That is it. Let's get into this week's episode, shall we? My very special guest, Catherine Peterson. Hey, Catherine, welcome to the show. Hi, how are you today? I'm fantastic. It's Friday. No. I'm a Friday, don't pay. Friday, and as I was telling you, before we hit record, I got my special coffee from Sambalate here in Sumberland, Nevada. So if you live in the area, check out Sambalate, a little plug. It's good. It's good. No, I just had cheers. Oh, cheers. Yes, cheers. Let's do a virtual cheers. I like that. That's a nice looking cup, by the way, that looks like one of those homemade cups. Yes. My sister made it. It's awesome. All right. So for the listeners, tell us briefly, who's Catherine Peterson? Why? What is she all about? Why does she love doing loans? Great. Well, I am a mortgage banker in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, tiny little town, but great place to live for a resort town. And I have two girls, 13 and 10, which definitely keep me busy, and luckily my husband is obviously a ton of help. So that's great. And I really love doing loans because we love to help people capture their own little piece of Steamboat. I really love helping people really believe in education and making sure we spend enough time with our clients so that they, no matter what, they leave my office kind of in a better place than when they arrive, whether that be through education or just even their happy mood. So that's what I really love making loans come true. And so 15 years in the business, right? Yep. You have to go fast. What goes fast? So I'm trying to clarify your path because people in this industry for a long time, some people can get jaded, burned out, whatever. What keeps you going, though, is it the connection with the borrower and the feeling you get by helping them educate them? Yeah, it's definitely, that's the biggest piece of it. I'm occasionally all crying and closing, which sounds like, but you know people so well that you get so excited about it. It's an emotional process. Wait a minute, you cry at a closing out of happiness? But also, yes, yes, I have more than once, sadly, but it's good. Look at my notes from the last conversation we had just to keep me fresh and honest. People are always curious. I know you're, you know, I would say you're on the list of top producers on the various organizations that rank those things. But quick summary from 2017, volume slash units, what did that look like? I roughly 50 million for around 160 units. Okay. 50 million, 160 units. What's the population of where you live? About 12,000. 12,000. That's some, you're scooping a lot of business out of 12,000. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is a small community. Would you have some second homeowners, but we primarily work with primary residence purchases and we're roughly 80% in our county, which even the whole county has 20,000s and it's a big county. So like square footage wise. How many realtors roughly in, you know, your patch there? Roughly 340 or 325 was the county yesterday. Wow. 325. How many of those do you work with? Like 300 maybe. No, right? It's obviously some that aren't active, but we, there might be 2 or 3, I don't know in that way. But you know most of them, don't you? Yes. It's a small town. You see with the grocery store. What's your biggest, I'm really curious then, your biggest competition or in such a small area. I mean, because my perception is, is that, you know, other loan officers, whatever that you're like running into each other out and about wherever you go. Is that the case? That is the case. Yes. I see them all the time, but yeah, there's goods and bads. We actually work pretty well as a team. So if there's something I can't figure out, I'll occasionally call another L.O. and say, hey, yeah, like is there something that you have that I don't or what, you know, can you help this person because I can't or whenever else happens? I don't like to do that, but certainly we've gotten that call as well. So friendly competition. Yeah, we were pretty friendly competition, but you have to be at a little town. So it's not like it's not like New York City, you know, get the hell out of here. Right. Yeah. No, no, no. Oh, my gosh. It's not enough to do that. I don't think. Right. Right. Okay. So your main source of business? Past clients and real estate agents. Is it past clients above real estate agents? It's 50, 50. It's fairly even. There's, you know, a lot of times we'll, you know, we'll get the referral from multiple sources, but I would say that there's, it's pretty even past clients and, and, and realtors. Well, let's, let's kind of find a couple of nuggets here. What would you say is, you know, your most successful or, you know, source of business that is the constant go to for you for consistency? A few things first, really staying in touch with our past clients. We just recently did a whole team retreat on how to just pour love into our clients as much as possible from, you know, basically, them not even, them starting to even look for a house to the time that they, you know, move out of steamboat or even beyond that. So it's just how do we pour as much love as possible into them? And that's worked for us over the years. You know, we want to know everything about our clients and that helps us serve them better. So we really try to, for, for my bad service, anyway, we can. So that's really the go to this, that's brought us businesses. People will call us for, basically, anything that they need and not really keep some coming back. So, you do a lot to stay in touch. All right. So we have to unpack that a little bit because, I mean, I, that sounds really 30,000 foot level. That's, that's awesome. And of course, people are like, well, what do you mean, stay in touch? How do, you know, CRM? Do you have, do you touch points direct mail? Right? Yes, we have a whole system that we do, but basically we're touching, uh, based with MV of phone three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, um, beyond in your views. We do Britney calls. We do just random like this, this last, right before Thanksgiving, we called every client that we closed in the last year, someone from my team actually picked up a phone and called or myself. And that was an awesome, awesome thing to do right before Thanksgiving. If you want to feel grateful, that's a good exercise. So just as little things like that, we try to do, um, I now carry around stuff in my purse when I see them at the grocery store. We've got just all things of, hey, here go buy yourself a cup of coffee or, hey, here's some hand warmers because it's zero outside today. Um, so all of those things that we can do just to, you know, kind of continue to pour that love in. And then, um, obviously, we do mail and all of that as well, but you do direct mail. Is that, yeah, it's our clients because that postcards newsletter is what is it? Both. We have postcards. We do, um, yeah, newsletters, but most of it, we try to make a little bit meaningful. So we do per pay postcard, we do, you know, every so often we'll do, hey, you know, it's time for this or time for that or how's this going? So we have a line out in the CRM. How do you manage the, um, the three, six, nine, 12 month outbound calls is, is that, um, I assume you're like, you know, putting some type of a trigger on your calendar or something like that. Yeah, it's triggered out through our CRM and then we do those through a, um, basically like a slide dial. Oh, okay. All right. Got it. And so it's, it's a generic message and then it's put out on slide, dial slide broadcast. Yep. Okay. What's the RMB use? I'm curious. I have a proprietary system in our company that we use, so nice, very nice top secret. I like the name, but I don't like it meaning anything. Yeah. It's just an inhouse name, exactly. Right. Um, okay. I'm looking at my notes and, uh, you do CE classes. Is that correct? I do. Okay. Yes. I've done those for a long time for real estate agents. Um, and I know that, that you're a believer in this, which is very, uh, so I was getting frustrated with the, the, some of the crazy things I was seeing come through, um, my desk, as far as what was going on in the agent world when it involved lending. So we started doing, uh, mortgage 101. This was maybe 10 years ago, um, maybe 15, mortgage 101, and then I did mortgage 102 and I added USDA first time home buyer at JBA. We now have a contract, some lending class, which I developed with the managing broker, which is kind of my favorite class, because it's kind of overly geeky. And then, what else do we have, um, and, uh, I mentioned FHABA. So I, and I just created a rates class, um, rates and rates strategies. So that'll be fun. We just submitted that, I think yesterday, for the new year. So I tried to add a class a year, um, and I'll, I'll actually call it to this year. How do you do the classes? I've only once a month, all, if I have a new class, I'll try to hit every real estate office I can in steamboat and just go to their offices and provide a, and at lunch and, you know, do the CE there. And then we have a regular schedule of class just for anybody to come, luckily the board does it at their office, which is awesome, and they advertise that for me. So I'm pretty lucky that way. So you're lucky that way and the fact that you can actually get in a lot of these real estate brokerages to do a class. Yep. Yeah. Um, that's really great. Um, some people listening are like, man, that's, that's awesome because, you know, there's a lot of closed offices out there, different parts of the country. Um, you mentioned the rates class. I'm, I'm kind of curious what your angle is on that because I have a thought in my head, but how are you going to, as I put together yet, the rates class? Yeah, I, I finished the outline this week. So we're going to go through a historical, what happened with the meltdown, uh, now what's different as of October this year, and also go through, you know, kind of how rates are determined, economic factors. We'll talk about lines of resistance, all that things like that, but hopefully not get too technical, geeky. And then also go into some rate strategies like seller by down, cost awaiting that kind of stuff that are some great tools out there leveraging the mortgage coach platform. Yep. Yep. Yep. Shout out to Mr. Savage. Gotta love that. That idea though, the rates class, cause uh, talk about positioning you as an expert, you know, I mean, that's one of the best classes to do that, especially when you're educating them over the timeline and history of rates, lots of opportunities there. I, I had this thought of, I don't know if you ever run into this and, and maybe not. I think it depends on the company you work with, but you know, sometimes realtors are like, they have these comments or beliefs about rates, like maybe your rates are high or, you know, whatever the case is, right? And this is your chance to kind of like, kind of shut that conversation down. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And explain it's on a market. It's not like, oh, we changed the rate today. Right. Right. So yeah, no, I'm actually, it'll be really exciting, because I think it is a little bit of a mystery and that I think by here, agents tell say of, oh my gosh, I heard that, that rates are going up at the next Fed meeting. Yeah. Oh gosh. Okay. Let's have a discussion around that. Okay. I brought it up a little bit in my mortgage one of two class, but now we really get to tie it in, especially with rising rates. Mm-hmm. Their clients are going to be asking about rates, the more that we can tell them, you know, the more tools we can give them to kind of fight that a little bit is going to be great, because there's a whole generation of people that haven't seen rates over five, which is crazy. Yeah. So they're, they're all having a small heart attack right now. Yeah. I had some guys say that to me the other day, it's something about buying a home, he's just like, oh, you know, I don't know. Rates are kind of getting high. I'm like, what? Shut up. You have no idea what high rates are, man. You've been spilled so damn long. So crazy. I think the, the staff I was looking at this week was since 1971 to now the average is I think eight points. Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly what I said to him, because I follow, right, I get a lot of my info from the mortgage coach community and all that stuff too. So yeah. I mean, come on people. Let's face that. Awesome. Yeah. It's incredible. Love that though. I'm going to, I'm just, I'm big circle around that right here. The other thing I love about that is, and this is obvious to you, but just as a heads up to the listeners is, you know, positioning that class in a way that it's like, okay, guys, you clearly demonstrated your expertise around interest rates. And if you have a question or like you do the seller buy down or the cost of waiting and all that stuff, and it's like, guys, you got a question about rates? Call me. You know what I mean? Love it. Love it. I have a question all day. Well, because of all the C classes, I get so many random question calls, which is great, because that's what we want. We want our agent to ask every single time. And we'll even get calls and pay. I got a settlement statement from somebody else. But at least then they're calling me as a gut checkup. They're not using you. And it's so annoying. And then we have that opportunity to say, okay, next time when you see that come through, this is some things you can say to your client to make them use us instead. Awesome. Okay, so sometimes I'm just like, you know, randomly thinking here real time, with the agents, the settlement statement made me think of this. Do you have agents who still do the like three card approach with you or try to? Yes. Absolutely. How do you deal with that, if at all? Why do I tell them that that's always a tough question on the fly. But generally what I will say is, A, if I'm referring you, do you want me to give them three agents as well? That's one thing I do. The second thing is that, you know, we, you know, kind of stress that, hey, how would you feel if they used the other agents or the other lenders on here and what differentiates us? So great. But you also send it with, this is, this is what I, you know, my favorite and why just a little bit of background around it, or please Google all three of these people and then make your decision because I'm going to win the Google War. So other strategies that they are just out of it, we have a C class that's taught by somebody up here in May. They are like, basically tell them that they're going to lose their license if they don't do that. So I've got some agents that are pretty crazy. Yeah. Try to go around that a little bit. This is to me, such a line of BS. I know. I know. Could lose your license if you just give one referral, please. And not only the key is, it's not going to impact you as long as I do my job and my reputation stands up. So it's, I get it if you were, if I was your one and then we didn't close, it was the deal. Yeah. I mean, once you've proven yourself, yeah, they can trust you. Okay. So while at the top of mind, you mentioned you're going to win the Google War. I love that. That's awesome. And I think I know what you mean by that, but why do you feel so confident in saying that? Well, if I try to make sure that whatever comes through on steamboat mortgage, if you do that, or Catherine Peterson mortgage, if you Google that, you're going to see a good reviews, good websites, Microsoft video, videos that we do, can face that. So we try to just really watch that. You know, if you're not Googling yourself once a week, you, that's problematic. Excellent. Yeah. So we try to watch that pretty, pretty tightly and make sure that we're going to stand out above the rest in that. Yeah. No, I just Googled you, like I said, or Google the phrase steamboat mortgage. And yeah, you are coming up number two in the Google server. You know what's a bummer? Is the number one? I created that website. Which one? Which one? Which one? Which one? It's a bank. It's a bank. It's not USAAA or? No. No. That one's on our panic. You know, it's crazy about Google as you know, it changes every day. But hey, your number two and number three. Oh, good. And that's pretty awesome. Okay. No, that rocks. Yeah. And you're probably in there even further. So how do you do that? What are your strategies to show up in Google? Certainly. You know, it's all the keyword. It's other, you know, being in enough sources that it pulls you through. It's, you know, posting enough, staying relevant. All of those things, I think are posting where you have a blog or something or? I know a little bit, but we've got, we don't have a YouTube channel. Oh. Do Facebook. We do. I've got an Instagram. I've, you know, we've got all of that website stuff. All right. We're live without a net. We're flying real time here. I love this. So YouTube. You just started a YouTube channel, but you've been doing videos for quite a while, haven't you? Yes. Yes. What made you decide to have, you know, jump on YouTube? You. Well, so, so we started doing a whole series of Facebook videos. I wanted some content that was more real and relevant than just kind of the standard boring post. So we did these little snippets of videos and have been posting those on Facebook. So that gives us some good YouTube content to get that out. So the key is now trying to get that YouTube channel out there, but at the same time, the Facebook videos are definitely getting a lot more hits than anything else that we post. So steamboat specific always does the best, and then those videos are definitely great. Steamboat specific does the best. So meaning if it's, if it's like about steamboat itself and living in steamboat, the videos you're doing, are they only on your business page, personal as well, what are you doing there? I typically will share them to my personal page also. I do have some separation of the two, but I still try to share them personally and stuff and I get the hits on both. I don't share them every time. I try to be a little bit careful because they'll Facebook algorithms will start to not show those if you do it too much. So to be a little bit careful, but the secret code, oh my gosh, I wish we, you know, the secret code of Facebook, like, oh, and they show what? Yeah, I know, right? This is a constant thing. Okay, so the videos you're doing, and by the way, I'll put links to your Facebook page and all that stuff in the show notes for those who want to go look at it. But your videos are what I would call professional videos, right? I mean, yeah, they're not, they're not the handheld mobile phone, which is there's nothing wrong with that. But for your educational videos, it looks like they are kind of that more professional, right? Set up. Yeah, but they're, they're all just ad live. I didn't want to. Well, because you know your topic so well. That's right. That's right. You know, the stuff I talked about already, anyway, so they're all, they're all ad live. I didn't want them to be like so edited, but I also wanted them to look good. Oh, yeah, and they do look good. I mean, it's a combination of like you've got the animation, right, with the question on it. And then it cuts to you being on the camera, right, which is good. And you've got some nice views on some of these. Looks like your two most popular so far are what affects your mortgage rate and are you ready to buy? Hmm. Interesting. Um, who's the market at where you're at the first time home buyer? Well, you said, would you got you said renters or something like that or second home buyers, right? Yeah. We have some second home buyers. We've got a lot of just locals who are looking to buy. So that's, that is for some home buyers. That was really my focus when I got into this market, because no one was helping for some home buyers and steam boats. We really do open to that first. And then, um, but we've got a pretty wide mix. We'll do stuff that's super rural. That's, um, all in. Yeah. I love the market. Um, what's the average price of a home there? Roughly 550. Wow. All right. So it's high. Yep. Yep. We have a lot of 50% cash, which root all in this time. We got a lot of rich people buying homes there. Right. That's right. Yes. Lots of people that unfortunately, um, I, I wish they needed new more. It's, it, those are my comps, though. So it's all good. Right. Are you close to a ski resort? Yes. I can see it from my window right now. Which one? Me no. Oh, I've done steamboat. Hello. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. That's great. Are you a skier? I'm, I'm a skier, but it's, it's not that pretty. I'm a lot better at doing loans, but I'm a skier. I wasn't trying to, ever year, it's like, you need to take lessons, but I can get down the hill, but my kids are better than you, by far. Of course, right? They're more nimble and their bones don't break as easily. Right. Exactly. They don't have a fear thing going on. Oh, yeah. On that 50-year-old, 53-year-old snowboarder going very just cautiously down the hill, you know? Right. I mean, no rush. I always tell the kids, you guys go ahead. Go without me. I'm coming. I'll catch up. Yeah. Don't hang by. All right. Back to business here. I want to unpack a little bit my notes from like how you generate your business. Um, I wrote down also Popeyes offices. So you're doing Popeyes? Yeah. Right now we've got those, uh, those little handwormers that we're doing, but we certainly like to just swing in every so often and say hi and hopefully have something with us. Now, is it you out and about your team? Who is it? Most of the time it is me. Um, I'm really the face of the business and I like it to be me 95% of the time. If there's an event, I can't attend or something like that else than someone from my team, but normally it is me. And how consistently do you do, do you do those? Uh, it depends on the season, obviously when we're crazy, it happens a little bit less consistently as we all know, but we try to get out at least every month. Okay. So once a month. And you kind of now, this may sound like, you know, I'm like overkilling on the details, but, you know, I really want the listeners to really understand this. How do you plan those out, meaning, uh, obviously seasonality is one, October, it's pretty obvious, right? What you do, Halloween theme stuff. But how far in advance are you planning that out, buying your stuff and all that? Well, we generally do it almost a year at a time. So we'll plan it. We'll map it out for a whole year on calendar. Smart. Smart. Yeah. Because I also, we don't really have a lot of great stores. So you have to plan around trips to other places sometimes, right? Oriental trading is, uh, you know, like company, it's a great resource. Yeah. Super best friends. All those little chachkis, um, Oriental trading people for those of you listening, um, okay. So we got agents, you're doing CE classes, um, do you do any non CE classes? You mean like, uh, just classes for buyers, that's it? Yeah. So we've done both classes for first time home buyer with just ourselves and also partnering with an agent. So we've done both those. Okay. Yeah. So that is, that's awesome. So small community, how many, uh, average attendance of your agents to your CE classes? It depends on the class. So we'll have the biggest one we probably have is maybe 20, 25 and, you know, occasionally I'll have three. Yeah. Right. So it can be varied just depending. Actually, once I had one and then we like bailed and went to breakfast and he's actually an awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. Love that. So what the ever can't complain about that either? What percent, I'm trying to understand because I, the way I look at classes as you probably know is, you know, top of the funnel, right? So as for me, marketing and prospecting to agents, you know, I don't do the call call thing. Been there, done that. It's just not fun. So I'd rather like do that, the reverse prospecting and track people in of those classes that you do. It's a tough question to answer, I know, but roughly, I don't know whether it's like you can tell me like a number of agents or percentage like, how many, what weight would you give to that activity to converting agents to referral partners, how, how critical is it? I'd say it's, it's key and, and the reason is is because two things. So one, a new agent comes on, right? Well, what happens is managing brokers are now saying, oh, you should take Catherine's 101 class. So then even before we even know they exist, they show up at a class sometimes even before they get their license. So then I know, okay, there's this new agent and you can kind of get an idea, you know, you have this feeling if they're going to be, they're not, you know, it's not always 100%, but sometimes I'll really click with someone and I know, okay, I need to put this person on my radar and get them in the funnel of, you know, marketing depend and having a coffee or kind of getting them into the fold of marketing. So it's huge. We've gotten some awesome, awesome agents out of classes and it's, it's great to because you think we just have the new ones, but there's times when there'll be an agent who's been around for 15 years, 20 years who shows up at a class because they need that CE or they're just curious on what's going on in lending and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I've been trying to get this agent to sit down with me and now here they are. So this is my change. So it does give you an hour of time with them, even if it's in a group, you can still make an impression on them. So it's pretty awesome. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a whole different impression when you are at the front of the room teaching the class, there's a lot that goes into the influence factor, the branding and all that kind of stuff, the perception you are not seeing as the average loan officer when you do it. Yeah. Are other L.O.s doing that in town as well? Classes. No. One has tried and it didn't, I know they did it directly to buyers, but they did it just here in the last month, which is not the best time for a person home by our class season wives, but that's really been it. There's a couple title companies that have brought in people like 1031 class things like that. But that's really it. So I've been pretty lucky in that arena that no one's stepped on my toes, but I've also put the fear in them. I hope so. Now, maybe I should go work in New York, right? Exactly. So you are a, you know, with all due respect, I hope you get where I'm saying this is, you're a big fish and a little pond. I don't know if I would say that, maybe I'm a little modest, but at the same time, we want to be, we want to be the only person that they think of every single time. I appreciate your modesty, but you're a big fish and a little pond. You're the only loan officer in your town doing classes, right? Your brand, I would venture to guess your brand awareness is greater and I don't know, but I'm just guessing your brand awareness is greater than almost any other L.O. in town. Yeah. I have a task. Yes. Hey, it's not bragging if it's true. Thank you. I should break that down somewhere. No, I mean, that's awesome. That's the real key, isn't it? As an L.O. With the noise, I mean, you know, you're in a smaller town, so you've got perhaps less noise, but you still have noise. You still have, hey, why should I work with you? Call that, but you've built your mouse trap, a better mouse trap, if you would. Yes. That is correct. Yeah. How difficult is it in your, so you're submitting your CEO approval to the state of Colorado? Yes. How difficult is that? Here, it's actually not that bad. We have to, I did, you do have to do a resume with speaking experience. It took me a little bit of time just to kind of work on when I did my first one a long time ago, but I think there were desperate proceeds back then. So I don't know if that's the case anymore, but, so that's, but overall, it's getting in the outline. It needs to make sense and sound logical, and I believe that's, it's not brain science. So you submit an outline. You don't submit the PowerPoint. No. Interesting. Have you ever gotten them to ask you to change this or that? No, when they change their rules about, I used to have a class on credit, and they don't allow that anymore because they changed how they, the credit classes, but that was fine. We had a replacement class we were working on the meantime. So that's been the only thing that's ever, you know, changed or they've never really asked me to change anything in the outline ever, but I also read the guidelines thoroughly, so that does help too. That does help. Yeah, but no, it's, it's actually hasn't. Okay. All right. All right. Doing it. I'm going to go back to, to, to giving you some props here, because I wrote down from my notes. If, if I understand what my notes say, this was a while ago, your, your next competitor does 50% of the volume you do. That's correct. All right. Come on. You're a big patient, a little pop. I mean, you're trying to be humble, but you know that's a compliment, right? Yeah. Yeah. What really changed my business a lot is when I, because for a long time, I operated just solely and I wasn't part of any. I did mortgage coach, um, all that kind of stuff. That was kind of, I was going to the old program and all that. But, um, yes, the really cool one that you could manipulate, but that was a really long time ago. All right. All right. So go ahead. I'm sorry. I was going to interrupt you. Sorry. I have to do this. Yeah, with the disc. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Exactly. And by manipulate, I don't mean it a bad way. I mean, like, you do really cool, like craziness. But now they like have built into make it more like. Oh, it's awesome. It's awesome. But yeah, you and I were pioneers, man. I was, I was back there in my countrywide office downloading that sucker, you know? Oh, one hundred percent. Yeah. I was, I was really. So, uh, but I was really the standalone office and standalone person. I still really am. So finally, I got kind of hooked into a whole bunch of communities. Did a whole bunch of yellow round tables. Yeah. You know, sales mastery. All that. They're really. I could bring different strategies into our market because I think. When, when you are so isolated in such a little town, it's so. Thank you. And so that's been really, really great. I mean, you have to figure out how to put together a team and all that stuff. Because I, you know, it's, it's hard to do that when you're, you know, just by yourself. Yeah. It's been a really, really, really good thing for me to change my circle of influence. But that's a great point is that you have to expose yourself to other ideas and communities and all that exists on Facebook now as well. So get out there and learn from other people. You mentioned your team real quick. Tell us about your team. What does that look like? So there's five of us. Total. And I've got someone that helps me on the prequel side. We have some really complicated prequels in this town as you can imagine with self-employed, seasonal, all that fun stuff. I get super excited when I have a W2 employee who's on salary. Like, what? You're not even. So. So that's, it's great to have that extra help up front, help with follow up a little bit as well. And then once we start the loan, we've got a loan coordinator. I have a processor slash. A genuine processor in our office that submits and does be a reason all that fun stuff. And then we've got lovely duty who does really everything, but she kind of steps in in all parts and also helps me with marketing. So she's a little bit of everything that that's what we love her for. So yeah, that's our awesome. So you're the sole originator. Yes. Yes, we do have three licensed. Sure. More licensed. I'll everyone online. But yeah, but I'm the sole originator. Yeah. Then what do you spend most of your time doing? Making phone calls, going to offices. That stuff meeting with clients. Anything we can do face to face voice voice. I try to spend most of my time planning. That's certainly part of it. Planning. Yes, strategic vision and all that stuff. At what point, just a quick rollback on your career, when did you get your first assistant to help you with the processing and all that stuff? To for you up to continue that. It was a while ago. It was maybe like two years and sort of a while ago. Now definitely that's that's changed throughout the years. I think what really helped is when I uploaded the loan process on to somebody because that is not where I function best. Yeah. That's been huge. I'm really got a problem solving. So obviously something really goes wrong. I mean, but the day to day, like, oh, you're missing page seven of seven. Yeah, on those bank statements. Yeah. Okay. Hey, one thing I want to bring up to just that I think might be helpful for other people in little towns is. What's really served me probably the best in a small town is ethics and accountability and really falling through. So I can't mess up and I can't mess up once. And if you do, it just eat everybody knows everybody knows. So you've got to be who you are 100% of the time. And that's it. You can't be that an authentic person ever. And so it adds a lot of pressure, but it's also really awesome because you get reputation is so big in all towns. So that's something that I think is just really good in any community. But especially in a small town, that will set you apart above all else. So just something to kind of think about in your own businesses. Look, but I think it's just a thing that's something we don't think about enough, I think. No, that's good. Those are kind of the intangibles, I think. Yeah. Because that's a personal responsibility. So, and that's a really good point now that I think of it because I know from talking to lots of loan officers, both, you know, in my role at movement. And like externally is that one of the constant things I see that keeps an LL from going to that next level is they don't treat it. Seriously, they don't treat it as a profession. You know what I mean? Yes. Yeah. And really understand that that we're incredible responsibility you've been given to. It's not just a, you know, this I'm preaching to the choir, but for the listeners. It's not about like, hey, what the loan program per se, that's part of it. But it's really about the impact you're going to make in that person's life. Yes. Yeah. There's one of those three products. We have the that and selling them real estate. It's like, what else has that big of an impact of a purchase they make? Yeah. You know what I mean? We are so lucky and they trust us with this crazy information. Like, they're social and why they were late on this thing. And what happened when that happened? You know, so we get some crazy stuff. And especially in a small town, we know everybody and everything about everybody. So we really have to take that seriously. Yeah. That's what's right. We're very influential in a small town when you know that much about everybody. You know, and the grocery store. Hey. Did you know? Gosh. Yeah. We probably have more secrets than most. All right. So in respect to your time and know your business, let's close out with 2019. I'm sure you've already kind of begun the business planning process. We're going out of the new year. Anything's you're doing differently more of less of for the new year? It's it's just all about that personal touch. So for us, we're tracking a little bit more of our clients, personal interests, and really trying to hone in on those, you know, sending more handwritten cards and making more phone calls and just really touching them a little bit differently. That's really what's going to set everybody apart is things really continue to go more and more digital. So we just want to be, hey, we're we're your hometown lender and we are here, you know, constantly. And we know what's going on in your life and we care about you. So those were just kind of the key things that we're trying to market really almost individually. And I think that that'll help us stay connected to our clients a little bit more and a little deeper. Okay, I love that. Yep, yep, it's all about personal connection. That is the differentiator, especially in a tech first world. We've got to still keep that human connection. What about you in terms of your business? You know, are you looking at the market in terms of planning your production and volume? Or is is that impacting what you're planning to do to fund? Are you kind of you want to do more next year? What are you doing there? I want to do more. I'm going to ignore what everybody else is saying and just work on what I can do and what I can control. So I'm still planning to have a better year next year than this year. And this year was better will be better than last year. So if I can just keep growing and I've got a really great team in place. We had a lot of changes this year with we moved our office and did a bunch of stuff. So we're really positioned well that keep growing. Yeah, I love that. And that's a hallmark of a highly productive, highly successful person is the mindset. Right? Because to your point, you basically said you're going to control what you're going to you can control. Which is what you do every single day of all that noise and the mark of the sky is falling and all that kind of stuff. Here's a phrase somebody shared with me the other day might have been Tom Ferry. He basically, you know, the phrase is the shift is a gift. So this market shift that everybody's talking about. People with the right mindset like you, like other people listening, that's a gift. And that's an opportunities like when there's blood in the streets, that's the time to double down and invest. And the last downturn was phenomenal for business. I mean, that sounds crazy. But we had so many L.O.'s in town and I think lost like two a month for a while. So it was, which was great. So it really does weed out the good and the bad. And it also sets experts apart. Because if we know what we're talking about, that'll show a little more. Yeah, the tide is out. We see who's swimming naked. Right. Right. But yeah, it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Awesome. All right. Now for those listening who want to connect with you, where should they go? Is it Facebook? Yeah, Facebook. I've got a business page there. Like we've never talked about. You can always Google me. That's right. Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes to your Facebook page. But it is Catherine Peterson, Fidelity Mortgage. So thank you so much for being here. We appreciate you shooting. And as always, let's stay in touch. Absolutely. All right, listeners, as well. Thank you for tuning in. We appreciate you if you like this episode or others. Let us know by leaving us a little love on the inner webs with a review. If you don't mind. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks for listening to Mortgage Marketing Radio. One more truth in Mortgage Marketing. 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