What Shawn Way tells loan officers.

Leaving the direct lender model is actually a very tough decision for me. I had the steady, nice W-2 paycheck at the insurance for my whole family. I mean, I'm a sole income provider, so my wife was a stay at home mom. We had at the time we had one kid and a baby on the way and the baby was doing it in a couple months and my initial plan was to wait until the baby was born. So everything's good with insurance. Then make the jump. I had to make the move sooner than that. So I quit two months before the baby was due and it was probably the best decision I'd ever made in my life.

The three common characteristics or biggest reasons why people fail is either one, they don't get themself in front of enough clients. Number two, they don't work hard enough. And number three, they don't have the sales ability. The best part is all three of those are 100% in your control. If you're not buying enough leads, buy more leads, sales ability. Some people are naturally gifted at sales and some not so much. When I first started in mortgage industry back in 2012, I wasn't that great at sales, it took time. And I learned and I developed that skill. So that's a learnable skill.

The number one reason why loan officers fail is actually two reasons why they fail is one, either they don't buy enough leads or two, they don't work them properly. So some loan officers buy a ton of leads but don't know how to work them. And that's why I've created this system to show them exactly how to work them and maximize their leads. The second reason is they just don't buy enough leads so they don't have enough opportunity to even be successful in the first place. Again, I teach my loan officer how many leads you want to buy, where you want to buy your leads from and how to work them and maximize them to their fullest extent.

How did I decide how much I'm going to spend on marketing? That was kind of a trial and error in the beginning. I wish if I could do it over again, I would do it a little bit differently. I wish I had come out a little stronger in buying more leads. I was afraid on what leads I should buy, how much I should spend, and I was a little timid on actually having to put my money out there before seeing a return versus my previous employer. I didn't have to do that. So when I first started, I kind of slowly eased my way up. Once I realized, hey, this actually works, that's when I really ramped up my lead spend. If I could do this all over again, I would just start off right off the gate. I mean, there's a proven concept. There's hundreds and hundreds of loan officers here making it work and proving that this model works. Had I seen that, I would have started off the gates with a higher lead spend. And I'm encouraging all my loan officers to start right out the gate with a high lead spend, knowing that they have my playbook as a proven model of how it should work.

I give them my exact playbook. I set them right next to me or right behind me, I should say. They have direct access to me and my four assistants. They can hear me on the phone pitching. I can still enact the exact same skillset that I practiced for five years, getting very good at what I do and just translate over the broker model. I don't have to like reinvent the wheel. And it's plug and play. They take away a lot of the guesswork and a lot of their, like the risks, figuring out what lead providers are good, are gonna convert, what are worth the money, what lenders to work with. That's all like kind of laid out for you. We are the best team. We're the number one team in the company. We have the utmost support from Shawn, his assistants, the rest of the team on the floor. If you have a question, you can turn around and ask someone. And if you're someone who's just on the fence, like you know you're good at what you do, but you want something more, this is a place you can have a system, you can have support and you can have the freedom you desire.

But in addition to that, I think the reason why that was even possible is because I leave everything out on the table. I share with everybody what I'm doing, give them a guidebook.