How to Prepare Your Business for 2023

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Go check it out right now. Visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Or welcome to the hot cast so glad you're here coming at you back from the Thanksgiving holiday. Hope you had some time to get away with people that matter to you doing things that you find valuable and useful and fulfilling. Fans, family, eating, football, whatever that was, glad you're back here tuning in. Now it's time to get back to the focus. And what I'm hearing a lot of people talk about is preparing for 2023 now. Like you've heard it said before, perhaps that what you do during this given month over the next 30 days is what's going to show up in 90 days, right? So you're literally building for your Q1 business right now. Question is, what are you doing? What are the activities? What are your priorities, right? And are you executing on those priorities and activities to build that momentum? Because please don't wait until January 3rd, January 15th to get in action mode to get motivated to build momentum. It takes time to build momentum. And you've got to be doing the right activities, right? And do them consistently, you know, well, no, you don't drop 20 pounds by going to the gym once, right? You do it by repeatedly going there over and over again. And you get better and you learn and you evolve, you evolve, right? And so my question is, what are you building for 2023? What are your key sources of business? I'm going to assume that referral partners, real estate agents are going to be a key source of that. And most people that I'm talking to are agreeing that you need more realtors than you did before. For all the reasons that we know, the better question is, is how are you approaching those real estate agents, right? Are you ready to get more purchase loans without chasing in cold, calling agents who don't want to talk with you? Well, I've put up a new page at mortgage marketing.pro. You've heard me talking about the folks that I work with across the country that are teaching agent classes, building their personal brand, right? Building these online communities and attracting agents instead of chasing agents. And they're getting meaningful engagement and conversations. More importantly, they're getting relationships, which leads to referrals. And oftentimes they're getting referrals on demand. Guys, deals are scarce, right? The deals have thinned out for a variety of reasons in terms of buyers and so forth. Realtors are going to be thinned out. So I would propose to you that you need to become an agent recruiting machine. And you need to turn the gas on for a period of time to add more realtors to your bus, to maybe clean out some of the ones that need to be cleaned out or are getting off the bus anyways, to go deeper with the ones you already have. And as you've probably discovered by now, I believe there's no better way to do that than helping a real estate agent succeed, leading with education, pouring into them, discovering more of the challenges and issues and frustrations that they face and provide solutions to help them break through and overcome them. You do that. You build loyalty. You will get people fighting for you and advocating on your behalf. You will build a personal brand. You will get introduced to other successful agents in town because Eagles like to soar with Eagles. So here's what I've done. I've opened up my calendar. Want to learn more about mortgage marketing pro, the managing classes, what we're doing over here and some of the cool things that our law officers are achieving, whether that's Eric Carson, who's exceeded his yearly goals by seven X seven times increase over his goals. Or of the results you heard me say before, you're hearing from our one of our favorite folks, Kevin Dwyer, Mike dropped mortgage, you had a $20 million in volume to his business or Auden Quintana, who just closed his first transaction from an agent who came to one of the classes. Guys, you've heard me talk about this on and on again. The question is, is it for you and are you going to take the next step to learn more? I'm not sure if it's for you. Only you can decide that, but I do know it's not right, not right for everybody. It's those that are willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work both on themselves and in the local market. So I want to learn more. I've made my calendar available, go to mortgagemarketing.pro, there's a brief video over there that explains this. By the way, this is a brand new page, brand new video. Those you've heard this offer before, maybe you've gone to the page in the past. I've got a ton of new testimonials loaded up over there for you to go look at. I've got my brief brand new video intro and a link to my calendar for you to schedule a call to learn more and see if this is a fit for you. Go to mortgagemarketing.pro and we'll see you over there. Okay, this episode, I'm bringing to you my very special guest, Mr. Ken Perry, who is the founder, guru extraordinaire and quite a funny man as well of the knowledge, now, what is the knowledge coop for those of you who may not know? So the knowledge coop is pretty much the destination, the best place for you to go and get your continuing education requirements that you need to do every single year. So they've got the skills training, the courses, right, classes, compliance resources, everything you need to know that are delivered, but not only from Ken and his team in a very humorous engaging way, but from a roster of industry experts as well. So whether it's CE, whether it's new license, et cetera, you're an individual L.O. or company and you're looking for a place to get that continuing education. That is the place you want to go is knowledge coop.com. They also have a new app that you're going to be hearing Ken talk about, which is an educational community, which I'm now part of, along with some of their esteemed colleagues in the industry. But that, you can go to app, app.knowledgecoop.com, we'll put links in the show notes to both. So whatever is going to be the appropriate option for you here, I'm looking inside the community here. We've got training for mortgage goats, from Josh Pits at Shred Media, we've got, like I said, I'm going to be adding content in there, win by noon, sales boomerang, the resource.tv. So if you're looking for a place to get great information all for free, by the way, this might be something for you to go check out once again, links in the show notes. But Ken and I, Ken has been around in the industry a long time. He meets with a lot of industry company executives. He attends the mortgage bankers association meeting every year for years and years. And what Ken is going to do is bring his perspective, his wide, angled lens and deep knowledge and understanding of having lived through different cycles. But he's going to, we are going to talk about how to prepare your business for 2023. And what are some of the things that he sees coming, some of what he heard and learned from the recent mortgage bankers association conference and how you can use some of this information to be better equipped and prepared to handle 2023 and everything that comes at you. So I appreciate you guys tuning in. I know you'll enjoy this episode. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Ken Perry, welcome to the show. So good to be here, man. Thanks for having me. Thank you, man. It's been a while coming. Well, let's just jump right into it for those who may not know and I'm shocked and dismayed that anybody doesn't know and they need to know you after this. So who is Ken Perry? What do you do? The president and CEO of the knowledge group and founder. We started back in 03 and we provide training to the mortgage industry and provide a technology that becomes company's internet. So we're the platform that a lot of people use to communicate with their people. Awesome. That was well done. Thank you. You might have done that in the past. Might have been a best elevator pitch ever again. Our biggest struggle is finding an elevator pitch because we have this technology that we sell and then we also do a ton of content. So people like, oh, you're a training company. It's like, well, yeah, but we also have a trained technology. Oh, is it just training? No, no, it's also an internet. So it's hard to like, it's a really narrow down what it is we do, but it all fits together really well. Yeah. No, that's true. And I definitely, we're going to talk about that before we finish up here today. Is the community, the internet, as you call it, right? It's cool gathering of minds and ideas that you've built and we'll talk about knowledge group more. But I think why I wanted to have you on the on the show is because first of all, you speak to a lot of executives at companies. You interact with a lot of loan officers thousands and thousands of loan officers across the country. So a real diverse kind of exposure. And then of course, you just recently attended the MBA annual event and I thought we could start with like what, if you were taking notes, what did you take notes on or what, like what did you walk out of there with going like, this is great. This may be not so great. What do you have? Yeah. Yeah. And I actually upload all my notes into the coop so people can go get those for free. But let me give you some takeaways because I take really deep and in depth notes and then I like to step back and do what you're asking me to do, which is like, okay, what's the basic like theme? I will tell you for part of that conference, it was like watching people sweep the deck and wash the floors on the Titanic, where it's like just clean it up. There's no way we survived this, but clean up the deck. And it was definitely feeling that way, like watching Mike Fran and Tony talk about the upcoming recession, talk about how many people are going to get laid off. And I think he was light on how many people he said where we lose through all of this. And seeing all the real data, it's not great. But the interesting thing is as he's going through all the depressing stuff, he gets to this one slide where he compares production in 2023, so our upcoming production to what we did in the past, you know, many years, we're not going to be that far off of total production from other years. Like it's not, it just feels like it because we're coming off of such an incredible time that now just doing a normal amount of loans feels really weird. And also, you know, the bottom dropping out of the refine market, that's been an announcement every single year at MBA, since I can remember, like get your purchases ready because refines are going away. And it was so funny that all of a sudden people were like, what happened to the refines? And it's like, we've prepared it's almost like that boy who cried wolf. Like every year you say we're going to be done with refines every year or not. The mortgage industry has got in the habit of like, all right, well, I guess we'll just do refines till the rates are zero. And then maybe they'll be like negative three percent, like it could keep going after that. And so I think people forgot it could dip. I don't think anybody thought sevens, you know, would be what we're selling on a conforming rate. But I do know that there was a lack of preparation. It felt like. And so there's a lot of people confused about what's going on and more kind of stunned and looking around. I just interviewed Rich Jefferson for a class we were doing on sales. And he was talking about hunting and how, apparently, and I've never hunted, but when you get a deer in your sights, you make a noise so that it freezes and looks at you and waits to get shot and or bow whatever you go on. But it's so interesting because he said that's what the market's like right now. Lone Offs is like, right, and they're not able to come out of that stunned. And if you don't come out of that stunned level and keep running, you're going to get hit. Like it's not going to be good. And that's what I felt is there's a lot of people kind of standing still wondering what the heck's going on and what's next and what's next is not good, especially if you're standing there staring at it and coming back from that, I just had a meeting with my team on Monday and I said, Hey, there's going to be a recession. I don't know anybody that says there's not. I know that Paul Ryan spoke of this thing and he said, we just hope it's only two quarters and then just have a deeper session and get out of it and go back to normal. And I told my team, I said, I'm just going to choose not to participate in the recession. And so what we're doing is looking at, all right, are there still people that want our product? Yes. Do we still love what we do? Yes. Well, then let's just go gather market share. And I think right now coming out of that was like a lot of people being stunned. There's a great opportunity to go gather market share because I think people just forgot how to do it or that you have to work for this business and just got too easy. We got lazy. So there's some of that coming out of it. Definitely. Interesting. I mean, you and I were talking about 2008 before we hit record and the history repeats itself. Yeah. A lot of people were caught off guard and shocked at the implosion of the now granted the degree and the ad mass. A lot of people didn't have visibility to that because what was happening, you know, with all the big, you know, funds and the whole more direct securities and the fractioning of all this. And we didn't necessarily, but you know, at some point you just got to look at fundamentals and basics, right? And I guess what happens is we get too drunk and we don't realize he's going to end and the lights are going to come on, right? Right. Right. I think that's where he did. There's one guy that was describing four types of companies right now. There's one type of mortgage company that's just going to file bankruptcy. Like they're on their way to closing their doors and there's some of those out there still. The second type is the ones that are hoping to be acquired. And so they're out there actively and drastically, you know, doing whatever it takes to seek that acquisition. It's not going to be a major purchase with lots of money changing hands, but like fold me into your umbrella under your umbrella. And then there's another type that's like just trying to do what they can to hang in there. And then there's some that are actually in rapid growth mode. And I know a couple of those companies that are kind of doing it a lot better than other people are and they've got the cash. They didn't spend it all in the past. They're kind of in build mode. So that definitely was a parent and of course you're seeing a lot of these mortgage companies that even the ones that try to sell and then think they're going to sell and then it all falls apart. I mean, there's just there's a lot of that out there. So yeah. Yeah. And it's funny. I'm seeing the real estate agent reaction as well, right? The emotional, the over index on I love that metaphor of the deer kind of freezing and what do I do? And, you know, how long are you going to wait like because it's like what you got to control the controllables? And I know you know this is like, what can you control? You can control your attitude, your attitude, your actions and your skills. You know, like never before I asked this question to agents the other day, are you a student of the market or is this a new skill and right? And more than ever, we as mortgage professionals need to be a student of the market and fiscal keeps saying this at borrow it from other mutual friends, savage and everybody else, fiscal literacy. We got to be that much better at the discussion around buying a house that's F1% versus what it we've been spoiled at, so to speak. Right. Well, I think I love those three that you said I would add we can control our time and I think that's that was a big takeaway for me is the time. I mean, we only have a limited amount of time. Everybody's playing with the same ball, right? We all have the same exact amount of time. But what are you doing with yours? And I think there's a lot of people like not sure what to do right now. Right. I'm not kicking into strategy land because they're not spending their time wisely and they're they're not going out there and figuring out where the business is. I just got off the phone with a CEO of a company. It was such a great phone call because he's a service provider in the mortgage industry as well. And he's tied there kind of on the marketing side of the space and he was talking about how much they're doing for the loan officers because the loan officers won't do it for themselves. And we just kind of laughed at it like, yeah. Loan officers have so many amazing tools. And for years, they haven't read many of them haven't gotten those tools. Grab them and said, how can this thing help me grow my business? Yet they're paying for a tool that they should be using. And Dave Savage over mortgage coach, my favorite example of that. Like, do you have access to mortgage coach? Because if you do, why are you not using it? Like, I think it's almost like we want somebody to come in and force us to use what's going to make us successful instead of us sitting down or just going, this is what I'm going to do. And I think the key to that, by the way, is mastermining with people that are doing it right. That's what I've been doing at least over the last few years is go find people smarter than I am, or at least better at what I want to be better at and hang out with them. You've helped me, Jeff, with a lot of the way you look at things. I need what you, I need your perspective so that I can figure out my business because you may have thought of something that I go, like, you think you, I remember the first time you and I talked a few months ago and you're like, well, could you use the coupe for this? And I'm like, holy, like, I never thought of that. And I think there's a lot of loan officers that are locked in their offices right now, or at home, even worse, that aren't mastermining. They're not brainstorming. The event we went to mastermining in Vegas, wasn't it shocking how many people showed up for the nine o'clock session? Yeah. Like some people get it. I need to be out with people and I need to be with great minds. I don't need to be sitting at home wondering what's going to happen. I need to be sitting in better rooms, making stuff happen. I think that was a big deal. I love that sit in or get in better rooms. I recently as well have been making investments. There was this phrase I heard called paying for proximity. And so that's what you're kind of talking about, right? Paying to be in the room at the table of other like mind, not like other people who are ahead of you on this journey, right? And that's how the heck do we grow? We don't grow by doing the same loop over and over again. Right. We got to step outside of that and get ourselves access. So that's why groups, you know, what you're doing over there with Knowledge Cube and content. Like there's no shortage of like answers to your solutions or information or direction. It gets me so frustrated all the time with like teaching classes to realtors, for example, or even loan officers, they'll ask how I have this situation with Google, Google my business profile. Like it's not, it's not publishing a review. What do I do? Like, what do you mean, dude, have you heard of this? So you're talking about Google, right? How do I do something on Google? I'm like, why are you even asking me, you know, it is, but I don't know, but the difference between that is there's one thing about all this random information. I got off track there, this is my little rant, but getting around the right people proximity and stuff like that. And I know you're doing some of that at Knowledge Cube, right? You're providing access to these, would you describe that to me? What are you doing over there? Yeah, we open up the cubes. The cubes always been an enterprise play for us where a lot of companies use us. And it's just their internal team that's communicating with each other, delivering content, video documents, all that stuff. And what we did in April is we opened up where we opened our own public facing. So anybody can join the coop now. It's a way different look than what our enterprise looks, our enterprise cubes look like, but it's, I mean, just a kind of a social learning environment where you can come in, take all the training you want, the CE and the PE are in there, but more importantly, or as important is the people that are in there that you can grow and learn from. And what we're trying to do is curate the best content in the mortgage industry, just by bringing in the friends that we trust to deliver in there. And so I kind of looked at my team and said in this environment, like we have a, we have a mission as a company to make this mortgage industry better. So we need to be delivering everything we can to make that happen. So we created the environment for that. So any questions you have, you can ask in there, connections you can make, people you could follow, just a really clean and nice environment to go in and learn and grow. So we're saying it's everything you need to learn, grow and win in the mortgage space. And then we're just pumping tons of content in there so that we get people a fighting chance that it being the winners of the industry. So would you mind if I shared a screenshot of it for those that we can kind of talk through it. So for the audio listeners, you can get a visual of this, but this will be up on YouTube as well. If you want to go get a screenshot. So I've logged in. These are the communities. Break this down. What are all these communities? How would people use these? So communities and you you clicked on communities. So when you first jump in, you can click on like learning and things like that. When you jump into communities, we've got some of our friends are in there and just able to answer questions, deliver content. So you can get things that are really built for this community. You could also if you have an idea for a community, we can build additional communities in here. I want to build communities around like regions, so in Northwest loan officers who can jump in there. And then what we also want to do is create process our communities and L.A. communities. And that's just groups that you can join and share content. The big thing that makes us different if you click on that academy is where you go in and you can look at the CUBE academy there in the middle, see we're trying to make it actually bigger and better because it's not obvious. So here you can look at all the classes we're releasing. So we're basically going, when I was a loan officer back in 1998, it's been a minute. When I first got in, I was fresh out of college and I looked around and I'm like, why isn't everybody doing better? I looked at all the loan officers that I've been doing it for a long time. I'm like, you guys should be crushing it. And I was like, where do you learn all this stuff? And they're like, what? Learn. They had stopped learning. They had done loans for a little bit and then stopped. And so what I decided is I would just learn everything and I did that and I ended up being the top-reasing loan officer at the company because I just knew more so my confidence was higher. And I saw more loans because they were top of mind for me in my brain because I just studied. And so what we did is created everything we could to help people, whether it be calculating income or what is FHA, non-QM. And that reputation management, James Duncan did that with us, super cool. It's just basically a class on how do you manage your reputation out there as an originator. And each one of these classes is actually included. You can buy them one off, but we include it in the membership. So the membership is $368 a year. I think it's all your PE and CE and all of the content we ever create. So we don't want anything from them. That includes the CE as well. Yeah. All the states, everything. That's cool, man. Good. Well, I mean, obviously CE is something everybody needs. We're at that time of the year. So it's good. And I've never actually seen there's rumors or there's legends about how fun you make CE. It's so good. Yeah. We did the loan ranger this year, like 30 minutes of CE is a movie. It's a Western that we loosely based on the Yellowstone concept because I just watched Yellowstone. But we had sons of compliance before that. What's really funny, you got to hear this today. I was in the coop. I can like, if you're taking our classes, you can comment below the videos. Says in there, looking at comments and replying back to people. And I clicked on one that somebody made a comment on. They're like, I love this video. So I clicked and watched it. I'm like, dang, that was good. And then I like binge watched our own training. Like I did the training and I couldn't stop watching it. I'm like, Sawyer cracks me up. He's one of our guys on camera and now he's a producer. But like watching, watching our stuff, like even though I did it, I know it's in there. I'm entertained by it. And we kind of did the concept of we never want to create anything that we wouldn't watch ourselves and we wouldn't enjoy watching ourselves. So when it comes to CE, it's like it's podcast style, it's us chatting. Nobody in the industry comes anywhere close to our quality. Like that's almost the hardest part about telling people what we do is explaining that it can be amazing because people are like, oh, amazing, right? Like there's literally nothing in this market that touches anywhere near our quality. I mean, they're catching what we were doing six years ago right now. And we're always chasing who we were last year to try to beat our last year. And it always works. But we do it as an example because that's what mortgage people should do. If you ask me why they should take our training over other people, I can tell you in a heartbeat were the best out there and I can explain why. And I always desk loan officers like, why are you better than everybody else? And loan officers have a hard time explaining that without defaulting to service or I call you back, which should not be your best thing that you do for people. It should be like, that should be of course you do. Like you should never brag about, I return phone calls. That's awesome. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, I return calls within an hour. Oh, yeah. It just doesn't make sense. So you've got to, we are, we can, we can justify our, our ask like we can justify what we're doing. And I think everybody should be able to, but well, what you're kind of dancing around the whole unique experience thing and you're taking what would otherwise be a not so exciting topic, right, getting seed credits and you're making, you're creating an experience. That's what you even call it, a lot of continuing education experience, fantastic. And then you're also in the communities. If I go back to that for a second, you're going to be providing additional education just to build out the value of the community, whether it's a branding or sales training or digital type stuff, social media, all that, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, anything you could jump in there and be like, Hey, do you guys have a class on this and gave us ideas and we just build, we build content in our studios back here constantly. So we don't farm it out. So we've got the ability to pump out any training and we've got all the best friends in the industry to bring in. So there's so many anybody wants to hear from or if there's information people need, we're always open to adding more content. The only thing that we do is we vet the content. So one of the struggles I've had in Facebook is seeing people say stuff that just is illegal or like, here's how you do it and like teaching people in some of these groups. And if you're a brand new loan officer, like we all were at some point, you know, you're susceptible to listening to the experts and going, that really sounds good. And then you follow what they're doing. And then you end up getting busted by the state or federal government for doing what they said. Yeah. And we will never allow that inside the cube. So we have a report button. It's really important that you can report a video if something's like, yeah, like you could jump in there and let us know and we'll immediately go look at it because we want to keep a clean environment where it's not a lot of, you know, garbage out there or recruiting videos in there of like illegal things that they're talking about. You'll, I don't think you'll ever see anybody doing illegal recruiting jump in there and say anything because they know us and they know that we are at the heart. We're a compliance based company. We care about ethics. So yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So for those that want to know more, want to go check out Knowledge Cube and you need your CE. You want to go do it and actually have fun doing it. Where do they go? Go to KnowledgeCube.com and you can put in what states your license and it will shoot you right into app dot at KnowledgeCube.com or you can go straight into app dot KnowledgeCube.com register, become a community member and then that's free and then from there you can purchase your CE. But the best thing you can do is go in and become an actual subscriber to the cube and once you become a subscriber, it unlocks everything you could ever dream. The whole world is yours. We drop two classes in a month to the Academy of just more classes. We're dropping in on things that people really need to know about. There's a recruiting one in there that's spectacular with Eric Levin from Model Match. So we bring in the right experts to talk about the right things and you basically unlock that forever. So annually, it's 360 a year and you get all that stuff. Wow. That's really cool. What I'm looking through here in some of the communities and stuff. So let me ask you this question. You're a loan officer. You started with back in the day when you're still writing on tablets and not the digital kind either. That would be actual tablets. Yeah. You're a loan officer today, man. Well, let's bring a back full circle to taking what you learned from being exposed to those high level thinking peeps over there at the MBA annual event. You're a loan officer today. What are you doing from now through January 31st? Well, I think I think the first thing you do is plan, right? This can't be a ready fire aim scenario. It has to be a ready aim like you've got to figure out how you're going to do this. You know, what are your strategies going to be going into the end of the year? And those strategies can't be paying for business or like begging for business that has to be creating value about like what is it? What's your value proposition? What do you bring to the table? And so I would start there and then depending on where you're getting your business, you always got to go where the leads are, right? So it was for a while there, realtors were closing so many deals that, you know, it was already happening. All you had to do is find two or three realtors and you were eating for life. And I had a really funny conversation with Kaimak Bride, done in Vegas, grew down there on that trip. You were on. And we went over to Dim Sum across the street from the palms. Apparently there's the really solid Dim Sum place over there. Of course he would. Yeah, he knew. Yeah. He takes us over there and he was talking about people are like, all I need is two realtors and he's like, no, like two realtors are going to get you one deal a month if you're alive. They're good realtors. They're just not closing. And so figure out where the closing is about, right? Who's still doing loans? Divorce attorneys still have deals. So if that's your strategy, go figure out how you're going to educate that part of the business. There's a giant group of young people that want to buy houses and many of them will buy a house and live together with other people to how do you get around them so that when they're ready to pull the trigger, you're ready to do that loan. That my so interesting. We have seven wine tasting rooms on the waterfront now in Vancouver, Washington. And one of them has this really, really amazing manager at Brian Carter sellers. His name's Lily. If you ever go there, she's awesome. But she walks over and we were talking about buying houses and they're getting married, they're not spending much money on their wedding. They're putting it into the honeymoon and a down payment on a house. And so she just wanted information and I always think it's crazy when people are asking me for information on when it's right to buy a house. I have answers like I can help. But why doesn't she know any loan officers like how is it that she works at a wine tasting room and she has zero experience with talking to loan officers who've given her their card and said, I've got a class coming up this week. I'd like you to join us and I can talk all about new home ownership. Like how do you become a homeowner? Like why has nobody met Lily who wants to buy? She's like, I'm scared about the market. And so we've had conversations. But why am I the guy for that? If I did loans, I mean, it'd be easy, right? But it's getting out around those people who are looking to buy, never had the opportunity to buy. It's working with parents on, I bet you I can get your kid out of the house. We want to do a video. We'll do it at some point. That'd be a good game show. Oh, man, we want to do one that says, are you suffering from this disease, which is children in your basement? And then signs include, you know, lots of popcorn, bags all over the place, pillows all over the floor. Wet towels left in the floor on the back. Yes. We can help you with the home mortgage. Like that would be, I think we'll do that video, but it's those types of things like how do we get to them to help them coach, even if I'm not getting the deal right now? How do I get the deal next year? Because there's going to be a five and a half percent rate. We all agree, all the experts that I know agree that we're going to be around five and a half next year. That's what I was going to ask you. Were they saying that at the meeting? Yes. All of them were from the economists to that everybody was saying that we're obviously it's the confusion right now. And there's the video we dropped in with Matt Graham from MBS Live that's in the coop that's so good. But he talks about the chaos is what's causing all the disorder. Right. It's nobody can, as any freaking clue what's going on, that's going to settle, especially after the election. And as that settles, then it's going to be like, okay, let's just figure out a good, like where should we be? And as I goes down to five and a half, everybody close right now. We'll be agree with you. I don't promise that. And Nor should anybody promise what the rates are going to be because who knows what Russia's going to do? Who knows what's anything? Anything can happen. But I mean, we're pretty sure absent, you know, some wild event, which I, after the last two years, I would never put those out of the, you know, possible. But they're probably dropping down. So what's your plan for that refi? Like, what's, are you going to be ready for purchases as they get better? Are you going to be, it's not prep for next year's situation. And by the way, we're doing that right now with our clients where a lot of our enterprise clients that we're about to close deals, sometimes we're seeing that lag of like, let me see if we're going to be here next month, not our current clients, but ones that we're picking up. They're like, let us figure out if we can get through this. And then we're going to sign. And so we're staffing for a rush of new business in 2023. Again, as the chaos slows down, as the uncertainty clears, we'll go up again. Like that's how it always works. It's a pendulum. Right. Yeah. Good advice there. Preparing for the, you know, that turn, the turn, you know, when it comes back down to the chaos is gone. That's what, and I wrote down a couple of things is, is when there's chaos, people seek context. Right? So they can make sense of it all, just like during the pandemic, there was always chaos, all this misinformation. You didn't know who to latch. People latched on to different people, but everyone was reaching for someone, right? Right? Like a house, you know, in the, in the store. And that's where your person who works at the, um, the wine tasting room, it may be think of why does she not know of somebody? Well, this, this gets back to, you know, talking about, you mentioned realtors, one of the traditional, um, sources of, of business. And by the way, to your point to back that up, uh, just last Friday, I had Denise Donahue on my private group called, you know, she helped 700 families last year. Okay. Right? You looked at her numbers for real estate agents, um, her number one source of business, is real estate agents. However, this is the thing that blows most L.O.'s minds. Um, she has, and if you look at MMI, she probably has a 100 agents on there that she got one deal from. Wow. One deal. Okay. And so she has two or three that are like her, you know, A players. And by the way, here's her definition, an A player, any agent who sends you four or closed, four or more deals a year, or, take about that, quite a few A players to get those numbers. That's why I'm bringing this up because we need to shift to your point earlier about the Kai example and all that. It's like back in the day, sure, but now we have a, you know, the flood of realtors and the, the, the fraction, you know, the bifurcation of the, of the market and everybody's peeling deals away, the high tech firms, the I buyers, all that. Well, so that's, that's why you need more realtors in your, in your roster is, is for those reasons, right? So you're, you're spot on with that. And then the last thing you said with the wine thing, long term perspective, you, that this is where I think some L.O.'s are, are short-sighted. You've got to be willing to go out there and do stuff that doesn't get you reward today or tomorrow, but does six months or 12 months from now. That's the key. All right. So obviously the last thing people need to do, you mentioned that person who owns the wine tasting room, I think part of the challenge with a lot of originators is they want the instant gratification. They don't have the long term play and you've got to be willing to do activities today that don't pay off tomorrow, but that pay off six months, 12 months down the road because that's what the future business is. It really is. I mean, thinking long term, you know, the, there's not a lot of immediate wins out there, right? Yeah. But I'll tell you what there are, win-wise, it's not necessarily in the closing of more deals. There's fewer deals than you did last year. It's fixing the problems that we never fixed before the run-up. And during the run-up, we found a lot of broken stuff, right? Broken stuff like underwriters don't agree on things like why do we have inconsistency and underwriting at one company? Like how do we solve that? What systems were not very good? We used them because we couldn't switch systems. Well, if what system needs to be fixed, how do we need to communicate as a company that we haven't done before? And that's one of the things driving me insane right now is I've got clients that are delivering content to their teams all the time through video and the coup. And then I watch people never communicate right now at a time that everybody thinks the next Zoom call they're on is where they get laid off and not communicate to a team right now is, is suicide in the mortgage industry. Like your company will not do well if you're not talking to your people. Because guess what? Everybody else is. I mean, the recruiting emails going around, most of them are garbage, but there's some pretty solid people recruiting and they are taking people from companies that have been suffering from a lack of communication. And I don't understand why you wouldn't right now. You've got to get in front of this. People want to know, like, are we going to be here tomorrow? Maybe give that speech. And if you aren't sure, say that, like in a way that's encouraging, just let me know you're trying your hardest and you are ahead of this thing and you figured things out. Like, I want to know that, but as leaders in the industry, to not communicate is to basically send your people to into the arms of another, basically, right? We all want to know we're loved and appreciated, right? Well, and that the company's going to be in business. You know, there's a lot of fear and anything you can do to watch the fears. The other thing is that I heard somebody say that the, the sin of a leader is ambiguity. And ever since I heard that, it has been running through my mind and I have changed my leadership style since I heard that the first time, I'm like, oh, clear all ambiguity. Like everybody deals with ambiguity where it's like, did we decide we were going to do that or aren't going to do that? Or, you know, where's the company going? Am I going to have to do something like people are confused and that's as a leader, you can clear a lot of that up, not all of it sometimes, but clearing it up as fast as you can or at least being in communication clears that. I love that. I wrote that down. I might swipe that for a real. Also it made me think about as your role as a loan officer, just in the context of your partners, like if you're in this for the long game and you're committed, communicating about. Yes. Like if, because people buy confidence, they're attracted to that leadership to that certainty, right? And if you could show up with certainty, you're going to instill confidence in that person. And by the way, there are relationships that are in being disrupted right now, are our loan officers who are stopped communicating, who are getting out. I know realtors are as well, but this audience is loan officers. So the point is, don't wait, don't be that deer who's right, get out, get active, reach back out to all those people you met to, but we're too busy to. When you go shore up, right, your, your resources for when this market does turn and the tide comes back and you get to, you don't have to net out so to speak and get all that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, all those people need help too, right? You're stressed and so are they. So serve the community and serve you way out of this. Go out there and figure out like, let's all get together in a room and figure this stuff out. Let's have conversations. Well, speaking of context, I swipe this. You know who Mike Delprett is? If you don't follow him, look him up for sure. LinkedIn, Mike Delprett, he does a lot of, he has a lot of data on real estate markets and what's happening. He started off big with the iBire thing, but anyway, he came out with a, he, he, you can find this on LinkedIn. If you just search Mike DELPR ETE for those listeners, he has data. This goes back to what we talked about with context. He has data that I shared this slide to real estate agents the other day. Everybody's talking about how the market's down 13% or whatever the number is in your market, right? We're down. Oh my God. It's not a crash, but we're down, right? Right. Yeah. No, go ahead. And then what he does is he makes a point of clarifying with data that yes, we're down compared to last year, but 2021 anomaly. Yeah. So you can't compare that's to your point earlier. Why everybody's freaking out is because they're looking back at just 12 months and they're like, holy crap. But if you go back to historical averages, we're only down 3%, right? Right. Right. So it's about perspective and how is you as a loan officer, are you showing up with the data? This is, here's what I say. Are you using housing data to create confidence? This is your advantage as a mortgage professional. Time to show up and do that. You know, I, it's so funny to say that because I just went for a run. I did a video on this. I do Friday update videos every week and I was like last week of the week before that. I did a video on I went for a run and I looked at my watch. I was, I did a good time, but I was really fast last year. Like last year was probably my fastest year and I looked at him like, why am I so slow? And it was so funny because first of all, I could post that time online and I'd be faster than most people my age that are, that are, you know, running casually. I don't run a lot. I run casually. But, but second of all, I'm not going to beat former me like I have to get that through my head because the guilt and shame that comes with not making what you made last year is overwhelming. And it shouldn't be like celebrate last year Bill Hard did a video on my favorite videos he did. You probably saw when he's standing on the lawn with his hose and he's like, so you had a record here. So did everybody else. It was easy. What are you going to do next? Get off my lawn. It was so funny because he said in a way like not to be the old dude, but like stop bragging about how you beat your last year, everybody. If you didn't, you should quit now, but you're not going to be last year like it's okay. I just, it's that hero complex on those, right? When heroes come home, it's like it's a struggle to not be the hero. You're not going to be the one that did that many loans, but you're still going to be a hero. And I think we have to redefine hero right now where it's, my team is happy. It feels like I care about them. We're on board. We're streamlining Brian or CTO came up with this thing. He's like, and it's super simple. He's just said things should be simpler than they are. And now with everything we do with the company we're flowing through, is it simple? Like that's kind of our mantra right now is nothing, nothing but simple. And so if my team is all believing that and growing in the right direction, that's a win. If you're not killing it like you did last year, it's okay. It's just still a win. It's redefine winning. We're very fortunate, right? It's like, you know, the win that are back, all that stuff, the Irish poem, whatever it is. But that wonderful, beautiful win is gone for now, right? So we need to adjust ourselves accordingly. You did a video on that one time too. I was running and I was like, I was so freaking fast. I was having a fast run day. And I turned around, it was an out and back. And I turned around and just got smacked in the face with wind. And I went from like, I'm killing it to, it was so horrible, and it made me realize my ego needed to be checked a little bit in that like, I was going to injure myself by kept running at that pace. So turning around helped me go, oh, like that's what, it's all data, right? The data is the win was fast. The data is the wind is still fast, but I'm running the wrong direction or the other direction. Loneasters need to think through that, like it's true. You ran because the wind was fast. You can still run. It's just harder. It's harder. Yeah. And we are we up for the task, right? This is where gym round, right? Don't wish things were easier. Wish you were better. Yes. Yeah. So where do we get better? Do my goal next year is I'm doing a webinar for a company tomorrow that I just call these like, can you talk to my people and my, yes, it's what I love to do the most. My goal this year is to get in front of as many presidents, clubs and like company meetings to do to speak on all of these things because it's like, it, there's so much you can do if you change your perspective and people need to be shaken a little bit right now and just kind of shaken out of that, that zombie, like, you know, people are zombies, some. And like I said, you and I were at mastermind, we didn't see zombies. We saw people taking massive notes and go, and I got to get after this, I got to get after this. That's, that's where I want everybody. And I'll keep talking to people until they get there because I know we can, but it's a lot of perspective. That's why we're doing this, this session right here right now is to hopefully bring some conversation or perspective to people to get out of that frozen mode. And one of the ways to do it, we talked about that earlier is the coop community. So that's app.knowledgecoop.com go check it out, lots of good stuff happening in there. And of course, get your CEO, man, you need it, you're going to be here next year. Get it done. Yeah. Why not? Exactly. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Jeff. You bet listeners, you know what to do. Hey, first of all, go check out the knowledge coop. And secondly, if you like this, leave us a review and we appreciate you tuning in. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. 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. 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