chrisj

Bill Rice, sometimes contributor here and full time CEO OF Kaliedico sells one button for a living.  If you only sell one button, it better be a good one, and his is.  The button?

Get my next lead.  I have wanted an excuse to use Icosales for a long time, and now Bill Rice, Keith Burwell me, and the Robert Owens for Ohio Attorney General campaign have teamed up to use it to carve through all the people in our database to hit our fundraising goal of 1.2mm in 75 days.  The Ohio Attorney generals’s office has an entrenched jerk that I talked about over on Bloodhound Blog. This phrase got me into the race:

Still needed is regulation of yield-spread premiums — cash rebates paid to third-party brokers as a kind of reward for funneling unsuspecting consumers into higher-rate loans

-Rich Cordray, Ohio Candidate For Attorney General, Demonstrating for the record his utter lack of understanding of how real estate financing works.

Can any mortgage broker abide by that?  Hell no.  I decided to Join Robert Owens and take the fight to this dude (who has cashed nearly six figures worth of campaign contribution checks from bank executives) that is practicing deliberate ignorance.   Nobody takes my industry out.  So, I got with Bill, who got me with Keith, who got me with Icosales.

Icosales is as cool as it seems—when you get it going. You give it a vast number of leads, you organize them into channels, you prioritize the channels, and it assures you that you and your people are always following up on the most valuable leads.  It works with skype, so you can just fly through a stack of viable people and pitch them.   With a two monitor setup, you can have the correct script in front of you at all times.   You hit GMNL, and then dispense the lead as whatever you want to.

I don’t know what else exists, but for prioritizing calls and ensuring you’re talking to the right people, it is best thing I’ve seen, including Dan Greene’s  vaunted My Loan Biz.

Oh–It’s got its warts, and the biggest ones are the fact that it’s underdocumented, and it’s designed for big batches of leads, not smaller uploads.  It’s harder than necessary to get leads into its system, and easier than it should be to screw it up.   All of this is manageable, because the team has the best communicating tech lead I’ve met in ten years.  There isn’t a lot of fault tolerance built into it, and the interface needs more things to do on one screen.   Some of that may be design, methinks, but IT is the best call prioritizer out there.  I’d guess you can set the logic up to be whatever you want it to be and then execute accordingly.

Bill told me that you can figure out originator productiviy, and lead cost and scale however you want.  “The rest is just math.”  The seeing your business part of Icosales is pretty nifty, because it fosters competition and does a ton of cool things.   You can see leads to call, velocity, productivity, a leaderboard, and more, so your teams stay focused (a big deal for work at home warriors).

Icosales was a mortgage-only (or mortgage-mostly) tool until very recently.  When they become “vertical neutral,” as Bill puts it, it’s going to be dangerous because that button kicks ass.  That button is the best thing to build a company around, and as long as that button is made into a star, they will continue to matter.

Chris Johnson requests that you donate the legal maximum to Owens For Attorney General If you want mortgage brokers to survive.

With the tightening of the mortgage markets, we see a lot of new ‘vendors,’ offering a seemingly needed product: paid credit repair.  We even have one here on Lenderama who seems like a good guy.   There is no worse idea for originators to pursue than relying Credit Repair customers to pay your personal mortgage.  Nothing will drive you out of the business faster than staking your income on people with crap credit.  Even if the credit improves, can you improve the homeowner credit faster than the guidelines change?

I’m not against credit repair services in theory.  In practice, they are far from ‘set it and forget it’.  If you could make one phone call, and be sure that the recipient honored them, then it would be fine.  But as it works now, the customer follows up with you instead of the service.   The membrane between the originator and the poor credit risk is too permeable to not have the originator get infected and dragged under.

First Reason Not To Use Credit Repair:  It Crushes Your Velocity

Speed is important in this business.  With more uncertainty entering the picture, we have a situation where we are in need of more certainty as to our own personal finances.   We need closings NOW, not later.  When a customer takes 30-60 days before they are even qualified to maybe apply for mortgage financing, try sending that lead to AMEX to get your bill paid.

Credit repair clients that do everything they are supposed to do don’t get funded for 90 days.  But, even with a good service, they will call you, say 1 time a week.  Let’s say that per that one time per week, 60% of the people get to the closing table (best case scenario).  For 12 weeks, you’ve gotta talk to them for 5 minutes a week.  That’s 1 hour.  If you have ten credit repair clients, you’re working with them for 10 hours in 12 weeks.  And in those ten hours, I could find two buyers that could close.  Bubba, today’s market doesn’t allow for charitable conversations.  Why would you subject yourself to this?

Probably to avoid rejection, but the tonic for avoiding rejection also avoids a paycheck, and gives you busy work that you sort of have to do.

Second Reason:  You Should Be Chasing the Creme De La Creme OF BORROWERS, The Ones that have the best per hour rate.

The other thing (that is being talked about over at BHB) is the fact that you should be chasing the best borrowers.  You should position yourself to earn their business.  The best borrowers will have the most easily packaged loan scenarios, and the fastest closings, and usually the most gratitude.  These are the folks you will be working with if you’re going to be sustainable.  Think: white shoe bank, not shyster in a zoot suit.  Being able to earn the best business that exists is the surest way to ameliorate the problems with this market.

Settling for credit repair borrowers lets you off the hook and confuses activity with productivity.   You’re insulated from feedback.  You don’t know how good you really are because you have people that ‘let you help them.’  Essentially every credit repair candidate will say yes.  Some qualified borrowers shop around.  Credit repair candidates don’t.   They are loyal and are able to ‘let you help’.’  But Tom Saywer ‘let people help’ too.

Help the folks that pay, not the folks that don’t reject you.

Third Reason To Avoid Credit Repair Business: You Are On The Hook For The Service Provided BY SOMEONE YOU DON’T KNOW.

Let’s think about this for a second.

Realtors commend commissions into our hands all the time.  And they are implicitly responsible for all that we do as lenders.  It takes a lifetime to build up our lists, and one missed phone call or bad deal to hurt both our selves and the real estate agent.  Will we be able to ‘vet’ the actions of a credit repair guy?  And do we want to invest the time and energy learning about a service that just gives us more unprocessed loops to weigh us down psychically?

I don’t want to learn the nuances of credit repair and the methodology.  I don’t want to ‘vouch,’ for the responsiveness and efficacy of a call center, and I can’t imagine a financial structure that puts highly competent people in charge of the minutiae of credit repair.  So, I’m not going to risk my reputation on any organization that relies on call center (i.e. uninvested) employees.

Forth Reason: Like Attracts Like

This is a corollary of #2.  You should chase the good and avoid the bad.  Studies have shown that looking at fat people makes you fat. Being around people that have gone through adult failure spiral changes you psychologically.  Makes it OK for you to do likewise, and makes shady and entitled behavior OK with you.  It’s the same moral hazard that was created by the meida,only it’s happening to you.  You see people, have empathy, and then realize the consequences aren’t that bad.

Then you don’t really care about slipping a little because you see that it’d be OK if you did, because you surrounded yourself with a group of tough people to work with.

I know Chris will likely have a lot to say about this.  And it’s not a malicious service, but no top flight originators should be using this type of thing.  My take: if they aren’t closin’ in 45 days, find someone that will.

Chris Johnson is a Vagabond new market survival enthusiast that is unable to catch up with the sheer number of blogs that Todd Carpenter runs.

I’ve been here a while now, and 3 months ago, I talked about walking away from the idiots.   I still think that’s sound advice.  And now that another batch of burnouts has left the business, it’s time to actually…actively start having fun.  I mean it.  I read mortgage blogs here all over, and I see nothing but dour news.  I contact originators all the time, and there’s great fear and trembling in the air.

Even today, June 23, 2008, it’s still possible to have more business than ever, and our business is still the quickest and most simple path to 6 figures that exists in America.   It’s still dead simple to find clients with financial problems that our products that solve, and believe it or not, there are still buyers out there.  Some estimates have 40% fewer originators out there right now than there were, and only 25% fewer transactions.   More deals/survivor.

But fun.  I want pure unadulterated fun back in this business.  I mean the kind of time when you’re buzzing at 6pm when you come home, and ready to pop out of bed to get to the office.   I mean having voice mails to return and stuff to do.

Ah, there it is…stuff to do.   Work that leads to a paycheck is what the fun was always about in this business.   It was that way in 2001 and it’s that way today.  I’m gonna say that if you go after getting some business in a way that suits you , whether it’s my program, or Chad’s, getting deals is the way to make this thing fun again.  Right now, in a post bust world, Loan officers have to be responsible for their own lead generation–and winning is what makes the business fun.   When we convert a lead we created out of nothing, we’ve risked rejection, we’ve created something really cool, and we get a rush of pride, and we have such a blast.

Right now, there are more working, predictable, repeatable sources of leads than there ever were. We know more about lead generation, and an individual has more and better tools to work with.  If you are closing fewer than 6 loans a month, you should spend 60% of your time generating leads, and following up on leads.

Tiger Woods says: “A day without adrenaline is a day wasted.”   We get the adrenaline when we risk rejection to win the game that we’re playing.  The reward is great, let’s have fun.

Chris Johnson runs an ultra low cost Loan Officer Training program at LoanOfficerSurvivalTraining.Com

Some time ago, Todd graciously contributed to my Loan Officer Survival Guide.  I asked him to write the ‘how to’s’ on starting a blog, a topic he’s well qualified to write on since he seemingly starts a PR4 (or above) blog once every 12 hours.  Later, I got on Jonathan Dalton a little bit for calling blogging ‘prospecting.’  (It’s still not).  

I’m still watching a lot of nonbloggers enter the fray to start a blog, and sometimes the posts start really solidly, then degenerate into a morass of ‘now is an excellent time to buy or sell real estate,’ uselessness to them and their readers.  The blog gets abandoned and life moves on.  80-90% of the people that blog get no benefit out of actually blogging…but they support those of us that do.

Blogging can be the biggest, most distracting time suck in the history of time sucks.  But, if you can power through, it can be one of the most invigorating and rewarding ways to get business, refine your voice, help others, and put yourself out there.  Realize that the law of ratios still applies; just as 90% of the practitioners that enter lending and real estate fail, so do 90% of the people that begin to blog.  Here’s how to not be in the 90% that screws up.

1. Realize It’s 100% OK not to blog.   There are relevant, thriving 1.0 businesses out there.  Lots of ‘em.  You’re free to be relevant and thrive and not blog.  It’s 100% OK. 
2. Have A Goal For Blogging.  It’s okay to blog as a hobby, as a way to refine your voice, and if that’s your goal, God love you.  But, if you’re blogging for business, make sure that the blog supports that idea.  I have many blogs because I have many goals for this thing. 
3. Give Value First:  Consumers desperately need a clearly written easy to understand way to figure out what the heck to expect on a blog.  Write that for ‘em.   Give ‘em a reason to come back and talk, not a friggin’ sales pitch.
4. Get A Return:  Don’t hesitate to give a sales pitch.  I know, I know, contradictions.  This starts with The illustrious Teresa Boardman advocates being seriously easy to find.  I’d agree.  Put all of your contact information on every single page and even at the bottom of your RSS feed.  You want people to contact you, make it simple, don’t worry about spam because Google aps takes care of that.
5. Edit Every Post:  I let things sit, and reread everything.  I’m not perfect but this keeps the obvious hanging sentences and malcommunication out of what I write.
6. Focus On Quality Content, Not Post Frequency.  Yaro talks about the ‘pillar post,’ as a way to really post.  Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  You want to post often, but you can just do link posts.
7. Cap Your Social Media Time.   It’s easy to let it be a time suck.  I use a series of timers to cap how much time I’m spending (I have 24 minutes to finish this post).  You don’t want it to be a serious time suck, and your focus will be laser sharp if you cap your time.  WE ARE SEEKING ROI, NOT A WAY TO AVOID REJECTION.
8. Look at Feedback.  No, it’s not when trendy bloggers think you’re cool (but that’s fun), look at search traffic, bounce rates, etc.   Figure out what it’s taking to get the traffic you want engaged.  See #5.  Every practitioner has something to give, so let’s do it.
9. Link to Good Stuff.  A lot of bloggers don’t link out because they want to ensure they keep the traffic.  OKFINE, but the reason I’m on Bloodhound Blog (and here, etc) is because I could count on the various lists and awards to call the best of the net to my attention.  If you become a Trusted Filter…that’s enough to get traffic.  (See Earth’s most efficient blogger, Dustin Luther, for examples).

There’s no guarantee for success, but this formula is presently working for me.  I made a lot of missteps when I started getting beyond the simple livejournal stuff that started me on this path.  I’ve made tons of mistakes, and had I started with that advice…

Well, my 24 minutes have lapsed.

Chris Johnson trains Loan Officers at LoanOfficerSurvivalTraining.Com.