The Three Freedoms Every Loan Officer Can Have
A loan officer is the best career ever. There’s so much margin and freedom. Imagine if the rest of the world caught wind of this. (We don’t want this to happen, right?)
When it comes to a successful loan officer career, there are three specific freedoms we want for you: financial freedom, time freedom, and relationship freedom.
Financial Freedom
Let’s break down the income aspect of a loan officer’s goals. We make $2000/close on average. In a 40-hour week, when you close just one more loan per week, that means an extra:
- $2000/week
- $8000/month
- Almost $100k/year
Can you just grab ONE more loan a week in 40 hours? Yes. You could go door to door. You could stand on a street corner with a sign (I Close Loans! Call Me!) and get one more. Think about it—$8000 is almost a six-figure income all by itself. With just one extra loan a week.
Okay, but how am I going to do it? I don’t have the time freedom and the relationship freedom. These three freedoms are deeply intertwined. Financial freedom is great, but when it comes at the expense of your family or your happiness, that’s not great. I’m not saying that if you’re closing a lot of loans, you suck. No. I want you to close more loans AND have a happy family.
The ability to have a great work life and a great life outside of work is an important part of balance. What good is a lot of money if you don’t have time to enjoy it or people to enjoy it with?
Time Freedom
It is absolutely critical that you take time off to recharge your batteries. I have a dear friend with a doctorate degree in Human Productivity. One study she did found that someone working 40 hours a week will get more done than a person working 60-80 hours a week. We see this in our business all the time. When we get loan officers to work less, they get more done. When you’re here for 80 hours, you mess around, waste time. I’m not impressed by loan officers who make a lot of money but work 80 hours a week.
Parkinson’s Law says that your accomplished work grows in inverse proportion to the amount of time you have left. The less time you have left, the more stuff you’ll get done. What if you trick yourself? What if you give yourself a small amount of time? Monday through Friday 9-5 or even less? Give yourself a short amount of time to get something done, and you’ll get more done than if you believe you have a long amount of time.
Time freedom also includes mental recovery time, being able to take time off, and having your time to rebuild. Many people believe that taking time off is a waste, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. A loan officer—or anyone for that matter—who takes time to recharge their batteries will be better at the job than someone who is just going and going nonstop. If you do that, you’re eventually going to burn out. We need time to recover.
We require our loan officers, after six months in the Freedom Club, to start taking every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. If you take just a two-day weekend, you spend Saturday thinking about work and Sunday mentally ramping back up for Monday. You need to take three days off to really have one day off. You’ll be so much more effective at achieving freedom.
Relationship Freedom
There are two aspects to relationship freedom:
- Working with the people you want to work with
- Being able to enjoy your family and friends
Let’s start with work first. Put together processes and systems to attract referral partners so you can pick out the ones you actually want to work with. You’re going to kiss some frogs here to find out who the princes and princesses are. You want to find more cool people, people who make work a joy, not a drag. The cool people are out there. You just need to attract them. It starts with YOU being the kind of person you’d want to work with.
When it comes to referral partners, you want the freedom to be selective, not desperate. We only want to work with people we would hang out with anyway—ride motorcycles with, hang out with our families at a BBQ. This doesn’t happen by accident. As part of our loan officer coaching, we have very specific and effective ways to develop relationships with new referral partners.
Relationship freedom is what gives you the power to implement what I call the “no jerk” policy. The “no jerk” policy means that, if you’re a jerk, you get fired. It doesn’t matter how much money you bring in. If you’re in a situation where you feel compelled to work with jerks, that’s not relationship freedom.
Bringing It All Together
As a loan officer, the three freedoms will change your life. I have an incredible passion for helping people find freedom. If you’re feeling overwhelmed about figuring out all these freedoms at once, let’s chat. We can map out a plan so that you can really, truly have it all. Click here to schedule a FREE strategy call with me TODAY.