Interview with a Winner:
Dan Green
Mobium Mortgage, Chicago, IL
2006 Origination Volume: $52 million
2006 Average Loan Amount: $350,000
Software: Calyx Point, Mortgage Coach, MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com, and Bring the Blog
Referral Source Mix: 40% past clients, 25% blog, 20% financial planners and 15% Realtors
In Touch Today: How did you get started in the mortgage business?
Dan Green: I'm a former software developer. I worked for some of the largest companies in the world, advising CEOs and other corporate leaders on how to apply technology fixes to save millions of dollars on an annual basis. One day the bank in which I was working terminated my entire department and offered me a lateral move into a different group in the company. I had a kind of “eureka” moment then when I realized that true job security wasn't going to come from working for a large established company. The only true job security was going to come from me. And so I left. I left my job. And I'd recently bought a home with my wife and was disenchanted with the whole process.
I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm not a dope either. So like a lot of folks, I began studying mortgages before applying for one. I learned from the internet and books, and I talked to my family. On a recommendation from a friend, I shot the popular online lender an email and was overwhelmed by my phone ringing every ten minutes with “better offers” and really high pressure sales tactics. The deeper I got into the process, the more lost I felt. It was a difficult experience.
Around this time, a friend in the mortgage business recommended that I check it out. I had the same bias against the mortgage industry that I think most folks do who are unaware of how the industry works. But this guy was an MBA from the University of Chicago, and I knew he was really smart. “If it's good enough for him, then why not for me?” I thought. So I met with the company owners and quickly fell in love with the business model. I was surprised because I didn’t realize that being a “good loan officer” required on-going client consultation and systematic execution of a plan. And I thought, “This is exactly what I used to do. This is my former career.” The difference I noticed was that instead of helping faceless corporations, here I was helping actual people who had real problems. And that's how I got into the business.
In Touch Today: Were you an immediate success?
Dan: It depends on what you mean by immediate. I had countless appointments in my first 30-45 days. I was very good at getting appointments. But I'd only managed to close two loans. I hadn't really learned how to relate to my clients. I realized, after the first few appointments, that I was having the same conversations over and over and over again. I started to go home after my appointments and write down the questions that were asked. Then I started scripting answers. I knew that I had to deliver concise answers and project confidence in order to earn the trust of my potential clients and referral sources. I rehearsed my responses. I was training for the Chicago marathon at the time so I was going on very long runs. I would spend those three to four hours at a time just repeating my answers in my head, over and over, until they sounded natural. As a result, I closed over $20 million in my first 12 months. It wasn't immediate success, but it happened.
In Touch Today: What mistakes do you think rookie loan officers typically make?
Dan: There are four major areas where all loan officers make mistakes, whether you're a rookie or a veteran.
1) The first is lack of goal setting. If you don’t know where you want to be, there’s no way that you’ll get there.
2) The second is lack of investment in the business. A lot of folks are trying to go at it alone. Maybe it’s a matter of saving dollars, or maybe they don’t see the value. But we all can be more successful if we rely on the lessons that others have learned before us. Somebody somewhere has been through the same struggles and they’re willing to share what they’ve learned. You need to invest in your business with education and training.
3) The third is lack of time commitment. You can’t be a part-time mortgage planner or loan officer. You’re not only cheating yourself, you’re cheating your clients. You have to be committed to your craft if you want to succeed.
4) The fourth and biggest mistake is to approach your business on a deal by deal basis. It's a recipe for failure. You need to approach your business on a client by client basis. Unfortunately, a lot of folks get a lead, hold onto it only until the loan closes, and then they’re done. They never talk to the customer again. They don't have a plan to stay in touch with the customer or to follow-up with them. If you're properly managing the client lifecycle, you can do more good for people over time
Incidentally it’s that type of loan officer, who doesn’t follow up with past clients, who tends to close all those loans you hear about in the press - the foreclosures, the people with ARMs who now can’t afford the payments. “How can this happen,” you ask? It's because those loans have been orphaned. The LO thought of the mortgage as a deal rather than as a client.
In Touch Today: What are your current goals?
Dan: I’d like to cut back my hours, and also the hours required by my team members, by hiring more people. I'm very much about work-life balance. It was a decision I made early in my career. I shut off my phone after business hours to make sure I'm spending time with my family. It takes practice to learn what a true emergency is.
I would like to be at a point, five years from now, where if I wanted to shut off all of my lead sources except for my blog and my client database I could and still have enough to sustain not only my book of business but also my team. A lot of things change in five years. But that's what I'm striving for.
In Touch Today: What do you think separates you from the average loan officer?
Dan: I honestly don't think I'm all that different from other loan officers. What's interesting is that when you talk to the average person, they equate loan officers with the scum of the earth. But by and large, they are mistaken. We’re a caring and knowledgeable group of people who are genuinely interested in helping people. I know that's how I am.
One way I am a little different is in having my team actively manage entire client lifecycles. We put extraordinary focus on customer service. At Mobium, we use MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com to maintain constant contact with our clients throughout the prospect or lead management phase, into the processing phase, and finally the post-closing and follow-through phases. It’s an end to end solution, and it helps us keep tabs on our clients and their lives. It also helps insure that we're providing a consistent and repeatable customer experience.
Client Lifecycle Management is the number one reason why I joined Mobium Mortgage. I've never seen anything like this in the mortgage space, and I can't begin to tell you how effective it's been in retaining my existing clients and helping me to earn new referrals. It's not groundbreaking. I think a lot of loan officers do something similar but they don't have an orchestrated plan. MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com has been a huge help for us in that department.
In Touch Today: If you had a son or daughter entering the business, what advice would you give them?
Dan: Don’t worry if rates are up or rates are down. Don’t worry if mortgage guidelines are tightening or loosening. Always talk to your clients in plain English and give them an education. Give them a sense of control over their own finances. Regardless of their background or their comfort level with personal finances, people are going to make the right financial choices for themselves if they understand those choices and how they impact their lives. Education never goes out of style.
On my very first day in the business, my company owner sat us all down to write our own personal mission statements. My mission statement was "Nobody will ever feel as lost as I did when I bought my first home." This has been the guiding principal in every client appointment that I've ever had - that my clients will not leave the appointment wondering what's going on. I think that's one of the reasons why I've been able to do the volume that I do and retain the clients that I have. Most of the time, I'm the first one to sit them down and explain to them how a mortgage works or the pros and cons of a 30 year fixed versus an ARM. There's so much information that people need to hear, and you just have to put it in a language that they understand. When you do, they're able to make the choices that make sense for them. That’s empowering people with education.
In Touch Today: How did you develop your relationship with financial planners and Realtors?
Dan: It took me awhile to figure out the mix. It became a lot easier for me from the financial planner perspective once I discovered Mortgage Coach. It was very hard for me to connect on a cerebral level with the financial planners that really understood about asset and debt management as opposed to just taking money and investing it somewhere. Financial planners have the same biases that a lot of “ordinary” folks do about mortgages. Many of them believe that the safest product is a 30 year fixed. But when you can mathematically show them how equity management or paying credit cards can free up cash and help folks reach their other life goals, it really opens their eyes. I didn’t have the tools to do that until I discovered Mortgage Coach. But that's how that all came about.
In Touch Today: What has been your most successful marketing campaign?
Dan: My most successful marketing campaign continues to be my blog, The Mortgage Reports (www.themortgagereports.com). I began blogging in January 2005 with the intent to help my clients. You sit down, you share so much information with them in an appointment, but they leave and sometimes they're starry eyed just because of the sheer volume. So I wanted them to have a reference point for all the things that we discussed. I think loan officers sometimes forget how overwhelming mortgage planning might be for people. That's how I use my blog. It's a continuously updated educational series. Once my clients go home, they can refer back to any number of items that I've written about on the blog.
Another big benefit of blogging is that it has reversed the flow of my business. I used to spend a lot of time making phone calls for new business. Now I spend a lot more time answering my phone as new business calls come into me. That happens more and more each month. A lot of my new clients are finding me from my blog. What's most interesting about that is that I don't need to have the prequalification discussion. I don't need to sell them about working with me. If they're calling me because they've read my blog, they've effectively put a prequalification on me. They already know that they want to work with me because they understand what I stand for and how I conduct my business.
I've known Realtors who insist on always giving out four or five business cards at a time. Multiple times I've had clients say, "Yeah, my agent gave me a bunch of business cards but I went to your blog and we just never called the other guys. We want to work with you." In that respect, my blog has been an unbelievable marketing campaign. It’s ironic because it wasn't created for marketing. It was created for education. The success of it just goes to show you that people want to be educated, and education does lead to new business.
A lot of loan officers read my blog and tell me they’d like to blog, too, but just “don’t have the time,” or offer some other practical reason why they can’t blog. I heard it enough times, actually, that I used my software development skills to create Bring the Blog, an automated, blog-for-you service for loan officers. Bring the Blog provides LOs with their very own blog and each day, we’re providing brand-new content and uploading it for them. The blogger can then write as often (or not often) as they like. Regardless, every single day we're providing new content so their blog never “gets old.” The blog is always relevant and it won’t ever look like it's been abandoned. If you've ever seen an orphaned blog you'll know what I mean. A lot of Bring the Blog’s users are having tremendous success with it.
Blogging has been fantastic for my business so I know it’s worthwhile. If your readers would like to learn more about it, they should visit www.bringtheblog.com and sign up for a free 15-day trial to test it out.
In Touch Today: Do you stay in touch with your past clients through any other means than your blog?
Dan: I send direct mail pieces to my past clients, but I don’t send anything to prospects. I don’t need to because I have a better source of pre-qualified leads already from my existing clients and my blog. I learned pretty early that there are three ways I can get business. The first is to go out and prospect for new business. The second is to try to steal business from my competitors. The third is to get more business from the clients I already have. That last one is by far the most effective option. It's easier to deepen a relationship you already have than to start a new one. My successful marketing comes from people who already know who I am and what I stand for. I leverage that. When you conduct your practice with the utmost integrity and respect for your clients, they're a lot more receiving of what you do.
In Touch Today: Who or what was the biggest contributor to your success?
Dan: Mobium Mortgage has been a fantastic partner in my success. I was doing good business before I got here, but I didn't truly understand the concept of managing your own practice to really turn it up a notch. The tools and the general attitude of the loan officers and support staff here are extraordinarily. I wouldn't be able to achieve the things that I can if I was at any other company. I'm certain of that.
In Touch Today: If you had a magic wand, what would change about your current business?
Dan: Some of the best loan officers work for small mortgage brokers. They may be self-employed or otherwise. States reserve the right to legislate any broker who operates within their boundaries. And states are increasingly enacting legislation that is making it harder to do our jobs effectively. Not to say that the states don't have their hearts in the right place, but what makes that a challenge is if you're a small business owner and you're licensed in one state but want to become licensed in another state it's an arduous process and very expensive. So loan officers end up committed to being in only one state because it's too costly to be licensed in other states.
If I had my magic wand, I would do away with state legislation. I would love to have a national certification program similar to what securities brokers have in the NASD because I think it would do two things. First, it would allow some of the best originators to reach more American homeowners who truly need their help. And second, it would keep operating costs down for some of the best mortgage brokers that want a multi-state practice
In Touch Today: Is there anything else you would like to say to other originators who aspire to the kind of success that you've created?
Dan: Reread this interview two or three times. Then, go back through the archives and read the other Top Producer Strategies interviews. This business is not difficult. There's more than enough guidance out there to help you become successful. All the answers are out there. You just need to execute them.