Train To Be Flexible And Accept Change

Train To Be Flexible And Accept Change

Being ahead on technology also important for mortgage brokers

BY RALPH LOVUOLO, SR. | CONTRIBUTING WRITER, NATIONAL MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL

It’s Aug. 16, 1971 and it’s time for my first inclusive weekly sales meeting. Inclusive will be explained in a bit. It’s 8 a.m. and I’m sitting in a glass walled conference room.

I had come to the office early at Bill’s “be there” invitation. He had called me at home the night before to let me know we had to discuss my raise, prompted by the President of the United States. Well, President Nixon hadn’t actually called Bill, but what had been on TV had changed my life forever. The day before, as I recall it, on that Sunday evening, the president, in a televised address announced, “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States.”

The announcement kicked me in the gut. The effect on me and my family was going to be catastrophic, a serious blow to my future and the plans I had for our growth, both for me personally, and the other three members of my burgeoning family.

Financially it would cause a bit of a strain. The previous week Bill had let me know that he was going to give me the raise we had discussed. That was a big deal to me. It meant that my future was tied to him for the foreseeable future. I respected his business skills more than anyone I had yet worked with. His personality was not something to be copied, but the trust I had in his business skills were very high. My salary on that Sunday was $12,500 a year. It was double what I had been earning five years before when I took my first job at a “real” mortgage company. My previous mortgage experiences had been with my father who started his mortgage brokerage business in the late ‘50’s.

LIFE CHANGING

That salary was adequate, maybe even more than that. Well, I’m not counting the credit card bills that needed to be brought under control. But overall, we were fairly comfortable with that income, living with a $20,000 mortgage and one car payment.

You can imagine how much sleep I had that Sunday night, not knowing what to expect. Meeting with Bill about half an hour before the weekly sales meeting, he showed me the approval that had been signed by the president of our parent company.

Little did I know that that half-hour would change my life forever.

He did his best to mollify me, but I was inconsolable. Getting raised to $15,000 a year would have been the fulfillment of all my wishes. [That’s about $96,000 in today’s money.] I would have been almost 30 years old and content. My raise was effective on Monday morning.

Bill said there was nothing he could do. He had called the corporate president right after the announcement and was told I would have to wait until Nixon lifted the ban. Our discussion centered on not knowing when that would be and then Bill suggested that maybe there was a way for me to earn the kind of money I felt I deserved. The circumnavigational way to foil the gods of Washington D.C. was to become a salesman!

No, no, no, no, NOOOOOO! I didn’t want that. It was the farthest thing in my mind. It was impossible. I was not going to be a salesman. I was not a salesman! I knew my life was predetermined by the God I worshiped. He had my whole life planned. I was NOT going to be like my father. I was not going to be that blue suede shoe operator that my father represented.

I guess Bill said he understood. I don’t remember. But what he then said immediately made the conversation turn in his favor. He had planned the meeting down to the number of words it would take to get hooked.

COULDN’T REFUSE

Paraphrasing, “So, here’s what I can do. I’ll turn over a couple of house accounts to you at full commission, give you a weekly draw of $200 and pay you any overages each month. You’ll make the money you want and when the president lifts his order, you can decide what you want to do. Deal?”

How could I refuse? I needed the money, wanted the money and what the hell, what I knew of those guys and how they conducted their lives looked like a lot of fun. So, we went into my first inclusive sales meeting. No longer a businessman.

The prospects were daunting. Instead of my previous label, I was going to be a loan solicitor. Yes, that’s what they called us. The label was well known in the mortgage industry, and lest I forget, imprinted soon on my new business cards.

After spending a bit more than four years toiling in the bowels of South Jersey Mortgage Company, learning the inside operations of mortgage banking, I was now going to be a loan solicitor. Within the year I was the number one salesperson, more than doubling what my raise would have been. I’ve had a life full of changes and challenges, but some things have not changed, and the lack of serious forward thinking to enable change disappoints me.

ACCEPT CHANGE

The purpose of letting you in on my first big unexpected life change is to let you know that I’m trained to be flexible, to accept change as part of my life. I am forced to think about it every day now that I’m working with managers and salespeople who need to acquire that skill. The pandemic has been earth shattering insofar as change happening quickly. WOW, I bet you didn’t expect that.

Let me ask you to consider changes that I see as key to the mortgage industry being able to thrive as change continues to proliferate our profession.

Zillow wants to put you out of business. Yet mortgage loan officers who are tied to a one-day-at-a-time business plan with no thought about tomorrow’s challenges are allowing the Zillows’ and their like to move forward even more rapidly. This shows a lack of professional business thinking in the mortgage brokerage industry.

Why do brokers need to depend on a big brother to protect them from themselves? The kerfuffle that has been recently wending through the mortgage brokerage industry is an anomaly that was totally unnecessary. It is because of the laziness of mortgage brokers to use the marketing tools they already possess. If mortgage brokers would just do their jobs and stay in touch with their clients, this whole sordid mess would not have occurred.

When are business owners who have purchased a companywide CRM going to realize how much business they are losing because of the lack of their loan originators and marketing people non-use of some of the most sophisticated intelligence gathering and business development tools at their disposal?

WORKING TOGETHER

When is there going to be cooperation between the many diverse mortgage organizations that profess to represent their membership going to sit at the same table and, for the benefit of the public, going to discuss those areas of law, rules and regulations that would forestall the government taking their incomes away from them?

Why didn’t those organizations see what the FHFA was thinking? Because the leaders don’t have think tanks to forestall attacks. When will this happen?

When are the leaders of our industry going to accept the innovations that computer power could bring to streamline and improve the mortgage process, so we can actually approve and close a mortgage in a matter of minutes?

Why hadn’t the more well healed national mortgage organizations been dealing with state legislators and overseers to allow e-closings? When the pandemic hit there were about 38 states that did not allow this sort of benefit to their citizens.

It has always seemed to me that the industry that I’ve been a part of for over 60 years is always behind, technologically, every other industry that I come in contact daily. When will it stop? When will there be leadership?

Ralph LoVuolo creates a daily video @ www.oneideaaday.com