Welcome to the mortgage game. I truly, truly believe that building a mortgage business, a successful one, is like playing a game. There's winners, there's losers, there's certain things you try. Some of us are playing checkers while others are playing chess. I've had the ability to coach and mentor hundreds of mortgage brokers. I myself built a very nice business.
So now I want to distill all that information, all the things I've learned from that and bring it directly to you in a simple to understand way. I hope you enjoy. Okay, welcome to this week's episode of the Mortgage Game Podcast. West Coast Wiley in the house coming to you live on video now, not just sitting in my truck anymore. We had a good run. We definitely did. If you've listened to the podcast, you get it. So let's get into it.
So this week, I'm going to cover five questions I get asked all the frickin' time. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Keep the questions coming because it allows me to make videos and podcasts and stuff like this. There's probably about 20 questions and I'll get those in other segments. But for this, I've carved out five questions. I get asked all like weekly.
I get asked and I don't mind answering them, but I figure, hey, let's just put them on here on YouTube, on the podcast, and let's go from there. So let's get into it. Number one, Ryan, what database should I use? What type of, sorry, CRM should I use? Ah, that old question. Then the old answer is that the answer you hear everyone says, the one you're going to use. Well, sure. Okay. Yes, I agree. That's a cliche answer, but I totally get it. Cliches work in a lot of scenarios.
I'm going to go a little deeper on that though. Okay. So if I'm brokering and I'm coming back, and so here's my philosophy on this. Like most of the stuff you've been following me long enough, you know, like I don't sit on the fence on shit. I just don't. I go one way or the other and I'll back it up with my reasoning and I'll show you stats and I won't just throw stuff out there and go, yeah, that's what I think.
Sometimes once in a while, but most times I will back it up with information and reasoning as to why I have that opinion. So what CRM would I use? Well, I personally think, before I tell you what I would use, I personally think a lot of mortgage brokers are overcomplicating their business and they feel better about themselves because they have their CRM set up. And they feel like because they have one and they've got some automation built in and you don't need all that.
I'm just telling you, you do not need that. I ran a mortgage business for 12, 13 years and we did not have a CRM. We had an Excel spreadsheet. It's an Excel spreadsheet. And I know a lot of top producers, but that's all they use. It's not connected to anything. It's not connected to a submission platform. It's not connected where emails go out. I always come back to how many deals are you doing? Seriously, we were doing between 100, 180 files depending on where we were at a year.
I ran a spreadsheet and we email marketed out we email marketed out of BombBomb. That was my favorite software to use with video marketing. We could build drip campaigns. You don't need these fancy CRMs. And I know there's ones that say they're simple. And I know there's ones that say, hey, we do this and we do automation. Sure, but you don't need it. And a lot of times you're just putting yourself on this massive learning curve.
You're setting up all these steps in your process that you really don't need. And so for me, my answer is, what CR your language you use? I'm not going to go, whatever one you use. I'm just going to say an Excel spreadsheet. I don't want to pay for something else. And I'm not saying I'm cheap here because I'm not. I'll spend money to make money all day long. But the spreadsheet does the job and you can make it as robust as you like.
spreadsheet does the job and you can make it as robust as you like. And you can't convince me that someone running 20 files a year, 40 files a year, 80, 100, 150, 180, because I live that world, that you need a CRM to do all that and that it actually makes your life easier. Quite contrary. that and that it actually makes your life easier. Quite contrary. Don't believe it. Till proven If someone wants to have a debate on by the reach out to me. otherwise.
that, way, You know where to find I'll me. gladly do that. I just think there's a lot of services out there that are promoting things and they're like, we're hey, going to solve your business. No CRM is going to solve your business. No CRM is going to make your business go from here to here. It's just not how it works. It's like a catalog. That's all it is. It just holds data.
And so you can get the ones where they overcomplicate and it's part of a submission platform because they want you to get on the submission platform. So they build these inferior products to kind of layer around the submission platform so they use the submission platform. You can't go anywhere else and they force you to use it because they get beeps on the back end and they get kickbacks from the lenders.
I'm just going to use whatever submission platform I choose, and I'm going to use an Excel spreadsheet. That's question number one. Okay, question number two. Ryan, how do I know who my avatar is? First off, what is an avatar? An avatar is your ideal client. before Okay, I tell how do you you, know who my avatar is? First what is off, an avatar? An avatar is your ideal client. Okay, before I tell you, how do you know who your avatar is? You need to know what an avatar is.
If I said to you, who's that perfect client you want to work with? Think back to all the clients you've worked with. Who is it? Give them a name, right? Tom and Sally Smith. That was mine. Tom and Sally Smith. So how do you know your avatar? I'm going to explain who mine was, and then I'm going to give you some tips because it's different for everybody. If you are brand new, sorry, I'll explain who mine was.
Tom and Sally Smith, provable income, household income of 250 plus, white collar professionals, appreciated another professional, myself, taking care of their mortgage and other financing situations around their mortgage. White glove concierge style would pay a premium to work with me because I'm never going to be the lowest rate. We're never going to be the lowest rate, by the way. Insured deals, blah, blah. Okay. Yeah. For the most part, uninsured files, we will not be the lowest rate.
So you need to come up with something else. So that was my ideal person, not a price shopper, not a rate shopper. I want someone that appreciate, valued their time, right? And white collar professionals, they value their time. They've got young kids, potentially they're being, they're trying to climb the corporate ladder. They're like, they just don't have time to like go and source all this shit out. And then to realize maybe they didn't know what they were doing.
And they understand someone else who's educated in the skill set and spend time upping their game to have that person in your corner at guess what zero cost maybe a premium on the interest rate but we're going to make that back in other ways that was my avatar so who how do you know who your avatar is well if you're newer to the industry you should not make that decision right now you need to go why you need to go get exposure to a bunch of different deals.
Commercial, residential, B, private, all day, self-employed, A stuff, like everything. You need to go get investors. Go get it all. And then you'll quickly decide probably, I don't know how many files it'll be. It might take you two years. It might take you 30 files. I don't know. You'll start to realize which files feel warm and fuzzy to you that you want to work with. And so this is what I will tell you.
If you are still in the business and you have been however long, you've been in the business for a decent amount of time, five years, 10 years, 15 years, and you don't have an avatar dialed in, you're doing something wrong. And I get it. I get it. I understand. A lot of you, you're trying to take on anything that comes to you right now, especially when times are a little tougher.
Applications are a little harder to piece together, a little harder to get people on the phone to actually see if they'll give you an application. So you're just taking everything. You're scrambling. So my mentality on that is if you're trying to be everything to everyone, you're being nothing. You can't be everything to everyone. You just, it's impossible. It's impossible for you. You might as well be that restaurant.
You know, those restaurants where they have 72 dishes on the nine pages of the menu and you are, you open it and you're like, Oh God, I already know none of this is going to be good. Like you already know versus the place you go and they have like, we have 12 things. They're going to knock out of the park, all 12 things. So you need to figure out who that person is and you reverse engineer where you go find those people. And I get it.
If you do all day private and you do all these things, like think about the logic here for you to know all the guidelines for all those different lenders to knock that out of the park, all the relationships you have to manage with all those different lenders and BDMs and underwriters. It's a moving target in some of those areas with B lenders and privates, and everything's always changing. The A stuff stays a little more of the same. For you to stay on top of all that, that's exhausting.
And for you to be phenomenal at it, even if you get a deal done, let's say A client is who you prefer working but you get with, some B And let's deals. say a client is who you prefer working with, but you get some B deals. And let's say you get it done at a B lender, just because someone gave you an approval doesn't mean that was the right spot for that client. So this happened to me in my mortgage career. I'd get the deal done. EQ Bank, I believe it was.
And I'd compare notes with an actual B person who was a specialist. And they're like, oh no, Ryan, you should have went And here, that's here, why you here. cost your client six Client didn who grand. was a And they're specialist. oh you like, should have no, Ryan, went here. here, here, And that's why you cost your client six grand. Client didn't have a clue. I was like, oh man, damn. So instead I referred out that business. So I could go focus on my avatar, referred out, I took 25%.
And that's what I'm telling everyone I coach to go do is do that. And then it allows me to identify my avatar. I only want to work with the same people over and over. If you're dealing with all three of those categories, I know there's more categories than that, but I'm putting them in those three categories of A, B, and private. You're dealing with three different types of personalities.
You're dealing with three different types of income, documentation, provability, situations, credit scores, all of that. It's just a bunch of shit coming in and you're looking through it all trying to figure your way. Is this the lender? Is that what I want? And it's exhausting and you're never going to knock it on the park. You're never going to be amazing at it.
If you have an underwriter who knows the answers to all of that stuff, there's an argument to be made that you just bring it in, let them sift through it. You handle a discovery call, let them sift through it, and then they place the deal. Sure. To find those types of people, those Swiss army knife underwriters, you're going to have to pay them a lot of money. And B, what type of business are you running? Most mortgage brokers are one man or one woman band shows. They only need so many deals.
Most people want to earn two, 300K a year, work 30, 40 hours a week, call her a day. You're trying to build something bigger and robust and you have opportunities. I get it, totally. But for the majority of the industry, pick your avatar and reverse engineer. So for me, when I said Tom and Sally Smith, and I named it Tom and Sally Smith, where do I find more Tom and Sally Smiths? Well, I need to find people who have access and trust already built up with Tom and Sally Smith.
I'm not going to sit there and try to go directly to Tom and Sally Smith. That's a longer play. Today's social media world, I didn't do social media. Biggest mistake in my mortgage career. But if I was brokering now, I would have that plan in place to put that social media out for those avatars. But my quickest way to get that type of avatar business is to find referral partners who already have it. So is that FA?
Is that accountants? Is it realtors in certain situations, certain cities, certain neighborhoods? That becomes the equation now. So it's a different puzzle I have to solve. The puzzle I have to solve is where do I find my avatar? Because once I find it, my life is easy. I'm dealing with three lenders. I'm dealing with the same situation. Every client of mine is going on the same client journey.
If you have A clients, B clients, private clients, because of how the lenders interact with you and how they price deals and how they want to see the file versus A lenders where you send everything in and then you already know what they're going to come back with. Your clients are going on three different client journeys. That's crazy town. Your staff who might be helping you fulfillment, they're going on three different journeys with you. It's so easy if you just dial in one type of avatar.
And then that's the puzzle piece now. Instead of you learning all the lender guidelines and relationships and sifting through all the different personalities you're working with, that's the puzzle. The puzzle over here is way easier. Just go find Tom and Sally Smith. So that's what I did. There you go. That's number two. Number three, Ryan, what kind of realtor should I work with? I'm going to blow your mind here. Blow your mind. Producing not new agents.
ones, if you're a new agent, Yeah, if you're a broker, mortgage broker, two weeks in, do not go find a new realtor. It's just a waste of time. You only want to work with people who have business. They need to have business. So for it us, we was, needed buyer agents, ideally buyer agents who were doing $150,000 to $500,000 gross revenue. That told me they were serious about their business. They had enough files coming in. They had a database they were working.
They had relationships built in the community. I don't want listing agents. Listing agents, for me, they just do listings. They're on the next one. Their clients aren't typically buying. They are, but it's harder to get in there. Their main focus is just getting the listing, throwing a sign up onto but the it's next harder to one. get in there. Their main focus is just getting the listing, throwing a sign up onto the next one.
Whereas buyer agents, they're continuously working that relationship and all their clients need to be pre-approved before they work with them. Whereas listing agents don't have to be pre-approved. If you're in a listing presentation as a realtor, you're not like, okay, you're pitching just to get the job to put a sign up. And you're not I need to make sure you're going, you're selling my Yeah, pre-approved. Well, home. but what are you doing next? You buying a home?
Like I need to, that's no, not part of their pitch. So I don't want to build relationships with those people because I want the ones that need them to be pre-approved. So I need a buyer agent, $150,000, $500,000. That was for me. So where do you find these realtors? How do you find out if they're producing? Well, this is training we're going to be doing pretty soon in accountability group. But I'll give you some tidbits to it. Go do a Google search.
Search up, we did this last week, search up Regina Realtors, wherever you live. Realtors are going to come up. They're going to have all the reviews there. I would only work with a realtor if they have 10 Google reviews or more. If they don't, that's step one. If they don't, it tells me they don't have their shit together. They're not serious. They don't have enough business. Any realtor that knows what they're doing and is that avatar realtor I want to work with, they've got reviews.
They understand the power of social proof. And then number two, because I would only they understand the power of social proof. And then number two, because I would only prospect realtors through social media, I would also call and text, but I want to align our brands together. And I would be building my brand on social media. And let's just say it's Instagram, I'm going to be building it on. If I was a broker, that's where I would go.
I want to make sure that realtor that has 10 Google reviews also has a brand on Instagram and they are highly active with videos and they're on there all the time and they get it. Because when I reach out to them and they see that I'm the same, already we have something in line. Our brands can support each other. We're in doing things. We have the same morals about our business. I can be like, you understand content's important. I understand. Like, let's do some things together.
So those are the two things I do. Okay. The Google reviews, I search and that, and then you get into how do you prospect? I'm not answering that question right here. Okay. I know you want me to not going to. Okay. That's number three. Number four. How do I know if my brokerage is the right fit? Whoa, loaded question, but I get that all the time. I think a lot of brokers are, A, I think starting to see that the brokerage they're at isn't perfect.
But then on the flip side, I know there's a lot of brokers that are, because business is down a bit, you start trying to point fingers around and you're pointing them, hey, instead of in the mirror, like this guy or this girl, the reason I'm not doing the shit I need to do, I'm going to start pointing out like, what am I getting from my brokerage? And so I'm saying you should do that. You should still do that. But I'm not saying it leave. The grass is not always greener on the other side.
So A, you need to have access to the lenders that you can submit your deals through. If it's Scotia, TD, and a monoline, whoever, you need to have direct access. If you don't have direct access, there's a problem. If you're not allowed to talk to the underwriters, massive problem. It means something's being hidden from you. If you're not allowed to submit your own deals, I get that if you're a newer agent because they want to protect the relationship.
But at some point, if you're doing business and you still can't submit your own deals and it's going through someone else, then there's a problem. Much like if you're not getting access to all the pay that the lender's paying, there's a problem unless you signed an agreement saying you didn't need that. With Scotiabank as an example, you get finder's fee, you get volume bonus, and there's an efficiency bonus that comes out of up to another 10 basis points.
That's paid retroactive on all your files. If you're not getting that, you need to inquire. If it's something you signed on knowingly at the beginning, sure, that's your own fault. But if you didn't know about that, it's sort of been hidden under the rug. Well, there's a problem there. Okay. Also, I like asking questions. So I'm not going to ask questions with people at my brokerage. I'm going to ask questions of people, mortgage brokers, I admire as business models and them as people.
I'm going to talk to them about their brokerage. I'm going to go, what are you getting? What's in your split? What do you get access to? What's your $150 fee or $180 fee or $350, $500 fee? What do you get for that? I'm going to go do some work. And so I'm telling you, this is one of the things that will be your highest and best use of your time is doing some detective work on that level. Because there are a lot of brokers, talk to a lot of brokers.
There are a lot of brokers who are in spots where they shouldn't be. Early in my career, not early in my career, mid-career, doing 40, 50 million. I'm on an 85, 15 split. I didn't know any different. I was like, yeah. I started to talk and they're like, oh God, Ryan, you should be like 90, 10 minimum. And I went and checked and there was a grid and I was supposed to be, but they didn't tell me. And they were waiting for me to come there. And meanwhile, I lost an extra 40K there in commission.
And I was like, this just feels wrong. And I can't even articulate what I'm getting for my And I money. it was my just, own And I can't fault. even articulate what I'm getting for my money. And I just, it was my own fault though. I recognized it. And then I did something about it and I made a switch. And so if your spidey senses start tingling, your woman's intuition starts kicking in, whatever, whatever, whatever.
I'm not saying the grass is greener, but you owe it to yourself to do the due diligence as a responsible business owner. So that's a loaded question from here. How do I know my brokerage is a fit? I can tell you how I know it's not a fit. And a lot of it are those things I said. But I also know a lot of brokers who are staying where they're at on an inferior split and not getting the value they need because their relationship they have with the broker owner.
And they're putting a lot of weight in that. And I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I'm saying that relationship is costing you and the broker owner knows it. They know it. They know you could go across the street and get a better deal and more value for your money. But they're leveraging the taking you out for golf and the fancy stuff and the tickets to this and checking in. They're going, hey, that's costing you an extra 20K a year. So I'll gladly do it.
Okay. Just from my perspective, I get to see all angles. That's pretty cool perspective. Okay. That's number That's number four. And number five, last question for this video, Ryan, how do I get more deals from my database? Ryan, how do I get more deals from my database? There's not a magic pill. There's not for this. There's like a marketing business plan here. This is a plan you have to put into place and then execute and be extremely, extremely diligent on.
But I'm going to give you some things you need to do. So the first thing I always ask people is, okay, and this is in no specific order. Where's your list? Ah, it's over here. Okay. What software do you use to market to your database? Okay. Is that the best software to market? We used BombBomb at the time. We used the VIP club once a month and BombBomb once a week.
Because BombBomb, I don't want an inferior CRM I have because it's attached to my summation platform or it's over here that I want to send out really good looking emails with videos in there where I can build drip campaigns of videos. And I can do it at the click of a button. It's super easy. And I have an app on my phone and they have a widget in my Gmail and I open it. I start recording. Just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Out. Done. I don't want to have to be hosting stuff and this and that. Crazy town. I'm going to use the marketing for your database, which should be once a week, by the way. Just saying. The marketing for your database is where you're going to make the most money. That's where you'll make the most money in this business. It's going to be one or two for you. So you should have the best software to deliver email with the best looking email with the easiest to use.
Why am I going to jam, lose efforts and do something else that wasn't built to do that?
It's crazy, Tim. So A, you need to market to your database and it has to be more than once a month the more you market the more the smtp server is going to recognize that you're a trusted source is going to put you more in their inbox instead of their spam and then the client's going to see you more in their inbox and guess what the more you're in their inbox providing value timing is everything in life and so if you're relying on your one email going out a month, if you're not doing one email a
month, oh God, I don't even know what you're doing. Maybe you're beyond help. I don't know. Probably not. You can always help everybody, but come on. Come on, really? You can't complain. I hope you're not complaining about business and your market's down, interest rates are high, and you can't find deals. Like really? I just shake you. We're not going to do that. So you need to market at least once a week. If you're doing once a month, putting a lot of pressure.
So let's say you have this perfect email you want to send out. It's like, Oh, this email and you fired off your database. Whoa. Did it make it through the inbox? Okay, cool. Step one. Did they open the email? Did they see the email or did it get pushed down their inbox and they're on vacation or they're on your own second page or your way down here or whatever? I never go to a zero inbox. I think that's bonkers when people do that, by the way, but that's so stressful every day.
I just have like, it's always going, right? So what if they missed? Okay. So let's say they saw it. Okay. Did they open it? Was your subject line catchy enough? Was it October newsletter? Who's opening that? Really? Come on. We've got to be better than that. So did they even open it? Okay. Let's say they opened it. Was what you had in there compelling enough? See how all the things you have to get right here? Let's say you got those up to that point. What you said in there, was it
compelling enough? Did it spark an interest? Were you even asking them for something? Or were you just giving them boring market stats about a bunch of shit? And just like, paragraph, stuff on stuff on stuff. And you're just, hey, database marketing doesn't work. Well, yeah, because what you send sucks. Let's be honest. Let's just be real. That's why it doesn't work. Should be value, value, value, ask. Value, value, ask.
If it's not working for you, because you're not good at it, the skill set you need to learn. So let's say they open it and let's say what you said was awesome. Did you have a call to action? What was your call to action? Was it reach out to me if you have questions? That's not a call to action, right? Did you have the big calendar button in there, right? Direct access to your calendar, 15 minute, no strings attached call.
Is that like, you see the, and then what if everything you said was awesome and it made sense, but what if they just didn't need a mortgage at that time, or it wasn't relevant to what you were saying to their situation. But let's say it was three weeks later or three weeks earlier. Well, because you're only emailing once a month and you need to get eight things right for it to line up to show you it was working, you missed the mark and you missed the timing. Timing's everything in life.
So that's why you email once a week, right? Now you take away the excuse of, I didn't get the right timing. They didn't need, no, because I'm always there. I'm always in the inbox. I have to be. So that's one. You're just not doing enough. Then you have data mining. How do you get business from your database? That's the question. Are you mining your database? Are you looking for opportunities with past clients, people you pre-approved, people that clients you did deals with, clients you
did deal with a while ago? Are you looking at their other properties? Are you looking for variable rate spread arbitrage? Are you looking at where poster rates are in the market? And it means IRD penalties are actually three-month interest penalties for fixed rates. Are you looking for people with six interest rate because now you have five available, doing the math, reaching out, hey, I've got an opportunity. Like, are you doing that? That's how you do it.
So more email marketing in a really good platform to email. And that's specific to getting business through email, not something that's jammed into some other funky CRM you're using, trying to make it be a Swiss army knife for all the things because you're just too cheap. Don't do that. You're going to make more money from this than you will from a CRM, hands down, a marketing CRM. And then more of it. And then are you mining your database with sniper rifle opportunities?
And then last but not least, list management. Are you managing your database? What I mean by that is, are you constantly adding the email addresses in? Like weekly, the bare minimum monthly? Are you going around everywhere in your world looking for these email addresses and exporting them out through CSV file and uploading them in and keep on topping up your master list or even having zap set up to come from your calendar over your submission agent over.
If you're just having from calendar over to master list, you're missing out because the people are doing an application and there's a co-applicant. You're not going to get that on the calendar. So you need to have it coming from your submission agent. And if you don't have that zap set up, that's okay. That's cool. Then you need to just go in and have a calendar reminder to go do a CSV export, CSV export out of there and then upload it to your master list.
So you should have ongoing list management. So between ongoing list management, more marketing, using a really good platform and database mining for sniper rifle opportunities, that's how you get business out of your database. I know that because I was the king of doing all that. So that's the answer to that question. So that's it, kids. That's all I got for you this week. There's more to come. Keep tuning in.
If you like what you're hearing here, you are on YouTube, subscribe more to the channel, please. We love that. It gives me fuel to fire, keeps me going. Otherwise, we'll see you next week on the Mortgage Game Podcast. That's it, kids. Peace out.