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. All right, welcome to Mortgage Game Podcast. West Coast Wiley here, coming to you live, sick, driving to pick up my kids from a cooking class, which is phenomenal. Nine -year -old kid learning to cook. Two and a half hour cooking session every Wednesday. I think that's freaking awesome.
What a great husband that guy will make, let alone just fend for himself. Pretty cool. I'm going to keep this a little shorter, a little tighter, simply being I'm coughing a lot. I'm powering through this. And so I don't want you to have to listen to all that. So instead of this being a 20 minute, 25, it'll probably be a 10 minute. It'll be a little shorter, but that's okay. It'll still be value. We're doing a lot of prospecting.
A lot of the coaching I'm doing, a lot of the mentoring, a lot of the training, a lot of the conversation I'm having. It's all around prospecting. Right. A broker came to me the other day and she's like, hey, I want to retire my husband. I need to double my business, if not more. What do I do? Well, there's no magical pill here. There's no webinar we start running. There's no paid ad program we start running. There's no right.
It comes down to there's only a couple of ways to get business without paid ads. It defaults to content and conversations with people. So prospecting. It always, everything comes back to prospecting. You show me your prospecting plan and what, how consistent you're going to be on it. And I'll show you what your business looks like six months from now. We all know this. Come on. We know this. And if you don't know it, you must've been living under a fricking rock.
So what's the best way to prospect? Well, we can dance around and we can send DMs and we can do that. And a hundred percent, that'll get you there. But most people quit because it takes too long. The quickest way to cut through all the fricking noise. And I did this in my own business, and I know how well it worked, and it didn't go away. But it's pick up the phone. Oh, my God, Ryan. What? Tell me more, Ryan. Is there a course you can sell me on that? What do I do?
Okay, so you pick up the phone, and you call people, and you ask them if they have any questions about mortgages. And then you just have a conversation. But what if they don't answer? Oh, that's where it gets crazy. If they don't answer, guess what? Don't leave a voicemail. I'm going to just lean in. I'm going to tell you a secret. Call them back. Yeah, call them back. Like maybe the next day or three days later, call them back. And then what do you say if you get them?
Well, then you introduce yourself and you say, hey, it's been a while. I'm reaching out. Check it in. Do you have any questions? Do you have any mortgage concerns about your mortgage next 12 months? Anything I can help with? I'm here to serve. I'm just letting you know I'm here. Holy shitballs, Ryan. That's crazy. You should sell that. Yeah, I should. I should. It's Netbar. Yeah. Pick up the freaking phone and call.
There's this broker out in BC I ran into and we got to chatting and she's like, yeah, Ryan. And I'm like, what's your business? And her business was, and I forget the exact numbers, but it was something, hey, my business is 20, 30 million and I hired a coach out of the US and I paid them $30 ,000. I'm 12 months into it now. And my business is at the 60, 70, 80 million mark. It's like double, triple, if not more. And I'm like, so what's the training? Basically just call.
I'm like, so what do you just touch base with people? And there are some scripts here and there, but you can get by without the scripts. I'm like, so how long do you do that every day? She's like two hours. And I'm like, can you have time? She's like, yeah, now I have time. And I hired fulfillment. I have help and blah, blah, blah. And I got really super busy, super fast. And I'm like, so what else do you just call? Anything else? Just call. Ah, interesting. Right. It's one of these things.
I ran a calling company for a while and it worked really well. We got results for people. I called for my own database. It worked. Why did we get away from this? Well, I don't know. I think we go back to people are just really lazier now. Lazier than we've ever been. I think that goes without saying. And I don't know. don't know. Are you just uncomfortable? Are we at the point now? I think we're at the point. So here's the thing.
I was talking to a couple of brokers and I was saying like the difference between that broker I was talking about. She's paying $30 ,000 and making calls for two hours. Guess what the difference is between me just telling you to go do that and me saying, hey, did you do it today? Did you do it today? Did you do it today? And you didn't do it. What's the difference? She had skin in the game. She had $2 ,500 a month being dinged on her credit card in the skin in the game. She's paying money.
A lot of people are just showing up to things where people are telling them to do stuff and there's really not no cost. And so you don't have enough commitment. It's just interesting. It's very interesting. I'm seeing the psychology play out all around me, all in front of me.
The path to applications, quick applications that can close in 30 to 60 days is at your fingertips on that device that you spend so much time surfing the internet with, where you could turn around and instead make money with. And it's just funny, the pain point is not there with enough of you. The pain of being poor. It doesn't outweigh the pain of you being rejected on a itsy bitsy phone call that you're making. And I'm being real here. I'm just cutting through.
And it's like, because I talk to brokers every day about this. And at some point, you just kind of go, I don't have anything else to tell you. You've got all the pieces. It's up to you to go do the work. There's no magical text you can send someone, a DM on Instagram, a video you can make with a value add that you can send. That stuff will work, but it has to work in conjunction with a lot of other things you're doing. And you have to have a long runway.
But if you want to get people having conversations with you, real conversations about your mortgage and about life and about connecting with human beings, then you pick up the phone. Right? Obviously, the calling, you're going to get one out of every three people, you're going to get them on the phone. So you can't call your database once a year. That's asinine. That's fucking crazy. If you're committing to calling, you're calling. And so I'm going to give you the easiest schedule ever to call.
You call once a quarter. If you have 300 people in your database, you divide that by 12, 12 weeks and a quarter. That's 25 people a week. You pick two days of the week. I pick Tuesday, Thursday, 25 calls a week.
for three months then you cycle back through you start at a no way ron yeah you start a day and you work your way down and you call and you do 12 calls on tuesday 12 calls on thursday you have your calendar open and you book any appropriate calls you need where you need to go deeper on a topic with someone in your calendar and you just go boom. And then when you get through the 12 weeks, you start back up a day because one out of three calls, people are going to pick up.
So then you get them next quarter if they don't pick up and then you get them next quarter if they don't pick up. And that's what you do. And that's a regular thing you do in your business like clockwork. And then guess what? You pull up your database and you put all the data you have. We're doing this right now on the team. We're doing this. So you pull up all the data that you have and you just dump it into a spreadsheet and You're going to have maturity dates that are 2020, 2021.
You haven't kept up with data. You're going to have some that are 2028, 2029. You're going to go through and you're going to call every person on that list. And you're going to go, hey, there might be an opportunity to save you a bunch of money on your mortgage. If you've got the current data correct, then you crunch the numbers and you see if there's an opportunity. But if not, you're calling to get correct data. Hey, I remember I closed your mortgage six years ago.
I now offer a service called rate insurance. I'm following up with everybody. Rates are fluctuating so much. In those fluctuations, there's a lot of times we can save you a bunch of money. And so this is me reaching out to you going, hey, I'd love to track that for you. No cost. I just need these pieces of information. Mortgage amount and maturity day, who the lender is, fixed or variable, what your rate is, bum, bum, bum. Approximate mortgage amount, approximate value of your home.
Thank you very much. You're on the tracking sheet. I'm going to be tracking it for you. Have a good day. Phenomenal phone calls to make. Absolutely phenomenal phone calls to make. A, you're checking in with people like you told them you were going to. B, you're tightening up your data on your spreadsheet so that you can farm it later for opportunities. C, you're going to find deals doing this and just putting money in your own bank account as well as saving other people a lot of money.
And it's not just rate arbitrage. A lot of opportunities come out of that. And so right when people ying, you yang. When people sell, you buy. When people buy, you sell. When people tell you phone calls don't work, blah, blah, blah, they don't work. I'm not going to do them. Guess what you do? You pick up the phone and you make phone calls because people are craving connection unlike any other time ever. And so if you make those phone calls, guess what? You stand out from doing what?
not from a social post you did, not from you dancing around doing something, not from a special strategy you talked about, nothing else other than you just picking up the phone and being a kick -ass human being, being a kick -ass mortgage broker and caring about somebody. It's crazy what happens when you do that. And so... This podcast was about this. I was going to talk to you about, there's tons of things. I have this whole list because I'm a little behind on my podcast, but that's okay.
I'm going to get there. This is me just telling you, you've got it in front of you. Everything you want in your mortgage career, in your business is sitting on the computer in front that you have in your hand that you might even be watching or listening this on. And so if you choose to do it, that's okay. There's a saying out there. If you're not changing. If you're not going to change the situation, then you're choosing the situation.
So if you're not going to change the situation, I'm telling you, phone calls will dramatically change your business. And you're OK with your current volumes and the money in your bank account and the current lead flow and the current pipeline. And you bitch about the economy and inflation and lenders are kicking our ass and all this other crap. And you haven't went out and made 100 phone calls. Then you're choosing the situation you're in. So you have no one else to blame.
It's on a coach, a mentor, a team lead, broker, owner, the economy, the lenders, RBC, CIBC, your clients, because all they care about is rate. That's because you haven't changed the story. That's all they know. They're like, they're just sheep following around. What's your rate? What's your rate? Rate, rate. I'm a rate robot and I follow around. And you're not like, you're not changing it. So you're just playing into the game.
And then it's just this game where now all of a sudden you're competing on rate. And then you start getting in your head. You start talking yourself out of things. And you start wondering if this is the right career for you. And you start going, are my numbers ever going back to where they were? And you start, get back to basics. Go to basic training. Right? You're in the army. You're in this advanced version of something in the army. And it's not working.
And you're just, your fundamentals aren't there. Get back to basics. Basics are picking up the phone and connecting with people. I can't say it any other way. They're craving it. But while you're doing it, you might as well be tightening up the data that you have. So go and take that gong show of a dumpster fire out of FiLogix or Velocity or Finmo or wherever. Export it out into a spreadsheet and look at all that cluttered data that is a mess and gives you headaches and nightmares and tremors.
And instead of running away from it, dive into it and embrace the suck. Embrace the hell out of it. And jump in and make calls. Your life will change. Your business will change right there. That model right there. You will have a tight database that then you can work great arbitrage opportunities on later. You would have connected with people. You would have got so much momentum and confidence back, and you would have realized, wow, people actually want to hear from me. They do.
And something really cool about someone just calling to ask you if they can help with no strings attached, especially where we're at now in 2025, it seems like no one gives a fuck, or at least that's who the people you're hanging out with, the vibes they're giving you. It doesn't have to be that way with you. You can spread some love, some kindness, some care, some joy by just connecting with people. All of you have so many unique personalities. You don't realize it.
People are craving connection with you. You have to get out of your own head, out of your own way. You choose the change or you choose the path you're on, right? If you don't change, then you're choosing where you are. You're gladly putting your hand up going, I'm cool doing seven mil. I'm cool making 120 grand eight years in. I'm cool doing this. I'm cool not knowing how I'm going to feed my family in six months. I'm okay with it. You're choosing that. Okay. So that's it.
That's what I want to talk on today. Hopefully that like jumpstarts you a bit. The jumper cables. Hopefully I'm coming out like clear. Like, let's go. Come on. Jeez, let's get at it. It's crazy town. This business is way easier than you think. Come on, stop complicating it. Let's go, kids. Peace out.