How to Grow Your Agent Referrals with CE Classes

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. This has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Welcome to Mortgage Marketing Radio. I'm brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in Mortgage Marketing. Hey listeners, what's up? This is Jeff Zimfer, your host for another edition of the Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast. Thank you for tuning in. And if you've been with me for some time, I just want to say I appreciate you. I know that you've got a lot of options and choices of where your attention can go in the marketplace today. And if we have been able to keep and hold your attention for any length of time, I'm grateful for that. We work hard to try and bring you relevant content conversations that makes a real difference in your business. And so if we're delivering on that, I'd love to hear your feedback. You feel free to email me anytime you can email me podcast at mortgagemarketingradio.com. You can also, if you haven't yet, leave us a review wherever you're listening to this podcast, whether it's Apple, Spotify, leave us a review on our Facebook page. We do have a private Facebook group, Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast on Facebook. If you haven't been there yet, go check it out. I'd love to have you in there and we keep the conversation going there. And also don't forget that I do have a new book coming up. It's over there on the desk. I can't reach it from here. Anyway, it's called Disrupt or Die. How to survive and thrive. The digital real estate shift. Have you not heard, please? And would you like to get an advanced copy of that before it becomes available to the mass public? Here's how you can do that. Go to getdisruptordie.com. Getdisruptordie.com. And the book will be released here in the month of March. We've got some really great bonuses for people that are on that advanced list, like a free companion course. And we'll be doing a lot of things where you can make that available as a gift to your realtor, referral partners, et cetera. And even some custom branding for anybody who might be interested in that. So if you want to learn more about that, obviously hit me up. I already gave you the email, you know, where to do that or just message me on Facebook. It's probably one of the better places to reach me. All right. On today's episode, what we're doing is we are featuring a member of the month. So I was doing this for a while last year. We took a break from it, but I'm bringing it back and the member of the month, what does that mean? It means that you may or may not know that we have a pro membership as well. That's an exclusive private group, a membership for those mortgage originators who want to get maximum agent referrals and minimum time without cold calling, without chasing, without begging, without doing the Zillow co-pay leaves and things like that. And following a proven system and process that will maximize your exposure to agents and your conversion and referral rates as well. How do we do that? We do that by providing a done for you turn key platform of teaching agent classes. If you want to learn more about that, you can go to mortgagemarketing.pro. Mortgagemarketing.pro is where you can learn more about that, a little video put up on that and that should give you some more details on that. So with that said, what I'm doing on this episode is featuring one of my special two actually, two of our members, Ryan Phillips with Associates title and Ryan Miracle with Roof Off mortgage. They have really leveled up this agent class platform. They've taken the turn key done for you classes that we give them and they're now, they've created a brand in their local marketplace and it is called next level continuing education. And they are averaging right now over 50, more like 75 agents in attendance at each of their classes. They do ones per month. They do them at the library for free. They have partners that they've teamed up with that have actually covered lunch and other expenses. They've gotten what they do is they get each of these classes CE approved by the state board and they've been given the entire database of real estate agents by the state because they're offering CE classes. Uh-huh. Hink, wink, wink. That's a little bit of a hint. Kind of a bonus there. But they've created a unique format and now what they are doing is teaching a three hour real estate CE with lunch. And they so who's involved here, we've got Ryan Phillips, as I said, from associate's title, right? So he's teaching a session, a section and get an agent's get a credit, Ryan Miracle from rural mortgage teaches this section and they get a credit and then they've teamed up with a financial advisor who teaches financially related educational topics such as B financially fit for today and tomorrow and they get a credit for that. So agents have decided, look, if I'm going to come, I'm coming all in, I'm coming for three hours, give me three credits, give me lunch, I'm good. And this has really impacted their business in a positive way, which you'll hear them explain. Plus, they've created a thing, a brand, they've are, you know, as you've heard Gary Vaynerchuk perhaps talk about, right, today you need to become a brand, you know, I become the digital mayor, right? And your back end is mortgage, real estate, title, et cetera. And that's what they've done and perfected quite well here. And so that's why I wanted to have them on as special guests because if you're looking to perhaps get started with classes and by the way, you know, everybody starts at square one. So you might not come out of the gate and doing a three hour, right, three credit CE platform. And that's okay, right? It's all about the law of large numbers and how do you accelerate and scale the quantity of agents that you're connecting with, but also how are you differentiating yourself? How are you creating value? Do you have a system for accelerating and converting, right? The realtor prospecting you're doing and doing it in a different way that nobody else really does it because who wants to take the cold calls every Monday and Tuesday? Who wants to do the coffee talks, you know, over and over and over again, right? So do something unique and different. That's what these guys have done. So I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I think it's a great education in leveraging a platform like education. If that's your thing, cool, and if not, that's cool too, we appreciate you either way. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show, Ryan and Ryan. Welcome to the show. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Yeah. With associate's title, Ryan Miracle grew off mortgage, Compass Ohio. All right. So Ryan Phillips, associate's title, Ryan Miracle, Roof Mortgage, Columbus, Ohio. Yes, we are. All right. Welcome to the show. And as the people learned during the intro, Ryan Miracle, right? And by the way, could you get a better last name? I could try. I mean, have you used that at all? Like I pull off miracles in the mortgage. Yeah, but being the mortgage industry sometimes you get phone calls that, hey, I heard you can do miracles. And that's not necessarily the type of clients I want to track. That's right. You're like, let's clarify. That's awesome. All right. So do me a favor. We'll start with Ryan Phillips. Just give us a quick summary. How long have you been in the title business? I started in 1994. So a little over 25 years. I've been doing every part of the title business. I started my own company in September of 2008. About the best time I could start a company. I think we opened on Monday and the stock market crashed on Thursday. And then it's been up, up and up since. That's awesome. Air survivor. Congratulations. Thank you. All right. Mr. Miracle, give us your quick tenure in the industry. Yeah. Sure. So I jumped right into real estate out of college in 2005. Did new build thing for just till 2009 just after the crash and then jumped over to consumer direct with a large bank and was there during the refi boom shortly after the crash and then got tired of being a number and then transitioned over to the broker side, which is a completely different animal. So that was about 2011 and not been their sense. OK. Fantastic. Well, we're glad you're here. And of course, Ryan Miracle, as a matter of fact, I probably go like RM, RP, maybe that's how I'll differentiate. How does it go? Last names to it. Does matter. And to what works, whatever works. So Mr. Ryan Miracle, you are, as people learn in the intro, you are one of our pro members as we call it and our mortgage marketing pro membership, which is the kind of done for you library of Asian classes. And is that how you guys originally connected by tell me how your relationship, what's the genesis of it? Well, I mean, we started the CE thing about two issues ago and it didn't really take off. So I bowed out for about a year, but they kept working on it. And then when they asked me to come back, Philips was part of the group, as was two financial planners. So at that point, they were looking for a new lender to help pull some weight. And then so that was about this time last year, March, last year. And that's when the group that we have right now is up and running. Okay. So the financial planner has actually introduced us and then what we can do in this sense. So about two years. Yes, sir. Okay. And if I signed up for your product about a year ago, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so the financial planners though are the ones who introduced the two of you to each other. Yes, sir. And that was, did they already have the CE educational platform? Yeah, they had already gone through the compliance, but we jumped on and did the marketing stuff with you right and I tied up the marketing stuff. Right. Right. And so the financial planners, the platform was it or is it theirs that what's called next level continuing education? No, it was just, I think they just had it under their names originally. And then when I jumped on board, I looked at branding and tried to make the whole image cohesive. So working with my marketing department at Rua, they helped us kind of craft this brand at this next level, and then it just kind of keeps evolving from there. I like it. So, so Mr. Phillips, is that mean we have to give Mr. Miracle credit for the right, you know, next. Absolutely. He's 99% of the show. I don't know about that. No, that's awesome. You guys are a great team, but now I'm looking at the, and we'll put links to all this in the show notes. I'm looking at your event right page right now, which is next level continuing education. So just to be clear, give us the format of kind of like the frequency of your CE platform, just describe it what it is. Have you? We try and pick the second Thursday of every month. We do a class once a month. We usually do three hours of electives, and we try and keep changing it up. We might do two or three months in a row with one class, but then just keep it new. And then that keeps the agents coming and, you know, they can almost fulfill all their electives with us, and they just have to go get the boring law classes somewhere else. Exactly. Now, you have a, your approach is unique, which is partly why I wanted to bring you guys here, is that you actually have, if I'm correct, at every class, you have three different presenters. Yes. So what we did is, so I mean, the one thing that we're really focused on is competing with ourselves and constantly evolving, because there's other CE providers in our market, but they'll only do an hour to hear. So what we did was, obviously, we wanted to have as many of us in the group present as possible. So we're all pulling weight. We're all getting equal gains out of it. So we went, we started out with one hour, then we went to two, then we went to three. I don't think we've experimented before yet, but we found that three hours is a good sweet spot, because it allows them to cram it. The realtor's allows them to cram it as much CE as possible, and it allows us to have a captive audience for three hours. Yeah, they've said, if I'm going to come down here, go for it. If we're going to show up, might as well just do three hours and get it done. And we've kind of ran with that sense, and it kind of allows for a lunch break in there somewhere pretty easy, and it's pretty easy for us to just roll one hour to the mat. So each of you take an hour? Okay. Roughly. Is this something that they have to pay for? No. As we do it all at libraries, and then all the presenters, Ryan, me, the financial planners, we're all using this as a platform to get business, so we're not charging any money. So the only thing what we've been doing of late is we pull in other companies, whether it be home warranty companies, home inspection companies, they buy lunch. Right. Yeah, works out well. And so you've been doing it as next level for roughly a year and a half? About a year. About a year. And when you started out, how's it grown from when you began to where it is now, in terms of like attendance and awareness and all that? We're packed at every event is it's not the only way we could grow it more, I think, is if we found a free auditorium that we could do it, we the last event, 90 RSVPs in two days or three days or something like that. So a lot of last year, we were at 50 to 75 RSVPs depending upon our venue and our venues are the public libraries, and we're lucky enough that they just retooled those within the last couple of years. So they're great, the tech is great, everything works nice, parking is usually pretty good, and it's free if you're a member. Now what we're kind of running into now is we're outgrowing the spaces, so we're now trying to find different alternatives. So answer your question, I mean, we would start out at 50 to 75 RSVPs and it would take us about two, three weeks to get enough RSVPs to sell out. The last four classes, which once again once a month, we're starting out with 75 and we're selling out within 24 to 48 hours, and then we have to usually up it and make sure that we have enough room in the room to facilitate how many people would show. And we've been packing them in, they've been standing room or, you know, four to five people at a table. It's in the libraries, like Ryan said, the libraries here are great facilities, super nice, but we are hitting capacity with a lot of the rooms they have to offer. When you started out though, what were your reservation counts looking like? Well we started out with our target being 50 to 75 depending upon the room, and we've averaged pretty much from the beginning at 55% show-up rate. So depending upon what our RSVP count is, 55% is a pretty good gauge of what we're looking at. Yeah, that's a great show, right? So I'm trying to address, and you know this is some people starting out with classes, you know, the quote success, although I don't like to judge it by the numbers, is all over the board, right? Some people start out in their first class as five. Some people have, like, you know, like 40, you really, you came out of the gate getting 40, 50 people showing up? Um, 20, 30 at best, in the last nine months, I don't think we've done less than 40 though, have we? No, yeah. It's been a minimum 40 at least for the last nine months. Yeah, but when we started out, it was much smaller than we were right now, right? So for those listening, what do you think that you could share with them that you might do differently or that you've learned along the way to maximize attendance and show rates? Well, one of the things that I think has really helped is we've, and we one had the contact information for all the realtors in town. So that's kind of a side benefit of teaching CE is at least here locally, they, they allow you access to their name phone number or name and email. So we have the name and email for all the realtors in town. So we have that kind of audience. So the board of realtors, if you teach CE, gives you the data. Yeah, exactly. Yep. So we would upload that to you. Not to interrupt. I'm just curious. What do they give you for info, name, phone number, email, the whole soup to nuts? What kind of a broker or salesperson, you know, good bit of, good bit of info. The state gives us pretty much everything with their phone number. So but through the event bright, we're able to collect their phone number. So therefore we have that information after that. So we uploaded to the CRM and then send out the invite. And then four class. So once we've gathered the invites, we download it from event bright, and then I go through the list and create a drip campaign on a node. We're going to kind of high level. But it's basically we're creating two text messages that go out the day before class. It's a hey, don't forget you signed up for CE tomorrow. And then the one the day up, they actually gives them the address. So all they have to do is click on, click on their phone and it takes them right to the event. So we don't want to have them have an excuse not to show up. So is that the primary means of promoting and getting bus and seats is email and text? Yes. Any phone calls go out at all? No. Not yet. The text features, you know, because Ryan is such a wizard with the CRM, the text feature personalized. Hey, Bob, don't forget you signed up for a CE class tomorrow. And you know, he thinks that Ryan just texted him alone. Yeah, no, I love that. So there's a lot of good lessons in there, right? Personalization is key, but also you're leveraging automation because look, your full time job is not event promoter. Nope. Very, very cool. How long? Let me think about this. On average, I'm sure you've got a streamlined a bit more, but how much time do you put into those mechanics of promoting an event prior to your class? Well, for the email, we use the same email every single month. We just changed the back end link that goes behind a click here to sign up. So we already have the list primed, we already have the email written. Now probably the biggest challenge is finding a sponsor each month, but once again, we're getting traction with that happening on its own. And then downloading the list from event bright and then plugging in the drip campaign on the back. And so right now, we're all as a group spending probably an hour prepping for one event, which gets 50 more or more 50 more leads now the beginning, it was much more than that because we were learning and throwing up, failing, and fixing, but yeah, so I mean, it's getting a lot easier as we grow. And don't don't allow me to finish this before we want to talk about the feedback form and like the cool thing that happened there with you, but I'm curious, like, and maybe this is just my own kind of learning curve here. So you get access to the database of real church and your local community because you're teaching seeds. Was there any warming up or did it just go like, boom, email, hey, here's a class coming up. And we hit him with both barrels right away and the response was, was okay, but the longer we had that list, the more that they warmed up and the lower our subscribe unsubscribe rates have gotten. Yeah, I think we had one real jerk that, you know, threatened this, threatened that, you know, stop emailing me, blah, blah. That was it. I think we only have one person do that. And then now it's it. And anyone else quietly unsubscribe, but we don't, we get way more positive feedback than we do negative. Yeah. You don't worry about it. Do, are there any additional communications that go out other than your event related things? As far as to that database? No. So once again, we don't want to burn out our list. So we're very careful to make sure that, like you said, we're respectful of them. Yeah. Cause God forbid you start spamming them, then it gets back to the board and et cetera. And then you're done. Yeah. Yeah. Right. This mark. Okay. Cool. So that covers that. There we go. Do you need to fix anything there? No. Just get it. Okay. All right. No worries. Actually. Okay. So tell me about like before and after, give me a before and after, like how were you prospecting and marketing to agents before? What was the results there and what's the difference now with these classes? You. Usually it was the other side of the transaction, the non directing client that I was going after, you know, the in central Ohio, the seller chooses or the seller's agent chooses the title company. So I was going after the buyer's agent through the transaction. Now this is giving me another avenue to show value and show them I have something they need. And it's made quite a bit of difference of just being known in the community if nothing else. So you know, I, I coach fourth grade basketball and I go out to do the team introductions the other day and the coach on the other team comes out and says, I was just in your CE class. Maybe it was a realtor from Keller Williams and so it, you know, he starts to get around and then you just kind of a face they can trust or a Facebook who business with. Yeah. I mean, just like look a lot of lenders, they struggle with exposure and sameness and trying to break out and be different in their market. So before this all happened, it was cold calls every week working the listing agent on the other side of the transaction, peer intro, there's those kind of things. So it was the real like boots on the grand hand to hand combat kind of thing. What this has done is it's allowed all of us to break out of that sameness and go to very distinct. I wouldn't say word to iconic it, but that's the goal is to have this be something that we are recognized for for more than just real estate, yeah, we have something different to offer. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so first of all, congratulations to you guys for putting in the effort and having the awareness that you, you know, a platform to help you rise above the noise was was a smart thing to do. But also, I don't want to just brush over the importance of kind of the lessons that we're hovering around here, but we're not driving too deep on and that is back to the branding of this thing. Next level continuing education, whereas a lot of people, quote, do classes, do lunch and learns or whatever, but they never make it a thing, right? And our years consistently, like the third or second Thursday of every month or yeah, yeah. Right. And so that's another thing that makes it something substantial. So the point is this for those listening or watching is as you get going, right, I think it's useful to consider coming up with a name, right? There's the agent marketing alliance, whether it's the next level, whatever, obviously, you don't plan on expanding in all 50 states, right? Yeah. We haven't saturated this market yet. Yeah. Yeah. We're still, you know, even a year in 40, let's say average 45, uh, realtors per, you know, we're only staring down, but 600 realtors and there's 8,000 in the central Ohio market alone. And we have had plenty of repeaters too. So, you know, it's, it's, we're, we only have a toe hold, even with as well as we're doing with it. Right. So the secret is, if you're going to leverage agent classes, right, for example, um, whether they're seat year or not, um, and you're going to play the long game, right, create some branding around it. Because this is now, you guys are now becoming, oh, uh, you know, almost local celebs in some ways, right? In the realtor community. Mm-hmm. That's the idea. And getting showered with gifts and cars and all that, right? Oh, wow. Wow. Well, they can give us stuff. We got, yeah, yeah. Yeah. How many repeat attendees do you see on average, um, we'll have maybe three to five of the class. Good. We had one guy that came to every single class we did. We had to take him off the list. I think we just, he was just coming for lunch, but nevertheless, it was, you know, those of you really like this or maybe really like Ryan, I don't know. Those are the agents who have no business, right, or they just, that's right. Get the lunch. Um, tell me then about how you're converting attendees to meetings or how you convert this to business, which your process post event. Well, I mean, before, so to your credit, you have the feedback form and that is pay dividends. But before that, um, I tried to just call everyone who was on the list. So if we had 45 people, I would spend however many hours trying to call them, taste down 45 realtors, but I didn't really have anything to talk about. So once I switched over to the feedback form that actually gave me, if had me filter out the people who didn't want to talk to me, so either they weren't producing or didn't find value when I had to offer or they already had a loan officer. So I'm not going to chase someone who's not interested in talking to me. So the, the feedback form has really allowed me to filter out from like a class of 50, so to speak. I'll end up with like 20 feedback forms of people who actually want to talk. So it really cuts down on my, my back end and I have something to talk to them about. And for me, it's a process. It's an ongoing process for me. I have sales reps that I'll pass out the list to and let them do the follow up, but it's an ongoing system of one that you know, I know how much it does for my branding. So I'm kind of satisfied with that. And then it helps me be a loop, you know, the real or be a loop war lead for either me or my sales reps. Just I've got a little bit of a, I've already shown them value just to get in front of them to show more values is the real goal and calling them after the fact is, you know, really the means of doing that. Great. Well, it's a difficult question to answer whenever I ask the question about like getting specific on referrals back to you and things like that, but can you at all speak to like what impact this has had on your business over the last year in terms of deals and things like that? Specifically, you know, I can say I got this deal out of that. It never seems to work that way. I think whether it be coming at them with my service or pricing, the value I add with the continuing education, it's a three to five pronged effort that produces results. So point at any one particular one would be difficult, but nevertheless, it's a valuable piece of puzzle. Yep. So my wife has a really high business acumen and that's something that I didn't have coming into the business. So she taught me how to run a P&L and my lead and lag indicators. So part of that P&L is knowing how many referrals I'm getting from specific silos or verticals. So for next level specifically, as I grow a realtor relationship, I have them logged on a P&L and any lead they give me, it goes on to the P&L so I can track to see how many leads I'm actually getting from the efforts. So if that realtor ends up growing into a relationship, that's kind of a amount of the crossroads. Do I take them off the P&L? But I did find that relationship from that next level silo. So that's sourcing new relationships? Yes. Yep. Yeah. You know, most of these people, I wouldn't even be able to get past the gatekeeper at their office to get in front of them. This goes right around all of that trouble and you know, it's them to recognize my face or recognize at least what I'm doing without having to walk into their office and be down the door. Well, we all know that part of the battle is, yeah, first getting attention, right? And standing out and differentiating somehow and then getting them to respond. And so that's why I think you've bought into, like I have, is the class is makes a lot of sense because, hey, it's a wide net strategy, right? So it's a law of large numbers, we're putting a lot of people in the top of the hopper. Secondly is, as you well know, there's a lot of things that happen simultaneously while you're teaching the class, the positioning aspect, the building of trust, so the resistance is down, the rapport, the likeability, everything about a relationship is accelerated when you're in person face to face there. And then, of course, the value delivered, then the reciprocation kicks in and they feel like, my gosh, these guys are doing such a great thing. I want to go back. Yep. Yes, sir. Okay, so in terms of you guys feeling comfortable presenting, right? Are there any hurdles you had to jump through over there? You know, just the speaking in front of a large audience is that everybody, you know, some of the most people fear that more than death, I think, and that's really it, because the material's being laid out for us, it makes it a lot easier when I'm not coming up with the lecture or every bit of it. You know, we plug in our own pieces and parts and things like that, but that makes it a lot easier when it's all laid out for it. The one thing that I found is like when you're getting up and speaking, you have to kind of perform a little bit. So normally, I'm pretty low key on the disprofile, my high S and a high C. So I am not a traditional salesperson, but getting up in front of people and talking, you have to almost perform, you have to almost a moat 10 to 20% more than you normally would in crack jokes and try to get people to engage. They're actually like looking people on the eye instead of over their head. So it's a learning curve, but you learn what works and what does it. Yeah, so it's good skill practicing overall for being better presenter, et cetera, building that confidence. And they say if you can speak in front of a group and one on one's a piece of cake, you know? All right. So I'm on your Facebook page here for next level, continuing education, and you guys do a great job with video. When did you decide to bring in or when did you start video, like video tape video, sounds so I was gonna say video tapeing really, does anybody grow them anymore? I'd say. I'd say recording. As soon as he joined the group, he is. At first it was him. He was doing all the video and you know, he did a marvelous job about it, but we kind of decided, let's take that burden off of him and then we brought in videographers, but you know, he is a AV nerd and loves all this stuff. And so he made it, he made it pretty easy to video at first, and then it just got to be too big of a job. So then that's what we brought in the videographer. Yeah. And you don't have to get super specific, but I'm just trying to get a sense because people are listening, right? I'm trying to cover all context or angles. People could be coming from video or sounds expensive. Okay. So I actually got a tip from one of my realtor partners that, okay, so here in town we have a art university, it's called CCAD. And they have graph designers, potters, fashion people, but part of that is videographers as well. So they have a job board that you can place job descriptions on. And then we found Josh, our videographer, from CCAD. He was just looking for side work outside of school. So as far as cost is concerned, I think we spent, was $300 for two different, yeah. So this is at the same time we onboarded our first sponsor. So we offloaded the food costs to our sponsor. And then we took on the cost for the videographer. I mean, the video is really clean and we used all the time. And the nice thing is it's created an asset for us so that way we can use it over and over again. Well, yeah. The video is great. I'm looking at that. I mean, there's a little poltergeist time in there about the Ibuyers. That's pretty cool. Yeah. That's great. And he's doing that editing for you? Well, so Josh did our big video that was in the main library. A lot of the other small promo videos, like the one we did with Karen Carr and the one for the poltergeist one that you saw. So I'll just find an hour in the office and then duck into a corner and then start shooting. So that video, the Poltergeist video was for Halloween class and it was for your disruptor diet class. So I played heavily on the like a zombie kind of theme in the video. Yes. So yeah, I just got, I found a dark corner in the office and then just lean back and lean forward a couple of times to try to figure out the lighting and exposure. But yeah, it was really, that's probably my favorite one I've ever shot. Yeah, that's a good one. And you have testimonial videos from people after the class, very professionally. And then like the more recent one I remember that I've seen, which is the promo video, which is all the nice cuts and shots of the class and people registering in the class, just filling up. And I think you put that on hyperspeed as well. Yes. Yeah, that's really cool. So you're really, I mean, creating this kind of like we talk about, like you've dairy V, right? You've got to become a media brand today and you're back end as mortgages or a title. Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Now I see you doing the dark, dark shade. That's really cool, man. Great job. By the way. Thank you. Fantastic. Have any kind of private group for these people yet? That's kind of our next evolution. Yeah. So we don't have a Facebook group yet, but we're thinking about creating like breakout mastermind classes for, for like a deeper dive in the words of you just did one the other day for a Facebook. Right. Did a, did a kind of a workshop hands on rather than a lecture? Yes. Definitely needs some tweaking. It was, we, I went into it telling them they were all guinea pigs and it was kind of just a, we have to, when you're doing a workshop, it's your skill levels you have here and skill levels you have here. And you know, one woman, one woman, we had to show her how to get on the Wi-Fi and the other woman knew everything she knew, you know, everything we could teach her. So it's just, we got to come up with a, a way to bridge that gap and to separate the newbies from the professionals. Hey, man, I salute you because I've done that twice now, try to do a, what did we call that, a hands-on lab. Yeah. It was more like a hands-on blood bath. Oh. Pretty, because to your point, people are all over the, all of the map, for instance, I'm actually leading one right now, which is five agents helping them set up their first Facebook ad. Okay. All right. Yeah. Well, you know, for six weeks, by the way, once a week, once a week in person for six weeks. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Believe me, I'm there to rethinking this whole thing right now, but step one is set up is, yeah. We've got a great idea in mind, you know, we'll, we'll talk to you about six months or a year to see, see how it works out, but we've, we've got to sit down and, and organize our thoughts to what we have to solve that problem that you're talking about. I think we have a basic system, but once we get it down, we'll share it with you. Yeah. For sure. I'd love it. It's well experimenting. And since he is this duplicatable, right? Because it is a certain set to do that lab thing. You guys do any virtual meetings, I'm curious, it's relevant in the context of where we are right now today, right? Right? I saw that stuff. And then virtually you're planning on doing honestly, that's a heck of an idea. I mean, because we still, that's a concern is the class is waning because of everything that's going on. You said you're venue was canceled. Right? Yeah. Like 12 hours before 90 people were set to show up. Yeah. Okay. Well, so this has just come so fresh off of our call this morning and in the membership, is that, you know, that's my, was my suggestion is to reach out to your agents. If that and indeed it happened to you is, you know, try and convert that to a virtual like a zoom, you know, it's going to be much smaller, but at least you still get to make that, you know? We have to, we have to see if the state allows it. We haven't even gotten that far yet to see what this, this state of Ohio will allow us to do. You know, do they have to sign in person to we had, you know, they ask who keeps the records and who you know. So if we're doing all virtual, that's a little bit of stuff that's up in the air that will probably have to clarify on the state and see what they'll accept. I agree. For CE, you're right. It's a different conversation. I'd look at it from the standpoint of it's an opportunity to still kind of, you know, check in and have that FaceTime ad value pour in. You probably get much less attendees because it's virtual and all that kind of stuff and you got to work out the kinks that's, you're like learning, well, building the plane while flying there. Yes. Right. But you get to see it, so to speak, right? For when you, you can go back to that venue and just say, Hey, people, sorry to cancel it. And so we're just going to do a mini version of this today, but we'll do the full blown CE thing when we can get back in the venue. That's a great idea. Thank you. Yeah. Good to shot. What else is on your horizon? What else are you doing that you're excited about this year for 2020? What else is related or not or just anything? I think just kind of diversifying our class offering. Yeah. Then moving the classes around the city, we've kind of, you know, it seems like you get a different dynamic of a group depending on where you are, but library we choose in the city. So just bouncing around from downtown to the suburbs to wherever it seems to bring it totally different dynamic to each group. Hmm. Interesting. Are there any other types of events like social events or anything for agents? Just with groups that are already established, you know, whether it be the local area real at our association or what it might be because I, you know, I don't know how things aren't biggest, but here, the local realtor groups are very well attended and very well organized and very social. And I've been to in the last six months, I don't know, probably an average of five or six social events just organized by these real estate groups. So, you know, you can jump in and help sponsor or help organize those, but as far as doing stuff on, on my own, other than small group outings, nothing for me. You don't really have a need to because your pipeline is still full from these events. Well, yeah, you know, I have 50 realtor's a month, that's a lot to, a lot to keep track of right there by itself. A lot of warm leads get in front of. I guess before we go, that brings up one other thing I wanted to better understand is, are you then, is the goal to, like you said, use the feedback form Ryan, use the goal to then convert the right attendees to face-to-face meetings? Yeah, so based upon having some stats of who's the performers and who's not, I can kind of cherry pick who I want to work with. And at this point, the volume's coming in well enough to where if someone's going to be a jerk or a personality's don't mesh, I don't have to be pigeonholed into working with them exclusively or begging them for business like I could just move on to the next person. Right, right. And our lunch guy that, you know, we already discussed, he did five deals in a year, so we knew already, we really, you know, calling on him might not be that fruitful. Just giving crackers next time he shows up. Well, I think at one point, he wasn't on the email list and still came. Yeah, he still showed up. He found us on November. He's googling, yeah, yeah. And your classes, are they built out for the next several months? We're only 30 days out of the time. I think that's the next evolution is we want to make this a streamline and low maintenance for us as possible, so that's probably another step that we are thinking about taking. Just make it like a lunch appointment almost for us. Yeah, it's something that's not not too involved. Right, right. Exactly. You have seen some of our members do that where they build out six months on their calendar for class. Library is only this book 60 days out, so that's kind of that. You know, if we want to keep those free venues, keep the cost on this low, it's kind of a thing there is, you only have 60 days out. That makes sense, awesome. Well, cool guys, this has been very helpful. Great education in how you're leveraging this platform of next level, continuing education classes to really maximize, optimize, right? The amount of realtors you're in front of and probably you're speeding up, what is usually a slow process is sifting and sorting realtors, you know? Can I add one thing? Yeah, please. All right, so I think we kind of glazed over the fact that there's more than just the two of us. So the good thing is, and for the people that are listening, that they want to take this step and do events, my suggestion is to find rock solid partners that you would count on to pull their weight. So there's not one of us who's pulling an uneven share of weight. So all of us have our responsibilities, and since there's four of us, it's not overwhelming for any of us. Like, for example, we lost our reservation two days ago, 12 hours before class, all of us hopped on a call and we got it figured out within an hour. So we were able to pivot locations, but that wouldn't have happened if we didn't have a team to kind of fall back on. For anyone who's wanting to take this step, find your partners. Don't try to do it yourself. You don't have enough time in your day, and you wouldn't be able to protect your dollar per hour if you're dumping in massive amounts of effort on your own. You have to find partners, and then it'll go so much better, so much faster. And it allows for more diverse classes. Yes, yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's great points to the diversity. And we really haven't gone deep on that. But the third player who's not here in the room is your financial planner. So he's in an hour out of each of your total three hours, and helping them with financial planning, right? Yeah. Yeah, very good, very good. Awesome. That's a great combo. Each state, of course, is different when it comes to CE requirements and things like that. What did you guys have to do to get approval? Well, we had everything pretty well dialed in before we started approving classes. So we went to the state and found it exactly what we needed. So now a new class approval will take a week. Yeah, that's just as long as it takes them to review it. That's it. Really, I print off your PowerPoint, tell the state how long I intend to spend on each slide, long as it adds up to an hour, hour and 20 minutes, and it's relevant. It's usually good to go. Yeah. Wow. That's awesome. And make it nice with the CE approvers because they are going to take care of you. Yeah. Was it hard to have those initial conversations with them and reach the right people? Once again, I was coming in on the back end, so they already had that relationship established. But yeah, they are really good at making friends with people that they work with. So he was already in love with the group when I jumped in. Nice. Great. So just snap down your piece and you're good to go. Very cool. All right, gentlemen, listen, it is Friday. So I've got to let you go. You probably have pressing engagements to get to. Closing. Closing. Closing. Yeah, right. We'll have two more closings to do. If anybody wants to reach out to you, I'll put links in the show notes. But just to Ryan Phillips, where would people connect with you? Because occasionally title reps float through here and hear this. So you want to get Ryan Phillips as soon as he gets title. You can be I can be reached on my cell at 614-419-2418 or via email at Ryan at AssociatesTitleinc.com. All business like your typical superstar title rep. I love it. Miracle, how about you? Yeah, I probably just direct people to my email. So it's RyanRYAN.miracle. And my R-A-C-L-E at Ruof. R-U-O-S-F dot com. So Roger, umbrella, ask your friend Frank. I love that. That's great. And I'll put if you don't mind, I'll put a link in the show notes to your event brain page. Is that okay? Peace. Perfect. Yeah, yeah. Have people check it out because your format's really nice. And it looks good and all that stuff. So again, can't take you enough for making time from your busy day to be here. Thank you both. And I appreciate y'all. Hey, being members. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Thank you for making a music. Yeah, exactly. That's all. My pleasure. And listeners, do you know what to do as always? If you like today's episode, hey, leave us a little love wherever you're listening to this. Leave us a review that helps us reach more people. We appreciate you and we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. I'm going to be 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 if 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. 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