Marketing Lessons in Becoming #1 in Market Share and Closing $4 Billion in Loan Volume

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can, too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now. Visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. So, guest, a quick reminder, you've heard me by now talking about all the success stories from our mortgage marketing pro members and the hits just keep coming. Recently, I had a conversation with one of our superstar members, Chris Cogill out of Charlotte, North Carolina and Chris, I recently recorded a case study with Chris and we're putting together and that's going to be available for you to go check out and download. So stay tuned for that. Check out the next episode coming up where you're going to be able to get access to that case study in Big Deeper into Chris and how Chris leveraged agent classes being a mortgage marketing pro member and how he funded 36 million in loans and served 133 families, 100 percent, which of that funding, right, the 36 million and 133 loans came exclusively from referrals from real estate agents. Chris doesn't do anything else, doesn't call call, doesn't pay for leads, he doesn't visit we get open houses, he doesn't chase agents, teaching agent classes as Chris is only method of acquiring agent relationships and referrals and he's got it down to a science. He teaches 50 to 60 agent classes per year, primarily on topics that help agents build their business. Those are the topic we equip our mortgage broke members with, by the way. And in addition to that, Chris has put together a marketing services agreement as a result of him teaching classes that has 800 agents in it and it's the primary source of his business. He's always adding agents to his databases, as a matter of fact, there are a total of 5,000 agents in his database that he's markets to for various purposes. So the question is, what does your database look like? We all need a database here today, like your future business is in your database, right, both on the consumer side but also on the referral partner side. Well, do you have a means and a mechanism for attracting and capturing and converting real estate agents, not only to referral partners to building your database, right, because not everybody's going to say, yes, right away, are you building your future business? Well, that's one of the things that Chris has leveraged being a mortgage marketing pro member. And that's one of the things that will help you do too. Should you be interested in learning more about becoming a mortgage marketing pro member and everything that's included with that, you can go to mortgagemarketing.pro, check out the success stories, grab a call with me on the calendar, and let's see if this is a fit for you. It may not be, but it just might be the only way to find out is a good mortgage marketing pro and grab a call, and by the way, not all will qualify either. There are certain levels of production and experience required, but you can learn more about that on the call. Okay. So my special guest for this week's episode is Quinton Harris. He is VP of Bank of England mortgage in Florida, and in 2011, he challenged his team to go on a journey with him to change the industry's traditional lending model. The challenge succeeded, and together they become the number one branch in the organizations for six years in a row, while gaining the number one market share position in Northeast Florida, closing over four billion in transactions. Quinton is a smart marketer understands personal branding, and this conversation is going to be chock full of marketing lessons in how to take the number one market share position close over four billion in loan volume by leveraging a personal brand, leveraging marketing and content, and you'll hear more about Quinton's podcast. He's the host of What's Your One More. He's the co-founder of the market distillery, which helps real estate agents become better marketers, and he's really just stepped up his content personal branding game, and you'll hear the results that he's been able to achieve by pouring his efforts and attention into that. We're going to put links in the show notes, so make sure you check that out. We got links to his podcast. We got links to the web, the market distillery, his Instagram, where you can go follow him and learn more, so I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation if you're looking for ways to how do you leverage a brand and marketing to build the preeminent position in your local market to attract people to want to work with you. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Quinton, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on here. Great to be appreciated. You bet, man, my pleasure, and thank you to reaching out. I always appreciate getting to meet new people with different perspectives, and this is kind of the cool thing about the world we're in right now, all right, is... with the ability for us to connect or social media and just like have these really cool conversations. So I know that's what we're going to have today before we get into it, those that haven't heard of Quinton Harris. Who is he? What do you do, man? Well, man, I work currently for the, excuse me, for the Bank of England mortgage here in Jacksonville, Florida. I've been here for about, really in Jacksonville for close to 20 years, been with the bank for 14 years, and I'm honored to get a chance to work with them, lead an amazing team, and I'm surrounded by so many good people here that have helped us get to this level. It's a real fun place to come to work every day, and I just really enjoy it, and I've kind of had the honor of kind of passing over the reins a little bit to one of my predecessors here, and man, he's doing a great job, which has allowed me to kind of step out into another journey with podcasting, and man, I'm really excited about that as well, and it's interesting people go, man, how do you run two businesses at the same time, and I always tell them that when you're having fun doing it, you're not really running two businesses. You're just kind of, you're out there playing the game, and it's a great one to play right now. Yeah, that's true. It's like when you love what you do, right? You know, the old saying I never work at day in your life. I know that's one of those things. We still have days that are hard, right? But when you kind of have that bigger purpose, you've got more energy as fueled. You can 100%. But hey, let's not show our way from your track record in the mortgage space for a moment. You know, I'm just reading here off your bio, led the number one branch at Bank of New England for over nine years. Right. It manages a team of 50 L.O.'s, got it four billion in purchase and re-fi. I mean, you're kicking some tail out there, yeah? Yeah, man. We've had a, I appreciate you saying that. It's, I would say that again, man, all the glory of that goes to the team I'm surrounded by. Just a great group. I had the luxury of having a really long retention with quite a few people. I think when you could build that foundation that helps that growth, that success, and that continuity. And so when we stepped on the scene in 2009 here, I bought Bank of England mortgage here in Jacksonville and it was kind of funny because people like Bank of England, what the heck are they doing here? And we see questions about like exchange rates for pounds and, you know, just funny cracks here and there. And our competitors, man, they really had fun with it. But what they didn't know is they were just putting the light on us even further. And the more attention they drew to us, the better it was. And so we kind of, we just ran with it. We're like, yeah, we're not the one across the pond. We're the one here in the US. And we've had a lot of fun. We're actually out of England, Arkansas, which is where the name Bank of England comes from, founded in 1898. You know, every bank was a bank of a city they were incorporated in during that time. We just have kept the name. The nostalgia had never changed it. And when we came over here, our market really penetration rate just grew. And the more people we brought on, the more opportunities we got. And by 2015, we were a player in the market. And by 2018, we were in the top five and by 2019, we were number one in the, in the market with capture rate in our local area in five counties surroundings. And so what does that mean capture rate? Are we talking about purchase business or what? Yeah, absolutely great question. 100% purchase business. I mean, even during the 2020, 2021, it was crazy when you look at the metrics for our organization. I remember people going, why are you guys not doing more refus? I'm like, I can't keep up with the purchases. I mean, we were, we were at 90% purchased during 2020, 2021. And we were doing close to 750 million out of this branch. We just couldn't keep up. So there's a lot of volume going on through here from a, from just a pure purchase standpoint. So I want to unpack that for a minute, you know, new bank, new area name, you know, bank of England, Florida, what, what the hell? Like, did you get people to even, you know, because you know, this is a leader and manager. It's always about recruiting retention. Right. That's the game. So I want to unpack that if that's okay for a moment or two is absolutely because I know there's a lot of shifting going on in the marketplace. As you know, right now, there's a lot of people looking and there's leaders that are potentially listening to this going, how do I attract and build my team? So can you kind of walk me through like how did you deal with that challenge of building a new brand and new name and attracting people in your market? Yeah, great question. So for us, it was something different. I always believe that when everyone's going right, look left, go left. I mean, you can always come back. They've paved the way for you. Get there pretty quickly. But in our industry, there is a knack to say, listen, Jeff, I'm going to recruit your guys because you've already done everything. And then those guys or girls, they make their way, men and women make their way over your team. And then they're one foot out the door to the next best offer. And so the thing was, I was tired of the revolving door. I've been in the industry for like a set for 20 plus years. The revolving door is just extensive. You can't build a house on a foundation that's not completely solid. And so what I did was I wrote a proposal to our company to go hire college graduates and MBA programs. In 2009, the market was not hiring in any really industry. So when we stepped out to a couple of local universities, we said, we're coming to the table with X amount of jobs. We'd love to meet the following candidates. And it was amazing the outreach we got at these universities went to. They were like, here, we want to help you. They, I mean, they set up the interviews for us. They set up the students they thought met our criteria. And we hired right out of college and we changed a pray program. We went against the industry standards pay program where you just pay basis points. And you know, at that time, I think it was like even like a 50 50 split in 2009. And people were doing stuff like that. We went against all the grain. We paid a salary plus and override. And we allowed the college students to come in and learn with the expectations of learning first originating second. And we wanted to get them very comfortable. We went to understand we were hiring a new generation of originators. We were bringing a new blood in the industry. There was a major gap between people that were 35 plus and then 50 in our industry. And then there was nothing underneath that. And we wanted to bring a new line of people in that could really take over the business as time went on and as people got out of the business. And so in doing such, you know, it was a great opportunity for us to teach show our industry knowledge to our new team members. And then also really bring them in under our wings and create a culture that we want, not what the industry had provided. And I think that was really important because oftentimes you get people go, well, at my old company, we did this. You know, back in 2000, whatever we did this and none of that's relevant in any market at any time. And so what we want to do is bring in a group that was ready to be eager. You know, they didn't know what a door being shut in your face really meant. No really wasn't this thing that was dangerous to them. I was like, okay, whatever. Let's keep going. You know, an underwriter asked for a condition. They're like, great, I'll go get it. They didn't fight. You know, and so it's just all of a sudden, it was just breath of fresh air. And we were all buzzing off that breath of fresh air and just ready to roll. And it created this basically lightning in a bottle. And yeah, I've lost some people over the years because we've had some great people come through this organization. They've been recruited. You know, someone's always vulnerable for the taking. But for the most part, our retention rate is unheard of in this industry. You know, I've got people in this branch right now over a handful that have been here for 12 years. I've got a couple that have been here for 14. You know, I've got very many that have been here for eight. So we're very, very blessed to have the culture and the environment we have. And again, all that success goes to that group that helped build that foundation and grow from there. So you were able to compete to capture real to business for purchase referrals. I'll assume. Correct. And builders. And so we have two large builder relationships where we would be considered the primary lender of choice. And for us, that was a new field we got into in 2012 because obviously the builder market, we had this false notion that every builder owned their mortgage company. Or they already had a relationship set up with a nationwide lender that there was no chance. And and that was something that we kind of put a limiting belief on ourselves. And then once we got around that, we recognized we had something to offer that maybe the other companies did. And that gave us an opportunity to start off like maybe is a third lender work your way up to a second lender. Next thing, you know, you're you're you're been to be the primary lender. Interesting. So you so that I love that concept. You know, as I've heard people talk about that before, what what are the was there any potential downside to that plan? Yeah, I mean, you don't you don't make money right out the gate. The downside is you better be patient and you better have a game plan set up for, you know, at least six to eight months of that's not going to be a profitable run. You're probably, you know, I run a I run a PNL branch and you're going to go backwards on that. There's there's there's really not a lucrative eight month run there. Now if you have the patients and you can see, you know, what's coming down the road and you can see the success, it's it's a short term. I guess you could say a short term sacrifice for a very long term game. Sure. Yeah. Well, that's actually probably somewhat lacking as well. I don't want to make any gross generalizations, right? But in this industry in general, everyone seems to be focused on a short term, you know, and 100%. Yeah, I think I think, you know, a lot of managers like the definition of like training is like, hey, sit by me right here. And you're going to learn as it's convenient for me to teach you, right? So I'm in the middle of whatever I'm doing. And you're going to start in the middle and imagine how hard that is for a new recruit to digest what you're talking about our new team member to understand. And so what we wanted to do was we said, hey, listen, as you're coming out of college, number one, my interviews have to be different because you have no mortgage lending experience. So the questions I have to ask you have to be relatable to what you're doing so that I can get a true idea of what, you know, I'm getting into here. And the second thing is when I bring them in, I have to find this nice, basically conversion from a college world to our world. And how do I do that? And building that classroom environment, you know, we have Bank of England University that we built, we were forced to build it online, obviously, with what all happened. We still have an in-class room setup. But we treat it like a university with homework assignments test. It's not just a cram session for one week and be like, you got it, you're good, because we all know how that works. So this was, this was something that we really said, we're going to make it work and invest significant time and resources into this. And the result is, you know, what we have today, which is a pretty credible team and an incredible environment. Wow, that's really cool. Kudos for like, you know, thinking outside of the box and differently about that. Really cool. I definitely, I wouldn't be lying if I wasn't told that a lot of people called me an idiot during that time and that I was going to go broke. And for about a month, when do I start to question my sanity? And they were, they were right about me, not making money during that time. Well, that says a lot about who you are and you know, kind of how you think and see things more as the, you know, on the opportunity side of things, which probably is a good transition into this next phase of your career, which is, you know, now you've got this brand. What's your one more podcast? So tell me about the shift you're making here and becoming a digital creator and what's behind all that. So one of the the premises was we started trying to think as an organization like, how do we outreach to our customers other than a newsletter and a CRM? I mean, how do we stay in contact with them? And again, when everyone else is going right, go left and we try to figure out that there's really not, there's really not a mortgage company that's staying in contact with their customers via podcasts, but giving them items of value through that podcast, not just like, hey, what's up? This is what we're doing over here at the bank, you know, verbalizing a newsletter, actual valuable content. And so we started brainstorming on sessions and we really didn't have an idea of what the podcast was going to be called, but we had an idea of some forecasting and economic things of value. We could offer consumers about their house that they couldn't get anywhere else. And so that was that was kind of the premise start. And then my kids came up with the concept of, you know, what's your one more and the idea behind that was that, you know, Dad, what you're, you know, when you're talking to people, what's there one more goal? What's there one more financial thing they want to accomplish? What's there one more person they want to meet? And then the possibility started to come in endless with that concept. And so doing this for quite some time, we've met some really cool people in the industry and have met a lot of friends that, you know, bring a lot to the table and over the course of this last five months of recording and publishing, we brought some of those guests on and it's been really cool. From the likes of John Gordon, Damon West, Patrick Young, Barry Haby, Rob Christmas, the list goes on. We've had some great people step in there and do us some solids being on the show. It's been real awesome. And, you know, it's an opportunity for financial growth and leadership as well, leadership growth and leadership lessons. So we released twice a week. We're on every platform. And it's been, it's been cool. We just got our first metrics in yesterday, which I was, you know, blown away with our marketing company, well, they came in, but, you know, we ended up in the top 10 percent globally ranked and then we ended up in the top 100 in our category on Apple, which for a five-month-old podcast, that's from what I understand. That's a pretty cool, that's a pretty cool feat. Yeah, congrats. Thanks, man. Is this still connected to the bank in any way? Yeah, so the bank is actually the title sponsor. Our board director's decided to approve it and became a title sponsor. The studio is named the bank. Oh, it's a banking bank, man. Yeah. Bank of England is the studio sponsor. They've got ad reads. We've got commercials that have already generated close to about 10 applications per month nationwide from the podcast, which is pretty cool. But the ideology is that the bank thought, well, man, if we can get this content out there, you know, we've got a database of, you know, over 300,000 people that we can send this to monthly with valuable information. And again, you know, great stuff on leadership and growth as well, promoting the bank. And it's nice when you get some big names in there and you can do brand association with that. So all right. So so bank of England is licensed nationwide. Yep. As a bank, you know, federal FDIC licensed nationwide. Okay. So and and and have they did they pull the U2 Apple thing? We're just they're automatically sending this podcast, everybody in their database, you know? Yeah. I mean, quite honestly, you know, sometimes we send, you know, because we're at least twice weeks, that's eight a month. So we don't want to bombard our database with that. And so we've got a really cool project that's coming out may first where we're going to start financially rewarding our listeners. And we're going to start giving away a portion of the sponsorship back to the listeners. And so we've got details on that on our website at 1mpodcast.com under the giveaway section. All you have to do is register your email, opt in and then put your social handle on there for Instagram. And we just verify that you're following us. And we've got a database system that will pull the name. And then we're actually going to zoom that person into the podcast and give that money away on the air to him. Wow. That's a smart idea. I like that. I'm like, that's why. And no problem. And so the goal is as I get more sponsors and I've got a couple more in the hook. I'm going to get to where I pay your mortgage payment, which is in line with some of what we're doing. See, that's how it all connects together. Because I was thinking about, you know, the old thing of a with realtors, for example, if you keep posting your just listed sold all the time, if people aren't in market, they tune out. So I was wondering about like, yeah, how do you keep this database of bank clients interested and engaged? And you're welcome to unpack that in terms of like your content strategy. You know, so go ahead. So, man, so myself and one of my co-hosts, I got two co-hosts. I've got one of my co-hosts is deemed number one originator by CoreLogic and all of Northeast Florida for like five years running the gentleman's a complete machine. As a matter of fact, I've never seen a person that's this dedicated to his craft and is a pretty amazing person in general. And then my other co-host is a gentleman that helped co-founded company with me called the market distillery. Where we basically just take everything from the market's bunch of noise to still it and actually give you what's going on there. But what we found was in the Northeast Florida, you can't go online and get specific metrics with what's going on here. You can't get details about housing, meeting, home prices. They're they're accurate and dialed in by zip code as well as other things that are going on. And so what we did was we produced an index called a relocation index. Now, we've been tracking this for close to about six years now. If people basically net migrating into Florida, specifically Jacksonville, and we created an index and paired up with the University of Florida to publish that index. The Orange and College of Business at the University of Florida is actually publishing our data right now. We've paired with them. And my co-host is a doctoral student there. So known him for years. He actually works with the bank. He's been with us for eight years here at the bank. His name's Alex Stewart. So our content comes from a lot of the headlines. It's really easy for us to talk about what's going on. I mean, between the Federal Reserve and our government, they're giving us plenty to talk about on that show. And so what we try to do is take that information and break it down to the general audience and apply it towards real estate finances and really take out the political aspect of it because there's so much of that in there. And let's go with the facts and make sure that our consumers are well educated. And they're jumping up and down on the news, telling us about home prices, this, and they're going to fall on that. And we can debunk that with stats that show that's not true right now. It's a lot more comfort back in the market instead of fear. But we're supporting that with facts. We're not trying to create a narrative. And so we also do forecast on interest rates. We do forecast and what the Federal Reserve is going to do. We do forecast on our inflationary measures. And so these forecasts are what you can get. You can't find them anywhere unless you subscribe to the market of stillery. And then all of a sudden, it's really cool when we see things happening now that we predicted in November that would happen. You know, November, we're doing episodes and we're saying expect to see this over the course of the next six months. And then it happens, you know, in a short time period, it's cool to kind of come back on and talk a little bit about that as well. And this show is being in what format does the bank send out show episode updates? You said there's a newsletter or whatever, but what does that look like? So I mean, the bank will drop episodes. They're into all of our socials. So we have a marketing company. We get eight digital assets per show. So we get all the rules, the clips. We do a couple blogs, YouTube notes, show notes, all the good stuff. And then the ones that the bank kind of really gravitate towards and goes, man, our customers can use this. They'll pump that author. All right. So they have kind of like a selection process. Yeah. Absolutely. And their marketing team at the banks real good. I mean, our marketing director is very much in touch with me. She does a great job of reaching out and saying, I love this episode. Can you tell me some more things that kind of relate to this? And when you have future episodes like this, we tip my hat. And so they do a great job of interacting with us on that at all different angles. Even our recruiting department is taking episodes that we're doing and shooting them out saying, hey, listen, you know, here's some value that I just want to share with you. I'm not sure if your company's talking about this, but here's some information. And I know you mentioned applications a few moments ago. But there was some kind of a dotted line back to business generation, right? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the reality is as we get this information out there, I would love for any real estate agent. And the other thing is this, we're actually giving advice to loan officers on the show, regardless of the work for the bank or not. I mean, we're sharing particular things and trends that we see that if you're a loan officer, it might be a great idea to start doing now waiting for the next three months. I mean, we always are talking about that. But, you know, obviously, we'd love to get business from that. And we do have commercials on there and we do have ad reads that come back to a bank of England. And so that is a goal. That is an ideology of that to stay in touch with our current database. Because right now, I mean, think about it, you know, the, we see a trend right now happening where the power 10 banks are really clawing back and taking a little bit of control of of the banking industry, if you may. I mean, there's a lot with what happened currently. You have a lot of the bigger banks that are coming in and saying, hey, we'll take your money, you know, we'll also take other opportunities that come with that. And in doing such, they're squeezing out the regional banks opportunities that were once there. Well, when they get that customer, we all know what they're going to do. They're going to cross sell the hell out of that customer. So we have to find a way to stay in front, you know, and I would be foolish to think that there's many regional banks, midsize banks like us that can service 100% of everything they're doing. We just can't do it based on our deposit ratios. So those bigger banks are going to get their hands into some of your customers. And if for whatever reason, you're not finding a way to stay in touch and providing value, they may slip through the cracks and up going to one of those bigger banks. Have you yet had because you're kind of leading from the front, right? As a digital creator, have you had any loan officers, you know, your employees come to you and say, hey, I want to do something like this? Oh, absolutely. And we welcome it on the show. I mean, we say, hey, come on in the studio. Let's get you on the air. Let's see how it sounds, how it looks. Are you ready for this? What do you want to talk about? See the thing that we found when studying podcasts for us, especially in the financial mortgage real estate economics, where everyone will call it lane, is man, it's not necessarily crowded, but how do you make it interesting? Like how do you make it appealing? You get the same loan officer on there talking about the same stuff over and over again. Man, people don't tune you out. They're going to stop. I mean, you can only talk about product and rate so many times. And what you can provide so many times, we've got to have something better than that, right? And something that's more longevity in that. That's why our lane's so wide. We didn't want to, you know, we didn't want to be boxed into what we could do on this show. The other reason we separated from the bank is we didn't want to be regulated what we could say and what we couldn't say. That's another challenge, you know, by the FDIC, FDIC will come in and say, well, you can't say this and you can't do that. And, you know, the regulators will put their paws and something like this and then all of a sudden it's for nothing. So that's why we created a separate entity and the bank happens to be a smart one. Yeah. And so that's why I'm clicking through some of your content here, you're diversifying the content to your point away from just specific. Correct. Yeah, I hear our theme song playing in the background. Sorry about that. Yeah, man. No worries. No worries. I love it. May my producer actually wrote that song, which is pretty cool. Yeah. My producers are super talented man, Charlie Walker wrote that song and he's got a great, he's got a great hook at the end there, the each episode. Yeah. So I'm going to share all the stuff in the show notes to your YouTube channel and the podcast and all that kind of stuff. So if people of course subscribe, check it out. But that's why yeah. So I'm doing this like live real time audit big into your channel and all that, you know, seeing that you're posting shorts, you got and this is curious for me too, as I continue to evolve my podcast strategy, you know, you're doing the full interview plus some clips, right? That's cool. Yeah. Doing that on the YouTube channel and then obviously on IG, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you know, all those major platforms we've got content that goes on there every day, sometimes twice a day. It's interesting to you because you know, I think one of the hardest parts of podcasting is that it's a lonely echo chamber. I mean, it's the best way to describe it. You throw out this amazing episode, you put your heart and soul in and you're just sitting by and you hit submit and then you're so fired up for it to submit and it's like crickets and then you might get something to text message comes across, man, a lot that was great and you're like, oh man, please put that in the comments like that's where it needs to be. But you know, the thing with podcasts is just it's consistency and content. And then you got to keep doing it over and over again. I actually had someone reach out to me last night on YouTube on one of our episodes and was like, hey, you know, for a guy like me that doesn't know much about what you're talking about. If you want to attract more people like me, keep repeating the following things over and over and over again so that we get a better grasp on it. And I think feedback like that's critical, critical, excuse me, because it allows us just to understand what our audience is looking for. What was that example of a repeat what? Yeah, he said was you could continue to repeat the correlations between the treasuries and the fed funds rate and inflation and mortgage rates. He's like, if you could continue to expand on that, he's like, I would greatly appreciate understanding more about that. So that was just for that individual to better understand that whole relationship. Yeah, I think it was and he said, you know, there's a lot of people there don't understand the relationship because you know, the news has this program fed funds rate goes up mortgage rates go up, right? And those don't necessarily correlate. And so this programming that's out there and that's usually done because the person writing the content or reporting on it doesn't understand what they reported on because they got a report on so many different things. They're just kind of throwing it out there and going. So helping people to understand the fear mongering versus the facts, you know, I think sometimes we find ourselves saying things over and over on the show and we're like, man, how many times are we going to talk about this? But that was a great affirmation last night, just to kind of see what this person said and was like, man, I'm digging a keeper peeing this stuff because it helps tremendously. Is that like a DM or something to you? No, on YouTube, you know, how they comment on the channel. They commented on the channel, left it on there. And then I get, you know, then you get the people from overseas. I'm sure you get it to you end up and man, they're just, they're just, you know, they're, they're just not happy with what we're doing over here. And they let you know it on there. And I think that's the other thing is that when you're doing podcasts and putting yourself out there, you better have some thick skin and have fun with it. That's the other thing. You know, don't let that stuff get to you. Don't let it burden you, don't let it bury down. Just have fun with it and, you know, and move on. And, you know, if someone's on there wanting to get into like a Twitter battle, just, just, you know, walk away from it. It's what it is. You know, I've always found that it's easy to go. Hey, listen, man, this is a 45-second clip from a 45-minute podcast. Here's the full episode. We address what you're saying. Give it a listen. If you don't like what you hear, let me know. But I'd love your feedback. I usually find they like it and they never respond back. Wow. And that makes me curious of what resistance individually personally yourself, right? Did you have to work through when you made this decision of like, okay, I'm going to put myself out there as a digital creator? Yeah, that was, that's a great one because, man, I never really lived in the digital space prior to this. I've always been very behind the scenes for numerous reasons. My children now are 16 and 15. And I always, I always wanted to be like involved in every aspect of their life, coaching, school, friends, whatever. And so I'd seen that time for the digital space. And, you know, when we sat down and talked about this, I kind of explained after talking with a marketing team that I hired, what it would take for this to work. And I wanted to get the buy-in from all of them, being my two children and my wife. And they all agreed that if we were going to do it, let's do it right. And so that, that was one thing. Put yourself out there. I never forget my wife saying, you know, just be prepared. You know, we all have enemies and they're going to come out. And when you put that out there, just be prepared for for some things and mud to be slaying. And it did. It happened within the first two weeks of us dropping it. It didn't take long from a competitor, multiple competitors. It didn't take long from people that, you know, that have had a past with me to kind of say their peace. And I always find that liquid courage probably adds to that a little bit. When people, we see a post at like 1130 at night or something, you're like, oh, I know where this is coming from. But the reality is, again, it's more attention to us, you know, going back to when we started the bank when people wanted to kind of make fun, poke the name. The more attention you give me, I'll take it. And, you know, and I'll use it as a reason to get better and continue to build the brand. And that's what we've done. But you're glad you did it, aren't you? Yeah, I'm absolutely glad to zero regrets. You know, I was, have you ever heard of the card game, the end? So one of my guests on my show told me about this Patrick Young, who is a former Gator player, played in the NBA and then recently suffered accident, made him paralyzed from the waist down and we were talking and he said when this happened, he and his wife had not been married yet. They were engaged there in the hospital in Nebraska. And they're playing this game and he's like, when he got to get this game because it forces conversation and gets you away from these things and forces conversation. And so I'm playing this game with my son the other night. And, you know, it's kind of not slightly dropped and they have different versions, you know, for friends, for family, kids, whatever you get the point. So he's like, dead. What's this box? I was like, I don't know. I was like, Patrick told me about it. I was like, I don't even know what it is. I just picked it up and he starts opening and looking through it. The rules on the game is you draw 12 cars. Each car has a question. If you don't want to answer the question, you got to stare intently at that person for 30 seconds, which is harder than it sounds. And so I'm playing this with a 15 year old and one of the questions I asked him was, you know, what have I done recently to make you proud of me? And he said, the podcast. Oh, nice. I thought that was so cool. Like that was the rewarding moment. That was it right there. And he, he definitely, he elaborated on that. But when I got that feeling, I was like, okay, I know I'm doing the right thing. That's interesting. Yeah. Thank you for introducing me to that because we do something similar in our family. We have a couple of car decks that sit around on, you know, mine are 21 and 18. And so, you know, you get the usual kind of resistance. So wow, I got to break the cars out again, you know, whatever. But that's cool. I got this whole new solution here. I'm looking at an Amazon right now. They'll dig it. One of my buddies that I recommended it to his daughters in college brought her boyfriend home for the first time for them to meet through the deck on the table. He's like, let's get to know him. And he said it was like the best three hours. Oh, that's fantastic. I love it. And you know what I mean, man, that's so true. You know, quick sidebar on this cool topic. But like that's that's what it's all about, right? It's having those meaningful interactions and questions. And for anybody who is in, you know, the same shoes we are when they become teenagers, right? And the conversation, if, you know, they don't necessarily want to engage as much or whatever. And so we have to kind of like work at that. Absolutely. It's a dynamic. And you know, you don't want to over pursue it because then they resist it, right? And you're out. It takes a while to bring them back. So it's tough. It's a tough dynamic. And especially when you're used to being so involved in their world and being a part of their conversations, it's you cherish those moments when you get them. For sure. Well, look, I'll put a link in the show notes to that as well. It's called the hand. Yeah, the end. And it's a great, great, different, different style of car game. They're all over Amazon as well. So you can check that out. Absolutely. Before we run out of time, I want to ask you if you could, I'm looking at the market distillery, which will link to that market, the market distillery.com insights and analysis simplified. Tell me about that. Man, this is a project we are so excited about. It's because as what it allowed us to do is back in 2000, I think like 16, we started forecasting the market because we were like, man, are we growing too big, too fast? Like, what's going on here? I had just bought this commercial building here. It's about 10,000 square feet at Jack's beach. And I'm like, man, am I are we growing to am I committing too much too quickly here? You know, being in the industry, you always worry about that. And so we're like, we got to get better grips on metrics in the market. And we found out that you just, it's hard to find this stuff. And matter of fact, we found out there wasn't really anything besides your local real estate association or MLS, but even then the data is limited. So Alex and I and the other founding partners that you see on that website started putting together some data analytics and pulling from different sources. And then what we found was that the more we were able to pull, the more we were able to compile, the more we were able to digest, we started becoming the local economist of choice. We started becoming the experts in this area. And when we did that, people started gravitating towards us and go, I, it wasn't like, hey, I like working with bank of England because of this person and our southern became, I need bank of me because man, they got data. I can't get my hands on. And now I can share that with my customer. And now I can be the local economist of choice as a real estate agent. Now I can speak more intelligently than the news. And now I can control my market's destination better than the news can at this point and more accurately. And I think there's a huge difference in that than what other people are doing. And then when we got that partnership with the University of Florida, it just, it, it solidified and validated what we've been doing. Touch on that briefly if you can, the partnership with the University of Florida. So University of Florida has a college of business called the Orange and College of Business, Dr. Steve Tuffs, who's one of the founding partners and Alex Stewart, Dr. Steve Tuffs is a doctoral professor there and Alex graduates in August with his doctoral. And so I've gone down there and been a guest speaker or lecture a couple of times, each quarter actually a couple of times. And we started meeting people there and through Steve, it was an easy connection. And the Orange and College of Business was looking for a way to create a relocation index because in the academia world, real estate is always in the form of commercial real estate, not necessarily residential. It's actually a large gap between the two. And we had a tremendous amount of data through the bank. We had a tremendous amount of data that we had compiled that we could create that relocation index. And Alex and I actually put together an algorithm that can actually forecast the market home prices through the next three years here in Jacksonville. And so they were very interested in that. We started showing them how we got the model and the data integrity and then all the seven Orange and College of Business started producing our data. And we've partnered with them. And so now as you see on the website, that's powered by the University of Florida and Bank of England. Yeah. And I also see that there are, if I click on the speaking tab, you guys are you're doing these events. You're in the community. What is this whole economic update premium and all that? So we have a free membership that you can sign up for on the website. And with that, you'll kind of get a 30,000 view if you may have of Jacksonville and Northeast Florida with about 12 minute video breaking down each month, the local market. But we have a premium access that's much more in depth daily updates, a community, lots of training and a lot more educational stuff on the backside, if you may. And then Alex and I go around town and we speak as not uncommon in a lot of real estate offices will ask us to come in and talk. But they'll go, Hey, listen, we already got a lending partner. We recognize you guys with Bank of England. We can't have you here talk about Bank of England. And so for Alex and I, the trade off for the company is, well, if we have no problem coming in there, I mean, we will absolutely not even mention Bank of England. But you know, there's a speaking engagement fee for us to come do that. And so we've also speak at numerous conferences as well. And so they'll ask us to come in and give either our forecast for the year, the remaining of the year, depending what time they bring us in there. We're doing one here in May, a large one for about 300 people that we're going to do the rest of the year and give our future forecast for 2024. So do you have real estate brokerages asking you to come in and present? All the time. All the time. I mean, it's not uncommon for he and I to be out three, four, five, six times a week doing, excuse me, a month doing this. And of course, it's, I mean, we all, I guess I'm trying to figure out how do I say this? Yes, they may have an in-house lender, but you know, you and I both know the attraction strategy, lead with education. Yes. And so I'm sure, again, dotted line business as a result of this, right? Yeah, absolutely. Like we'll go into a place that says, hey, listen, we far from owning the mortgage company. We have a relationship by the end by the end of our presentation. We're usually getting questions from the audience like, hey, what's your day job? Like, what do you guys do? So yeah, we were in a mastermind group where they don't allow vendors in and they had us take over the whole mastermind group, which was awesome. It was about 16 just top agents, hard to get in the room at one time. And by the time we got done, two of the agents go, hey, what do you guys do? What's your daily job? And we knew about 10 of them in there, maybe even more than that, but it was hush hush. We weren't allowed to say anything, and then I look at the person leading it and he goes, you've earned the right to say it. Go ahead and say, that's all that was kind of cool because no vendors allowed. And here we are doing a vendor presentation at the very end. It was pretty, uh, pre-rewarding for us. Well, yeah, and that just speaks to my audience notes if they've been listening to me long enough, right? The leading with education, the impact that that has in the, you know, the trust goes up, the confidence goes up, resistance goes down, right? People are just drawn and attracted because you've added so much value. Yeah, you know, I think we're both talking about that trust confidence curve and how it works, you know, and that's a, that is a huge, huge thing. And in our industry, I really do feel like over the years, advising is a lost art versus selling or order taking, whatever, you know, we want to refer to it as, but the advising portion, you know, we always teach our guys, yes, we would love to do the loan or the consumer. But if it's not the best loan, and we don't have the best product, or matter of fact, if this isn't what they need to be doing, let's tell them like let's, don't be afraid to lose the deal. Because, you know, I think what happens is a lot of people get that commission breath and man, they're already thinking that, like commissions based on that loan amount and what they're going to do with that versus maybe the best deal for the consumer. And you know, oftentimes when people sit down with real estate agents, this is one of the things that just we talk about loan officers that do this all the time. Some of the sits with the agents says, hey, can we have coffee in the agents? I go, why do you have coffee? Because I want to help you grow your business, which I laugh because we know what's happening. They're going to sit down how coffee and they're going to go, well, you know, I'm hoping maybe you could send me some business, you know, I close them early, they're real fast. Oh great, you're good at all the shit. You should be good at okay, fantastic. And it's almost like that help me help you help me proposition. And that's a lot of what's going on still to date. And I think if you could sit down with someone and say, hey, listen, we really want to help you grow your business. Here's some things that we're going to do. Take the mortgage out of it. We're going to show you things about your market. You can't get anywhere else. We're going to show you seasonality trends. And we're going to show you when you need to actually grind out there and make haywire the sun shines. And then how you go out and work your database almost all of times and things that you can do inside your database. That's really going to boost that. And here's some messages you can send. Oh, by the way, do you have a database? Let's start there. And really kind of go through that stuff with them and show them some things that's a lot different than let me help you grow your business. I love that you said that. Yeah, because you're right. Everybody kind of plays that out there. But then it's like, well, what do you actually do? Right. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Let me have a great business with no follow-up. Yeah. No, that's very smart. You guys have put together one heck of a package in a plan for that. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It's very professional too. And I'm like, you got how you got to URL the market distillery. I don't know. Well, hats off to Alex on that. He's pretty forward thinking. And when we were thinking of a company name, he pulled that one out of thin air. And I think we're all like, man, distillery thinking like, you know, brewery or something. Well, yeah, man, sounds great. Let's do it. Right. I was looking to see the shots of you guys drinking, you know, unpacking the market. That's right. That's right. Maybe that's the next next update on there. All right. So listen, for those who want to connect with you, what we're going to put all the links that I talked about in here, but what be the primary place you want people to connect with you? Yeah, they can connect with me at oneinpodcast.com. That's our website. It's got all the links to everything on there for our socials. Our social handles are what's your one more with the number one at all platforms. And then obviously on my personal LinkedIn, Quentin P. Harris, on my personal LinkedIn, he connected that way as well. But you know, get a chance to check out the podcast. Let's know what you think. The contest starts may first our giveaways up on the website. Isn't that just for people you can know that's for anybody? It's anybody, man. We want anyone on there. I mean, obviously, you know, we're talking to agents when they're always looking for a value ad to give their customer. Here's going to be a free $500 and we're giving away. And I firmly believe within five months, that's going to be a mortgage payment that we're going to be giving away for someone very soon. That's very excited about that. The bank has a slight advantage there with that program. Who say that again? The bank has an advantage with being able to roll that program out. Yeah, I think yeah, they've got a pretty good advantage. I'm glad they saw the the fortitude in that when they decided to be the sponsor when I asked them to do it. But you know, we're looking for a co-sponsor on that as well. So it's going to be two people giving away that and we'll take the big check. We've got offices everywhere in the United States and we will make sure we connect with that customer with that big check with two sponsors names on them. So we're looking for that second one. And I think we're close to getting it, but you never know. So I'll put it out there. That's awesome. Yeah. And by the way, just to put a kind of a cherry on top of this Sunday, we all just enjoyed here today is think about the ideas you've heard and the strategy and the positioning and what version of this can you do in your own local level? Because I mean, anybody can do this. It's, you know, you're doing it obviously now at a higher level, but you can start from somewhere. If all you're going to do is be the quentin and just be like, you know what? I'm going to be a digital creator and I'm just putting content out there that's relevant for my audience and I'm going to help my agents literally grow their business. Not just talk about it. I would you assume or would you agree? People are going to be winning just on that alone. Oh, man. Absolutely. Absolutely. I heard someone say this comment a long time ago, like even if you're marketing is terrible. I heard, I heard this person say, my terrible marketing is better than your no marketing. Yeah. There you go. Exactly. I'm like, man, that's, that's hard to swallow, but damn, it's right. You know, if you're not doing anything, then you can't complain about it. It's good, good, good one to add on that. All right. I love the conversation. Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate being on the show. You bet, man, listeners, you know what to do. If you like the episode, I'll leave a review, share it, check out the links in the show notes, and we will see you on the next one. I for now. Hey, guys, what's up real quick? We'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 purchase loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling done for you agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you, everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market, attracting convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seeds, partnering with affiliates, real easy, but that's not all. 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