How to 10x Your Loan Officer Income
When Kristen Jamison and I met almost seven years ago, she had closed a grand total of ZERO loans. Last month, she closed 54 loans in personal production. She’s a true zero to hero story, the classic “small town girl makes good.” And, through it all, she’s still the same wonderful, humble person she’s always been. She just has a heck of a lot more money now.
Do you want to learn how to massively increase your business? If you’re just getting started or you find yourself stuck at a plateau, Kristen’s story will inspire you.
Starting Literally From Scratch
When I say Kristen started at zero, I mean it. She had just moved from the Midwest to central Florida, and aside from a few in-laws, she knew no one. She had to figure out how to get attention, how to make a name for herself in the business.
She knew that every loan officer on the planet could do conventional loans, so she needed something that set her apart. She decided to put together a presentation on Reverse Mortgages for Purchase, something she had experience with as a former loan processor but not a loan officer. She picked up the phone and just started calling real estate offices to ask if she could share her presentation. She didn’t have one person tell her no.
Word spread, and she was getting invited to agencies, introduced to agents, teaching about reverse mortgages, getting her foot in the door. She would follow up after her training, set appointments with people, form friendships, and let them know what else she could do. Actually, they started asking her, “Can you do this for us? Can you do that?”
And guess how many reverse mortgages she ended up doing. ZERO. To this day, she has never closed a reverse mortgage. Yet she went from 0 to 54 loans a month. She knew no title companies; she had no past database. She just decided to take a stab at something, push through the fear, and it worked out.
Now, that’s a remarkable story.
The Difference Success Can Make
Kristen is a really humble person, but I can tell you that she’s become kind of a big deal in her small town. Her local community had a Dancing with the Stars competition, and she competed as a STAR, and her team won The People’s Choice Award. How cool is that?
So, let’s back up to when Kristen first moved to Florida. She and her husband needed the two-family income. She only had to make $38k a year to match her salary from her old job, so she didn’t need to be phenomenal; she just needed to close some loans. She didn’t have money saved up. She didn’t have a marketing budget. She worked hard with what she had, and it paid off.
She spent two full years laying the groundwork for what her business has become today and went from $38k a year to $38k a month. She’s now one of the leaders in our Freedom Club and our Two Comma Club. She made 7 figures last year—a W2 of personal income over a million dollars. How does a person’s life change with that much more money?
Kristen told me that it’s really cool when your worries are no longer about paying the bills. She has a better relationship with her kids, not because they take elaborate vacations, but because she can spend more time with them. She lives in a house on the lake that’s 0.2 miles from her office and 0.7 miles from her kids’ school. She can do things for the community, give back. She’s a really giving person, and this has really completed her. Does she need to make that much money? No. But it sure is nice to be able to do all those extra things.
“It’s life by design now,” she says. “That makes a big difference.”
What Her Business Looks Like Today
Kristen says pipeline management is key in her loan officer business. She believes in a world where you’re only as good as your last deal, so she doesn’t want any part of that pipeline messed up. She does all of her own pre-approvals and initial disclosures—this is something she hasn’t turned over to her team. They sort their leads between online leads and referral leads, and her staff does a good job of getting people to their online applications. She also does a lot of videos and presentations to realtor referral partners on lending (during the pandemic in particular) and spends time in the community.
Her team gets about 130 leads a month. I asked her how she gets so many (even though I knew the answer). She told me that the first two years she did Thor’s Hammer religiously. And now they do weekly calls Monday through Thursday to specific groups of people using scripts she learned from us. That seriously makes me so happy. And Kristen says she loves making those calls, because these people are her friends now.
Kristen’s one regret is that she didn’t give herself more time to succeed. She was working so hard that she missed a couple years of her kids’ lives. And, if she’s honest, when Covid hit, she started working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week again, to keep up. In some ways, it felt full circle, back to those first two years. Her team didn’t have time to plan and prepare for a pandemic, and she feels like they’re digging themselves out of the trenches.
This is where I put on my Counselor Cap and gently told her something a coach of mine told me years ago. He said, “Carl, if you find yourself in the office after 5:00 or on the weekends, write down everything you’re doing in those extra hours.” I did what he said. Then he said, “All that stuff you wrote down? That’s the job description of the next person you need to hire.”
That person doesn’t have to be an exact replica of you, just have a lot of your same characteristics. It won’t be as hard as you think to find someone who cares almost as much as you do. Kristen has been hesitant to do this, but her family is so important to her that she’s going to give it a go. She wants to get some of those years back while her kids are still young.
You Can Be Like Kristen
Back in the day, Kristen had a lot of people telling her she wasn’t going to make it as a loan officer. Then she closed 16 loans in 45 days. She decided right then and there that, if other people could do it, so could she. They weren’t any more special than she was. She repeated that mantra, pushed through her fear and doubt, and she did it. She really did it.
If you’re inspired by Kristen’s story and want a peek at what she does each day, Monday through Thursday—kind of a week in the life of a loan officer superstar—I would be happy to walk you through that. I’ll even give you the scripts she uses on those phone calls. It’s really the secret sauce of knowing what to say and who to say it to in order to close more loans.
Chatting with new, curious loan officers is one of our very favorite things to do, and the call is absolutely free, no strings attached. You’re more than welcome to take that valuable information we give you in that 45-minute call and go work it on your own. Or you might ask us to help you implement that plan on an ongoing basis. This isn’t a sales call. It’s walking you through being a superstar, step by step. Don’t wait another minute. Schedule a call TODAY.
View Related Article, How Loan Officers Can 10x their Income while Working Less Hours: https://mortgagemarketinganimals.com/how-loan-officers-can-10x-their-income-while-working-less-hours/#more-90249
