Ep #65: A Revealing Look Inside the Business of a $2.5 Billion Dollar Originator

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Mortgage Marketing Radio Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Here, listeners, Jeff Smith here, welcome to this episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio. How are you doing? Is 2018 kicking off the way you intended it to be this year? I hope so. Not listen to this episode, lots of learning lessons in here. Who's my guest? Well, my guest is none other than superstar, originator, rock star, Joe Calpebiano from Chicago, Illinois. Now, if you haven't heard of Joe, where you've been living under a rock? Come on, Joe's been in the mortgage business since 2001 and since 2004, he was closing over $100 million in loans every year since 2004. How do you start in the business and four years later be a $100 million producer? Well, listen and you'll find out. Joe's total fundings in his career of so far is over $2.5 billion and obviously consistently ranked among the top loan officers in the country. I mean, number four in the country in 2011 for purchase business as well as consistently the top one for production for purchase business in the state of Illinois. I mean, Scott Simmons guide named him number four, originator, MPa magazine, hot 100 list, number four in the country on mortgage executive magazine. You know, the list goes on and on and on and how many accolades Joe has got. But I think why I wanted to bring you Joe today is because a couple of reasons. This will be a little bit of a longer lead up to this actual show. So bear with me here. But look, so Joe's doing some mega production, right? Lots of units helping lots of families. Now, oftentimes people hear this a couple of things come up. First of all, the assumption is, oh, well, Joe's got a team of five loan officers out there generating the business for him. And not true. Joe's generating all the business. He's a rainmaker. Does he have a team? Yes, he does. You'll hear more about that on the podcast. Does he have individual loan officers that are out there in the field actually originating? No. He does have support staff that are actually handling the business that he generates and then turns over to his team for his onboarding, his loan process, etc. And you'll hear about that. We'll unpack that on the call. That's number one. Number two, as you listen to this episode, just know that there are some lessons you can extract for yourself. And then there are some that might not be appropriate for where you are in the business. For example, Joe is not someone who meets his clients face to face. You cannot do the volume that Joe does and scale to that many units face to face. You simply can't, right? So what I want you to be aware of is that might not be the right model for you. Look, if you're in a place where you don't want to do $100 million a year, you don't want to do 1,000 loans a year, right? And your business plan and model is not as aggressive, if you will, right? So if your goal is to, instead of do two loans a month, do five or do ten, right? Or whatever the case is, even 20, right? And you're at a place where you need to build your brand, you need to build more trust, you need to improve your customer experience. Well, meeting face to face with your clients is one way to do that and to do that in a very controlled way. Because in a competitive rate environment, right, et cetera in technology coming in, right? One of the things that separates you differently from the rest of your competitors out there or from technology push button mortgage is your customer experience, the level of education and transparency that you provide, right? So just keep that in mind, right? I don't want you to hear this podcast from Joe and to be like, oh, well, Joe C doesn't meet with any of the clients. Therefore, I'm not going to do that. Not the right answer there, okay? Do what's right for you and your business, but just take the lessons that you hear in terms of Joe and his process and how he approaches, right, structuring, you know, files and working with realtors, et cetera. Those are the takeaways I want you to pull from this because, as I said, right? In today's world, right, you've got to build that trust and there's no better way to build that trust than face to face. So if that's a model that you want to subscribe to, meeting with your clients face to face, I highly endorse that, particularly if you're in that growth mode, right? That's going to help accelerate a lot of things for you, your conversion rate, right? Your referral rate and things like that. So just know that going in. Okay. So enough said about that. Hey, by the way, if you're liking these episodes and you want to share the love, I appreciate it. You can go to iTunes, go to Stitcher, more platforms to come soon. Leave me a review, okay? Just leave me a nice little thumbs up, four or five stars, whatever you think is appropriate. And then as a thank you, I'm going to send you a cool sexy t-shirt as that. And I do mean sexy, by the way. These things are soft, they're, you know, comfortable, they're attractive, it spikes conversation people. What's mortgage marketing radio, right? I actually sleep in mine. That's how comfortable it is. So if you want to get yourself one of those t-shirts and if you want me to keep talking in this bedroom voice, I can do it. Here's how you get your t-shirt. Leave me a review and just email me info at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com. Email me that you'll have to review your mailing address and your preferred shirt size, large or Excel, only please. You small people out there, you know, you'll grow into it, okay? Hit the gym. So leave me a review and you'll get your t-shirts and these things are selling like hotcakes selling. I'm giving them away for free. So I just ordered a new batch and appreciate you sharing the love. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Let's get into this week's show. Joe, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks Jeff. Great to be here. No, it's great to have you. I know you're incredibly busy. You've got a lot going on in your life and I'm just honored that you've been willing to take time to share your experience, you know, as a wildly successful loan officer. So give us the quick skinny on who Joe is, what he's all about, man, you know, give me the rundown. Yeah. The mortgage business in 2001 started as an assistant, learned the business pretty quickly. I was very fortunate to kind of find a career path that I enjoyed and that I was fairly good at business kind of grew organically and, you know, been in the top 10 of the country for a while now and just been very fortunate to have a successful career in the mortgage industry. Awesome. So I want to start with, you know, whenever I have a guest on like you and as you know, I've had your buddy, Shampanozian on. So, you know, we get what I call mega producers, right? And if I'm looking at your stats, over two and a half billion in funded loans since 2001. Yeah. Done a lot of loan. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big number. And so oftentimes people hear that and they're like a couple of different reactions. They're like, oh, my God. How does he do that? Number one. And then the second reaction is, you know, he's probably got a team of 20 loan officers under him. So first order of business, I want to deal with that. Let's set aside how to do that for a moment. We'll come back to that. But give us a breakdown of what your team structure looks like. So I, as kind of SVP, I talked to all the clients. I quote, rates, but then beneath me, I've got a rock star team that I've built over the years finding the right pieces takes time and a lot of work and effort and energy. And you really, your team is only as good as the effort you put into building them. So spent a lot of time developing a strong team. I've got a few mortgage consultants, my mortgage consultants. Know everything about the loan business, just like I do. They know guidelines, they know rates, they know programs. They are the ones who interact with the clients as much as I do. They handle getting front end paperwork, they handle getting paste-ups and bank statements and tax returns and qualifying income and things like that. Once clients get us documents, that's where kind of the machine takes over. And we've got a couple, we call them loan coordinators, but in a traditional sense from all of the processor, they handle the submission of the loan to the underwriter, the first round of conditions that they can handle. Anything relating to client documents goes back to the mortgage consultants. Spread in there, I do a lot of condo business. So I isolated having a specific person dedicated to the condo process, chasing down condo questionnaires, certificates, insurance, things like that. Things that were specific to my transactions, I think that was a big differentiator from me to some other people who also did a lot of condos. But staff would get burned out chasing down things like the condo docs. And then there's support staff sprinkled in there to help people do the more mundane tasks of chasing down a verification of deposit or following up on titles from attorney's and things like that. So that's kind of the key minutes in its whole, I've got about nine people who work for me in total. Okay. And so back to those, the people that are the front-ends talking to the customers, would you call them loan consultants? Yeah, the mortgage consultant, mortgage consultants. What percentage of the business that's being generated for you overall under the umbrella of Joe, right? How much are they out in the field generating versus you? Zero. That's not their job. The expectation is I'm the rainmaker. That's my sole job is my job is to make the phone ring develop business and take kind of the front-end side of the application. They are in a traditional business world. They're kind of an inside sales rep. So inbound phone calls, they may handle. But for the most part, they're supporting me and giving me the ability to be out. So the phone's always getting answered. If somebody calls me, it may roll to one of the mortgage consultants. And they're certainly capable of quoting rates and doing all those different things. But I source 100% of the business that comes through our doors. So is the, give me an average day in the life. You're out in the field, shaking hands, kissing babies, right? Meeting, greeting, realtor partners, et cetera, to generate, to make it rain. But the directive is the conversation you have with your referral partners that, hey, when you've got a referral, you call this number. Does that, depending on the situation if you're on the clock or off, does that roll automatically to your team? How do you set that up? Yeah, so I'm very seldom off the clock. To realtor partners and referral sources, the conversation is, hey, call me here's my cell phone. I'm available 24-7. So any of the front-end conversation with clients is all me. It's getting to know the client, understanding what their goals and objectives are. Give them some brief overview on the mortgage process. But also mentioning that once we get started, Nikki or Chris or Rob from my team will also be involved in the process. So making sure that they understand it's not all me. That's how I can be in 10 places at the same time that I have an incredible team. I want them to be comfortable with them, but I am the first phone call always out forward my phone if I'm not available, but in general, it's only my phone number that goes out. It's not, hey, call so-and-so, call Nikki for a rate quote. It's called Joe, called Joe, and that continues to build my brand, right? That helps reinforce that I'm in 10 places at the same time. So you kind of want to act as if and act as if you're omnipotent to a certain point. And what does the daily flow look like for income and calls that you're getting on average? It varies. Mondays are brutal. My assistant doesn't really schedule any appointments for me on Mondays because in general, the cycle starts on Saturday, Sunday, people are out looking at houses. So Monday is flooded with people who've written contracts and one understand where rates are and things like that. So Mondays are, you know, just kind of putting out fires with your finger in the nail and trying to stay up with water is really what a Monday looks like. You know, the rest of the week, I'm not a guy who blocks time. I'm not a guy who schedules, like, you know, a pay between 9 and 11, I make outgoing phone calls. I'm more of a ad hoc kind of fly my night guy where I just go with the flow of the day. Mondays are incredibly heavy with phone calls. Some days are not, but I keep myself busy and I'm either taking in business or I'm reaching out for a new business. Very interesting to hear that somebody doing the level of production you're doing, not time blocking. That tells me. I know it's certainly an interesting time. You know, I hear a lot of guys talking about time blocking. It's just it never fit for me and it seems to have worked out pretty well. And so I get that. I think there are some unique situations where people can, you know, like you do that. But I'd say they're the rare because too often people then get bogged down in the stuff that doesn't make it rain, which you don't do, do you? No, I mean, my time is very efficiently spent, right? I don't, if I'm on social media, it's purpose driven. I'm not looking up, you know, who was outware last night. My social media focus is highly focused. If I'm on email, I have a purpose for being on my email at that time. If I'm in our loan softwares, I'm everything I do is very strategic. But if something else pops up that is a revenue generating event, I think that's important piece to understand is if I am in the middle of writing a Nobel prize-winning idea down and my phone rings and it's a realtor or a new client, everything else ceases immediately. And the focus is on revenue generating events because that's the highest and that's used my time. It's not penning some novel to a writer, but if I have downtime and can help strategically position us to close more loans, I certainly don't waste that time in any stretch. But revenue generating events are the number one focus of my day, 100% of the time to the point where if a client called right now, I would probably drop this conversation and move on to that, just kidding, but you know, I can't stress enough how that interaction is critically important to loan officers and they need to understand that their sole purpose is generating revenue. That's what you are, that's what a loan officer is. And that's the single highest best use of your time. So that's a great point. I think I want to highlight that for a second because there's one of two directions people can go and I talk to L.O.s a lot about time blocking and the question comes up, you know, well, what if a realtor call comes in and you can go one of two ways in that you either, you know, structure your day where you do have time blocks and you let your referral partners know, hey, and obviously you can use your voice mail to say during these hours, et cetera. And that's one way to go. But the other way is your way, which is, you know, no, a call comes in, everything stops for business. The question I have around that though is, because I know this is the loan officer's head is, well, how often does your time get wasted, right? If it's one of those calls that you think is going to be a productive call, but it's one of those questions that could have been dealt with later. How do you respond to that? Sure. You know, I'm efficient on the phone. I'm efficient on emails. A lot of people don't answer the entire question or don't hear what the other person is saying. So if you're efficient with your time, I mean, I can drive, I can go through a loan application in five minutes. If it's a client, I know is comfortable with that, you know, there's so many different clients out there and clients and people types, right? The traders that I deal with who want to know what the rate is, what the payment is, what do they need to do, and they don't need to understand every single detail of the loan process compared to the first time home buyer needs additional time. So, you know, understanding who you're talking to and how quickly you can navigate and hit on all the key points without them feeling rushed is an art form that you've developed over time. And I think that's something that has been, I've honed my skills on being as efficient as possible. I don't have very many 30 minute phone conversations. I don't have very many 30 minute meetings, you know, my average time in the phone with a client is maybe 10 minutes, even for a first time home buyer, because I'm driving the conversation. And I'm asking very direct questions. I'm not beating around the bush and asking, you know, I don't have that crazy personal relationship with a client that a lot of people try to do. I'm Josie. I'm here to help you get a mortgage and I don't care if it's a three bedroom or one bedroom. I care about what your goals and objectives are related to the financial piece. There's very little emotion. And that's what the realtors are there for is to talk about the size of the unit and the color of the walls and things like that. That's not me. My job is, you know, what's the mortgage payment for 300,000 with 5% down 10% down and there's any benefit to putting 50% down and really driving that conversation and constantly putting it back on the point of, do you have additional questions? So there's very little dead ear when I'm talking to somebody on the phone. So I'm trying to get an idea of them, what that conversation looks and sounds like because you know, there's some people, I'm trying to get a sense of how much of a kind of financial consultation you're called is, you know, you've heard people do like, you know, total, you know, total cost analysis and things like that and look at three different loan scenarios and make sure the loan fits into the overall financial picture. Are you delving into any of that stuff or is it really more focused on the loan for the home right now? You know, that thing. So it's always hard to answer, you know, that from a general sense, right? It's very different clients and different experiences throughout the time. I do a lot of stuff through email before I get to the phone call stage. I'll go, I would say 20% of the clients, I may not talk to on the phone because my email presentations and my email strategies are much more focused on extrapolating out those questions and I explain to a client, it's always good, you know, when you're dealing with financial things to have things in writing. I can't tell you how many times a client has heard something different than what I said or vice versa, you know, that the phone tag conversation or you're talking to the husband and the translates to the wife differently, having things in email, I try to push people towards the email side of things so then I can respond thoroughly and efficiently. So when I'm on the phone, less of the conversation is about anything other than rates and where they are and very specific questions, I try to push most of it onto an email format and you know, provide helpful links to clients to do real research. So if they want to go and dive into a deep hole on amortization schedules and understanding, you know, whatever tickles or fancy I guess, they're lack of a better word, they can do it at third time and not while I'm sitting on the phone with them. And during your process, you know, new customer onboarding client process there, do you have various educational, you know, pieces or links that you drive them to, right, to, I mean, obviously they get on the phone with you, they get a referral from an agent, they're already positioned as obviously an expert, right? But what additional things do you do to help, you know, around that? So most of the time those clients are first time home buyers, so they may be looking for grant programs or things like that and I know a lot of loan officers want to control where they look and where they find their information. I try to give them the source material, right? If they want to know something about a grant program, I direct them to like the Illinois grant program page. I don't hide behind that even though it mentions 15 other lenders on there, I don't mind them going to the actual sources to find that material. So I try to be very rudimentary in the information I give because I don't hide anything, right? There's no game, you know, I always quote the best rate I have available. I don't play around with things like that. I'm very consistent whether it's the little old lady or the high-powered attorney, they get treated the same and get provided the same information. So, you know, there's access to the Fannie Maeke eyes online now. So I walk people through things like that, I don't couch the conversation on anything other than the baseline facts. And I think that's something that's important to understand, you know, for a company like Be Mortgage, you know, we're raw guidelines. So a lot of people work in a lot of places where there's guardrails up and they don't drive into the Fannie Maeke website because Fannie Maeke can go to a 50 DTI but their company has a 45 max DTI. You know, I work for a company that the guardrails are down, it's raw guidelines. So Fannie says we can do a 50, we can do a 50, if Fannie says we can do a manual underwrite, we can do a manual underwrite. So I think a lot of people don't give the real source material, which is the Fannie or Freddie or FHA guides because they have overlays and that becomes a more difficult conversation of, well, this says I can do this and, you know, the answer is for me, yeah, absolutely, I can do that. Yeah, that's probably a unique situation for you then without the overlays. And additionally, you know, most borrowers, you know, that's, that's, they probably don't understand a lot of that where they get so deep in the weeds, right, that just kind of mucks up the conversations. Yeah, there, you know, people are used to following what they're told verbally. And that's unfortunate, you know, because there's a lot of things that become available for clients that they didn't know. People won't explain LPI, LPMI to them compared to PMI or vice versa. And I try to give them the, the information I don't want to spend an hour on the phone explaining things. I try to drive them to rock eyed lines in the purest form so they can do some research on their own and get as comfortable as they want. And then usually they'll have questions forming, but it's something that I can usually answer via email very quickly. So you're back to your, you know, kind of onboarding process with your clients, you're taking the initial call, you're doing the high level consultation stuff and you're introducing that they're going to interact with other members of your team. When do you kind of jump back in at any point during that process? In a perfect world, I'm just kind of there at the end as shake hands and kiss babies. You know, the process in general, I spend a fair amount of time on the front end with the client, both through phone or email, never for the most part face to face. I probably can count on one hand the number of clients I've met with in the last year. Spend a lot of time on the front end, introduce them to the single mortgage consultant that they'll be working with. Once the loans approved, even the mortgage consultants telling them that they're approved, I probably give the final figures to the clients a fair amount of time. So congratulate your clear-to-close, here's the closing estimate. But other than that, you know, very limited conversations with me directly, except if a problem arises, you know, again, it goes back to my team being a machine and a machine only works as if the things that go into it are, you know, have rounded edges and this is where I picked it somewhere else. So I extrapolate out the problems. If something arises, then information wasn't accurate that the client gave, and now he's texturing something different or whatever, I died into solving problems and might spend a little more time with the client if a problem arises, certainly in an increasing or increasing interest rate environment, anything related to rates or payment changes, I jump in and handle that, anything relating to market movements where there's slowdowns, I try to be proactive and reach out to clients about that. But from the loan process standpoint, I really have such a rockstar team that I'm not involved other than the front-end conversation and maybe giving some final figures. Sure. How about loan status updates? Does your team handle that? Team handles it. We update realtors, attorneys, certainly on the buy side when loans approved, appraisals back, clear to close, those are really the things. We always try to be proactive, very seldom do we have extensions needed or anything of that nature. We're usually very proactive. I manage my pipeline based on mortgage contingency dates, more so than closing dates. We treat the mortgage contingency data as a closing. A lot of people, especially the big bank, look at mortgage contingency dates or suggestions on our side, that's basically the closing date as far as I'm concerned. That loan needs to be 100% done by the mortgage contingency date. I stress that to realtors, I stress that to clients, I stress it to attorneys, that is the critical date, especially in a hyper competitive mortgage market that we're now in certain markets. The Denver's and California's and Illinois's and Boston's, those markets, man, if you miss a mortgage contingency date, the seller is talking to the realtor about relisting the property. That is a very nerve-wracking experience for a client and just creates a flood of phone calls that blows up somebody's day. If you blow a mortgage contingency, that's a call from the buyer, that's a call from the buyer's agent, call from the buyer's attorney. Half the time, it's from the seller's attorney or the seller's realtor as well. Those are five calls that I wasn't planning on having that date, and somebody like me who's very strategic with my time and we talked about time management a little bit, that blows my whole day off if I have too many of those during a week or during a month. I don't have time for that. I put a lot of pressure on my team and the people around that when I ask a client, my team, and they ask for a client an updated pay stub, I put deadlines in there. They're saying, hey, John, I need a pay stub by Tuesday or we're not going to meet the mortgage contingency date on Friday and putting a lot of the pressure back on the people who are providing you that information. That's a good strategy. I like that. I put it back on them. The other ones that want to buy the house, right, so let's get it together. Nobody's ever said to you. Nobody's ever said you and Amoris can deal that you communicated too much. That doesn't come out of somebody's mouth. A realtor never says, gosh, I really wish you wouldn't have told me all those things about how the deal went. They like the information and the more you're proactive with that level of communication and putting deadlines so everybody's clear. Here's your contingency date. Here's your closing date in order to do that. We need to do things by three days before that and five days before that. Communicating the same stresses that we have internally as loan officers and companies, making sure that everyone's aware of the process will accomplish a goal much smoother. Okay. So curious, how do you handle the past database for generating business from that? Do you do like annual reviews or whatever? What's that look like? Yeah. I do a pretty good job of staying on top of clients, interest rates. I have a knack for remembering deals and remembering clients. One strategy that I was very successful at is, and it's unfortunate it usually starts this way, but a client will call me and say, hey, I heard rates dropped and I'll say you're absolutely right. I pull up their file and look and I say, yeah, I can probably save you a half a point next Y and Z. But then what I do is once I get that deal started or locked in or whatnot, I go through and look at a closed loan report from that time. So if they closed in May of 2017 and had a 30 or fix and that was able to refinance and chances are, they're not the only loan that happened between April and June of 2017 that I can refinance. So I start digging in very strategically for loans that close during that time frame. So you know, certainly that you've got to have a fair amount of loans to do that, right? If I'm closing 30, 40, 50 loans a month, that's that's a lot of loans in that if, you know, if different listeners are closing two, three, you know, you've got to have some different strategies. But I really focus on loans that close during that time frame and then will strategically take some time to look and delve into each one of those. And now there's so many tools, you know, making sure your bounces, values off, silo. I think too many times people today say, oh, yeah, John Smith, that four and rates are at four. But then you realize that the property values up 10% and you can drop PMI or, you know, these were clients that maybe we're talking about taking out a home equity line. So having different conversations that aren't all about your X rate and I can lower you to Y rate, looking at different opportunities or maybe they can take cash out and keep the same interest rate. That's a very favorable thing to people as well. So. Yeah, at the same rate, you know, they were comfortable with the money and people who buy homes, you know, in general, you have a fair amount of outlay, you know, people bought furniture or any, and they get zero percent credit cards. But that comes doing a year if you can offer them the ability to, if you saw a quarter point in rate drop and you, or they had a appreciation event, you can sometimes find other things than just lowering the interest rate. Yeah, well, I know, so best practice we're kind of talking about this here is people go through different life changes and so it's that you would agree, I think it makes sense for you to be proactive in touching your past database, you know, just to check up and go, hey, you know, is anything happened, right, since we last out or on the horizon in the next six to 12 months, that could impact your financial situation, right, could be birth of a baby college graduation job change, whatever. Right. Yeah, let's just go say that, you know, social media, again, when I'm on social media, it's looking at key clients or key realtors or, you know, what life events are going on for key strategic partners that I can be a part of. Hmm. So I'm curious, because of the volume you do in the size of your database, maybe in kind of a technical guy, do you use a particular CRM database management tool? So yeah, at the mortgage, we use a total expert, kind of rebranded and tweaked it a little bit, but yeah, total experts, awesome, super powerful. Yeah, I had Joel on the podcast last year. Yeah, I mean, I'm very happy with that platform. I think it's a great tool that other companies I've worked at haven't implemented. You know, I never really had a tool like that in kind of my previous life, so to speak. So excited to have a pretty powerful thing, I think, you know, the SMS texting platform is great. There's a lot of tools that I haven't seen in a lot of other things. So. Are you using it all for the co-marketing with realtors? Yeah, yeah, I am not as much as maybe I will in the future, but, you know, I've done a few of it. I started to get my toes relatively new to me. So, you know, most of the stuff I use it for is client-based reaching out, but I will get into kind of that third party stuff. Okay. All right. Well, that's really good data in terms of like how you run your business. I appreciate that. So for the last few minutes we have, I want to transition a little bit into psychology. And what I mean by that is, you know, if it's taking us back, whether it's, you know, let's say back to Lakeshore funding, right? Take me back there. I want to better understand if, you know, your psychology was, you know, you were going to be a superstar mega producer, or was this all a surprise to you? No, it's, I always asked it bigger than I was in my career. So, you know, at Lakeshore funding, which was a wild time and a great time, we had all the assistance sit back in this small little area called the pit, myself, my buddy Jim Fuller, and some other guy set back in this pit. And it was all the assistance sharing information, so it was a really great environment to learn from. But, you know, so I'm chasing down a certificate of insurance or I'm chasing down a title, and every time I talk to you in a turning, I would ask them who they worked with. And I didn't know that they were the biggest attorneys in the city of Chicago, or they're the most well-known high-powered news data attorney in Chicago. I still asked them for business. And more often than not, they would say, I worked with a few people, but send me some cards. So I was constantly asking for more than maybe a traditional assistant would, and it works, you know, I think that's something that a lot of people don't understand is if you don't ask for the business, you have a zero percent chance of getting the business. Even if asking for a yield, the 5% result, it's still infinitely more than zero. So ask everybody, ask, you know, ask for as much as you want, and I did that from day one. I was a confident sales guy, so yeah, I was always banging on the door. I didn't care who they were, because I was naive enough to not know who they were. It was a pretty powerful situation to be in, being confident in the information piece of it. I knew mortgages, even though I was an assistant, I spent a lot of time reading guidelines. We had this, like I said, of really good information sharing system back there. So I was always comfortable asking for business, and you knew the first deal you'd get was hard, but I would spend more time on that hard deal than anybody else that was busy and then business grows from there. Okay, so two ways we can look through this next question. I wanted to get a sense of, you know, either what you would tell yourself today, looking back to that young Joe C, back at Lakeshore Funding, of what, you know, you would say to that young Joe today, kind of combined with, you know, how you would advise somebody to be a successful loan officer today. Yeah, so I wish I spent a little more time on ROI from agents or, you know, people you talked about, time wasting and some of that stuff. So quantifying who you're getting your business from and understanding that and what you did to make that result successful, whether it was co-hosting a happy hour, whatever I did to create some of the relationships that have been long-standing relationships, beyond the fact of, you know, treating people like you want to be treated and kind of the basics of life. But understanding where I invested time and effort and where it worked and where it didn't, I wish I would have tracked that a little bit better. That's don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun over the time, if you have doing events and things that maybe didn't yield mortgage results, but yielded life events. But I wish I would have focused on that, so I would give myself that advice. So just to clarify there for a second. Yeah, I think what you're saying, and this is a great point, I'm glad you mentioned that, for listeners, is you've got to analyze the ROI of your relationships. You see this, I'm sure Joe, I hear it, where it's like, you know, how many realtors are on your bus? So, you know, about 12 or whatever. Great, how many of them are sending you a business? Well, you know, only about half and then that's like, you know, once in a while. So yeah, we need to be very strategic, I think is what you're saying with who we're pouring into and investing our time with and if it isn't, you know, meeting kind of our standards for that, we need to re-evaluate. Yeah, and it might have taken two years, right? I might have had four of them, I might have done one thing that yielded a ton of results. So I wish I analyzed that a little bit more than I probably did. But if it all worked out over time, as long as you don't waste too much of your time doing tasks, it don't yield anything. I was fortunate that a lot of the things I did were very fruitful. I just wish I could say, you know, these are the three things that I did that yielded and I don't, I never really track that until, you know, more recently in my career. And so the payoff to tracking the activities that produce the highest ROI, you do it again. Yeah, right? Obviously, I'm back to the business. You know, it's like, yeah. All right. So I know you're working with a bunch of seasoned loan officers, right? But I don't know if you're bringing, you know, newer people on the team. I mean, right, the average L.O. is about 57 years old. So are you looking at newbies coming in and trading them up? Or what are you doing? No, right now our focus is on experienced loan officers who really want to grow their business. My focus in this industry, when you have a company that you lower the guard rails, that only works if you have experienced trustworthy people who just haven't been given all the tools that I was fortunate to have over my career. And giving them the opportunity to get one more deal done a year is what ultimately yields more results, right? I have some of the realtors that I work with who have a ton of non-warnable condos. But they're not really non-warnable condos. It's the lender they were working with calls the non-warnable condos. But the fact is, is these loans will get sold to Fannie and Freddie. So given a seasoned loan officer, the ability to close that deal ultimately cracks the ice with that realtor. And then you get 50 more deals from that agent. So we're looking for the people who understand the mortgage business. I don't need 50 million dollar producers, but I need people who understand guidelines. I need people who understand getting business are focused on selling. And people that I can provide more support for and things like that. So really helping them go from a 20 million dollar regenerator to a 50 million dollar regenerator. Okay. And so let's talk about that briefly. Tell me about the mortgage. Is this a nationwide play? Yeah. So B mortgage is a division of bridge view bank. So it is a bank platform. So you eliminate the licensing piece of it, your license and all 50 states from day one. There's a great opportunity. We rolled out a construction lending program. We have access to commercial loans. So not only just your traditional bank broker model of down loans to Fannie and Freddie and Chase and Wells and things like that. But having ancillary tools that the way I look at my business is, you know, ex percent is refinances, ex percent is purchased and you're kind of a victim of the market when it comes to refinances with rates pushing up to the four and a half percent range. You know, you're losing a lot of refinance opportunities. So to be able to replace that with maybe a couple commercial deals a month or maybe a new construction ground up single family that, you know, you weren't able to do or that I used to have to refer out at previous companies gives me the ability to not only grow and what might be a down market for mortgage people. It gives you the ability to grow along with your clients. You know, there's nothing more frustrating than working at a place. You do the person's first $200,000 one bedroom condo than they buy a three bedroom condo than they buy the count home, but now they're building a $2 million home and you have to refer them out. Well, the minute you do that, that client is going to look everywhere for everything going forward. When they go to refinance, they're going to talk to one more person because you've already established some doubt that you can do everything. You had to refer them out to begin with. So being able to follow clients their whole career and their whole life cycle of the mortgage world is critically important. You hate doing the small tough loans and then referring out the bigger, easy ones. So being at a platform that allows me to do that or when they buy their second home and things like that, being able to follow that client everywhere is a very powerful tool and it continues to expand your database by a spider web. You know, it's a growth trajectory that I'm excited to be a part of. So that's kind of the core principle of B is being able to follow that client through their whole mortgage life and needs. And the website for that is bmorgage.com, right? B e mortgage. Yep. All right. I'll put links to that in the show notes. Hey, one last question before I let you go. Just curious about this. Are you a reader listener? How do you sharpen the axe? I'm definitely a reader. Although I will tell you I'm starting to get more into podcasts and things like that. I'm a digital reader. Kindle. Very focused on. Yeah. And no, I just mean, you know, I'm on a computer all day and I'm like, pull up more articles than I used to, but certainly the podcast, I don't drive anymore. You know, I left my car's been in my garage for a year and a half. So, you know, I'm in the back of an Uber a lot. So starting to get into some podcasts has become a much more valuable tool that I really didn't explore before, but I'm really enjoying it. Awesome. You know, it's funny. You mentioned about reading. So, I for a long time, you know, quote, was a reader, but I've recently really stepped up my listening, like with Audible, and so like, you know, books on tape and all that jazz. I found I could consume that info a lot faster than sitting down and reading. Yeah. I get it. I think it's right. So, I'm right there with you. I think it's an evolution that's powerful, but, you know, everybody learns the different things. I don't want to listen to guidelines, you know, that would be a terrible, audible book, you know, especially while driving a fan-y-made guy. Yeah, exactly. I pull up, you know, the fan-y-made guys will read that type of data, but business strategies and things like that. I think that the audio ways is a much more enjoyable means of absorbing that information. Well, I think it just, you know, goes to show that somebody, even at your level of success, right, you're still always looking for that slight edge and, you know, learning from others. Oh, no doubt about it. Yeah. Well, listen, I know you're incredibly busy, this, the meters run in here, so I got to let you go. Yeah. Cool. I want to thank you for being here and for listeners. Thank you, as well, for tuning in. Joe, I'm going to put the link to the website. Is that the best place for people to go learn more? Should it be be mortgage? Anything else you want to? Yeah. Yeah. You can always reach out to me at, uh, joeatbeelhoan.com, joetbeelown.com. I'm here. Big question. Small scenarios. Whatever. Nice. Awesome. So listeners, thanks again, and, uh, we will see 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. 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