78: The #1 Predictor of Rapid Success

Welcome to the 10 Loans a Month podcast, where mortgage brokers become business owners. And now, your host, Scott Peckford.

Hey, Broker Nation. Welcome to the Aller Mortgage Brokering Podcast. Today I'm going to do another 10 minutes a month series. This is a tactical podcast produced every week and I'm your host, Scott Peckford. Today I'm going to share with you the number one predictor of rapid success for mortgage brokers.

And I've been coaching mortgage brokers now for the last five or six years. And I've always been interested in, is there certain personality traits or characteristics that predict success? And I can say personality-wise, I've met every type of personality that have been able to be successful.

There's one characteristic that I see in mortgage brokers who have success, but not only success, they have it extremely rapidly. How do they grow so quickly? They all display this. What I'm going to do, I'm going to do a little differently this episode. I'm actually going to share with you three examples.

from this and then i'm going to share with you so i'm not going to actually tell you what it is until i go through these stories these are from coaching clients and from personal experience then i'll explain to you what it is all right so as i said i'm going to give you three examples of mortgage brokers who have rapidly growing their mortgage business. And I'm going to get you to see if you can figure out what the...

key characteristic is. All right. Example number one is from Denise Lafonboze. She's a mortgage broker who I initially met when I did my first $25 million blueprint. More on that later. And she was a new mortgage broker and the program was designed specifically.

for people that were already doing 10 plus million a year. She was brand spanking new. She's like, let me in, let me in, let me in. I promise you I have drive. I will do it. I'll do it if you let me in. I reluctantly let her into the program.

And she completely blew my mind with how quickly she grew to mortgage business. And within a couple of years, I saw, I think she's doing 50, 60 million. And she came from no real estate background. So she didn't have any family that was in real estate. She didn't have any of the advantages that some people have. And.

One of the things that I noticed about Denise is when she gets an idea, she executes on it extremely quickly and then actually made her coach. So she was so great at growing her own business. She's now a coach in her 10 months a month academy. But I remember one campaign in particular, remember when COVID first happened and we were like.

Like, oh my gosh, everything just paused. He was looking around like, what do we do? And I always find, okay, at that time we had two options. One, we can't capture market share right now because there is none, but we can capture mindshare. So let's go out and create a Love19 campaign, which was support.

local businesses, promote them because they're all getting hit pretty hard, especially the small businesses. And so I rolled this out on a Friday. I said, hey, guys, I got this idea. It's called Love 19, support 19 local businesses, partner with your referral partners, do some giveaways.

and monday she'd launched it like literally the time between the idea and launch and it wasn't perfect like she said oh there was a spelling mistake in one of the emails but i don't care she just launched it and she had a fantastic campaign added hundreds and hundreds of people to her list

and built out her network during a time when most people were just sitting back on, I don't know what to do. So that's one example. And now she's like a 60 plus million producer. And her whole goal is to try and figure out how to do that in less hours per week. So she's working on reducing her hours by leaning on. team.

And very, very amazing mortgage broker. Second example is another one of my coaching clients. He's actually a broker at our brokerage named Jeff Mudrick. And Jeff, prior to being a mortgage broker, he joined our brokerage in August of 2021. Prior to that, he had funded no mortgages. He was kind of fooling around on social media, trying to figure out what to do with his business. He joined our program. We gave him a blueprint. We said, okay, here's the path you have to follow.

And he executed on it rapidly. So what he did was we said to him, look, we'll show you how to build a list of realtors. Use your network to build your list of realtors. Use that list of realtors. Show you how to build a presentation to convert them into referral partners. And he figured, hey, if I'm going to do this, I might as well go all in.

And in a 30-day period, he did 39 presentations. So it's like literally every day, sometimes three times a day, he'd be doing presentations with realtors. And then in the morning, he would practice before he did them. And Jeff's background.

Again, nothing to do with real estate. He worked with kids with addictions, teens with addictions and decided that, Hey, I want to be a mortgage broker for freedom, which is kind of funny because now he's working harder than he's ever done, but that's all good. So within that first 39 days, you know, he got some referrals from that, but the referrals really started.

to come the next month. The month of September, he did 39 of them. In October, all of a sudden, the dam burst. He did his first 10 mortgages, 165 days. And then after that, the way our brokerage is set up, after we do 10 mortgages with you at 50-50, then you're on an 85-15 split that's capped at 100K. And then he did 100,000 in commission in another 116 days. So he did from the first 10 mortgages, took him 100.

160. The next 100K commissions took them 116. Yeah, so the thing that really helped Jeff is, well, A, he said to me, you know what, I didn't even know how to underwrite. He said, I was out talking to these people. I didn't have it all figured out. I knew that there was no point trying to learn how to underwrite if I didn't have any files to work on. So I had to get the files going. And so.

Jeff knew intuitively, and we coach on this, is that you can be the best underwriter on the planet. If you can't find business, you're going to struggle. And so he knew that that was the thing he had to master. And by compressing the learning in such a short period of time, he got really good really fast.

He got really good at the presentations. He got really good at the communication. And then now he's getting very good at underwriting because he has so many files that he's working on. I think like last month, he funded 13 mortgages in the month of June. So, I mean, now 10 months a month, he's averaging that pretty often now.

awesome right and then so that's the second example so denise and then the last example i'll talk about myself so the very first program i created the 25 million blueprint the one that i met denise in that actually came to me i was in san francisco with my wife she was taking at the sourdough baking institute

I know there's actually a baking Institute for sourdough. She was taking some training there for a week and I was just hanging around on there, just kind of doing whatever. And one of my friends who was a mortgage broker at the time, she called me up and she said, Hey Scott, she was actually a realtor.

and a mortgage broker. And she said, Hey, Scott, I'm at this real estate conference. And, you know, you should do training. Like, why are you not doing training? You know, lots of stuff from the people you've talked to. This was like six years ago. Her name is Sarah Lucia. And she phones me up and I'm like,

It's probably a good idea. Why don't I do that? That's a good idea, Sarah. So literally I sat in a coffee shop. I banged out. Okay. I said, I'm going to create something called the 25 million dollar blueprint. I'm going to basically give a plan for how to get your business to 25 million. I just came up with basically the table of contents and I had an email list.

on the podcast for some time so i started sending with these emails saying hey i'm doing this and i think it was in july i think we sent this out and i said i'm doing it in september and when i had sold something like 30 or 40 000 worth of training i was like holy crap this actually works and i hadn't

written a single line of the training i knew what i was going to talk about i had a pretty good idea but i literally had none of it finished and i was like oh crap now i have to build this thing that i have sold and so it turned out great worked out to you know program that i developed and improved over

time, Denise is one of the people that went through that program. Hopefully, you picked up on this theme. The people that are rapidly successful, and people can be successful slowly, but the ones that go from zero to 10 really quickly, there's almost no gap between ID and execution.

they basically i've got an idea like denise with the love 19 i tell about her on friday like literally i didn't i was like holy crap that was literally most people are just kind of figuring out what to do with it denise had the thing launched and did she have a perfect no did she get better by the time she got to the 19th one of course

did. She got that thing dialed in, but she launched it immediately. Same thing with Jeff. He's like, okay, if I'm going to go in, if I'm going to follow this system that you guys have put together and get in front of realtors, I'm going to just go all in both feet. And I don't have everything figured out on the underwriting. I don't know. everything i don't understand all the lender stuff doesn't matter i can figure that out but i need to get leads first

So here's three things that they don't do. So if you think about these folks that are rapidly successful, they don't get stuck in perfection. So I sometimes see people that want everything to be perfect before they launch. Like I want to know everything. It's got to be perfect before I get this thing launched. It's never going to be perfect.

And even if you think it's perfect, you're going to launch it and realize I need to improve it. So just launch it. I always say launch and learn. That's one of my philosophies in life and just get it going, get the rocket off the platform and you're going to figure out what's working, what's not and make adjustments.

If you get stuck in thinking you're going to make it perfect pre-launch, you never will, which means you'll never be able to improve. They also don't worry about knowing everything. So in knowledge, there's always a gap in knowledge. They talk about this in the military, the fog of war. You have to make decisions even though you don't know what the other side's really doing.

And it's the same thing in business. You're not going to know everything. Jeff didn't know everything. Even Denise didn't know how she was going to do this whole campaign. I sure as heck didn't know how this blueprint thing was going to go. I could have bombed. I could have like, oh, my gosh. But you just have to go anyway. And you figure.

it out as you go one of the things that i found too when i did that program is i would say okay guys this is what i'm coaching on this week and they're like are you going to coach on this scott

And I was like, yes, yes, I am. And I'll be able to do that next week. They actually helped me shape the program, which made it better because as they were telling me things that they were wanting to learn, I would make sure that I put them into the program as we went further along. And then the last thing I find that.

don't do so they don't worry about perfection they don't worry about knowledge and then they also don't get stuck in analysis or researching so i've met some people who literally take you know a year and a half to figure out a crm it doesn't freaking matter Honestly, any CRM work as long as you put the time into learning it. None of them are perfect. You can use a spreadsheet. Heck, you can use like I've seen some very successful mortgage brokers that use a spreadsheet. So you can.

think that what you need is this perfect tool and you can spend all this time researching. Yeah, you got to do some research, but you ultimately have to make a decision and then you just make the decision right. So hopefully you find that helpful. I know that for me, the times that I am more decisive and I remind myself.

to launch and learn that I make the most progress. It's when I get stuck in thinking that I've got to know more, I've got to figure stuff out, that I sit there and nothing happens. And if nothing happens, you don't learn. So hopefully you find that to be useful. A couple of quick things. One, if you're an experienced...

mortgage broker wanting to get your business going, go check out 10lonesamonth.com. We've got some amazing coaches, Denise being one of them, who can help you scale your mortgage business. And two, if you're new or in the mortgage business, go check out rookie2rockstar.ca. It's a specific program.

Jeff went through that program and we can show you how to build a referral-based business faster than anywhere on the planet. I promise you that. Check that out. And thanks again for listening to this episode. This is an I Love Mortgage Brokering production.