Ep# 44: How Star Wars Sells $10 Billion By Choosing Their ONE Thing

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. Welcome to Mortgage Marketing Radio. And brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Any listeners, Jeff Simpson, for welcome to this week's episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio, how are you doing? At the time of recording this, it is Wednesday, May 24th and so we are approaching end of the month. How's your end of the month looking? Are you at where you thought you'd be? Are you beyond that? Are you happy, satisfied, exhilarated with the closings, with how you're tracking at this point in the year? Are you a little bit frustrated? Are you a little bit behind? Are you not quite sure you're going to be able to hit your goals? So I don't know where you're at, but I'd love to hear your feedback as always about anything. You can always email me info at Mortgage Marketing Institute.com. Let's get right into it. We are picking up this week where we left off in going through this book, The One Thing, the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results by Gary Keller and Jane Pappasap. And if you haven't read this book, I definitely encourage you to get it, check it out. I am taking excerpts from this book. We're unpacking some of the concepts in the various chapters and I'm putting them in the context of the mortgage business for you here. And so hopefully you've been enjoying that and getting benefits from it. So if so, let me know. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please do so. Leave us a nice rating if you're liking the content. So let's jump into it. So we're talking about The One Thing. And it's funny. In the book, page 6, chapter 1 opens up with a movie that I hadn't thought about in years. But remember that movie, City Slickers, Billy Crystal, Jack Pallins, these city guys who go off to this like, you know, ranch, do ranch or whatever out in the country and they just, you know, live in the rough life and ride in horses and rope and cattle and doing all that kind of stuff. And they're out there on the open plains. And at the, at a certain point in the movie, right, well, if you remember Billy Crystal and Jack Pallins' character, Curly, who played the greedy cowboy, of course, Billy Crystal right, one of the city slickers, they go on the search looking for straight cattle. And they get into this conversation. And then as they're riding along their horses currently, right, just, you know, brings this horse to a stop and turns in the saddle and looks directly at Billy Crystal's character and he says to him, do you know what the secret of life is when Billy Crystal's character says, no, what? And I remember this, I remember the scene from the movie, the leather glove. He's got these leather gloves on and then Jack Pallins, his character, Curly, holds up. He says this and he holds up one finger, one finger. And of course, Billy Crystal goes, your finger, that's the secret of life. And his response, Curly's response is one thing, just one thing. You stick to that and everything else doesn't mean shit. That's an actual line from the movie. And then Billy Crystal says, well, that's great, but what's the one thing to which Curly replies, that's what you've got to figure out. So as I'm taking on this concept of one thing, you know, it's something that I've heard about before, obviously, but now I'm really diving in and unpacking this and it's really starting to take hold for me personally and focusing on the one thing. And I didn't really get how much that made a difference until recently as I'm going through this book. And I'm really, right, looking for those ways that I can apply this in my life. And I look back on my life when I decided to focus on just one thing where I narrow my concentration on one thing. And this is where my best results showed up. This is where I have huge success when I just narrowed my focus to one thing. And in my case, when I became a mortgage loan officer in 2003, after working for a short period of time, about a year probably, roughly at a mortgage broker who dealt exclusively on internet leads, subprime mortgage broker dealing with online internet leads, you know, in a difficult environment there, right, making calls, following up on these leads, of course, right, they're selling the leads to multiple people and so forth. So you're kind of playing that game. That was the re-fight game. And I remember back in the day, reading the publication, Mortgage Originator magazine. You know, many of you probably remember that magazine, right? And so it would feature all kinds of success tips, stories, strategies, right? A lot of top producers were featured in there. And I remember reading these articles about, you know, these top producing successful loan officers that are doing, you know, $20, $30, $50,000, $100 million a year in closed loan volume. And I'm just, you know, thinking about myself, wow, that's amazing, man, how the heck are they doing that? And I noticed that for them, right, there was a large percentage of their business was focused on purchase, working with real estate agents, and not living and dying by the re-fight. And so I went to my burger owner friend and I said, hey, you know, I'm reading these articles about these loan officers and they're doing like $30, $40, $50 million, we see them, even some $100 million producers in here. And he turns to me and says, well, yeah, but that's not an individual loan officer. Those are companies. They're just like using all the company production to claim that that's their actual loan. I'm like, no, it isn't. These are actual individual loan producers, loan originators, now that they have one, two, three people, whatever on their team, but it's not a company. And so that was the day for me when the light switched on in my head and I said, look, if I'm going to be a considered a top mortgage originator in terms of production and volume in my income goals and a lifestyle, I'm going to lead, I had to make a shift. I had to decide what was going to be my one thing, what was I going to focus on. And I realized through reading those articles and studying other top producing loan officers that I had to be successful with real estate agents. And so for me, my one thing became real estate agents. I became obsessive about real estate agents. I went all in. I didn't care that real estate agents were hard to work with, if you will, that they can be moody and needy and cheesy and there's a mix of bad, good and terrible agents that didn't matter to me because what I wanted to build was an oil well or a series of oil wells, right? I wanted to be an oil tycoon and I wanted to develop a number of producing oil wells, AKA real estate agents, because I knew they were, they are the go to source for buyers in volume, right? Real estate agents that are active, that are producing regularly consistently are dealing with buyers. They need a qualified competent professional loan originator and that was to be me. So therefore, I just had to figure out what was the best way for me to get in front of these real estate agents, right? And I, if you know my story, if you've got my book, Insta referrals on Amazon, I tried and did everything, everything else from me on my fellow loan officers were doing in my office. Now, when I started a country, my home loans, my manager gave me a great gift. It was setting the box of business cards down on the table and he said, go get them. Good luck. Go get some realtors. And that was the extent of my training. Now, being somewhat resourceful myself coming from the background that I did, I decided I was going to get after it, no matter what, didn't matter, so I figured it out. I, through sheer effort, through sheer experimentation at scale, right? So I'm making the call calls, I'm going to broker previews, I'm showing up at the real estate office with a bottle of champagne and a congratulations card on your new listing because I'm prospecting listing agents too. I mean, I did it all, shock and all carpet bomb and some of the things worked, some of them didn't. So it was up and down, roller coaster ride, can any of you relate to the roller coaster ride? Right? Something's generated business, something to do. So I wanted to be smart, wanted to be efficient and be leveraged. So I had to figure out what's the one thing I can do that's going to guarantee, if you will, hedge my bets, leverage my effort so that I'm going to be able to succeed with real estate agents without having to take a year, two years, three years to get there without having to sell my soul without having to beg borrow steel and, you know, show up like I'm selling pencils on the sidewalk and just give me a loan, would you please try me out? It's not the game I wanted to play, right? Wanted to be smarter, wanted to figure out what's the one thing I can do to get agents to want to work with me. And as we get into today's lesson, you may recall, for me, the one thing became teaching into classes. I don't want to run a big self-promotional commercial here or anything like that, but if you want to learn more about how to teach Asian classes to achieve what I just described to you, if you want to make agents your one thing, your key oil well source of business that once tapped, continued to produce referrals ongoing on a regular basis for you. If you want to learn how to identify target sift and sort and convert those agents to referral partners and do it at scale, go check out getpowerfulpresentations.com, that's all I can do tonight. Okay. There's my commercial. All right. And for you, agents may not be your one thing and that's fine, right? Maybe it's something else. Let's dive back into the book here. Okay. Just closing out on that thought, right? The realization, for me, once again, it became, you know, achieving extraordinary results is determined by how narrow I can make my focus. So I want to know all of it. Now, for those of you that may start be starting out with agents, I want to share with your concept from the book called the domino effect. There's a quick story. So dominoes, right? We all know what happens with dominoes, right? You set up dominoes and one leads, you know, you have to knock the first one over and what happens? The rest of them all fall over, right? So that's what we call the domino effect. It's got to start with one though, right? So I want you to keep in mind that if the real estate agent is for you, if that's your one thing or whatever your one thing is, right? And remember, the concept is the one thing, right? It's the one thing that if you do it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary. So how do I fill my pipeline with qualified buyer referrals? If I do the one thing, if I get in front of agents at scale, if I confer, and if I do a good job in presenting, and if I am able to move them along the relationship funnel to referral partners, everything else for me became easier, because I had a steady stream of buyer referrals. I didn't need to worry about where my next door was coming from, okay? So but it all started with one agent and for me, and with teaching agent classes, it's all started with the first class that I have a huge showing my first class now, right? Did I do great? No. Was I nervous to tell you? Like not the greatest speaker, well, you know what? Because of my background, I had perhaps a slight leg up, you know, having worked and presented on behalf of Tony Robbins across the country, yeah, definitely gave me some skills, right? But now I was presenting something different. I wasn't presenting, you know, all the concept, you know, hey, come see Tony Robbins in the seminar and spend 30 minutes selling agents and other people on why he should come see Tony Robbins. Now it was convincing them on why they should use me as a law office. I had started with one agent, right? So if you're asking yourself where do you start, right? Start with one and whack away at it until it falls. So I've worked with many law officers who've done classes and their first class, they have six agents, they have ten agents. Some people even have one, my friend Tim Davis, right, his first class that he did, I think two people, himself and one other person, still gave a class. But again, all it takes is that first domino, right? Because you know what happens when that first domino gets knocked over? Yeah. The next one, the next one, the next one, the next one, and it grows, it builds, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the domino effect. Case in point, again, back to the book. In the Netherlands, on domino day, November 13, 2009, why did your domino productions coordinate the world record domino fall by lining up more than 4,491,863 dominoes? In this instance, a single domino set in motion, a domino fall that cumulatively unleashed more than 95,000 jowls of energy, which is as much energy as it takes for an average size male to do 545 push-ups. So when you think about this, if you break down your activities and the things you need to do in your business, and especially if you're under the umbrella of the one thing, right? And there's, you know, there could be several different things you need to do under the one thing. But, you know, the domino represents a small amount of potential energy. So the more you line up, the more potential energy you accumulate. Line up enough, and with a simple flick of your finger, you start a chain reaction of surprising power. When one thing, when the right thing is set in motion, it can topple many things. And that's not all. In 1983, Lauren Whitehead wrote in the American Journal of Physics that he discovered that domino falls could not only topple many things, they could also topple bigger things. He described how a single domino is capable of bringing down another domino that is actually 50% larger. So how do you achieve big goals? Start small. Start with just one domino. Start with one action. Today, one activity. One thing you can do, that creates that chain reaction, that creates that momentum, that builds up that energy over time. The key is over time. Next is built sequentially. It's one thing at a time, or it's Jim Rohn, just to say, success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every single day. So the one domino, what's your one thing? What's your one domino? But one thing you need to focus on so that everything else becomes easier or unnecessary, and what's that first domino you can flick over? Is it hosting an agent class? Is it making those agent calls? Is it finally hiring that assessment? I don't know. You figure out your one thing. But just to know this, success leaves clues. Aug Mandino, a little author, quote from Aug. It is those who concentrate on, but one thing at a time, who advance in this world. So back to the book, the one thing, chapter three, success leaves clues. Extraordinarily successful companies always have one product or one service they're most known for, that makes them the most money. Colonel Sanders, started KFC with one single chicken recipe. Made off course company, grew 1,500% from 1947 to 1967 with one product, made in a single brewery. Micro processors generate the vast majority of Intel's net revenue. And Starbucks? Yeah. I think we know. The list of businesses that have achieved extraordinary results through the power of the one thing is endless. Sometimes what is made or delivered is also what is sold, sometimes not. Case in point, Google. What's Google's one thing? What is Google's one thing that has turned them into the behemoth that they are, basically the internet, right? What's Google's one thing? What do they start with? And what do they still, what's their one thing today? Yeah, search, search engine. But because they focused on that one thing that makes everything else easier, what does it make it easier for them to do? Sell advertising. What is their key source of revenue? Billions of dollars. And what about Star Wars? Big Star Wars fan. Got some Star Wars fans in my house. Star Wars. Is the one thing, movies are merchandise. If you get merchandise, that's a little buff. Revenue from toys with Star Wars, check this out. Revenue from toys totaled over $10 billion. Now, this is what's interesting. And worldwide box office revenue for the six main Star Wars films totaled less than half of that. $4.3 billion. Think about that. So from where I sit, movies are the one thing because they make the toys and products possible. What's the one thing that when I do it makes everything else easier? Create an incredible movie franchise. Build a massive audience so that I can then have a distribution channel of built-in customers for toys, teaching agent classes, build an audience, build a network, build a platform of agents in my local area who know me, like me, and trust me so that I can build a distribution channel of mortgage loans and be these sorts of the place for those agents to refer clients to me. So when you think about the concept of teaching agent classes, it's much like I talked to it when I coach and teach real estate agents classes, right? And I got this from Gary Vaynerchuk. So Gary Vaynerchuk tells agents you're not a real estate agent, you're a media company, you're producing content, your back end is real estate. And I would propose to you as a loan officer, you're not a mortgage loan originator. You too, much like a real estate agent, to the advice of Gary Vaynerchuk, you today need to start thinking of yourself as a media content company, producing content in various forms of media across various channels in person, online, offline, so that you can build that distribution network to ultimately sell your end product, which is mortgage loans. The question is how are you building that platform, how are you creating your distribution channel? The choice is up to you, okay? And it can grow over time. For instance, if you want to start with teaching agent classes, much like I have done. And once that's built and established and profitable, can you add additional elements that drive your one thing, additional channels, sure, you can do agent classes, get that up and running focus on that because we know that works, belly to belly always works. We know face to face in person works. Even that's successful, should you choose, you can expand. You can get into Facebook ads, you can get into creating a YouTube channel. You can get into all these other channels and mediums, but ultimately what's the goal? The goal is to create your audience, your network of loyal listeners, followers of people who know you like you and trust you, so that you can build a distribution channel with your back end being loans. Then it goes for the consumer side, right? Your past database, you know, any consumer generac, you got to think about, put your hat on as well, that you're immediate, your content company, your back end is mortgages, does this make sense? Okay. There can only be one most important thing. Many things may be important, but only one can be the most important. So what's most important in your business right now? Is it getting more realtors on your bus, on the real to referral bus? You know, get a keep in mind that if you're not constantly adding real to referral partners to your bus, sooner or later your bus is going to be empty or pretty, you know, or pretty empty, right? It's not going to be full with the amount of passengers there are referral partners on that bus that you need or want to achieve your goals. Why? Because like any bus, you're going to make stops along the way. People are going to get off and hopefully people are going to get on. If you've done your job enticing people to get on and ride your bus and you'll have different levels of riders, right? A participant. You'll have your A players, right, the active agents who are sending you deals and referrals every single month, like clockwork, then you have your B players who, you know, every once in a while, they flip you a bone and then probably send in business elsewhere too. Maybe they're not that active of an agent and then there's those C player agents where you don't talk to them for a year and all of a sudden out of the book, hey, man, what's up? Got along for you. And maybe they're doing a few deals a year. I don't know. But the point is unless that bus is constantly in motion, unless you keep opening and closing that door and inviting, come on board, the party bus, the referral bus, that's where most fell short and why the bus sometimes isn't fun and why we're maybe not achieving our income goals, why we're not building our pipeline big enough. So I'd encourage you to, if agents are your one thing, get more agents on your bus, keep it cruising around the neighborhood, get more people to know, like, and trust your bus, right? Become that friendly bus driver. Everybody knows, here comes the lone bus, yeah, this guy, this guy, she's great, right? She's professional, she follows up, she's courteous. She actually adds value to us and she is showing up refreshingly unique and different than any other lone officer in town because she's driving the referral party bus. She's not just hammering a place to get loans and let me tell you all about my company, how we close fast, close on top, guys, get it, content, how you engaging with your market. Maybe that's your one thing. Getting active with your content through which your company provides or some other source of content to create conversations, engagement, right? So back to the one thing. Again, look behind the story of any extraordinary success and the one thing is always there. It shows up in life, successful business, professional life, shows up around personal passions and skills, each of us has passions and skills. But what you'll see when you look at extraordinarily successful people, originators, there's one intense emotion or one learned ability that shines through, defining them or driving them more than anything else. And often the line between passion and skill can be blurred. Here's an example of that. Side note real quickly for me, the line between passion and skill can be blurred. The great news about that is if you have an interest already in something, right? You can build the skill around it, right? So if you want to do video, if you want to do podcasting, if you want to do aging classes, right? You have a natural inclination or interest for that already. And you may have been holding yourself back because you say to yourself, well, you know, I'm just, I haven't really done it. I'm not a quote expert. Oh, I hate that word. Who says you need to be an expert and anything to do it? You know, I love the old saying. I've been using it a lot lately that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly in the beginning. Think about driving a car. When you first drove a car, will you get at it? No. Too many moving parts and your eyes and brain are going crazy. They're working overtime. You're sweating bullets. Like, ah, I don't know what I'm doing. No. Right? You drive a car without even thinking about it. No, you're texting or you're on your phone or radio talking to the kids, right? Or eating hamburger, it's just a party. So those things that you are attracted to, to want to do in your business, look at where you can build the skill sets around that. You know, for me, I already have kind of a basis of a decent skill set brewing and being able to speak. So for me, there was naturally a skill with speaking, but there was also a passion around sharing content and information that helped the real estate agents that changed their lives and the impact of their business in a positive way. So for me, that became, as I said, my one thing, and nowadays I can help those law officers who want to follow a similar path once again, like in promotion, get powerful presentations not come. So is that any of this making sense? Is this resonating with you? Okay? I hope you're starting to see how the one thing shows up time and time again in people's lives, right? Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Bill Gates, right? Bill Gates, his one compassion, his one passion was high school, was computers, was let him develop one skill, computer program, and while in high school, he met one person, Paul Allen, who gave him his first job, became his partner in forming Microsoft. How did that happen? Because one letter, the two of them sent to one person, Ed Roberts, who changed their lives forever, like even them, a shot at writing a code for one computer, the Altair 8800. They only needed one shot, like I'm saying, one shot, and you know, you never let it go. Microsoft began its life to do one thing, they fell up and sell basic interpreters for the Altair 8800 computer, which eventually made Bill Gates the richest man in the world for 15 straight years. When he retired from Microsoft, Bill Gates chose one person to replace him as CEO, Steve Wilmer, Raymond College. Now of course, Bill and Melinda Gates decided to put their wealth to work in making a difference in the world, guided by the belief that every life has equal value. They formed one foundation to do one thing, tackle really tough problems, like health and education. Bill and Gates foundation has one goal is to harness and advance science and technology to save lives in poor countries. To do this, they eventually settled on one thing, stamp out infectious diseases and major cause of death in their lifetime. So at some point in their journey, right, the Gates foundation makes a decision to focus on one thing that would do this, that would stamp out infectious disease as a major cause of death. And what is that? What's the one thing that can do that, vaccines? This is how Bill Gates explained his decision. We had to choose what the most impactful thing to give would be. The magic tool of health intervention is vaccines because they can be made inexpensively, a singular line of further questioning led them down to this one path when Melinda asked, what's the place you can have the biggest impact with the money? All right, that's what came out of that question. What's the place you can have the biggest impact, and for them those vaccines, as you may have heard in the news and seen stories about malaria, or tariff, there's little quizzes on social media. What's the most dangerous, what's the most, is it dangerous, which animal kills the most human beings in the world, right, and people that says, you know, quiz, how is it charged, there's a crocodiles, there's a poisonous snake, no, it's mosquitoes, tiny little mosquito kills more people every year than any other creature today and say, so Bill and Melinda Gates, of course, are doing great things with them, focusing on one thing, vaccines, right? So remember, live the one thing, the one thing sits at the heart of success and it's the starting point for you achieving extraordinary results. What is your one thing, and to truly engage and adopt the one thing mindset, right, I encourage you to go back to the previous podcast and listen to the six lies between you and success. Those lies were such as, hey, everything matters equally, I can multitask and it really takes discipline to succeed, willpower, I've got an endless supply of willpower and, you know, oh, I need to lead a balanced life and, you know, big is bad, right? So those are the six lies that were on the last podcast, if you haven't watched them, let's go check that out because we're moving forward and kind of progressing through the various chapters of this book, the one thing, and once again, if you haven't got the book, let's go check it out. Hopefully you're liking some of the experts, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. But if this is resonating with you, if it's making sense, if it's helping you kind of hone your focus, where you're going to put your attention, your energy, and realize that you can, not everything matters equally, you can let things go by the way, so things are important, but not everything is urgent, right? So what's the one thing for you and your business, think about this, right? And sometimes, jelling on it, really just sit quietly and think about what is the one area of your business that if you did it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary. Now for many of you, this may be in the context of generating more loans, and that's fine, that makes sense. That might be the ultimate outcome, but remember how Star Wars, right? So there one thing became movies through which they could sell $10 billion worth of toys. Your one thing may not be, I just got to close loans, it's how do you get there? How do you create something that's going to get you to that end result? So those are the tools and activities and various things we can be doing in terms of sales and marketing, right, generating one loan a day, and that's broken down into various tasks, right, oftentimes on a given day. If our one thing is to generate one loan a day, what do we have to do to do that? Do we got to have to make, right, daily calls to my past database, do I have to make those calls to agents, do I have to get in front of more people more often, do I have to create a platform, do I need to become a my own media company, your own brand, so that you build a distribution platform and network of people with your back end being loans? What's your thought on this? What do you think? I'd love to know your feedback. Leave a comment if you're listening on the blog, leave a rating if you're on iTunes or Stitcher or send me an email info at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com. Lastly, if your one thing is real estate agents and you want to build that distribution network of agents that send you business every single month like clockwork, last chance at the blatant commercial here, check out GetPowerfulPresentations.com if you're looking for a fast track to getting more agents to know you like you trust you and send you more referrals. That might be the ticket for you, getpowerfulpresentations.com. That's it. We'll see you on the next one. We've got some special guests coming up, very excited about that and some new announcements rolling out about a video, a TV show, mortgage marketing TV, yes, things we're doing with the Facebook and otherwise. So excited to have that. Stay tuned for that. But once again, I always appreciate you, Boyle listeners, I got a heart for you. Let me know that we're making a difference as always, you go out there and make it a great day. Thanks for listening. This is your host, Jeff Zimper, mortgage marketing radio. We'll see you on the next one. Back from now. Thanks for listening to Mortgage Marketing Radio. One more truth in mortgage marketing, get more free training and resources at Mortgage MarketingInstitute.com. Hey guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the Mortgage Marketing Pro membership before and you just want to quickly remind you of that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchase loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. 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 seats, partnering with affiliates real easy. But that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top L.O.'s, authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time, for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere from 8 to 50 transactions in the last 12 months. And we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you so you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at mortgagedmarketing.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. 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