Ep 156: The Strategy of Preeminence to Gain Trust, Relevancy and Ignite Your Business

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with 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. Welcome to Mortgage Marketing Radio. Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Hey, the stories of what's up. This is Jeff Zinfra. Welcome to another episode of the Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast. So thrilled you tuned in. We got a special one today. I'm going to tell you about that in just a moment before I do. Let me give a quick shout out to one of our podcast listeners who left us a review. And this comes from Rake 11. Rake 11 says, rock and podcast. So I'm new to the lending side of the business. After eight years as a realtor selling over 20 homes per year, I made a change. In many ways, I moved to a whole new state. I'm enjoying the lending side and new challenges. This podcast has been an awesome addition to my morning to get me going, adding ideas perspective and getting me pumped. All right, rock and podcast, Rake 11, thank you so much for leaving that review. We appreciate you. And if you're listening and you haven't left us a review yet, hey, I'd appreciate it. It's always positive feedback to know that we are making a difference for you out there. What do you get when you leave a review? Just like Rake 11, he's going to get himself some podcast swag, a t-shirt, a swag box and stuff. You can get the same for you. By the way, rock and rake 11, please go to my Facebook page, message me, let me know your t-shirt size and size and mailing address and we'll send you off a swag box. And if you want to leave us a review, you can do the same, wherever you're listening to this podcast, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, go to my Facebook page. We have a podcast page just from podcast listeners that's just search mortgage marketing radio on Facebook, get more resources, access, community in there, all about helping you succeed as an originator in this awesome fun business. Okay, so that being said, I also don't want to overlook that if you are looking to take your business to the next level, you're looking for better, more successful, deeper, more profitable agent referral partnerships, go check out the mortgage marketing.pro membership. That is for originators who want to have more success with agents who want to become a modern originator, originator as well and get access to a bunch of self-paced modules and learnings, Facebook ads, YouTube, Instagram, etc., I put a short video up about that. You can go check it out at mortgagemarketing.pro. Okay, let's get into this week's very special episode and I'm thrilled, honored. You know, there's some time, some moments in one's career, I guess, that stand out as highlights and this is definitely one of them because my special guest today has been a mentor both from afar and directly for some time. There's actually a funny story which I won't go into depth here on this time, this session, but I actually had the privilege of meeting this gentleman in his office roughly 10 years ago or so and just as an incredible human being, but also has achieved some incredible things in his career. Who am I talking about? I'm talking about Mr. Jay Abraham. Jay Abraham is a business expert and icon and let me just read to you a couple of the comments and testimonials. I mean, he's worked with Tony Robbins. He's worked with Damon John. He's worked with FedEx. The New York Times says that Jay is amongst the best entrepreneurial coaches in the country. He has worked with thousands of businesses, hundreds of industries and has a unique perspective on business models, thinking processes, mindsets, strategic approaches to help businesses achieve quantum leaps in their success and income. Jay has generated, I think, the last figures they call Jay the $29 billion man in that through the consulting and work that he's done with organizations over the last several decades that his clients have collectively generated. I think it's about $29 billion in increased revenues collectively by working with Jay. I'm just looking at the list here. One company took from $800 million to $2 billion, so anyway, I think here's the bottom line. Here's what Tony Robbins says that Jay is almost to take any company and uncover a minimum of $10,000 and a maximum of $1 million in windfall profits that the company has just sitting waiting to be harvested. So I wanted to have Jay on to have this conversation about how do we do just that? How do we gain a powerful advantage? How do we uncover and identify unharvested profits and opportunities sitting right under our nose? And oftentimes what it takes is somebody else to point those out for us, and I hope that this conversation with Jay does this today. Jay has spoken at the Mastermind Summit, Stephen Marshall's event in Las Vegas. He's worked in the real estate space. He's got testimonials from pretty much every respected thought leader and business professional under the sun. I'm scrolling him here on his website, they go on and on and on. And we're going to put links to everything in the show notes. By the way, I suggest you check out his book, which was a very influential book for me. It's called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Go to his website, Abraham.com. He's got tons of free resources and downloads for you to check out there. I would say just dive in, invest, put anything Jay, Abraham, does on your to listen to read list and you won't be disappointed. And I'm so thrilled to share this conversation with you. And as always, which you'll hear when listening to this conversation is Jay is really, he's a critical thinker, right? So you're not necessarily going to get the, hey, man, I need one idea to get me alone today, right? It's not the quick instant fix because that's short term and that doesn't really produce real change. So this conversation, Jay and I have is very reflective, very strategic in nature versus overly tactical. But I hope there's some discoveries and opportunities for you and application that you will take away from this conversation and start to implement in your business. And I'd love to know your feedback on this episode, email me, podcast at mortgage marketing radio. Love your feedback. Leave us a review as well. Without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Jay bram, welcome to the show. Thank you, Jeff. Pleasure honored to have you here. You know, it's funny and prepping for this. I didn't show you this before, but I busted this copy out. That's one of my favorites. I like that book. It's very, it's very fun read. It is, it is a fun read. I've got an earmarked and yellowed and all that kind of jazz and, you know, I've been a student of yours for a long time, obvious atoms, right? Back in the day. That's great. And you're right. I mean, all that stuff is still, it's as applicable today has to be translated to you know, more of a technological world, but it really, it's, it's all universally human nature. Yeah. 100%. All right. So let's, let's kick it off this way. People heard the formal intro before we got into our talk here. But I saw something and doing some research for this. I think this sums up you quite, quite appropriately. I'll let you kind of unpack what does this mean. You are self described ethical pusher of a drug called strategic thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you wouldn't mind. Well, it means that most people, I mean, critical strategic thinking, consequential thinking is a very powerful, dimensional sort of elevation in your ability to accomplish anything. Most people are very tactical. They do a lot of stuff, but they really don't have an end game other than let's make more money or, you know, pay the bills or, you know, do in your cases more, more, more mortgages or whatever. But when you get into really sophisticated strategy, you look at me, said differently, I spent my life focusing on elements of business performance enhancement that each have the ability to be geometric or exponential in their impact. So not incremental games, but things that will go, and we decided years ago to look at big drivers that were so powerful that even if you screw them up a bit, they'll work and spy you, they're compensating. And probably the biggest one, you change your strategy, you change your results. If you look at the majority of businesses, not even individuals, but businesses under, I don't know, $40 million, their tacticals can be, they don't really have a big driving master plan that everything they do integrates through. They just do whatever they're going to do, episodically, you know, they run ads or they do this. There's no congruency. They're not trying to build an integrated strategy that keeps advancing and enhancing a masterful game plan. They don't have a big vision of how this is going to produce something bigger next year in the year after, and they don't use relationships, opportunities anywhere close to optimal. And part of it's not even their fault, Jeff, because they have a very limited scope of reality and experience, excuse me, for moving myself one second, pretty closer. I have an advantage, you know, truth and probably a modesty, I've done over a thousand industries, not companies, and when you look at a thousand different business models, a thousand different strategies, a thousand different ways of selling, marketing, building and enduring ever compounding business, and then you look at how most people have a very limited, very, very insular, and a very, very follow the herd type of a tactical approach. It's not their fault. They haven't had enough experiences, but very candidly, I guess I'd use the word honestly to answer your question, most people are tactical in nature. Strategy is the overriding game plan that everything is driven from. It should only be used if they advance and enhance a big master long-term game plan. If you don't really have a master long-term game plan, other than I got to make enough money to pay my bills or buy them or say these or a bigger house or go on a vacation or set the record so I can get the trip to Tahiti, that's not a strategy. That's really not even a tactic, it's a hope and a prayer, it's just totally different. I don't know if my answer is too abstract or whether that makes a point. Yeah, it does. It makes me think of this saying that I've kind of borrowed. I forget who originated it, but that principles, I wonder if you agree with this. Principles don't change, but tactics do. Yeah, that's true. I mean, the world today is different, but the same. I mean, attention is different, and I think that many people in business, probably a lot of your viewer listeners, have what I call their suffering attention deficit from the market. They don't know why, but if you're not getting the results you want, the response you want, the distinction you want, the financial conversion you want, the referrals you want, then you better figure out why and not just keep doing a lot of the same stuff because I'm going to get you any different results, but even nature, it hasn't changed, but the way it manifests itself as if that makes sense. Let's unpack that a little bit. How would you describe how it manifests itself is different today than it has been in the past? Well, me and you and I both talk. I happen to prefer long form communication. You do too. The majority of people have little... Yeah, some bites, yeah. So you have to grab them beneficially and... You've got to be able to trust rapidly, you've got to be able to connect with them where they are and how they want to be, but people are still motivated by the same drivers. They're just expressed differently and they are more compressive if that makes sense. Yeah, so we bring up a personal relevant points there. You mentioned a certain percentage of my listeners are feeling, there's this word disruption, obviously happening, especially in the real estate space, disruption, tech disruption, things aren't working like they used to, just referencing my notes here. I know you are an expert in these various areas of pre-eminence and relational capital and leveraged marketing, so I want to maybe dive into those different categories. I know you know this space pretty well. You've been, you know, you spoke at the mortgage mastermind summit in Vegas and so you have a good understanding of kind of the mortgage market, the real estate market as a whole. And in the context of we've got a lot of noise happening, we've got all these competing platforms and mediums for attention. Some of the traditional methods aren't working like they used to, such as telephones, etc. And we know the name of the game for our listeners, mortgage professionals, they've got some primary sources of business, right? And there's consumer direct, past client database, and referrals from referral partners, etc. The biggest challenge with that I think of the people that I talk to is how do I show up differently? How do I not sound and look like everyone else? You know what I mean? How do I become pre-eminent in my space? Well, it starts first of all by understanding what pre-eminent really means and looks like and most known. They don't want to be pre-eminent. They just want to be pre-emptive. And there's a difference. We interrupt this normal programming to bring you my message. Yeah. So I mean, I don't think they understand. Pre-eminent is a really cool concept. I mean, it starts with really understanding at a depth of communication and verbalization, exactly what your target audience wants, what they don't want, being able to express it. It starts with understanding what trust is predicated and built on and being able to authentically convey it. It starts by being genuinely interested in them as more of a holistic being. So you grasp what their hope streams for other things more than just getting the loan. It starts with caring enough about them that you are focused on their best interest to your subordinated interest. It starts by really being able to be a great listener. It starts by understanding. I mean, there's all these soft skills, fascination, trust, curiosity, communication, inflection. And again, listening, I can go on and on and on. The pre-eminent is an integration of a lot of things. And it all stems from authenticity. And I think that authenticity, I mean, I did a work a few years ago on the concept of greatness, Jeff. And it was pretty interesting because I don't believe any human being comes into this world unless they have a, you know, some kind of a mental defect, not wanting to be great at all they do. Great in business. There's a leader, a salesperson, a owner, entrepreneur, team member, employee. Great as a husband, wife, father, mother, friend, lover, parent, great, you know, all forms. And yet almost 98% of us are mediocre. And I wanted to know why. And I'm going to tell you that because it might take you a little off your path here, but I think it'll have relevance. And relevance is something I've done a lot of work on too. And the concept of the rules for relevance gets real complex because people don't think about relevancy either, but back to greatness. Most people don't have any clue what greatness is supposed to feel like, be like internally in your brain, in your heart, your soul, in your mind, express like, be received like, be validated like. And there's, you know, seven or eight gradients of greatness, greatness and business, greatness is human being greatness and this and that. And most people don't, first of all, know what it's supposed to be like in all those gradients of interaction. Second, if they don't know, they can't even, they don't have a framework for figuring out what kind of a reference model they're trying to get to. And mostly I can get you some help on that. Second, if they get that far, they don't have any clue on how to go from wherever the gaps are in their various segments of, let's call it deficit between great, if they want to be in one category and let's say mediocrity, they might be at. Third, is if they end up even figuring out how to get there and what path and mechanism to take the first time they try to do it, it's so foreign and awkward that they default back to status quo, just like a little kid who's learning to walk talk and unless they have somebody like yourself to support them and nourish them to a higher level, they go right back to where they were. It's a different tangent than you asked me, but it's sort of a form for me expressing a lot of thoughts I think are relevant to your listeners or viewers. Yeah. So what did you learn about how to identify what does greatness look like? Greatness looks different to different people. The first thing you have to do is start with these number of gradients in your life. Greatness as a leader, a salesperson, advisor, greatness as a human being, parent friend, because all that interrelates and if you're really lacking in one, it can really unintentionally sabotage and toxify the rest, but the way that you do it is you start by thinking about people in your life or that you observe, that you genuinely admire, you genuinely trust, you genuinely enjoy, you genuinely feel positive and better about when you're either in there or when you're observing them and then you try to isolate clinically what it is, how they communicate, how they listen, how they acknowledge, whatever it is, and then you start thinking about whether or not those elements and attributes are achievable by you with authenticity, some of them aren't, but you start by saying, okay, I would like to have this person's this and this person's that, this person's this, and then you say, okay, but I can't be that person that way. How can I adapt, adopt, extrapolate, modify, and if so, can I do it authentically, and you start layering slowly different elements, and over time, if you understand bulletproof jackets, that they're crisscross layers of Kevlar, you know what that is? Yeah. You build a bulletproof, it's not a single plate, it's the crisscross layer, it's a constant, you know, interwoven, yeah. I don't know if that's too, again, I can get a little less, so, Terry, I don't know if that's clear or not. That's okay, it's my job to bring it back. I think it's good to kind of set that up conceptually, and what I take away from that is that's why we have models and mentors and people we can observe in the wild, so to speak, right, in their daily method of operation, we can extrapolate. I don't think most people know how to model. I don't think, and I think you need to learn, okay, if you're going to model somebody, I mean, we try sometimes, you have to pull vault in our intent on transforming ourselves, and that's very hard to do. Modeling needs, it's like everything else, it needs stages and steps, if you try to do it too abruptly, more often than not, you basically implode. So you were saying it's small incremental improvements over time? Well, yeah, I mean, it's funny, even though you're looking for exponential, you can't, you got to do it in stages so that you are, that you become comfortable with your new self, if that makes sense. Sure, sure. It's like learning a new skill, right? I mean, it takes a while to adapt to that. And you build up, I mean, weightlifting, tennis, golf, running, cycling, whatever. By the way, I got to ask you, do you in your office, you still have the office over there in as a Pell's Verties? My office is right outside, it's in Torrance, but it's right adjacent. Do you still have the, you mentioned building muscle? It was curious. Do you still have the pull-up bar in your office? I used to, I do not anymore, and for a reason, when I was younger and thinner, I was stupidly able to do, believe it or not, 800 pull-ups at a time. They weren't great pull-ups. And I had quite a physique, and I also was able to do 400 dips, and I had quite a physique. And now at an older age, I have nine inches of titanium in my neck, and I have a rotator cups, and I got no shoulders, so I don't do as much enough anymore because I realized to my chagrin that your body wasn't built to do that. Now, you know, I try to stretch and do things that are a little more compassionate to my body. Long jeopardy instead of the power, right? Yeah, but when you're young, you have more vanity than you do, let's say, logic. Yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. So let's bring this back to some tactical stuff, because as you know, that's what people want, and I understand we've got to first have the strategy in place first, being very, very intentional and thoughtful, I think, about, for me, it's like, who do you want to be? How do you want to show up in the world? We can borrow some best practices for other people. But back to knowing the space that we're in, where it's highly competitive, there's the threat of this, there's just this threat of, well, not for everybody, because people who are confident are confident in their system and their process, right? But how do I, if I can answer the one question, how do we today, in the modern world that we're in, where we've got kind of modern tools of communication, anything you're seeing best practices or strategically that you're working with on clients that helps individual practitioners, whether it be mortgage real estate, insurance, finance, right? Great connection, get chosen, be pretty eminent. Well, I mean, the first thing is, whenever I work with anybody, we try to default first of all to a couple of activities or methodologies. First thing is, who can you secure in your market to be your, whether it's your endorser, your benefactor, your champion, your advocate, and it's beyond general referral, it's that you basically become the recommended provider and that person or entity is very aggressively and continually committed to helping you. And in order to achieve that, I mean, there's different ways to do it. If it's ethical and legal, you can certainly share compensation, but there's other ways to do it. The easiest way is to help them benefit. And we've done a lot of work where I've helped people create in the course of a year, as many as a thousand influential referral and endorsement sources that built businesses, did gargantuan scale and rather than teasing you, I'll tell you how we did it, okay? We basically realize that in any marketplace, there are lots of, quote, influencers that aren't necessarily the biggest, they are the ones that deal with people repetitively and in very, very long, discussionary periods, anything from restaurant tours, hair salons, things like that. And those are businesses. There are men and women in business who have hopes and dreams that are working very hard and have committed a lot of their opportunity costs and their hopes economically to this enterprise and in what this enterprise to provide livelihood, support, security, retirement, all these things fulfillment. And we've gotten people to help them grow. You're talking to me about growing your audience's success and mortgage people, but if mortgage people want to help other entrepreneurs grow their businesses and in reciprocity, ask them at such time is that help produces results to reciprocate when the opportunity arises. And if every week you try to identify five or 10 entrepreneurs who have influenced that you can start contributing to business growth, knowledge, ideas, expertise, methodology over the course of a year, you might have a thousand and if you keep doing that, you could have the whole community ethically in your debt because you're helping them be better and grow and they are only to impress appreciative and they reciprocate. We've done that with great success. So that's under, that's kind of your concept of relational capital. How do we have access? We have 43 ways to do it. Then if you're going to do referral generation, rather than do it reactively, you do it very, very methodically and strategically bringing strategy back. My brain isn't in real granular and specific mode right now, but we have something like 150 referral generating strategies that people can use. And I do this exercise all the time, Jeff. We'll ask somebody, does 10% to 100% of your business emanate from referrals or word of mouth? Most will say yes. And we'll say, okay, how many formalized systematized referral generating processes do you have in place right now that you adhere to continuously or your team does for you? And most people don't have one. A few that have one don't have two. We have 150 and we say, well, if you do anything else to generate business, cold call, advertise online, there's a big gap in your logic. And this goes back to critical thinking, strategic thinking, consequential thinking. And advertising or cold call sales generated prospect is on the outer periphery of trust building. You have to migrate them quite a bit to get them to closure. And even a closure, they're still a little bit suspect. You've got them there, but they're not sure you didn't get the best of them. They're not sure that you didn't sell them something more than they wanted or they paid more of whatever, depending on the application. Whereas a referral generated client, they know all about you. They trust you. They're ready to do business. They're more enjoyable. They cost you nothing. They deal with you longer. They're usually more profitable in size of the transaction. They're definitely more profitable in what it cost you to acquire them. They refer more people. And yet most people don't even look at it strategically. They just get them episodically, intermittently. Imagine if you get 50% of your business, 100% of your business from referrals and you don't even have one referral generating systematic strategy. If you just put one in place and you increased at 40%, what would that do to your bottom line? If you had two and it increased at 70%, if you had three and doubled it, what would that mean compound it over time? It's pretty profound, Jeff. All right. So this is I think relevant in the concept of where do people focus to to to try and drum up business? And in my industry, what I see a lot of people, and you probably see it too, is they're focused on the sexy, right? The bright shiny objects and social media. That's right. Yeah. Let's run ads, right? And I'm a big component of the referral as far as the source of business. So here's this study. Got it up on my second screen over here. It's from Alexa about 40,000 different websites they surveyed. What's the the number one source of traffic to your website? Here's the categories. Number one source of traffic to the website. Let's guess and see what it is. Was it search, Google, all that direct meaning, right? There was a direct request, go check out our website, whatever. There was a referral, right? Hey, you should go check out this person's website. Or it was social. That was like a call to action to go to the website. So we got four categories, different results in terms of, right, largest and least source. Sure. I get it. No one that I would say is your social and referral could basically overlap, but I'm sure it's got to be more in one of those two categories, Jeff. So we've, and I send this to you afterwards, we want it. So like 15 different categories. We got arts and entertainment, automotive, food and drink, health and fitness. Anyway, real estate. This is why I'm kind of like the anti-message for some people in my community. 13% of traffic to real, two websites in the real estate space was from social. Now, that's not bad, right? When you think about it, but if you compare that to search, 44% referral, 38%. Yeah. No, no. It's, I mean, today more than ever because, I mean, you've got, the only thing it's a little tragic is that is that all review sites are authentic. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it is, if you are trusting the reviews or if the reviews are people you know and trust, but I think that anybody who doesn't focus an enormous amount of their sales marketing, strategic action into generating referrals, relational capital leveraging and who just goes into advertising as their source is making a big mistake for two reasons. One, your profit level is going to be much higher to your repeat level and your and your sustainability. And it's going to be much easier to close, so it's going to be more efficient, faster, usually larger transactions. The trust factor is already, I mean, everything about it is more preferable. Yeah. You know, it's funny when, when people hear about you and, you know, see all that you've done and achieved, right? They, they think about you, I think is obviously a marketing expert, right? Marketing guru, whatever the terms are that you want to apply to that. Then what I find interesting is when you get in and unpack some of your philosophies and strategies for growing your business, for winning greater share of customer, for having pre-eminence, I think it's interesting that you actually talk about, for me, it was actually surprising, perhaps, in the beginning, is like empathy and falling in love with your clients. I mean, you can't be great in your service to others if you really don't appreciate and empathize and respect and recognize that everybody has enormous value. I think a lot of people to serve themselves in their careers, their jobs, their businesses, because they really have almost a disdainful attitude to the market they serve. And they're gaming themselves as opposed to gaming the system. Yeah, I love humanity, and I particularly adore and admire entrepreneurs. They're, you know, they have passion, they have purpose, they started out with a vision, they're, you know, they're competing every day against, you know, big business. It's, you know, they're, you know, they're usually authentic. And I love entrepreneurs, if I didn't hurt for them, because I see them accept a fraction of a fraction of the business they could get, the joy they could get, the predictability, they could get the, you know, the viability, the wealth creation, I hurt for them, and I want that hurt to trans send itself into contribution. But I think if you can't appreciate, respect, understand, evaluate, and acknowledge your, your markets relevance, and, and really appreciate and almost fall in love with them. You can't achieve the optimal possible, because you have a disconnect, and that disconnect, this friction and friction is evident, whether you know it or not, it's evident. Yeah. It's evident, you know, and authenticity, it's evident, and, and you not always, you know, communicating is fully as you could. I mean, all kinds of things that are subtleties, but it's evident. And along the lines with that, this concept, concept from your, your book, which I'll put links to everything in the show notes, but one of my favorite books I've ever read is giving everything you can out of all you've got. This in here, I love your, it's a mindset shift. You've got a definition to, to clarifications, your customer, a person who purchases a commodity or service, client, a person who is under the protection of another. It's totally company. We insist anytime I ever work with a client, I insist that they understand that difference. If they want to be preeminent, and preeminent is extolling and elevating yourself above the maddening crowd, but you refer to people you do business with, I'm sorry, I'm home, you're going to hear the phone ring. As a customer, what you're really saying between the lines is, I am no better than a commodity. I am a marginalized generic, non-distinctive provider of something you can get from anybody. Maybe I'm a little bit better, a little bit worse, a little bit more less expensive, a little bit more convenient, but I'm nothing more than a commodity. And then you struggle and say, why do they treat me as a commodity? Well, the first thing is, unknowingly, you acknowledge yourself as a commodity. Right, right. I just love it. I mean, there's just so many learnings. I'm just continuing to read here. I don't want to quote like every page of the book, but another mind chef for people listening. I love this is that most people think, what do I have to say to get people to buy? Instead, you should say, what do I have to give? What benefit do I have to render? And mindset? Yeah, Jeff, if you look at it, it's always been this way. Again, the way you deliver it is changed, perhaps, but we are rewarded in this life. And we always have been for the problems you solve and the opportunities you make possible for others. If you do the same thing, everybody else does the same way everyone else does it. And there's no distinction advantage. There's no benefit above and beyond just, hey, call me. I mean, people try to say, it's give me the business you could give to someone else, but there's a big gap. They're forgetting the word because the reason why. Yes. It runs through everything that you do. If you use no reason, why, why would you do it? Right. All right. Listen, I know for a second time, we're almost out of time. I wanted to close out on this last thought of there's so many things I could go, but I had to focus and just pick a few ones that stood out for me. I might sneak one more in. But what do you mean by, um, explain, there's no relationship between being good and getting paid? Yeah. I mean, it's, you mean, very good at what you do. You can be, you know, masterful, but if the market doesn't recognize the value that that goodness or mastery represents distinctively and, and again, preemptively, meaning above and beyond the options available, then it doesn't matter. You mean you can be the best, the best intended, you can be the best educated, you can be the most knowledgeable, but if you can't express that to the market in a powerfully distinctive, preemptive way that they see you offering them a value above and beyond their options, you're not going to get rewarded. You're going to get frustrated, Jim. Exactly. I love that. Okay. Let's end it there for those people listening. I think the homework assignment for you is to, to get some quiet time alone in your business, identify your overall business processes, your customer experience, from the first moment of awareness, right? Am I on the right track here? What's it like for the first conversation, all that stuff, right? Our kids have the ideal process. Yeah. I mean, well, I tell people your first job is to try to examine, evaluate, understand, appreciate, respect, and acknowledge that the other side is having a whole different reality than you. Until, unless you appreciate them, and again, if you can fall in love with them, maybe fall in love with their hopes, their dreams, their drive, they're not you, but you're not there. And the first step, the second is, I mean, too many people try to manipulate the relationship they have with someone doing business with them. That's the big mistake. It should be very fluid. Even what I'll call not selling, but compelling communication, it doesn't have to be prepared. It doesn't have to be you queuing up, trying to get your message in. It's free. It should be very fluid, and it should be very natural because you're so engaged in providing contribution, solution, opportunity to the other side that you're just really in the moment. But it's a whole different dynamic. And you probably, I may be today, I go through moods, Jeff. So I might be a little more cerebral today, regrettably, because I have lots of very finite stuff we do with clients and we've taught people. But I think that without the mindset, I mean, you got to think differently if you want to achieve differently. How about that? I like that. That's really good for sure. And to put a cherry on top of that reminds me of a quote I read by, you know, Dr. Robert Chaldini, when asked, you know, in this world of algorithms and automation and all that kind of stuff, how can somebody, you know, rise above the noise? How can somebody have a greater impact? And he simply said, be more human. Yeah. And be more connected in the real way, not the theoretical online way. But Jeff, thank you. This is not too abstract for your viewer listeners. No, it's awesome. Thank you very much. It's an honor to have you here. And obviously, we're going to put links to all your stuff in the show notes is jabraham.com. Just Abraham.com. It's just Abraham.com. Okay, great. We'll make sure we have that in there. I know you have tons of resources for people to download and check out. So I'll encourage them to do that. And so once again, Jay, thank you so much. And listeners, you know what to do. If you like this episode, please leave us a review and we appreciate you. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks for listening to mortgage marketing radio. One more truth in mortgage marketing. Get more free training and resources at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com. Hey, guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before. 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