Interview With a Winner: Tom Griffith CLA, Visionary, Practical Wealth Community, Eugene, OR |
2006 origination volume: $43 million In Touch Today: How did you get started in the mortgage business? Tom Griffith: In October of 1997 I was a client of the county’s number one mortgage producer. At one point he showed me his paycheck and that is when I made the decision to go into the mortgage business. I had recently married and had a new baby. I needed to make a change to an industry where I could have more control of my time. So I became independent as a mortgage broker in 1999. In Touch Today: Were you an immediate success? Tom: That’s an interesting question. I’ve always been a little bit of an overachiever. When I started I had 90 days worth of income saved up. I knew I had to become successful within 60 days or I’d have to go back to my old profession. So I contacted all the people in the area who already knew and loved me and asked them for help. Many people said to me, “Tom, you're getting into the business in the worst time possible.” It was the late 90’s and inventory and rates were both going up. But I firmly believe you get out of anything what you put into it. If you can see a vision of your success, you can achieve it. So that is what I did. In Touch Today: How have the recent events in the mortgage/housing market affected your business? Tom: The recent events in the industry have driven home the need for successful originators to differentiate themselves from the herd. That, in my understanding, is best accomplished by providing the client with education. Education from the advisor perspective, not focused on rates and fees, but designed to bring clarity and confidence around fiscal literacy. Or more accurately said, Fiscal Integrity. Whether we’re talking about the originator or the client, once we have this newfound clarity and confidence, taking action is much easier for both parties. Today, more than ever, people are confused, even scared; they are seeking solutions to problems they never imagined having, and we have the ability to help in a powerful way through proper liability management. In Touch Today: What mistakes do you think rookie loan officers make? Tom: So many of them sit at their desks and expect that there’s business in the office. There’s no business in the office. You have to go out and find it. My advice to a rookie would be to sit down on their first day and compile a list of contacts. Every single person they know should be on that list and they need to contact them if only to say, “Hey, if you can believe it, guess what I'm doing!” Another mistake is focusing on rates and fees. The average rookie over the last several years has lost sight of their potential impact as a financial educator. If they’d recognize this potential, it would change how they present themselves and ask for business. In Touch Today: What mistakes do you think veteran loan officers make? Tom: They don’t understand the power they have in their client’s financial life to help them create real wealth over time. Most of them don’t understand that to become fiscally literate themselves allows them to potentially change the life of their client through education. The veteran loan officer should already have a base of people who know them, love them, trust them and look to them for advice. If they would simply use their position to reach into their clients’ lives and help them financially, they’d have all the business that they ever wanted. But many of them continue to focus on rates, fees and beating out the other guy by an eighth of a point. In Touch Today: What do you think separates you from the average loan officer? Tom: The relationship I build with each client over time is far more valuable to me than one transaction. Instead of thinking about how much money I can make from each client, I focus on how I can best serve their needs. By doing so, I’m going to get all their repeat business and referrals. I did the math early on in my practice. I know that one loan is really three. I also believe in doing more than I promise I will do - under promising and over delivering. I am my own perfect dream client. So I think about what I would need to be happy and then I deliver that for my clients. I would want somebody to care about and do what’s right for me. I would not want to be seen as a dollar. Every now and then I get a client I just can’t make happy. If I realize they’re in that category, I cut them loose. It’s not worth the headache to me. I also present my business differently from other loan officers. I’m not in the mortgage business – I’m in the financial education business. I don’t run a mortgage brokerage. I run an event management company. I set up events to educate potential clients and my business comes out of that. We’re committed to educating people on proper liability management even if that means losing their business. Meaning if a client says to me, “Tom, I just want to know your best rates and fees,” I would say to him, “Sir, you’re obviously not getting the big picture and I'm not going to make you happy. Have a nice life.” I won't take just any deal any longer. I’m not going to do the wrong thing for somebody. They’re going to have to go do that on their own. I won’t facilitate their dysfunction. In Touch Today: If you had a son or daughter entering this business, what advice would you give them? Tom: I would encourage them to become a student of the business and seek to change people’s lives. I’d advise them to truly become a servant of their clients and to make themselves available. I’d tell them that they couldn’t sit in the office and wait for the phone to ring. I’d tell them they have to go out in the world and let people know how they can help them. In Touch Today: What was your most successful marketing campaign? Tom: I generate Rate Watch Reports through Mortgage Coach and send them to my database. They generate a lot of transactions. The Rate Watch gives me what I call a situational awareness of my client’s life. They’ll call and tell me about things in their life because of the Rate Watch report that I would have no other way of knowing. I wouldn’t know that they have a financial problem or opportunity otherwise. The other thing that I do a lot of to brand our business is hold boot camps. We hold what we call Practical Wealth Boot Camp once a quarter. They run for five to seven weeks. We don’t sell loans. We don’t sell asset advice. We provide knowledge. Out of that, the people who attend realize they need to restructure, and that generates business. I advertise the Practical Wealth Boot Camp on the radio. I actually create my own recorded radio shows. I actually have a lot of clients call me or come in to see me because they listen to my shows. They’ve listened to me for maybe weeks or months. After awhile they can’t stand it anymore and they’ve got to know “What does this mean to me?” In Touch Today: What is your best turnkey sales or marketing idea that we can share with everyone? Tom: We may actually begin selling our boot camp curriculum as a marketing tool. The conversion ratio of boot camp runs about 65%. It’s an extraordinary marketing piece. I would say with a little training, a lot of people could teach it – but not just anybody. In Touch Today: Who or what has been the biggest contributor to your success? Tom: I've had a lot of really great mentors in my life. My father told me not to limit myself because I could achieve anything I want. I was a big student of Jim Roan, who is now in his retirement from motivational speaking. Dave Savage and Steven Marshall have been big influences. Also Barry Habib, Jim McMahon and Todd Ballinger. A man named Jim Hardy was an incredible business coach to me. I worked with him for many years. We were partners in business for a long time. So I’ve had a lot of influences in my life but I tend to operate my life pretty basically. I believe there’s a lot of scriptural content that’s applicable today. In Touch Today: If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your current business? Tom: I would change the commodity perception of the business. But that’s almost like trying to change the tide. Everybody wants to own a home. So why does the mortgage business have to be so disgusting? And the answer to that is the money. Easy money makes for easy corruption. If I could have a magic wand, I'd want people to realize that we don’t have a problem of supply in this world but we do have a problem with distribution. There’s all the money that you could ever want. There are all the resources you could ever want. They’re just not distributed to people’s liking. I’m not a socialist. I believe the market rewards you for bringing value. If you bring extraordinary value, you’ll be extraordinarily rewarded. It’s a lofty goal for me. It’s my little way of changing the world – all through education. In Touch Today: What are your current goals? Tom: One of my goals right now is to create an institute of education built on credibility. It will be a forum where the public or professionals – whether they’re Realtors, financial planners, CPAs, or insurance agents – can come together to learn and become agents of change. Another goal was to liberate $60 billion. It sounds like a lot but it’s about half of 1% of some of the house wealth that’s just lying fallow in this country. That’s a goal I wrote down about a year ago. To liberate or give back to people about $60 billion of their own money that’s laying around, doing nothing for them as equity. When you factor the trickle down effect in the economy, we could change the face of this country by doing that. In Touch Today: Is there anything else you’d like to say to other originators who aspire to the kind of success you've created? Tom: Learn to educate. Sit down and chat with your clients. Find out their situations, but more importantly, find out what they think they can’t do. Then solve that “can’t” for them by teaching them to borrow smart. It’s a revolutionary, simple concept. If the average person in this business could understand how powerful it is, then we could make really incredible results happen in this country. |
