Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: You're listening to selling the dream. This isn't an interview, and we're not journalists, but each week we'll ask our guests to open up and share their secrets to business success. Let's have a conversation and have some fun.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: You everybody. Ken Jordan here with another episode of selling the Dream. Of course, I'm joined by my co host, Joe Ardell from Carlsbad, California. Joe, what's up?
[00:00:38] Speaker C: What's up, man? Living in Carlsbad, California.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Living in Carlsbad. From Philadelphia, from Delaware county. Living in Carlsbad. Can't forget on the other side of this glorious country I want to bring in. Our guest today is a mortgage leader by the name of Bill Mervyn. Bill was introduced to me by mutual friend Jay Duran. Jay, if you're listening, I appreciate the connection, as always. Bill is a 19 year veteran in the mortgage business, branch manager for NJ lenders, born and raised in Levittown, and from all indications, a pretty good guy. We still got a little ways to go before we're really making that judgment, but from all indications, a good dude. So, Bill, thank you very much for joining us today.
[00:01:23] Speaker D: Yeah, thanks for having me, Ken and Joe. I'm looking forward to chatting it a.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: I can't remember where I heard it, but human instinct to be attracted to sports in general, especially sports, the highest level, the professional sports. These players train so hard and they work so hard to approach perfection. And I think that instinctively, intrinsically, we all have that connection with infinite wisdom or God or the universe or whatever your idea of perfection is. And I swear sports, for most people, gives you that glimpse of what perfection might look like because they work so hard and do such great things. And I think that's why we're all attracted to sports. I think that's why people are attracted to art and that's why people are attracted to music.
When you hear something or see something that's that close to perfect, it's very attractive. So that's kind of my thoughts on sports. And that's why I love it.
[00:02:26] Speaker D: That's why I love talking about.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: That's why I love watching it. That's why I love playing it. Bill, you played sports growing up, didn't you?
[00:02:31] Speaker D: I did, yes. Tell us about, uh. I did football, wrestling and lacrosse. I mean, I did soccer when I was very young, but yeah, I played sports twelve months out of the year. And for me, it was a big part of my identity, maybe too much so, some would argue, because when I got knocked out of sports with an injury, it threw me for a loop, because so much of who I thought I was at the time was wrapped up in that.
But there's something about just winning, right, when everybody's left it all on the field, so to speak, or on the mat or whatever, that just.
I don't know, there's something special about it, just really just putting your all into it. We know that even though it's six minutes for wrestling or 60 minutes for football, and however long the lacrosse games were, that it's all that preparation and everything that goes into it, where the games are won and lost.
I always loved it, and I think a big part, I've carried a lot of that over into the business world in terms of how I approach business.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Isn't it amazing how athletics or playing, competing, let's just say competing in a sport at any level higher than middle school? I think that the lessons that you learn, they translate so well into sales and entrepreneurship.
[00:04:15] Speaker E: Right?
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Joe, you played lacrosse at a pretty high level, right?
You ever remember a time where you literally thought you didn't have anything else in you and where you thought this was it, the game was over, and then boom, just one little thing happens. All of a sudden, the trajectory of the game changes, or trajectory of your career changes. I mean, it's so relatable to what we're doing right now in this industry where we're just fighting and fighting. Bill knows, and Joe is an know. You're just fighting and fighting and fighting. And even when you feel like you're losing in the moment and you keep going, all of a sudden good things start to happen.
[00:04:56] Speaker C: So I think that the beauty of sports and how it relates to anything like entrepreneurship or any goal that you set, is that a.
It's so boiled down. There's a time limit on it. So there's a season, there's the time to the game. There's all of this stuff that has a finality where you can actually see a direct correlation between the work you put in and the result that you get. So I start my training camp or I start my fight camp or whatever this day, this is when the fight is going to be. This is when the game is going to be, and then all of that leading up to it gets the result. So that's how business is. But the difference is there's no finish line, so it keeps.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Unless you make one.
[00:05:46] Speaker C: Well, yeah, but there's plateaus, because once you get to one, you want to get to another. So that's why, for comprehension's sake, people can relate to sports. Because they know, okay, if I work here, I'm going to get this result and so forth, where, when it becomes the life goals and things like that, if you don't have that, as you mentioned, if you don't have the finish line, you don't have the benchmark or set those types of goals and then achieve them and move on, then people just get listless or they get tired or frustrated or think that the result isn't coming and then they move on to something else. So I think that that's where, if you've played sports, you have that mentality. You understand that there's consistency. And then when your inspiration wears off, that's where your discipline and your consistency sets in and that's how you can get to where really where you want to go. And that's how it's helped me. And I've noticed that even more so with some of the new businesses I've launched and setbacks you have and so forth. And the thing that's crazy is you're not fired up about them every day and it's the day that you're not fired up. Is that when you just need to go, all right, well, turn off the brain and just go with the schedule that I set up and the consistency. And when you add up all the little pieces and you look back, that's when you've accomplished something great.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: When you're talking to your loan officers or the people you're leading, the idea of goals has to come up.
[00:07:10] Speaker E: Right.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: It's a fundamental component of any success. And obviously you've been very successful.
I leave your accolades off of our introduction, but you've been doing very well in the mortgages business for a long time.
How do you go about setting your goals? And more importantly, what are some of the most key components to your goal setting strategies?
[00:07:34] Speaker D: Well, some of this is, well, I mean, let's not assume where anybody's coming from, but what's that old saying?
Goals without a plan is just hopes or whatever the saying.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I know what you're getting at.
[00:07:50] Speaker D: Or wishes.
First of all, I start from the place of if your goals aren't at least a little bit scary, then you need bigger goals.
And I'd say as well that one thing that I have worked on and I try to instill in my team is as you hit, I remember my first big month, so after the whole mortgage meltdown and then in 2010, I had a really great month kind of coming back and I remember just this euphoric feeling, but I also remember this feeling like, I don't know how to explain it. I'll do my best, but wow.
[00:08:37] Speaker E: Right?
[00:08:38] Speaker D: I got so excited about it.
And then in the same way, maybe like somebody walking on a tightrope who looks down, right. And the second you look down, you take yourself out of the moment, things go badly.
[00:08:52] Speaker E: Right.
[00:08:52] Speaker D: Go poorly. And I didn't get back to that mark for many, many years.
For me, I think a lot of it is psychological in that if I allow something to feel so big and I get so excited about an accomplishment, then I think subconsciously your mind's like, well, I don't deserve this.
[00:09:14] Speaker E: Right?
[00:09:14] Speaker D: Or this was so exceptional that then I naturally felt like, well, if this is that exceptional, then it takes an exceptional month to get there, or all.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: This exceptional person, which I'm not.
[00:09:26] Speaker E: Right?
[00:09:26] Speaker D: Yeah, maybe that was what was unsaid and what I just said.
And then as 2015 16 is when I really started to kind of hit my stride and I started to actively push against that, right? So when I would have those big months, I wouldn't allow myself this grand, like, go out and celebrate or whatever that looked like, or to get overly excited. And I tried to actively push that down and kind of embody the feeling that, no, this is me. I deserve this all along. This is the value that we bring to our clients. And I think that then that allowed me to kind of hold those things in place and that becomes then the baseline and then stretch that goal up further. But so I feel like that's the one thing, is that actively working on kind of feeling like when you hit these big goals that this isn't something extraordinary, that this is ultimately what you should have been getting all along. And now the market's catching up and realizing the value that you bring. So that's one thing. I haven't been perfect with it over the years, particularly last two years where it was just like, well, 2021, right? Where it was just like it was tough to even project because of how much abnormalities was going on in the market. So I got a little bit away from my goals. But in a perfect world, I'll set kind of three year goals of kind of where I want things to go.
And then ultimately, I think breaking things down by the quarter in more smaller chunks because it's within those kind of, let's call it quarters for right now that you're able to kind of identify the key things that are going to move the needle towards those longer term goals.
[00:11:26] Speaker E: Right.
[00:11:27] Speaker D: And then you can kind of reassess that on a regular basis.
I've had a habit in the past of wanting to take on the world all at once and get a bit of paralysis in that by trying to implement too many things at one time and then not doing enough of them at a high enough level. And really smart gentleman that I know and a guy I did some coaching with as a mentor, not as my coach, Caleb the grand, who just kills it down in, you know, where literally he'll pick one, maybe two things per quarter and then just absolutely crush that before moving. Execute the shit.
[00:12:09] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:12:10] Speaker D: And that's something that I have not in the past been as good at. But yeah, I think that it's about setting, I think, a longer term goal in terms of what you envision your business to be a couple of years into the future.
And I try not to get too caught up in market conditions. I mean, you can't ignore market conditions and that will obviously impact your goals. But I try not to get too caught up in that because of course we can't control that.
[00:12:37] Speaker E: Right.
[00:12:38] Speaker D: And then I think what's important is then identifying the individual things within your business that you can control that are going to move the needle towards those goals and then checking in somewhat regularly on those things to make sure that you're making progress on them.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: It's funny because all the analogies, right? Checking in, seeing if you're making progress. That's the scoreboard, right?
If you're of the mindset when you're setting your goals, of setting a time bound, right, quarterly, half a year, annually, whatever it is, that's your clock, right? That's your game clock. And I think the people that the most successful, especially when it comes to goal setting, are the ones who honor that clock and treat it like a countdown to the end of a game, right to the end where you don't get another shot at that particular goal, you can regroup, you can. Okay, now what are we going to do for next quarter? We're going to readjust, we're going to iterate, we're going to make some changes. Your quarter, honor that quarter, man. Treat it, respect it and honor that time frame that you set out to accomplish the goal. It's not life or death, but honor it, man. Don't go soft on your time frames, right. I think that's a big takeaway there. And the market is never going to save you or break you, right? That's another one that you got to control what you can control, especially now, the market is not going to save you. But if you're smart, it's not going to break you either.
[00:14:07] Speaker D: No, that's a very good analogy. Yeah, I'd say that's very true. Right. It can impact things, but it's not going to be, at the end of the day, people are going to be buying homes, people are going to be financing their home, and there's going to be winners that are going to be capitalizing on that. And it's our responsibility to put ourselves in a position to capture as much as possible that selfishly and then kind of the opposite of that, be there to help. I find that during challenging markets is when I feel like in every market, but certainly in challenging market, that's when people need us the most to be at the top of our game and giving them advice and guidance through it.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: Without a doubt.
[00:14:55] Speaker C: Well, that's the whole, I mean, time is the ultimate scorekeeper. Because think about it this way, if I told you I made a million dollars, right? Let's say I said I made a million dollars this month, that's a lot more impressive than me telling you I made a million dollars in my career.
Like Ken said, if you don't have that in mind, then there's nothing to compare it then. You know, we had a guest on a couple episodes back and it stuck with me. What he said, it's not what you do one time, it's what you do over.
That's.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: That was Arthur.
[00:15:37] Speaker C: That was Arthur. And that's stuck with me since he said that because I would always say a broken clock. Right. Twice a day. And if you kind of merge those two together, if you can shorten the time that you get your success and then you can elongate the time that you are continually really, that's what you should be looking at.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: You know what's interesting about what you said, bill, with the picking one thing or picking two things per know, someone might look at that and think that's short term thinking.
[00:16:10] Speaker E: Right.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Because you're only looking at one focus for one short period of time, a quarter. But the reality is, if you're really thinking long term, if you know you're going to be in this business 40 quarters from now, right. Then you got 39 more quarters coming after that to implement the next idea. Right. And you don't have to, as they say, eat the elephant all in one bite. Right?
Yeah, I like that you brought that up because I think that's important for people to hear.
[00:16:40] Speaker D: I think also, if it's in the absence of any sort of long term planning, that argument would carry more weight. But I think if you have a longer term plan and you see where you want your business to go, you can then start to break down the different things that it would take to get there. And the picking of the one or two things isn't necessarily meaning that you're ignoring the other items. It's just that you're assessing in that moment of time which ones are going to have the greatest impact, and then focusing on them and then reassessing. We'll stay with the quarter reassessing them, which are the next ones. So it's within the context of a larger plan, but that at those moments in time, there's limitations to exactly how much that you can push through successfully and do it the right way.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: I want to shift gears real quick.
Two truths and a lie, Bill, lay it on us. Give me two things that are true. Give me one that are lie, and anybody listens to the end of the podcast, they'll be blessed to know what the truth is. But give me what are they?
[00:17:46] Speaker D: All right, so the first one is that I've been married 21 years and I have five children.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:17:54] Speaker D: The second one is that I took an awesome family vacation this past summer to Jamaica with my family and took two weeks off.
And the third one is that I was a state champion wrestler when in high school.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Awesome. Two truths and a lie. When you get to the end, you'll hear what the truth was. Now, we got to be careful not to talk about this stuff.
[00:18:25] Speaker D: We were getting close.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: We also, at one point, had a body language expert, and I think I nailed it based on his body language. I'll keep it to myself, but I'm pretty certain I know which one's the lie.
[00:18:40] Speaker D: I'm not going to take that bet, because I think you probably did.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: We did have a body language expert on, and it was a great episode. I haven't listened to it in a while, but she was basically talking about nonverbal clues as to whether or not somebody was lying, and Joe completely had her.
Like, there's no way you got five kids.
And it's true. Joe has five kids, too. Oh, bro. See, that's. Yeah, look, it doesn't matter. If they're still listening, then they just earn, right?
[00:19:13] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. I will say this, I haven't lost a game of poker since that time.
[00:19:19] Speaker D: So I got to go back and watch that one.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Good one. We had some fun with her.
So talk about, I want to go back to. The three of us are very similar in our place of origin.
[00:19:33] Speaker E: Right.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: I think growing up in Levittown, I grew up in upper Derby. Joe grew up in Broomall, in Delaware County. I think we all came from relatively humble beginnings.
Does that still play a role in who you are and your drive? Have you left that behind, Bill? Or tell me about kind of your upbringing and how it translates into your drive today.
[00:20:00] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:20:01] Speaker D: God help me if I lose it, too.
We always had what we needed, but I grew up in a middle class family.
I wound up going in high school to Pennington Prep, but I got in. You don't get sports scholarships in high school. But I certainly got some accommodations in terms of aid and assistance. So I went to school with a.
[00:20:27] Speaker E: Lot of.
[00:20:30] Speaker D: Wealthy individuals.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: I'm going to have to edit this. I didn't know you were so privileged. We have to pick.
[00:20:36] Speaker C: I got kicked out of Devon Prep freshman year.
[00:20:40] Speaker D: No, I mean, I didn't pay much to go there and through a lot of assistance and things like that, but it definitely colored. I look, and at the time, as a young man, you're a young adult, whatever you looked at, and in some ways, you were envious of some of the things that some of these other folks had.
My first car was a Ford Escort station wagon, nice baby blue with wood paneling on the side. And a lot of my peers had new mercedes and new bmws and things like that. And at the time, I remember having some envy about that.
[00:21:30] Speaker C: That guy had a car, KJ.
[00:21:31] Speaker D: I had a car.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: Maybe I'm the odball out here.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: I'll tell you what, Bill.
My mom had a brown station. I was allowed to drive wood paneling. It was a 1988 Pontiac freezeian. This thing was nasty looking around, though. Got to take what you can get.
[00:21:51] Speaker C: I had a squin with a banana seat.
[00:21:54] Speaker D: You win.
But I actually look at it now, and I think that I had the advantage, right, because it kept me hungry, right? I remember I have a good friend, Jason Jordan, and my first book I ever read on business was think and grow rich.
And I've always kind of taken a lot of what's in that book to know. We used to go up to Barnes and Noble, up by the Oxford Valley mall, and know wouldn't buy the books. We would just read them and just sit there and talk about business.
I remember at points in high school when I first. Well, actually, it was right after high school, I started wanting to get into real estate, and I would get the best suit that I could get from my father's closet, and I would go over there and we would just sit at his mom's kitchen table with the newspaper, like, making hot calls and just trying to stir something up.
I just always knew I was going to find a way to make it right. I didn't know. Whatever that means. It means different things to different folks, but I didn't know how I was going to get there. I didn't know what the vehicle was going to be. I knew I was just going to do the same thing I did in sports and other things growing up, and I was just going to put my head down and I was going to find a path. And I think that just having a desire for more, right, and. And again, not coming out of a place of significant need, but just seeing what was possible in the world, I've always had that kind of unquenchable kind of burn inside of me to want more and to achieve more and to become more.
It's funny because I think about this with my own children, right? So I have a handful of children. I won't let the cat totally, I'll leave. It's already out. I have a handful of children that are young, older, right. And in a range between 16 and 20.
And they were through some really tough times as I was trying to kind of come up in real estate and mortgages. And then I've got younger children that are seven through nine, and they've had a much different life.
And as a parent, on one hand, you don't want your kids. I don't want my children to suffer or to want or to need, but yet I wonder whether, and I think that not in a way that they're buried under the weight of it, but sometimes the older ones think like, man, those younger guys got it easy.
[00:24:43] Speaker E: Right.
[00:24:47] Speaker D: But I try to help them reframe it. I think maybe you're the lucky ones, right. I think so much of people that really have a burden and a desire into them to achieve more and to kind of go for it, come out of a place of either brokenness or come out of a place of want.
And I think while not necessarily a prerequisite, I feel like it certainly is helpful.
[00:25:11] Speaker E: Right.
[00:25:12] Speaker D: So it's like, how do you give your children enough of that so that they still kind of have those life lessons and things that kind of build character but still shield them at the same time from having to go through some of the hell that I went through coming up.
But, yeah, it's definitely a big part of me and my character and who I am today, and I pray that I never lose touch with it.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: I'm going to comment on that.
Something you just said hit me. And it's the how. When you are hyper focused on how, I think you hold yourself back. I think it's like breaks, man. Like you said, you didn't know how, but you just knew you were 100% intentional about making it. Whatever that means for you, right? Whatever that means for anybody. And you never cared how you were going to do it, right? Because if you focus on the how, there's so much you can't predict that. You're like, okay, I'm going to do x, y, and z. And then as soon as x and then y doesn't happen, it's like, well, the how all of a sudden matters, and it's not going the way I want. And I think most people quit. Most people quit because their how is too much part of the focus and not enough?
[00:26:33] Speaker C: They don't even start. I think most people don't start because of the how. I think that analysis paralysis, or call it what you will, but I just had a conversation with a business owner, and he's a top in his field. I don't have to say what he does, but he says, I want to scale. I want to grow this company big and all this. And I was like, you're a craftsman. It'll never happen. You have to step out from being great at what you do and understand that if you hire and you scale, that no one's going to be able to do it as good as you're going to do it and just be a business owner. And we talked about it more, but.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Would you shoot his dreams down, Joe?
[00:27:16] Speaker C: No, I gave him, listen, 90% of all restaurants fail. Do you know why?
Because they're started by chefs that are not business owners. So they go in and they don't run it as a business, and they don't understand all the complexities and the things that will make it not perfect, not the perfect meal, not this. And so they don't move on it. So this is maybe not in that scenario. I'm getting a little bit off course here, but the idea is you just have to hit the fuck it button and go and then figure shit out as you go along. And then that's how you gain the experience to do the business. I think your example, sitting at the table and saying, we're going to do this, I don't know how.
That's it. That's everything that you need to know and everything that you don't know, you'll figure out along the way. And if more people approach business like that, a lot more, they'd be more successful.
Know, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the, that's, that's how business is.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: You know what else is interesting about the how is sometimes it's someone else's.
And I, Joe and I were yellow page ad salesman, Bill, at one time, right? And believe it or not, their how was go door to door with a suit on and a phone book in your hand and set appointments.
[00:28:36] Speaker E: Right.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: And if we just focused on their how, that's what we would have done. But instead we drove a quarter mile from the office, parked the car and made phone calls for about two and a half hours, set five to six times more appointments than anybody else in the office. The afternoon was spent going on these appointments and our close ratio and our productivity was through the roof because it wasn't about how we got the appointment, it was about getting the appointment. And we found out a better way because we weren't focused on the how, we were just focused on the intention. Right?
[00:29:08] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:29:09] Speaker D: And it's funny, I think it's on this topic.
So mortgages just fell apart, 2007, 2008, and talking about being a big kind of believer in the think and grow rich kind of mindset and approach to things. And there was a period, let's call it 2003 through seven, where that was really prevalent in my life, right, where I felt like things were coming together. I kind of set these goals, set these visions kind of broadly, and they were just kind of becoming attracted to me. And I was achieving success in real estate and in mortgages at that time. And then when all the cracks appeared in six and seven, I hit a period in 2008 where it felt like the opposite, right? Like I started to doubt myself. I started to feel like now I started to attract the negative energy and the negative things, and it just all came kind of collapsing down on me. And I had a period in 2008 where I had kind of like on my own checked out, right. I'm done with all this commission, I'm done with because I never had a paycheck in my life in terms of guaranteed paycheck. And I was ready to go, just get an $1112 an hour job, cut my expenses way back, and I'm like, I just need out of all of this. And that lasted. So I went from working an overnight shift at the wood schools in 2008 for like two or three months, making less than twelve an hour for sure. I don't remember exactly, but then, to use the sports analogy, my muscle memory kicked in, right. My reflexes kicked in. Like, I wasn't meant for that. And I went from working that job to then getting hired at Merrill lynch in Princeton in the height of the financial crisis. In fact, I was doing my second interview the day that they were getting sold to bank of America. And so talk about it. I didn't know that that was. So then I got hired there, got my series seven, my series 66. They were talking real tough about gaining market share and all this stuff. Oh, this isn't going to impact us. Everybody else is doing hiring freezes. We're going to pick up all a bunch of great people. But then like four months later, they axed the whole program.
But I fell in love at that time with financial markets. I got kind of involved in kind of a more advisory approach to things instead of kind of more transactional sales that I had been doing up until then. And then after one other pit stop at Northwestern Mutual, mortgage business had settled down, came back into the mortgage business in 2010. But my point was that all of that, to Joe's point of all of the work and all of the different conditioning that I had done related to knowing the direction I wanted to go with things, even when life just socked me, right, and knocked me totally off my feet, I couldn't stay there. And even though I also didn't see the path back at that time to where I inevitably wanted to go, which was, I love the mortgage space, and I thank God every day I got back into it at 2010, but it just kind of kept me on that path, even when my own resources had kind of failed me and it just kind of kept me going.
And if you'd have told me then and you'd asked me to plot a path from there to where I'm at today, I could have laid out 1020 different scenarios, 100 different scenarios, and I never could possibly have thought up a plan good enough to do it right. But I just kept the ball going forward. I just kept pointing the ship in the direction I wanted it to go and eventually found my way. So if I got focused on the how, in a situation where it didn't really feel like there was a how, I would have got lost in it and given up. But my why drove me.
And here we are today.
[00:33:14] Speaker C: I think that kind of plays into our story with the yellow book and then yours. It really speaks to, you have to be careful when you work for companies and you get into their idea of what's going to make you more successful and so forth and a lot of times it's there. Like Kenny said, it's their game plan. But if you work on your own self development and you develop your own set of know, maybe they go along the lines with the job that you're currently doing. But if you improve yourself that way and you have this transferable skill set, then, like, in your case, again, muscle memory kicks in. You train over here. I can take this skill and I can put it into any business, any operation, because these are the foundations of what makes people successful. So I've butted heads with big corporations and the training things they do and get you to drink the Kool Aid, and we're all friends and all this stuff, and that's all well and good for you to make them money because they're training you how to be an employee there, but you really need to step back and say, what do I need to do to better myself to have transferable skills for everything? So thanks for sharing that. That's a good point.
[00:34:29] Speaker E: Awesome.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Bill, right now in our industry, there is a lot of hurting people, right? Production is down 60, 70%. I mean globally when. I mean globally overall in the industry, there are people who are working for less money than they made when they worked a second job in college. And that's not like, I'm not making that up. That's happening right now. What's your advice for the real estate agents and for the loan officers out there that are struggling, that are thinking about, do they get out of the business? Do they stay in the business? What should they be doing right now?
[00:35:08] Speaker E: Great.
[00:35:08] Speaker D: Well, I'll tell you quickly a story that I told. Now, I think this thing has had bigger legs than I even had anticipated in the early innings of it. But one thing I told my team in the very beginning, and you guys may have heard this already, but when it first started and we knew we were heading into a period of decline, I told them the story of two guys that were walking through a path in the woods and stumbled upon a bear. And the one guy looked over at the other guy and saw him bending over and tying his shoes, and he looked down and he said, what are you doing? You're never going to outrun that bear. And of course, the guy that was tying his shoes said, I don't need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you.
[00:35:50] Speaker E: Right.
[00:35:54] Speaker D: I gave them that story and kind of using that, of course, as an analogy of outlasting the folks in the industry, right. And now more broadly or more specifically, I should say so we're in a period of contraction.
[00:36:10] Speaker E: Right.
[00:36:10] Speaker D: There's going to be a ton of mortgage people that aren't going to renew their licenses at the end of the year. We've already seen contraction in the numbers. I think in Pennsylvania they renew the licenses every two years. And I think that that comes up in the spring coming up here in 24. And so I think they're going to see a bunch of people that don't renew their license. So the herd is going to thin.
And so while the pie that we're all eating at is going to be smaller, the amount of folks that are eating at that pie is going to shrink.
While this is particularly painful because it's coming from such of a place of abundance in 2021, these types of cycles are necessary in any industry and certainly in ours, I think, because we attracted, I don't care what I seem like, but I'll just say, I mean, it attracts a lot of people that I think, frankly, don't belong, that don't serve the consumers right. And so when you have those good markets, you need to kind of purge them out from time to time.
I think any good operator during a market contraction is going to focus on the things that they can control.
[00:37:27] Speaker E: Right.
[00:37:28] Speaker D: So that is improving your deliverables.
[00:37:31] Speaker E: Right.
[00:37:31] Speaker D: So in our world, that's the service that we provide to our clients. So I had used to do occasionally without regularity, I would do post closing calls and I would do checking calls with my database. But now we've been religious over the last about nine months. We do a post closing call with every client. We do a six month check in, and then we do annual financial reviews where we're kind of already talking about what is potentially to come in the future and getting in with them and preparing them for that. So that's something that in 2021, I had no bandwidth to be able to put those systems in place.
So we're improving what we're delivering to our clients. And that's just one example.
You just want to up level your systems generally.
[00:38:26] Speaker E: Right.
[00:38:26] Speaker D: And so use these. Tim Brahim is a coach of mine, and he talks his kind of two. According to him, claims to fame were his perfect loan process that he did in terms of having like step by step, team member by team member, a breakdown of what every person is supposed to do to deliver the loans and the experience that they're trying to deliver. And if they ever hit a roadblock, they all would revisit it, update it, and kind of, it was like a living document and his other kind of claim to fame or his strong suit was his database management.
[00:39:02] Speaker E: Right.
[00:39:03] Speaker D: And he will tell you that both of those things were born during really challenging markets, that he took on one of those projects during each of the two major down markets that he was in. And he used that as an opportunity to implement those things into his overall system.
[00:39:19] Speaker E: Right.
[00:39:19] Speaker D: And so that's really the first thing that I would focus on. And then at the end of the day, it's not rocket science. So I'll give another kind of little. There's this guy, Al Granham, who had this Granham system, and I'm going to probably take some liberties and mess up some numbers. He's a northwestern guy and he ran or helped build agencies over a number of decades, to my understanding, and in all sorts of regions. So the point being is this wasn't something that was specific to one area or one period in time. And he had these numbers.
[00:39:55] Speaker E: Right.
[00:39:55] Speaker D: You make this many dials, you have this many booked appointments, this many kept appointments, it turns into this much production.
[00:40:04] Speaker E: Right.
[00:40:04] Speaker D: And a good salesperson might be able to beat those averages slightly.
[00:40:08] Speaker E: Right.
[00:40:08] Speaker D: But at the end of the day, provided you have a baseline level of skill, at the end of the day, the fact was, it's the activity going in which is going to control the result coming out the other side. And so you could be the best in the world. But if you don't do the activity, and right now when there's going to be less overall transactions, the only thing that we can add as an input is more activity.
And I think that it's very easy to feel productive and stay at your office until nine or 10:00 at night when you know you got to get ten apps out and you're going to get paid on all of them.
[00:40:43] Speaker E: Right.
[00:40:43] Speaker D: You can feel good about yourself, you can stay late, you can go home to the family and say, look at, I did this. We're going to have a great month next month. But when the activities don't have the immediate results.
[00:40:53] Speaker E: Right.
[00:40:53] Speaker D: And when you got to stay to pound those extra couple of phone calls or spend two or 3 hours mapping out something within your process that you haven't been able to get done till now, and you don't see those immediate results and you're getting paid less, it's tough for most folks to dig in to do what they got to do, but that's when it's the most necessary. So increase the activities. We know that at the end of the day, you do the activities, the results will come out the other end and use the opportunity to improve as much about your system and get yourself in a position so that when you come out of sowing season and you get into reaping season, that you're able to pick it up. And I'll just close with. That's where I think the opportunity is. Wherever this thing turns, there's going to be less standing. And if you've gained market share and you've really improved what you're delivering, there's going to be a golden period in the beginning where you'll really just clean up. And then, of course, in the fourth or fifth inning, all those folks will come piling back in and the cycle will repeat itself. So that's kind of my mindset about what's going on right now.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: You just touched on. So if anybody in the mortgage industry is still listening to this at minute 46, congratulations, because you just got a shit ton of gold right there.
Axe sharpening season. Some people call it planting seeds so you can get into that harvest later database. The one thing that really, that my eyes opened up big was productivity. Productivity doesn't leave a residue. I always say that effort, hard work leaves a residue. At the end of the day, you know, if you worked hard, but you don't know if you were productive, you don't know if you're productive because productivity means doing the important but not urgent activities, and you have to track it. You got to track the activities that you're doing, because at the end of the day, you could have worked hard unproductively. And that's a mistake a lot of salespeople make, is they work very hard unproductively because they're not tracking their productive, important, but not urgent activities that we all have to be tripling down on right now, or just not going to get through this cycle and get to that golden era before they all come back in. So that's really good stuff there, man. That was awesome.
[00:43:06] Speaker D: Thank you.
That's it, man. That's what we can all do. And just trust that if you do know, you're going to get the results.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: Joe, which one was the lie?
[00:43:21] Speaker C: Well, I see pictures of five different kids behind him. Let's start there. That's seemingly not the lie.
Did a little research on him. Plus he looks like guys that I train with, so I'm pretty sure that he's a state champion wrestler at some point. And usually when someone goes on vacation, they don't pause and look to the right when they think about where they went. So I want to go with number two.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Was the lie number two. So you did not go to Jamaica Bill?
[00:43:56] Speaker D: No.
[00:43:58] Speaker E: Yes.
[00:43:59] Speaker B: I have five children.
[00:44:00] Speaker D: I've got Nathaniel, Gabriel, and Micah. They're my oldest crew. I always joke around. Micah was born in 2007. So that's the big pause in the middle was when the mortgage and real estate business was collapsing. I know we've talked about that. And then I've got my younger two. After the market settled down, we didn't have a girl, so we've got Seraphina and Xavier, who are seven and nine.
Yes. I was a state champion wrestler in New Jersey because I went to Pennington, as I said, my junior year, and they finally built out the calendar my senior year. Really? Because it wasn't really a wrestling school. And then my senior year in football, I blew my shoulder out, and that was the end of it.
So I was debating on whether I did take a vacation in 2021. It was to Costa Rica, and I was trying to decide.
[00:44:50] Speaker E: Where I was.
[00:44:50] Speaker D: Going to say we went. And so you caught that Joe human.
[00:44:55] Speaker C: Lie detector right here.
[00:44:56] Speaker E: Yeah, you got it.
[00:44:57] Speaker D: I'm not playing poker with you.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: Can't bullshit a bullshitter, right?
I might have to pick your brain on costa rican bill. My wife's thinking she might want to go there sometime soon.
[00:45:10] Speaker D: It's my favorite that I've been to on the west coast, on the Pacific coast there, and it's amazing.
[00:45:16] Speaker C: That is awesome. That is awesome.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: All right, well, this was a really fun time. I'm glad you came on. I hope you enjoyed it. We'd love to have you back. As you can see, we just try and have some fun and share some wisdom and knowledge wherever it pops up.
[00:45:34] Speaker D: I had a blast.
[00:45:35] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:45:35] Speaker D: And I love chatting about this stuff and enjoyed hanging with you guys. So anytime.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: All right, cool. All right, we'll see you next time on selling the dream.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to selling the dream. We know you don't want to miss a single episode, so go subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts, and then make sure to share the show with your friends and leave us a review.
