How I Became a Successful Mortgage Originator

Hey, what's up, everybody? Jeff Center, the host of the mortgage marketing radio podcast, hope you're doing well. This is the place we help mortgage loan originators get more agent referrals so they can become the go to lender in their local market. How do we do it? We help you implement a proven system for attracting versus chasing for leapfrogging from solicitor and vendor to partner in peer. We do that by leaving with education in your local market, not having a call call, hey, for leads, beg for leads or ever work with another agent that you don't want to work with again. Why? Because you'll never question where your next deal is coming from because you'll be attracting and building those agents in your community who are attracted to want to work with you because of who you are and the value you're bringing to your local market. And before we get into this episode today, I thought I'd share with you a couple of success stories that just came across my desk from our mortgage marketing pro members looking at our Facebook group. Here we are. We just have these shared a day ago. So what's up? Janelle shout out. Janelle has been with me for, I don't know what, three years or so, Janelle, at least. So what she posted on our Facebook group is boom, is this amazing or what? We had eight high producing agents at our last class, 28 total attended. This is from this one particular agent. She said it's his second testimonial about this class and he has started to attend every class. This is a very established real estate agent. And in our Facebook group, she shared the post that this real estate agent posted himself about the class he attended, hosted by one of our pro members, Janelle, and the fact that because Janelle is providing direction, education, helping agents solve problems, in this case, get more listings. This agent posted about how he's actually started to create videos and the result he's getting. And so this is a share that Janelle's put in the group. And again, one of the ways that we talk about becoming a partner in a peer is by not being a vendor, right? Not being a solicitor solicitor, but by actually helping people solve problems. And listen, if you help an agent solve problem, right, you're going to earn that loyalty and you're going to earn them fighting for you on, on your behalf. Other testimonial from Lisa, what's up, Lisa, Lisa presented to Google business profile classes. So imagine this. If you can picture in your mind, another area agents need help with is how do I get more reviews? How do I get found in local search? How do I show up on Google page one of Google, right? We've got a class that helps them do that and a lot of other things as well. But she hosted this class. It was co-sponsored by a title company and she booked 27 digital audits. So she did a Google business class and she did our chat GTP class twice. And one of the things we teach our pro members is how to convert the currency of attention, those who registered and attended to your classes. How do you convert those to post class follow-up and conversations where you help them solve problems? In this case, Lisa booked 27 digital audits where she's going to be helping 27 agents to get more Google reviews, to understand how to use chat GPT in their business. How does she do that? You may be wondering. She does that because she's a pro member and she follows our system and our plan and she uses the tools and resources. We give her to do that. And that's just two quick stories. So you've heard me talk about it before. If you want to schedule a call to learn more about this, if this is a fit for you, the only way to do it is you go to mortgagemarketing.pro and you grab time on my calendar where you will meet with me over Zoom. So we can each learn a little bit more about each other and see if this is fit for you. Okay, so on this week's episode, I was a special guest on a friend of mine in this industry of ours, Eric Braun. You can look him up on Instagram at Not Your Average Lender. He recently launched a brand new podcast called The Mortgage Marketing Pro Podcast. I had Eric back on my show at least two years ago or more and at that time, Eric was just kicking ass and taking names and things that he's doing in the New York area with hosting events, with posting content on social media. At that time, last time I checked in with him, he was actually actively using Instagram to drive engagement relationships, conversations and referrals from real estate agents. And if I look him up right now to see, here we go, so he's got 16,000 followers on Instagram right now. And so Eric interviews me. And I think this is a useful conversation for you to hear because one of the places we start in this conversation is my origin story. Like how did I get into mortgage business? He asks me a lot about like my experience in working at Tony Robbins, how that helped me prepare to become a successful mortgage originator. And then we unpack all kinds of other things as well, which I think no matter where you're at, your business is going to be, you know, for some of you, it might be the first time you're hearing it, but for others and actually this is even more impactful. It's not necessarily that we need to be told what to do, but often that we need to be reminded of what we should be doing. And I think you'll definitely hear a lot of those, both of those through this conversation. And so without further ado, by the way, if you can, please look Eric up. There's links in the show notes to his Instagram, not your average lender. As I said, his new podcast is called the mortgage pro podcast, Eric Braun. Without further ado, let's get into this week's show. All right, guys, special, special, special guests today, somebody who's crushing it in the podcast game. So I'm very happy they took time out of their busy schedule, Mr. Jeff Zimfer. How are you? I'm fantastic. I appreciate the opportunity, Eric. It's been a pleasure to watch your growth since you and I talked on my podcast. I was thinking this morning, was that like two years ago? Yes. And I can look back and honestly say that that moment was very, very important, instrumental to me because it put me on a national kind of platform in the mortgage industry. And still till this day, I have people reaching out to me. They've been following me for two years, but they found out about me through your podcast. So I thought it was natural to bring you on now that we launched the mortgage pro podcast as one of our guests because just to kind of return the favor. And I also have some questions that I want to selfishly ask you, and that will also be valuable to to the audience. So let's for everybody who doesn't know who you are, let's first touch on that. Give me some of your background, what you do in the mortgage space now, how you got here and feel free to feel free to take time doing that. Yeah, sure. I appreciate that. So I'll give you the kind of the condensed version of everybody's, you know, how did you get in the mortgage business, right? We have all heard nobody wakes up and says, I want to be a mortgage professional. I said, I've said that up probably on every episode so far. Actually, I actually wanted to not say, I made it a point not to say it, but you said it so. Come on, because everyone wants to know the origin story, man. Yes. My origin story is 30 some odd years ago, I was working for Tony Robbins and traveling around the country, speaking and presenting, asselling his one day events, which was really cool. You know, back then, I'm like 20 something, 25, right? Probably roughly what you are right now, I'm guessing I'm doing there. And so having a, having a job where you travel around the country and your job is to fly into a city and live in a city for two months with six other guys or gals and it's like a fraternity on the road and imagine this, like, this is of course before Facebook and all this stuff and all the cool tools now, but like we used to go into a city and have meetings scheduled where we go into, speak to every sales organization in the city, insurance, real estate, mortgage, MLM, you name it, man, we're out there blowing and going and just, you know, doing the thing. And I was in front of real estate agents and mortgage professionals a lot. And when I had to come off the road from that position and, you know, got a little bit of tired of traveling, I was like, hmm, what am I going to do? What do I next wanted? What am I, what do I feel drawn to? And I was drawn to the real estate space and I didn't want to be a real estate agent. For whatever reason, I was drawn to the mortgage space as to be a mortgage professional. First of all, because it seemed to be like those guys and gals always made a lot of money. And it was a bit of a, bit of a different dynamic than the real estate agent. So anyway, long story short, as I chose to become a mortgage professional, and this was in 2003. And so I got in the business in 2003 and in Southern California and, you know, went off and running from there and, you know, here we are today, 2023 and went through a lot of different, you know, roles. I was an originator for over 10 years did well in Southern California, always as you might guess, have that part of me that still was passionate about training, speaking, coaching, things like that. And so I was able to make a pivot in the business to become more of a sales trainer and coach, if you will, for a large lender of which I did and did that for about five years. And simultaneously at the same time, you know, recognized the opportunity to have a platform, a marketing platform. And that's why I started the podcast back, I don't know, about six years ago now, by the way, six years ago, I started the podcast. And the reason why, by the way, quick side note, the reason why I decided to do the podcast, oh, audio only back then was because video was too hard. I was doing video, man, I was traveling, I was in hotel rooms and I have my little cam quarter up and, you know, upload into YouTube and I was like, man, this is, this is taking a lot of work and hard. I'm like, what could I do? That'd be easier. Boom, I pivoted to podcasting, only audio back then. Now, of course, it's video, we're here anyway, started the podcast because I wanted to bring conversations like this to the industry, right? And like what's really working? And so anyway, shifted, it did the podcast and then continued to help mortgage professionals capture real estate agent conversations through events and seminars and teaching classes and things like that. And that's a lot of what I do today, man, so awesome. And just just to plug your podcast because I think it's one of the best in our space, just say the name one more time so people should go over and check it out. Mortgage marketing radio. Perfect. And now, so let's talk about the Tony Robbins days because I think, I mean, listen, we're going to have plenty of time to talk about what you're doing now. But I know for me, like whenever I meet a new person, even though we're, it's not the first time we're meeting, what interests me is there, is their story. Because everybody has one that I always like to kind of reflect on like how my life has prepared me for the moment that I'm in and all the different experiences. So when it comes to, so when you made the transition to from Tony Robbins, for everybody who doesn't know who Tony Robbins is, just wake up. There's no one who doesn't know who Tony Robbins is. So when you made the transition from working with Tony Robbins to the mortgage business, how did that help you or how did those experience help you and prepare you for the mortgage business? That's a good question. I think when you're out there and you're putting yourself in front of people purposefully every day, what I mean by that is you've got to get up every day. I had to give at least two in person face to face group presentations with the intent being, I'm going to sell you today on making a decision today to invest in this product. But when you and there's no, you walk in from, they don't know who the hell you are from Adam. Right. All they know is we've got a guest speaker today, right? I've been in plenty of state offices in the frigging bullpen and the heads are above the bullpen. You know what I mean? Nobody wants to hear what you have to say, like that's a great training ground for building that skill set and that certainty of being able to show up and in a moment capture the attention of an audience and take them from where they were to where you want them to go. Like man, if you can present in group like that one-on-one becomes a piece of cake. Right. Not only were you learning presenting skills and how to close, but you were also interacting with the industry a lot. So you kind of get, you kind of understand what the daily life of a real estate professional is like, specifically a mortgage pro, and then you apply that kind of sales and building relationship and building rapport as well as the skills you've learned by being an educator to your mortgage career. And you were an originator for 10 years, you said. Yes. Tell me a little bit about your experience as an originator. Well, you know what's funny about that is, is oftentimes when we get into a new industry, we sometimes forget the past. And what I had forgotten, like I started new as a mortgage originator and I had zero experience doing that. You know, I had a lot of experience like speaking in front of groups and things like that. But all of a sudden I got into this new thing and all of a sudden I became brand new and had it seemed to be there was a period where I unlearned all those things about what I just described to you. And so I felt out of place and I felt uncomfortable starting as a mortgage professional because there's this whole financial side of the things right in, and listen, I'm no math with. So all of a sudden it's like, you got to understand numbers and DTIs and you know, underwriting guidelines and there's just a lot coming at you. And so I definitely felt a little bit off my game for those reasons. But then I remember one of my early mentors asked me, he said, what, this memory came into my head. He was like, hey, Jeff, how long do you want to be new? And I'm like, what do you mean, I'm like new, I've just only been here three months and he's like, yeah, but how long do you want to be new? And he kept going and then finally dawned on me. I was like, I'm new in my mindset so long as I choose to be new. And that flipped the switch for me and I was just like, I'm caught up in my own BS and my own story that I'm new because I've only, quote, had a frigging business card that says I'm a loan officer for three months or whatever. But mindset wise, you know, like the old thing of like, yeah, you've been in this business 10 years. You have 10 years of experience. No, you don't. You have one year repeated 10 times. Right. So I had to get out of that quickly and then what I realized I was like, wait a minute, I've got a ton of experience presenting to groups like, oh, really, and I was intimidated by real estate agents, especially the big players and all that kind of stuff. And then I just started to remember all these things and build confidence and said, you know what? Instead of chasing, cold calling ones, he Tuesday, I'm going to start like getting in front of groups of real estate agents and then things accelerated from there. I was doing about 120 loans or so a year back in 2003, 4, 5. So you know, was that top 1%? No, but it was top 5%. I mean, anybody who's doing 120 loans a month, no matter what period of time that you have a real business. Yeah. 120 year for sure. You know, and again, this is back before all the tools we have today, like Facebook and social media. 120 loans a year right now would be amazing right now during this time. So and something you said, and I think it's so important not to not to just go go past. I'm reading this book right now, The Power of One More by Edmah Mylett. And it talks about identity and it's within one of the first chapters. And basically your identity is who you believe you are. And it sounds to me like you believed you were new. And that identity comes with like it limits you. So at some point, you have to make the decision to kind of change your identity and it sounds like you did. And then all of a sudden, your rocks are. Yeah. Absolutely. And even for people who are new, I understand there's still going to be that, well, but I am new. It's like, I don't know every guideline. Well, then, okay, great. What is the knowledge you need to bring to get right to feel less new? You need to definitely get a lot of at bats. Get stuff done. Start to build like you think about, I'm going to back to my Tony Robbins days, right? So, so how do you have certainty? If you think about a table with legs, right, you may have heard his, him give this example before, but a table with only three legs isn't very steady and sturdy, right? But you've got to add more legs. So the, so legs are, legs are your own belief, right? Draw from the past, other areas you've been successful and followed through on. But at the same time, yeah, I think in this business too, you do need to have results to support and build your belief. Yes. And I think one of the easiest ways to get results is at bats, like you said, like you need to have more at bats, period, and then also plugging into a team, I think, helped me out a lot. Being new in this business is not something that you can do on your own in my, in my personal opinion. And I relate with you so much on the kind of getting, putting, putting myself out there. I got started in the business telemarketing, which some of our listeners, I'm sure, heard the story. Like for me, that was the best way to get started. That was the best arena to, to really address that learning curve because the more conversations I was able to have, the more I was able to learn and telemarketing is literally all about having a mass amount of conversations. So similar to your presentations in your Tony Robbins days, I was telemarketing, not really knowing what I was doing, having the identity of being new and all the beliefs that come with it. But because I was able to kind of persevere, plug into a team, and then I made a decision to take everything seriously, which I think everybody has that point in their journey where they made a decision, and then everything kind of followed after that. So I relate with a lot of what you're saying, and I know it's going to resonate with everybody listening. Let's, let's touch on a little bit about what you're doing today, because I think it's, the whole educator mindset and getting into and doing group presentations is extremely powerful when it comes to building a mortgage business. And everybody listening is mortgage pros, and that's why they tune in, they want to learn how to build their business. So talk a little bit about the mortgage marketing institute and what you, what you've built as far as the platform. Yeah. So what I, it's specializing, if you will, I mean, a couple of things, but the tip of the spear is helping a lot of officers reach real estate agents, right, create, get attention, get connections that lead to conversations, which leads to referrals. And we do that by leading with education, teaching classes to real estate agents, both virtually and in person. It doesn't sound sexy, right? But here's what I know. I know that it works, and it works very, very well when applied correctly, because this is a numbers game, right, in terms of reaching real estate agents. So I believe or I am a fan of using leverage activities, I could call, call, I've done all that, I've done all the burger previews open, you name it, right, did it all, which goes back to that story about when the lights went on in my head, I'm like, wait a minute, if I get in front of 10 or 20 agents at a time, I'm going to get to the agents I want to get to faster, you know? So that's what I do now. So, so you know, in today's world, how do you differentiate yourself? I believe leading with education, adding value first, induces reciprocation and causes people to be attracted to you more importantly than that is, you know, you've got to build also your platform as a mortgage originator in your local market. Like how do you stand out? It's not going to be rates and, you know, programs. It's not going to be service while your service may be awesome. Nobody knows it until they actually engage with you. They think it's all BS because that's what everybody says. Right. It's great service. I'm awesome. Trust me, give me your toughest deal, you know, all those things we've heard before. I'd rather attract agents instead of chase agents. And so what we do is we equip agents with a platform of turnkey educational content that they can just show up in their local market, grab all the stuff we give them, help them get butts in the seats, emails, landing pages, the done for you class content, soup to nuts, everything's done. You just need to show up and actually kind of follow our system and teach the class. And I can just tell you, man, when you do something for yourself and you're like, okay, yeah, I'm doing this. I wonder if like this will work for other people. And now, you know, I got L.O.s across the country and the results are like awesome. And it's just, it's my passion project now. There's one of the things I love about this business and I've said it multiple times is over the number one thing that I love about this business is there's so many ways to build it. When it comes to hiring, like as far as your staff, you can have two L.O.A.'s, a processor. You can have three processors, no L.O.A.'s, you could, there's so many different ways to structure it on that and then as far as going out and getting the business, there's also tons of ways to go and get the deals. My thing has always been referral based. I've never been so much of a consumer direct guy except for the beginning of my career when I was throwing on the phone as a 20 year old as my first real job as a telemarketing. But I realized very quickly building the referral business is where the, the gold was. And then there's so many different ways to do that, right? And I think it's very easy to get caught up in all like, you know, chasing the new shiny object, right? Maybe it's running Facebook ads or maybe it's, you know, you want to do social media and you want to put out content. Maybe it's having happy hours or doing the broker opens or what, like my advice is always like pick two or three things, get really good at them. And once you squeezed all the juice out of those, those berries, then you can move on to different legs, not to use the same, same analogy that you used before or just use it in different, in, in a different concept. And I think if I was brand new and had to do it all over again, I would brand myself, which includes putting out content and I would do some sort of event marketing. Event marketing has so many different kinds within itself, right? Like I do, I host a huge networking event twice a year called Brewery and, you know, we had 300 and something people at our, at our last event. We already have 300 tickets sold for our next event coming March 30th. Now that's one thing that you can do, but you could also do monthly workshops or, or some sort of educational, smaller groups sort of events, which we also do, we have a, a mastermind called Not Your Average Agents. It's for our referral partners only, so it's not to the public. It's by invite only and we meet monthly and we go over different, a different topic every month. Sometimes it's an activity like we do a content day where I'll bring in videographers and everybody will be able to shoot content. Sometimes it's a topic like past client marketing or, you know, something educational. I think if you just do branding and events, whatever fits you as your personality and what you enjoy doing, you can build a multi, multi million dollar mortgage business. And I absolutely love the idea of having a plug-in play system like what you offer. So where can somebody get more information about that? Because I don't want, I don't want to make it about a product or anything like that. I want to keep it on strategy. However, I know your product works because I've seen the success stories and I know there's plenty of LOs out there that instead of recreating the wheel, they want to plug into something that they know work. So where can somebody get more information about your platform? Very simple. They can go to mortgagemarketing.pro. There's a video from me there. There's a bunch of testimonials. And what I'm doing right now is I schedule calls with people who want to learn more about it. So you can grab a call with me. We'll set aside 30 minutes and get to know each other a little bit better and see if it's a fit. So you can go to mortgagemarketing.pro. Perfect. You hear that voice, guys? It's like he has his own podcast that has over over 600,000 downloads or 700,000 downloads I saw. Last I looked. Yeah. I don't really look at that anymore. But I'm now pulling it up. It's mortgage marketing radio. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Yeah. Any of those numbers you see would have been posted by me. Right. So that's the last time I looked. But um. So it's way over that. Yeah. It's getting up there. We'll see. We'll see. We'll say millions of downloads as. One day I'll be like McDonald's. Billions and billions served. Yes. Yes. Um. So speaking of podcast because that's how we connected originally. Actually before we go into podcast, I really want to focus on events a little bit more. Because I think it's I think it's so crucial. So. Aside from getting more and for it. We'll get on to podcast because that's that's really that's I think there's some golden there as well. But. Aside from getting in touch with you to learn more about your platform. What are some tips. That you can give. When it comes to hosting events as a loan officer. Yeah. Great question. So, uh, you know, like I said, I've been doing this since 2003 in terms of the mortgage space for events. I've heard every question objection issue complaint, uh, and including on this other side of success stories. Um, as a matter of fact, I had a call with a loan officer yesterday, uh, who was struggling to get a agents to show up. And I think first and foremost, um, like you see the classes that that we do, I don't currently do any mortgage 101 stuff. I don't do FHA. I don't do DPA all that kind of jazz. You know, A, because like you should already have that stuff yourself. You know, but B, that's not sexier exciting for most real estate agents. Right. Those are going to be the CE classes that agents attained, uh, attend just to get the credits. Right. So the call I was having yesterday with a loan officer, he was struggling with getting butts in the seats. And as a matter of fact, true story, the title rep, who's well seasoned, uh, about to retire in the business, had kept complaining or asking about CE credits for classes. And this, by the way, I don't know if you know this Eric, but this is a common thing that many loan officers think, I need CE credits to get agents to attend my classes. I can see you shaking your head. No. Not BS. You do not. That is a crutch. And that's an excuse. And I get all passionate about that because if agents only attend classes, it gets CE credits. It's the wrong agent. 100. It's an agent that's probably just has their license on the shelf. Yes. And isn't, isn't really trying to grow. They're just trying to keep their license and do the minimum requirement required CE credits. Yeah. 100% agree with you. So an example of that is we are now doing a class that's all based on chat GPT, right? Hot. It's everywhere. I did one yesterday. I had 30 agents show up. So I teach these classes also in my local market here in Vegas. Now, what do you get? It's hard to interrupt. What do you get out of it? Just trial and error? Or do you charge for the agent to attend? So you're not active. You're not an active originator right now. No. No. Okay. It's a variety of things. One. Yes. It is a sandbox for me. I get to go create and play and find out what's working. What's not working. Change it. And then that's how this is real world stuff that my members get to use. But secondly, is I do work or contract with a local title company here. Gotcha. And they bring me in to add value to their clients. And I do it for the local lenders too. So yesterday we had a lender. We had a title company and we had 30 agents in the room. Cool. And the lenders, you know, they come up and they get the credit and all that kind of jazz. Anyway, my point being back to your original question is it's the topic, right? That's going to get the agent interested. And that's why we're seeing these classes that my members are doing on chat GPT specifically. That's they're selling out those classes because it's hot, right? What else is hot? How to get 10, you know, how to get listings in a low inventory market, right? Right. Disrupt and die, right? How to pivot and shift during the digital real estate shifts and all those types of topics. Google business profile. Facebook custom audiences ads. The reason why a lot of lunch and learn suck and their look, they're poorly attended is because your topic sucks in his boring. Right. You know, so give him a compelling reason to come out. And last thing I'll say about this is for loan officers who get hung up on, well, I'm not the expert. I don't do Instagram real. So how am I going to teach an Instagram real class? Right. You need to be you are the nightly news reporter. You reporting the news and you're sharing the facts with them and showing them examples of other agents where you're you're off the pedestal hook. They're not looking to you to be the expert. They're just looking to get the infertile. That's why they go to YouTube and stuff like that. Right. Right. So I think it's I think it's really cool that you're still like a practitioner of this stuff. That's why I asked that other question because you're like you just said like sometimes it's it's it's 100% the topic on why somebody's not coming or why they show up. It's not sometimes it's like I have agents that will show up to our monthly workshops to support me. Sure. And I'm like, I'm like, listen, you don't need to drive an hour to come to the workshop because I'm your friend. Like come for the information because I know it's going to benefit you. That's why I'm doing it. Yeah, but that's a real partnership you have though. And that's that's you know, that's something that you build over time. Right. And they help promote the workshop for me because they they want to those are the right people that you want to surround yourself. Those are your fans. Yeah, yeah. I would say friends because listen, I'll work with anybody. I don't care what anybody says about being selective with your referral partners. That is there's true to that. But if you're going to send me a deal, I'm going to try and close it. Right. But after a while you do start to build real friendships ideally with your referral partners, which is a whole topic that we can spend time on. But I think the topic gets them into the seat and it also gets them to the next one. Right. Right. The content at that workshop gets them to the next one I should say. Yes. So chat GPT our monthly workshops. It's not like hey, here's two of you know, everything you need to know about two or three K loans. I don't want to talk about it. They don't want to hear about it. It's the people who do want to hear about it. I don't want to say that they're probably not producers because I'm sure some producers do want to learn more mortgage 101 or products. 100%. But I know for me, I've always gravitated towards doing classes and giving information that doesn't specifically pertain to mortgages. It's more about helping with marketing or business or how to get more clients. Right. And I think that's what those are the topics that get agents to show up. Now, what about chat GPT? Are you teaching? Not that you can give the whole class right now, but I am interested because it is a hot topic. Well, we're teaching agents primarily how to use it themselves. So we're giving them case use cases. We're showing them how to use chat GPT to to write listing descriptions to write emails to write listing presentation outlines to yesterday in class. I showed them how to ask a seller for a price reduction on a property. You know, it's like you can do almost anything with it and they just need some guidance. If you know anything about chat GPT, it's all about prompts and what you ask it, what you enter. So we give them a checklist of prompts. These are the best real estate related prompts for you to start asking it to get good results. And so they're blown away, man. Right. And the whole point, by the way, let's remember the whole point of doing this class. You mentioned branding earlier and you've done a great job of branding, by the way. It's because people are attracted to want to work with somebody who is unique and different in that's value and you rise up noise. And why we're doing this, doing these types of classes is because if you show up, you blow their socks off, you show them how to save tremendous amount of time with a tool like chat GPT to be more efficient and ultimately to impact their business. And then the ask is, hey, if you liked this today, right? And you want to talk about a further partnership because this is just a sample of what we do for our realtor partners. But if you want to grab a zoom 15, 30 minutes, whatever, let's see if, you know, boom, we have the potential to do something. All of a sudden, as you know, Eric, the trust goes up, the resistance comes down. Right. And now all of a sudden, getting to those conversations is accelerated because you didn't show up with. Let me tell you about my 203K, my DPA loan or whatever. It's just like you sound the same like everybody. You'll get to that. But you've got to add value first. Not only does being a presenter or a host edify you, put you in a position of power, whether you realize or not, when you deliver a presentation, the people in the audience are looking at you in a way higher, higher regard than if you were to stumble, you know, meet them at a networking event. I have some, sometimes you meet somebody one on one and they don't, you know, they like you, they trust you, but they don't really respect you until they see you at a workshop or host an event or or do something of, you know, something big, right. So I have, I have that a lot. Not only does it do that. But I also think giving value first, like you mentioned, is so, so, I mean, it's Gary Vee's jab, jab, right hook, like it's, it works. It works. I heard Alex Ramozy, he said, if you're not afraid of the value that you're giving away, you're not giving away enough value. Because I think it also can be very tiring. I'm speaking from experience and you, I hope you guys hear it in my voice to give, give, give, give, give, give, give, and not get anything in return. And sometimes that's this business, but I will tell you, the longer that you give, the more you will get in return, always, always. I am a big believer in serving delivering value, not worrying about the result, because I know from experience, the results always come. And sometimes it's not that agent that's sitting in your class, giving you the referral, it's in some weird way that they invite you on another panel. And then that panel produces another four one on ones and like that there's, there's so much power and just going out there delivering value without expecting anything in return. And of course, always asking. So talk, talk a little bit about that. The asking, I think, is something that loan officer struggle with. And I think it's extremely, extremely powerful. So give me a little bit of insight on like how to ask after these, these presentations. Sure, man, we've got a couple of ways to do that. One of the ways I like is, at the end of our class, you know, there'll be some confirmation, like, for instance, yesterday, hey, did you guys get value here out of today? Yes. And I might joke with them a little bit. I'm like, are you getting this from your current lender or title rep? You know what I mean? And they're like, well, no, they've never even talked about this. And I'm like, hey, guys, look, like I said a moment ago, look at, so here's what I believe I believe as a mortgage professional that before I asked for business, I've got to write, give you something of value and help you grow your business. Did we do that today? Yes, we did. Okay, great. Would it be okay, then, for those of you who are interested in talking further, if you wanted to schedule time to talk to to see how else we can help you, I'd love to learn a little bit more about your business. This is just a scratch of the surface of what we offer. So if you want to talk further and you want to go deeper on how to use chat GBD or whatever the topic is that we did cover today. Here's a QR code on the screen. I want you to hold your phone up to the to the screen scan that QR code. That's going to go to my calendar. And I want you to grab time on my calendar. Now you've got calendar or whatever you use for your predetermined time slots and it's going to be automatically set up to schedule those those meetings that are limited to 15 to 30 minutes. And it's like, grab time on my calendar. Let's get connected so I can help you further. And by the way, you may have already, you know, done a very soft pitch on your product on your company, right, or you as a mortgage professional, whatever. They know you're a mortgage professional, you know, that's one way we're doing it is like do a QR code. The other thing we're doing is we are doing these digital audits. So imagine this, you're a realtor Eric and you came to my class and we talked about Google business profile and you recognize how you're missing the mark on getting reviews, et cetera, optimizing your profile. And I say, hey guys, so if you got value out here today, if you want to go deeper on how to optimize your Google business profile, would you be open to one of my favorite phrases. Would you be open to a digital audit of your online presence where I will help you identify I'll put on the glasses of I'm a consumer and what is the consumer fine when they Google you and I'll help you walk through that. So what we do is we give our people a checklist to help them walk through step by step how to do that for a realtor. But now that realtor same thing gets on the call. And now you're changing your positioning. Yes. You know, you're not just a mortgage professional. Now I'm going to give a quick plug to the podcast session I did a few weeks ago with Wally Ellibary and if you heard it, Wally's a $200 million producer in the country, Wally said he decided to become the best realtor he could be without being a realtor. So Wally's a mortgage originator. Yeah. And Wally took all the realtor courses, the training, the Tom Ferry, you name it got coached by so he could understand how what it takes to be a realtor to succeed in running and building a business. And then he brought that stuff to his realtor partners. Hey, man. The guy's doing 200 million. If anybody asks for the secret to building relationships, that's that's it right there. I don't want to pretend like I made the concept up because I think it was just the environment that I was in the stuff that I was plugged into the people that I was speaking to. I realized very quickly that if I'm not a partner to my referral partners, if I'm just a vendor, I'm always going to be limited on the amount of relationships that I can build. So I made a, you know, a hashtag called real partnerships. And then I started to play around with the hashtag not a vendor. And it was a mindset and, and then I focused on honing my value proposition for my referral partners. And, and then I created a mastermind for my referral partners that's basically a coaching group that I'm, you know, that's free to them. And then I, you know, made a list of all of the things that I do for my referral partners. And now when I sit down with somebody, I have a document. I have talking points. I know what I bring to the table and not just a vendor. I'm a, I'm a partner to you. Right. And the whole business will change if you just take that mindset. And a lot of loan officers will start to, you know, their mind will start like, all right, I know I get why I need to do that. But what, how do I add value? What do I do for them? What do you do for your referral partners? The answer is right in front of you. The answer is right in front of you. It could be something very simple like offering marketing material or it can be doing the workshops or presentations like me and Jeff are talking about now. Think about who you are and what you enjoy doing. That's start there. Don't get all fancy and try to do other stuff that you hear other people are doing. Focus on the stuff that you have right in front of you. A lot of times we're asking ourselves, we're asking questions that we already know the answer to. I find. So I want to, I want to talk about, I want to shift gears a little bit because the podcast and like I said in the beginning, I've, I've some selfish questions. This is a new journey for me. I've been doing social media for seven, eight years. I've been putting out content on Instagram. I was, I started doing Instagram when it was basically all photos and just captions. Then it shifted to long form content with IGTV. People are doing vlogs. Then it shifted to now, you know, microbes or, or, or reels and tic-tocks and shorts, right? And every step of the way, let me tell you, it's been a frickin' struggle because as I feel like as soon as you crack the code, the whole platform changes. And you've got to change your whole content strategy. But now this podcast thing is new to me. And it's, it's fun for me because my goals have changed. My goal of this podcast is to get, is to build a community within the mortgage industry. As the content that I've been, maybe not as of recently, but the content that I've put, been putting out for a number of years didn't really have that goal in mind. But I think one of the best ways to kind of build relationship and notoriety in this industry is for me, my next step was to, to do a mortgage specific podcast. So that was the whole thought process behind it. Now, with starting on this new journey, there's been struggles, there's been, you know, I didn't know what equipment I needed. Software, you know, how do I even post the audio? So, and I have, I'm lucky to have some people around me that already do, do podcasts. So I got some of these questions answered, but I think as an, an originator, even if your goal is not to, not my goal, right? If it's just to build relationships with realtors, I think starting a podcast is extremely useful. And it's a great way, forget the listeners, forget the downloads. But just to sit down and have a platform that you interview people on, makes them feel really special. And it gives you a chance to, instead of just going to get coffee with somebody, you say, come on my podcast. Nobody says no to that because we all, we all want to be a guest on the podcast. So talk a little bit about for the, for the LOs that are listening that maybe want to dive into that strategy. What do you think first steps would be to start a podcast and, and, and just give me your overall opinion on, on the topic? I think the first question to ask is, who is your audience? Who are you trying to reach? Like you're trying to reach fellow professionals in the mortgage industry. You're not doing a consumer direct podcast. So I think that's two obvious differences right there is, because I always think it's like, why, why are you considering doing a podcast? Are you doing it because everybody's doing it? Are you doing because you actually have an intention behind it? You've heard this quote, but like I was Lewis Howes, I think years ago, who said, if you're considering starting a podcast, don't even start, unless you plan on not quitting for at least a year. You know, like there's no look back, man, it's like you're going for a year before you, like, so just know that guys coming out of the gate. If you're going to like try it, don't just try it. It's not like posting it tick tock or real. It's the only way you're going to get anything out of it is consistency. Because like I have a friend right now who's building a YouTube channel outside of the mortgage space, it's guitar's whiskey and golf, right? And so I'm watching his journey and he texted me the other day. He's like, dude, I'm stuck at 2000 subscribers. Like, what do I do? You know, and I'm like, congratulations. Welcome to the doldrums. You know, what do you do? You keep effing going. That's what you do. Because if you're looking for the pad on the back or the G, how come I haven't broken through not coming? You know, so I think first and foremost, have an audience that you're going to, who do you want to address? Are you going to do another right industry related podcast? Maybe bring on realtors? Are you going to have the local focus? Like I thought about me here in Vegas doing one that's something like Las Vegas power players or something, you know, where it's just a real estate focused. Great way to get realtor relationships. As you said, they want to be on the podcast because it's exposure for them. So first and foremost audience. And secondly, I already said, right, commit to a year. Thirdly, in terms of equipment, I don't overthink that much starting out. I would say you don't have to invest a lot of money starting out. I mean, zoom, we're on zoom, right? I mean, you can have a zoom meeting for free for 40 minutes. So. Yep. Yeah, I think then the thing is like, what do you do with it afterwards? You're going to have this content, right? And today it's a podcast is going to be video in most cases included. So it's all about what are you going to do with that afterwards? How are you going to repurpose that content? And so that's going to be editing. And then I don't, I don't encourage people to get down the rabbit hole of editing, you know, especially as a mortgage loan officer, YouTube busy already. You probably have your own content already. You're trying to post. So anyway, those would be the first two things I start with is, A, you better commit to a year. Who's your target audience? Right? Or for me, the two biggest things. And then what's your intention? What are you trying to accomplish by starting a podcast? I think I think so many people just do content, podcasts, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever it is, because they're told by some marketer online that that's what they need to do. And that's what they see everybody else doing, but there's no intention behind it. There's no thoughtfulness behind it. And I'm going to tell you right now that as, as a marketer, marketers aren't, you know, there aren't just, you know, brain and brain. They're, they're everything is thought out. Now you can easily take that into an extreme and then you get analysis paralysis, which you also don't want to fall into, right? But there has to be, you have to at least know who you're talking to when you turn on the camera, right? You at least have to know like, okay, after I'm done and the camera is off, what's the plan for it? Just to keep it very simple. And then you can go, you know, where am I directing traffic to and then, you know, how am I getting? How am I building an email list? And like, that's, that's all again, like secondary to the few things that you mentioned. But I think, I think that's extremely valid points that you just, that you just brought to us. I just have this thought. By the way, an easy place to start is interviewing other agents and local business people and things like that. And that is part of your social content strategy. Taking those interviews and cutting those up into little clips, like that could be an easy way for you to also fill in your social content, right? Because interesting thing happens when other agents see you around other successful agents, having a presence with local business owners, etc. Like you said earlier, all of a sudden your brand cache goes up, you're now somebody, because you're studying to have a conversation with an influencer, right? A person of influence in your local market. Right. I think the podcast clips, so for me, the audio is important because of my target audience and because of my goal, right? But if your target audience and goal, the audio is almost less important, right? You know, posting it to Spotify and Apple Music and all the different podcast platforms is almost secondary. If I was a regular originator, just trying to build referral relationships. Really what you get to do is chop up that 30 minute hour, hour interview into many, many Instagram clips, tagging them in those posts and guess who follows realtors, other realtors. Your name is spread all over the place and I think it's a great strategy if that is your goal and what you're trying to do. And of course, I also think like you need the right personality too. I think a lot of times like on social media, we get caught up and you know, I need to be doing this or I need to be doing that. You have to think about who you are. I truly believe that if you double down on who you are and you're not a camera person or you or whatever. And you focus on other things like building email stuff and writing and you know, building a Facebook group. There's so many different ways to do it. So don't force yourself to do TikTok dances if you're not a TikTok dancer. Right. Yeah. Are you doing any TikTok dances? No, sir. But you're an excellent interviewer and it works for you, right? So I think I think that's also something to put some thought into. But I want to I want to just say thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule. I want to thank you for bringing the value that you brought over over the past, you know, half an hour or so. And I also want to thank you for giving me a shot to come on to your podcast maybe two years ago. Right. I might be even three, honestly, because before COVID, I believe. Well, you know what? By the way, what that says is I don't even remember how you got on my radar. It was on Instagram, I think. But you were leading with this brand of not your average lender. And I was like, that caught my eye. And I'm sure that's caught realtor's eyes as well. And they ask you, what's that? What do you mean? Not your average lender? Because who doesn't want to work with somebody who's not average, right? We want to work with the average people. So that was smart already. And then you've just leveraged that to so many other things, real partnerships, the brewery events and stuff like that. So you're pretty savvy and you're working at your reels here on the screen. Your reels are popping off, man. You got thousands of views on these reels. And I know you start there. You kept going. Let me ask you this if I can. Yeah, go ahead. Because I haven't asked you a question in a long time. It's been a long time since we talk. How has you building everything I just mentioned, your personal brand? How has that impacted your mortgage career in terms of deal flow coming to you? I think when we sat down because our member, our member after we finished our interview, you asked me what my production was and I gave you an answer. And then after the podcast, I was like, let me check that number real fast. Because I don't want to ever lie. I think since that moment in time, production has drippled if not quadrupled. Now granted, 2023 and, you know, 2022 was still a great year for me. I definitely took a step back, but the whole industry didn't. But I think even with the pullback, the industry has seen. It was probably triple to quadruple. And I'll tell you one of the reasons is my name is solidified in my marketplace now. Like if you're an L.O., if you're a realtor, you've at least heard my name. Doesn't mean everybody works with me, which is what I'm working on now. That's the never ending battle is like, why aren't you working with me if you know me? But I'll tell you one thing. It has made me known and it's solidified my name, which is priceless. And then on top of that, what it has also allowed us to do is build our division. So other L.O.'s naturally would follow me. Most of my following is actually other L.O.'s. And that's why my goals and my vision has kind of shifted. And that's why I'm doing this to kind of double down on that. Because I really, really love this business. And I always say, like, I'm in debt to this industry, pun intended, pun intended. I've just truly changed my life. So I wanted to kind of focus on that more. But it not only has the whole social media thing allowed me to grow my personal referral business and solidify my name and my market, but also build a national division. Where we have L.O.'s across the country now. And that's something that I'm super, I'm more passionate about that at this present time than anything else. So it's really, really cool to bring on somebody to our team and plug them into a system that all of a sudden they're making ripple double. And that's what it has done for me and naturally what it has done for others. It's been worth it. I would say so. And listen, it hasn't been easy, man. Like you said, my reels are popping off. There's thousands of views. There was a time maybe two years ago and where like my social media really leveled off. And it was like a plateau. And I couldn't really get over that 2000 subscriber moment, right, that you that you mentioned your friend was having. And I think when you're when you're at that crossroads, you need to think about, is this something that I just need to think with a longer time horizon? Or do I need to change my strategy a bit? And what I needed to do was I needed to get on to the micro stuff because every time the platform change, I needed to change my content strategy. And it was very hard for me to let to set my ego aside and say, I'm going to do this new thing because I was like, oh, I already do this. You know, I'm already, you know, doing a vlog. I'm already doing like three minute videos. I don't need to do this. And then your ego gets in the way. You don't want to be new again. Right. Right. And that's that's when I when I set my ego, which which I it always I always humble myself and may take a little bit. But when I humble myself and figure out like, I'm not special. I got to get on board with this thing. I got to become new again. That's when my social media started to take off again. So I think that's that's a cool little. Yeah. All process you can run yourself through if you're not seeing results right now. Is it just I need to think longer term or do I need to get new again and new skills and take a new approach to to things. So, but I appreciate the compliment. Yeah, man. No, whatever you're doing. Keep doing it, man. Yeah. Well, I'll I'll have to change it again. Well, that's that's actually the other good note to end on is it's not the strongest to survive. It's the most adaptable to change survive. So and we got change. So how are you adapting? You know, like drop. Well, and we'll end with that. Thank you so much, Jeff. Anybody who wants to reach out to you, they go to mortgage marketing.pro. They'll also hit you up on Instagram, right? Or listen to your podcast. The mortgage marketing radio, correct? Correct, sir. Thank you. No problem. I got you. I'll check you next time. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. 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 purchased 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, attracting convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seeds, partnering with affiliates. Real easy, but that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top elbows, 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 to from eight 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 mortgagemarketing.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 mortgage marketing.