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Hey, welcome to this week's episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast. I am your humble host, Jeff Zimfer. Appreciate you tuning in. We are today, October 2, Wednesday, October 2. Welcome officially to the beginning of Q4, Q4, 2024. Hey, I got some news for you. I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but guess what? 91 days until 2025. 91 days left in the year. And that makes as of the recording of this, If I'm correct, 58 working days. If you take out holidays and weekends, 58 working days as of October 2, 2024. Where has the time gone? More importantly, what have you done with the time? Perhaps even more importantly, what are you going to do with the time that's left in this year? What is your plan? You basically got 58 or so days right to build your plan for momentum, to grab market share, to enter 2025 with the wind at your back instead of starting from ground zero, scratching your head, wondering how you're going to capture market share, grow your business, grow revenues in 2025. Now, if I know you, you're a listener to this podcast, you're already on the ball with this and think hope. But what I wanted to do today is unpack some of the key learnings and lessons and takeaways that I recently learned attending a two day on site workshop with Alex and Leila Hermosi. You may be familiar with them. Acquisition.com they are obviously big time leaders right now in the content marketing space. They run a company, a portfolio of companies that last I checked, I think it does 250 or 500 million a year. And so if you don't know who Alex her mosi is, go to YouTube, look him up, go to Google, look him up. Some incredible wisdom and content there as I look over my shoulder here. He is the author of several books including $100 million offers, $100 million leads, et cetera, et cetera. So you invest $5,000 and you spend two days on site at their headquarters and there was I think 100 and some odd, I think it was 100, 150 maybe people in the room. So you do the math. It's a pretty good take for the day. Yay. And you wind up sitting with their staff who have different positions from their portfolio company. So they'll have their CFO from acquisition.com itself. They'll have various marketing specialists from companies that either directly create Hermo's content or other portfolio companies content. So they'll have subject matter Experts, operations, hiring, right technology, et cetera, from all these different disciplines so that you can glean the experience and expertise from these various roles within the acquisition.com portfolio of companies and apply some of those learnings to your business. So I wanted to unpack some of my key takeaways from that. But before I do, I have got a win of the week to come at you as well, once again coming from Glenda White out in Texas. What's up, Glenda? Shout out to you Win of the week. She hosted our class called Winning the Buyer Presentation. She held it yesterday on October 1st, and here's the funny thing about it is nine people registered, but 22 showed up. And immediately before leaving the class, she set four appointments with Realtors and she already has people registered to attend her very next class, which is going to be delivered over Zoom. So one of the strategies, of course, if you're thinking about 20, 25 in grabbing market share, is increasing your brand awareness. So shout out to you, Glenda, you're obviously a superstar. Keep rocking that. And by the way, if you want to learn more about what we do, you can go to MortgageMarketing Pro to check it out. Grab a call with me and we'll see if it's the right fit for you. But we're helping originators, right, move from being seen as solicitor and vendor to partner and peer. We're helping them scale their reach with real estate agents and we're helping them scale their production and referrals as well. Mortgage Marketing Pro. Hey, also, before I forget, shout out to my good friend Greg Scher. Greg, what's up? I got the shirt on today. If you're listening, hashtag all of us Mortgage movement. Hey man, you got to come and watch the video. Whatever, wherever this is, YouTube, Instagram. I'll make sure I try and create an Instagram reel out of this. Hashtag all of us. If you don't know Greg, follow him on LinkedIn. Greg S H E R Greg Scher. Super, super cool dude. Great leader in the industry. All right, so back to my content. Let me put on the glasses so I can see and I want to unpack. There was a few different things we talked about, but today I'm just going to focus on this one thing. What we what they called@acquisite.com headquarters they called value detractors. How to make your company less unvaluable. So I want you to think of yourself as a company, right? Because you are a company. Whether you're just a solo person, you're a team you're listening to this, your leader, branch manager, regional, whatever it is. There's many risks in business. We focus on these five. And I may or may not cover all five of these, but the five are key man risk, key customer risk, single channel risk, market risk, and data risk. Let's go through a few of these key man risk. What is it? The company needs you to grow, period. Now, for many people listening, right? If you are the mortgage originator carrying a bag and you eat what you kill, right? You hunt deals, right, and you bring them in, that is this, that's just what it is, right? The company needs you. Like if you stopped doing your activities tomorrow over the next two, three, 30 days, right, whatever it is, those activities that you're doing, would the deal flow stop? In many cases, probably. So I want you to think about this contextually though, is just not, not just think about this, hey man, what can I do right now? And maybe there's nothing you're hearing in the moment where you're like, oh, that doesn't apply to me. I want you to think about what it is that you really want to build. What is it you want to build, right? You want to build something that isn't 100% dependent upon you. What is it going to take? More importantly, who do you have to be in order for that to happen, to become that person who attracts the right people to build the team, to build your sources of business, your infrastructure, et cetera. So think about that as we go through this. But the key man risk is the company needs you. It's dependent upon you to grow. Why does it matter? Because it's core function dependency, okay? Many people, many business owners, right, if you will, quote, unquote, entrepreneurs are stuck. They have. The business is truly just a high paying job, by the way, if that's it as a mortgage originator, it's a high paying job, but you know, it's feeding your family, it is paying the bills, it is building your financial future, allowing you to invest in other things for your overall goals. There's nothing wrong with that, by the way. There's nothing wrong with having a high paying job. Maybe you don't want to build an entity that is not dependent upon you. And that's cool, right? So if you want to change that though, right? How do you change it? You've got to break your role into several roles and hire out. So your role right now as an originator has several roles, right? There's rainmaker, there's marketer, there's salesperson, there's social media person, there's you know, class host and facilitator. There's probably some level of operations, some level of related to support customer service engagement. There's pre, during and post activities. Right. Pre sale, during sale and post sale. Right. Post sale, quality control, follow up things like that, long term nurture, database reactivation, like a lot of different moving parts, man. So shout out to you guys and gals that are doing the role right. But if you want to think about diversifying yourself so it's not solely dependent upon you or you can more focus on the tasks that you want to do, such as being the rainmaker or being the deal structure person. I mean, I don't know, right? You've got to think about how can you what, what roles, what activities that you do, could you start to plan for hiring, out, outsourcing, delegating. So for many of you that be that begins with an loa, right? Loan officer, assistant to handle some of those duties and roles. I think that's smart, right? That's a good place to start because you want to be able to free up your activities to do the key roles right in your business. And so this is just more so food for thought to think about is is there an opportunity to place down the road for you to start to break your role into smaller roles, outsource, hire out and all that kind of stuff. And if it's an alloy to start with or an assistant, like you've heard it said before, if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant. And most people, including myself, wait too long to hire. So hire sooner than you think you're ready for the right role. But don't delegate the role that you're ideally suited for and equipped for or the role that keeps the lights on and puts food on the table. Delegate for the role that keeps you away from the main thing so that you can continue to grow. Does that make sense? Okay, the next risk is of these risks. Remember we're talking about value detractors. Many risks in the business. The key five, the next one is the key customer risk. A few customers determine the fate of your business. Um, what is it? Maybe you know it is your business is based on a small collection of referral partners, half a dozen or whatever or one primary source of business. If any of your sources of business left tomorrow, would your revenue drop by 20% or more? So most, most of you listening, I know you're probably your main sources of business are things like past client, database agent, referrals maybe financial advisor referrals, various things like that. You know, the worst number in marketing is one. Because if that one source of business ever goes away, you're dead in the water. So what's the key takeaway? Key takeaway is diversify, start to add those additional layers of sources of business. And this isn't to say that we stop and no longer pay attention to the sources that are producing for us. That's not saying, hey, you know, bail on realtors, right? You don't want to kill the golden goose. What this is saying is if you've got the bandwidth to be able to add another source of business without it jeopardizing the main current source, then it's something to evaluate. But the mistake a lot of people make is they're going to add something else, a bright shiny object, right? And all of a sudden what happens is that other primary source of business that was feeding them suffers mistake. You've got to make sure that as you're pursuing that additional source, it doesn't sacrifice and burn the ships on the other one. Does that make sense? Okay, cool. So let's keep going here. Another channel risk. Most customers, I think we already talked about most customers come from one source. That might be an extension of my notes here. Okay, here's another risk to your business data risk. Knowing your numbers or not. Aha. Knowing your numbers or not, or KPI's right to key performance indicators. Why does it matter? Because if you don't track it, right? Well, you probably don't care. You've heard it said maybe that what gets measured improves, right? What gets measured gets managed. See, one of the things we also learned at this two days with Hermosi is that most people think they need more leads. That's like so common. Like, I need more leads, right? Leads, leads, leads. I need the Glengarry leads, Glenn Ross leads. And that is actually more often than not, not the case. As a matter of fact, there's an exercise we go through during the two days where we basically do a breakdown on conversions, math conversions, to take a look and see what your conversions are. Because for many people, the conversions are. It's not about. It's not about more leads, it's about more conversions. Right? And to optimize for that. So before you make the decision about, oh, I just need more leads, let me throw more. And then at the top, take a look at your data and look at what are the conversion rates for the existing leads that you're working. Does that make sense? Because that's going to be the case for most people. So when it comes to leads, right, Depending on the source of the leads, conversations, getting on the phone with you, whatever that source is, different lead flow or channels you have for leads, right? It's looking at what percentage of your business is coming from a single source. It's looking at what is the show rate. Like if you're scheduling calls, meetings, appointments, whatever, what's the show rate and can that be optimized or improved? And then of course, what is the close rate. So, you know, usually people focus on leads as like, that's what I need. But the highest return on your time and money and effort, where is that really going to move the needle and grow sales? And I would beg to argue that for most people it's increasing the show rate and the conversion rate versus working the existing leads you have. Not true for everybody. But take a look at your own business and evaluate that for yourself. But knowing your numbers, right? Can't track it, can't manage it. Take a look at conversions, take a look at conversations to apps, take a look at apps to contract, contracts to funding, right? Take a look at referrals to conversion. Take a look at who shows up for meetings and who doesn't, right? Take a look at how much you get shopped. Take a look at how many times you have. I just earlier today I was on a webinar and one of the loan officers said is, you know, I'm tired of the realtor, you know me pre quality, pre qualifying the deal with the realtor and then realtor sending the loan over to buddy boy, other lender. I'm like, well, whose problem is that? Whose fault is that? Is that your fault or their fault? I'm going to say that's your fault. Why are they sending it to another lender? There has to be a reason. All behavior is goal oriented. All behavior is goal oriented. And that's just a lack of, I think proper alignment with values and expectations and partnership. And that's also going back to, right? One of the earlier things we talked about here is sources of business, right? Single channel risk. So key, key man risk, key customer risk. We talked about data risk and we talked about, I believe we talked about single channel risk as well. So hopefully that's helpful. Just some talking points, some things for you to think about as you go through this into 2025 and planning out your strategies. And I think the last thing I'll share with you is, you know what, we spent a lot of time in the first day with the at the Alex Alex Hormozi event on site was identifying the key constraint or constraints in our business. Right? Because one of the things Hermo stressed was that most business owners, most business owners work on a lot of things in their business, but most of them work on the wrong things. Like not the actual thing that's going to move the needle. Right? The number one main primary key constraint, what is it? And you need to identify that. And smart businesses, what they do is they invest repeatedly, build great businesses by allocating more resources to solving the constraint over and over. And by the way, you will only grow up to your constraint and no further. So that's why it's so important that you identify what is the constraint and then you allocate the proper resources to solving the constraint and then you do that over and over and over again. So you have one constraint, you'll solve for that, there'll be another constraint, Right? But you've got to choose those things in order of priority and importance of what is the most important constraint that comes back to, you know, your business surviving, thriving and continuing to grow. Okay? So that said, hope you enjoyed this quick little episode. Just between you and me. And once again, if you one of your constraints is more referrals, right, from real estate agents, more consistently without cold calling, chasing, begging, you know, paying for leads or being treated as a vendor instead of a partner, you want to now not be seen as a solicitor. Well, maybe leading with education, attracting agents at scale, becoming five mile famous in your backyard might be a good strategy for you. You've heard some of the success stories here on the podcast. You heard the one I just shared at the start of today's podcast. Getting in front of 22 agents all at once, four appointments set with zero effort. And that's just the beginning. Hey, mortgagemarketing pro, we're looking for a few good loan officers. If that's for you, go check it out. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now.