The Four Key Areas to Grow Your Business

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. And I think so many loan officers identify themselves so much as a loan officer that they want to be involved in every single part of the transaction. Now, I know what a lot of people are saying. They're saying, yeah, but that's what I do. I'm a loan officer. And I'm saying, exactly. And there's nothing wrong with that, but understand to be a loan officer, you're making 100% of your money on 100% of your time, which means you're going to cap out at about five to seven loans a month or there are people that do 20 loans a month with no systems, no processors, but ask them what type of a life they have. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Zimper, your humble host of the mortgage marketing radio podcast. Hope you are enjoying your day or evening wherever you might be listening to this. So listen, we're in a new market. You know that. I don't have to tell you. It's not what happens. It's what you do. How you're going to respond, right? And the market is the market. The market does what it does. It's going to fluctuate and go up and down. The question is, how do you respond? How do you prepare for the future? And what is your mindset about the current market? Let me give you a piece of advice. It's easy to fall prey to the sky is falling. Chicken a little running around, right? Chicken a little attracted a crowd because the sky was falling and created a lot of fear and certainty in doubt. Be careful of what you buy into the narrative. Stand guard at the door of your mind. Protect yourself from those influences and messages and people who made detract and deter you from moving forward in confidence with a plan. And I do underline and stress a plan. This market is not about winging it. You could wing it for the last two years because the flood was coming at you of business and opportunity. The tide has gone back out. What do you do? You need a plan. You need to start swimming. You need to keep your eye on shore. You need to have a target. Sometimes you need to ask for help. Sometimes you need a better technique, a better process. And a stat I read today was about a market forecast from I emergent. It's a forecast and origination volume for 2022. That origination overall volume will fall to its deepest decline ever, sharply dragged down by a refi drop off. The latest forecast predicts that overall mortgage volume, overall mortgage volume will decline by 35% from last year, a refi origination drop of 63% and a purchase gain of 4%. So where's your focus? I'm going to assume your focus is at least in large part now back on purchase business where it should always be no matter what a healthy balance of purchase. Question is, how are you going to attract that purchase business? Are you going to get in front of the purchase business that's already happening? You've heard me talk about it enough here. You've heard the stories of our students that are mortgage marketing program members in my ageing classes. How would you like to get yourself in front of the right agents in your local area and generate referrals on demand? You want agent referrals. You want an easier way to attract and convert real estate agents to referral partners. Your approach may be lacking in its effectiveness. Therefore, allow me to invite you to learn more about the my agent classes platform within the mortgage marketing pro membership. A proven way for you to quickly and easily attract, convert, and build your own database of real estate agents that lead to conversations and referrals over time. We're talking about a complete turnkey plug and play system for you to become a leader in your local community to grow your brand by leading with education, teaching agent classes in person or virtually, completely done for you system and platform. The PowerPoint is done. The speaker notes are done. The social media images are done for you to promote and share the invitations on social media. The event registration management system, including customized branded landing page for you, pre-written email templates and SMS emails, SMS messages, as well as the confirmation and reminder series, plus an entire training program and curriculum to help you, whether you've taught one class, never taught a class, or you've taught 100 classes, simply follow the recipe, the blueprint, and you too can attract referrals on demand, just like our other members consistently do, and you hear their testimonials here every single week. Want to learn more? Go to mortgage marketing.pro to check out the brief video and see if it's a fit for you. Now, my special guest for this week, Kai McBride, CEO and head coach of Kai McBride Performance Coaching, you know, Kai is somebody who I've been a fan of for a long time since I started originating back in 2003, then I saw him come up in the mortgage coach, a loan toolbox community, he's clearly in the mortgage coach community as well. He was voted among the 40 most influential mortgage professionals under 43 years in a row by NMP Magazine, and the guy is just a stud when it comes to understanding people process systems, technology and money, and what it takes to create a step-by-step method for you to gain efficiencies in your operations, your systems, grow your team, and increase production without killing yourself and working mega hours. And Kai is definitely one of the most sought after in demand coaches. He's got a very unique program and structure put together for helping loan officers succeed in any market. And so make sure you check out the links in the show notes to go check out Kai McBride.com and we have a social links in there for you to follow him as well. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and make sure you take notes because it's all about how do you develop the right mindset and the right systems process and tech so that you can grow and scale your business to whether any market. So that said, let's get into this week's show. Kai McBride, welcome to the show. Hey, good to have me here finally after six months of, no, that doesn't work, that doesn't work, that doesn't work. Yeah, I think it might even be longer if I look back at my calendar when I originally tried to connect for this. But obviously we're both busy guys and that's cool. Hey, so I always like to give the person, you know, the interviewee here, your own version of whose Kai McBride, what does he do? So go ahead. Right. 21 years in the industry, 2001, I started off as an originator, was mentored by the right people, Tim Raheem, Bill Hillestead, Bill Tesser, 2006, I started speaking, which, you know, forget the fame and all that stuff of speaking and I say that, I say that. But it was really about giving back to the industry and educating and what that did was that sort of shine the light on my skillset, which was coaching. And so I was out there helping people on stage and so then I was approached, can you coach me? Like coaching business, I coach mortgage originators, I started that in 2009. And then in 2009, I did that while I was originating 2011 around the end of 2011, I decided to just take a breath from my mortgage origination business. So I've now been coaching, I have a coaching company of seven coaches for the last 13 years. But I'm not completely detached from the mortgage industry because I do business development, which is, you know, basically loan officer branch acquisition and also business development training, business development management for division of celebrity home loans. So I don't troubleshoot loans anymore, but I work with the 13 branches that I've brought on and I manage and I help them with business development, I help them develop their business, recruiting, anything growth related, that's me, anything ops and funding related, that's somebody else. But yeah, it does keep me in the mix of knowing what products are still working, knowing what pricing is, knowing the technology that's coming in now. I just don't do loans anymore per se. In some ways, I stopped doing loans in 2004, even though I started 2001, because once I built a team in my origination business, they were really the loan experts, my processor, my junior law officer, all the way, we call them something different back then, we call them transaction coordinators and loan partners, but I've always been in a business building function, and now I just do that on a coaching level or I do that on a divisional management level. I build businesses, I build my business, I build other people's businesses that build branches, and then the other functions of loans, you can delegate that out. Yeah, exactly, that's like making widgets or whatever, right? That's a very interesting conversation to open up, by the way, thanks for sharing all that. And for those, I mean, first of all, you glossed over it, I'm sure I talked about it in the intro, but your best year, no slouch, 223 units, that's a hell of a lot of volume. And back then, hey, that was before social media and all that stuff, right? Remember those days? It seems hard to even remember those, but similar to you came up through 2003 to 2010 was kind of like my run. It was hard to be popular back then, you can bring popularity today for YouTube, but we had to do it really the old fashioned way of speaking and events and throw up a couple hundred units or more a year, it was a lot of energy, it was a lot of work to get that audience. It's funny how you say that though, it was harder to quote, be famous, but you're right, it is easier to use that phrase, be famous today to become known, to create awareness. However, I'm sure you see this, but a lot of loan officers still don't take that opportunity. So let's get into the coaching here. So for those listening, right, it's now Kai switching his coaching hat is like, all right, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, but that transition right there, what do you see as the most common resistance roadblock or, you know what I mean? And how might you help people break through that with, oh, I think it really starts with how you see yourself, do you yourself as a loan officer or do you see yourself as a business owner, a business leader, right? So my favorite business book of all time, if you've never read it, everybody that's listening is the emeth revisited by Michael Gerber, it talks about a baker who one day says, I'm going to open up a bakery. So she opens up a bakery, she basically realizes that she's either trying to get customers or she's baking all the time. And that's not really a business, she's just self-employed. And so if you identify as a loan officer and that's, and listen, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying that, right? But if you've ever had aspirations of huge growth or heck, envy a huge growth, the people that do 20 units a month and some of them do it barely working 30 hours a week and they build teams and they build branches, you have to make that shift to being a business owner. So it wasn't until the baker said, well, the only way to get myself out of the kitchen is I'm not the baker anymore. So she created recipes for people to follow. And I think so many loan officers identify themselves so much as a loan officer that they want to be involved in every single part of the transaction. Now I know what a lot of people are saying, they're saying, yeah, but that's what I do. I'm a loan officer. And I'm saying, exactly. And there's nothing wrong with that. You'll understand to be a loan officer. You're making 100% of your money on 100% of your time, which means you're going to cap out at about five to seven loans a month or there are people that do 20 loans a month with no systems, no processors, but ask them what type of a life they have. They're working 70, 80 hours a week, 12 hours a day, 14 hours late today because it's just you. And the biggest difference between a business owner and a loan officer is a loan officer uses time to make money while a business owner uses arbitrage. So they use other resources. They leverage processes, technology, people, and money to make money. They utilize those things because, you know, here's the analogy that one of my mentors said is, Jeff, if if I had a $20 bill and I said, I'm going to sell this to you for $10. How many would you buy? Right. Yeah. Thousands as many as you can, right? So if I look at an L.O.A. and what the cost of an L.O.A. is, let's say an L.O.A. is $4,000 a month, but that L.O.A. helps me get three more loans, which is $12,000 a month. I have arbitrage and I just leveraged $4,000 to make $12,000 and I've profited on $8,000. That's what the baker figured out. I can hire the baker and I can bring in business and now I'm just going to make the net profit on my resources. And so the good loan officers that have pushed past boundaries have learned to leverage resources to either make themselves more efficient at the time, to leverage people so that they're using a cheaper resource than themselves or they're using lead lives and technology to automate. And that's how you break through barriers. I would say every time a loan officer breaks through a barrier, a volume barrier or unit barrier is because they implemented a process, a technology, or they hired somebody. And of course, money is one of those leveraging points because some of those things cost money. I love that. So it's also one of my favorite phrases is people process technology. You added money to it. So I just added that on as a nice book end. Sometimes I mean, you know, because things cost money and you have to bounce the money or sometimes things are just kind of out of the box. You just have to invest in it and that's how it is. I mean, you know, somebody asked me just today, they said, is it worth it if a realtor asks you to pay for their lead marketing? And I said, well, I mean, let's look at it this way. First of all, if that's their only source of business, no. But if they have organic business, this is the map on it. Let's say that they give you two clothes loans a month on organic business and you're going to make $4,000 a week. So you're going to make $8,000. And then they say, well, to sustain this relationship, I want you to contribute $1,500 toward my marketing. If it makes them happy, and I'm going to contribute $1,500, but I'm still netting $6,000. Well, netting $6,500, netting $6,500 is better than them leaving. And then you're back netting at zero. And you're just kind of throwing money into leverage for relationship, right? But I'm not necessarily putting any extra time. So yeah, sometimes money and resources itself, but obviously money helps establish the other resources. Well, that's a very interesting point of discussion, though, because as you well know, that's a much heated debate in the various groups online and so forth about, I'm never paying for, you know what I mean, all that kind of, we hear that back and forth. But I love the fact that you, again, this goes back to identity and mindset. Take out the whole drama, it's an ideology, the drama that is associated with, oh, paying for realtor leads. And let's back to your Baker example, right? Well, what if you could pay another business down the street that if you paid them that money, they could refer all those, it's the same concept, right? You're paying for leads no matter what, because you're either paying, you're paying it in time or money. I mean, even for me to go on lunch appointments, even if lunch was free, I'm still putting my time. So there's a concept that everybody has to calculate is, what is your hourly rate? Okay. So assuming you work 40 hours a week, if you make $200,000 a year, your hourly rate is $100. And so every realtor appointment you do, if it's a two hour lunch, that costs you $200. So it's plus the cost of lunch that may cost you $250 just for one realtor appointment. And if you say, well, I'm going to go on 10 realtor appointments to finally get that one realtor to get that one lead, well, that was $2,500. And so some people would say, well, I'd rather take my $2,500 and apply it toward a marketing campaign, a Facebook ad, or somebody's lead generation campaign. It's going to come out somewhere or another. And people just don't just don't see it that way. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to maximize our hourly rate or increase our hourly rate by doing things that are more highly leveraged in less than that. Yeah, which is, of course, why I'm a big advocate, as you may or may not know about classes, right? It's a leveraged way to reach out to realtors and attract them, you know, top of the funnel, large group, and sift and sorting. It's a system and technology, just like you talked about. One of the things that I learned from my coach, I get coached as well too, is in order to multiply, you have to simplify, because if you don't simplify, how do you multiply something that's really, really complex? So let's take the baker example, in order for her to multiply how much she can bake, she had to simplify by creating a recipe. So if you want to do more business, it starts at the ground level where you have to create a loan process checklist so that you're doing, so you're going through a checklist and you're doing, so think about a loan process checklist. No different than a recipe when you cook or a grocery list. Imagine going to the grocery store without a grocery list. So imagine how many loan officers are doing loans without a loan checklist. So you simplify in order to do more, or you simplify, you say, well, now I want to present to 10,000 people, I mean, 10 people instead of one person, well, when you first do it, it's a little bit of work, because you got 10 people and you're kind of joking all this stuff. So the way you simplify is you create templates, you create PowerPoint presentations, you create scripts, simplifying always helps the multiplying. You can multiply without simplifying, but then it creates complexity. And so anytime you take, you know, so a lot of people they want to hire somebody to multiply. Right. But when you first hire somebody that actually adds a level of complexity, because you know, you have like two cooks in the kitchen, you know, but then you have to simplify that by saying, okay, well, I'm going to give you your set of instructions and we're going to give you a daily task list or a weekly task list, because the more you can simplify their lives, so they don't think you're simplifying your process. And that allows multiplication to continue to grow. And it's just always being in that framework or even how many times you have to, so how many times has a loan officer had to have the same conversation about how impounds work and have the tax period of impounds work? So you know, you simplify that is you create a one page PDF where one page slide. So now instead of talking about it for 10 minutes, you just point and go here and you just kind of bullet it. But the reason why that simplification is now a multiplication tool is now you can post that on a website. And now you can say, hey, just go to my link and I'll read this. And then they start sharing that for you because they start telling their friends and they start to share that document. And then you can take that link and you can post them a TikTok on Facebook on IG. And so that one thing now gets exposed to thousands of resources because you simplify what was in your head into a document. Hmm. And those are all growth principles leveraging growth principles. Yeah. You have a core for focus. Do you want to touch on that briefly? And then I'm going to shift into current market shift as well. Oh, man, you're going to do my core for focus from my website. I'm going to put you on a spot right now. Hey, hey, got a second. I have so many things up my head. I got my core for focus. Oh, yeah. We're already talking about like three of them, systems, team technology, production. What do you mean by production? Is this talking about growth like we talked about? Yeah. So systems, team technology, of course, my core for focus. So, well, production is so, so when I'm helping somebody coach, we focus on four things. The first one that people think of is, is, is production. How do I help you create more business, more referral partners, more more being more sales? Yeah. But again, that you, you eventually hit a wall. Yes. You hit limitations. And that's not scalable. So in itself, that's the foundation is production. Do you know how to create a relationship? Do you know how to have a conversation? Do you know how to close a sale? Do you know how to do alone? The other three cores are the other three points of leverage that I'm talking about. Well, now we create systems and processes. That makes things more efficient so you can do more of it faster but also more consistently. We use technology to automate a lot of that stuff. And then finally, the fourth core is people so that you can delegate more cerebral actions that can't be, that can't be automated. Well, it sounds like we, you know, you took me through the core four basically. So yeah, I apologize to throw that curve ball at you, but let's transition that into, are you hearing the issues, needs, pain points from your current clients, you know, the shift that's happening in the market, right? And of course, you were around in 2008, like I was. So we've lived through that. But what's, what's surfacing now? Like what do you think if somebody came to you as like, you know, are you seeing panic and then what's your prescription? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's, yeah, there's panic on the street, but what's interesting is that if you've been in the industry for a while, we know that, we know that these things are cyclical. Like this is the 2022 panic. I can't wait for the 2026 panic because there's going to be one, you know what I mean? And there's going to be the 2030 panic and the 25 panic, there's going to be a panic. And there's going to be like the, probably the 2025, 2024, 2025 feasts, right, we're just going to do so many more loans than we ever thought we were going to do. So the main thing is like, if this is, if this is kind of the market, you have to build a business, which is like irregardless with the market, like the market's always going to go like this, but can you create a business that goes like this, right? And so one of the things if you really want to avoid panic is you really have to ask yourself what is your long term goals and, and what are you trying to do? So like I said, if you're a long term goal, it's the build a business. If your long term goal is to create a brand, if your long term goal is to, is to take market share, if your long term goal is to be technologically innovative, you're doing things which are above the market. And I think one of the reasons why people, and also if one of your long term goals is to do 25 loans a month, you know, 25 loans a month, listen, I have a client right now that did 37 loans last month. What market? What market? I mean, like this is this and she's just, she's just going like that. And I think one of the reasons why, why the market bothers people is they don't have that long term plan. And some people, they, they don't think big enough or they can't think big enough or some people just say, I don't need to think big enough, I would be happy. The problem with saying I would be happy just doing eight loans a month is, um, it's kind of like small enough where there's going to be those markets where you might do two loans a month. You know, I'm saying like, like, if you want to do eight loans a month, realize that that's your average. So you kind of have to know how to do 15 loans a month, because then there's going to be those here. So she's going to be five loans. Right? Does that make sense? And so to do a 15 loan a month business is a much different place. So whatever average you think about, you have to like overshoot your average to, you know, just count for the small times. Um, but when you build things that are bigger than that, you're not really thinking about the market. So think about it like working out, you know, if you're constantly looking at your weight and you're being reactive to your weight and you're, you're getting out of shape and then one day you say, Oh, I'm going to go to a wedding. So I'm going to work out, okay? Um, or I went on a binge and I, and I gained all this weight. Well, you're constantly reacting to just your schedule. But if you said, you know, I have bigger goals, I want to be in shape. I want to be healthy. I want to look like, um, what is the name Tony Horton or whatever it is from. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so beach body. So beach body guy. So, so, so you're on a trajectory, which is above the normal person, right? And that's, that's really what I encourage people is to like create a trajectory and a goal above the normal person. Otherwise, and here's the key word. You're just going to be average and you know, average is the market. You're just going to be average. So you have to create something that is above that. Um, so, so if you create something above that, you're always striving for that. And so of course, let's just say that you, you ever met a fitness freak and he's totally in shape, but he benches, you know, he'll go on that Vegas trip and he'll binge and he'll gain five pounds and get a shape and then he's like, well, but what do you say says, but he didn't really affect my overall fitness, they kind of set me back for a week or two, or maybe it's set him back for a month, but he kind of gets right back on that long term goal. Yeah. But when you don't have a long term goal, every setback is like a major setback. So, so that's the first thing is, is to like, it's not about recovering. I know some people were doing eight loans a month and they're down to like one loan a month, two loans a month. I'm thinking, how do I recover to eight? It's like, you want to recover to eight, create a plan to get you to 15, is that makes sense? Because that's more long term. It's bigger than that. And not only that, but when you're in that sort of four to seven range, you identify as a loan officer. And as a loan officer, you're pretty much subjected to sales. Right. Sales is subjected to the market. Yeah, that's a very good lesson in there. There are a couple of things you're saying. More units is more margin of, you know, fluctuation, capacity in the market. Like for instance, I was just reading this post this morning by Chuck Cowan, you obviously know who he is. I'm sure on Facebook. And he shared this post that overall volume is down 35% these are the projections. Refi drop of 63%. So you and I both know a very heavy refi originators. And if you were all refi, you're doing eight units a month or even 10 or 12 because of the refi boom. Did you see 35% overall volume? Yeah. Okay. So let's look at this from a mathematical point of view. If overall volume was 35%, that's really nothing. You can think about it. Okay. But what's really happening? Okay. So if somebody is doing 10 units a month and if overall volume is down 35%, that means that that person is dropping to six, seven loans a month. That person should not really be panicking per se. See what I'm saying? If somebody does five loans a month, then they're going to go down to four loans a month. That's actually not panic. But here's what's really happening. Somebody doing 10 loans a month, all of a sudden is now doing four loans a month. Somebody doing five loans a month is now doing one to two months. From an individual point of view, a lot of people are dropping 65% okay, but how does the math work though? If most people that we know, their volume has actually dropped 50 to 75%, why is it that the overall market is only down 35% because there's an offsetting mathematical factor. The top producers, the top one percent, the top five percent, they're sustaining 100%. There's a sustaining 90%. Some of them are even growing. I know originators that are growing. They're at 120%. So somebody's taking the off-step, you see them saying, it's not like everybody's down 35% equally. Right, right. And so which side of the fence do you want to be on because trust me, when people are dropping more than the average of the market, people are dropping more than that 35%, they're dropping 50%, 70%. That's because somebody else is growing. Why are they growing? They're growing because they had a bigger plan than the market. The market just happens to be in the way. You know what the market is? The market is, I'm going to Vegas, I'm going to a mortgage event, I'm going to go camping. So the market is forcing me to not eat, healthy, and not go to the gym. But my bigger plan is to be this fitness person so you hit these mumps, but you still get back on the wagon, right? Right. Well, when you talked about with the fitness examples and stuff like that, it goes back to kind of what we opened up earlier with about being on the versus now low, which is all about identity, you know, it's identity. That's what it is. You see yourself, who do you identify as a loan officer, salesperson, or a business owner? And therefore your habits and your core four are going to show up like that, right? Well, not only that, but one of the things that I was I was challenged on is that, you know, at first I thought it was really cliche, like think bigger, think bigger, think bigger. But think bigger, I'm going to tell you why it works because it forces you to do something in a different way. So if I take the average originator, his four loans a month, which probably isn't any matter, the average might be less, but let's just say it's four loans a month. And I said, what is it going to take for you to do eight loans a month? That person is more or less going to have an answer. Okay. Okay. A little bit more work. A little bit more strategy. Okay. But if I looked at a four unit originator and I said, was it going to take for you to do 25 loans a month? Yeah. Big gap. Much different because your marketing plan has to be clear. Your target market has to be clear. Target market has has has a lot of clarity and has to be very precise, but not that, but like before you in a month physically couldn't close that many loans because they don't have a team. Right. They have a process. So now you have to think about, oh, I need to hire. I need to build. I need to CRM. I need to be a trainer. I need to be a leader. Okay. I might even need to go to a different company. I need to invest. And those are not things that you do overnight. That's long term planning that you lay out a one to three, one to five year plan. And every day instead of waking up every day and saying, where's my next loan coming from? My next loan coming from you're asking to yourself, how do I build one more piece of that big blueprint? How do I, how do I now build the CRM piece? How do I now find my first L away? How do I now put that automation piece in and business becomes a lot more fun that way as well, too? I mean, even even in my coaching business, you know, when I started coaching, I was a one man show, one on one coaching with like 20 clients. Now I have a hundred clients with seven coaches and I don't, I don't do a lot of the coaching as much as my coaches do, but we have like, you know, three levels of programs. We have workshops. We have this and this and that. But that's a lot different than if you would have looked at me four years ago and said, Hey, you're one coach with 25 clients, how do you get to 100 clients? I'm thinking, I'm not going to work. I was probably working, you know, my good 40 hours, I'm like, I'm not going to work 160 hours a week. I had to do it a different way, but if you said, well, how do you get from 20 clients to 30 clients? But I'll just get to more clients. So my next goal is, how do I get to 250 clients? I can't get to 250 clients and ask my coaches, it's just worth double time. My coaches, more programs, which generally means greater attrition, so now how do I fight attrition? How do I, how do I create more automation? I need to build up my administrative team. And so that's how we challenge ourselves. I mean, I think the bar for most people, I think the bar should be, if anybody who's listening is ambitious, it should be 15 units. That's your starting bar, 15 units a month. Why do you think that's the number? Because that's the first number that's a game changer. It's even 10 units a month. You can kind of grind your way to 10 units a month with one assistant, just work really hard. That is true. If 15 units a month, you're starting to push the wife wants to divorce you, you know what I'm saying? No, seriously, you can get away with 10 units a month and just have like a long, hard day. Right. You send them shopping and they're fine. And it goes both ways to, if you're the female, you just, you know, you buy your husband a boat or whatever that is, right? But what I'm saying is, but at 15 units, you physically couldn't do it in, like everybody listening right now, everybody watching right now, if you did 15 units at your systems, it would break you. It would break you. A lot of you can get away with 10, but not 15, it would break you. What, what, not, when do you think it makes sense for them to consider hiring an assistant? The general rule of thumb, if you want to have a life, it's one person that works with you for every five loans closed. So automatically right off the bat, it's you in a processor. Whether the processor works for you or not, it's you in the processor. You in a processor can do five loans a month comfortably. Now I know some people can say, oh, with me in one processor, I can do 10, 15 loans a month. Yeah, but again, remember how many hours you working, do you have to work on weekends? Do you have to do pre-approvals on the, you know, while you're on vacation, okay? So once you hit about that seventh loan, that's when you should hire, for example, your L away. Now your L away will allow you to burst to 10, 12 loans a month, right? And then to burst from 12 to 15 loans a month, you may want to look at a marketing assistant or a junior loan officer. So a junior loan officer should be licensed who then takes loans for you so that you're not doing all the 10 or three work and talking to the clients that way you can focus on the realtor. So if you had a processor in L away and a junior processor, you're good at 15 loans with a good life and you can burst up to 20 loans working a little harder sometimes. Okay. Is there any specific hiring process? I know some people use the disk to get, you know, to identify the right candidates. Any recommendations around that? Yeah. So when it comes to hiring, first of all, there's to keep it simple, yes, there is disk, right? So the D side on the far the side, the D in the eye side, that's like the extroverted people person side and on the left side, which is S and C, that's the detail, methodical and steady side. Okay. Here's the mistake that people make in the mortgage industry, you want to hire everybody on the right side. Detail, right? They do this. Okay. Or for the role of processor support assistant, all that. Honestly, for the role of anything on your team, except you. Right. You're doing your loan officer, anybody on the team, except you need to be on the right side. Okay. When you hire people on the left side, they may be good. They may be outgoing. They may be kind of salesy, but what you're going to find is because they lack a lot of that detail, even the babysitting them too much. Right. There's not a lot of delegation. You know, it's interesting. I don't know if you've seen this, but I've looked at a fair number of disk profiles. There's a lot of LOs that are high on the other side, the S and the C. And you know what? A lot of them struggle creating their own business, create your own business, the marketing and the business development. You want to be on the left side. So a lot of times, that's how, I mean, it sucks for me to say this, but I say, you want to hire team members. Just hire that failed loan officer that can't do more than two, three loans themselves and just get them on your team and together. Other loves. Yeah. But loves figuring out a loan or problem. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. So the thing too is that to attract that number one, you should just test everybody. Yeah. Just to filter that, but sometimes, you know, you notice you tend to attract more than others. It's because the way people write ads, like don't write this, looking for an organized detail person who's outgoing is good on the phone and is ambitious. It's like, dude, that's a unicorn. You want like, you know, I put all the boring stuff. I say, organized can manage a pipeline, detail oriented auditing skills. Don't say anything about people skills and in no life, but people skills, you're going to interview that, right? But you want to attract like good with numbers, all the stuff that you hate, that's how you want to write. That's how you want to write it. You know, because here's a problem with job listings as soon as you say, good with people, the people that are good with people because that's their strength that they think they're good with detail and they're not, they apply for that job, right? So you want to be, you want to be on this side, here's another thing too, and you know, if we want to kind of transition into training and leadership. So a lot of people will hire people and it can become an absolute disaster because I don't know what happened. I mean, you know, they shouted me for two months and now they still don't know what they're doing. You know, they make all these mistakes. Well, first of all, that'd be like saying, all right, I have two daughters. All right, daughter, that's going to learn how to drive. Just like sit in the car and shadow me for a while and then I'm going to kind of give you your car unless you drive. So we don't do that. We teach our kids how to drive in controlled environments. Let's start in the parking lot, you know, and then we move to city streets, then we send into formal training and then they can only drive from home to school, then they can eventually go to other places, no freeways, well, unless you have an experience, because then that's a busy who's 27 years old and that knows how to drive, if you're hiring somebody that doesn't have that skill, you have to put them in controlled environments. So first, we're only going to collect documents, then we're only going to do conventional refinances only, then we'll move to conventional purchases, then we'll move to possibly jumbo purchases, then we'll move to VA, because you always want to create an environment where your employees can't fail, and I think leaders and managers too much put employees in environments setting themselves up for failure. And that's, and because they don't want to take the responsibility of that, and just again, you would never do that to your kids. Right, that's a good parallel to, would you do this to your kids, what you're trying to do to this person right now? Oh, yeah. It's kind of back to not keep plugging this, but it's a nice fit. Your four core, right, systems, like you said earlier, people process technology. I'm sure you're also a big believer in that, if you're going to be hiring somebody, you've got to have that documented, not in your head, documented process. Well, let's think about it this way, you know, Jeff, do you cook at all? A mediocre, yes. Yeah, okay. Probably means a reverse example. So who in your family is like a really good cook? Or Dash is the best cook. Oh, or Dash is the best cook. Let's just, let's just get an answer, Graham or something. I'm sorry. Yes. Yes. Here's how you don't learn how to cook, just, just watch me and follow me and take notes. I'm just going to look at Graham. I'll go, can you just write the recipe? Right. Then I can, like, do it exactly, you know, like, take the time to write down the exact process for people, exactly how you want it, and you know, I hear this a lot too. I don't trust my team, nobody does it better than me. I'm going to tell you right now, if that's your attitude being a parent, you're not a very good parent. I'm sorry to say, right? Because you're just saying, well, nobody's going to do it as, but, and you know, there are some parents that I know that are kind of helicopter parents, and all they do is they just end up picking the pieces like, you have to set people up for success, you have to give them the training tools. And so what was the example that I'd give you first controlled environments? Well, what did I also say? I sent my daughter to drivers training, send them to some formal training. There are plenty of loan officer, L.O.A. training schools, send them a coaching, teach them from ways. It's constant, continuing education that will get them to a point that's going to be better than you. There's also a four core in training too. There's qualification, guidelines, company processes, and then team processes. So the first two are qualification and guidelines. So qualification means, do you know how to calculate a pay stub? Do you know how to calculate a W2 bonus income? Do you know how to calculate DTI? Do you know how to find a middle credit score? In other words, those are things that you calculate regardless of the program, you see I'm saying? Like, I'm just trying to calculate a DTI. It doesn't matter what the DTI comes out to be, whether it's 80% or 33%, I'm just, do I know how to calculate DTI? Do I know how to calculate resource? That's a qualification thing. Guidelines is a completely separate thing. Guidelines is memorization. What's a conventional guideline? What's an FHA guideline? What's a VA guideline? What's a jumbo guideline? What's a self-employed guideline, okay? Don't mix those up and don't put them together. That's why I say, when I start people out, I'm going to stick with one single guideline and go conventional only and make sure they know how to qualify in general and then fit into conventional only and then they can start learning different guidelines. But here's the thing, you may know guidelines, but if you suck at qualification, then you're going to fail at everything. So you have to know qualification. But then once you know qualifications, start with one guideline at a time. So those two cores are separate. Same with company processes versus individual processes. When you hire somebody, there's a company process. This is how the company wants submission. This is the process for talking to underwriters or talking to the closers. But then you have your team processes that you have to establish. This is what happens when a lead comes in. This is how many days it's going to take me to follow up. So when you're training somebody, you have to separate the four just like when I sat and I trained my daughter had a drive, it's, this is how we make left hand turns. This is how we make right hand turns. This is accelerating, decelerating. This is city streets. This is freeways. It's not just shadow me and you'll figure it all out. It reminds me of the progression through martial arts, the different belt systems levels that they have. Move from white to et cetera without first kind of quote mastering those base level skills and then you can move up and there. Yeah, exactly. Imagine going into black belt. I mean, I've done martial arts. Imagine going to black belt. That shadow me and you'll figure it out. You're asking. Get your ass kicked. Yeah. Let's go get my husband. All right. With the last few minutes we have, what are the buckets of business? I jotted this down that you tend to always recommend. I know it varies a little bit, but are there any like go-tos? You know what I mean? From your box, what are the buckets of business people should definitely be deploying? Well, so this is what I recommend just in terms of how to build your business too. There's three areas that you want to focus on when it's building your business. You want a business that's self-managed, self-sustainable, and then self-growing. So self-managed is creating the good processes, the technology, and the team that is efficient in just running leads, running leads the pre-approval to live loans to close, just in a way that you can delegate it, you can automate it, you can systemize it so that you're not always babysitting and all that stuff, all the anxiety. The self-sustaining part is really every business you need to establish a database, and you need to be database-oriented, okay? Here's why there's database math. The average consumer gets a new mortgage loan every five years conservatively, every five years, they're either going to refinance or they're going to move, that's a pretty conservative number. What that means is that if I have a database of 1,000 people, I don't mean close loans, I mean, just 1,000 homeowners or to be homeowners, 200 of them will get a new loan this year, 200 next year, 200 of the year after 200 year until you get to the fifth year. So if you wanted, now what if you knew 200 people in your database are going to get along this year, you have to do everything you can, put yourself in front of them, put yourself in front of them, they can convince you to do business with you. If you can convince 50% of them to do business with you, that is a 10% pull-through rate, but of 100%, 20% will get a loan if you can get half that, you have a 10% pull-through rate. So here's the formula, if you want to do 100 loans a year, your goal is just two things, build a database to 1,000 people and constantly nurture that database. You want to get to 200 loans a year, build a database to 2,000 people, nurture every single person, if you get a 10% pull-through, you get 200 loans a year. The average person also gets on average seven mortgage loans in their lifetime, how often has somebody lost the loan to their competitor and they're like, oh, screw them, I never want to talk to them again because you got offended. Maybe they were nice about it, I'm so sorry, you went someplace else and you're like, yeah, that ass, hold on, I have a bear he because I put so much, dude, just relax at the next refi boom, hit that person up again because you know why their lender may have done a crappy job, their lender may have disappeared, their lender is not going to remember it. So seven loans, if I get three out of the seven, I'm good. Just nurture that database forever. So having that database mindset, there's only two functions, you're growing, you're nurturing, if you grow and nurture, you get 10%. The third function is what I call the self-growing database or the self-growing part of the business. Every person, like we sit here and we stand on these high horses and these stools and they say, oh, I give great service, I give great service. So, okay, well, how many loans did you last year? So somebody did, I did 100 loans last year, okay, out of those 100 people that you close, how many of those 100 gave you a referral, like they gave you a referral, not the average answer is, what do you think, out of 100 people, what is average? 10 or less. 15ish, maybe 15ish, maybe 20, you're seeing their touting great service, but your own people that you put through great service didn't refer you to business. You should get at least 50%, I mean, one of my coaches that coaches for me, she has a 70% referral rate. So if she close 100 loans, she's going to get 70, she's going to get a referral from 7B of the people, okay, and you know, the number one reason why we don't get referrals. Yes, you take it, they'll go ahead. We don't ask, right? Yeah, I'm going to say, I bet that person who gets 70 out of 100 has a very specific process. A very specific process to ask consistently with the right script, right? Yeah. Secondly, what about all the listing agents that happened, okay, so let's just say out of the 100 loans, maybe only 50 of them were purchases, well, there are 50 listing agents. I always ask people, how many of the listing agents now also gave you business? Average answer, two, two, at least 10, one out of five, somebody asked me again, how do I meet realtors? I'm like, you can't even close the realtors that were in the transaction. So there's, but there's a process. Yeah, but those are listing agents, Kai, they don't have the business. They all have business. They don't have the buy, you've heard the excuses, right? They have buyers agents, they get buy sides, or sometimes they're just connectors to meet their friends. Listing agents have buyer agent friends, you know, but we need to, but they also have buyer leads that they're feeding to their team. They got buyer leads because who's visiting listings, buyers. Exactly. Who owns inventory, listing agents, right, right, they hold all the inventory. So we're not converting listing agents, we're not converting the title agents, you know, the title agents and the escrow agents that are working on your transaction, they're watching you too. You do a great job, go talk to them, go get a referral, title agents and escrow agents are the best referral sources, because if they see you doing your job, they'll introduce you to their favorite realtor, who's lender just failed them. There's financial planners, there's CPAs, here's what I'm saying. In one transaction, there's like 10 opportunities at the business, but we don't pay attention to that because we just go to like the next business. So the reason why I call it self-growing is if one transaction can self-grow into multiple transactions, you're growing your database on itself, like if I could take a 100 closed loan database and say, even if it's like two years ago, I'll call all 100 people and I'll ask them, can I get a referral? And sometimes the agent that they brought was their own agent or sometimes I was just the refinance. Let's just say you did 100 refinances, you're like, well, how do I meet realtor's? Call your 100 refinances and say, hey, I know that I only did your refinance, but when you bought your house, did you love your realtor? Because I'm looking for a good realtor to refer my clients to, could I get their name and mention that you referred me, well, now you have some credibility and rapport when you meet them. Everybody is a connector to somebody else. Everybody has a financial planner, CPA, realtor, a friend, an aunt, an uncle, a title agent, and an Esperagian. So you can self-grow your database out of it. It's like a lemon that has seeds. The lemon has like 10 seeds in it, so there's so many seeds in there. You grow your business off of those three platforms. Now you're looking at 15 units a month pretty easily. Yeah, I'm reminded of the, I try and not sound cliché, but relational versus transactional. It's true. It's true. And again, it comes back to mindset, how you see it, because I know I remember, like you could be, I remember in sales, you probably look back, like started out as a sales jockey. You're just blowing and going and just like hunting kill, you know what I mean? But at some point, you mature and you're like, wait a minute, I want to eat like three years from now. Well, I was actually the opposite, so I started out trying to, I was a tech guy, introverted with like marginal social skills. This is 21 years of development that comes along way. Yeah, yeah. I'm like the extrovert now. It's like, it's like crazy. But back then, I had such little opportunity and I was like framed to go visit a real state office. I was taught how to eke out every opportunity out of existing opportunity. I'm the one that's like, oh, I'm too scared to go out and hunt. But if I can create food out of this existing soil that I have, right? So I call that the leaky buckets syndrome. It's like the hunters want to go, you know, there's natural hunters in this industry. They want to go hunt and pour new water in the bucket, but that bucket's leaking because all that opportunity is going away. And you know, we need to cultivate that. Okay. Good stuff. I'm writing that down. Leaky buckets syndrome. Beautiful. All right. This has been awesome. This is like a coaching session here. So speaking of coaching, let's, do you want to briefly mention your coaching program options? We'll put, you know, links to whatever websites we talk about, but go, man, you have the floor. Yeah. So kiamicbride.com, if you know, figure out how to, how to, how to spell that when Jeff puts it up. But kiamicbride.com is we're going to see all of my coaching, my coaching programs, you know, my coaching program is based on those principles of leverage for core principles of starting with production, but then creating systems, technology and team. What's interesting about the way we coach is what different, you know, a lot of coaching programs are either one on one coaching or group coaching. And I didn't want to necessarily limit that. I wanted to provide a three tier approach. So the first approach, and you get all three, me, join my coaching program. So the first tier is the group tier. So we're going to put you into a group, not just a random group, but a group where you want to learn something specific. So if you want to learn how to build your CRM, if you want to learn how to grow and manage your team, if you want to learn how to get better at stripping, you want to learn how to get better at social media sales, we're going to put you into a group that is going to focus on that for one quarter, and that group is then coached by a coach. And so you learn a subject, you have peers, you have collaboration, and you have sharing. The second tier of coaching that we provide is one on ones, and the one on one, the one on coaching is made to troubleshoot and tweak and optimize. So you can set a one on one call with either the coach or another one of the coaches, just to fine tune. And the third thing that we do is we do individual workshops and individual lessons that will kind of throw, hey, you should learn how to do a seller buy down in this market, you should learn how to win offers in this market, and we do those on a weekly basis. And so I look at my coaching program, kind of like an academy of learning where we have group sessions, individual sessions, and also workshops, because people learn in different ways, and you also want to teach people in a multitude of ways. The other big distinction is that I separate my clients by level one, level two, level three. So level one is like the less than 100 unity you're producer, where like almost 70 percent of your coaching is going to be on production. And then once you get into level two, you start the beginnings of processes and team building, and then by the time you get to level three, it's advanced leadership management and then technology innovation. So that way, if you're level three, you're going to be in a level three group, level two, there's going to be a level two group, so that you're learning with your same peers. So you can read all about it on my website. You can call and send an appointment and talk to me. I'm not very much of a salesman when it comes to coaches, but here's what I know. I can be a really good salesman and convince you to coach, but if you're not committed, you don't understand, and you don't have to take advantage of it. It's not going to work for you anyway, so I'm more concerned about, let's have a conversation and see if it's right for you and see if my program's right for you. Awesome. Well, you've got this rack record to back everything up as we've learned today, but clearly you've been around coaching a lot of power players. So I'm going to put the links in there, Kaimek Broad, k-h-a-i-m-c-b-r-i-d-e, Kaimek Broad.com, plus I'll put links to all your socials so they can follow your world travels and adventures wherever the heck you go out and about, which I enjoy watching myself, by the way. Well, that's another thing. I mean, you got to be doing it for something. You got to be, you know, whether it's you're trying to build your retirement plan, you want to buy that fancy car, you want to donate to charity, you want to have a second home. And just inspiration helps motivation. Absolutely. 100%. Well, listen, I appreciate you making time. It was great to finally connect after six months. So I really enjoyed it, man. Thanks for being here. Yep. Thanks, Jeff. It was great being here. Hey, so I hope you enjoyed that episode and special guest. Most importantly, always remember to never leave the scene of an idea without putting it into action. So whatever the one big idea, one takeaway is from this episode, please make sure you create a plan around that, write it down, put a reminder in your calendar for you, follow through and get some of the resources that were shared and just make sure to take action so you can build momentum on your ideas. And then of course, if you're interested in more agent referrals and less time with less struggle and building a platform that attracts agents to you and helps you find the best agents in your local area that are actually doing the business and generating referrals on demand, just like Liz Reyes LaFour has does is she recently hosted a class and had 39 agents registered for her class, 15 agents attended immediately following the class. She got three new purchase loan leads and scheduled two appointments immediately after the class. That's just within less than 24 hours of the class. If you want results like that for yourself, make sure to check out the managing classes and mortgage marketing pro membership over at mortgagemarketing.pro for more information and I'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 of that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchase loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. 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, attract and convert agents into referral partners. Class done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seeds, partnering with affiliates real easy, but that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top L.O.'s authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere to from eight to 50 transactions in the last 12 months. And we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you. So you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at mortgagemarketing.pro, see more of the success stories there. And if you feel compelled to do so, book a call, we'll have a chat. We'll see if it's a fit. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now. Head over to mortgagemarketing.pro.