The Mortgage Motivator: How to make moneyRalph LoVuolo Sr., CMCdiscipline, success, goals
One of the most successful articles I ever wrote, in terms of
readership response, was one penned a few years ago called "Making
money is easy." The article described a typical day in the life of
one of my loan officer trainees. The reason it was so successful is
that the concept of making money, the discipline it takes to do
that and the straightforward idea of getting up in the morning,
doing whatever we need to get ourselves ready for the
day--dressing, getting in a car and going out to visit people to
ask them for business--seems so simple when broken down to the
basic steps.
On the other hand, when I spend the day with a salesperson who
wastes the entire day in the office, it makes me so frustrated and
angry I can hardly contain myself. Making money is easy, but only
for those who work smart and hard, and spend a lot of time doing
both. Because on the other hand, making money can be very hard.
I've given two seminars in the past week to two separate groups,
in two separate parts of the country. I found one similarity that
screamed at me so loud that my brain almost did a St. Helen's
dance.
Why, I ask you, do people who want to do business with other
people spend the major portion of their day indoors, chained to a
desk as if they had been sentenced to a life of solitude? If it is
the most time-honored truism that sales are made by salespeople and
not by machines, paper or any other artificial means, then why, oh
why, do most salespeople spend most of their time avoiding
people?
Making money is hard, and if you don't think I believe that,
then you don't know me. But--and it's a big "but" that I offer to
you--making money is hard because we make it hard. Making money is
hard because it takes great thought to determine how best to spend
our day, how best to be effective and how best to be salespeople.
The only insight I have to offer is that most times that I have
observed successful people, I copied what I observed.
My first sales manager, Bill Schor, taught--no, demanded--that
each salesperson on our staff call the office every day at 9:30
a.m., noon and 4:30 p.m. If any of us missed even one call, we had
to go to the office to account for our time. Bill's discipline was
far greater than mine. He was managing six salespeople, five
operations people, and juggling secondary marketing and corporate
growth. But I learned from watching him that the right way to
success is to be as disciplined as possible.
Here's a typical day in the life of my most recent students: Get
up at 7:00 a.m., be at the office by 9:30 a.m., grab a cup of
coffee, shoot the bull with others who are doing the same, grab a
file that needs fixing, make some phone calls to help fix the file,
spend some time to talk to their processor, underwriter, closer,
boss or anyone else that they can corral. Go to lunch (sometimes
buying it from a lunch truck), eat at their desk, read the paper,
memos, rate sheets, updates from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other major
investors, find other files that need fixing, go to pick up an
appraisal or other document from one of their sources, and maybe
make some more phone calls and go home about 5:30 p.m. Impressive
day! Would that person be tired yet fulfilled that they had spent a
complete day? You bet! But how many sales calls were made not by
phone? Not many.
I believe that you need to see people. That is what successful
salespeople do. And they trust their office to process their files.
And they read their mail and updates at night. And they make their
follow-up calls from the road and at night. And they work weekends.
And they write deals at the clients' homes. And they visit as many
referral sources as possible every day.
Sure, this is hard, but I found inspiration in an article
written in the Evening World--a New York newspaper--published on
July 17, 1925 by John Blake: "But no man who has honestly earned
fame, and no woman either, ever did it by dreaming of how wonderful
it was. Even those of great talent discovered that work and
planning and self-sacrifice were necessary to achieve it, and gave
them unstinted until the fame was accomplished."
If I can, in any small way, help you make a plan to success,
e-mail me a request and I'll fax it back. Always include your fax
number in any request.
Because you see, making money is hard, as hard as we make it,
and if we could just see that spending the better part of our day
seeing people who can refer business to us, face to face, belly to
belly, we will make the hard job much easier.
You need to set yourself goals--goals beyond your reach, goals
that require untold effort. Goals that will help you realize every
dream you could ever want.
Goals are dreamlike, or should be. We should dream of what we
want, but we need to realize that we are dreaming in the present
and understand what resources we have at the present. It is very
difficult to see where we want to be, our dream or our goal, when
we live in the present, yet want to believe--dream that we can have
what we want in the future. Dream big dreams, not little ones. The
bigger the dream, desire, want, craving, longing or yearning, the
more we are apt to achieve it. We need to keep the dream in mind
constantly in order to realize the steps we are taking to achieve
it.
Then we need to awake from the dreamlike state and act as if the
dream is a reality. Act in every way that we possess the dream, and
act to take the steps to achieve the dream. Without action, dreams,
desires and wants are just dreams.
Now, get out of the office and put your dreams into action. Go.
Go!
Ralph LoVuolo Sr., CMC is president of Mortgage Motivator, a
mortgage industry training and coaching firm. He is a founder and
past president of the New York
Association of Mortgage Brokers, a teacher accredited by the
New York and New Jersey Real Estate Commission, a former associate
professor at Atlantic College and New York University and a
published author. He can be reached at (609) 652-6901, e-mail
[email protected]
or you can visit his blog at www.mortgagemotivator.blogspot.com.
