Ep 47: How to Originate $50 Million Teaching Agent Classes

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. Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute. It's your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Hey listeners, Jeff Zimper, welcome to this episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio. So glad you're here. So thrilled to bring my special guest, Mr. Vince Kingston to this episode of The Show. And the reason why is Vince is not only a top producing mortgage loan originator, producing four to five million per month, averaging about 50 million per year, pretty good, I'd say in most people's book. But Vince has a business model that is pretty unique in terms of how he gets his referrals for real estate agents, you know, he's a specialist in first time home buyers and what we'll talk about that on the podcast by the way about, you know, should I specialize, should I choose a niche or not. So for those of you who have submitted questions to me and asked me about, you know, Jeff, should I choose a niche and what about losing the other business? We unpack that with this conversation with Vince. And if you do want to submit questions to me about anything, always email me at info at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com. But back to Vince's business model. Vince's unique and it is close to my heart in that Vince, the number one way that Vince gets, well, the way he gets all his business, as you'll hear from him shortly, is through teaching agent classes. And I saw what Vince was doing. We connected. I have him tell his story, his process, his system for attracting, capturing and converting real estate agents, what he teaches the subject matter, how he teams up with title affiliates to help him and how Vince is now shifting his model to do way beyond just CE courses, which is, and he'll, of course, reference the offering that we have, which is getpowerfulpresentations.com. So if after you listen to Vince's story, his, you know, his success rate, his, how he's generating this production and automating his follow up and really never having to chase a deal or beg for business or co-call or any of that kind of stuff, and you are hopefully by now convinced on the value of teaching agent classes, you'll hear Vince tell his story, how Vince is expanding his library of classes by teaming up with us here at the mortgage marketing institute, go and check out getpowerfulpresentations.com. If you want to take that next step and get started teaching agent classes, that will tell you all about how to get started with done for you agent classes, a library of PowerPoint presentations, speaker notes, video tutorials, the whole follow up system, everything souped nuts, and Vince happens to also be a member of getpowerfulpresentations. So the fact that he, you know, without any prodding on my own or anything like that, you know, gave us a glowing testimonial on our product and platform, well, that hopefully says a lot for you. So listen to Vince's podcast, take lots of notes, and most of all learn from it. And then if you are so inclined to want to take that next step, go check out getpowerfulpresentations.com. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Hey Vince, welcome to the show. Thanks, chef. Happy to be here. Yeah, thanks for being here. And so I wanted to bring you on the call today because you have what I think is a unique business model, and you know, I talked the other day about how you're actually capturing real estate agents and doing it in an extremely predictable, systematized way. That means no co-calling, no chasing, none of that stuff. And yet you are consistently able to produce what, what is it, four million, five million a month? Yeah, it's about between four or five, about fifty million a year, fifteen months a month, very consistently. Yeah, very nice. So for those listening, give us the quick, you know, story of Vince Kingston. Where are you? Who you're with? How long have you been in the biz? So Vince Kingston, you go home mortgage Portland, Oregon, and been in the business since 2005, I feel like I was, you know, I didn't really understand my way until about, I would say, 2012. So I was kind of halfway in, halfway out of the business. I feel like until 2012, all of those some stuff going on prior to that, sure we all remember. That made a difficult industry. But 2012 came to my current company very much on purpose, you go home mortgage because I had this, I had this intuition that I had to, I either had to change careers or I had to figure out a way to authentically and confidently engage in the actions I needed to do every day to be very successful. And so I switched companies to be able to, to offer some knit products and the rest of history, built everything around that. So I've been told so many times you can't base a business on product and I am here to tell you you can and you can be very successful if you build, you know, if all your platforms focus on, you know, specializing in those areas. So two things I heard in there, I want to unpack a little bit. One of them is kind of finding your way and then be successful, focused on a product. What did you mean by finding your way? You know, I didn't have something systematic, first of all. So to this day, I still have to refocus myself almost every day to like not be attracted to the shiny flashy objects, you know, and go in like too many different directions. And so for the first three or four years of my career, that's what I was doing. I was, you know, trying this fizzbo campaign and then this, you know, listing campaign and this new thing and that new thing, I didn't understand my own personal value proposition and took me years to figure that out. And then once I did, it's been a joy. It's been a real joy. I mean, there's still been challenges with building a team and everything, but it's such a joy once you figure out what your value proposition is and then it focuses all your efforts. So that leads me to an obvious question, perhaps if you could articulate a bit your value proposition, what is that? Sure. So ever since 2012, or I would say actually late 2011 coming to EO home mortgage, I've nitched myself relentlessly. My favorite two words were actually my favorite three words when it comes to the mortgage business are niching or niching however you want to say that, scale and delegate. So I'm sure it's a scale and delegate later, but so I nitched myself relentlessly in first time home buyers. That's why I initially started and then I have a couple other that I've built on to that. And it was just, it was almost like a article of faith. I mean, like everyone, I don't care if it was a real or not. I mean, I tell homeless guy on the street, I serve first time home buyers better than any other lender in the city. And that's the demographic I want to serve. And then it really helped me go out there and be confident and get in front of agents because, you know, I can care less if they're working with other lenders. It's totally fine. And I honor that. But I know that I serve that first time home buyer demographic better than anyone else. And that's who I want to help serve with them. And so that has been very successful for me. So there's that for some home buyers and then a couple of years later after I've been pretty successful myself with rental real estate. I have six rentals now. I start niching, niching, niching and, you know, you can go with niching, man. Just go niching. I'm not. Exactly. Exactly. I'm from Nebraska. So that's how you say in Nebraska, niching, I started doing this investment seminars that have been very, very successful and just focusing on that. And now I truly believe that, you know, anyone who has a desire to own multiple properties or does own multiple properties, I serve them. I serve them better than anyone in the city because I walk the walk. I teach classes and I understand the strategies that are inherent to those more sophisticated financing situations. So when you say investment seminars, what does that mean? You are running seminars for a perspective just, you know, every day, man on the street who wants to get investing in real estate? It's twofold. It's two consumers. So like what you were just described and then also two realtors, it's actually quite an appropriate continuum education class, you know, fits under the category of continuum education. It has a lot of real finance in it and everything. So to both those groups. Interesting. So how do you, on the consumer side, how do you get butts in the seats? How do you promote this? Get the word out. So a couple of different ways, we use EventRite extensively, like I know you do too. And I figured out years ago that if you hold a class consistently, you know, I'm not a tech guy, I'm hired a marketing guy because I know I'm not a tech guy, but I do know this on EventRite. If you hold a class consistently in the same place and you just keep on changing the day, then eventually EventRite starts organically driving traffic. It's pretty amazing. And so we'll list the class on EventRite and, you know, we may get 20 to 30 signups through EventRite alone just organically. And then we do Facebook advertising for, you know, people who are interested in buying investments and anyone who signs up for that or says they're interested, they get put on a drip campaign for investment-minded topics in addition to being fired at the class. And then we also leverage local agents. I mean, it's a great way for them to build their business. I have several agents that are being really successful with it. So they use their database. Oh, regarding Facebook, how do you target that? What kind of options, you know, demographics are you picking there? How do you know they're like potential investors? Sure. So I told you delegation was my other pair of words. Is that like, is that like, I'm actually pulling all the letters out? Hey, Sean, we have brought somebody else to the call, too. Ryan's in the other room, I can go grab him. I can fake it till I make it all. You're good, you're good. So, you know, obviously we pick it, you know, it depends, you have different submarkets here. So if it's an inter-apportland, we'll pick a zip code that corresponds to that. If it's in Vancouver, one of the outer lying areas will pick zip codes that correspond into that. Certain income levels, certain ages, you know, most 18-year-olds aren't buying investment properties. So, you know, usually college educated, you know, we'll just, and that's how we'll try to. So, you've made maybe certain amount of income, all that. Exactly. And then it's just different ads that are, you know, we're being fairly successful. And I mean, we have no problem generating leads. We have on Facebook. That's no problem. And I can just push a button and generate leads for about five bucks each. It's a little harder converting them, but I found it easier if I think about it as like a two or three step process, where I'm, you know, cultivating that lead, where first they pick a button saying they're interested in maybe investments, then they get a drip about different investment strategies, then they come to a class and then, you know, then they become a client at some point. Is that the process right there? The ad is directing them to summed up of a lead capture page and then they're getting dripped on? We were doing that, and we found that Facebook has a new type of ad, I think it's only been around for about a year, where they don't even have to leave Facebook or conversion rate in terms of at least getting people to give their contact information and it's just skyrocketed. Yeah. And what you get from that is you get an Excel spreadsheet of their contact info, right? Well, it gives you everything. Yeah. The reason the conversions go way up is because they see an ad and they click on it and ad just turns around, it says, are you, are you interested in receiving more information about this than they click? Yes. And then it gives you their information, their telephone number, their name, their email. Yeah. No, I've seen that before. If my understanding is it, is that doesn't like automatically put them on, on some type of a CRM, you still have to kind of manually import that over. Actually, there's a patch you can buy. There's like third-party services that will automatically push those in into your CRM. Yeah. We're getting a little technical here. You're right. Yeah. And that's not my area of expertise. I mean, that's. No, but that's good. All right. So that's one of the ways you've built your business to kind of bring us back. Full circle is first-time home buyers and investment seminars. Let's go back to first-time home buyers for a minute. Why did you choose that as a niche? Because I want to be tactical as a policy model. I'm really trying to build a business by design. And so if you're in a competitive market space and you're building a business by design that you want to be able to scale, and I always had a master plan, and like a lot of a lot of a, I know I'm kind of, it seems like I'm digressing here, but I'm going to get back to this like I think. Like a lot of loan officers, it's almost like they believe you have to have a personality cult to be successful, and like, I don't want my team to be about me. I want my team to be about, you know, things that we serve people best with. And so first-time home buyers are a unique platform for that, because A, nine to ten lenders in my market don't offer for some home buyer programs. It's a very easy value proposition for me to walk in and make other lenders look poor, I think. I mean, it's very easy to say, oh, your preferred lender is such and such. Well, here's the web pages right here. They're not certified lender for these programs. I'm sure they're a great lender, but I really think you need to serve your first home buyers and make sure that they're working with a first-time home buyer advocate. That's a really cool value proposition. So it was easy, and it made me feel special, you know, it's easy to sell when you think your product or your, or whatever you're offering is really special, compared everyone else. What is the unique product or whatever that you're offering first-time home buyers? Well, and here's where we get into, you know, marketing, and just saying something over and over until it becomes true. So the underlying product is really only like three or four. It's not like I have, you know, ten unique products that no one else has. It's really only three or four, and there are many lenders who have some of those, but very few, if any, who have all of those. And then if you position that correctly in a CE class, and then you do a good job of proving to agents why your first time home buyer advocate above and beyond the special programs, you just take them to normal, fan your Freddie guidelines. I mean, you talk to them about, you know, how if anyone except IBR and how Freddie will, you blow their minds. You look like the first time home buyer expert. So you just figure out how to speak to the challenges, and then I guess what I'm trying to say is, yeah, I have some unique programs, but it's more about just determining I'm going to be a first time home buyer expert, and then doing that, even without having so many different programs. Right, right. Okay. And branding or messaging around that first time home buyer concept. Well, so getting back to the reason why we're chatting is the primary business model to deliver that is the CE classes to agents, continuation classes. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that. Are all the agent classes you do, CE? Yeah. That's why I was attracted to what you're making available in terms of the, you know, powerful presentations, because I do recognize I need to branch out. I mean, I would be even more successful. I will be more successful once I branch out. And because I recognize that even though my business model is successful, I'm not going to walk away from it. I could leverage it very easily into non-CE classes, and I'd get a whole different demographic of realtors who are never going to come to my product-based classes. Right. Exactly. All right. So let's kind of um, um, um, um, practice a bit more because I remember when I talked to you, I want to summarize this and you can kind of correct my course here, but if I understand, if I was to sum up your business model, you in terms of working with agents, you 100% exclusively, the only way you attract capturing convert agents is through classes. You don't call, call them. You don't try and doorknob. You don't go to open houses. You don't chase and even after the classes, you don't even follow up. So how accurate is that? And you can comment as needed. I believe it on. It's completely accurate. I am. So people are listening and going, wait a minute. What the hell? Well, I get the classes, but what do you mean he doesn't follow up? How the hell do you get business if you don't? Yeah, go ahead. We'll be back up. So I do follow up, but I've been in a passive way because again, I'm trying to build business by design and I encourage more people to think about that. And so, and so back to niching, you know, I know I'm there. I'm there to demonstrate that I'm a personal homeowner, homeowner advocate and to make them believe that I'm the person who can serve their personal best. All right. I think I do a pretty good job doing that in a class. And then all I've done is built a email campaign that specifically reciterates the specialized programs and tactics that we have for first home buyers. And then they go on that drip after the class. So that's the only fall of it. I don't personally follow up. They just get a very specific niched email drip for that class. Let me ask you a quick question. On the first time home buyer classes, you've got CE credits attached to that. How is that? That's like a financing related class and that meets the requirements? Well, yes. And I recognize that I'm pretty lucky here. I've been told Oregon is less strict than other states. I've been told I've had colleagues on the state saying, you know, we can't do that here because in Oregon, the title companies will certify you as long as it's a certifiable subject. Yeah. Your material, unless I get really, really crafty, I won't be able to get that certified CE. But I'm going to try. Trust me. I'm going to try. I love you to try. Yeah. Because you're right. Every state has its own requirements for CE. And if I throw enough economics statistics, I'll say, look, I'll go through 10 minutes to boring statistics. I will call the CE. I don't know. I got ideas. I'll let you know on that. That's cool. But in any rate, as long as it's a subject that is certifiable, like real estate finance, obviously, is a big, big one, then they'll certify it and they give the credit hours. It's kind of a sweet deal. That's awesome. Okay. So let's go back to your follow-up system. So you do a class, let's just say it's the first time home by your class. What does your post-event follow-up system look like? How do you get business following the class? It really is as simple as I do the class, I'm not making this up. I do the class and I go back to my office and leads come in. All right. Man, you're selling the sizzle here. I'm sorry to be not sophisticated enough, but that's pretty much what's got to be harder than that, Vince. Come on. Well, first of all, I'm not scared of presenting, and I recognize people that would be really hard for them if they had problems being in front of people. Second of all, I think it's just doing a good job and just reiterating and proving to people without selling yourself how you serve this one demographic. I like using indicator words like service, and it teaches my team to say, we just want to serve you the best way possible and stuff like that because then I just think you come across and more sincerely. So look, the biggest innovation I made with my classes is doing more of them. I want to do more business, I just do more classes, and then building the email campaign. I did that about a year and a half ago, and I think it's increased my conversions. But before that, I would just do the classes and not even follow up with the email and I would get business following. All right. So I'm going to come back to the email follow up a second, but I'm curious what was the impetus or something that drove you to start doing classes because you're obviously attached in a big way. Why classes? What happened? What did you realize? Why is that kind of your go-to strategy for realtors? Sure. Thanks for asking that question because it started with book called The Seven Levels of Communication. You heard of it? Michael Mayer, yeah. He's been on the podcast. Exactly. I used to hand that out to all my agents, and I think it's probably one of the most awesome books that I've ever read. And it's a whole business plan. There's lots of stuff unpacking that book, but the biggest takeaway I got, and then I've lived by, obviously since then, is that you are wasting your time unless you're faced to face with someone. It's just junk, and you walk around a lot of mortgage offices, and there's just one officer sitting in their office, and I'm like, you gotta go out there. You gotta get out there. I read that book in mid-2011, and then I said to myself, if I'm in a market, it has to be face-to-face. That's all I'm gonna do. And so I started doing that, and at that time, I did go to broker-opens, but it was with this same message. I would pick, and tax credit or something, and I'd go create a flyer, and I would just talk to people about it. And it was very successful. I was like, wow, I'm actually getting loans, talking to people. And then the logical progression, I was like, well, it's kind of hard to go to talk to onesy-twozy realtors, what if like, 20 would count in me, and I could tell how awesome this program was. And that messed this history. Yeah, and so you got sold on that, because it's working smart, it's what I call the law of large numbers, and once you've got a taste of that, you're like, oh man, this sure beats onesy-twozy chasing and all that. That's what I love scale. That's my favorite word, though. All right, so let's go back to, and by the way, have you ever called the agent some just curious? I did the, I know you're from the core, core coaching. I did them in 2012, and so I did that horrible, horrible, exhausting call 40 or 50 realtors every Monday, call 40 blah, blah, blah, Tuesday. And you know what, I'm here to tell you, I guarantee that works, but it just sucks. I mean, I want to do that, and I got business from it too, but it was like, quality of life was really low. So I did that for about six months, and now I train other people who work under me to do that, because I do know it works. But for me, classes work a lot better. There you go. And it's also positioning you in a different light, you know, to those agents. You teaching a class as a whole different perception of positioning than you do in those calls. Yeah, doing the calls, you were just, you were, you were a beggar. You're like every other one officer doing those same calls. Yeah. In fact, in fact, so many won't have to do those calls, I would get agents going, why does all the loan officers call me on Monday, and you talk about not feeling special? Exactly. You automatically put yourself in a box, which again, it's part of the reason why I started doing classes is because of those, those reasons. I didn't want to look and sound like every other LL, because I'm not, you're not. So, and it's up to what I'm hearing from you, Vince, is you, you know, like you said, you wanted to work by design, take control of your marketing, your positioning, and you've done that. So far so good. Yeah. All right. So back to your email follow-up system. People want to know, man, what's in that magic system, how does it go out, what email system do you use, and how many messages is there, you know what I mean? That's where I'll start. Sure. So we use constant contact, because, you know, I mean, even though it's cheap, I mean, even though I sound like tactical strategic and everything, most of everything else we do is totally wrong. Like, I'm doing 50 million a year and don't even have, I don't even have a CRM, which don't, and my team is disappointed in that. And that's one of my initiatives soon. But, you know, I didn't even have a database until a couple of years ago. So we just use a simple constant contact, but it might as well be MailChimp or whatever else. But we like constant contact, because frankly, it allows you to dump a lot of emails in there without getting, you know, spam issues. Or, you know, like everyone else makes you like verify that the person must receive a email, which good, I mean, even people who love me usually verify, yes, I want to get emails, you know. So, anyways, look, that's a little tip, why we like constant contact. And then there's about, I think there's about 20 emails, maybe 25 in the first time home buyer drip. We just have two drips with the first time home buyer and investment drip, and those go out and then they just get recycled. So after they after agent goes to the 25, it just starts over and then we can go through it again. Interesting. And then the emails just, again, you're just on target. I mean, just every single email is like first time home buyer, first time home buyer, and who came up with the copy? Who wrote it? I did. Okay. How long did it take you to build out that series of 25 for our first timers? It is kind of exhausting. Well, you have to work, damn it. I know. You have to work a little bit, but at least only had to work a lot for like one week a year and a half ago. And then it's been paying dividends since then. So, you know, and that at hours, I don't know, maybe 20 hours. Okay. Cool. And in that email, is there a call to action in every one of those, or are they more like informational? Mix it up? Mostly just, I mean, there's a simple call to action, you know, like, you know, call me. Let's make a plan for your first time home buyer today or something like that. I lay out text base. No images? Just text base. Text base. Okay. Got it. All right. Very cool. And do you like look at your open rates and all that stuff? Or it's like that, not of interest? Never? Never. Yeah. Your success rate is somebody what sends you an email back or calls you with a referral? No. I know this sounds weird. And it's hard to go off and for other people, but it's just, it's just faith-based. It's, well, it's not faith-based. It's, it's, I just know that if I do X-Mata classes, I'm going to close X-Mata loans from those classes. And it just, like, it just works like that. So I don't have to, I don't have to micromanage smaller metrics, like open rates and stuff like that. I mean, I just look at the big overall metric of, okay, if I do X-Mata classes, then I'm going to close X-Mata loan. All right. So let's talk about that a little bit. What is that ratio of those numbers if you do X classes that equals X units or loans or volume? Right. So that's a great question because, you know, everyone, like every year, everyone talks about how you're going to write your business plan. Yeah. And, you know, I know this is going, Vince. Go on. You're 30 percent more likely to accomplish your goals if you're out of plan, blah, blah, blah. Well, I could never follow, like, more than, like, two things at once. Usually, two things I couldn't do because it's busy. So my business plan of, like, last three years, you know, January 1st was, like, double your classes. And then I just did that. And then my volume, like, thinned and double, went up, but I went up by 40 percent, last three years in a row. And that's it. That's my one-blind business. Oh, my God. I think people should try to streamline things out there and just write, you know, maybe one thing. It'll probably be successful. Yeah. But how many classes do you do a month? Okay. So now, you know, I started out doing, like, one quarter, I think I was like, 2013, then I went to, like, you know, one a month, 2014, I was like, wow, maybe if I do two a month, I'll be really successful. And then, so I think I did that in 2015 and 2016, my goal is to do three to four months, and I hit that pretty close. And now I'm doing bare minimum four months, but usually six to eight, like I did nine last month. Wow. And you typically do them at the same place? No. We've grown in our strategy. So we have different micro markets. We're active in a tri-county area. So we'll do one in like Multnomah County, and then one in Washington County, and then one in Clackin's County, and mix them up, because we don't want to, we don't want to hit the same realtor as too many times to get unsubscribed. So we've broken the realtor database into three segments, geographical, and then we just rotate the classes right under there. So taking that same class, the first time home virus class, what rotation would you be on? Let's say, just pick Seattle for simplicity. So you did a first time home virus class yesterday in Seattle. How soon would you come back with that same class? I would say once a month. Once a month. Okay. Got it. Rotation. Yeah. Like we try to do a class, well maybe once every other month, because I want to do the same class the very next month, I have like four CE classes. So, you know, probably I'd let it rest for a couple of months before I hit the same counting or something with the same class. Got it. Okay. But obviously you're not getting the same realtor's back, because they already got the CE credits for that. Right. Okay. And the average attendance at your classes? That's another thing I did. So, when I used to do the classes, I would rely on the tile companies to market them, which is just such a limiting belief. I don't know why I did that. And, you know, the average class in years past would be like five or ten realtor's. And, you know, sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out really simple things. And my big aha moment was like, wow, if I could get like 20 or 30 realtor's per class, I could probably be more successful. And it turns out that that's true. If you get like 30 realtor's instead of 10 realtor's per class, you go close to ones. And so now my average is about, I'd say about 20 to 30, because we've gone the extra distance and built a whole, you know, more or less email campaign around how to get people in the class to come to the class. Speaking of that, you are emailing your database every time you're doing a class in that area. Right. But, you know, like I said, rotating through those segmented realtor lists. Yep. Okay. So, you still partner with the title companies to help fill the room? Well, yeah, I need them because they offered the CE. Oh, that's right. Got it. Yeah. They don't let a mortgage company offer the CE. Yeah. They're definitely unique up there because they do do that in a lot of different states. Now, I'm always teaching encouraging LLOs, especially when they're getting started with their classes to team up with your title, escrow affiliates, all those people because they can help fill the room until you kind of get off the ground on your own. And they don't get me wrong. They still do it. It's just that now we do it as well. Yeah. So, as you know, I'm doing a class tomorrow where I think the title agent, she got like nine or ten signups, what we have 25 from our own efforts. So instead of being like a 10 person class, it's going to be like a 35 person class. Yeah, exactly. Very cool, man. Very cool. So, you're not on, you do anything other than you're running your Facebook ads for your classes, but you're not really like trying to be the guy on social media, right? Facebook, all that kind of jazz. Well, I am, but this is all just like secondary and tertiary stuff. Okay. Yeah. It's a big word I'm working on. It's not a, it's just not my core business model, but you know, I'm trying to make it all work together, but I don't get leads like like we do this branding thing on Facebook, which is kind of cool. It's really cheap. But it's just to support what I've already told the Reelers that I first on home buyers. So you can do branding ads to a very targeted group like just Reelers and it's not like you get charged like a buck every time I click it like you can, people will see it. They'll just see your picture saying you're the first home buyer expert for like two pennies. So we spend a little bit of money every month branding. Can you trace that to anything? Well, not really, except for, you know, like I was doing class last week and or gentlemen, or Reelers sit in the front row, you know, I walk in and he's like, hey, I know you. I've seen your pictures on Facebook and I'm like, well, here you go, you got me in person now. And so, no, it's like a kind of a soft thing, like a subjective thing. You can't tell it's not like where I do a class and someone said, I'm calling you because I Reelers said you did this class, but that you keep top of mind for your niche because of that. Yeah, exactly. It's a brand of thing. Like you said, top of mind awareness. And you're not really driving a lead, a call to action on that. It's more of an awareness. And it's cheap. It's super cheap. Like for $80 a month, I can be viewed by almost every Reelers on Facebook in the whole track area. Yeah. So that just feeds into everything else you're doing in your local market there. Right. That's cool. One quick question about niching because you clearly chose a couple of niches out of the gate. Every time an LL asks me about niching, right, and if you've heard this before, maybe had a similar concern, which is, well, gosh, if I choose to go with a niche, am I going to lose out on all that other business? I don't know if you've thought of that or heard that, but what would you say to that? I would say that it's just the complete opposite. This is not my original idea, but it's my original thought. But I heard someone vocalize it perfect a couple of days ago where they were saying that, you know, if you, a commodity tries to be everything to everyone, especially in the lender game. And, you know, like a luxury item knows that it can't be everything to everyone. It only wants to serve, you know, the demographic that it serves best. And I don't want to be a commodity. And plus I want to build an efficient business. And here's an efficient business where someone calls you and they're already sold. Yeah. Sell me one. I mean, they call me, all I do is reiterate, yes, you're Realtors, right? We do specialize in all the area, first home, home, buyer programs. I can't wait to help you with your first home. Boom. That's like, I'm done. I just sent them a link to the online application. That's it. I don't have to resell them. So, I think if you niche yourself properly, you can create the most efficient business ever. And it's just totally the wrong mindset to think you can like be everyone to everyone and somehow be successful. I don't think you can. What was that you said about a luxury brand knows it's a luxury brand knows that it's only going to appeal to a very narrow part of the market. That's all they care about. So think how efficient that is. Oh, my gosh. I only care about this little teeny narrow place, but I can make a amazing living just on that instead of trying to care about the whole marketplace where there's too much noise and you'll never be everything to everyone. Yeah. So that doesn't let's just say you get somebody who's a move up buyer, right? They come to you by way of a rail to referral. How do you handle that? Of course. Then we go on a salesman, that's a great question because then we go on a salesman. Of course, we don't say, hey, we specialize in first time homebuyers in your move up buyer. We don't say that. Right. You know, that just happens to be your specialty is first time homebuyers, but we also handle. But I think the point you're making for those listening is, look, you got to have to your two-point vince is, you got to be a specialist, right? Who makes more? The old cliche generalist or specialist who you think about doctors? Let's make a hell of a lot more per hour, right? So you've got to specialize and become known for something. But that doesn't mean you're saying no to the peripheral business that's going to come simply by way of that. And I love what you said. You go into sales mode. Right. We go into sales mode, but let me give you another example of how it does lead to, you know, just because I'm really focused on this, it doesn't mean I don't do lots of different loans, you know, jambos, move up buyers, whatever. So like another C class I do is renovation financing. And I love rehab financing because again, there's only five lenders, five or six lenders maybe out of, you know, 100 different lenders in our market who offer renovation financing. So definitely very unique. And here's the thing, 99% of people will never, ever use that loan, but I get remembered. People call me like, am I real or said, you're the only one who does rehab financing? And I'm like, awesome. I sell them on rehab financing. So I speak to them right away about why they called me and sell them on that. But then, you know, too much later, they're just doing a regular conventional loan. And I'm getting that commission because that makes sense. I got remembered for something unique that just led to a normal loan that I would not have gotten. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You got to be known for something. Or, you know, like you said, okay. So just closing out here last couple of minutes, I'm obviously thrilled that you're expanding your library of classes. And, you know, for those listening, you reference, get for powerful presentations, which has some other non-CE topics like video marketing, millennial marketing, etc. Do you have that next non-CE class on a calendar yet? No, I knew you were going to ask me that. Put me on the spot. It's going to be on. It's going to be on. I'm really excited about it. And, you know, I have my own ideas like I think we're going to combine a couple of those classes. Because. I've already been successful with like Facebook marketing. And so I can take and end the video market. I mean, I do have lots of videos online. Where? And YouTube? Where? Yeah, you go. Just go on YouTube. I have like 20 or 30 videos on YouTube. I actually get loans off of those. Not definitely not like the CE classes, but I will get a call, you know, once or twice a month. It's not a big deal. But once or twice a month, I got a call. And I'll close like three or four loans a year because of those, excuse my French for their crappy videos. I'm professional. I thought you didn't speak French with the niche. Yeah. I know. I've given you some contributions here. But anyway, you know, I'm really excited to teach those classes. I think what you're offering is a really, really great service. And I think it's really fair price. I'm just being totally honest about that. Yeah. Well, thank you. I didn't set you up for that at all. Appreciate that. We're really hoping to expand that and offer more topics. I'm on your YouTube page. And by the way, we'll put links in the show notes to all this kind of stuff. I'm curious because everybody's right. And they start, you know, every loan office is like, man, I got to get going with video. I got to get social media, all that kind of stuff. But I like, you know, it's like you've established, look, man, get your core business, your foundation built. And the message I heard you say there per the book from Michael Mayer is, unless you're face to face, right, you're wasting time now. How you get face to face, though, may include lots of different other elements like, you know, Facebook, et cetera, like you're talking about. So I'm curious with your videos because I'm just, I've got my L.O. cap on and all of a sudden you see the text over video and everybody wants to know, how did you do that, man? Do you got your tech person? Would you do? They're looking at my one of my deals right now and it has text over it. Yeah. It says, well, just the thumbnail, why you should buy home in Portland. Okay. Well, that's totally compliments of my marketing guy because I don't know how to do that stuff. Yeah. So next time we can interview him, I'll be happy to. There you go. I made the videos. You know, you've seen them. Well, who's videotaping you? You have somebody on staff or what's that up? Some of them, you know, like a couple of those were professionally made, but I'd say about half of them are just in my home office. I found it. No, it was just on my laptop. Laptop. Damn, is that easy? It really is that easy. I mean, but back to your point, like once in a while those do SEO because I give you Google used to be better. They used to put video on the front page of just search and now you have to actually click on images. But if you click on images in my market, you know, I'm for some of those things like personal homebires. I'll be like first page, but it really is just to reinforce the first time homebires of after I've done a class and gotten in front of someone. Yeah. So I think for me, the big takeaway is, look, your number one primary source of business is the classes, is real estate agents. Everything else is just complimentary to that. Totally. Everything else just supports that and doesn't contradict that. Let me ask you this question, and then we got to wrap up. But you still feel though, I mean, it's pretty clear to me, but I'll just ask you for the listeners to clarify, you still feel having a presence online, sharing content is relevant and important in your overall branding marketing strategy. I think that's a great question, and I want to give a disclosure that, you know, I totally may not be correct, but I think people put maybe a little too much emphasis on that. You know, I think if you didn't have a webpage, but you went out and got face to face of 10 billers per day, you're going to be, you're going to make a quarter of my dollars here. I mean, people put way too much emphasis, I think, on this online stuff, and I get it, and I'm, I'm building an infrastructure around it, but that's after I've already gotten to this certain level and had nothing to do with like online stuff. So yes, it's important, but it's important as just a supporting vehicle, supporting infrastructure if you will, around going out and doing classes or creating relationships or something. That's my personal. I love it. I love it. I agree. The core foundation for everything else, right? Cool. Well, listen, I know you're busy, and you've got lots of stuff to do for anybody who wants to reach out to you. How would you suggest they contact you? They can just call me. I'll be happy to chat. You know, I'm a real person, or they can email me at minskinksthanategalagem.com. Minskinks? Yeah. I'm sure you'll be busy doing a class or something like that, responding to all those emails. Are there going to be thousands? Come on. No. I mean the emails from the agents. Oh, the agents. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we didn't talk about delegate yet. Maybe that's another. Yeah, go ahead. Real quickly. How do you delegate all this? So you don't have to do it all? I feel very lucky being in the mortgage industry because as a realtor, you're like on your own, hiring independent contractors, and with, you know, if you're aligned with the right mortgage company, they'll support your success by basically, you know, you can hire people as employees. And so every time I meet a volume milestone, I know go back to management and say, okay, I did my part and met this volume milestone. I'm going to hire another person and they're to their credit are like, yeah, you earned it. And so I hired another person. So now I got five people on my team and, and I'm just able to delegate everything except the classes almost. Yeah. So I don't know if we're out of time, but I think it's really interesting subject because I think a lot of people are afraid to do that and I was afraid to do it as well. But it's like, and a lot of agents, I have to admit, don't understand it. It's just, you know, division of labor. This is not a new concept. Henry Ford came in with it a long time ago, you know, if like, if you have one person devoted to only pre-approvals, that person is a pre-approval monster. She doesn't do sales, she doesn't do processing, she doesn't chase conditions, she just does pre-approvals. Or if you have one person devoted only to closing loans, that's all they do. They're not after doing sales, not after doing the fifth yellow things. And I think it creates a very efficient situation. Well, how did you deal with the issue of cost, right, when you decided to hire your first assistant or whatever? It was that something you had to kind of deal with? Well, again, I recognize I'm lucky because I align myself with the right company and all the company to do this. But once I hit a certain milestone, you know, loosely it was about one and a half million a monthly production. They would pay for your assistant and you could choose to bonus them. So I further incentivize, so everyone gets a base salary paid by the company. But then I've chosen to further incentivize my people by paying them a part of my basis points. And I believe strong in that because I, first of all, I make them do a lot. And second of all, I want them to be incentivized like I am. And so I'm very proud that I have five people on my team and they all make really, really good income. That's awesome, man. Good for you. Well, maybe what we could do is have you back and unpack a little bit building a team because I know that's a very frequent topic that comes up for me and some of the coaching that I do is, how do I build that team? How do I hire? Who should I hire? How do I make sure I got the right person on the bus, you know, all those kinds of things? I'm hiring two more people right now. So I'm still learning as I go, but I'd be happy to chat about it. Oh, that'd be great, man. Well, well, damn. Look at that. Hiring two more people. Hey, if you haven't got it already, people. I think that class is pays off. So, yeah, hey, man, I appreciate it very, very much. And next time I'm up, now, where do you importantly, you said, right, Portland, Oregon? Yeah, Portland, Oregon, offices are tired, but that's just a little suburb to the south. All right. So, come on up. I'll be together. Yeah, there you go. That's right. Micro-brews. Appreciate the time. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And if you haven't yet subscribed to iTunes, please do so. If you like this episode, leave us a rating. Subscribe to the podcast so you get notified of each new one coming out. And once again, for your listeners, I appreciate you and we'll look forward to seeing you on the next one. Bye for now. 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, and I 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. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our Mortgage Marketing Pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling. Done for you, agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you, everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market, attract and convert agents into referral partners. Plus, done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seeds, partnering with affiliates, real easy, but that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top L.O.'s, authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time, for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere 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. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now. Head over to mortgagedmarketing.pro.