The Power of Relationships in Mortgage Lending

Hey, what's up, Jeff is him for coming at you again with another episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio. Appreciate you tuning in here. If you're liking the podcast, do me a favor. We want to reach more people and you can help us do that. How do you do that? Leave us a quick review wherever you're listening to this somewhere, most likely on your phone. There is a link to, it says, enjoy the podcast and there should be a link under that, tap the link and you can leave us a review about how the podcast content guests have impacted your business. I greatly appreciate that. If you do that, go over and DM me on Instagram what you do that and I'll send you a free gift as a thank you. Appreciate that. Okay, before we get into this week's special guest, which I know you're going to want to listen to if you want to get some guidance and direction on how to close out 2024, strong and hit 2025 with a vengeance. My special guest is a multi-year president's club producer, branch manager, area manager, regional SVP platinum club, like the guys got all the accolades and in just a moment I'm going to be introducing you to him. But before I do, I have another success story coming at you from the community of Mortgage Professionals that we work with in our my agent classes program, which helps you as an originator, attract versus chase agents, scale your reach, scale your conversations and multiply your results, getting agent referrals at scale. There I say double your agent referrals in 90 days. Shout out to lone lady Liz, Liz Reese, what's up, longtime member four plus years member in our platform. We've got multiple people who are senior founding members like Liz and others and Liz shared with me the other day that she hosted our winning the buyer presentation class, which is helping real estate agents navigate the new rules with the NAR settlement and helping them position themselves as a leader up their value, integrate the lender as part of the value proposition. Well, check this out, Liz did that class yesterday, 17 of the 20 agents that showed up for her class. She did not previously know nor had she worked with in the past 17 out of the 20. So you're going to hear in a moment from my special guest that many people are woefully short on the roster of agents that you have as potential and existing referral partners. You're going to hear from my guest now he has 35, right? When he was originating, he had a core base of 35 or agents who were referring him on a consistent basis. What's your number? When I have L.O.s come to me and they fell out the form to come schedule a call with me, the average number I see on there is 10. It's often less and I got to tell you, 10 is not going to cut it in this market with all the chains that's happening, the transition with some agents leaving the market with there being a transaction recession. You need multiples, you need more than you think on your bus. The real question is how do you then scale your engagement and conversations so you can add more realtors to your bus of qualified referral partners? You've got to give yourself that margin of insurance with the law of large numbers. You've heard by now that the way we do that is we go into the local market and build our personal brand. We attract versus chase and we host classes events and workshops. That position you as the most valuable lender in town make you five mile famous and attract a bunch of agents to work with you so you can have conversations and decide if you guys are the right fit. Back to Liz, how else would you get in front of 17 agents that don't know you otherwise? How long would that take you? What methods would you use? Well Liz did it in about an hour, right? So she used the class that we put together for her. She used us for the marketing. We send the emails, the text messages. We do the landing pages. We do the follow up automation and confirmation, etc. Basically she shows up and uses the content that we provide. Turn key, plug and play, run some slides, read some speaker notes, show some videos, follow a process and you get conversations and you get in front of agents you've never gotten in front of in the past and people start talking about you and you build your personal brand. 17 out of 20 agents you never met before. You know what's happening now? She's getting conversations, meetings, referrals, she's building her future business now. If that sounds interesting to you, go to mortgagemarketing.pro and book a call so we can see if we are a fit for each other. It's not right for everybody. You must be coachable. You must be doing at least three transactions on average or more per month. You must have at least an average of three years in the business per full time, right? Or more, we are not for everybody. We're for somebody who is willing to work, willing to be coachable, willing to show up and follow the proven process. Mortgagemarketing.pro. Let's see if it's for you. Okay, on to my special guest. I've been teasing it up a little bit. I'm really thrilled to finally bring my conversation with Brian Weiss to you. I already told you a little bit about Brian, right? President's Club Producer, Multiplatinum Winner, all around great dude, father and husband. He's also co-contributor to this green book. I'm holding up my hands, rethink everything you know about being a next-gen loan officer, which was spearheaded by my good friend's Kyle Draper and Brian Vue. I'm also contributor to this book as is Brian and many other professionals in our industry. Brian is an amazing mortgage leader. He is knowledge and experience is deep and wide and he really understands what's happening in the market because of his years of experience and because of the companies and individuals he's working with right now. So we are going to unpack the strategies for today's mortgage originator. We're going to unpack his chapter from the book and give you some really key high-level takeaways on how to reignite your career with ideas and action and I'll just give you a quick little snippet right here to thrive in today's market. Mortgage professor must diversify their sources of business and take a multi-layer approach that combines traditional methods with a modern system. So we unpack some different pillars or different additional sources of business in addition to the traditional sources like agents in past client database and we're going to give you some ideas on which of these pillars might be potentially worth you pursuing. And of course Brian's done some cool stuff and so there's lots of links in the show notes for you to go check out. He's got a free Facebook community, he's on LinkedIn and a lot of other things. So listen to this podcast episode, check the links in the show notes and let him know that you heard about him and connected with him through this podcast. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Brian Weiss, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. This is a long time coming, frankly. I've seen your name around for so many years. I've bought your book and I finally get to meet you face to face and actually talk to you. So this is an honor. As well, I've seen you buzzing around and you know, we're both contributors to this wonderful book. Let's give a shout out to the book. I'm holding up my hand, rethink everything. You know about being an ex-general loan officer led by Kyle Draper and Brian Vue. Of course, we are both co-authors in there. So I'll link it up by the way in the show notes too in case anybody does not have it yet. But before we get into your chapter and what your topic is for people who may not be aware of you, tell us whatever you want to tell the listeners about who you are, what do you do? Yeah, so I'm personally for most a dad and a husband, but professionally, I've been in the mortgage industry for nearly 30 years. I almost hate to do the math, but now it just sort of is what it is. But I've been in mortgage for almost 30 years. Most of that time with some of the bigger retail companies. And most recently have evolved into a coach, a consultant. And then I also work with a consulting agency that helps other people open mortgage companies under a franchise model. So it's newer in the space, but it's a great support system for those that want to go down that entrepreneurial, take that entrepreneurial leap. What's the name of that organization? So the name of that company is CoLab Mortgage Franchise. Okay. Yeah, it was founded by a woman. Yep. And it was founded by a woman by the name of Megan Marsh, 20 years in the industry, very successful as a mortgage broker and company owner. And now, oh, you know, Megan? I know who she is. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. A great lady, amazing human being. Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. So. And then you're, why don't we put it out there right now? By the way, for those who are curious to learn more, you don't need to stay at the end, but the link will be in the show notes. You also have a website for your consultative services. What is that? Yeah. So my consulting website is brwconsole.com. Got it. Brian Russell Weiss. Yep. And then coLab is coLabservice.com. We got housekeeping out of the way. A week. Yeah. I mean, normally I save that for the end, but what the hell, let's mix it up a little bit today. Hey, we're here. Okay. And we're right here. Yeah. That's just over folks. Thanks for tuning in. Yes. Thank you. All right. So I want to jump into this chapter. If you don't mind, let's get right into it. We think everything in the chapter 19 from the book, reignite your career with ideas in action is the title of your book or the chapter. And your focus is on, if I'm correct, well, let me ask you this way, what will you hope into accomplish with your chapter, your contribution to the book? You know, ultimately, and this is going to sound a little strange, but ultimately, what I want to accomplish is to give people hope. I mean, it has been, and think about last December, November, when you and I were asked to participate in this group, I mean, that, sorry, the book, that was in the thick of it, right? People were really struggling. It couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel. I just wanted to give people some hope. And I wanted to give them some ideas about things they can do to adapt, change, and to bring in some business. You and I have been around the business long enough. We know there's a thousand different ways to get business. And I believe, especially earlier in my career as a loan officer, you could survive on two good pillars. And that was your past customer database and your sphere. And that was a nice list of real estate agents that would refer you business on a regular basis. I think in today's world, two pillars are not enough. I think we've got to be a little bit more creative in other pillars, social media. Another pillar might be financial advisors. Another pillar might be builders, pillar might be, you know, zilla leads or lead acquisition. It just, we've got to be a little bit more creative and put more lines in the water to get business than what we needed to do even just a few years ago. Right? Okay. Love that. Let's break it down a little bit further. Why do you, what's changed? Why is that now you believe important today? What's happening? What's happened? What's coming? Yeah. So it really, it comes down to the business dropping off. So many people entered the business when, when rates were low. It was refinance, mania and a lot of those individuals hung on for a very long time, made it harder for those of us that have been in the industry for 20 or 30 years because there was just more competition. So that combined with margin compression, you know, certain loan officers might be making less per deal. Companies are certainly making less per transaction. So we might not have the resources that we used to have. And I believe, you know, a lot of the, especially the bigger companies had some pretty robust coaching programs and support from a business development standpoint and a lot of those resources, I was hearing we're going away too. So that's why, you know, it's great to have individuals like yourself and some of the other coaching companies out there as resources, but, but their internal resources were, were cut back or eliminated altogether because of the compression that was happening. So I feel it was, you know, it's our duty to fill that void and help wherever we can, whether it's ideas or business development planning or, you know, mindset or whatever it may be, it was our job to help. How, this might not be a fair question and I'm just trying to, so I'm thinking through the frame of what you just said and what, what, you know, I know or at least I have some access to feedback from because I talked to a pretty decent amount of L.O.'s around the country is, I think, first of all, I mean, on its, on its surface, I agree with what you're saying, right? As we need to add more, as a matter of fact, that was the kind of, what I talked about this morning on the podcast, which you and I were talking about before we hit record, which was adding these additional pillars. But house, I guess what I, what I see when I hear that or my response to that is a few things I see occur. One, they do a lousy job of it, they dabble and they don't really create any momentum or they forget that the foundational element or sources of their business at the, you know, at the risk or the sacrifice of that golden goose to be like, you know, I'm going all in on social media, man, screw agents, right? Like, you know, like, so how do you address for those that are listening, like what would you advise them if they're, if they're hearing you, they're like, yeah, I get it, man, I need to add a couple more pillars. Like, how would they begin to identify those pillars and then maybe add those? Yep. Yep. So first of all, you know, my advice is always don't, don't trade one pillar for another, right? Don't neglect your current database just because rates are high and you're focusing on social media. I do think there's a little bit probably a lot for some people too, too much focus on social media. It's important. I think it should be there. Gotta invest time, but don't go all in on social media, not right away for most of us. So there's that. It's adding pillars, not neglecting the others. And that might mean working a little bit longer. That might be work, meaning working a little bit smarter, a little bit harder. The other thing is that's where the coach comes in. I think, you know, now more than ever, people do need a coach and a mentor. If you're not getting that, my advice always is if you're not getting that at your company or if your company's coaching resources have diminished, you've got to seek help outside of your company, right? So it's realizing you need more pillars. It's getting with the right coach to help you develop those pillars and simultaneously. And you and I touched on this right before the before we press record, too, but I developed it. I started a coaching company back in December, too, a free coaching group based on Facebook. It's called the action plan community. It started out as the loan officer action plan, but it became the action plan community. Because even though it was for loan officers, we had real estate agents joining our calls and our group all the time. So I wanted to broaden the scope, rebranded recently as action plan community. You can anybody can find it on Facebook and join the group. So there's that community inside Facebook and then we do calls on a regular basis with subject matter experts. Jeff, I hope to have you. It's my goal. My dream to have you as a contributor in the group at some point here. You didn't know that yet. So you don't have to answer off the cuff, but when I created that resource to get that creativity and get those ideas flowing and then it's up to the individual loan officer then to execute. And if they need help with execution, that's where they reach out to a coach, maybe even Jeff, right? Sure. So we can link that up in the show notes then, right? Yep. Yep. Okay. Cool. So anybody's listening. It will be a link to that also in the show notes. Okay. So back to your book here in a wonderful green book. And once again, shout out Kyle Bryan, if you're listening, hey man, we love you. Green book. Great. Nice and prominent in the video. As a matter of fact, I'm going to get a real clip. That's like, let's just point at the book and go, yeah, man, the book is awesome. They've developed quite a community too. I mean, I'd sorry to interrupt your chain of thought here, but I mean, the contributors and I've met almost all of them at this point, great people with great hearts, passion for the industry and some really amazing ideas. So if you are a loan officer looking for ideas, I mean, that green book is your, your Bible. I mean, that's, that's it. That's the best. What is it? $15, $16. You can ever spend. Yeah. I mean, so that's from what I hear. That's a beer at Michigan State these days, so it declarifies University of Michigan, not Michigan State. Oh, sorry. I don't know if it watches this. I've got to, I've got to clarify that. The test is over now. Sorry, Katie. Sorry, Katie. Oh, boy, there's like, there's a guy who doesn't really know his colleges. That's me. All right. So let's go through some of the pillars you have in here. And maybe let's, I'm the reason why I want to do this is to help those listening. How would they identify what would be a natural next pillar? Let's just assume that whoever's listening has real estate agents somewhere because it's tradition. And I'm happy to get into a riff on why agents or why not and a lot of people like to bag on agents, but that's up to you. But the other pillars here are, I mean, not read them all because you have quite a few, financial planners, renovation. What else we got? You mentioned social media, video, consumer direct marketing strategies, educational webinars. Like where would somebody start what, you know what I mean? What would be, is there any, does it depend on where they're at or what would you say? I would say follow your passion and as cliche as that sounds. I mean, I would, you know, take a pen and a paper going to quiet room on a Saturday morning where you're not going to be interrupted and just sort of think through these things and the types of people that might be involved in those pillars and what you'd most enjoy. And I would dip my toe in the water, maybe talk to a coach, talk to some colleagues, talk to people that are already in that space. If you've developed a passion for, or you think you'd be very interested in renovation lending, I think it's an amazing pillar. It could be a pillar all in itself just focusing on renovation lending. I mean, there's coaches in the industry, MrRenovation.com, there are coaches in the industry that talk about just renovation lending, Vince at MrRenovation.com, amazing human being. He was a contributor on my calls just a few months ago on the coaching group. And for a week laid out how to develop a business development plan for renovation lending. All of those calls are recorded. You could go into the Facebook group now, scroll back, see the calls with Vince, and get a little taste of what it's like to work renovation lending. And you might listen to those calls and or talk to Vince and find out, you know what, it's not really my thing. Okay, then take a look at a different pillar. Maybe it's VA lending. Maybe it's reverse mortgage. I mean, there's so many ideas out there and I guess, you know, you and I have been around in the business so long, Jeff, that maybe we take those ideas for granted. And that was kind of the idea of my chapter is to spur some creative thinking and get some ideas cooking for some people. It's also the idea of how my coaching group, then you can choose from there. Choose from the list, I guess. Yeah, I like that a lot. You know, it's funny. And I love this, it's expanding the pool of opportunities or thought for some people listening. I hope because usually what most people do is they deal with the realtor thing and then they're like, oh, you know, I'll try some financial advisors. And then they go down the list like, oh, let me pay for some leads, you know, but you've actually opened it up. And I think there's an important point here, you know, as you well know, there's a difference between being transactional versus relational, right? And I am going to say publicly right now and you can, I'd love to riff on this if you think it's somewhat different, that when you're buying leads and you're dealing with an internet lead that's been purchased, that's hard to develop a relationship. Am I a long or you're absolutely right? So when I was a retail loan officer, I purchased leads. They had a, they had a retail, I think they called it the retail purchase lead program. And I can't remember. I think I paid $2,500 per month and you had a certain allotment guaranteed a number of leads that would be sent to you. I tried it for three months. I failed miserably. It didn't close one loan, but it's because my mindset, the biggest waste of money ever. But my mindset was retail and especially at that time, if you got a referral from a real estate agent as long as you called them within a few hours or in many cases, same day, you were fine. And lead, you got to, even then, you had to hit that in a couple of minutes or they already had 12 other calls and they're already angry because people are calling them. So it was a different mindset. I was taught that, but I didn't act on it. I didn't understand it. So I, I, yeah, I, and you think about that, but I've been this, by the way, we didn't talk about this, but my first start was I worked for a subprime lender, taken internet leads over the phone, you know? So I totally get what you're saying, and that's why I got the guy out of that and went to Countrywide or Mutual Company that we both were at. And because I realized that I wanted to build a career, which circled back to these, these other pillars that you talked about, I mean, that's why I wanted to highlight the, and again, I'm not here to pass judgment like everything works you said at the beginning, right? Everything, I have this saying that mark when it comes to marketing, everything works. It just doesn't work equally well for everybody all the time everywhere, right? So you got to figure out what, to your point, what works for you. Now what I love about the examples you wrote down of additional pillars is these are largely relationship driven. Because if I'm going to put time, money, and effort in something, I want to be able to have a competitive advantage. That's built on my skillset, my ability to market, my ability to connect and build relationships with people. And I just think, as I said, that's a lot harder to do with, with buying leads. There are companies that do that because they are a huge operation, right? Like quick and loans or somebody. So that's a whole separate animal though. There's nobody listening that's going to become a quick and loans. I don't think. But could you, could you build a platform? Could you follow some advice in coaching that helps you attract and engage financial advisors, reverse mortgage, reno loans, you know, all those things? I think so. Why haven't more people done it? Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. I have a feeling though, and I don't know for sure because it was never a pillar of business of mine. I'm trying to think if I ever had a loan officer on my team that it was a pillar of theirs. But for sure, you could find a coach in the industry that would help narrow in that particular pillar. I was just tossing it out there as an idea because I know there are people that do it. I'm trying to think of anybody that's actually doing. I know. On the reverse side, there is Christine. I love them. Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. Christina, she's been on the podcast. I have a client of mine. Liz Reese, what's up? Shout out. She also is diversified and reversed and does really well with it. And of course, I always come back to if I was going to originate again. I love that you brought this up because I hadn't thought about these pillars in a while. But one of the other pillars I used to think about would be the divorce niche because that's one that's recession proof. You don't get shopped on rates. They value expertise. It's not super crowded. It's relationship-based. It's referral-driven. Yeah. So that'd be one I would consider too. Yeah. Absolutely. And absolutely. It's a great idea. And again, I know there are coaches that zero in on that and teach how to build a business development plan around that. So I personally don't know if you do, but there are people out there that do that. I mean, there's certified diverse lending that CDLP. There's DivorceThisHouse.com. These people have been on the show and I've gone through Divorce This House training. They've been on at least two times in the podcast. I've interviewed loan officers that are doing divorce. And again, talk about sources of business, which is why a lot of people tend to go with the financial environment. They're like, what's the next place that's got sources? Oh, financial advisors. And then we get into this discussion about what's wrong with agents. What's wrong? Why agents suck? All this stuff. And it's like, look, man, every lead source has its issues and challenges. It's easy to throw agents under the bus because there's so many of them and we have a long history. But there's challenges worth working with every niche. You know, like my buddy Tim Davies, just to say, everything's hard to choose your hard, right? Yep. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. Yeah. That's a key point because none of it's easy, but that's why I think you have to choose and focus in and not add too many fillers, but it does take more than two. So well, and see, that's another good point. Let's circle back and kind of double tap on that for a second. We mentioned this a few moments ago, which is be careful. Like I'm sure you've seen people try and scatter themselves too thin. They spread themselves too thin and try and do 17 initiatives at once. Hmm. How do you coach around that? Yeah. So more often, it's the opposite problem that people aren't investing enough time and enough fillers, but you're right. There is that other extreme when people try to do too much, so they've got seven pillars and there's really only so many hours in the day and what happens is if you dilute your time too much, you're not being effective in any one given area. And I'd love to say the magic number now is four pillars, but the reality is it depends on which pillars you choose, right? So I think sphere and your database is always a number one pillar, real estate agents. If you're going to really focus and focus well on financial advisors, and if you're going to add a reverse mortgage component to that, like you just brought up, that's a big time commitment too. That might mean, you know, those four pillars are enough or those three pillars, sorry. So I think it just depends on your approach and how much time you're going to need to invest in that given pillar. If you are going to do lead acquisition, you know, that can be a time commitment in and of itself because you're not investing time getting the leads, you're just writing a check, but it's the follow up, it's the chase, it's the long cycle of rapport building, it's building the marketing and follow up plans, it could be a big pillar too. So that's why, and I'm throwing, I know I'm kind of vomiting a bunch of ideas and stuff here, but that's why it's important to have a coach and have somebody that's going to help you hone these things in and really focus on it and be held accountable. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Having a fresh set of eyes who can see things you can't see because you're too close to it always helps. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. What were your, I don't know if we covered this, but what were your primary pillars when you were originating? So it was two. It was real estate agents and it was my pillars, or sorry, my sphere of influence, my database, past customers, friends of family. That was it. It was two, a little bit of builder business on and off, you know, in the condo boom in the late 90s in Chicago, I had a number of condo development groups or condo developments in the city of Chicago where I'd call on high rises and condo conversions, but that was really only for a few years, yeah, yeah, it was fun, it was a lot of time. What was the primary source of your business when you were originating? It was real estate agents was was the primary. What did that look like? Like how many core agents did you have like sending you? Yeah, yeah, so that's a great question. I was I had I would say 35, 35 to 40 good agents at any one time. There is there's two, there's a lot of ways to approach real estate agents, right? So within that pillar, there's sort of micro ways to approach it. Some people will only call on top performers, right? Only call on the best of the best and therefore you'd only need four or five. My approach was not to work with the newbies either. I mean, I did, I have another of those in my in my sphere, but I didn't spend a lot of time with them. I would do group training with the newbies and things like that. But I would go for the middle of the road agent and my theory was and I think I was right in most cases, but the theory was that they're not getting called as much as the top producers and maybe didn't require as much financial support, right? They weren't asking for the big marketing budgets. They weren't asking for covering big expensive events. They were a little bit more realistic on what the marketing budget should be. So that's why it doesn't mean that's right, but that that was my thinking at the time. And there's four. I had a pretty large group of agents. The other thing, my approach was always just to do open houses with sponsor brokers opens. I would go to open houses on Saturdays and Sundays and I met, that's how I met people. And then from there, I would build this big pool, this big list of real estate agents and I would drip on them with email, phone calls, and then I would do monthly events. Usually happy hours occasionally, a lunch and learn to educational event, but I did mass marketing through open houses face to face, then events to build relationships. Yep, that's what I did a lot. So open houses was your superpower? It was. It was. Interesting. I don't hear that very often. There are a drudgery for many. Did you enjoy it? At first I hated it. At first I hated it. I'll be honest, the first time I did this, I remember I drove into the city and went to one of the nicer neighborhoods and sat in my car, had my list of addresses that I was going to go see, sat in my car for 20 minutes before I walked into the first one. Stressful, right? You don't know how you're going to treat it or you're going to have a door slammed on you. Are they going to shout at you? But it took me a minute to work up the courage, but once I did it, I developed a routine and then I kind of enjoyed it. I found it a way to meet new people. I made it a game in my head. My goal was to not go home until I had 10 business cards in my pocket. Because I knew if I got 10, there would be one or two that I just knew I wasn't going to call because it wasn't an immediate match. But so if I did that twice in a weekend, I'd have 15, 16 cards, 18 cards of people to follow up with on Monday. I would add all of those cards to my database, add them to my email drip campaign, and I would call them throughout the week. And then it would bite them to my events. I mean, it would slow it. Brian, can that work today actually? I honestly think it would. I really think it would. You know, open houses are coming, yeah, yeah, it would. It would. It's, you know, the phrase that I keep going back to, and I can't remember where I heard this at first. I didn't write it. I heard it somewhere. But if you want to do more business, meet more people. And honestly, what better way to meet agents face to face is to show up at their open house. It's a captive audience. Most of them are very, very nice. It was very rare that I got a negative reaction from you working on a Saturday just like they're working. If nothing else, they're impressed that you're out there hustling just like they are. Right. And did you wind up like hosting them together, like pre-qualling people in the house with your laptop and stuff? You know, rarely on a weekend, I probably should have done more than that more than more of that. But my goal doing the weekend things was in different approaches. But my goal was to just get as many cards as I could on one day, right? Yeah. If you're sitting there, you're only connected with one agent. Meet and greet. It only enough time to build a poor grab a card and then I was off to the next one so that I could get a number of cards. What I would do is I'd host a broker's open during the week. At the time, if I remember correctly, it was every Tuesday that had broker opens in the city of Chicago and I would host, I'd bring sandwiches, flyers, my laptop, I'd do the whole thing. And then agents would come to me and still it was the goal was to get as many cards as possible. Great way to meet a lot of agents, you know, your position with that agent at the open house. Yeah. I mean, it's a quote unquote old school, but you know, this is a connection business, right? And the more, like you said, the more people you meet, the more business you do. It's a lot of large numbers. Absolutely. 100% it is. The other thing about that too is do you think, like back then, was it quiet out there? Like there's not a lot of L.O.'s do in open houses. There was not. There was not. And I'm kind of curious now, I'm going to do a poll and find out how many loan officers are actually doing open houses today. I would guess very, very few. But back then, no, I don't think I ever, ever, and I did this for years. I don't think I ever ran into another loan officer at an open house. You know, I also want to just pause and make a, just double, double tap on this thing. This point you made for a second though that you sat in your car out in front of that open house for 20 minutes and kind of worked up the courage. I can 100% relate to that. And I can remember more than one occasion where I was afraid to walk in, nervous, scared and all the stuff you described. And then you realize that most of that, it's just a head talk. And they're nice. And they're like, oh, how are you, they're happy to see you. And I used to go in with finance flyers that I would design for the house in advance. Look up the listing for that day, you know what I mean? And just walk in like, boom, I got your flyers ready to go for your listing. Oh, thank you so much. Now, some might toss them, but I don't care. Like you said, the whole strategy is you physically got in front of 10 or 20 agents and tell me about that then on Mondays or Tuesdays, when you follow it up, how did it look conversion wise to lead them to the next step? It was about a third that I could get them to, you know, meet or have a, yeah, about a meat or and or have a meaningful conversation on the phone. I would call that a win. Not everybody would take time for coffee. But to me, if I had a 40 minute conversation about our kids and sports or life, like to me, that's a rapport building and that's the idea of a coffee meeting. So I knew that if I could have a meaningful conversation, I could get them to one of my events eventually and I was doing them every month. So I knew I could get face-to-face with them if I had that rapport building conversation day one or day two. It's so funny. You say that events. I know you're working lunch and learns classes, workshops, all that. And you just described there is, you know, I were talking, we were talking about Alex Hermosy before we hit record. And I think this is another area, Eldo's myth is, if you have an actual system, like you think about a funnel, right? The picture of a funnel and funnels are so popular today, right, click, funnels, etc. Everybody knows what they are. But let's just, I mean, how many of you don't have a funnel? Let's just take agents because that's what we're running on here. Like you actually had a process. That's what a funnel is. It's a process. Meet, get 10 cards, you follow up, you've invited them to their events. It's just like, that's what a company, a business does. Is it markets to those people through different channels and means consistently over time? Yeah. Maybe, why aren't I, why aren't I more successful with agents? Maybe because you're not following a system like Ryan just outlayed, you know, which is like, oh, you actually have to follow up. You have to have what's next when they don't take the call or they don't meet with you. You're always dripping, dripping, dripping. I'm sure you have stories of agents who you stayed in touch with for three, six, 12 months and eventually, right? Some people they start turning after that period of time. Yes. Yes. Yes. Sometimes it's a long game. Sometimes it's a short game. But either way, you got to play the game, right, which is getting front of people, dripped and have a system. That's well said. Now, you said at the, you said when I asked you how many agents you, you know, your core agents, you said like 30, 35, I have to tell you, when you said that number, that was shocking to me. When I asked most loan officers, like they actually fell out of form before a call with me and I asked them how many agents, et cetera, I mean, the average number is 10 or less. Oh, wow. Crazy. Wow. Wow. Today, 10 or less. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I was going to say that's kind of dangerous because unless those 10 are top producers, you're not going to get a lot of business from 10. Well, you've seen the stats when it depends on the agent, but yeah, true, right, true. You know, that, oh, like, you know, what is the, what is the stat lately? It's like 90% of agents closed for deals last year, whatever, like I just love that. It doesn't tell the whole story, right? There's a flip side to that. But I think the, the, the takeaway is you need more agents on your bus in this market, considering NAR, people heading out, right, all the turnover, all that stuff. Yes. Yes. Yes. Hmm. Oh, yeah. Interesting times. And I do think, I mean, you bring up a great point. I think this would work. I believe this would work today. It's, there's relationships. The technology of a face-to-face conversation and a handshake never changes, right? How we follow up with them changes or how we market to them changes. The videos we send, um, video marketing wasn't a thing back then. No, I just sounded really old when I said that, didn't I? No. I'm probably older than you, but keep going. The marketing changes, the handshake is, is that doesn't change, technology doesn't change in a handshake. Yeah. I guess that's one of the things, you know, I don't know if you've heard this said before, but I love this quote. It was from an interview that somebody was doing with Jeff Bezos, and they were asking him, you know, how do you stay on top of like what's changing, like how do you look out into the future and be aware of the changes, et cetera, technology? And his response to that is we spend more time focusing on what's not going to change. And we try to get really, really good at that thought that was brilliant. Interesting. So what's not going to change like with Amazon, what's not going to change, people want a good deal and they want it fast, right? That's not going to change. What's not going to change in our business is it's a relationship business that's based on trust. And that's not going to change, even with technology. So where is your focus? So, yeah. So business of saying they then focus on the things that aren't going to change because when you focus on the things that do change, when it changes, you've got to change your plan. But if you focus on what doesn't change, your business plan is consistent. Well, and you could also burn a lot of time, money and cycles chasing this next big thing, AI or whatever, not saying it doesn't have its place in its relevance, it doesn't it will. But if you just, like we said earlier, divert your focus away from what will always be the same, which is relationships, connection, trust. And all of a sudden, you sacrifice that once again, because you think AI is the magic pill or whatever, all of a sudden, you know, your business is hurting. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Great. Amazing points. Yeah. You got me fired up. I'm going to go back into origination. Let's go. Same here, man. Well, let's pick a niche. You go one niche. I go another. We'll compare notes. All right. All this stuff out. I do like the red on niche, though, because I think considering right where a lot of people are sitting at subpar, sub four percent interest rates, like there's not going to be as much turnover anymore. I heard this term a while back that we're in a transaction recession. So those are where they are. I live in a 25, 28 year old house. So I'm probably some point going to be a candidate for Renault, you know? It just depends when you're ready, right? Yeah. Absolutely. The other cool thing about Renault, now I'm geeking off here, is that my Starbucks is kicking in. But I remember working back in the day with title companies. This is an idea for you guys listening where they can obviously pull data based on how old a house is. And when I was living in Orange County, there were certain pockets of South Orange County that were all 25 year, 30, 40 year old homes, and there were tracks. And you could target those homes, right, for Renault or sale, because we know they're more likely, right? And then you could do other stuff like how long is the owner living in that house, et cetera. But again, that's called being smart and marketing. And if you're going to pursue a niche like Renault, I'm just riffing here, but I would think that would make sense. No. I think that makes a ton of sense. I love it. That's a great idea. I'm writing that one down. All right. So let's close out on this. Brian, we're in Q4. Yes. You've got a captive audience of loan officers who are stepping into Q4, 2025, looks like it has some positive headwinds for us, for interest rates. What are you telling everybody they should focus on for the rest of this year? So the big thing I tell everybody, I tell different things, depending where people are. But the big thing I tell everybody is not to put too much weight into this Wi-Fi wave. We've been waiting years for this to happen. And guess what? Some of the servicers. The servicers are coming at their servicing portfolio with inventions. They, for months, they've been building their internal loan officer teams. And their internal loan officer teams, guess what? They take a reduced commissions because it's internal leads. And they're going to be able to offer a better price. So make sure you have a short price, a, b, make sure you're staying in touch with contacts, c, don't count on this to write all your financial woes if you're looking for that to make a bunch of money in 2025. I mean, focus on it, do it, but don't bank on it. So still, focus heavily, heavily, heavily on the purchase business. The other thing I say is, yep, the other thing I say is, and this, again, depends on the individual, but it's developing our pillars of business. It's spending time in education, getting a right coach, holding yourself accountable, and executing at a high, high level. It's not time to take off or foot off the gas because this magical Wi-Fi wave is going to save our problems or save our, save our making. Live and die by the re-fi, right? Mm-hmm. All right. Well, that's some good advice. I love that you said that because, yeah, there are some people salivating thinking, oh, I just, I can't wait. And then, you know, they see them, the post, oh, the rates came down, like all this, just like, you know, man, you got to control the controllables. And what you can control is your mindset, skill set, and what you do every single day. So, wait a put a cherry on top of this. Once again, Brian, how do people connect with you for those who want to? All of us. Yeah. So, I'm very active on LinkedIn. I can be found on LinkedIn. And of course, on my Facebook, Instagram, they can do a Google search and find me on any of those platforms, send me a DM. My consulting and coaching website is brwconsult.com. My coaching group is based on Facebook, and that is Action Plan Community. So, if you do a Facebook search, Action Plan Community, ask for an invitation. Here in Mortgage, a real estate, I'll bring you in. And then, CoLab, I mentioned CoLab, which is a very unique and fun company. I'm really enjoying this because what we do is we help people go down this entrepreneurial space of starting their own mortgage company. And this could be a loan officer doing five, six deals a month. You don't have to be a mega producer for this to make sense financially. It's structured in a way that it's reasonable to start, reasonable support and ongoing fees so that you don't have to do the compliance, the legal, build the marketing, and the systems we, the CoLab does all of that for you. We also work with real estate company owners to open there on Mortgage Company. But that website is colabservice.com, and you can get to any of us at Colab on that website. All right. We're going to link all that up in the show notes so people can easily just log in and say to links. A lot of them say to links. I know, right? Get a higher and assistant, just to put that in. Okay. Cool. So listen, everybody, follow the links in the show notes. Follow Brian, let them know that you'd like this episode, what your one big takeaway was. Brian, I'm glad we did this. Thank you so much, man. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate you. All right. Listeners, you know what to do. If you like this episode, make sure you leave us a review. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.