Interview With a Winner: Brian Kludt Waterstone Mortgage Corp. Menomonee Falls, WI |
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2007 origination volume: $25 million In Touch Today: How did you get started in the mortgage business? Brian Kludt: I literally fell into it ten years ago. I turned 30 and was very disenchanted with the software business and heavy travel demands on my life. I had dinner with my dad one night and he asked me if I was looking for a new career, as he knew of a couple professionals who were looking for a branch manager for their mortgage company. The timing was just right, as it was during the refi boom in ’98 and ’99. When I saw the opportunity to build my own business and control my own financial future, I was hooked. In Touch Today: Were you an immediate success? Brian: I was an immediate success in some respects. I never doubted that I would succeed, even though I didn't really know what it was going to take to be successful. I worked hard. I put a lot of extra hours in. I did a lot of “outside the box” thinking, and tried a lot of different approaches. In my second year in the business, I was a top producer in my company. It came as somewhat of a shock to me to realize I had already surpassed the seasoned originators. It made me realize I was really onto something In Touch Today: How have the recent events in the mortgage/housing market affected your business? Brian: My business, in general, has always been very vanilla “A” paper. But that was by design. So when a lot of the products disappeared from the industry, they were products I had never really utilized. My borrower base has always been made up of people with 720+ credit scores and a fair amount of equity. Probably 20% of our transactions have gone to FHA, where in the past it was just a few here and there, but that has been the only real change. In Touch Today: What mistakes do you see rookie loan officers make? Brian: The biggest mistake I see most rookies making, and the biggest mistake that I personally made early in my career, is looking at this business from the perspective of a hunter versus a farmer. A hunter tends to view things from a short-sighted perspective, eyeing up the dollar signs with each transaction, where a farmer looks at things long-term. If you approach your business from the perspective of a hunter, if you don't secure the deal, you tend to walk away from that prospective client and subsequently lose the opportunity in the future to be able to earn that individual's business. The farmer would look at that lost sale as an opportunity to plant a future seed. A farmer would build a relationship and nurture his database through long-term relational experience with the clients. The hunter would secure one transaction, while the farmer would have a high percentage chance down the road to do business with not only that client but multiple referrals as well. Transitioning yourself from a hunter to a farmer is critically important. In Touch Today: What mistakes do you see veteran loan officers make? Brian: One thing that is important from a veteran loan officer standpoint is to constantly be looking for ways to challenge and educate oneself by developing new paradigms, new ways of doing business, and embracing new technologies. Veterans should strive to keep themselves out of what I call the “script crypt.” You are trapped in the script crypt when you say and do the same things in your business everyday. As a result, business becomes stale. Your clients recognize that you've become stale and that you’ve lost the passion for what you're doing. You must maintain a constant sense of passion for what you do, and that only comes from spending time immersing yourself in discovery and rediscovery. In Touch Today: You mentioned that you have a 70% repeat and referral base, which is quite good. How do you cultivate those relationships? Brian: One of the buzz words I use all the time is “intentionality.” With that in mind, I've created what I call a “Client for Life” program that encompasses two very important elements of intentionality” First is our intentional “Mortgage Management” program. We recognize an important fact: Not only does the market change, but people’s lives change. As such, there needs to be two distinct components to a good Mortgage Management program: Proactive practices like annual mortgage reviews, and reactive responses, such as a very intentional system to handling refi opportunities. The second component of my Client for Life program embraces what I call Intentional Client Intimacy. We provide our clients with personal celebration events throughout the year in an effort to say “Thank You” for their business and referrals. In addition to a monthly VIP drawing, we host multiple family-related client appreciation parties. Some of our past events have included renting out a movie theater, an Olympic ice skating center, and what is arguably our greatest event – our fall family festival. By making these events regular, we create an expectation on the part of our clients and subsequently deepen our client intimacy. In Touch Today: Have you been approaching marketing or other methods of business generation differently given the current state of affairs? Brian: I’ve been ramping up my efforts towards expanding the referral model with my clients. I firmly believe that people who have good equity and good credit run in similar socio-economic circles, so I’m constantly looking for referrals from those types of people. I’ve also developed a marketing strategy with real estate agents to help them grow their businesses through seminars. I’ve built up a lot of trust and credibility there. In Touch Today: What differentiates you from the average loan officer? Brian: I think it's a combination of having that proactive and reactive system in place. I have been working on the idea that as service related industries like the mortgage industry become more commoditized, the consumer has so much more information available to them that there are only two paths we can take to get clients. Number one is to go the way of price, and just fight it out based on cutting our margins. The other way would be to give that client something that they can't get anywhere else. I help my clients think outside the box. The average originator would just be able to quote a price and give them a good faith estimate. I can get them thinking about the future value of their money. I can get them thinking about decisions they need to make five years down the road, and how decisions made today are going to impact that. I think that's perceived by the clients as a higher level of professionalism. In Touch Today: If you had a son or daughter entering this business, what advice would you give them? Brian: I would tell my son not to follow the masses or worry too much about the way things have been done in the past. Instead, look at the relational element of what we do as the primary focus. I think Bill Hillestad said it best when he said, "We don't sell loans. What we do in this business is we intersect with people who we have a relationship with that at some point in time will need our services. If we've entrenched and we've established that relationship, they'll work with us." In Touch Today: What has been your most successful marketing campaign? Brian: I think our most successful campaign is going to come from looking at the opportunities we have in today's market and adopting the management of people's mortgages. If we look at the fallout of the attrition in the industry itself, I’d estimate that at least 8 out of 10 homeowners out there do not have a relationship with a professional who will monitor their mortgage. We’re currently developing a campaign where we track our client’s opportunity point. Maybe they can’t restructure their mortgage right now, but we’ll figure out the point where they should act and monitor for that. We’ve developed a proprietary program called “AutoLock” whereby our clients give us authorization to automatically lock in a certain rate when it becomes available, and the system tracks it. The client doesn’t have to do anything else. In Touch Today: Who or what has been the biggest contributor to your success? Brian: The biggest contributor to my success from a product standpoint would be having a really solid CRM database program and using Mortgage Coach as a tool. In terms of understanding that this business is about relationships, first and foremost it would have to be my Dad and my grandfather. Each of them built a successful insurance practice based on a relationship model. Brian Buffini has also been a huge contributor in terms of showing me how to build my referral business with intention. Tim Broadhurst, an originator in Austin, Texas, has been a huge mentor and role model for my business model. I met him in 2003 and at every turn, I find myself building my systems and team configuration accordingly. In Touch Today: If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your current business? Brian: I wish that I would have developed some of my current ideas earlier in my career. I would have liked to have developed more relationships with real estate agents, financial planners and other wisdom counselors earlier on. I’m convinced that if you have a team of five or ten of those folks who get it the way that you get it, your business will exponentially grow. In Touch Today: What are your current goals? Brian: I'm putting some finishing touches on building out my team to the point where I will be able to transition myself out of some of the day to day operations within the business. Right now, I’m purely doing consulting with clients. But I aspire to get out and do more speaking and consulting within the industry. I really have a passion for sharing a lot of the successes that I've been able to develop over the years and help other originators implement these strategies. In Touch Today: What advice would you give other loan officers who may be struggling to keep or find clients? Brian: Success is all about building trust and creditability. Clients ask three questions consistently. Are you good at what you do? Can I trust you? Do you care about me? Everything I do in my business is answering one of those three questions. Everyone needs to examine their role in this industry. A good loan officer’s role is not to sell loans. It’s to build relationships and solve people's problems. As long as you're continuously looking for ways to build relationships and solve problems, whether you make a sale or not, eventually it will come around. If you see yourself as a relationship farmer, your business has nowhere to go but up. As Zig Ziglar once said, “You can get everything in life you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.” Question of the Month We're adding an exciting new feature to Top Producer Strategies! Each month we will pose an interesting and/or fun question for you to think about. Share your answers with us (just email them to newsletter@topproducerstrategies.com with "question of the month" in the subject line) and we'll compile them for a future article. This should be a great way for us all to learn more about each other and our industry! This Month's Question... What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done to market yourself?
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