Point of Thought - Point of Sale: Coaching, Compliance, and Community in DFW

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Loan Officer Life, Hustle, Heart, and Home Ownership. I'm joined today by John Donnelly. John leads up all things mortgage sales at Service First Mortgage.

John, you and I, we've been connected for quite a while. Yep. You're one of the top LinkedIn mortgage peeps, as I call it, on my tracker. and I can't remember exactly who suggested we do this together, but I don't know, a few weeks back, somebody said, you need to get John on the podcast and here we are.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I don't remember who it was, but I'm glad we connected. Definitely, I've seen you on LinkedIn. We've tracked each other and it's awesome to have conversations and become connected in real life and not just on LinkedIn.

Exactly. Exactly. And we share we share a mutual friendship with Kyle Draper. Somewhere over my shoulder is the green rethink everything book that Kyle and I did together a couple of years back.

And so I guess any friend of Kyle's is a friend of mine. Yeah, no, he's a great guy. You know, like I said, we're we're neighbors. Like we live close to each other.

So we get to see each other once in a while. And, you know, yeah, I agree with you. He's a buddy of yours and you're a friend of mine. So love it.

Well, let's let's get right into it, John. You're, you know, among amongst your activities, duties, responsibilities at service service first, you know, production management, sales management, recruiting, coaching. I want to go a little bit into coaching because I think we're at this really interesting time in our business, especially for loan officers. And I'll just kind of dive into what I think is going to be one of the most important tools for loan officers to understand and adopt, which is AI.

And not AI for decisioning and that kind of stuff, but really for leverage. How do you think about AI and how is your team from a top of funnel perspective leveraging the various AI tools today? That's a great question. I think the first thing for me is my desktop right now is reimagined.

And we've purposely as a leadership team challenged the company this year to reimagine everything that is happening. from how a loan officer creates content, how they put their system together, how we do loan setup, how we underwrite, how we close and fund everything. And so we've been purposefully re-imagining everything and there's nothing that's not on the table, if you will. So if you kind of lean into the AI side of it, there's things that we've kind of learned.

I think people know this, but the one eye opener for us was early this year. We got on a call with a couple of IT guys and we said we didn't like our CRM. We want to do something different. And in a matter of 20 minutes on a Zoom, they created a new CRM using, you know, LLMs and all this stuff that's new.

that was better than what we had in our own way that we wanted it using our data and it blew our mind and that was the beginning of like wow what's about to happen what revolution is about to happen in the world not just in mortgage yeah everywhere and so that brought it like made it real for us you know we all kind of knew but then all of a sudden you're like wow and so we've been down this path to build our own system and create our own CRM. And mind you, we are a company. I've been here since 2009.

So a long time. So I know our company. We were a company that said, we're just going to adopt the latest and greatest technology. We're not going to be in the IT business.

We don't want to host it all. We haven't got big enough. We can't compete on that level. So we'll just use the latest and greatest.

And that's how we've been forever. like that's our philosophy but now all of a sudden there's a shift and we're like you know you don't have to have a five million dollar and two-year investment to create a crm you you can do it quicker faster and more you know productive probably this is what it's looking like for us and then own it and then adjust it on your own in a right way so that's one thing that just kind of yeah it comes to mind that's a little bit bigger level than just the lo but well no i think it i I think if you can look at that as an example of how quickly you can stand something up, even if it's a workable prototype, let's say.

Imagine the power of what you can do in a micro setting. To me, it's the art of the possible is the way I think about AI. and AI is like this overarching terminology. I was at an event last week and there was like a three-hour AI bootcamp for mortgage and it became very evident.

There's probably a hundred people in the room. It became evident in the first three minutes, the gap in knowledge and expertise and comfort in the room with basic AI tools. And I'm talking like chat GPT, basic, basic. Intro, right.

Yeah, so we're in the first inning of this thing from an industry perspective. Now, I'll go ahead. Okay, keep going. Keep going.

I want to hear where you're going. Well, I want to throw one thing at you and get your reaction. Because this is the risk if a company doesn embrace AI and help their loan officers understand the tool So like you I in a bunch of different community groups where loan officers are sharing best practices sometimes not so best practices, bragging, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. About two weeks ago, I saw a loan officer, not from Service First Mortgage, posted in a braggadocious way how they're leveraging AI to read consumer credit reports.

And yeah, exactly. Because you know exactly where that's going, right? Yeah. They're got MPPI data showing up in chat GBT.

That's a no-no. Yes. And so in my head, this light bulb went off. From an industry perspective, we need to develop some best practice guardrails that companies can embrace and actually go to their loan officers and help them understand how to leverage the tools, but leverage them in a way that's not going to get anybody in trouble.

And so there's a little wild, wild west going on, but I think now's the time for companies to get behind this and really help their LOs. We're probably just ahead of you, but we had the same thing happen. We had a, I hosted like a, I don't know, call it a mastermind or roundtable around AI best practices. Because a lot of our LOs are doing, it's very separate.

Like there's either the ones really using it and take it off. And then there's the other ones that don't know what to do. So I just got them all on a call and kind of, I knew kind of where people were. So we share and coming out of that, my HR director was like, hey, We need to have an AI policy for like the company, you know, because I'm seeing exactly what you said.

We don't need to take this in the wrong direction. So we created an AI policy, went through risk committee and we're only a couple hundred employees. We're not a giant company, but we saw it and had dealt with it already. But I don't know that that sounds kind of unique for when I'm here.

And I don't think everybody's dealt with it yet that way, you know. Right. Yeah, that was that was a scary aha moment for me. for sure yeah i think i think you got to be smart about it and i don't know that everybody's thought about that to the level they should um you know but also think like kind of going back to the lo i mean it's a it's a requirement that you learn ai at this point and it's not an option yeah and but the thing is it just helps you dial in things and scale so much better and faster once you start doing it, it's almost like an addiction for me.

Like, it's crazy. I drive to an office one day a week. It's about 35 minutes. And I've noticed the last two months, probably my entire drive there, because it's early in the morning, I'm not on the phone.

I talked to AI the whole time. And I'm asking it and I'm working with things and I'm talking about content and I'm creating. I have this crazy story. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro a couple of months ago.

and and and i've been creating this keynote out of it what does it mean and so i'm telling it all my story and i've saved it in a project and i'm helping it yeah it's helping me uncover this the story in the story yeah you know so it's a cool thing in that and so that's like i love that making fun of me yeah like dad you talk to me too much you're gonna become dumb i go no i don't think so. I don't think so. Making you smarter. I mean, smarter because the way I'm using it, I'm not letting it do everything for me.

I'm having to ask me questions and it's enhancing what I'm doing. Agree. Yeah. There's, there's a, a, a big, um, you know, I see this a lot on LinkedIn where there's the, the AI content bashers, right.

That, that just want to go on and say, Oh, AI is taking over all the content on LinkedIn. And there was some of that you could tell yeah you can tell who's you know simply doing a lazy prompt with a lazy copy paste and post but your example i think that's a brilliant application because you had a real experience ai didn't climb the right ai didn't do the work right and so yeah now you can uncover you i mean i I can't wait to see that keynote because it's going to be like the level of detail and depth of it is going to be pretty, pretty amazing, I'm sure.

Yeah, it's been awesome. I got, you know, you do things and other doors open. I've been asked to come to Nepal to speak at a men's leadership conference in January. And I was like, what am I going to?

And it's really Christian based kind of deal, which is great. but I'm like what am I going to talk about and so they challenged me to to spend an hour talking about climbing a mountain and use my story as the basis and so I'm working on all the things that you would think about the preparation and the ups and downs and that's easy I think the climbing to the top is easy and then he said the next day I want you to talk about coming down the mountain and all the lessons that are in the coming down part because there's a lot more to that and that's not the common speech you hear people say, you know, they don't talk about the lessons coming down.

And that's the one I'm most excited about to unpack that. And I'm using AI to help ask me questions and seek it out. And the way I'm talking to it is, is ask me 10 questions, dig deep into this, compare my thoughts to other things that are out there. You know, what am I missing?

How can I make this better, more impactful, you know, and it's, it's given me stuff back and forth honestly i have most of it it hasn't it hadn't blown my mind yet with anything that's come back yeah you know but i always ask me like give me a famous quote that ties into this and you know and stuff like that you know and yeah so i think just by sometimes by hearing somebody say how they're using it it can help you think about new ways is why i say it this So I think about our audience who listening watching right now Imagine now as a loan officer who serves first homebuyers as a cohort as a segment If you've spent 30 minutes a week, like you described in your morning commute, right?

If you spent 30 minutes a week as a loan officer working with, whether it's ChatGPT or whatever the platform is, to kind of perfect your... your story and the value you bring as a loan officer to your community and serving first-time homebuyers, the output of doing that work pays off exponentially because every time you add to it, it becomes more powerful in terms of the output and the content you create. Are you actively kind of teaching and coaching that with your loan officers today?

Yes, exactly what I'm telling you is I'm teaching, you know, I'm a big person that I believe I follow leaders who do the things they say and lead by example. So I'm trying to be ahead of them and learn it and practice it so I can bring them along. And so I'm just teaching what I'm doing, you know, in your example, you know, the first thing you got to do is do the paid version. and make sure that you've programmed.

I use ChatGPT, whether it's Gemini or whatever, but you have to program it to know you and think the way you want it to and spend that little extra time. And if you don't know how to do it, just ask it and it'll tell you. It's not that hard. And then I save projects.

So I open those projects specifically. Like in this one, I just call it Kilimanjaro and it has all my history. And so I can say, hey, are we in the Kilimanjaro project? do you have all my notes?

I always, I always doubt it for some reason. Yeah. I got all the notes, you know, I'm like, okay, well, I don't have to start over from the beginning. I can just keep adding on.

That's powerful. Right. Huge. Love it.

Um, what, you know, so here we are, we're, we're in the second half of the year. We, you know, we continue to speculate on what's going to happen with rates. I, you know, it really doesn't matter at this point, what's going to happen with rates where we're kind of in this market that's probably going to be like this for the foreseeable future what uh what are you seeing you know if you if you analyze like your best the best of the best in your team or those that you coach what are things that they're doing today that are really make you know creating that opportunity for them to be the best of the best versus what the rest of the LOs are doing that is holding them back they're not doing anything that's going to be a silver bullet or blow your mind that you've never heard of before.

The ones, you know, we all kind of see it now. There's like, there's almost like no middle ground loan officer. There's the ones that are like killing it. And then there's the ones that are struggling.

There's almost not a lot in the middle. And one of my loan officers, her name is Stephanie Johnston. We've worked, she worked with me for 12 years and she's killing it. She's almost to break a hundred million right now for the year.

And, and something she said the other day to me kind of summarizes what you just asked. She said, a lot of these loan officers don't have enough business and they only spend, you know, 30 minutes prospecting or a day. And she goes, I've just spent eight hours calling all my builder sales reps continuously for eight hours, straight all day long yeah she goes that's the difference she was not it's really not anything else that i'm doing it's that i did it for eight hours today and they did it for 30 minutes or an hour and thinking that's enough right i think that's the big x factor there's not you know there's sure there's some little things you can do in your follow-up or your marketing or whatever but the the talking to people and having connections and figuring out how to you know solve their problems, if you will, that's going to win you the business still to this day.

It's like old school blocking, tackling, back to the basics, X's and O's, all that stuff. And what I find is loan officers, they don't know what to turn to. They don't have a plan. They're not, they might have their realtors that some are still in the business, some aren't, some aren't doing enough, but now what?

Who do I, if I wanted to prospect eight hours, who do I even call? you know they need what to do and so like today i'm leading um with a bunch of lo's uh you know just a quarterly business plan review because i feel people are drifting right now and i'm like okay whoever's lost get on this call today and let's get focused we're gonna get a theme we're gonna work through this and and it's not just about me telling you what to do it's about others sharing like what are they doing because that's how you learn the most is is from their ideas And, you know, it's really just getting somebody motivated again and getting them some kind of a list to call and a strategy and something to say.

We have this giant event coming up in November. It's called the Builder Realtor Roundup. We rented Dickie's Arena in Fort Worth, which is the large arena where they do, like, concerts. We have 25 builders.

We've invited every realtor in Dallas-Fort Worth. it qualifies for a Guinness book of world records, largest real estate networking thing. We just don't want to pay the $16,000 to have them come out and validate it. So I'm like, you got no, no excuses.

Call every realtor in the DFW and tell them about the event and then go, Oh, by the way, are you working with somebody I can help? Like just the littlest thing like that. You could call for days and create conversations and open opportunities right now. That's an easy one.

Yeah, I love the fact that, and this is consistent with the conversations I'm having. There is no silver bullet to your point. It is at the end of the day conversations lead to XYZ Insert whatever you want for XYZ It basic basic walking and tackling Now can you be smarter about setting yourself up for those conversations and leveraging tools like we been talking about to actually give you kind of some sharper talking points Absolutely, for sure. I agree with you.

And another thing is if you're not sure or you feel like you don't like to make the cold call, nowadays you can message people in like a messenger or like a LinkedIn. But you can do it with a voice or a video and really stand out. And I had like the other day I had an insurance guy reach out to me with a voice message on Facebook Messenger. And I hadn't had that.

And I was so excited to get his message. He was like, hey, John, we've been connected on here. We were saying for quite a long time, I love an opportunity to like earn your business and talk to you and whatever. So I messaged him back because he tried.

I was like, hey, man, I'm not really originating a lot. You really want to talk to my LOs. But the fact that you sent this message is why I messaged you back. Keep doing that.

It's working. You know, I was encouraging. And I think that stuff gets attention. That's not the normal right now.

Yeah. So but you got to be you got to get the right message to just doing it. Yeah, I think like you have a personal connection of a message like, you know, anyway. Well, tying it back to our what we talked about at the early part of the conversation, Kyle Draper, when he when he's coaching anybody, not just not just mortgage people, he's having this conversation across multiple industries.

your example of that voice message you know whether it's a voice message or a video message there's still very few people that are doing that and that is just such a unique I'm the same way as you if I see we we get blown up with dms on you know linkedin right yeah and most of them are most of them are kind of poor kind of cookie cutter and you just skim by but I always look at the video messages and the voice memos. And it's like, it's different. It stands out. Now, I may not do anything with it, but it gets me to stop and actually pay attention.

Yeah, it's the next factor. I think so. The other thing that you can do, go back to our AI, is you can ask AI to help you and look at the people and find something unique and help write a script. Like, it's amazing this tool.

We don't think about it that way. When you get stuck in these moments, like you got this friend over here in a sense that can help you yeah ask it see what happens and and i'll bet you it's going to help you in a way you're not expecting so like like you described setting up all your projects i've done the same thing i also am uh chat gpt is kind of my go-to yeah i have one project and i just call it my agency so it's my it's my marketing agency and they're yeah they're open 24 four, seven, three 65, by the way.

And they, they like input there. They don't pretend to be smarter than, than the client in the, you know? And so I feed it as much information as I can about our target, you know, our ideal client for Finlocker. And then I'll, if I'm stuck on an idea for content or an email outreach, I'll ask my agency to help me prepare, you know, an outreach email or a text or a video script, whatever.

And so that's, you know, as a loan officer, you can create your own little, you know, your own team. And then one of those teams can be your marketing agency that's there for you all the time. That's a cool idea. I haven't thought about it that way.

The thing we've had some of our yellows doing is uploading all the Fannie and Freddie guides and all that so it's current. And then making sure it's seeking out all the latest guidelines and not some company that posted something five years ago and it's out of date. You know, it can burn you using it for guidelines. But if you use a project and you really make sure that it's current, super cool to like say, I'm not sure, like get that second opinion.

That's something we all have seen as being in this business forever. you know one of my leadership lessons if you will uh early on was a lot of times the people that come to me they always knew the answer but they were just unsure and so i always had this kind of approach it would be like tell me your problem you know what do you think we should do as my next step and they always knew the answer they just wanted confirmation i'm like that's it go do it even if i didn't know it was the leader of the answer they probably gave me a better answer You know, and that now you can have another tool that's really smart, by the way, like genius level smart with this level five or the new version of it.

It's pretty good. Yeah, it is game changing in a lot of ways. John, we could probably talk for hours. I know you've got your calls coming up and I appreciate you spending some time with me in the audience today on Loan Officer Life.

yeah I think it's this is fun hopefully it gave some value to some people I appreciate you having me on here it's a great conversation great to get to know you now next time I see you around we'll we'll get to get to hang out a little bit for sure and then I want I'm anxious to hear excited to hear about the Guinness book slash Guinness book record for uh for that networking that's that sounds like a very it's gonna be epic it's gonna be great it's in November like November 19th So love it.

Well, John, thanks again, man. And for the audience, thank you all for tuning in. Be sure to like, download, save, share all the stuff you do with your favorite podcast. And also, don't forget, we stream this every Saturday morning on LinkedIn.

So if you're not, you know, consuming this on YouTube or podcast, you can go right to my LinkedIn profile. And every Saturday morning, 930 Eastern, you'll see the latest episode of Loan Officer Life. Thanks again John. Alright thanks Brian.

Appreciate it.