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I saw an event that was scheduled not too far from where we lived. The people who were speaking and promoting the seminar had what appeared to be really good content about being successful as mortgage originators. The audience was to be made up of very successful mortgage originators, even at the same time that I was going through the struggles. They were more in the purchase transaction side, which I never knew anything about. It looked good and it felt good—the only problem was it was too expensive and we couldn't afford it. When there's a will, there's a way, so we figured a way to attend.

The event was amazing. There were a lot of great people. We heard great content and new tactics for approaching the market. Before attending the seminar, I didn't know there was another way to make it in the mortgage business and we found out that there was indeed a better way. We met people who were very successful even in the down market. The event promoters offered a coaching program for mortgage originators. It cost about $2000 per month, and with little money coming in at the time, it wasn’t affordable. I said, "Well this is all I have. I'm the provider for the family. I need to figure out a way to keep us afloat. This will be my degree in mortgages." We figured out a way to do it: we put it on the credit card. That was my first experience of getting into coaching. I wasn’t a huge success right off the bat. To be really, really good when you're involved in coaching, you have to be a really humble student and fully surrender. You have to be very open to suggestions and ideas. You have to not ask a lot of questions—simply do everything and anything the coach tells you and learn from that. I was a little bit of the opposite. I asked too many questions. I didn't implement enough and fast enough.

During my first year of coaching, I was still struggling but finally, when I let go of everything and just said, "Okay. I'm going to let go, I'm going to give in," and just became a humble student, that's when things turned around for me. I followed my coach's advice. I learned that when somebody teaches you something, the speed of implementation is the number one determining factor of your success—or your failure.

Since that time I've had four or five coaches in my life. I like adjusting, meeting new coaches, and getting different perspectives. I'm also in a mastermind group with people who aren't in the mortgage business who are helping me with social media. Right now two different people in two different industries are actually coaching me—that's how much I believe in coaching.

I like to give back as much of what I have learned to other people to help them grow in a lot of areas of their life, not just in business, but also in personal development. Overcoming obstacles is a great way of improving yourself and learning. Big breakthroughs typically happen after a breakdown. I've learned so much through my experiences, my trials, and my labors. My failures, my setbacks, and my obstacles at the time were horrible, but looking back, I can see how they were great because of what I learned and how my perspective changed. I've helped some people increase their income by 300% and others increase their production while going from seventy hours a week to forty or forty-five hours a week.

One of the most important things to realize is that you have to self-generate your own mortgage clients. The biggest obstacle I see for loan officers, whether they are new or experienced, is in making the initial contact. No matter what you are selling, there are four parts to a sale: initial contact, building rapport, closing, and following up. It’s the same in the mortgage business. You have to get out and meet people, get in front of actual potential home buyers or current homeowners interested in refinancing, and you have to get exposure with different referral partners, specifically real estate agents and builders. Even experienced people need to concentrate every single day on client acquisition. I ask myself every day, “How can I get my name and my services in front of more people who need my services?”

A big part of success in sales, not just mortgages, is having the right mindset. The mind is one of the most important things you have. The good thing is you can feed it whatever you want, but if you don't feed it, somebody else will feed it. There's a lot of negative news and negative attitudes in the world. If you pay attention to all that, you won’t be focusing on what you need to do to build your business. One of the most important things that you can do is to develop yourself in all areas of your life and have a great balance. That rolls into your professional world very well. Work on developing great purposeful thoughts, goals, visions, and plans for yourself.

I suggest all of us have our own vision statement and goals for both personal and business life. I’m big on planning. For example, I have action plans, battle plans, and strategic plans. I'm looking at my plans every day and I adjust them as needed. That's part of working on improving my business. Most people work in their business, but a lot of the magic happens when you work on your personal development as well as your business. The typical daily activities, like prospecting, are really just working in your business. When you are thinking about how to develop new marking plans or figuring out where you can get new sources of leads, you’re working on the business and planning how to improve it.

I have developed a morning ritual of undisturbed time to focus and work on self-improvement. I get up very early so I can have self-time when everyone else is sleeping and I'm not going to be distracted. I like meditating right after I get up for about twenty-to-thirty minutes. Next, I read my affirmations and my goals and review my vision statement. After that, I feel that I am ready to go out for a positive, successful day.

The starting point of the four-part sales formula is making contact and I use old school ways of doing it. I break down my activities in making contact into seven key areas and have metrics or goals for each. Number one is meeting people face-to-face. My goal is to meet fifteen people face-to-face every week. I generally do this with three people per day, but it needs to end up at fifteen by the end of the week. These contacts are applicants, potential homebuyers, business partners, real estate agents, or builders. These people are all connected to other people who can refer me business.

The next key area I call “breaking bread.” Building relationships is part of building rapport, the second step in the sales process. The best way to build relationships and rapport, especially with business partners who might be referral sources, is by breaking bread. This can be as simple as having coffee or it could be a lunch, happy hour, or dinner. I want to have at least five break-breads per week or once a day. The third one is a phone conversation. You need to leverage the phone because you can have a lot of conversations every day. I take what I learned during my brief telemarketing career where I was making 500 calls a day and I still make a lot of calls. I try to have at least twelve phone conversations a day or at least sixty conversations a week with clients who need an application or advice on a mortgage, referral partners, business partners, past clients, and prospects.

My fourth area is to send out old-fashioned, handwritten thank you cards. Almost no one does this anymore and it goes a long way to stay on top of mind. My metric on this is two cards per day or ten in a week. I use these to send a nice message to someone I just met, a new applicant for a loan, or a referral who was sent my way. I don’t like the computerized cards so many people use today because they’re just not as personal.

The next activity is to attend at least one networking event per week where I can meet people. This can be a typical networking event or it could be a happy hour, an open house, or a class someone is teaching that my prospects might be attending. I also teach a class once a week. It’s easy to give instructions, such as purchasing tips for first-time homebuyers, VA loan eligibility for veterans, or time management for agents to different groups who need our services.

We all have our own ideas about how many of each of these activities we need to do. The key is to establish metrics for yourself and make sure you are accomplishing what you set out to do. This is where tracking and measuring become important. I can all but guarantee that if you establish some metrics for yourself like I have done, that you won’t achieve your goals unless you also track every one of these activities on a daily and weekly basis. What you measure gets done.

My seventh key area is tracking leads and deals that I get. My goal is to get at least ten leads a week, minimum, so I track that. That means referrals from past clients, referrals from agents, people who find me on my website, and how many deals I get a week. These are the old school ways of doing business, but they are the basics, the foundation for any business. From there we have the new school strategies that incorporate technology, blogging, videos, emails, website, and social media. That's the new school, but I believe the foundation has to be in place first. Once the foundation is in place, you can add components with technology.

Loan officers should develop a couple of lists of people who are frequent referral sources, feeding deals in your direction. The idea is to focus on communication efforts on the people on these lists. I suggest the first list includes fifty top real estate agents who are likely to refer business to you. The second list should be fifty other people including past clients, business professionals, and service providers who send you business. You can have a really good year and a really good career just by taking care of those one hundred people. If each person on that list just refers to you two transactions the entire year, that's two hundred transactions—a very good year for most originators. All you have to do is take care of these people. You’ve got to know their birthdays and their interests. You need to check in with them, you have to call them, break bread, and send mail to them.

I think that being very tight with your schedule is a huge component of mortgage business success. We all have the same twenty-four hours every day but we can’t manage how they fly by; we can just manage how we use the time. We need to have a really good grasp on time and how time works. What we can do is establish and manage the important activities every day, week, and year. Without a good grasp of time and important activities, we’re not likely to be conscious of time, and without a schedule to work from, it will be very difficult to succeed. Because of all of the daily things that arise and surprises that come up, it’s very easy in the mortgage business to get off track and into a reactive mode. Once we are operating in a reactive mode, it's tough to be doing the most important activities like prospecting for new customers.

The first thing you need to do is start your weekly schedule—Sunday through Saturday—with a blank canvas. Fill in the blanks of when are you going to get up in the morning and when you are going to do your morning routine. Put it in a calendar every single day. While some people get up at 5:00 a.m. or 6:00 a.m., I get up at 4:00 a.m. The time doesn't matter; it's just that you need to have consistency and know what you're going to do when you get up. Next, schedule your personal time—time alone to improve yourself and workout or exercise time. The next phase is to schedule other personal time like family time and a date night.

Then schedule prospecting time. This is a critical part of the week and you need to block out the time on your calendar as reserved for prospecting. This includes all the sales activities I described earlier, like meeting people, breaking bread, telephone calls, networking, and others. I believe that if you are focused on success as a mortgage professional you need at least four hours a day, five days a week, devoted to prospecting. That's twenty hours per week. My personal schedule has me prospecting for five hours per day—two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, or twenty-five hours a week.

Most of us in the mortgage business don't have to punch in and out, so people tend to work whenever they want. I don’t think that is a good practice and people get sloppy if they don’t keep a routine. I believe you have to have structure and a schedule for when you start your day and have a structure for when you end your workday.

I read a lot of books to expand my mind. I ask people this all the time, "Do you want a fifty-two times advantage over your competition?" Everybody I ask that question always responds with a “yes.” I say, "Great, then read a book a week." The average American reads one book a year.

People look at books differently. The very wealthy people look at a book and they ask, "How can I get one great idea from this book to make my next million?" The average American looks at a book and asks, "How can I find this book cheaper on Amazon?" It's the same book but it's a different perspective depending on who is reading it. I look at every book as an opportunity to get an idea or two that I could incorporate in my life or in my business and it's drastically changed my outlook, direction, and success.

This business takes time to generate enough customers to have traction, so I advise to be patient. As a loan officer on 100% commission, you do have to be in a position financially where you can support yourself for at least six-to-nine months. Stay patient and do the right activities over and over. Focus on the activities, not the results, in the beginning. A lot of people focus on the results, but if they don't get the results quickly enough, they get very frustrated.