Category: Social Media Collab

This one’s an interesting one as Scott tells us how Tiktok can be beneficial to round off your social media game and the power it has to get your message out there.

Scott Betley – That Mortgage Guy – Content Creator and Mortgage Banker with over 7 years of experience assisting First Time Buyer’s and Move-Up buyers with their home purchases. Experienced in Home Loan  Grants. Over 350 past clients who have purchased homes with me over the duration of my career. Highly Experienced with FHA, VA, USDA & Conventional Financing. Also well versed with renovation loan options! Check me out on socials under @ThatMortgageGuy

Episode Transcribe

– Woo, we’re almost done friends. We have almost made it to the end but I’m almost the most excited about this one, because if we’re talking social media and we’re doing a collab and we’re not talking about TikTok, we’ve totally missed the boat. And I gotta tell you this guy who’s gonna come on. Scott Betley is first of all, he’s a brand new father like new new. So we’ll joke about that ’cause he’s a bold man for coming on here with a baby somewhere in the house but I’ve been poking around TikTok because humans are on TikTok and I’m like, what’s going on there? And Holy crap, somebody figured it out in the mortgage space. And I started to realize there’s something here. And this is going right down to the line guys of, there’s an audience for everybody. Get ready. Let’s talk to Scott Betley about TikTok. Alright, friends and professionals, our next topic, TikTok, you can not have a social media collab event without talk about the hottest new platform out there and this guy Scott Betley cracked at the mortgage guy. Somehow the algorithm likes you, it likes your community, It likes your fun, it likes your creativity. And man, he hit it and this is my point. There are so many more ways to customerabilty. Let’s go explore what Scott’s doing on TikTok to change his career.- Woo, what’s up Scott?- How are you doing?- Dude, so good to see you. I feel like I know you and your house ’cause I see you on TikTok all the time now.- So I’m filming all my contents in my house now, its kinda crazy.- It’s awesome, dude. Let’s break this down for everybody. That’s hanging on to the end ’cause they knew TikTok was coming. It’s a scary platform. It’s a bunch of underage girls dancing to silly songs. and then you’ve got Scott Bentley dominating the mortgage space. So let’s start with some stats, dude. How many followers you got on TikTok?- I think I’m around 135 K right now.- 135, 000, how many views have you got?- I think I’m averaging like, seven to eight million views a week.- See you guys. Thanks for being part of “The Collab”. No, are you ser… This is what blew my mind. So Scott you know, I started to search for hashtag, search for stuff, seeing who’s on there on mortgage and then all of a sudden I was like, holy crap and then I looked at your page and I was like, oh, holy crap, and then I went one step further. And I tell everybody this, I started looking at your comments. That to me is what I’m curious about. Music stuff are good but comments are interesting and then I was like, holy crap. There’s people that want mortgage information.- Yeah, it’s crazy.- So let’s talk about this. Not only did you, you’re rocking my world and my mind on this but it just further validates for me that there were more paths to the consumer than ever before. Why did you get on TikTok?- It was primarily because of Gary V. I listen to his podcast daily and I was in my home gym, I think in November or October of last year and he was raving about TikTok and the organic reach and how you know, it’s in its infancy and I was like I’ll try it. And then I was like 30 videos in, just kinda dabbling. And then my, I think it was like my 31st or 32nd video or something like that. And it got like three or 400,000 views overnight. I was like, wow this is legit. And I was having so many people reach out through it, how do I do this? Who do I call, how can I get in contact with you? I was like, wow I could really use this as a platform and that was the start of it really but all from Gary V.- So people forget on this platform of how to leverage it and how to use it. Describe TikTok as a platform. If someone asks like, “What is it, what’s happening there?” Let’s, I have my own opinion but someone who’s actually killing it there, what’s your opinion of this platform? What are people using it for?- It’s very similar to Vine. It was Musically but it’s essentially like Instagram with all video content. It’s short, sweet, up to a minute video and the premise with the platform is there’s a lot of trending songs and music and skits and trends that are happening. And if you can tap into that stuff, that’s really where you can benefit the most.- Yeah, so Scott what people don’t understand is that there’s people on that platform making jokes, making memes, doing dances, doing skits and then people are ripping off those skits and putting their own twist on it, taking the same music, doing it differently themselves a little bit and then you’re doing it but you’re doing it with mortgage content. I know you cringed a little bit there but this is the power of this. You’re doing it like, how much down payment can I afford or can I buy a house with zero down? And you’re doing these silly skits these other people are doing but it’s mortgage related.- Yeah, honestly man I never thought that it would catch on like it has. I was like, ’cause mortgages, they’re not fancy, they’re not too fun but yeah it’s been very, very cool to see for sure.- And this is one of the themes I wanna talk about. When you decide to start making content on there, you’re not making what I would consider traditional mortgage content. There are people on that platform who are doing what I would call a traditional mortgage content. They are planning debt to income, they’re not speaking in the voice of the platform.- Right, and the context of it.- And the context of it. So, you started doing it and all of a sudden you’re getting three to 400,000 views. This is a stupid question but how has it changed your business?- It’s blown it up, honestly. I just got licensed in Virginia, DC, Pennsylvania and Florida and I am getting probably 70 to 100 people a week in my licensed areas that I can help that are just reaching out via email. I have a little learning page on my profile where if someone comments, I kinda scan my comments but recently TikTok’s been blocking me from responding to everyone where once you’ve commented back to a certain number of people it stops, it says you’re commenting’s too much and stops you. So it’s kinda weird but, yeah I kinda scan through the comments, see who I can help send them to my landing page, have them reach out to me. And it has tripled my business easily just in the last five months. It’s kinda crazy.- Well and Scott, I want you to share about this because, what made you not put out the normal mortgage content? What inspired you to play the game differently?- It was Gary V, honestly. He always talks about the context of the platform in LinkedIn, in Facebook, in Instagram and how they’re all different and I realized around the same time that he’s right. For the longest time, I’ve been posting the same type of content across everything. And there were certain things that perform better on different platforms because of what type of content it was and I’ve really started to tap into the trends and what’s actually happening on that platform and performing well, not only with just viral content but you know there’s doctors, there’s physical therapists. There’s different people on there that I saw. They were a few people ahead of me. I think there was a doctor I saw and the dentist who I ran into early on and I was like, he’s tapping into these trends and just spinning it about his craft and what he does and that was kinda how I was like, this is the direction I need to go with it. And what’s cool too is that, it’s trickled over to my Instagram too where your IG gets embedded into your profile and now I kinda regurgitate that content on to Instagram and it performs well on there too. It’s pretty cool to see.- Well, let’s break this down. A lot of people, when they feel like they have to put out mortgage content are afraid to be funny because they think that they have to be serious ’cause this is a serious thing and we are talking about serious money for people. It is a serious thing. It’s boring but it’s serious and, mess it up and people can lose their earnest money deposit, there’s real ramifications and yet you infuse a ton of humor into your content. Even if some of the videos I’ve seen now that I started to social stock you on, redoing some of the most popular music videos with your own mortgage take on it. What inspired you to do that as an angle?- It was Gary Vaynerchuk, man. Literally he talks about authenticity and letting your hair down and being you and I pushed the envelope, sometimes on the edginess of it. But yeah for the first seven years of my career, I was so prim and proper and I felt like I had to be so professional ’cause like you said, we’re handling the largest investment of people’s lives and I kinda came to the realization that being authentic and being yourself and kinda just letting your hair down and not having those walls up, it’s so much better ’cause the consumer connects with that. They’re not necessarily all prim and proper and need that professional take and actually more people connect. Obviously there’s people that probably get turned off by it and the happiness of the content that I put out but there’s a heck of a lot more that connect with it. So yeah, that’s kinda what that comes down to.- You know, I just, I wanna echo that because I don’t think enough people are hearing it as authentically as I want them to, that the opportunity really, for everybody out there in sales and mortgage, et cetera is to really be yourself, to be yourself. If you think, like I know there’s probably some professionals out there who are like, “Oh, TikTok, I don’t connect to it. “I don’t like it, I’ve looked at it but it turns me off.” And for every one of those people, there’s millions and millions people on the platform who are super excited to be on the platform and tons of enjoyment from it. And again, this further validates to everyone that’s hung out for multiple segments today. There are so many paths to the consumer ’cause the consumers are radically different and you can have the super serious mortgage podcast, audio only or you could be Scott on TikTok dancing with some song and dropping mortgage facts and getting huge response.- I literally, I walked into my kid’s daycare this morning and all the teachers turn and they’re like, “Look who it is, that mortgage guy,” and I didn’t know that they see me on there and they were like, “We didn’t know you were TikTok famous.” I’m like, this is just crazy.- It’s crazy and I’m encouraging everybody, especially to this collab to get themselves out authentically onto the platforms that they feel connected to because this will never happen again.- Never.- This is never gonna happen again. There’s never gonna be another, that mortgage guy. You’re the guy and the more you lean into it and take ownership of the space, the more that it just distances from everybody else. And so, what’s your goal with it? Do you have a goal with it? What’s your thoughts?- Yeah, my goal at the end of the day is to really monetize my following and my audience. I’d like to grow it to, a million to two million in the next two to four years. And I, of course this last week or so I’ve had to kinda pump the brakes a little bit ’cause I’ve been— Congratulations by the way.- Thank you, man. The sleep is just what’s getting to me— Its the worst.- I’m running on 40 ounces of coffee today.- Bro, I’m feeling you.- Leave that there. But now that’s the goal is really grow to two to maybe three million of followers. And right now I’m at 135 K and I’m averaging probably 200 to 300 emails a day sometimes. If I could quadruple that, maybe even more, I kinda wanna grow to a point where I can grow my team as well and just kinda hand off these deals and not be so bombarded with all of this stuff ’cause it’s a lot to handle and then eventually maybe look at it like advertising and influencer marketing within the financial sector, with insurance and investment firms and real estate agencies and things of that nature.- Dude so fun, man. So what was your aha moment like, “Oh crap, this is gonna be a thing?” Was it that first time you hit, there was literally like no views and then you woke up and it was 300,000 views? Was it like that, did it grow slowly?- It happened pretty quickly. Yeah, I posted it and I think I got like four or 5,000 views in an hour and I was like wow, this is like, this is really this one’s performing well.- You remember which one it was?- What’s that?- Do you remember what it was?- Yeah it was literally, I just had my phone and I was walking through my kitchen and I was pointing to text bubbles on beat on how you can buy a house with no money down and it wasn’t fancy, it wasn’t anything special and yeah I was like, why is this performing so well? And it did. That’s the cool part about the platform too is, it doesn’t have to be so pro post produced, it doesn’t have to be so fancy, 95% of the content you see on the platform is shot from people’s phones and not even from this side of the camera. You’re talking about this side of the camera and it’s not perfect clarity, the resolution isn’t perfect and it doesn’t matter. So that’s what’s kinda cool.- By the way one of my favorites was, you posted about your old company wanting you back now that you were TikTok famous. I fell out of my chair. I’m dying, dude. I was like that is so fricking funny. It’s just so good, dude.- Yeah there’s been content I post I’m like, maybe I should take that down.- Okay, so let’s do this. If somebody is like, one of my big encouragements here is not to try to have everybody replicated everybody else. There’s been lots of people doing podcasting and Instagram and Facebook groups and I don’t wanna be like, “Oh shit, I gotta copy this person “and maybe I can get some of their stuff.” But if there is somebody who wants to start going into TikTok because they think that they’re like, “Ha, that’s interesting,” or their kids are on it so they’re like, “I’ll be there,” but there aren’t the whole time. Give everybody the kinda like the quick and dirty advice of how to understand the platform, what to do and not do, how to stay authentic, share your thoughts.- Yeah, so I would say, in the first, like when you start off on the platform, obviously download the app and spend four to five hours consuming content going through the foryou page, they call it where like on Instagram they have the search bar where you can see content all over the world, viral content that is performing well on the platform. TikTok is similar where they have a foryou page and a following page. Your following page are people that you follow, the foryou page is for people all across the world that have posted content that’s performing well on the platform. And within that content on the foryou page, there’s different themes, there’s different skits, there’s a ton of trending songs and if you can take advantage of those songs, whether it’s a play on the words within the song with your craft and what you’re talking about or whether you’re just taking advantage of that song ’cause it’s trending and has a million views made to that song and pointing to text bubbles on beat, I think that that’s the core of what it is. It’s just tapping into those trends and those trending songs.- Yeah, thanks for that. It’s the one on one on how to speak the same language of the platform you’re on. Understanding it, understanding what people are doing on it and then being able to put your own spin and creativity behind it. And you’re a pretty creative dude. I mean, it’s hard to come up with content people freeze up and then this, I can imagine them being a little scared of TikTok.- Yeah, it’s no joke. Once you hit like 20, 30,000 followers, you start to feel the special, like man, I gotta figure something out today. What am I gonna to do? And that’s literally like every night between probably 10:00 and 1:00 am. I’ll sit on my phone, my wife will falla asleep and I’ll just consume content and I’ll text videos to myself. You know you can text your cell, I don’t know if you have an iPhone. I don’t know how to enjoy this but you can text yourself, text the video to yourself and then put in a blurb of how you wanna spin it or what you wanna say or how you wanna do it. And I just store that content and just every night add to it and then pick what I think’s gonna perform best. And it’s always good later on at night you have a couple of beers, you can relax and just have fun with it and that’s probably where my most creativity comes from.- Exactly when all the inhibitions are down, you’d be like, “I got a feeling about that.”- Exactly.- Let’s see how that goes. So let me ask you this Scott, how has this, what’s the lead velocity from the platform, monthly, weekly? What kind of lead velocity are you getting from it?- Right now I have three closings directly from TikTok. I have 1.4 million dollars in buyers in a contract right now. I probably have like 30 to 40 buyers on the street shopping but I literally just got approved yesterday for those other four states, Virginia, Florida, DC and Pennsylvania and I’m getting probably 30 to 50 people a week in those areas, for Maryland, it was like five to seven leads a week but the leads were legitimate. I was converting probably half of them. That’s what’s crazy about it, is the conversion, it’s great.- It’s always awesome about it because it just shows that humans are out there looking for help and they’re connecting with who they’re connecting with on those platforms and if you’re there and, Scott has been working hard to put out content ’cause, how many videos have you done on TikTok? How many TikToks have you done?- I don’t even know, I have to go and look.- Tons, I was scrolling one day and I’m like, wow this guy is, but this is going back to everything you’ve heard this whole day which is hard work is still hard work. It’s not like you just go on TikTok and you just all of a sudden become famous and now you get leads everyday, no. Scott, you’re investing in it. You’re putting out, you’re thinking about it at night. You’re coming up with content ideas. You’re being creative and then you’re executing it at a much bigger pace than other people I think are even imagining.- Yeah and now it’s prime time. You have to be posting three to four times a day and I have been feeling guilty because the last week I’ve kinda laid off.- You have a baby, bro, well.- You know but it, I don’t know. It’s tough, I’m doing the best I can but yeah, you’re right. If you’re not tapping into it now, now is the heat of everything. Gary talks about how far in its infancy it is and how it is like three or four times better than what Instagram was in its heyday when it first kicked off and the organic reach was outrageous. So, if you’re not taking advantage of it now, it’s a mistake.- It’s a mistake. Here’s my encouragement for everybody that’s hearing Scott and maybe are a little intimidated or thinking that the platform’s not for them. I would disagree, everyone thought Facebook wasn’t a platform for adults or whatever we are. I don’t think that, people thought Instagram was just for photos. These platforms are places for human connection. That’s what they are and I gotta tell you, Scott I know I said this earlier but the second I started reading your comments and seeing people going, well can I buy a house? Well, what about me, what about where I live? Can you refer to it in California? And I was like, holy crap, this is real, this is happening.- It’s crazy yeah. I never thought it would but it’s been a good surprise for this year for sure.- So as we wind down here, what has been your biggest learnings, because this is relatively, give everybody some context. When did this really hit for you?- I think my first video went viral in December and then it took me some time to really figure out and harness the platform and the context of it. And I think in January, February timeframe, I really started to gain some steam and started to figure out, what content is performing better and how I have to spin it. I would say the top three things I try to focus on at one is authenticity and focusing on things that you like and things you like to do. Number two is providing value, whether it’s something about a down payment assistance program or a snippet of the home buying process or something that people need to know or a home buying hack or something along those lines. And then number three is being entertaining to some extent, whether it’s humorous or something that’s just off the wall or different. You have to grab the viewers’ attention and also have that hook within the first three to four seconds of the video, the platform is so fast paced. People are just scrolling, consuming content rapidly and you have to capture the viewer’s attention quickly. So you have to have that hook and I would say, those three pillars are what I focus on in trying to figure out how I can capture the viewer’s attention quickly.- Now by the way, for everyone that heard that, I think that that’s universally true across any platform, that hook concept. If you’re gonna do a 45-minutes to an hour long podcast, hook in the beginning.- Yeah.- If you’re gonna do an Instagram video or IGTV video, hook in the beginning, before it says, “Hey do you wannna keep watching this?” If you haven’t hooked somebody, they’re not gonna keep watching it on Instagram. Scott’s advice guys is universal to any type of content you’re gonna create, hook right away.- Absolutely, yep.- Well dude first of all, everyone probably just didn’t hear it that this is happening in real time. So Scott kinda got something contraction in December, now we’re like six months later and this thing is blowing up. So it’s like, it’s actually happening right now. It’s not like he spent seven years building his TikTok platform. It’s really happening right now and my biggest encouragement to all of you guys from anything today is just dive the hell in, dive in and get messy and make mistakes and do silly dances and see what lands ’cause people, they want authenticity. Scott, you’re nothing but authentic and they’re on all your content, everything you do I can see you’re like, what you care about is coming through in the messaging and so I’m just watching it all happen in real time. And I’m like this is the truth across, all these platforms guys. Any final words of advice, brother that you would give everybody and we can get you back to your baby?- No, I would say have patience, test the waters and try different things. It’s not gonna happen overnight and it’s a process just like anything else. I was listening a little bit to the gentleman you had on before me and I started doing video content a year and a half, two years ago. And just like he said, you can go back to my Instagram and watch those videos they were horrible. And it’s literally a process just like everything else. Professional baseball players don’t become professionals overnight. And so, you’ve gotta have patience and you’ve gotta put the work in, really.- Dude, go follow this guy on TikTok. You’ll learn the game. I’m so excited to see you and sharing freely Scott on what you’re doing. Thank you for everything you’ve done so far for the mortgage industry on TikTok. You’re representing us well, getting the word out. I love it and thank you.- Thank you, sir. Yeah, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.- Talk to you later.- Take care.- Man, dive into the water, team. How much more proof do you need? Dive into the water. I don’t care where but go all in and have some fun with your career, with yourself. Don’t take yourself so seriously. At the end of all that stuff is unbelievable opportunity if you’re willing to play in the space. I hope I impacted value today. Please go find these wonderful human beings online, connect with them, follow ’em, see what they’re doing. Man, I appreciate you all. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week. I’ll see you on the internet.

There are a lot of stories out there that need to be told. One of the best ways is through video. Sean Uyehara captures that beautifully through his video about Vegas right when Quarantine occurred.

Sean joined loanDepot in 2019 bringing 12 years of valuable experience and desire to help assist others in securing their American Dream of owning a home. He originally moved to Las Vegas to pursue a career within the financial planning industry, but his career went in a different direction. Given Sean’s natural knack for finance and passion to help people, loan origination made for a perfect career choice.

Episode Transcribe

– Whoo, you went out be in the restroom ’cause we’re breaking. Oh man, all right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re gonna keep rocking on this social collab. Thank you for hanging out live with us, thank you for being on You Tube, Facebook, LinkedIn. All of you, thanks for watching. In the future, appreciated if you are watching this feature, #bypass. It always gives me a little notification that somebody’s watching this later. Just makes me happy, man. Alright, Sean Uyehara, man, welcome to our video. You first were talking about with the others. You’re heard talking about the medium that runs non stop. So, we’re gonna get in the pocket, we’re gonna plan this phase. Let’s talk about video and let’s talk about storytelling video. Sean Uyehara is gonna be on right now at a viral video, “Go Crazy in Las Vegas”. We’re with the actual staff on here but we’re talking many views, which creates many brand opportunities and much influence. So, without further ado, hit me on, Sean.- Friends and professionals, you are going to love this next topic, video storytelling. And there’s nobody better right now to share this with you guys than Sean Uyehara, this guy right here, bang! The power to communicate your message and your heart through video is tied deeply into your ability to tell a story. Now, this guy has got over 100,000 views on a story about Las Vegas, and he’s gonna jump on with us right now and teach us how to tell stories in video.- Woohoo, I get pumped up every time with my stupid music, what’s up? Let’s talk about— You are a strong man.- Well, we’re gonna see what happens here. I might just pass out in the middle of this so we’ll see. Thanks for hanging with us, dude. Welcome to the show or whatever this is, “The Collab.” Man, I wanna talk about stories, dude. First, and I know I said 100,000 views but where are we at in this video of yours in Las Vegas?- I think we capped it at about 150,000, 150,000 is what we ended up at.- Dude, first of all, please go ahead, Mikey, let’s share the actual link to this video across YouTube Facebook and don’t leave “The Collab” and go watch it, don’t leave. Come stay here, hang in the pocket. But you did a video in Las Vegas and let’s just walk people through what you did, why you did it. We know the results but let’s talk about it for a second.- So we did kind of a tribute to the city when COVID shut us down and I think it was just kind of a cool idea that I had because obviously everyone who’s been to Vegas, it’s the glitz and glam and the lights and, you name it, you can find it here. And once the shutdown happened, everything went dark. Literally you could ride a bike in the middle on Las Vegas, Boulevard. So I was like, what if we did a video just kind of showing people, not only here in town but across the country in the world of, “Hey, we’re more than just a city.” People live here, we have regular jobs. It’s not just all about the partying and everyone’s in the service industry. There’s a lot of people like teachers and first responders and everybody else. So I was like, “Now, let’s do kind of a tribute video “and let’s just see what happens.” So we posted it and it just took off from the beginning. I think on our personal page, on my personal page, we got over 300 shares and I think on our business page, we ended up getting I think over 3,000 shares and I think, like I said, it was about 150,000 views.- So those of you that are gonna watch the video as it’s linking around, it was a surreal video, dude. And again, it had nothing to do, everybody with Sean the mortgage star that he is. It was you walking through the streets downtown in Las Vegas with no one there.- Yup, I mean— That was like post-apocalyptic and you just get a bit of voiceover effectively of the video, of about the ethos and the culture and the soul of the city.- Yeah, and a lot of it was just, Vegas has gone through a lot, you know what I mean? When you go back to the foreclosure crisis, we were the hotbed probably besides maybe Arizona and Florida and then you had the Route 91 shooting. So Vegas itself, I felt like we’ve gone through a lot but we keep coming back stronger than before. And I think it was just something where there was a lot of negative press and the media all the time. It’s easy to find that. So I was like, “Let’s do something to really shout everybody out.” We all move to Vegas from somewhere else in the world, hardly anyone’s from here. So why not say, “Hey, look, now that we’ve all moved here, “we’re all a family whether we wanna admit it or not.” And we always band together and Vegas always comes back, man.- So share a little bit, you made this video, you put it out there, it went crazy and then now all of a sudden you get all these shares. Has it changed your business? Has it impacted your mortgage career?- Yes and no. We found a few leads and stuff come in that people are like, “Hey, I seen your video.” And then they reached out and it was kinda funny too because we had a few leads that we were already kind of going back and forth with that they then reached out and said, “Hey, I see that this is your video,” and then we kinda went into more detail with the preapproval and stuff like that. So, yes and no. I mean, it wasn’t to where, hey, we’re doing a ton more business just because of that but I think it gave us maybe a little more credibility and just showing that, hey, we care about the community and we’re a part of this.- Yeah, it’s just such a powerful brand play to get out there and tell stories. So let’s talk about storytelling with your community ’cause you’ve done some other interesting things with video out there and I want you to share a little bit about some of the public services you were doing with COVID, the restaurants you were supporting, because again, it didn’t have anything to do with mortgage. It wasn’t just, you know what’s DTI? How does that affect the world? Share with everybody what you did.- Yeah, obviously the whole, again, COVID thing, it was, how can you contribute to your community? And I see a lot of people, they were doing stuff with first responders but I had a couple of clients actually comment on other people’s videos and stuff about them donating food. She was a nurse and she said, “We don’t need food at the hospital. “Go and support local businesses. “I’m tired of people bring in, dropping off stuff, “things to the hospital.” I was like, “Okay, I guess I can kinda see that.” So we reached out to our community, a few of my friends, they have restaurants and stuff like that. So I just said, “Hey, look, I wanna support you guys “and I’ll buy some food and let’s just give it away.” There was actually a casino here in town called Palace Station and they were doing like a food drive and I was driving by one day. I mean, this line to get food was blocks long. I thought something happened at the hotel. So that kinda made me think like, yeah, we need to help the first responders but look at all these people. They’re literally waiting in line at 7:00 am. and it’s a hundred degrees in their car to get food. So I was like, you know what? Let’s just give the food away to the community. I don’t care, who needs it? There’s only so many times you maybe are eating Mac and cheese or whatever it is to kind of stretch that dollar a little farther because maybe you don’t know when your unemployment’s coming in and stuff. I was like, look, a couple of my buddies, they own some great restaurants in town. I said, “I’m gonna buy food and let’s just give it away.” People can come in this isn’t about, like you said, this isn’t about LoanDepot or anything else. It’s just, you guys need food, come in and eat and I’ll take care of the bill. So, we did that.- Let’s just walk through this ’cause it goes so much deeper. So, you call your buddies at these restaurants and you say, “I wanna buy food,” and what do they say?- They’re like, “Yeah sure, why not?” They were wondering why, I was like, look, people are struggling and I think obviously some of it could be a pride thing and they’ll never reach out but if they can come in knowing that we’re here to help and there’s no gimmick or there’s nothing tied to it. It’s just literally, “Hey, here’s some food, man.” They were all for it.- So what went down? You went to the location, you bought your food, what happened?- Bought a bunch of food. We donated about a little over a hundred meals from two different restaurants. So we had people come in, we gave away some food and everyone was happy, we fed a bunch of families and then the second time we did it, I had some masks and stuff made ’cause that’s when the whole mask thing was kinda coming around so I did some LoanDepot masks and we just gave those away to people. And everybody was super appreciative of it. And not that we asked for it but you had some people that were reposting pictures of the food and giving shout outs on social media and stuff like that. So again indirectly, it grew our brand a little more here in town.- Well Sean, this is what I love about this and obviously you did an amazing thing. It was a really cool thing. I would have never seen it if you didn’t tell that story on video. I would have never seen it and I work with you, but the community, the reach you could have had would have been way less, if you didn’t share it through storytelling and video. That’s just period. And I want everyone to hear that because everyone’s doing really cool stuff. There’s a lot of loan professionals doing amazing stuff in your community but no one can see it because you’re not telling any stories through video and you’re not showcasing what’s happening. And once you push those stories out, share about what happened after that. How did people respond? What happened in your life?- We are really careful about how we did the videos ’cause obviously we didn’t wanna get a bunch of people in there and have them feel some type of way about it. So it was more about us taking control ’cause I think with social media and everyone it’s just easy to say, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea,” and you kinda keep scrolling or “Hey, I wanna do this,” but you don’t take action. So for me, it was “Look, I don’t give a shit. “It’s how many meals we buying? “We just need to do it.” I’m tired of just seeing other people, “Oh, we should do this and we should do that.” Just go do it. And it was to help my friends who had restaurants and everyone was saying, go support local businesses but how many people actually went out and did stuff? I was like, “We need to go do it,” and we documented it and not everyone’s gonna do that but it wasn’t for my benefit. It was also to show that that restaurant is busy. They’re serving food, they’re still in business. Hey guys, come out, check these guys out and go try their food. So, it was really putting everybody else first and our business has grown. Now, we’ve got agents that are reaching out to us. I just had one yesterday, I’ve never talked to her before and she reached out and she’s like, “Hey, I’ve been watching your videos “and I wanna start working with you.” She’s like, “I work with another lender “but they don’t do anything close to what you’re doing.” Again, I don’t do these things with the intent of, what’s the ROI. I think some of the other guys were talking about that earlier. It’s just a, I tell Leo this every day, who helps me with our videos is, we just gotta do what we gotta do every day, that’s it. That’s all we gotta focus on. All the other stuff’s gonna come eventually. At some point, the water faucet’s just gonna, you can’t turn it off. So until then, we just gotta focus on our daily grind and what we do and everything will pay off at some point. Hey, I’m gonna share the video. I want people to watch this. Let’s see how this goes here. Let’s do full screen. All right, and then let’s try this thing here. Can you hear the audio?- Las Vegas is our city, a city where 3 million people call home. The city that boasts the world’s best entertainment, fine dining, night life and shopping. What was once a tourist destination was completely shut down in the blink of an eye. I mean, who would ever think the bright lights of The Strip would go dark? Sin City is what many people refer to as a party destination. But we are more than just nightclubs and overindulgence. This is home, home to teachers, doctors, nurses and first responders that are doing everything possible to protect our community. They risk their lives every day to help those in need. Millions of us have moved here from somewhere else in the world but now we call Las Vegas home. This isn’t the first time Las Vegas has gotten knocked to the ground and it probably won’t be the last. We certainly have faced our fair share of adversity over the years, from the foreclosure crisis in 2008 to the Route 91 shooting. The people of our city have shown and will continue to show love and support for one another in tough times. No matter how hard we get hit, we always bounce back. We never quit, we never give up. In fact, we always rise up stronger than before. Like they say, this too shall pass. COVID-19 has hit our city hard but I know one thing, we are gonna bounce back even stronger than before. We are #vegasstrong.- Boom dude, that’s what I’m talking about. Jeez dude, I get goosebumps still, watching that thing and seeing you’re driving and nobody’s there and seeing the guy hitting the tennis ball in the valet line. This is storytelling with video guys and this is, the power of this stuff is human connection. And I just am encouraging you guys because what Sean did is an example for all of us of what we can do when we step out of the mortgage world, take our hat off and tell stories. And again, Sean share with people, where did the inspiration come from for that?- I’ve taken a lot of content and I’ve seen actually, Ryan Serhant, he did a video about New York city and I watched that and I was like, man, that’s, it was a pretty cool video. And I was like, we could do the same thing here. So we got out, we went out and shot it and just kinda threw a lot of that B roll and stuff together. I mean, for us too it was kinda cool to just get it on The Strip and again, you don’t ever see it ever like that. I mean, I’ve lived in town 13 years. So, it was one of those things before you start to see more people go out and bike ride and do all that stuff down there. We were still pretty early when we did it. So I think by the time we shot the video, we got it out, it was before a lot people started really going out there and trying to get those photo ops, I guess.- Yeah, I mean, yeah, of course. But I love this because what you said was very transparent. “I saw someone else do it, “what’s gonna stop me from doing it?” I wish more people would get in that frame of mind. So you do a lot of video content, Sean. You do a lot, anyone that follows you or has now started to click on your handles and found you online from this, you put out a lot of content, what’s your motivation behind that? What’s your motivation for your videos? Share your thought process in when you’re gonna make a video. I just saw on social that you just did eight, you’re going for eight videos in one day?- Yesterday, yep. I know what you’re feeling, man. You got that water by your side.- So yeah, break it down. What goes through your head when you make this content? What’s your intent behind it?- So a lot of it stem, like Neel talked about this morning was I just kinda got fed up with always just having to ask agents for business. And I think when you first get in, I’ve been doing this about 12 years. That’s kinda the only way you’re taught, you have to call agents every single week. “Hey, do you have any leads? “Hey, can I help you with this?” I kinda got tired of it because you do so good of a job sometimes on these deals. We can close early, there’s no hiccups and yet that agent will still not use you. They will put you at one of five lenders that they deal with. So, about a year and a half ago or so I really said, “Okay, I’m gonna just start creating content,” and I never used Instagram, never used Facebook for any marketing. I kept all my stuff private. So I said, “Screw it, let’s go. “Let’s just start doing this, let’s figure this out.”- Pause, why? A year and a half ago, you weren’t doing any of this stuff. What was the catalyst that finally was like, “I’m in?”- I just got tired of calling agents and I just felt like I was, I played basketball my whole life. I’m super competitive and I felt like I’m better than the next guy but why am I not getting the deal? If I can close faster and I have, our customer service is better and we close the deal quicker, why am I not getting the agent’s deal? There’s something else that I’m not doing, that’s we’re not getting versus just paying for the business, which I’ve done, spent tens of thousands of dollars doing that too. But I wanted more of that partnership with the agents, truly telling them like, “Look, we’re in this together. “We’re gonna create content together. “I’m not just gonna be one of five on your list “that you send leads to. “I want everything and let’s start building “something stronger together.” So I started like probably everybody else, Facebook, running some ads. We did okay with that but it wasn’t anything that really transformed our business, but it was the company that I was with prior to LoanDepot. They kinda put the handcuffs on me and said, “You can’t do certain things,” and it was just, I’m like, “Well, I’m trynna go in this direction. “You guys don’t want me using social media.” So, obviously I was able to meet with Chris and you guys and I was like, I didn’t know how I didn’t hear about LoanDepot before.- I want you to hit again like, there are so many loan officers right now. I know it, I see them, I talk to them in the entire industry who haven’t made the decision yet to get all in, in this space. And they’re still like, and right now with loans kinda falling from the sky, it can be distracting. I’m like, “Oh, I’m doing fine.” And Scott, the last guy we had on was like, “It’s not gonna be fine in the future.” He’s like, “It’s not gonna be fine in the future,” and there’s fear. And so if somebody is gonna go all in in just video and storytelling, what advice would you give them? How would you share your thoughts on that?- Just share your story. Like you said, you don’t have to talk about mortgages every day. ’cause honestly, no one gives a shit about mortgages. It’s boring, what we do is boring. There’s nothing cool about reading a tax return. So, how can you spice it up a little more? I know I’ve talked to a couple of guys within our region that there was one guy that loves dirt bike riding. I’m like, “Dude, post about dirt bike riding every day,” and he’s been doing it and I see he gets a lot more engagement. So I think for anyone that’s out there that’s listening, that’s struggling with content to think of, just talk about yourself, talk about what you like doing. And I think once you start doing that, people will start to follow you and people will start to engage and then you can start talking about PMI and down payment assistance. You can sprinkle that stuff in amongst your personal content that you wanna share.- Dude, I could not agree more. The fact that we are hiding our authentic self behind videos about DTI and down payment and not letting our selves come through that. The others talked about that earlier is gonna be the big hindrance to growth and success. When you finally show up, like you did one song, I really liked this and I want other people to take a lesson. You showed yourself watching one of your first videos, do you remember this? Your first video’s up and then you were next to it, looking at it.- Oh yeah, that was bad. That was all bad.- But what was that first video about? What do you remember?- It was about loans. It was, I think it was just about some kinda guideline I think, it was terrible. It’s like suit and tie and I would say like, you watch my stuff now, you’ll never catch me in a suit and tie but it was about some kinda guideline and it didn’t do that well. But it was funny ’cause you go back and you look at your library and how you’ve evolved, which is kinda cool and now, we do a lot more stuff that’s maybe inspirational and kinda sharing our journey ’cause I still feel that we’re pretty young at this whole social media thing ’cause it’s only been maybe a year and a half.- I want everyone to hear that, man. The journey has to start somewhere.- Yeah.- A year and a half to a video that’s got 100,000 , 150,000 views and massive brand play across the country. It’s like that it’s not too late, it’s time to start. Everyone has a unique and powerful audience waiting for ’em and you just tell your story.- Yeah, you just gotta get on camera. I think that’s the biggest thing. Everyone has this thing of what’s gonna be, when am I gonna get my money back or what am I gonna get my what’s the ROI? I think on our YouTube channel in the last three months we’ve done maybe over 100 videos. I put those out, I don’t care if I get a view. Some will get five, some will get 50, it doesn’t matter to me. It’s just putting the content out every day and just creating our brand every single day. Like I said earlier, that realtor that called me. I was telling this story to Leo yesterday that if she would’ve never called us, if it wasn’t for the videos that we’re doing today. However, if we didn’t start a year and a half ago, she would have never had content to watch regardless. So I don’t know who’s watching my stuff right now but the fact that she could have been on my page and she might’ve watched 20, 30 videos yesterday and said, “I’m gonna call this guy.” She called me and said, “I wanna work with you.” I’ve never heard of her. So I think it’s just those opportunities you kinda open yourself up a lot more once you start, like you said, you gotta put yourself out there. And I know that’s a big thing for a lot of people but, what’s a deal worth to you in whatever part of the country you’re listening to this? Five grand, seven grand? I mean, if you could post and every post could potentially lead to a deal, why would you not be more consistent about posting?- Well, dude, we got a few minutes for our next guy that’s coming on. So let’s drop some advice. What’s some of your advice, Sean, for somebody who’s new in the business or lifetime player in the business but hasn’t gotten into storytelling with video? What’s your advice?- I think the biggest thing is just do it, don’t get caught up with the equipment, don’t get caught up with trying to be too overly professional or anything. Just be yourself, talk about stuff that you have a passion about. It could be anything, your kids. Obviously you see jerseys in the back. Like I said, I played ball my whole life, so it could be sports, whatever it is, talk about that. That’s the easiest thing ’cause you don’t have to worry about a script. You don’t have to worry about what you sound like, just record. And we all talk about, it’s just, it doesn’t matter, we’re using Blue Yeti mics, they’re a hundred bucks. Just do it and I think the more you do it, like anything else in life, you get better at it. And yesterday we spent two and a half hours, about two and a half hours, we shot six videos. That would have taken me probably two days to do that when I first started. We shot nine videos yesterday but again, I’ve shot hundreds of videos at this point and I still screw up. We still make mistakes but you just have to keep pushing yourself every day. And the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. And if this is your career, you got another who knows how long? 20, 30, 40 years in the business. I mean, you might as well keep creating content now. There’s nothing that’s bad about creating content.- Well, here’s a comment too that people are forgetting and you said it so quickly and I think everyone’s gonna mishear this. You’ve carved time to film videos and then those videos get posted when?- We schedule them out. So from yesterday that we shot, we’ll probably get them semi edited by the end of the week, of this week and then I think hopefully by Monday, Tuesday of next week, we’ll have ’em completely done and then we’ll go and we’ll try schedule them off for the next few weeks.- So I want everyone to hear that because everyone’s like, “I’ve got to do videos all the time. “When do I have the time? “When do I find the time?” And they get a little overwhelmed and you’re like, “Just carve time on a Saturday “or carve time in your workday, “have some discipline and film videos during that time.” I used to joke that I had a t-shirt rack next to me, out of camera range and I film a video and then I changed t-shirts.- I had three of ’em yesterday, three different shirts, three different hats so we shot it all.- You guys have to realize when you get really tactical on video creation, you’re not gonna have the motivation every single day to show up and film a video let alone have the time because you’re working and hopefully you’re working on a ton of loans. So you gotta have to carve a time, make it part of your deal and then all of a sudden you’re gonna realize you got the power right behind you because you’ll have it all in the Dropbox and then it just picks up momentum and as Sean said, you get better. Now he’s filming in what used to take a hundred takes is taking five. I hope you and Leo are saving all the bloopers by the way ’cause I need— I told him that’s on our list and that’s another thing. So I have a videographer on my team. So the minute I get an idea, we have a Google doc that we share. The idea goes in there and a lot of times, I’ll text them like, “Hey, let’s shoot this.” So I get these ideas and I’ll wanna shoot it. Sometimes we get busy. I mean, everyone, like you said should be busy right now. So, two of the videos that we shot yesterday, I’ve been sitting on that idea for the last two weeks. So we finally got those done. We’ll get ’em out, before, obviously he’s sitting right next to me and I get an idea. It’s like, let’s just go shoot right now kind of thing. So, I like to move fast when we get ideas.- So we got two minutes left but I wanna share this for everyone that hear this and I put Leo up on the screen ’cause he’s your right hand man, helping you produce content. And in mortgage, I remember in 2003 and I know this makes me sound like whatever I am now, but I got my first assistant and my branch manager wasn’t gonna let me hire that person because I didn’t do enough production yet. And I was like, I need to get, I want to get some, Neel’s still hanging out. I wanna get an assistant that’s gonna help my business and the second I hired my first assistant, I hired him with my own cash. I gave my own money out of my commissions ’cause it was easier back then and it radically changed my life because now I could scale up my activities. And when I look at the world today, even Neel said it in the beginning on Instagram, if it’s important to you, you’ll hire for it. You’ll spend the money for it. You’ll carve time for it. And a good example is like all these loan officers that’s got a million production assistants. I’m like, one or two of those could be a video guy.- Yeah, absolutely.- If it’s important to you go hire him, go pay him money and step your game up. And I look at you and I’m like, dude, you’re leading the way on that, you’re hiring, it was important to you, you’re investing in it. You’re hiring ’em, they’re working side by side. You could have had another PA that was pushing paper but you hired a video guy to create content and I’m like, wow, this is the future. This is the future right now, dude. So thank you, Sean. Thank you for telling great stories. Thank you for letting me share that Las Vegas video. Any final words before we get you out of here?- No, man, I hope you know, I’ve talked to Neel a bunch of times and I agree with him, who cares what company you’re at? We’re all in this together and there’s enough business for everybody. I’ve bounced ideas off of him and obviously anybody else that’s listening to this, if you’re at a different company, you have questions, hit me up, I’m more than willing to dive deep with you and let you know how we do it, why we do it ’cause again, I’m all about everybody winning.- Thank you, dude. All right, you’re out brother. Have a great day.- Thanks man, appreciate.- Man, dive into the water, team. How much more proof do you need? Dive into the water. I don’t care where but go all in and have some fun with your career, with yourself. Don’t take yourself seriously, at the end of all that stuff, there’s unbelievable opportunity if you’re willing to play in this space. I hope you found value today. Please go find these wonderful human beings online, connect with them, follow them, see what they’re doing. Man, I appreciate you all. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week. I’ll see you on the internet.

Hear from Andrew Cady on how being consistent about digitally connecting people to your network will help increase your business.

In early 2015, Andrew found his passion in the mortgage business, quickly becoming one of the top single producers in the state. Andrew has now truly mastered his profession. Andrew adopted a mantra early in his career: “I aim to make the closing room more of a celebration than a sigh of relief.” Andrew has done just that, as evidenced by more than 350 five-star reviews.

Episode Transcribe

– I bumped into Andrew on social media as he was doing this game and I was like, there’s something about to happen here. Now, first of all he’s the Epic Mortgage Guy. Like all of a sudden were meeting like, okay, like, “who are you?” “The Epic Mortgage Guy”, I gotta get to know this, then I stated to watch content, watched what he was putting out. Then I was like, there’s something really cool here. And so without further ado, let’s bring on Epic Mortgage Guy, Andrew Cady, Friends and professionals, our next topic is the power of digital connections with this guy, Andrew Cady. Now, for those of you that don’t follow this guy, you’re missing out. When I first saw him online, I knew he was doing something special, something was happening because what he would post, when he would share his message, he would have a resounding audience, jumping in and collaborating with him, and it’s taken his business to new heights. So let’s bring him on and talk about what he’s doing and the power of digital connections. Entry music bro, entry music. I got walk-on music for you dude.- I don’t even know what to say right now man. How are you?- I have to use the restroom, but we’re gonna push through dude. It’s so good to see you man, look at the background and the Epic, dude you’re crushing it right now.- Hey, even have proper softbox lighting, you know, we got this stuff set up,- Dude, I’m jealous. So I wanna dive right in with you man, cause you’ve done something that I have never seen anybody do yet in the industry. And I was so impressed by it that I was like, man, I needed to bring you on to talk about the power digital connections. Because when I learned that you had spent two years of your business cultivating a digital connection ecosystem, universe, I was like, this is the power, you know? And so first Andrew real quick, share with everybody how your production’s going. Cause I know we’re all having good years. You’re having a really good year, like share with everybody with that. Let’s let everyone know who you are.- Yeah, So here today I’m about 25 days away from ellipsing last year’s volume. So last year I did 200 units. Somewhere in mid July, I’m going to close out my 200 unit for this year. And the crazy crazy thing is, 92, 93% of my business is purchase this year. So this isn’t a spike from refize, this is a lot of organic, a lot of referral based business, almost entirely driven through social media on my end.- Yeah. So that’s where all of a sudden I was like, holy crap, that’s a lot of production, but it’s all coming through your digital efforts.- Yeah. I’m not the guy that is, dialing real estate agents. “Hey, can I buy you coffee?” Yes, I did that five years ago when I got into the business, I bought a lot of coffee and a lot of lunches and ultimately a lot of beers. But, once the audience on social media began to kind of grow and turn into, really just a referral base, I have probably in the last 18 to 24 months, I haven’t taken anybody to lunch unless they’ve called me to ask me to go to lunch. Frankly, I just don’t have time for it, unless they’re asking me, I am desperately seeking ways to hire more people right now and not to seek more business right now, which is awesome.- So you say that and everyone out there is like, holy crap I want that. Like, how do I get that? How do I do that? And you had to earn this seat at the table. You had to put time and sweat and tears into it. And so for everybody that’s listening, like how many, in Facebook, like let’s just use that platform. How many connections do you have with real estate professionals on Facebook?- Yeah, so I’m capped out or close to being capped out on my friends list. I removed about 200 lender friends that have added me, so I can make room for more real estate agents. But there’s no exact math, but I figure somewhere between the number of 3,800 and 4,000 of my friends on Facebook are real estate agents, either specifically in my local markets or in Florida, Georgia, where I’m doing business.- So, for everyone else who just heard that, like I did the first time and I was like, this guy cracked the code. By the way, that takes effort, that takes tremendous amounts of effort.- It does.- And how did you get that? How did you create that? When did you start and how did you get that level of influence?- So where I began with this whole thing was, when I got into the mortgage business I got in, and I truly had like no mentor. A friend of mine brought me in the business who was an executive vice president of a mortgage company. And he basically put me in a branch, sat me in front of an encompass and was like, “Hey, go originate loans.” And so I found another friend of mine who was really good and we kind of collaborated. And so I had no connections. And so what I did is I spent about eight months pounding the pavement and went to 25 open houses every single weekend.- Yes- For about eight months.- I know what that feels like.- And just walk in, grab a business card, shake, hands, get out. And then I would add these real estate agents on Facebook. And what I found is, when I add that first realtor on Facebook, if I haven’t met them face to face, there’s a very low probability they’re going to add me back. But if I’ve met them at an open house, I could quickly in a matter of seven, eight months, a mass 500 realtors on Facebook pretty easily. And then when I would go to my suggested friends list, other real estate agents, now we have 75 mutual friends. So when I would click that ad, red button, boom, I get added back. Now when I go on there and it’s like, there’s a real estate agent. I have 1,300 mutual friends with them. Of course, they’re going to add me back. So it is a slow build, and it takes a lot of effort. But it’s also, managing the content you’re putting out and the quality of the content, but also, staying away from hot topic issues, keeping myself very politically agnostic, right down the middle of the road. There’s some things I just will not touch on my Facebook.- Well, and we can get into pitfalls and that’d be a fun conversation, but I want everyone to hear really hear this. Like what you did had incredible foresight because you built a digital community before it was cool. It takes time. And like you said, then it snowballs. Then you’ve got like 75 mutual friends and then you don’t have to meet them face-to-face. They’re going to accept it. And now all of a sudden you have this megaphone opportunity. And now when you put out a piece of content, put out a piece of video, put out anything at all, you have this audience that’s already there waiting for you.- Correct, yeah. I just posted about an hour ago on my Facebook, and right before we went live, I looked at it, I’m close to a hundred engagements in just under an hour. Just a screenshot of an email that I got, like the engagement level, it’s just always there, but it’s also making sure that we’re not posting a rant about a football game, because you’re going to kill your Facebook engagements when you start posting this. Every post I do has to be very thought out, the time of day I’m going to post it, the content I’m going to post. It has to be something that you’re not just arbitrarily doing, but rather planning to get done successfully.- I know everybody’s hearing this through your conversation and through your intent on this, but like, you radically transformed your career, like radical.- Yeah. What I’m looking at this year will be very likely somewhere in the neighborhood of a 75 to 90 million dollar a year, at 95% purchase. And that’s coming off of a 45 million dollar year, last year.- It’s so fun for me to watch because, there are so many different ways to the customer now, and this has been the theme throughout the collab today, is that there’s all these opportunities from people from podcasting to Instagram, to what you’ve done on Facebook connections to create this opportunity. So here’s a question for you right now live, great advice with a one-two punch of live networking and digital connecting. Man, if you’re in COVID land today, right? So you kind of have to put yourself there. It’s hard to meet that first connection. As a pro in this space, how do you tackle it today or how do you handle… You’re in a different space, but how do you handle it?- Yeah. So, it’s something that I’m not necessarily doing. So, I kind of can come off as hypocritical in saying this, but I’m also not doing it because I, number one just don’t have time. And number two, don’t know if I want that much more business right now. But if I was in that space where I’m like, boom, I need to grow today. And COVID’s keeping me inside. I would do a Tuesday 5:00 pm, bring your own beer happy hour on zoom. And I would do the same thing on Friday afternoon, and I would do it twice a week, and I would put it out there and I would get 10 to 12 to 15 real estate agents, twice a week into my zoom. I would keep it relative. Keep it funny. We talk about wines and beers and what everybody’s drinking and basically build a social connection over zoom. Cause that’s the best opportunity we have, short of face-to-face right now in my opinion.- Dude, unbelievably cool. So let’s do this. Let me ask this question, cause I know people are gonna relate to this. Everyone comes here, build your audience, and then they can be like, okay, I know what to do. I’ll go out and I’ll build my audience. But then once you have the audience like you do that doesn’t mean you instantly get success.- No.- No. So you have a very intentional content strategy. You’ve been kind of talking about it, stay away from these hot topics that will take you down the drain, but like share with everybody. Like what is your content strategy today?- So my content strategy is first and foremost, is to remain real and very true to myself. I do not want to be a talking head of mortgages. I don’t want to be the guy that only gets out there and talks about it. I’m a big believer that people in my market, want to see me as, an absolute kick ass mortgage professional, but also a kick ass husband, kick ass father. they wanna see pictures of my dog. They wanna see me at the beach on a Saturday with my kids. They want to see awesome mortgage content. And then they also want a lot of comedy, especially in the world we’re in right now. If we can do something to put a smile on someone’s face, whether it’s the post that I did a few minutes ago about a client who emailed me and saying, he’s putting his home shopping on hold, due to a collapsing housing market. People want something to laugh at right now. So if I can interject laughter, comedy into their life, while I’m also putting, mortgage related content in front of their face. It’s ultimately a method of top of mind awareness for me. So my ultimate strategy, I have professional videos that I’ve done that are on a cycle where they’re posted every day or every other day.- Yeah- I’m basically in between filling the gaps, with pictures of my kids, pictures of my dog, and then the occasional rant, once about every 45 to 60 days, upload a good rant. I’m a big believer that, negativity will turn people away in the long run. If all I do is get out there and I attack, eventually it’s going to turn people away.- Yeah- Because people are attracted to a better demeanor than always someone who’s attacking. However, when someone who is a positive person, a high energy person is always out there and then comes out with an angry rant. Where you dare say the word shit in it. Now you’ve got everyone’s attention. Now everybody’s like, “Oh my gosh, “this guy who’s normally calm, cool and collected “is off his chain I’m going to listen to his video.” So it’s a cycle of family thing, dog, business, rant, funny. And it’s just a cycle on social media.- What I want everyone to hear on that is that, it’s okay to be a human and show all aspects of your humanity. And Andrew, you do a great job of that. I’ve read some of your rants and then enjoy them. I think they’re fun because all of a sudden you’re like, finally someone’s saying it, like, no one else is saying it. And this guy is saying it, but it’s okay to be funny. And it’s okay to have humor. It’s okay to be real. I once read an article that, if you’re actually blessed to be funny, then you actually have an advantage because you change someone’s whole physiology, when you’re funny, like they laugh,- True- They get happier, they immediately like you more. And it’s okay to be human, and there’s a lot of people putting out content when they don’t show their humanity, they’re lying. There’s a lot of mortgage people that I even see and connect with on social media, that are disingenuous.- Yeah- And I’m not here to attack anyone personally, obviously, however, be who you are. If you’re not the funny guy, don’t be the funny guy. Because you’re going to connect with your base of whatever you are. And if you’re trying to be me, when you are not me, it’s going to miserably fail. The majority of people will see through it. And it’s not going to turn out how you want it. So just be real, be who you are, be unapologetically you. And you’re going to connect for every one person I turn off with my rant. I’m going to turn on two people that will follow exactly in line with me because they’re my people. So be who you are, don’t fake it. Everybody sees through that stuff.- So guys, what I love about Andrew is, not only his authenticity to be real, but it’s also his hard work and intentionality. Like you don’t get 4,000 realtors connected to you without hard work. You heard him, he was very quick in rambling off like, rant, dog, funny, professional, but you realize, Oh crap, like he’s running this. He’s so used to it. He has this such intense strategy around what he’s doing. That it becomes second nature to him where he just rips it off.- I mean, I’ve already got my posts in my head of what I’m posting tomorrow morning at 9:00 am. And I won’t post it at 8:00 am, I’m going to post it at 9:00 am. Specifically because the target audience I’m looking for, is gonna be at their computers, or at their desks, or at their phones, typically between 8:00 and 9:00 am. If I post that same post at 11:00 am or at 7:00 am, it’ll get half the engagement.- So you told me something that was new to me. How do you leverage Facebook messenger?- Yeah, so Facebook Messenger is a phenomenal tool. So let’s say Alec and I are connected on Facebook, and Alec occasionally sees my posts, but doesn’t necessarily see everything I do. If Alec is, say a real estate referral partner that I want to work with or potentially could work with, I could text Alec and say, “Hey, how’s everything going? happy Monday, “hopefully your day’s rocking and rolling.”- Yup.- That does nothing for my social media. But if I would send that same message, over Facebook messenger to Alec, the moment Alec responds to that message. Even with a thumbs up, it now changes Facebook’s strategy or it’s algorithm of the friendship that Alec and I have, and it brings it to a more personal level. And now Alec is guaranteed to see my next three Facebook posts, I post immediately in his Facebook wall. So rather than texting people, I’ve gotten to this habit of just shooting a message over Facebook messenger. “Hey, I got this contract in. “Hopefully everything’s going well, we’re on it. “We’ll take care of it.” That’s a text message, but all of us are on, so Facebook messenger, just as much as we’re on text message, in order to increase my engagement at the same time of communicating something, I would communicate anyways, why the hell wouldn’t I do that?- It’s incredible. I think it’s a missed opportunity.- It is. it’s a huge missed opportunity. And it’s something that, a lot of people just don’t simply grasp, or they feel, maybe like they’re getting too personal, but I don’t think there’s any more personal than, my phone dinging their phone. If I’m willing to text them, why the heck wouldn’t I Facebook message them?- So what other missed opportunities are there that you think people should come to?- Huge missed opportunity would be when real estate agents, invite you to like their business page. Love it, just my favorite moment. I used to go through and I would just like their business page cause I want them to get that little pop up that says, “Andrew Cady likes your business page.”- Absolutely.- And then what I decided I was going to do is I unliked all of them. And then I waited for people to start requesting me again, cause they will, cause they eventually just go invite their whole friends list.- Right.- And then what I do is, I send them a Facebook message on personal to personal, and I say, “Hey Alec, thanks for inviting me “to like your Facebook page. “I’d be super happy to do that for you. “Here’s the link to my Facebook page, “If you want to do the same, “I’d love to have an opportunity to do business together.” So now, number one, I’m acknowledging the request. I’m requesting that they like me, but then I’m also doing it over Facebook messenger, which is going to increase their engagement of the content they see at my posts.- God, it’s just like, I love the intentionality of that. I love the intentionality. Cause it takes time to write that message. You could’ve easily disliked their stuff and move on.- Yeah, that’s the easy route, but I’m not in this game for a hundred million. I’m not in this game for 200 million. I don’t know where my ending point is, but there’s no level of just like satisfaction for me. I’m in this game to play for the long haul and to push as hard as I can to make an empire I can leave my kids, to make an empire I can hire in and bring people in to create. I’d like to have a billion dollar mortgage team someday.- Dude. And you’re going to, I have no doubt dude, if you keep putting in the effort and the time, there’s no doubt you’ll get to where you want to go. So let’s do this. We got like 12 minutes. If someone was new to Facebook, and by the way, there’s a lot of them. I know that sounds weird that you’re like, they’ve never started a business page on Facebook. Maybe they’ve got a personal page. They got a few friends on there. And they came to for advice cause you inspired them now they’re like, holy shit, I’m missing the boat. How do you set’em up? what do you say to’em- Create a Facebook business page, primarily for just people being able to search you. Like if you Google search Andrew Cady, if you just search Andrew Cady, I dominate page one and page two, and number four or five somewhere in there is my Facebook business page with 57-five star reviews, they don’t do five star reviews anymore, but you want that ability for people to search you, create a business page. I rarely even post on my business page cause I don’t think business pages quite have the engagement they used to. I would say immediately go through, if you’re looking to grow social media, spend two to three to four to five days, depending on how long you’ve been on Facebook, go through your previous content and delete a lot of it. Delete a lot of your previous content. I don’t care if you’re democratic or Republican or how strong your views are on things. There are some topics that if you’re seeking to grow business through social media, yes, it’s a free country. Yes, you have every right to post whatever you want, but be forewarned that you’re going to lose 50% of your potential business, because of your Facebook post about a president. So guns, religion, abortion, drugs, politics have zero place on Facebook. If I post something and someone comments something political on my Facebook wall, I respond and say, please remove politics off my wall. I’m not doing it. Race, I’ll add race to it. We all have our opinions. We all have our views. But if you’re seeking to grow and engage with people on social media, you’re going to alienate 50 to sometimes greater than 50% of your audience, by having strong public views on these things. And if you don’t want to go that route, then don’t use social media as your platform to grow your business but I’m telling you you’re missing the boat on it. So go through and delete a lot of your stuff. Stay very, very positive. Stay motivating. Don’t always be in attack mode. Don’t always be in this mode of negative of always posting about your problems. People get very turned off by that. They want positivity and optimism. I sound like Gary V with that— Its good, bring the truth.- And yes the occasional rant, but I would say clean out your Facebook, and start by adding every single real estate agent that you’ve ever met in your life. And then spend 15 minutes a day, scrolling Facebook, through the suggested friends, and add 20 new real agent friends every single day, and do it for two years. And that’s going to take something that 99% of loan officers don’t have called consistency. And if you’re willing to be consistent with anything, that should be what it is. It’s not easy to carve out 20 minutes in my day, but I did this morning. I’ll tell you I have 78 loans in my pipeline right now, 52 purchases closing next month that I bet 37 closing this month. I don’t have time to breathe, but I spent 20 minutes this morning and I added 15 people in Facebook. Because the moment I stopped growing is the moment I start dying.- I love when people just blow up people’s excuses and it’s been a whole like day of it for me. Cause I know, everyone’s excuse, I don’t have the time. And then Andrew was like, I have a million loans in my pipeline and they’re like, I don’t have the time.- But I’m sick of excuses too. we all can make excuses. Every one of us can. For me, I’m not willing to entertain anything that is even close to mediocracy in my life. If it’s not furthering my business or furthering my family, that comes secondary to everything else, everything else is secondary to furthering my family or furthering my business. That’s it? Those are my two priorities. Those are my two focuses. So I’ll be more than willing to take a day off the water, off the boat and work if my family’s out of town I’ll just work. I would rather work than go have a little fun by myself. But if my kids are home, I want to spend time there. It’s all about priorities. But, God, if there’s one word that this industry is missing is consistency.- No doubt, dude.- Loan officers, habitually chase the next shiny object, the next app that’s going to make their life easy. The next software that’s going to change this. And they’re just missing out on getting out and doing old school grind, hard work and have fun.- That’s what I really wanted to highlight on this conversation Andrew because, carving time to make human connection digitally, is hard and takes time.- It does.- And it takes consistency and it takes hard work. And so all of a sudden you realize what the power is, if you can get behind it, you start to create like you have, the kingdom and of opportunity that yields all this opportunity now, and you’re not out there, You’re in control of your own destiny.- Absolutely, yes. And it gets to the point where, I have to hire again now, I either have to hire, or I just simply can’t take on more business and that’s the best problem to have, I would rather be stressed, 10 times over with having too much business than not having enough business. And I’ve been there, where my phone didn’t ring for two weeks. I’ve been there with that level of stress of not knowing what the next paycheck’s going to look like. And I’ll take the stress of having too much business all day long over the stress of not having enough business. And for that, I’ve learned one word and that’s consistency. And that is to consistently post on Facebook to religiously add people on Facebook, to consistently stay away from problems topics on Facebook. I’m just not interested in controversy. I’m interested in portraying myself, who I am, a good father, a good husband and a kick ass mortgage banker.- So in our last five minutes, did you ever have any fear of video?- I did, Oh my God. You go back and look at my first few videos, they were miserable. Oh my gosh. If I can give any advice on it, the best win I’ve ever done for fixing my fear of video was live video. When you screw up, you’ve screwed up you just keep going.- You just power through it.- Whereas when I would record a video, I’d screw up 45 times.- Yeah.- I’d screw up over and over again. And I’d retake it, and I’d spent four hours. Whereas if I just go live, you eventually just learn, you mess up, you move on. Yeah, live video, kind of started for me back in 2017 when I went viral with one of the hurricanes. And then from there, it just kept going. During March, when we had the complete market meltdown, I was out of town, bad time to take a family vacation. But I started doing a live video every single day on Facebook. And these videos are getting five, six, 7,000 views on Facebook, like 50, 60 shares by real estate agents of these videos, just talking about why interest rates are rising, what’s going on in our markets. People are seeking an expert and if you can truly… In the last couple minutes here I’d touch on that.- Please.- Don’t have ass this industry.- Oh yeah.- This is an industry where you’re seeking to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Why would you not absolutely become the best at what you do? Go out and read the guidelines, spend your time actually perfecting your craft. Buy in the MBS highway, learn with the markets, learn your candlestick patterns. Be able to intelligently tell people why mortgage backed securities are going up or down. When a client calls me and he’s like, “hey, I saw the interest rates have come down” and I can explain to him, no what you’re seeing is news that was two weeks ago. And if you actually look at the MBS highway charts that I can send you, it’s changed. It takes the wind out of people’s sails. I lose maybe one deal a month to rate. How is that? I don’t have the sharpest rates in the tool shed. There’s always some call center jockey, that’s going to have sharper rates out there. How am I doing it? I’m doing it by being an expert in it. And when you’re perceived as the expert, and the only way you’re really going to be perceived as if you school yourself to become the expert. That’s when you’re really gonna start to get the eyes on you. It’s not just posting funny videos, but it’s also educating people, and putting real relevant information in their hands. Especially like we were seeing in March when the market’s going sideways, people are looking for relevant, true information content that they can rely on. And if that’s you, you’ve got an audience,- Dude, I’m so impressed. I cannot wait to like re-release this or people watching the future or get it transcribed because you’ve dropped like bomb after bomb on this thing. I mean, literally in 28 minutes, if people would just copy what you just told them to do, they can have the career of their life.- Agreed.- Yeah. I mean, I’ll probably close 350 units this year.- I mean, is it worth it?- And that’s not to say that braggadociously, it’s just, I actually sit in the wilderness and wonderment of how the hell this is all happening. And it keeps happening. Like my phone just rings and I’m not prospecting. I’m not doing lunches. I’m not doing lunch and learns. I’m not doing CE classes. I’m just sitting at my desk all day, answering the phone when it rings.- This is what I want everybody to hear, because not only did Andrew do all the hard work, which is crucial, you can’t skip your way. No one goes viral off one video, you have to earn your audience, earn your place or your seat at the table. But this is what it looks like when you had influence. And Andrew has influence. He’s worked hard for it. By the way, heard him talk about how intentionally is and making sure he doesn’t alienate people, because his job is to help people get home loans. So he wants to do that for everybody? Why would you alienate people that you want to help and serve? If you were a contractor, would you drive around with a Confederate flag in the back of your truck showing up to people’s houses, offering your services?- Bad message.- No. It would just be the dumbest thing on earth. So why would you do it on social media? It just blows my mind what I see people post on Facebook. It’s like, congratulations, you just turned off half your audience,- Dude, they don’t get it.- Alright, so everybody on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, all of Andrew’s handles have been posted. Please go hang out and follow this guy, see what he’s doing, I say this a million times, but if you wanna get better, go follow what Epic people are doing. If you get me on Facebook follow, don’t always add me as a friend if you’re in the mortgage business cause I’m almost capped out of friends and I’m trying to leave room for my realtors. So follow me on Facebook, don’t add friends, cause I’m trying to keep room open.- Andrew you’re the man, dude. Thank you for hanging out with us today. I cannot wait to re-share this, tons of amazing content, dude, you’re the man.- All right, take care buddy.- See you buddy. Man, dive into the water team. Like how much more proof do you need? Dive into the water. I don’t care where, but go all in, and have some fun with your career, with yourself. Don’t take yourself too seriously. At the end of all that stuff is unbelievable opportunity if you’re willing to play in the space. I hope I brought you value today. Please go find these wonderful human beings online, connect with them, follow ’em. See what they’re doing. Man I appreciate you all. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week. I’ll see you on the internet.

Jessica and Ryan both speak on the journey and constant trial and error it takes to get to where there are today and give tips on how to start and the obstacles and success you will run into. 

Ryan is a self-taught master of video creation combining unique storytelling and messaging with creative content to share his passion and help current and future home owners. Ryan and his wife Jessica have an unwavering mission to be the home financing partner that you trust to serve your family, friends and community. You’ll find them either at the gym or chasing an adventure with our 3 little boys; Tyton (9), Rush (6) and Steele (1).

Episode Transcribe

– Whoo. I don’t know why I did this. This is too long. I’m already dying and we’ve only done two sessions. And I’m killing myself but it’s okay, we’re gonna rock this thing now guys, we’re gonna bring on Ryan and Jessica Ehler, now. These guys, this team has rocked my world because I was like playing in video. And now I’m realizing like I was a kindergartner with an iPhone, like trying to figure it out. But what I love about these guys, is they tell tremendously cool stories, they self taught, they generated all this fun stuff, and they put out tonnes of amazing content. So I’m gonna bring them on right now. Let’s get them introduced. Where are they? Where are they? Here we go. What’s up everybody as we move on to our third session, that video masterclass, nobody is better equipped to lead us than this guy, Ryan Ehler. Now hopefully, we’ll have his wife Jessica with us as well because she’s obviously the brains of the operation and the looks like these two people have been absolutely changing the face of video. I’m so impressed. Not only with their creativity, but it’s all self taught. And they’re communicating their language and their mission and their ethos through video and they’re creating engagement and they’re generating tonnes of business. So let’s bring on the master for a video masterclass. Whoo, yeah!- Hey hey, what’s going on?- Hi.- It’s like I’m Interviewing the most beautiful people in mortgage. That should be our our topic today is like this. Our couple that crushes content and just is amazing. So thank you guys. Jessica, I’m so excited you’re here. Like,- I’m so glad to be here.- This is so cool. So man, let’s crack this thing wide open because what I’ve loved about what you guys do in Our Space, is you just went all in on video. You just went all in on video and and you do it in such a cool way. And I wanna frame this up first because I’m a big proponent of not over producing your content ’cause I believe that people lose their authentic voice. When they become scripted and they hire agencies and they try to overdo everything. I’m like, don’t do that just like please, like, be a human. And then all of a sudden, I saw you guys’s stuff and I’m like, oh, they’re doing both. They’re doing both. And they’re making it beautiful. And they’re being authentic and they’re sharing their hearts and you can like really get to know who they are. And I know it’s you’re radically changed your business, how you operate. It’s given you lots of control over your destiny, like how much business do I want to get? And how much should I work life balance? And so I want you guys to share how you got it. How’d you get in the mortgage space? What was that journey like? And then what was the pivot like for you when you decided to go all in on video? And let’s start there.- Yeah, so we used to own a gym and I know you you as well understand that right? So we did that for about a decade. And one of our long term clients was in mortgages. And he goes, guys, you have a little building behind a building with no sign and you have this place packed. Like if you took your marketing skills, and a applied it to mortgage, it would change your life and your family’s life. And literally, a month later, I passed the mortgage test. And that’s kind of how it started. Like, once I make a decision, it’s just like I can pivot like that if I have to.- So Jessica, did you just get pulled in behind that? or what happened? How did you ’cause you’re huge in this space.- Yeah. Yeah so I actually kept the gym going for a couple of years while he was in loans. And then we closed it down on and I was just going to stay at home with the kids and I got bored. And so I went on just to help him like as an assistant, and I was like, oh, I can do this too. Let’s double down. And the first thing we did was that “Superhero” video, just for fun. And that’s really kind of what the major pivot was.- The “superhero” video is near and dear to my heart. So share what you did and the idea behind it and why you did it ’cause it was, you know, I can see you maybe like, oh, this could just be cheesy. how’s it gonna be received? Like, who came up with it? And what? Tell everybody what you did.- We were just brainstorming just sitting there like, hey, what can we do that would be fun and witty and just throw it out there.- And we already have the costumes for Halloween. So we went with that, like we have, okay, we have Superman and Wonder Woman, what can we do with it? Okay, we’ll be the superheroes of mortgage. What are, some common problems and it really took off from there.- And it took 50 hours to produce and edit and finish up. So it was it was an endeavor.- Yeah.- So speaking about producing, how did you get into like, how did you learn to make your videos as great as they are? Like, how did you learn this?- YouTube.- YouTube so when we opened the gym, I started doing just basic videos all the time. Like I knew I just I liked video. I wanted to be part of it. And so I would just YouTube. Really what took my skill from like, okay to really good, was watching Casey Neistat. I don’t know if you know him from YouTube. And I challenged myself to do 90 days of a Vlog everyday. I would literally shoot all day while working and then edit until one, two, three in the morning. and I did that for three months.- Yeah.- Well so how— It was brutal,- Huh?- It was brutal.- It was brutal.- Well, I mean look, if you’re gonna learn a new skill and you’re gonna you know learn it, it’s gonna be hard, right?- Yeah.- If you want differentiation if you wanna show up differently then you’re gonna have to like step into it and like learn new, do hard shit. And that’s what’s you know, self evident what you guys did. But like what, when you’re gonna do a video, what’s your process? ’cause and by the way, you know, share with everybody how much of your business comes from, you know, video and social media. So I think — 100%.- Yeah well.- 100% has either come from it or we’ve made connections or people are reminded of us. I can literally just, this is what Jessica does. And it’s kinda funny. No matter how, what we’re doing, she takes all of our money and she hoards it and hides it from me. And then goes, hey, look at the bank account, we’re broke. And I go, What? And, and then I get going, and I’ll go out and put a video and then instantly we’ll see a return. And once that started happening, then that’s kind of been our flow is we would say, Okay, what are the gaps? What are people needing, what are they missing? What don’t they understand? And how can we make it in a fun, exciting entertaining way? and not be douchey and salesy in the process, and just be ourselves?- Yeah, ‘coz mortgages are boring, like they just are, mortgages are boring. And we have to do whatever we can to make people interested and still answer their questions,- Educate them on stuff that we know they need, but if I just went there and was sitting at my desk and talking about interest rates or down payments,- And they don’t understand, yeah.- So we try to put it into stories and just make it simple for people. And I wanna mention this, what really changed things for us is when we started being our authentic selves.- Yes. So, like, when did that aha moment come? Like what was the experience? What do you remember from that? Because that that is so missed. There are some people who believe, and Jessica, you just hit this too. Like, you’ve gotta be super professional, like you can’t have humor in your stuff or else that doesn’t pull your brand down and people are not going to respect it and blah, blah. And so I think people are trying to overdress their content, suit and tie it. How did this aha moment come? What was it like, and how do you change your business?- No, we did, the one that we did upstairs. So we did a video where we were, we had it scripted out we were sitting on the couch and we thought we were like spitting fire. We’re like, this is awesome. And then we watched the playback. And we’re like, this is garbage. I wouldn’t even watch it.- No energy, boring.- it was just no energy, it was boring. And that’s when we decided that we had to come up with a different method of delivery.- And then one day, I just started posting stuff about like my mountain biking and my hobbies and kind of tied in what we do, into it. And it just blew up. And we’re like, oh, that’s the sauce, as we tie in our personal lives and who we are and our personality, and like, I’m a goofball. And Jessica likes to egg me on, like, if you guys were recording what was happening in the background before you brought us on here, people would have been dying.- Yeah. We’re always like messing with each other and,— I was watching I was like, oh, they’re muted, but something’s happening over there ’cause they’re,- like poking each other, like, pushing each other. And so literally, when we started doing videos together, she would cry about five times during it because she was so scared and she hated it. And then once we started loosening, she started loosening up, then we started just kind of bantering and using that playfulness and like how we act with each other in real life. And we just started just being ourselves and you know, just having fun with it.- Yeah.- Jessica share that experience please of like the emotion of going through this ’cause you’re putting yourself out there both you guys put yourself out there in radical ways. And like that can be really intimidating and just without talking Neal, it stops people from getting out and like getting success and having their influence matter like walk people through your experience on that and how you dealt with it and how you got through it.- Yeah it was actually years. So like he had said, we were shooting video in the gym and I would avoid it at all costs because no matter what, no matter how confident I was in the material, I would still like I was so paralyzed by fear. I would just break down I would start crying at some point and then once you start crying, it’s just it’s over. You’re done. You have to try again another day. So I think like he said the playfulness is what really changed everything because we stopped rehearsing, we stopped going over and scripting. We would do bullet points and shoot from the hip.- That’s a big moment in personal development and people are struggling with that.- Yap.- So you just stopped? Or did you have like an like we need to stop? or did you just say one day just— I kept telling her, you gotta stop scripting out like she will write up every word.- I would write paragraphs.- And then it was just paralyzing her. And I was like, who cares if you mess up? like especially if it’s not live, like we’d do it 10 times 20 times if we have to, but usually when we do it, unless like somebody walks in front the camera which has happened before, when we were going out and about, it’s the first go, we just go and just riff it.- Yeah, and that really was the game changer. Once we saw that kind of scripted video and how bad it was. We just decided to do bullet points shoot from the hip, talk to each other. Even though we’re looking at the camera, we’re having a conversation together and everything changed.- And we usually always have props in our hands which kind of helps with like the fidgeting like you’re not fidgeting ’cause you’re holding these props and so you just kind of hold them there and stuff- Yeah I’ve got my little like nut and bolt thing that I— Yeah, yeah. So we have a don’t be a sucker video where it says the six you know, home buying mistakes or whatever, and we’re holding these suckers. And so we have those props. When we did our veteran one we had our American flags, and those props just kind of keep us from like fidgeting and stuff on camera.- Dude, I love the journey. I love the fact that you, you know went through the scripted mess and realizing that was bullshit and then you went to the hardness of, you know, just ripping the band aid off and going, we just gotta go in authentically, we just got to go in like unscripted. One take and that 100% of your business, comes from this effort. Yeah, it’s so it’s so empowering. Like, I really want people to hear that. Because that’s available to so many people, that they can just take control of their destiny so much, and put out the messaging you want. And so how do you balance? You know, you said this before, I want you to, you know, do it again. How do you find content that you’re gonna talk about?- I come up with a lot of the content and it’s usually it sparks by either seeing something on Instagram or a video.- Questions, we get.- Questions we get. So I actually have a list, when I get questions from borrowers. I have a list in my planner so that I can refer back to that when we’re making a video. And so for example, like the “Angel Devil” video, that was actually a Saturday Night Live skit, it was about food, like they were talking about eating, but I liked the concept of that and thought, Okay, what can we do to apply this to mortgage and make it interesting? Then I looked through my List of repeated questions, and we kind of just put it together and went from there. So that’s how most of our videos and content where that comes from.- And then I was like, okay, we need to shoot three or four different angles. And she was like why? And I was like, Just trust me, we’re gonna do it. And I repeat myself and I do these things in different angles so that I have more more pieces to work with and post. And then we had the most ghetto rig, green screen, you could imagine I had a piece of green paper. I didn’t have a green screen yet. We taped it to the wall, open up all the windows, grab every little light that I had. Just make it work.- Oh my gosh, I’d love it. By the way, for those of you that want nerdy tricks on green screen stuff, had you guys zoomed yourself yet? where you make yourself the zoom background? And then you can walk in on yourself while you’re sitting at the desk?- I haven’t done that.- Old money. So I wanna go back, about halfway through but I don’t want people to miss this part Ryan. How did you, you said YouTube and how you educated yourself. But I want you to really unpack the process. If somebody’s like, ’cause I can tell that you enjoy it, even though it’s hard work. Like I can see it in your content. I can see that like, oh, he made this ’cause he likes this.- Yes.- Like he’s not making this to try to prove a point to somebody he’s making this because this is an expression of him.- Yes.- And that’s why you don’t lose your authentic voice in your messaging, which I love. So if there are people who are gonna nerd out on video editing nerd out on you know, Photoshop and bottle Ah, really tell everybody your process, like go through it again. Like how did you start into it? You know, where did you go and how, you know, I want people to hear your story on this.- hundreds of hours of binge in YouTube because I told myself I was working. So I would just go on YouTube and just find like, how to edit on Photoshop, how to edit on Final Cut Pro or whatever editor you know, I was using, and then as you learn the basics, you start to see these little tricks that some of these guys do and you go, oh, now I know the verbiage for like, you know, tracking and motion. And things like that. And then I’d dig deeper how to do this. And then sometimes you’ll have to watch three or four different tutorials to find the one that works for what you’re trying to do. And then I just mirror it. And then over time, you learn your own little tricks and your own little techniques that you add to it, plugins, like I’ve bought in, and I don’t know, thousands of dollars worth of plugins for my video editor to speed things up. Yeah, so it’s like, like all the wording that pops up and does all that those are all plugins. I didn’t build that from scratch, like all the tracking software, that’s a plug in or I’ll buy another program that does it easier for me, like whatever it takes to like speed it up, then that’s what I would do.- Mm hmm. And you said about two years.- I’ve been doing it for 10 years.- 10 years?- Yeah.- I think it’s overwhelming that can overwhelm somebody who goes oh crap, I don’t have I can’t do that.- But let’s go back to that three, when I did those video a day. My skills skyrocketed like that really is what took it to the next level ’cause I was constantly like, I had an idea. I was like, well, I wanna do that. I didn’t know how to do it. So then I’d have to go watch the YouTube video before you shoot it ‘coz you have to know how you’re supposed to frame the shot. So I watched the video, okay, here’s how you have to do it. Then I go and shoot all day. Try to make that work. And then sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. And then I just have to try it again the next day. Like, have you seen the “Reify” one that I did where I tripled myself and I was on my mountain bike doing a wheelie?- Yes, that was incredible. I was so I was so jealous . Anything like that?- She was so mad at me because I had no help. So I really, I went out there set up my camera. And I’m not really good at wheeling on the bike. So I literally would, I had 100 takes and then I nailed it. And I go in, and my framing was wrong with the camera so I had to go out the next day. Do it again. The framing was wrong with the camera. So the third day, I did it again and finally got it. And it was probably a total of two or 300 takes between three days. And she was like, are you just gonna give it up? And I was like.- Never.- No. So I’m literally rendering it as we’re leaving for vacation and she was like, let’s go let’s go like I had to like, hit the button and walk out the door to go on vacation like I get obsessed about these things.- But so I want to share a couple things for everyone paying attention to this like first of all, I love the rawness of rhinos undertake ’cause there are people that have done 100 takes on their iPhone trying to get like one minute video out so like people connect to that they understand like there’s effort there but clearly you get better over time if you practice consistently you get better every day. And then all of a sudden you hit this breakthrough point and it sounds like you guys something, I’m loving hearing your story ’cause this breakthrough points come and now you know there’s no lack of content, like Jessica is, I bet your book is full of content for months and days and years. You know, you break through, and now you can control your own destiny. And so, you know, there’s never gonna be going back. Where are you guys going in the future? and I, we Ryan and I talked offline about this and I love it because I want people to hear it like, where do you go with this now?- So here’s the one thing that I wanna get the point across is making money is awesome. But having that purpose of trying to like help people and educate them is really kind of what keeps driving us and just saying like, how can we make this better and reach more people and help more people from being taken advantage of from, you know,- Bad decisions?- Yep, the closer you get to money, who controls the money, the shadier people become unfortunately, you know, so if you think of where we’re at, then you go next level and people are, you know, start stockbrokers and doing shady underhanded things that we want to educate and be extremely transparent with our community so that they have the knowledge doesn’t mean that they’re all of them are gonna use us, but at least that we did our part in educating is just like being a personal trainer. You give people the information, you give them the tools, you give them the plan, and then it’s up to them to make that final call. And that’s how we look at it.- So I’d love for you both to also share your thoughts on your more I want to say under produce, but like your more organic content, you know, so like, the selfie stick and walking through your neighborhood. I mean, I’ve seen a bunch of videos from that stuff where I’m like, oh, you know, they’re coming down from the really super produce content and they’re making, you know, just really like I’m down the street like I’m a human. Share with everybody how that has landed in your efforts, what kind of connection that makes, business opportunities, when it’s just more organic.- The organic stuff in terms of turning content into business, hands down works the best.- Yeah.- But would I have the eyeballs if I didn’t do the produce stuff? That’s a chicken or the egg question. So we enjoy doing the produced and we think it does attract a lot of attention to our brand, but the down and dirty like my favorite camera right now is a GoPro HERO8 on a selfie stick, super clean audio super stable. It’s just an amazing tool. And then Jessica does her car videos.- Yeah, so the car video started because my kids were on spring break. And they don’t. They’re not ever quiet. So I just went in my car and shot a video with my cell phone and then Coronavirus. They’re still here. They’re still here. So the quietest places is my car, so I go in my car, I don’t even edit the video first take and people love it. People share it and it’s because they know that everything that I’m saying is coming from my heart. It’s 100% authentic and even if I no makeup sweatshirt, hair, they they connect with me more that way than like that.- Yeah, we let our community and our audience see us like our friends would see us. You know if we’re in a workout days.- That is so good Ryan. Jessica that is so, I hope everyone hears that a million times over because you don’t stunt double your life like you guys are just being humans. That reaches so much deeper. So let’s do this. We got 10 minutes left, guys, if there’s questions, throw them in here, we’ll put them up on the screen and get these guys answering questions. But I wanna, have you guys, if you had a brand new loan officer who’s never done video, who’s like, I’m ready to go, I saw this thing with Jessica and Ryan and I’m like I’m in, you know, and they’re sitting in front of you for your advice. What do you tell them to do? How do you set them up?- I know one thing is, don’t worry about the equipment is I’m an equipment nerd and it’s slowed my progress down substantially worrying about what I’m using. Do you have a cell phone, use your cell phone, get a ring light so that you ’cause lighting is key. Having good light is important and having good audio is important but it doesn’t have to be expensive. So get a ring light and get a wired lapel mic that you can plug into your phone. And those two things will take your quality above probably 90% of people out there. And then just start putting it out, just like Jessica said when she was afraid. You know what got her past being afraid. Keep doing it.- Keep doing it. Another thing that I would say is when I see new loan officers, they do it all the time. They’re talking so far above everybody’s head. They want to sound smart. But that’s not what people are going to connect with. People don’t want to be talked at, they want to be talked to. So you have to explain things like you’re talking to your friend.- So good.- So good.- Yeah. So those things is frequently asked questions, go after those videos first, talk about the things that you know about and what’s worked for me, is try to take a scenario in mortgage and relate it to something that you’re an expert in. So like me, like mountain biking, fitness, so I’ll say, you know you we heard somebody who had this challenge. So a lot like if you have this challenge and then it kind of just shows people the path if they don’t really understand a complicated you know situation you can make it to where more people will understand what you’re saying.- what has been some of your most successful videos in your opinion you know if you had a top three most successful, and by the way go ahead and define successful anyway you want. It could be how many deals you got from it or just it’s what everyone remembers, and it built brand for you. Like what do you think your top three are? And and I want people to hear kind of your your take on it.- The bike one got so many reifies it was insane. It was like I was extremely overwhelmed by how much business it brought.- A little bit like give him a little bit of grace back after you beat the crap out of him, for how long it took to do the bike one.- That’s how it always goes. He always makes me like eat my words.- Because when we find a winner we put money behind it.- Yes.- And that’s kind of where we’re gonna go in the future is you know, the more we grow the more we can expand our reach with advertising, the more people We can, you know, help out and see our stuff.- 100%. Okay, so we got the bike one.- Superhero.- Yeah. So yeah, those are all the produced ones but it’s because we put money behind those ones. So it’s hard to say like, you know, our organic ones we still get a huge amount of inquiries like I did one on forbearance, like right when Coronavirus happened just sitting in my car in my sweatshirt before I was gonna go to the gym, and I had, I don’t know, about 10 people messaged me asking me questions and people sharing it in and you know, people came up to me they’re like, thank you so much for that video. So even if it didn’t, you know, bring in a whole bunch of leads at that time. So many people were interested in it and appreciative of it that they’re going to remember me down the road.- And two more things before we end make sure we get it. Is doing this shirt has changed our business because now, I don’t have to say I do mortgages people just know.- By the way, I love that’s such a little thing. And yet it becomes such a big thing.- We did it just for fun for a conference that we were going to, and it blew up. Everybody loved it. It was a huge thing.- And I every time I wear it out, which is almost every day I have, like I have to order more.- Like the it’s all like, Oh, I lost your video come back. Oh no. Someone kicked the cord. By the way, if you’re getting value out of this, guys, please find Jessica and Ryan and connect with these guys on the internet. Like I said before with Neil, when you find people who do incredible things, learn from them. I’ve learned so much from watching Ryan and Jessica dominate their video space and laughing with them. I’ve seen all their stuff. I’m super big fan of their stuff. So you can get back on here in a sec. No, they just do a really great work. So we got disconnected from services. If they can come back in the next five minutes. We’ll bring them back. ’cause I really want you guys to hear this and I was going to try to pull Jessica into this and have her share more about it. And obviously she’ll do that if we can get her back. But man, fear, like she was so honest and authentic that like she was crying, doing videos and trying to push through the bullshit that is holding us back from putting our authentic self out there. And now all of a sudden, you look at it, and you see what they’re doing. And you’re like, holy crap, holy crap, their whole lives, their whole trajectory of their business has changed. And I am like, this is insane. This is incredible. I’m sending them a text. I letting them know I love them. And it’s just, it’s one of those things. So yes, my friends.- We are back- By the way, I got my green screen hanging behind me here. I can be as cool as you guys one day. You guys are amazing. So do this, Jessica. I know you could hear me on this, bragging about you, you know, and I talked about this with Neil and everybody else. Man, fear is crippling, it’s so crippling, and you were so vulnerable and honest being like, I would cry, I was frustrated, I was angry and I couldn’t get through it, it would ruin the day I could film the next day. And I just for the next couple minutes, as we wind down here, I want you to share more about that so that other people, they’re in the exact same place, they are in the exact same places, as you. And they’re, paralyzed, they’re sad they’re frustrated and so I mean, just go back there and share how you got through that, what happened in it because right now like it’s so fun to see you guys now. Like you’re animals, you just kill it. You have such fun, I can see that I can see the energy, the positivity, but it wasn’t always like that. And so please share.- Yeah, it’s still not like that. So even before coming on today, my heart was pounding. And this is just a live type of thing. I’m an extreme introvert, and you wouldn’t even tell you wouldn’t be able to to tell from our content, but it was just continually pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Because, you know, the magic happens outside of your comfort zone. And failure is going to happen no matter what you do. And you just have to keep pushing past it if you want to get where you want to go. So you just have to push your shit aside. and just put yourself out there and see what happens.- I mean, just look at what happened right now. Like our main camera died. We just put the cell phone you know, plan A doesn’t work, just go to plan B ’cause getting out there is the most important thing we talked about. What’s your best video? You know? The best video is the next one you make. It really is true. It really is true. Just keep pumping it out there. Just keep going. Keep going because it’s an accumulative effect. There’s not one video that was a magic bullet for us.- Yeah.- I love it.- I mean if we just stopped at the superhero video, we wouldn’t be where we are. So even though it was extremely successful. If you stop if you don’t keep going, you’re not going to go anywhere.- Dude. I love you guys. Thank you for sharing thank you for being authentic. Thank you for helping lead the industry and doing cool stuff that people can follow behind. Thank you for sharing your story. I know for a fact as we release, there’s a bunch people watching now but as we release this and other people get to see it the past they’re gonna be like, hopefully, it’ll be the one that pushes them through.- You know, I hope so. Thanks for having fun.- All right, guys. You rock. Have a wonderful day. Thank you guys.- Thank you too.- Man. Dive into the water team. Like how much more proof do you need, dive into the water! I don’t care where. Go all in and have fun with your career with yourself. Don’t take yourself so seriously. And at the end of that stuff is unbelievable opportunity. If you’re willing to play. I hope you value today. Please go find these wonderful human beings online, connect to them. All of them, do what they’re doing. Man, I appreciate you all. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week, stay on the internet.

Scott goes into the importance of facebook groups or online communities alike are important for the growth of your business and what it takes to be in one and the benefits of being part of that community of like-minded people.

For nearly 20 years Scott has been providing quality mortgage products to his clients on the Eastside of Los Angeles. As an online coach & live event facilitator, Scott has delivered keynote speeches & workshops on sales, marketing, and lead generation. Recently Scott also became an Amazon best selling author with his book Lead Generation: Double your pay in 61 days.Enter your text here…

Episode Transcribe

– Man, I love that. That is just like the core of our business right there. Video dies, craziness happens and you just keep rolling. You just keep rolling ’cause that’s what humans do and I love those guys. So please follow ’em. Man, okay, we’re gonna pivot a little bit here. We’re gonna go into Leading a Digital Community, which is probably the most important topic we’re dealing with right now because we’re like stuck being digital, this is… We can’t do what we used to do, man. We can’t go hang out and… Some of us are doing it and I’m watching you with no masks but I’m just, I’m thrilled for this next guy. Scott Groves has been somebody who I followed in this business for a long time. I’ve watched what he has done. I’ve been a super big fan and I’ve been most impressed with how this guy pours into digital communities, into Facebook groups to drive connection, to drive value and let’s get on what that’s done to his business, let’s bring him on and talk about what it’s done for his life and let’s see whose beard is better. All right, friends and professionals. In our next topic, Leading a Digital Community, man, nothing could be more important right now than your ability to lead a digital community in this land where everything’s digital and this guy, Scott Groves has been a huge leader of that. Leveraging Facebook groups and building massive amounts of influence with the people he wants to online. He’s gonna share all his secrets with you. Let’s bring on Scott Groves, Leading a Digital Community. Woohoo!- Yo, whoa! That was like a real intro. You were doing some big boy shit on here.- I green screened that. Oh, man, I’m so proud of my little intro.- That is some good stuff, bro, congratulations.- I see your trim and you’re keeping it clean and tight now. There’s been a couple of videos where I was like, Oh, I think he’s lost it.- Bro, I got this all cut and trimmed just for you. No, that’s a lie, I got it for my wife. She said she wasn’t gonna make out with me until I clean this stuff up. So, yeah, you’ve motivated me to put in the facial hair. I can see my neck again but luckily I’m still hiding the double chin. So life is good.- So guys, for those of you don’t know Scott, this guy is just a leader of people. He’s been pushing positivity, pushing connection, driving some of the biggest Facebook groups I’ve seen and been a part of. In a minute I’ll have you break down what that means, Scott and why you did that and all that stuff. But you’re a coach, you’re a loan professional, you’re a leader of people, husband, father, all that fun stuff and I just think you’re the man. So I think this is a really cool topic for the next 30 minutes on leading a digital community. I think that’s hard, I think it’s a new skillset and I think you’re one of the pioneers in it from my perspective. And so as we start, I wanna ask some kinda queue up questions. Why do you start doing this? Why did you start building groups and creating connection? How do you continue to pour into it like you do? ‘Cause you just feed it all the time. You’re always there contributing and then what has it done for your life in business? And before you go, guys, I’m dropping in the comments right now on Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, all of Scott’s handles, his book which is incredible. It’s on my stand, you guys need to connect with this guy and see what he’s doing like I said before, connect with great people and you get to learn what they’re doing. So Scott, how’s it going, dude?- It’s going well, man, thanks, I appreciate this and this is a crazy world we live in. We’re like, this is the new normal. For 20 years, professionals, loan managers, everybody’s been telling me like, just have a candy bowl on your desk at the real estate office and go to the coffee appointments and everything will be fine and now it’s like, no, now you need to know how to do this digital stuff and I’m already got my assistant. I’m like, “Dude, check out StreamYard. “I like how they’re doing stuff. “I gotta get something similar to that.” So, one it’s super exciting. Two, it’s, let’s be real, super dangerous because all loan officers and most salespeople have shiny object syndrome. So I could totally blow off the rest of the day learning how to use StreamYard and that’s probably not the best plan for my realtors and my clients but yeah, it’s a whole new, it’s a brave new world, I think I read that somewhere once.- You think you did. So you started building Facebook group communities. What made you do that? Why were you like, I’m gonna put time into this? and then, your latest one Generate is incredibly cool. I’m watching all the time and people are just networking and growing and so what has the effect been? Walk us through the process.- Yeah, so I gotta give a big shout out to my friend, Hal Elrod and Hal Elrod is the author of the book, “The Miracle Morning” and about six years ago through pure dumb luck, I ended up at one of his live events. It was actually the first live event that he had ever done and it’s because he had created this community on Facebook of people that had read the book, “The Miracle Morning” and they were looking for some accountability partners. And I think way back then he probably had five, six, maybe 10,000 people in that group. Now it’s up to a quarter of a million people and one of the things that Hal said is he said, there’s a guy named Dan Kennedy who’s written a bunch of books called, “The No BS series”. So like the no BS marketing, the no BS management and Dan said and Hal echoed this. He said, “At some point in the future, “the size of your database is going to be more important “than the quality of your work.” And I know a lot of people don’t wanna hear that because we’re all very proud of the hard work that we put in but just to clarify, we’re primarily talking to loan officers here, right?- Likely.- Okay, so— I don’t have a big reach elsewhere.- Yeah, there you go. So, let’s say for example, a new VA construction to perm product comes out and Alec is a better loan officer than I am. He’s kept in touch with his clients better than I have. He serves his clients at a higher level, they remember his name and so his database is, 500 people of clients that really love and respect him. He’s crushing and let’s just say, I’ve done a good job but not a great job. I’ve got the job done but I didn’t leave everybody with this wow feeling but I’ve got 15,000 people on my database or in a Facebook group or eyeballs on me or in a mailing list. Well guess what, man? When that new product comes out, construction to perm, VA widget, whatever, when I can go to my audience of 15,000 and Alec can go to his audience of 500, even if he’s converting at 10 times the clip that I am, I still win and I still get more clients. So now that’s not to say that I don’t do a good job. That’s not to say that I could care less about my pipeline or my clients or my loan process or my professionalism. No, I care about all those things but we’ve just gotta get in front of more people. That’s just the name of the game right now and sadly I think it’s only going to get more dramatic as we go into the future.- So number one, I agree a thousand percent. And then all of a sudden, even going back to your analogy, Scott, imagine that you and I are those loan officers in question and we’re both at the same level of expertise and we’re both competent and you got 15,000 and I got 500 and now it’s like, holy crap, what’s gonna happen? And we all see it and so you got inspired, you started building these groups. How big are the groups that you’re a part of?- I have one that’s just for loan officers that has a 3,000 or so. I have a couple of other groups that I would say that I have influencing, whatever the hell that means. I have about 10,000 in it— Hold on, I want to pause ’cause you’ve made joke about it but it’s not. You have a voice- Right- Through your hard work in those digital communities. That’s a real thing.- Sometimes it’s hard work, sometimes it’s just me being obnoxious.- Just controlling people, yeah.- But, yeah. So there are probably a cross section of, I dunno, 10,000 loan officers that I have some type of influence with where if I make a post, I’m gonna get some interaction. And then the goal with this Generate Group that I just started, which I would love everybody to be a part of is I said, the message in the book that I wrote, which is “Lead Generate: 61 Days To Double Your Pay,” shameless self promotion. The message in there it’s really for any entrepreneur, fully commissioned individuals. So this new Generate Group that I’m building and I think we’re up to about 2,000 people in that group. I want all my realtors, I want anybody that sells knives or insurance products or door to door widgets or they’re an entrepreneur and they own a bakery, basically anybody who needs to sell something to make a living, I want them in that Generate Group because there’s so many principles that we are all living in the mortgage industry and there’s so much that we have had to do in a shifting environment to build our business and stay relevant and keep lead generating and manage our pipeline and be business owners and be salespeople and be processors and be doctors. There’s so many skills that are transferable to any other industry. Why not go on that journey with other people alongside us instead of just hiding and pretending doing loans thing is a secret sauce?- So let’s do this, before we go into how and why you actually are and how physically you’re doing this, what has this done for your business, for your life? What are these groups that you’ve pioneered to done for you?- My wife would really like the answer to that question and I think that’s what’s so challenging. Yes, I do mortgages and I do well for myself but I’m not the number one guy in the country. Sometimes I lose focus and I do things like open a coaching business and I think we have a phenomenal coaching business for loan officers but we don’t have thousands of clients, we’ve got a hundred clients and then my wife’s like, “So what are you gonna do with this Generate Group? “Is there a monetization, return on investment? “Is this just to pick out like your mortgage business?” I’m like, “No, none of that, “just doing it to do it,” ’cause I wanted another side project and I really have no motive or end goal. I just know that it’s kinda like that field of dreams thing. If you build it, they will come. One day of this Generate Group gets up to 10 or 20,000 people in it. I say, “Hey guys. “I don’t know, we’re gonna do a live Lead Generation seminar “for two days and who’s got 200 bucks to come to LA “to do a live,” maybe that’s the end result. I don’t really know. It’s kinda just been like I have ADD, not diagnosed but I’m sure I have something like that or maybe it’s like the second level or fifth level of ADD. So it’s like in addition to my core business, which I spend 40, 50 hours a week on, I’ve always gotta have these little side projects going or I just don’t feel fulfilled. And one time I had a realtor busting my balls about like, “Oh, well maybe you couldn’t get back to me “’cause you got all this other stuff going on.” I’m like, “No, I get back to you at 10 o’clock “at night because I put in my eight or 10 hours a day “and load off some stuff,” and then instead of watching reruns of “The Walking Dead” like you’re doing, I just go build a side business for two hours and I spend two hours with my family then I come back to work at 10 o’clock at night. And so we’ve got plenty of time, all of us, to do these little side projects and side hustles or don’t, I don’t really care. But if you’re interested in getting eyeballs on you, it’s a 100% free to build all this stuff.- That’s what I wanted to hear, dude and that’s what I think everyone’s not understanding or not connecting the dots on. Maybe they understand but not connect to the dots. Your ability to start a Facebook group, Generate to get people connected, to have them sharing and sharing leads, sharing ideas, sharing community and you started it when?- I started at 60 days ago, I think.- And you have 2,000 people in it?- Yes.- Now Scott, for everyone paying attention to that, that doesn’t just happen, Scott’s good at this and he works hard at this but I’m walking that being like, holy crap, dude, you’re just putting a megaphone in front of your mouth ’cause to your point, Scott, if you wanna put out a message that says, “Call me for a purchase loan or refi loan “or this new product came out,” you’ve got this audience that you’ve been investing in ’cause you’re not just on there humble bragging. I’m in some of these groups, you’re not just putting your reviews out like, I’m amazing but you’re out there and I just shared it on Facebook for the Generate Group so you guys can join. We’ll get the link on YouTube and LinkedIn but this is you pouring into other people with no expectation, no secret buy my ebook for 80 bucks on the way out.- No ebook yet.- No ebook yet but at the same time, you were watching these people respond, build influence, build relationship with Scott and then when it’s time for reciprocation, when it’s time for, hey, help me, this is the opportunity he’s generating around himself and this is what it’s like when you lead a digital community. So Scott, lemme ask you this. How much, ’cause I’ve seen it so I know the answer but I want you to share. How often are you feeding into that community, helping build it, giving value to it? Kinda describe that.- Yeah, so here, I think the trick for all of this is you’ve got to put out content and contribution without getting consumed. I had the benefit of partnering up with somebody several years back that told me, “Hey, one of the criteria of us partnering up together “in the mortgage business is you just gotta stop “arguing about politics on Facebook,” ’cause I was the guy that would write a 27-paragraph dissertation on the libertarian thought process and it was intense. And I realized that I was getting absolutely consumed by social media instead of just being there to provide content and also to give contribution. And so what I do now is I say, okay, cool. Four times a day, roughly, when I wake up around nine o’clock and then twice throughout the day, I’m gonna go on, I’m gonna post something of value. I’m only gonna interact with my inner circle in those groups that I run. There’s three different groups that I run. One of them is a paid group so you can’t just jump in there but I’m gonna give a contribution to them, I’m gonna add content to them and then after I kind of got in that rhythm and the group started to grow, well, then I could afford a virtual assistant in the Philippines for eight bucks an hour, who then updates me throughout the day like, “Hey, Alec tagged you in this. “I think this is something you wanna respond to,” or she’ll respond to my incoming Facebook messages, which gets weird sometimes because she seen some stuff on Facebook messenger that maybe I would like her to unsee but yeah, it’s all about contribution and content without getting consumed into the endless bullshit that’s on social media and I’m still not perfect. I still get sucked into a political argument once in a while but I’ll live with it.- But just, guys please hear the echo chamber of this. From Phil to Neil, to Ryan and Jessica, to Scott, some of our content is a one way street. It’s just us humble bragging about how good we are and then we’re forgetting that the real power of this is to connect and have add value to others, to validate others, to communicate and be in the conversation. Neil said it about link about Instagram, comment on other stuff, that’s how you do a follow you back- Yup.- And Scott’s sharing the exact same thing. If you’re willing to build a group, pull people in, add value selflessly, all of a sudden now you’re gonna build a community of people around you and it can transform your business and your life.- Yeah, I mean, for example, I could go into my group every day and tell people to spend 14 bucks on this book or whatever Amazon has it listed at. At the end of the day, that’s just me self-promoting. So what am I doing instead? I’m going live every single day at nine o’clock, like clockwork. I read a chapter in the book, which is like three or four pages. I’m giving out 100% of my content for free and I don’t even know why I’m doing it ’cause like I said, the Generate Group has yet to have a principle or a thought process or a monetization, I just want everybody in there. I want it to be a safe space where every other loan officer can bring every one of their realtors if they want, without feeling like anybody’s advertising to them. I’ve already cut off some of the self-promotion in the group and then block.- Yeah, just like block- You be really clear about what you want to accomplish and then you just contribute from that point. And that is the one thing I would say is like, even if you don’t know what the end result is, be kinda clear about your rules, be clear about what you wanna do, be clear about the contribution you wanna give because I just had a guy pitch me on turning the Generate series into a podcast and I sent him about four paragraphs of exactly how that might work and he wrote me back. He’s like, “Whoa,” he’s like, “You don’t fuck around.” He’s like, “You actually know what you wanna accomplish “with this stuff. “I have never had somebody get ready “to sign up for a podcast,” and by the way, this guy charges $20,000 to build out your entire podcast network. He’s like, I’m reading the email right now. He said, “I’ve never had anybody follow up “with exact details about where they’re at “and where they’re going.” So again, I don’t have a way or an idea on how to monetize anything to do with this Generate Group but I know what the purpose and the mission is and it’s crazy to me that this guy that is a very well known podcast setter upper of things, he’s like, oh yeah, nobody ever has that much of a mission. They’re like, “Well, I’ll just go online and talk.” And he’s like, that doesn’t work.- So let’s talk about this, then. Let’s go into it, Scott. If somebody’s like, holy crap, they’re seeing in this conversation, the opportunity that’s for them and their city, their space, their digital community, they’re like, “I should be doing this.” How do you coach them? How do you set them up for it? What are the pitfalls? You just had a couple of them so like, have your purpose, hit it again. But how would you coach somebody to do this?- Yeah, if you’re gonna build, I think a Facebook group is the lowest lying fruit because you can even start a Facebook group with your immediate circle of friends that are really into Frisbee golf and you get your eight friends in there for Frisbee golf and this is how this stuff starts. Then they invite their friends and then whatever. I had an assistant, this is the craziest shit, Alec. I had an assistant. Tell me this is not like a niche within a niche, within a niche, within a niche. He was in a adult male, rollercoaster enthusiasts, gays only. There was 30,000 people in that group. So here’s a group of guys that are all gay, that all love this roller coaster lifestyle, where they tour around the world going on roller coasters and they’d make retreats out of it and stuff like that and they’re all these roller coaster enthusiasts and the dude that runs that group, he’s making bank organizing these trips. Now he has a membership program where this little pamphlet on new roller coasters that are opening around the world. I mean, think about 30,000 people that are in this Venn diagram of Venn diagram of Venn diagrams and then people would wanna have anything interesting to talk about, everybody’s got something. So maybe you’re gonna do it for business, maybe you’re gonna be the East Stevenson Ranch, HOA expert and you’re gonna get everybody in that neighborhood in there or maybe you’re gonna be the Alec Hanson, like I wanna teach people in the mortgage industry how to do social media 2.0. Whatever the case may be, I think the Facebook group is the lowest lying fruit and then the easy thing is you just invite every single friend that you have that is in that Venn diagram of interest into that group, private message them, ask them to be part of the group and contribute. So that’s kinda how you start and then I will tell you, you need a couple plants. You need a couple of undercover agents and whether you pay them or you bribe them with a steak dinner or you give them some type of discount in whatever world you work in, Facebook really rewards the algorithmic interaction early on in the history of anything. So if you do a live post, the quicker somebody likes it or comments in on it, the more the algorithm is gonna push it out. So what you need, and if my buddy Hal Elrod was on this post, he would admit to you that his huge group of a quarter million people started with him posting a question and then texting five of his really close friends, “Hey bro, can you respond to that question real quick?” And then it started, they basically were more professional moderators for each other and it started this critical mass where like, oh, well John commented on Hal’s things. So then Facebook pushed out to Alec who then felt interested in commenting and then Scott was another plant, I came in on commenting on Alec’s thing. So there is a little bit of gaming the system where you wanna find people that are on your team, that you can either pay or bribe or call in some favors and get them to put authentic content into your group. So the Facebook algorithm says like, oh, this is an interactive group where people are actually communicating. We need to push this out to more group members. So I have failed at doing that in the past and on the Generate Group, I’ve got a couple of professional moderators.- I just, I wanna hit this besides the hack, which is fun ’cause that’s where we go next level on this. What Scott said here, guys, I think everyone might have missed. It doesn’t need to be about mortgage. It needs to be about something that you care about. This is like building digital community. This doesn’t say building digital mortgage people. This is building digital community. Everyone knows you’re gonna do mortgages, everyone’s gonna know that, it’s fine. I joked earlier ’cause I got a buddy who’s running a podcast on adult men’s baseball leagues and he’s killing it. He’s getting business from it all the time and it’s got nothing to do with mortgage and this is your opportunity, it’s right in front of you. I talked about it, like it’s the gold rush of our generation. This is not gonna happen again. Your chance to build this connection, your chance to put yourself out there and then pour into it, it’s not gonna happen again. So it’s like, it’s unbelievable timing to make this thing happen and Scott, you’ve been doing it again and again for multiple groups from mortgage centric to coaching, to Generate, which is awesome. What pitfalls can you share to avoid if somebody’s getting into this?- Oh man, it can be a total time suck. It can be a total time drain. You have to know that you’re building for the future. So just to give you some context for anybody that’s watching, I’ve been doing this loan racket for like 20 years. I’ve come just at the tippy top of hitting 100 million by myself several times. My previous partner, Justin Bale, awesome, huge shout out to awesome guy, Justin Bale. We hit over 100 million a couple of years together. I will be honest, for the last 10 years, it would have been way more profitable for me to stay off of social media, not have a Facebook account, head down, email database, cold call 50 of my own clients every day, cold call 50 realtors, 100% would have been more profitable for the last 10 years. But where I think we got ahead of the curve a little bit is I think for the next 10 years, I’m gonna be way more profitable because I’ve done all of this and I’ve built the groups and I have the people in there. So, I made a big gamble, I’ve probably left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table by not just grinding mortgages, grinding mortgages and there there’s a lot of guys in the top five of Scotsman Guide that are doing 200, 300, 500 million a year who they don’t even have a Facebook page. So I’m not saying this is the only way to do things but I believe that we’re gonna start to see a shift where those people’s numbers over the next 10 years are gonna go like this and people who have engaged in social media and are giving out a ton of value, their numbers are gonna start to go like this and I don’t know where those two inverted yield curves meet and do that little dance but I think this has been a good investment and frankly, I just enjoy it more. I can maybe make 50 grand more a year by making 50 cold calls a day or I can have a good time and be playing racquetball by the way this actually happened and somebody walks in and they’re like, “Oh God, are you Scott Groves?” And I really thought I was gonna get my ass beat. I was like, “Okay I sleep with your girlfriend “in high school or something?” he’s like, “No, I’m a loan officer. “I just wanna say thanks. “I really enjoy the stuff you put out there.” That made me feel good, that really pumped my ego up and then I went and did five videos that night. So, I think it’s gonna be worthwhile. The biggest thing, don’t get sucked into it, don’t consume more than your lifestyle allows and then the other big pitfall is, right now it’s very toxic and dangerous to maybe be your 100% authentic self. I would say, do it anyway, you’re gonna find your tribe that wants to follow you and wants to do business with you. There’s plenty of people that have opted out of my funnel as sadly clients and referral sources that just don’t get what I, they just don’t get me or we disagree or I wore some hat with a snake on it ’cause I’m a Libertarian and that really pissed them off because they were Republican or they were a Democrat and I’m like, well, I don’t really care, that’s who I am. I’m not gonna hide who I am. I don’t hide pictures of my kids. I’m not gonna hide who I am or what I believe. So, yeah, those are the traps, too much consumption and not being authentic ’cause then people just know you’re full of shit.- And everyone listening to that heard the traps. There’s also something there that you might have missed earlier by Scott. Number one, we all have the same 24 hours in a day and you can use it watching “Dawn Of The Dead” and “Walking Dead” or you can use it to build a Facebook community, in addition to the hard work you’re doing slinging loans and helping customers and dealing with underwriting issues and all that other stuff that comes along with your day to day. So that’s a huge, if you believe in it, if you think this matters, then you’re gonna put the time aside to it. And then the other thing that’s been happening all day on this Collab guys is there are so many paths to the customer. There’s so many paths to the customer. If you’re like, I don’t wanna be on Instagram. It’s like, well then build Facebook communities. If it’s like, I don’t wanna do that, then start building the podcast network and putting your voice out into the world and sharing what you’re passionate about and this avenue though, what Scott has done and what I see him do and the reason I want him to share his insight on this stuff is it’s low hanging fruit, man. It’s like right there in front of you and by the way, it’s so powerful. If you’ve been in retail lending for a long time, you realize that a lot of your business was geographically limited. It’s where you could drive to, where the open houses were on the weekends, where the real estate companies were. There’s no geographical limitations on the Internets. Scott’s groups span the entire country and probably people outside of the country, which you can’t get loans for but maybe if he wants to do a trip, they can help him out with an Airbnb or something. But like, this is the power of digital communities. This is the power of it.- You know, shout out to RJ who’s a regional manager down in San Diego that you and I know from a mortgage company, great guy. One of his big initiatives is he’s telling all of his loan officers, “I want every loan officer in my region “licensed in at least three states.” One, because you’ve got a lot of people. COVID-19 is showing us, you can work from anywhere. You don’t have to be geographically relevant anymore. So we’ve got a lot of, Californians is moving to Nevada and Boise, Idaho and Phoenix, Arizona and then a lot of people there are moving here ’cause they’re like, “Well, if I’m gonna be stuck at home, “I wanna be in nicer weather where I can go work outside.” So he’s like, “I want all my people licensed “in multiple states,” because that’s gonna be the new normal. If you can’t market and keep up with somebody when they move from San Diego to LA to Phoenix, let’s be honest, man, your physical mail’s not gonna do it, your email’s probably going to the spam filter but if they can see pictures of your kids and they know what you’re up to and they can celebrate your successes, that’s huge. And you can only do that on social media digitally and so, come up with a content calendar. There’s some easy ones if you guys wanna email me at scottgrovesteam.com. I’ll send you my content calendar. It’s just like Monday is a business success, Tuesday’s a personal story, Wednesday is a funny story about the business world in general, Thursday is something motivational and on and on and on and on and on. So, it’s just, you get into a rhythm and I used to use that content calendar. Now I kinda just know what to do and it’s not as hard as you think. Pick something that you like doing and build a group around it.- So guys, I know this is in the comments on Facebook and LinkedIn. So you can’t click it when I show it on the screen but this is a great example of what the group’s doing. So if you’re seeing this, I know you can’t click on the screen, scroll up in the comments and click on it and go over there and you’ll start to see what’s happening in this community and you can start to take a lesson from a guy who’s done it for years now and who’s continuing to build value in it and go, “Hey, is this for me?” cause I’m telling you right now, if it is and you can find your niche within a niche or whatever it is you’re going to talk about, it can generate huge opportunity for you in the long run. Huge influence opportunity for you in the long run. So we’ve got four minutes, dude. Scott, what’s your final kinda words of wisdom to the people that are listening on this topic?- I would say have fun.- Like yes.- Have fun and be yourself because, you and I are both fans of Gary Vaynerchuk and some people are a little burnt out on him ’cause that guy is omni-channel everywhere. Once you watch one of his videos, you can’t escape but he talks a lot about his Sidecar issue and his Sidecar issue is, even if you’re never gonna hire Gary Vaynerchuk, you’re never gonna work in media or social media or marketing. People that are in his geographical area can relate to the fact that he wants to own the Jets. He talks a lot about making enough money in this game so that one day he can own the Jets. I talk a lot about drinking iced tea and smoking cigars. A lot of my posts or my still pictures on Instagram, I love cigars. My wife, not a huge fan. Hopefully they’ll learn how to regrow lips by the time I get some type of weird lip cancer but at the end of the day, I really love them. And so I’ll show up to a live event and I don’t ask for their stuff, I don’t pander for it but it’s like, I’ll show up at a live event and someone will walk up and be like, “Hey man, this is my favorite smoke. “This is the Liga Privada T52 Robusto. “You gotta try one,” and I’m like, “Hi, I’m Scott.” And they’re like, “Yeah, I’m Bill, man. “I just really love your shit. “I thought I bought you a cigar,” and I’m like, “That’s wicked.” So, pick something that you’re in love with and just talk about it, have it be the side issue and I think there’s such an opportunity to just be yourself and find other people who like you. They like you, they really like you like that Saturday night live show. “They love me, they really, really love me.” And then you’ll just, you’ll find people that wanna connect with you and then once in a blue moon, you’ll ask them to do business with you and you’ll make a lot of money.- Dude, mic dropped that. That was so good, it’s so true. Scott I appreciate you dude. Thank you for leading the way in this space, man. You’re the man and I hope you have a wonderful day and I hope everybody else goes and joins Generate right now and finds out what’s really happening in that space ’cause it kicks ass, dude. Thank you.- Thanks man, I really appreciate you.- Talk to you later brother.- Talk later.- Man, dive into the water, team. How much more proof do you need? Dive into the water. I don’t care where, go all in and have some fun with your career, with yourself and take yourself seriously. At the end of all that stuff is unbelievable opportunity if you’re willing to play in the space. I hope value today. Please go find these wonderful human beings online, connect with them, follow ’em, see what they’re doing. Man, I appreciate you all. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week. I’ll see you on the internet.

Neel explains how we can use Instagram and how to hack the system. He also speaks upon the growth it brings his business.

Neel is top producing manager based in Nevada.  He has exploded his business through content marketing on multiple platforms, and was recently recognized as a 2019 Video Influencer by BombBomb & Tom Ferry.  Neel produces a large volume of content on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.  He also produces a podcast, The NeelHome Podcast – which is available on YouTube and all major podcast platforms.

Episode Transcribe

– Friends we’re gonna pivot into Instagram. Neel Dhingra hidden studio hanging out, this is gonna be a really fun conversation, so without further ado, another 30 minutes, let’s go into Instagram and bring on Neel. All right friends and professionals, we are on to present a number two, with our topic of mastering Instagram, now, when I found Neel Dhingra. I was like, holy crap, this guy is producing content envy, if content envy is a thing, it’s a thing. And I first saw him on Instagram, dominating the space 20,000 plus followers, but actually getting great collaboration on that platform. And so I was like, hey dude, let’s dive in to mastering Instagram and he said, yes. So here he is without further ado, let’s bring on Neel Dhingra, check out the master of Instagram. I love the music, dude, I get pumped. I actually have to those otherwise I would die of talking to myself too much, Neel what’s up, dude?- Hey buddy how are ya?- Dude I’m so stoked to talk to you today, thank you for being part of the collab. Thank you for sharing all that you do, and I know, but just before we start guys. I know we’re gonna talk about Instagram and dive into that platform, cause it’s important, there’s people there, there’s opportunity there, but man, this guy does so much more to, I mean, this is another guy who’s had a podcast with Gary Vee and I hate him for forever. I mean, this guy is producing content at scale across multiple mediums. And so thanks for diving into one today, dude I’m really excited.- Yeah man, thanks for doing this, I really, you said how you found me and I had found you same way through LinkedIn, like you found me on Instagram, I found you on LinkedIn, and I saw when you were doing those hundred days every day.- No, never again.- And I was like, who is this guy? I cannot get him out of my feet, like every day there was another video and another video and it just kind of came out of nowhere and then I started watching them and then I started learning and it’s kinda cool how there’s people popping up within the industry now, that are helping others at other companies, because like I was preached at. We should collaborate, not hate and not compete because there’s so much business, and I think once you realize, how much business there is, like, once you, a bunch of business gets to a point where you could take on more, then you finally get that point of like, okay, now I understand what all these guys have been saying. Like there’s enough out there for everybody, so we should all help each other.- Man, I love that well, let’s talk about Instagram. When did you get into Instagram? When did you make it a focus and a core part of your strategy?- So I started on Instagram, an account just about two years ago, I didn’t even have an account. Okay, so I had a Facebook and— Hold on a second, everyone’s gonna freak out on this, like that’s two years ago?- Yeah.- That’s not like I’ve been building it for 10 years.- No.- And by the way, if you’re following on Facebook or YouTube and LinkedIn, look for the links we’re gonna post right now that are gonna have his handle, so you can go check out what’s going on. So two years ago you decided what made you get in?- So, I just been following content, from everybody and I was a consumer of content not really creative content and I just started seeing all this stuff, and it was just a cool place to be like, if you think about it, who’s the cool kid, of all these things, I guess we’re not getting into TikTok yet, but for me it was Instagram because that’s where that was kind of red hot, that’s where everybody’s at, that’s where my age group of content creators was at, that’s where all the big influencers, the most known influencers were at. So I started following and learning from other people, and then I kind of started seeing what they were doing, I was like, I can give this a shot. And the first, foray into posting content that was bad, like, I didn’t get anything from it, it’s a hard one to crack.- I wanna talk about that, why was it bad? Like why do you think it was bad?- Well, it’s because you’re learning. You don’t know what’s gonna work, and a lot of times in our business, like we’re so used… I’ve been in the business for 18 years. I’ve got the sales thing ingrained in me right? So I thought I was supposed to go on and say, hey, I’m the best mortgage lender, I have the best rates products, and I’m the most experienced, so you should work with me, like I started overselling myself and not really realizing that that’s coming across bad.- Well, so pause, cause that’s such, everyone’s not gonna hear that right away, I don’t wanna hear that right away, I want you to hit it again, because if you’re gonna go into social media, people think it’s social selling, I need to sell, I’m gonna sell. And so your experience was that didn’t go so well.- No, it doesn’t sales on… When you’re growing, you’re trying to grow and influence, to build your brand, grow an audience, selling works against you. So it’s counterproductive, so you want to, shift that whole mindset, and it’s hard for us in this industry, because like I said, we’ve all been taught from the first time closed mouth doesn’t get fed, always be closing, you have all these things that you’ve been trained, and I come from a background of like coaching and I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the core of coaching and things like that. And it’s very aggressive as far as like, you gotta ask for business, you gotta call these 20 people and ask them for business and ask them and shut your mouth. And you’ll be surprised what happened and all those things they teach you, and so that does work, like it’s, I’m not knocking the core or any of that coaching stuff or the sales stuff, it works, but it does not work on social right, so I had to get off that.- So what do you start doing?- So then I started thinking, okay, what are the guys who are growing. How are they getting, engagement? And, trying to figure out that hack, and I think it’s very difficult because what happens is on Facebook, I think the audience is more forgiving. They’re willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, on YouTube, you’re just kinda like tree in the forest, you post your video, you’re not really expecting much feedback, same thing with Twitter, you’re not really expecting much, but on Instagram when you post something and you get no engagement, it kind of hurts you, you’re like kind of bummed out, right?- So I wanna talk about that, cause that’s when people immediately go, this is bullshit, like, this is not for me, this is whatever, because they got that initial, stab.- Yeah, so what you’ll see is like, people reach out, they’ll ask me that question, like I’ve been doing it. So I just kind of gave up on Instagram, because it’s not really working for me. And you’ll see a bunch of posts that are all sales related or that are just canned corporate type produced content that everybody’s using, so it just, it doesn’t stick out. So you have to think about it, other than TikTok for Instagram, it is the shortest attention span. So we think of YouTube, we think of Facebook, we think of all these platforms. And as far as the users intent on Instagram, it’s their intent is quick, short things, they wanna get some piece of information or they wanna laugh or they wanna get some entertainment, and it’s fast, that’s why you see Instagram stories is the fastest growing thing. They literally put Snapchat out of business, almost like they came out with stories and it just took off, it’s insane, the daily user growth on stories, so what happened was. That tells you that stories is fast, it’s quick, it’s real and that’s what people want on Instagram, so like I had to figure out how can I create content that fits the intent of the user on that platform?- That smart, that’s totally, that’s absolutely dead on, people are missing that point.- Yeah and that’s where people I think are failing on Instagram so what I wanna try and do is. With things like this and with the content I put out is, I wanna help people, create content that would get better reach on Instagram, because it’s the hardest one to crack. And also, find success because like, what you’re saying is when you don’t get any positive feedback and you don’t get any engagement, you don’t get any results from there, you give up on that.- Yeah.- And that’s the problem. So, just simply posting, there is not gonna get it done. You actually have to engage there, and I know you do a great job of this, on LinkedIn and I’ve seen you on active on many platforms, engage with other people’s content, so that way they see you and then they come check you out.- So yeah, we have to unpack that deeper because I think that’s honestly the core truth by the way, on every platform.- Yes.- And so, especially on Instagram, because on LinkedIn or on Facebook you send a request to connect and now you’re buddies, but it doesn’t work that way on Instagram, you can go, I can go like Neel and follow Neel, it doesn’t mean Neel is following me.- Yeah, so in order for that, so you can like, you can follow somebody, but the main thing that will get somebody’s attention, either a client, a friend of a friend, somebody you wanna network with, somebody in industry or even an influencer. Is to leave genuine comments, genuinely engage with their content, so don’t spam people, but actually look at someone if you’d like, if you saw a piece of content, like it’s an image of a carousel or a video and you liked it or something stuck out to you leave a comment, like put yourself out there. And then that sticks out, because when somebody for a smaller account, when somebody leaves a comment, they only get five, to 10 comments. Yours sticks out like a sore thumb, now, all of a sudden you’re like, who’s this Alec guy I’m gonna go check him out. Oh, he’s in the industry too, or Oh, he’s friends of so-and-so, I know them and then all of a sudden it starts the connection.- Dude I love that? We have a question here for ya, I threw it up there. Do you think that conversations or vibes are different in the DM across all platforms? And how much do you utilize or I add to it, how much you utilize direct messaging in Instagram personally?- I use it a lot because the reason why it’s super easy, it’s native to the platform, you can leave, you can send voice memos, you can send video messages and you can send texts. But the cool thing about it, is the more engaged you are with people on DM, the more they will see your content, because then the algorithm realizes that. If me and Alec are DMing all the time, then when I post Alec’s gonna be one of the first people that the algorithm shows the content to, because the algorithm knows that we’re connected. So it helps to DM with people, and to be responsive when somebody DMs you to respond, in a reasonable timeframe because then it’s actually working for you as far as increasing your engagement, increasing your reach on the platform.- Well, lets talk a little bit about results Neel, so you’ve put a lot of two years of effort into this into that platform specifically. Share with everybody, like what has that done for you? What has it done for your business? How has it helped you? Are you getting business? Are you getting DMs? Like what what’s going on there?- Yeah, so I was in the industry, like many of us asking for business, getting referral partners, asking for meetings and things like that right, and I was asking and if you ask enough people, you get the business, but I was getting more more burnt up because my efforts were becoming less effective, so I would have to ask way more people in order to get the same results and then each time that’s growing, because people don’t want to deal with unknown individuals. They’re not taking, they’re not answering cold calls, things like that. So buying leads was, it just seemed like a dying business for me, so I said, how do I change that to attract? And so I started doing this stuff and then what happened was, as I started to find more success, people start to reach out to me, and I think you’d be shocked when it happens the first time when someone DMs you and says, hey Alec, do you have time maybe today to meet with me to discuss, my financing or would you have time to talk to me about this? I know you’re a busy guy, blah blah. And you’re like, do I have time? Yeah, this is awesome, so people start reaching out to you, hellos, like, would it be cool if a realtor asks you to coffee? Like the first time that happened to me, I was like, oh shit, I’ve been asking realtors to go out for 10 years, and now they’re asking me like, what’s up with that. So, once you become a thought leader, once you become putting out good quality content, I mean, I think of it this way. There’s so many people knowledgeable in our industry like that know the job inside out, they provide extreme value, but nobody knows it except a small group of clients that they work with. So imagine taking all those secrets and all those things and all your expertise and putting it out there in pieces of content. Now, all of a sudden, everyone gets to see it and you’ll be surprised how many people are attracted to that, so they’re like, who is this guy? That’s sharing all this great information, and then they ask you, can I pick your brain? When I need you, the first person I think of is that guy who’s, I’ve seen 10 of his posts. I started to get more and more inbound, more, more inbound, and then it just kinda took off like, it was really slow, and I think this happens with all businesses, as you’re trying to scale communication, it’s super, super slow and at the end, it’s fast, it’s big. And then all of a sudden it’s like a snow, it just started piling in, so my business from 18 to 19, quadrupled, so it was insane. So I had to hire and figure it out along the way, but— Exactly, in 2020, I will make four times the money that I made in 2018, as far as the annual net income basis, that’s a direct result of content marketing on these platforms.- So a lot of people haven’t that are now getting fired up. They probably clicked on your handle and it looked at your stuff on Instagram and they’re like, holy crap, it’s beautiful, it’s amazing I could never do that. I mean, he must have a full production team behind him producing this amazing looking carousels and content. And when we were rapping about that, cause I even asked you like, so share the secret man.- Yeah.- How do you get beautiful content like that without hiring a production crew and spending all this money and,- Yeah, and you’ll be surprised, I don’t know if I, can you share screen in here?- Yeah, you’re gonna break my… Let me see what happens here, oh yeah he broke my— Oh, okay yeah, we’ll do this for a second, okay so, yeah, so what I’ve got is… If I wanna show you guys one post here, can you see this?- we can’t see your posts, we just see .- There we go, okay so this was just a tweet. So you talk about like, this was a tweet. I’m just gonna tell you right now, this is the most reach I’ve ever got from an Instagram post and out of all those beautiful carousels and videos, think about this. I got videos with Gary Vee and this tweet outperformed the video okay?- I’m sorry, ’cause , I love that you’re doing this keep going.- Production value doesn’t matter okay, so don’t worry about the optics, I have a passion for things that look cool. So I put a little bit more effort into it, but it doesn’t mean that, that means it’s more successful that just means that I like it to look that way, that’s my preference, but that’s not gonna be why it’s successful, so if you look at this post, this was a thought I had one day I was sitting here and everybody was super negative on the media and everyone was super negative on Facebook and I was like, look guys, what you focus on grows? Like, it’s a simple thing and I basically said, don’t watch the news ’cause it’s gonna kill your mindset. And that’s all I said, it was just a thought I shared, and I was like, oh shit, I tweeted that screenshoted it and shared it on Instagram, and it reached 10,000 people in that day, and I was like, and half of those people weren’t following me by the way. So I don’t know what happened, but a lot of people started engaging with it and it was a thought that resonated with people and it took off, so I just wanted to show that to you guys because it’s kinda like. It shows that the quality doesn’t matter, but what I found was like, this is a, I’ll show you guys— That one was amazing, dude that one— That’s a part about squeezing content, but I’ll show you this. This is one I just recently posted and it was about the housing market and it was saying, is the housing market gonna crash? And there was, a lot of clients were asking me this. So this is where I get my, most of my topics. It’s either business partners, coworkers, or clients are asking these questions a lot. You could find it on Google Trends if you want, or you could take real data from the questions you’re getting on your email and in your DMs, in your phone. So this was one, I just got, and I thought, how could I share this real quick? So I just wrote down my thoughts and then I put it into this, image posts and what happens is when you’re on the platform and you see this, if I just said, is the housing market gonna crash? Look at my ideas. It’s not going to stop your thumb, so you think about people on Instagram, their thumb is going up and down on the platform that is feeding. I need to stop the thumb somehow, so I said, let me take a picture with my cell phone because you don’t have to get a photographer. They just made the, oh shit, “Home Alone” face, whatever that is, I don’t know. And I said, is the housing market gonna crash? And because this is kind of like catchy or like, may it stop, I have a better chance of stopping your thumb if I use that image. So try and do things that would… So that’s how I got people to stop on this, and this is a great performing post, I got a bunch of business from, because it answered a question that many consumers have, and it answered a question that many realtors are getting asked by their clients. So they could share this with their clientele.- I love so much that you just shared that you’re most the most reach you’ve had in a post is a picture of a tweet. It’s just destroying people’s excuses right now, which I always love because the real excuse is we’re just afraid of being rejected or being, not having our, that’s a real issue, and so we say things like, I can’t make beautiful content, And then Neel’s like my best pieces picture of my .- I don’t know why dude, I can’t explain it, but what I will tell you is that mix it up because don’t say no for the audience. It’d be like me asking you Alec, hey, can we jump on a podcast? But it’s okay, if you don’t wanna do it, I understand you’re really busy. Like you would never say no in the same sentence, so that’s what people are saying. They’re like, I have this idea to post, but nobody’s gonna like it, and then they don’t post it. So I had the idea to post it and I just posted it. You’re not offending anybody by posting it. You’re not, I guess you could offend, but if you, if it’s a general, if it’s your own genuine thoughts or your own general advice, you’re not offending anybody. If somebody doesn’t like it, they’ll just keep the thumb going, no big deal.- So, okay so let’s do this within a . If you guys have questions, we have 12 minutes left on this with Neel. Please go check out his handles, you’ll get the… By the way, the one of the best things you can do, if you’re learning these new games guys is just to go follow people like Neel and just pay attention. Like just what are they doing and how is it working? And like, that’s how people learn.- And to your point, Alec I thought I learned. Gary Vee says this, “watch what I do, not what I say.” So he says, or he does in his videos, he takes the most impactful clip or the most impactful thing in the video and puts it to the front of the video, so if you ever watch any of his microcontent or many creators do this nowadays as well. You’ll watch the video, the video that comes up in your feed and it’s him saying something that was kind of polarizing or him saying something that was catchy or whatever the most important thing of the piece was. And then it goes into the video, so I started doing that and it greatly increased my reach on the videos, because what I’m saying is on LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube, when you post a video, the intent of the user is to watch a video. So they stop on your video and they’re gonna watch it, and they’ll give you some time. On Instagram they’re not gonna give you that time. So if the meet, if the most important part is like 47 seconds in, they’re probably just gonna keep scrolling they’ll never get to see it, very few will see it, I mean, some people that are, that wanna watch your stuff, they’ll see it, but everybody else who’s new to you won’t see it or if who’s busy. So if you put that to the front, you just, all of a sudden get more reach on the video, so I started doing that. That’s a great example of like, just take the idea like from somebody else and try it in your own, and then if it doesn’t work, try it again. So that was done with a simple video editing app that I use, on my phone, it’s called InShot. You can do this stuff with your own apps that are free either on your PC, Mac or phone.- So here’s a question and this would be a good, like wind down for the next 10 minutes as we kind of get to the closing Instagram. You got a brand new person does not necessarily count and feels like I need to be in that space. Number one, do you tell them to go in? So, you say yeah, you need to be in there or not right? So that’s one question I want you to ask and then piggybacking off this one, how do you start building that initial audience? You’ve hit that a couple of times in our 20 minutes already, but just let’s land the whole thing on like, one-on-one get in, what do you do?- Okay so first I would get on the platform, yes. Optimize your bio, okay so if somebody lands on your page, your bio page, what does it say? Who are you? Okay, why should I follow you? because, so in my case, I would say, here’s who I am. Here’s what I’m passionate about, here’s what I do for a living. Don’t just self promote, but just say like what would be in it for me as someone to create that, I would say, to have an image of yourself, that is gonna catch somebody’s attention. That’s actually shows your face and is happy, some people use like a logo of a company or something that is not personal. We’re only gonna follow people on here, we’re not necessarily gonna follow companies, so I would use that. So put yourself out there and optimize your bio, then create a piece, a few pieces of content, just post, it could be pictures, it could be carousels, It could be like, if you just said a tweet, screenshot of a tweet, it could be a quick video, whatever. So post those, and then what I would start doing is engaging with others, so, go to your client, follow all your past clients and friends and people in the industry that you like and all that stuff, and start engaging with them, liking, commenting on their content. I would just, for me, I spend like probably an hour, in the beginning of the day, now it’s down because they’re so busy with day-to-day stuff that I may only have 10 or 15 minutes, but just spend a little bit of time each day, engaging with other people’s content and then go into like your friends and colleagues and go into those people’s, go into their friends and engage with them, because that’s connected.- That’s gold, people are gonna miss all that, so you got, I’m gonna to echo it again. Number one is just start engaging with people authentically with comments, thoughtful comments, like be a part of the conversation and then go to the friends of your friends and you can pull their list up and find who they are and start connecting and so Matt has a great question from YouTube, should this be a business account or should this be like your personal Instagram?- So I would convert it to a business account because it’s not gonna diminish your reach, but it gives you additional tools and analytics, it gives you the ability to promote and run ads. It gives you the ability to see all this backside analytics that are not available to personal account and be sure I forgot about this, make sure your account is public, because if you — can get that.- I mean, I see people all day on here, private and then you’re not gonna like, you can’t see any of their posts, you can’t see anything. It says private, so I mean, I asked people and they’re like well I do that because it’s private to me, it’s my family, that’s fine. Create a separate account maybe if you wanna not share family stuff, you do whatever you wanna do, but for your account where you’re gonna try and build your personal brand, it’s gotta be public.- So there you have it guys, I mean, if you’re gonna play in the space where the people are there in Instagram, Neel has been very clear, it’s radically transformed, not only in uplifting his personal brand and bringing him up to a new level where actually customers and realtors are like, Neel, can you help me? But he’s given you the roadmap, which is make it a business, get the analytics and then make it about them, start engaging other people. You have any advice brother? For anybody that’serious- And you brought this up earlier Alec and this, many people have asked us, how do you create this type of content? Okay, so if you’re busy in the mortgage business right now, you probably make an a good amount of money, right? Is it okay if this month you take like a little bit of that money and you hire someone to help with this stuff? Is that acceptable, if you just take home a little bit less money? Maybe we can, I don’t know, maybe hoard a little bit less this month. So I think there’s a lot of business out there, so if you’re doing a lot of business, spend a little bit on this, because this is important, like many times we’re hoarding all this money, we take all the money out and we hoard it for what, we’re scared to invest in our business, in our personal brand, because we don’t know what the ROI is gonna be, so we don’t do it. So I would tell people, look, go on Upwork. You want a graphics designer, go on Upwork and look up graphics designer for social. There are people where you can hire them for like couple hundred bucks a month to create, to help you create that. I don’t know anything about Photoshop, think I create those, I can’t do them. So what I do is I write down my idea. I give them some pictures that I took and I say, could you make this look cool here’s my idea. And then I get, the next day in my inbox, I have a post ready. So, leverage people to help you with where you’re deficient. I’m not great at video editing, but I know video editors are everywhere on Fiverr and on Upwork, so pay someone to help you edit the video, and then scan it, that allows you to scale, so I think at the beginning you could do it all yourself, I did all my stuff from the very beginning, I use tools like Canva and these free apps, and then as you want to start increasing the quality, if that’s something you wanna do, then you can have independent contractors help you, and it’s actually quite affordable I would say people think it’s super expensive to have that, it’s not, it’s very cheap.- So you’re just blowing up excuses, like Mike I’m blowing it up, showing that your tweet was like one of your biggest reaching things, you don’t need to have this higher produced stuff, but you can go to Fiverr and Upwork and you can find all these resources and spend some money, invest in it because it’s important. And so I want to end with this. The very first thing you talked about, cause the excuses are really, I’m just afraid. Cause it’s not about knowledge, knowledge is at the literal tip of our fingers we have all of human knowledge. So it’s not knowledge, it’s that I’m afraid, I’m insecure I’m nervous, whatever it is and when you push through it, you figured out how to post it when no one was responding. I wanna go back into that space where you were, when you first started your account two years ago and you were getting crickets, what was your motivation to keep going?- It’s, if you create something that is going to help somebody else. So before you post it, think what would somebody get out of this? Even if you just have all your close friends and your family following, they will engage with that and they will share it, okay. And you’ll be introduced to somebody, so when I saw the first couple of people say, hey, man, this really helped me, thanks for sharing this. Please do more of this, or I got that first DM where someone’s like, “hey, I saw this, “could you help me with this?” Or had questions, I think that’s when I was like, oh shit, this works and now I can, it gives you the motivation to going. So if you put out something that would help somebody, even if you have a small audience, it’s gonna resonate with people and then you’ll start to see results and that will motivate you to do more, more and more. But if you don’t ever put out anything, that’s gonna help and it’s all about you, nobody’s gonna really engage, and then you’re probably gonna quit, so I think first, fix that issue first and then you’ll start to find your own motivation before.- Dude, thank you, you guys, if you’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, all of his handles, all of his connections, YouTube channel, all of his Facebook, all his Instagram right there, connecting with Neel, find out what he’s doing because he’s doing really, really cool stuff. Hey, Neel I got my producer, Mike is telling me getting mad at me that I have to do a selfie for the gram.- All right- Or else I’m not on the gram.- I’m gonna do one as well. We’ve gotta do it, yeah, we’re talking about content creation, this is a piece of content right? So thanks so much for doing this Alec, I really appreciate it, man.- Oh man three minutes, any final words of wisdom and advice, what do you got?- I would just say, look guys, if you’re in the industry, there’s a lot of things you hate about your job. there’s a lot of things you’d love, there’s a lot of things you hate, the things that you don’t like about your job, this will solve that, okay so everything that bothers you, being treated like a commodity being commoditized. People grinding you on interest rates or price or commission or whatever. this will solve it, trust me, because this will have people value you and it makes your job much more enjoyable. And to me it’s given me, I was getting burnt out and it’s given me a whole new, motivation to keep going,- Dude I love that, that is so good. That’s so true and right now the opportunity has never been more ripe it’s just time. Thank you so much for hanging out with Collab man.- Thank you so much.- Talk to you, see ya on the internet.- All right, buddy- Later, buddy.- Man, dive into the water team. Like how much more proof do you need? Dive into the water, I don’t care where but go all in and have some fun with your career with yourself, or take yourself much seriously. At the end of all that stuff, is unbelievable opportunity if your willing to I hope it you value today. Please go find these wonderful human beings online connect with them, all of them do what they’re doing, man I appreciate you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful week I’ll see you on the internet.

Phil Treadwell – The Power of the Podcast If you are worried about content, hear from Phil how much you can pull from one podcast and how easy it is to just hit record. 

Phil is a 16-year mortgage industry veteran and the Founder & Host the Mortgage Marketing Expert podcast, with a simple mission: to help mortgage professionals build their business and do mortgage marketing better. I interview top mortgage industry experts who share firsthand experience and advice that mortgage & real estate professionals can use to build a more effective and efficient business.

Episode Transcribe

-I’m really excited for our first one, The Power of Podcast with Phil Treadwell. Let’s bring him on right now. All right, friends and professionals, here we are with topic number one. And what better way to jump into this social media collab and the Power of Podcast with Mister Podcast himself, Phil Treadwell. Now, this guy’s been running a podcast for over two years, dramatically changed his whole career, the trajectory of his path by putting his word out for everybody to connect with and engage. And so let’s talk about the Power of Podcast with Phil Treadmill.- Woo intros bro, intros.- Nice dude.- What do you know about intros?- I’m right in the background dancing to this Intro music. I’m like this is good stuff.- Well dude, Phil, thank you for being here today. Thank you for talking about this topic that I know you’re super passionate about. And I have to tell you before we start, you’re a major inspiration to me in my podcast. Just the fact that you were willing to, you were the first one I got exposed to in mortgage.- I appreciate that man. That’s awesome.- So let’s talk about your podcast dude, but let’s set it up. How long you’ve been doing this game? What’s it like?- Well mortgage game, 16 years. Podcast game a little over two. I mean, technically I started the podcast a couple of months before the podcast officially launched, but you know it was one of those things I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while, and like all great mortgage professionals, I’m a procrastinator and I waited and I bought all the equipment and the microphone, and then I did nothing with it for like a year. And so I decided one day, I had a really bad bout with pneumonia and I’ve had pneumonia a few times. I’ve always had some asthma and allergy symptoms and my mortality kind of flashed before my eyes, as I get older, I realize that hey, you know we only got a short time on this rock to do what we wanna do and not to go morbid but at the same time, I’m like hey why haven’t executed some of these things, and I was sitting on my couch on a Sunday night, and I thought “You know what? I’m just gonna do it. I’m gonna do a podcast,” and I started inviting some of the biggest people in the industry, people that I knew, people that I didn’t know and by the next morning, I had three podcast recordings later that week, and then I realized you know what? I want to do this podcast but I’m not really sure how to do it. And so I called a friend of mine and told him, I said, “Dude you’ve got a podcast. It’s like out on Apple, it’s on all these different things and bro like let’s be honest, you didn’t do this, like who helped you? Come on man.” And so he gave me his production team and we were off and running. And so launched with five episodes on the first part of June in 2018 and went to mastermind promoted it everywhere, started collaborating with other podcasters and the rest is history.- Dude, well I mean the rest is history. I mean it’s still it’s current life.- Right for sure.- You’re still living in this space. So I mean let’s just quickly, you mentioned insecurity, as you mentioned like I don’t know if I should do this or how to do this and you mentioned procrastination. A lot of people have been dealing with that in their own life, and so let’s just kind of dive into some results for a second and give some people some hope into like, is this worth it? What happened to your career, to you, when you just finally jumped off?- Man it’s been all positive. So first of all, let’s start with the procrastination insecurity and some of those barriers to entry that a lot of people have. You just have to go do it. There’s no quick fix. There’s no solution. The solution is to take action and that’s really what happened is before I even knew how to do the podcast, I started booking interviews and what happens is if you subscribe to that ready fire aim mentality, a lot more gets done. And so at the end of the day that’s really what I did and then from that point what happened was I’ve started collaborating with some of the industry’s best influencers, experts, industry Titans that came on the podcast because my sole purpose was to help people build their business and do mortgage marketing better. Anybody that’s listened to the podcast, here’s that mission in the beginning and so what we did is we were just trying to add value and content and so by collaborating with these people, I got to know what they knew. I got to share it with other people. I got exposed to a lot of concepts and people that I wouldn’t before and then through that, my business group. Podcast downloads grew; social media followers grew; income grew. It all grew because I subscribed to ready fire aim, and I didn’t, some people all the time, you can’t have paralysis by analysis. Everybody wants to have their setup and they want to know how gonna do it in the scripts.- Hold on, hold on let’s talk about your first setup dude.- Please.- What was it, like tell everybody– You mean, what is it ’cause we still have the same first setup. We got a right here it’s a blue Yeti. It’s the old school OG silver one. Yeah that’s a black one right there. I bought this a year before I started the podcast so 2017 bought a $100 microphone. I still have the same $40 Logitech webcam right here.- Yeah- Yep. You see what happens is if I go too high def and you see what I really look like, you’re gonna understand why I have a radio faced into the podcast and not like this whole video thing that you’re just rocking out of the park by the way. And so I mean at the end of the day, my first setup was about a $150 worth of equipment. I found a podcast hosting platform that was like 15 bucks a month and then everything else was because I didn’t want to take the time to learn how to edit, and I paid someone else to do it. So I mean again my setup was minimal and I still use it to this day.- Well see I love that dude because it’s just telling people dude just jump off the edge like, it’s just jump off the edge. It’s clearly worth it and we have a LinkedIn question here on this about solo style podcasts okay, which I love and I don’t know why I LinkedIn is throwing up LinkedIn User 1.0, but share with your thoughts on solo style podcasts.- Yeah you run an outline on what’s going on shared flow, as it goes, yeah, so I don’t do a lot of solo podcasts. I typically do an interview style. However, through industry syndicate, my partner Dustin Brown and a lot of other people do solo podcasts. Ones that I listen to and ones that I know that are most effective like Alec said you just talk. Now you may want to have some bullet points or some ideas of hey over the next half hour, I want to cover these concepts but if you try to make it scripted, it’s going to sound scripted and let’s be honest nobody wants to listen to that.- Nobody wants scripted.- At the end of the day you need to have an idea of what you want to talk about but you need to do it by telling stories right? A good friend of mine Rene Rodriguez has amplified, and he talks about frame message and tie down. That’s what a good story is, you wanna frame it up and tell people why they should care. You wanna cover your message and then bring it home with a call to action or with a challenge or if why did you listen to all this to begin with and if you have a couple of concepts, and you’ll tell stories that illustrate those points, you’ll have a lot of people who will listen and at the end of the day the reason memories are important is because you don’t have to memorize your own memories. So if you’ll just tell stories and talk about what you know and share, people will listen because you have something to say.- So Phil, did you ever think that starting the podcast two years ago would take you where you’re at today?- Absolutely not.- Yeah you didn’t see it either ’cause you know, I saw you sitting up there podcasting with GaryVee and I was like the most jealous like just sitting back like and like you know so two years ago to nothing to sitting down with GaryVee.- Yeah, yeah. So at the end of the day I started it specifically because I wanted to give people something to see when they googled me or looked me up on social media, because as a regional, I recruit and hire, I network, I like people, I love this industry. I want to move it forward and a podcast was a way for me to accomplish three things. One get exposure into the industry that I wanted to create credibility with. I wanted to add value and information to the people who was my audience and the third thing was I wanted to do content in a way that was passive, because I don’t watch a lot of long-form YouTube videos, and so podcasting you can get people engaged longer, and you can do it at the gym, you can do it while you’re at work, you can do in the car and that’s what I wanted. As a busy professional, that’s how I consume content. I wanted to create an outlet that did those same things.- So I want to hit something you said, because I don’t want people to miss this. You know what Phil’s doing is creating human connection at its core right? And so it’s framed up in mortgage ’cause that’s his space but I want to share a side thought and let Phil jump on it and go deeper because he’ll know people like this. I have a loan rep that works with us up in Seattle who started doing the podcast ’cause he’s starting to listen but his podcast is not about the mortgage industry.- Right.- His podcast is about adult men’s baseball leagues and these people that play baseball leagues competitively as adult males and are into it, like deep into it not just in watching it, but in playing it and so he started this thing called the Comebacker, and I’m like, “Well how much business are you getting from this?” And he’s like, “All of its now coming from this.” Because they know he does mortgages, like he doesn’t need to be like sponsored by me, the mortgage guy. It’s just amazing what it does and you’ve been living this.- Yeah, so personal branding I think people miss this a lot is about the person not the brand. And so many people want to create a shtick or a website or a logo and call that their personal brand when really what they need to be promoting in their content is themselves and just like this guy did with the podcast with the Comebacker, I’ve have a loan officer that created a podcast because he and his family to do a lot of ministries. They do a lot of nonprofits. They adopt kids and so he created a podcast in his community that does nothing but highlights other nonprofits, and charities and ministries in the area and again people know he’s a loan officer. You don’t have to go out and amplify that fact but he’s getting to get into circles and talk to people that he didn’t think that he would and so that’s really what this whole thing is about. With me my audience was other mortgage professionals, people I wanted to network with, people that I wanted to potentially recruit and hire and that’s the formula you have to choose. Who is your audience? You have to decide what type of message you want to give that audience and then number three, you choose the best medium to deliver that message to that audience. For me it was podcast because other busy mortgage professionals may not have time to sitting around and watch a 30 minute video but most of them do have time and are capable of listening to a 30 minute podcast. And so you know then it was a matter of just a little bit of hack and culture. I bring huge people on who had something to say you offer you know thousands of dollars a month is what their coaching costs or their platform and we get ’em for 30-45 minutes for free to ask any question, I didn’t care if nobody listened. I was learning all kinds of crazy stuff.- I like this again dude. The fact that you just asked people of credibility to come on, like who’s Phil Treadwell? And you’re like come on my podcast and they said yes, because I mean people want to talk about themselves and you’re giving them a platform to talk about themselves. You don’t even have to do the talking.- You don’t and that’s the cool part about it is most of them initially, I would never forget Todd Bookspan. He’s a good buddy of my now. When I reached out to Todd ’cause I had seen him at GaryVee he was there with a group of like 10 people and he was like, “Who are you? Why are you asking me on?” Whatever and I let him know, listen I’m just starting a podcast about mortgage professionals for mortgage professionals. I want to bring people on to offer content. We’re not monetizing this. I’m just trying to add value to the industry and those first 10 or 12 conversations were they realized, there was no hack as far as trying to get something for nothing. I wanted to amplify them add their value to my audience. I was gonna get to learn something and at the end of the day, once I had those first 5 or 10 guests on and had credibility, I was able to continue to get bigger and bigger guests and then now it’s you know a lot of people will answer my email or social media message because we’ve had you know the GaryVees and the Ryan Serhants and the Steve Sims and some of these people even outside of the industry that have come on, and so it was just a matter of asking. I learned that from 4-Hour Workweek with Tim Ferriss. Pick up the phone and ask and you’ll be shocked what happens, people like what do I need to say? What is my script? No call and say, “Hey here’s what I’m doing. I think you can add value. Here’s the type of value I can add for you. Are you interested?” And you’ll be shocked about how many people will say yes.- I mean it takes courage. It takes courage to do that but as you’re hearing from Phil directly guys, it’s gonna surprise you. Leslie I hope we answered your question. I think that Phil nailed it. Do what you’re passionate about. Connect to things you’re passionate about. You can see Phil’s passion about driving the industry forward, the mortgage industry, but trust me if you’re not connected into your passion, It’s not gonna land. Comment by Julian. By the way we’re on LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube and in a second you’re gonna see either myself or producer Mikey drop all of Phil’s social connection places. So where you can subscribe to this podcast, where you can find them online, his YouTube channel that’s gonna come across about all of them but this is a great point and personal branding is about the person not the brand, just driving it home Phil. So let’s do this. Someone’s gonna start a podcast dude. They are gonna follow it up now. They heard you. They’re like oh my god, changed his career, changed his life. I gotta get in there you know you can do audio only podcast like how you started Phil ’cause you know you’re joking about Face for Radio– Radio face I’m tell ya’, yeah.- But that’s actually powerful because some people were like I don’t want to be on video and I’m yelling at ’em to be on video all day.- For all of those people that don’t want to listen to Alec listen to me, like it works. We got yin and yang going on here.- So if they want to sort of podcast and they’re coming to you for consultation, what are you gonna tell them?- Yeah so again I go through that three steps, who’s your audience? What type of message you’re trying to deliver? What’s the best medium because sometimes podcast isn’t the right medium. The same way people, “I want to do Facebook Ads.” Facebook Ads may not be the best medium for what it is you’re trying to do. So I try to want to make sure that podcasting is what they want to do. The second like Leslie was talking about is what subject matter, what are you gonna talk about? I agree with Alec. It needs to be something that you’re excited about, that you’re passionate about. I know it’s crazy but I am very passionate about the mortgage industry. I am a young guy. I, you know 16, years in I learned from Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, but I’m 38. I’m kind of one of the original Millennials and so I kind of bridged that gap between the old school and new school and I’m passionate about moving this industry forward. Hanging onto our long-term you know, the long-standing success principles and applying them in a millennial world. And I think you need to be passionate about that whatever that subject matter is. The very first podcast I ever listened to was called Basic Brewing Radio. I’ll give ’em a shoutout. They’re a home brewing podcast that was near where I was and they’re national all over the country, because I was in the process of opening up a craft beer brewery. And so I loved beer. I wanted to learn and that’s my first exposure to podcasting was home brewing. I’ve listened to podcasts of all kinds of subject matters and that’s what you have to do. Find something that you’re interested in, bring people on who want to talk about it, have a microphone going and go. So it’s very simple as far as find a good host. I mean there’s Libsyn and Buzzsprout and SoundUp and there’s all kinds of great places that you can put that audio recording and they blast it out to all the places that we listen to podcasts, but it’s as simple as grabbing a microphone, plugging into your laptop, having a conversation or having a conversation with yourself and putting that up for people to listen to and then market it a little bit on social media, do some videos like Alec was talking about the process of a podcast is not difficult. There are so many great resources out there. You can google it. You can message me, you can message Alec. All of these people and all these resources are out there for you. You just have to make the decision that you want to do it and that you’re gonna do it consistently and persistently over time. I don’t know if persistently is a word but we’re going to use it. Consistence and persistence over time is how that you’re gonna have success with this.- Dude I was joking with somebody Phil. They’re like I don’t know how to do a podcast. I’m like “You know how to do Zoom” and they’re like yeah. I’m like you see the record button at the bottom? Yeah, you just did a podcast , like you just did podcast.- You joke. What people don’t know is that, a lot of people know, but I don’t think I mentioned enough is every single one of my podcast recordings from day one has been recorded through Zoom, even the ones that are live right? So that’s how my first podcast producer taught me how to do it, because when you record in Zoom, as we all now know, it gives you an audio file and a video file.- You’re done.- It splits it off, so that audio file I send it to an editor. For a little bit of money they you know create a little intro and outro with some cool music. They put those bumpers on there and we upload it and that’s it. Even when I’m live and people laugh at me, but you know hey it’s a poor man’s podcast. I’m gonna roll with it. I’ll have people live. I’ll open up my laptop put the webcam on top. I’ll hit record in Zoom and record me and that person right next to each other. I know there’s all kinds of more techie ways to do it, but I didn’t know how to do it. I was a mortgage professional right? I had a microphone, I had a camera, I had a laptop and I did the thing, and so I mean we’ve had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of downloads and guests all over the place because we used a little bitty mic, a little bitty webcam, we pushed record and that’s all you have to do. We didn’t do anything special. We just did it consistently over time.- Man I love that message so much. So many people need to hear that that are in their space, whether it’s mortgage or so anything in sales, anything in sales we want to build community, I’ve got a buddy who does hardware components for computers you know transistors and blah blah blah and international distribution and he started a podcast and all of a sudden these guys at billion-dollar companies are like can I be a guest? And he says, there’s no one else in his space like contributing to the conversation, all of them were audiences.- Well and I now get at least one a day, if not two a day, people that reach out that want to be guests on the podcast. Some are a great fit and some aren’t because again my mission and the whole point of the podcast is when mortgage professionals listen that they’re hearing something of value that can help them build their business or do mortgage marketing better and some of the topics may not be as sexy as others right? That doesn’t mean that there’s not value there and sometimes I’ll throw on those episodes that a lot of people even my, you know, my own wife she’ll listen to me and help me out was like, “Well I mean that was you know an okay episode or whatever” and I’m like the people need to hear it. And so you kind of get to that place where you’re sharing information, whether it’s popular or not because your point is to do that, but be excited about it. I learn so much new stuff by having conversations with people and we all do it at events, the difference is they put a microphone in front of mine.- So I got a question here from a LinkedIn user. It’s fun, it’s gotta be the same person because everyone else on LinkedIn I’m getting their names but what’s your take in group discussion style podcasts? In your opinion are Millennials consuming this type of podcast content?- I think Millennials are consuming all types of podcast content first of all. And second of all, I love group style discussions, especially if you have a topic that you can just kind of like throw in the middle of them and let them go. That organic type of conversation, the authenticity that comes along with it is super powerful. I think there’s plenty of podcasts out there that are very scripted, that are well produced and there’s nothing wrong with that but I think something that people have related to our podcast from the beginning is, we don’t edit out every um and uh. We don’t go through and ask super scripted questions. Now there’s maybe some questions that we make sure and want to ask or if you listen to my podcast, I go through the same process of giving someone a background so they can frame-up hey here’s my experience, so here’s why what I’m telling you is going to be relevant, but I love group style podcasts. I love having more than one person on there, because enthusiasm breeds enthusiasm and so I’m not typically this enthusiastic and excited on camera, but I’m feeding off of Alec, and we’re talking about something that I really really like and so the more people you have, especially if they’re also equally excited and passionate about the topic that you’re going to have, man I think that that’s gold, and I think a lot of people will listen.- And I want to head to another thing you said and just see if you’ll go deeper on it for everybody. Man there’s so much to talk about. There’s so much content and there’s so many things and sometimes you know as a personal example, when I was doing that stupid 100 videos challenge, I had a video that I was, I woke up that day to post it out of Dropbox and I was like this is garbage. I like looked at I like watched it again, I’m like this is total garbage, but I didn’t have time to do another video. So I just posted it and sure enough later that day, I got an email from somebody who was like I really needed to hear this today. And I was sitting down there thinking this is garbage. No one cares about this. This is a stupid thing. How have you experienced that in the content you put out?- Yeah so when I first got started before the podcast, I actually started an Instagram page called Mortgage Marketing Expert and the whole point was to do a mortgage marketing tip of the day and I did that because as is, my team and my wife heard me coaching and helping other mortgage professionals. I was recruiting people or whatnot I would have these little one-liners that I would say. Like you know it just kind of came out you know personal branding is about the person, not the brand. It’s things that I think about and I say repetitively and so she started writing them down, and I put them out as a mortgage marketing tip of the day.- I love it.- Ironically the podcast was a byproduct of after about a 100 days, I started running out of stuff to say, and so I wanted to bring people on and steal their quotes and make those the new mortgage tips because I didn’t want to be redundant but the point of what you’re saying is the tips that I thought were gonna be awesome and were gonna get a lot of engagement and a lot of shares and a lot of likes, kind of fell flat and the ones I’m like I mean it’s okay, I’m gonna post one today those are the ones, the same thing, there were people like, that’s what I really needed to hear, and I realized that you can’t prejudge the content on the front end because either a podcast episode, a video, a piece of content that I’m not sure that I don’t know if it’s really any good or not, sometimes those are the ones that perform the best, but the end of the day, you have to keep hitting record. You have to keep hitting submit post, whatever euphemism you want to use, ’cause if you prejudge it at the end of the day, you’re robbing someone of something that they may need just because you didn’t like it, and so put it all out there and see what happens. I have to echo that man. For everybody listening now and in the future, just stop judging yourself so harshly dude. You’re your biggest critic not that, the world is way more accepting than you think, like everyone’s like “Oh I’m gonna sound stupid. I’m gonna be judged” and I’m like no you’re not. You’re doing that to yourself and this is you know Phil’s just sharing openly about his experience through this and the connection is created. And stop judging yourself man.- The enemy of great is perfect and everyone that tries to be perfect that tries to have the right saying that tries to produce it that has the right background like all these different things, you’re robbing yourself of doing great things, putting out great content, really accomplishing something because of that perfection. If you look at the statistics, there’s a very very small percentage difference in great that’s pretty easily attainable if you work hard and this perfection that’s unattainable, you really don’t get that much lift between the two. So focus on making the mistakes ’cause I know Alec will say this because I will too. Every really impactful thing that’s ever happened to me or that I’ve learned has been coming through a mistake that I’ve made or a failure that I’ve had or learning through someone else’s failure. And I say that all the time is you know you taking your experience and failures and imparting that into someone else is the very definition of wisdom, and so you know you can’t have great things happen without failures is the point. So don’t worry about making mistakes. Just go do a bunch of stuff, figure out what works, figure out what doesn’t work and the formula becomes very very clear.- So guys we’ve got about seven minutes left on The Power Of Podcast before we’re going in deep diving on Instagram. So this is your chance to really dry out your own personal questions and ask Phil what’s really going on. I think it’s self-evident you know, okay let me ask you this Phil, should everyone have a podcast?- I don’t think everyone should have a podcast. I think everybody that wants to have a podcast should. Podcasting is still wide open. I’m getting ready to post a blog post that talks about the things I’ve learned over the first two years and the very first point that I make in there is there’s still room for everyone. We’re not at critical mass where there’s not a lot of podcasts and the cool thing about podcasting and podcasters is we’re not mutually exclusive. We’re actually each other’s business development right? If someone that’s not been exposed to podcasts comes and listened to my podcast, chances are they’re gonna go subscribe to three or four or five others and vice versa. So we want to lift each other up. We want to help each other, so if you’re wanting to do a podcast, one of my first recommendation’s reach out to other podcasters. And so yes go out there and do it. We have I think the number is close to 100 million people now listens to podcasts on a monthly basis, but there’s still like half of the country that still has never even heard a podcast before. And I want to throw out a couple of real stats real quick because I think it’s extremely important. The average podcast episode is 37 to 40 minutes long and 93% of people listen to most or all of an episode that they begin. Only 7% of people listen to just the beginning or less than half and a couple of stats on that the reason that’s important is because a podcast listener is 45% more likely to have an income of $250,000 or more. You should hear target market and then the other part of that is that 70% of podcast listeners say that they’ve become aware of a product or service specifically because of a podcast episode, and that’s super important because when we’re talking about unfolding content and we’re talking about really creating ideas and unfolding plots and whatnot, you can’t do that in the first 10 seconds of a video but you can do that in the first five minutes of a podcast and so man I really, really encourage people if you’ve got a cool idea go do it. Be committed to it. Don’t do it for three months. I think it’s Lois House that says if you’re not committed to putting out a podcast episode consistently for two years, don’t even start. And I agree with him. I will say you don’t have to do it every single week but you need to do it consistently but yeah I think it’s a long-term play that people need to jump on board.- So let’s ask this and try to get this out in like a lightening round here. So let’s talk about momentum because you just made a comment that I think might scare people, which is you’re not willing to do it for two years, don’t do it and everyone’s like, “Aaah, it’s too much commitment.” And my personal experience on that is I was gonna do one podcast a month in 2020, that was my goal, that’s 12 podcasts.- Yeah.- And then all of a sudden now, I’m doing one a week. And I’m booked out through like for next 60 days and I was like holy crap, like the momentum is, it just rolled on me, and I’m like I think if you put yourself out there, you’d be surprised how it all connects.- For sure.- But then let’s talk, did you take on long-form content? Like this is long form term content, a podcast, but what does that do for you in terms of creating like as a pillar content for you? How does that help?- That was a softball. That was a great queue up right there. Podcast in my opinion is the best way to create long-form content. Example if I use Zoom, if Alec and I were on a Zoom call right now and I’m recording both audio and video, we’re gonna have a 30 to 45 minute conversation, and now what happens is you can use the audio for a podcast, so you have audio content. You can shorten those into smaller clips and do it on Alexa flash briefings on the Amazon device. You can take those and create audiogram graphics. You can take some of the quotes and create quote picks. You can transcribe it and create a blog. You can take two or three minute videos and create highlighted videos on YouTube. You now have a pillar content and long-form content that you can break up into micro content to put across any social media platform anywhere that you’re putting content out period. So my point is that you can have one 30 or 45 minute conversation, a week, a month however often you want to do it. I don’t want to scare people with that. I just want to make sure people don’t wait it and some will do three podcast episodes and cross my fingers for results, because there’s an element of a long term play here, but you could create a podcast even if it’s not officially a podcast you could have a conversation with someone and break that up into micro content, hundreds of different ways and now you don’t have to worry about what content do I create? What do I say? Go have a cool conversation with someone and break that up into a bunch of different pieces and now you have content to share all over the place.- Dude you’re the man.- You’re the man.- I’m so appreciative of this, like this 30 minute engagement time. I mean there’s so many comments here about like this is amazing and thank you and you know just your commitment to pushing the industry forward to having these conversations to sharing openly and honestly about like what gear you use, no secrets no hidden thing, no buy my ebook for $20 in the back, like no just that authentic nature is what’s crushing it dude. So I really appreciate you. Two minutes left; final comments from Phil Treadwell. What have you got?- Man you know effective marketing is the balance of trust and attention okay?- You wanna wrote that down.- What’s that?- Say it again, say it again.- Effective marketing is the balance of trust and attention and it’s something I say all the time so people are probably getting tired of me saying it, but I can light myself on fire or light Alec on fire and put it on TikTok and we’re gonna get all kinds of attention but we’ve not created any trust that people want to do business with us, but we have a lot of some of the most trusted mortgage professionals out there and real estate professionals that aren’t putting out content, that aren’t trying to build a brand and so they’re still not doing any business because people don’t know who they are. You have to balance the two. I will say to take it a step further that I think the future of production in our industry are built around technology, automation and access to data and I think that if you, you do a podcast and you create that micro content there’s all kinds of ways to automate it, but man at the same time, you know go out have fun with it. Do something that you’re going to every morning wake up and be like I’m excited to do this today. Don’t count the results. Look up six months a year later and you’ll be shocked at what’s happened.- Dude keep crushing it man. Thank you so much. All right, you’re out, you’re free brother.- Thanks man.- Appreciate you.- Have a good evening everybody.- Man, dive into the water team. Like how much more proof do you need? Dive into the waters. I don’t care where. But go all in on and have some fun with your career, with yourself, and take yourself more seriously. At the end of all that stuff is unbelievable opportunity if you’re on the playing space. I hope your I brought you value today. Please go find these wonderful human beings online, connect with them, all of them. See what they’re doing. Man I appreciate you all. Have a wonderful day and a wonderful week. Ill see you on the Internet.