00:00 Episode Two Introduction
04:28 Lykken Market Update
06:20 Technology Adoption Challenges
08:54 Dan Habib Interview Start
09:41 Spartan Race with MBS Highway
12:29 Prepping for Morning Updates
16:07 Value of Just Starting
19:24 Value of Morning Routines and Discipline
22:37 Learning Tough Lessons
28:55 Take Advantage of Opportunities
30:26 Pivoting in Business
33:15 The Joy of Fatherhood
37:23 Balancing Work and Family Life
40:07 Famous Beef Wellington and Family Traditions
44:08 Working with Family: The Dynamics
46:32 Building a Legacy in the Mortgage Industry
48:26 Navigating the Crypto Landscape
50:40 Making Your Own Mark as the Son of a Legend
52:49 Keys to Success and Personal Growth
56:59 Wrapping Up

Bobby (00:02)
What’s up everybody and welcome to episode two of Changing Circumstances podcast. I am your host, Bobby Palmer. And with me is always a man who allegedly committed the heinous crime of putting gravy on stuffing. My co-host, Mr. Mike Morehouse. How are you, sir?

Mike Moorhouse (00:18)
Yeah, no stuffing, it’s bad for you. No, I’m doing well, Bobby. How was your Thanksgiving?

Bobby (00:24)
man, it’s amazing. Went up to the local mountains here, tried fishing for about three days, and, you know, just got skunked. But had some great time with…

Mike Moorhouse (00:33)
You said you said tried. So so

you went through the motions you didn’t succeed.

Bobby (00:38)
I did not say, well, actually I did. So funny story with our friend, David Lykken who will actually be joining us here on the podcast in a little bit to give his market update. I always talk about the Lykken luck. So this goes back to when I first met him, I think we had like a pre-interview call for being on his podcast, Lykken on Lending. And I’m actually out fishing while this call got scheduled. So I’m like, I can do it on my cell phone, right? I wasn’t catching anything all day. Like no joke, five seconds after I get on the Zoom call with David.

my my LeBron goes, you know, and pulled in a big old trout. And so ever since then, when I go fishing, if I’m not having luck, I’ll I’ll text him or call him. So sure enough, I text them when we’re up there in the mountains. And it was about 30 minutes after he texted me back saying, you know, good luck. Sure enough, I caught the only trout I got the whole weekend over three days. So, yeah, the Lykken Luck was good, but not great time.

Mike Moorhouse (01:31)
So, David’s probably gonna have to be

part of the family vacations going forward if you want to get any fish.

Bobby (01:34)
I think so. just need

to take a little picture of him and put it inside my hat or something. No, no, no, no. I wouldn’t do that to him. My kids are crazy. but no, had a great time with the family. We were up there with the in-laws. My mother-in-law is a great cook. So what about you? How was your Thanksgiving?

Mike Moorhouse (01:38)
you’re not gonna let him come.

I was good, good. think I’m just about recovered from the food coma. Just lot of over-eating desserts, side dishes, everything. I’m trying to be good this week. So see if I can lose whatever I gained during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Bobby (02:06)
Get back in the gym. well,

so speaking of getting back in the gym, getting up and doing it early every morning, and speaking of food, our guest today, amazing guest, has some awesome stories, Mr. Dan Habib, current EVP and one of the founders of MBS Highway. ⁓ Such great conversation, Mike. I know you’ve known Dan a lot longer than I have. It was actually my first time meeting Dan, and he was just fantastic. But what were some of your takeaways from our chat with Dan?

Mike Moorhouse (02:32)
Yeah, now Dan’s a great guy. You you talked a little bit about the gym and one of the things about Dan, and it comes out in the interview, and think everybody’s going to find this pretty interesting. He’s very disciplined. He’s got a routine that he follows. He gets up early in the morning. We don’t give too much away, but ⁓ he credits one of the reasons he’s successful is just this ability to be disciplined and have routine, being able to get a lot done in a day. ⁓ I think there’s so many great takeaways from the interview. There’s, ⁓ you know…

He’s a new father, so he’s going through a lot of that. you know, good luck, Dan. And, know, for those of for those of you that don’t know Dan Habib, ⁓ he is part of a team that comes on every morning. Bobby had mentioned about MBS Highway. Dan and this team is part of.

you know, in the mortgage business, thousands of people morning routine. It’s ⁓ sort of like being part of the family.

Bobby (03:27)
Yeah, he’s like, he’s like, goes with your cup of coffee, right? So every morning you need your coffee and you need Dan and his team. So, ⁓ yeah, no, it was, was great. I, I know this is a business focused podcast, but to be honest, Mike, I’m, having a tough time choosing between the discussion about his world famous beef Wellington ⁓ and the time that he got fired as part of a, what ended up being a really good life lesson for him. So those are some of my fun takeaways. Obviously there’s a ton more in there in terms of business.

We’ll get to that in just a moment. For those of you that may be first time listeners, I do encourage you to check out episode one we had with Eric Levin of Model Match. Not only was it just an absolutely incredible discussion with Eric, there’s so many takeaways from that I’ve had personally just from my career. But also that episode, you know, Mike and I share a little bit more about us, our background and what this podcast is going to be all about. So if this is your first time listening,

Check out episode one, you’ll get to know us a little bit more. ⁓ And now, Mike, think, should we throw it over to David Lykken right now?

Mike Moorhouse (04:25)
Absolutely. Where’s David?

Bobby (04:27)
All right, David, come on in.

Hey, what’s up David? How’s it going, man? Yeah, so what’s going on? What’s new at Lykken on Lending?

David Lykken (04:30)
Good to be here.

Well, first of all, kudos on you having a podcast and getting this up and running. I think that’s so awesome. I love the fact that you’re doing it. And I think you’re going to be awesome. You got a voice for it, personality for it. So it’s good. One things we’re focusing on looking at lending is we’re finding that a lot of automation is not being embraced by the loan officers. So you look at companies that are developing and bringing features forward, but they’re not the adoption of mortgage loan originators.

is not been as good. have tried and trued ways that they stick to. And so we’re starting to do more work and focusing in on what can we do to get adoption. It’s frustrating for marketing people to be working on or programmers working on something. And then you develop these wonderful features and they don’t need it. And so we’re finding that that has been a challenge that we’re focusing on. A lot of us also we’re focusing in on sales. We’re like, what does it take to be sales? So I’m getting some

Other sales coaches, again, we’re mo our podcast was mostly operationally focused, mostly focused on the everything, but mortgage loan originations. So we’re focusing more on right now, as we get into the new year, what is working for people and why is it working? So those are some of the things we’re focusing on. Of course, AI is one of those topics that just finds its way into every conversation.

Bobby (05:52)
Always there.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, that’s great. Definitely tune in to Lykken on Lending. I think those are great topics that are always relevant. Every year, markets up, markets down. Those are things. mean, Mike, you and I experienced that adoption challenge back when we were at Summit together and always trying to get people to buy in on whatever’s new and maybe change their process. So good on you, man. Great topic. Looking forward to hearing it. And thanks for jumping on.

David Lykken (06:18)
You bet. Glad to be here.

Mike Moorhouse (06:20)
Yeah, that was an interesting little sort of short comments from David. I think, you know, one of the things that sort of jumped out at me was this whole idea of adoption. And, you know, and I think technology, everybody is struggling with that. In the past, it’s always been difficult. But if you look at what’s going on now with the advent of AI, there’s a lot of struggles.

Historically, 70 % of change management projects have not met their goals. Some people will say they fail, but ⁓ almost always it’s human beings. And it’s something that I think we’re going to be wrestling with. I think we’re going to be in this constant change management cycle.

Bobby (06:59)
Yeah, absolutely. I think, gosh man, when I was working with you at Summit and I was on the marketing side there, I wouldn’t say we struggled with it, but it was something we worked very hard at, whether it was implementing a new CRM or a new marketing system or new websites, whatever it ended up being with the loan officers. And we put a lot of time and effort into getting out there in person. It’s so easy, honestly, to kind of ignore things or not pay attention when you’re on a Zoom call.

Um, or, you know, listening to a podcast, hope you’re listening. No, just kidding. Um, but yeah, I know, get out there, get face to face with them and learn from them. What are your challenges? What, are the reasons that you’re maybe not adopting it or what are your concerns and why isn’t this working? So then that was, you know, what 15 years ago and nowadays with the way technology changes so quickly. Absolutely. That’s the tough one. I can tell you at Byte you know, obviously an LOS is a huge undertaking, right? Cause you’ve got.

every different type of role from the administrators to the actual LOs trying to learn this new system. So, you know, we kind of do the same thing here. It’s a one-on-one lot of hand holding. Don’t turn you loose until until you’re comfortable, but really give you the tools to be self-sufficient because you’re right. Otherwise, if you’re just watching videos or you’re just given, hey, we’re going to set it up for you. Well, you’re not going to have the adoption because you’re not going to have people that know how to

make it work for them, right? Whether that’s a loan officer that can set up a menu that is in the order that makes sense in their head, because everybody’s logic and the way they like to work is different. So yeah, I think that’s some great insight from David. I encourage everyone to tune in to Lickit on Lending to hear what him and his crew have to say about technology and adoption. So thanks, David. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you on the next episode. What do think, Mike? Should we throw it over to Dan now?

Mike Moorhouse (08:37)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Let’s get them on.

Bobby (08:51)
All right, guys, here comes Dan Habib

Bobby Palmer (08:54)
Well, today’s guest is a veteran of the mortgage industry for 18, over 18 years. He was recently named one of the top 40, under 40 mortgage professionals in the country and received HousingWire’s Rising Star Award. He’s one of the founders of MBS Highway where he currently serves as the EVP and Chief Revenue Officer. Welcome to the Changing Circumstances podcast, Mr. Dan Habib. How are you doing,

Dan Habib (09:18)
I’m

doing great, man. Thanks for having me, Bobby and Michael. It is truly my honor to be here with you guys.

Bobby Palmer (09:25)
Welcome welcome or we’re happy to have you before we get going into that little bit more professional stuff You know, that’s Mike’s job. I get to have the fun. ⁓ He told me a little story I guess a rumor if you will ⁓ I guess a while back few years back. He talked you into doing a Spartan race. How’d that go?

Dan Habib (09:41)
He did. know,

Mike, Mike’s very good at motivating and you know, he talked to me about this Spartan race and me and him were kind of bantering back and forth, did some training for it and ended up doing it. It was in Tuxedo Park, New York. So like upstate New York and what a great experience. mean, I absolutely loved it. And I’ve actually been talking with him about trying to link up to do another Spartan race together.

Bobby Palmer (10:00)
wow.

Dan Habib (10:10)
especially now that I’m in a little bit better shape than I was then, but a great experience.

Bobby Palmer (10:12)
There you go.

Michael Moorhouse (10:14)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, but but you you made it into a team event, didn’t you? Dan, that you got some of the group there from MBS ⁓ Highway and I don’t know who else, but it was was it 2019?

Dan Habib (10:19)
Yes.

Boy, it sounds about right, but I’m not sure. Man, has it been that long ago already? But we did, we got a group of maybe six to eight people from MBS Highway to do it together. was awesome.

Michael Moorhouse (10:28)
point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (10:32)
It goes very

fast.

Michael Moorhouse (10:40)
Yeah, and I, yeah, I’ve been trying to get Bobby to do one, but I actually felt bad because the one that you did was at a ski resort, right?

Bobby Palmer (10:40)
Mike’s been trying to get me.

Dan Habib (10:48)
Yeah, it was I think it was like on the tougher side.

Michael Moorhouse (10:52)
Yeah, and there’s a sandbag carry, Bobby, that you do. It’s a 70-pound sandbag that you go uphill with. And it’s one thing to go uphill and downhill and all that, but I think you guys had to go all the way up, didn’t you? It was going up a ski slope.

Bobby Palmer (10:52)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (11:04)
Yeah.

You know, I

Bobby Palmer (11:06)
man.

Dan Habib (11:06)
actually, I was, completed every obstacle, but one, which was the rope climb. And you know, it was a little bit more challenging for me because then I was probably like 245 or so. So, but, and I didn’t have the technique down with the foot, you know, wrapping it with the rope. So that was the one where I had to do like the punishment. What was it? Burpees or something. But, but I got

Michael Moorhouse (11:29)
30 burpees.

Dan Habib (11:31)
Yeah,

but I did all the other obstacles, but now I think now that I’m a little bit lighter and I know the technique better, I think I’d be all right, but we got to see Mike.

Bobby Palmer (11:32)
man.

Michael Moorhouse (11:40)
All right, 2026. I’ve started my training already. Dan’s going to be in great shape, but I’m just trying to make sure that I don’t die along the way.

Bobby Palmer (11:41)
See, Mike, that doesn’t…

Dan Habib (11:49)
You

Bobby Palmer (11:50)
Hearing Dan’s description does not make me want to do this

Like, I’ll stick to hockey, buddy.

Michael Moorhouse (11:55)
it’s,

Dan Habib (11:55)
No, it’s great.

No, but it’s, one of those things like, you know, you set your, your sites or goals on it, you train for it. And then when you complete it, I mean, you get a real sense of satisfaction of being proud of yourself. And like you do it with a team and it’s pretty cool too. And you know, the, the atmosphere, the feeling there, ⁓ I mean, we felt like really juiced up after really like excited and like happy. I was like, man, I want to do this.

Bobby Palmer (12:02)
That’s true.

Dan Habib (12:22)
every year and then you know life gets in the way I guess a little bit but you gotta make sure to plan for those things but I loved it.

Michael Moorhouse (12:28)
I wanted to start out with this thing that you do every day. MBS Highway, you and the team there are really part of our lives. Those of us that tune in every day for the morning update, the alerts, you guys have become, your images and your voices have become part of a…

five day a week fixture for a lot of people in the mortgage business and real estate professionals. with that in mind, ⁓ every day you guys have got to get ready and you’ve got an audience that you’re really trying to work with

tell me a little bit about, know, sort of what do do to prepare? Because that’s a daunting task to be in front of everybody on a regular basis.

a big responsibility. Is it?

Dan Habib (13:08)
Mike, it’s like giving birth every morning. No, ⁓ no, but listen here,

Bobby Palmer (13:11)
Yeah

Dan Habib (13:14)
the reason why we do it is

most people in the mortgage business, and this goes for real estate too, right? Maybe they’re good at creating relationships, they know how to put a loan together, but most really don’t know what is driving the market. What is driving rates? What about real estate? What’s the financial opportunity? And they certainly can’t are.

Michael Moorhouse (13:24)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (13:37)
to their customers. So knowing that, if you can, even to a small degree, you really create a very big competitive advantage

it’s my opinion that data is everywhere. And especially with artificial intelligence, I mean, it’s really everywhere at your fingertips, but wisdom and knowledge is still a valuable commodity that people I think are willing to pay for. So if you can build trust,

Michael Moorhouse (13:51)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (14:04)
through knowledge, which is what we try to really help with every single morning, I think it helps you to increase your conversion and also forming relationships because, you know, like if you just think about your relationships, I mean, if somebody leaves you feeling smarter and better after you talk to them, you really kind of become magnetic.

every morning we do somewhere between like a five and 10 minute video update. So the way that looks is you have to get up early and do all kinds of reading.

Michael Moorhouse (14:22)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (14:32)
So there’s different people that we read, whether it’s like David Rosenberg, John Malden, Peter Bugfar, and we share our insights, Lacey Hunt and stuff. And then of course you have the economic data that gets released. Now, at the time of recording here, the government’s been shut down for the longest on record. So we haven’t been getting a lot of the official published data. Hopefully that ends this week. And I’m optimistic that it will, but you have to analyze the data. And you wanna look a lot deeper than the head.

Michael Moorhouse (14:49)
Mm-hmm.

Bobby Palmer (14:49)
True.

Dan Habib (15:01)
because the headlines oftentimes they miss either the strength or weakness within the report. So you have to go to the source. So of course we analyze the data and you do all this reading before and believe it or not, we have a team of like 11 people that join us on a Zoom like this type format where they bring stories, we break down the news together and then kind of formulate, okay, who is gonna cover what on this morning update? And then we try to make it concise and…

Bobby Palmer (15:19)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Moorhouse (15:19)
Hmm.

Dan Habib (15:30)
everybody has like kind of their own role. And then as soon as we’re done recording it, it goes to production. And then the turnaround is very, very quick every morning. I mean, if we get on there, we usually get on together at like 8.30 AM Eastern time, but you got to be reading much well in advance of that. But then it’ll be released into our subscribers by let’s say 9.30 to 10.30 usually on most days, somewhere in that range. So it’s a pretty quick turnaround, but it’s really designed to educate our customers every morning.

Bobby Palmer (15:33)
you

Yeah.

Dan Habib (16:00)
to really give them a competitive advantage, give them something of value to talk about to build trust, separate themselves from their competition and increase their conversion.

Michael Moorhouse (16:08)
Yeah, so it sounds like it’s a lot of work. How do you feel? when you go through this process and you get to see some of the effects, but ⁓ it’s pretty rewarding for you on a personal basis to be able to do that.

Dan Habib (16:20)
It is, ⁓ you know, people aren’t born good doing these things. Right. So I could tell you that people see me do it now and they’re like, man, Dan, you’re so good at doing it. And I’m like, yeah, well, let me show you my first update. And you know, it was many years ago now, but my father actually was solely doing them. I was helping them to like write them and stuff. have like a written version too, but he was recording them.

Bobby Palmer (16:37)
Hahaha

Dan Habib (16:48)
And he had to get like some surgery that was like a pretty serious surgery at the time where he was going to be out for two weeks. So he found out about this and he’s like, son, you’re to have to do the updates. And I’m like, okay. And, you know, kind of threw me to the wolves a little bit.

Bobby Palmer (17:01)
Yeah

Dan Habib (17:04)
And I was pretty bad in the beginning, but like anything, you know, you practice and you get better and you get more confident, but it’s very rewarding now for people. I actually was on the phone with somebody the other day and they literally said, Dan, you know, I just want to tell you.

you’re such an amazing job. remember your first update and you weren’t very good. But he goes, now you’re amazing. And I was like, thanks, man.

Michael Moorhouse (17:27)
Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (17:28)
I was just gonna say we’ll have to check in with you here in a couple years because we’re on episode 2. So hopefully a couple years from now you’ll be like, hey you guys don’t suck as bad as you do when I was on there. ⁓

Dan Habib (17:37)
No.

Michael Moorhouse (17:37)
Yeah, know, we

may have to, is there archival footage of that update? We may have to put it, oh, we may have to get a hold of that, yeah.

Dan Habib (17:41)
there is, I have it. I have it. I could send it over to you. ⁓ I’ve

Bobby Palmer (17:42)
awesome.

You

Dan Habib (17:46)
actually

Bobby Palmer (17:46)
sure, yeah?

Dan Habib (17:46)
was thinking about putting it in a presentation because I do public speaking around the country and a lot of times like I’ll break down the market for mortgage professionals or realtors and they might be sitting there in the audience saying, well, that sounds great, but I can’t do that. And I actually want to show like a clip of mine and be like, listen, this is what my first one looked like. You can do it. You just got to get started and it doesn’t have to be as good as mine, you know, but just.

Michael Moorhouse (18:07)
Mm-hmm.

Bobby Palmer (18:08)
That’s awesome.

Dan Habib (18:11)
talking about it and having even like ⁓ a little bit of knowledge there I think separates you from your competition who isn’t talking about it at all. So listen, it’s rewarding from a personal development standpoint, but it’s really, really rewarding to see the impact that the update as well as like our tools and our service in general has on customers because I get a chance to talk to a lot of them in person and they come up and they’re like, I can’t tell you how much you’ve changed my business, but in turn my life.

Michael Moorhouse (18:19)
at all.

Dan Habib (18:40)
my family’s life, you you’ve made me so much money, you’ve made me such a better loan officer, and that is really, really rewarding.

Michael Moorhouse (18:48)
So, you know, one of the things that I’ve been amazed at, you know, I think it started when we talked about the Spartan race you tend to be pretty disciplined.

it seems like that you have do you have routines am I correct that you just some things that you do on a daily basis is that is that part of what what you the way you’ve always been or is that a learned learned thing that you do.

Dan Habib (19:10)
It’s a learned thing. I’ve like kind of really looked deep inward at myself and I’ve realized that I do good with routines and structure and I could be an extremist either for like really being on point or not on point.

And what really has transformed me is winning the morning and having a routine. And I’ve noticed that when I’m doing that routine, like everything seems to be going right, whether it’s working out, diet,

just being super on top of my game, but is hard. is to is to like start that routine once you’re in. It’s great. But once you fall out, then you fall out for a couple days and it’s like hard to get back into that routine. But if you were to ask me like, what is like one of the biggest changes that I made that I think helped me with my relative success, it would be the morning routine and the discipline there, because if I’m getting up every morning and now I’m getting up somewhere between

Bobby Palmer (19:51)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (20:08)
445 and 5 a.m. Eastern time. When I do that, then I’m going to the gym and you know, I’m having like some morning kind of routine stuff that I do. I’ve recently started like writing what I’m thankful for and trying to like have like a gratitude type, you know, lifestyle morning and then, you know, what my intention may be for the day. And that’s all very new to me. I mean, if you would have asked me this even six months ago, I’d say, no, I don’t journal at all. But, ⁓ you know, it’s helpful because I feel like a lot of times, you know,

Michael Moorhouse (20:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bobby Palmer (20:25)
Love that.

Dan Habib (20:37)
I don’t express my feelings or whatever, get out. So it can be helpful, but mainly though, it’s the discipline of getting up, even when you don’t feel like it, going to the gym, and then I feel great. And then it leads to better decisions with eating. And I think eating is a big one too, because so many people over carbohydrate or just eat poorly and it just makes you feel terrible and it affects other decisions. I think it’s like a chain reaction of discipline, right? Like small wins.

lead to like momentum and then other good decisions. And then I’m like super sharp for the morning update and for calls and I’m and like you feel good about yourself. And I just think that then what happens at night if I want to get up the next morning, I got to go to bed early. I can’t be staying up till 1 a.m. if I’m going to get up at five for the gym. Right. So it all is connected. But I think discipline, you nailed it. I think is like the number one thing because motivation is great. It’s fleeting. But discipline.

Michael Moorhouse (21:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (21:24)
Yeah.

Michael Moorhouse (21:33)
Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (21:33)
True.

Dan Habib (21:34)
You know, that is really, I think, what matters. And it’s not easy, but ⁓ it’s meaningful.

Michael Moorhouse (21:41)
Do you see that as something that a lot of people have or maybe more people need that discipline?

Dan Habib (21:49)
think more people need it, but I think if you look at a common trait of very successful people, have it. But it’s not easy having that discipline. If it was, everybody would do it. But as a result of being consistent and having that discipline, it’s hard not to succeed in whatever you’re doing, at least to the greatest ability that you have. So it’s a common trait that I see with all top producers, right? Like they have a dialed in morning routine. We go on these events and like,

The ones that are top producers, me and them are working out at 5.30 in the morning every single day that we’re there, right? It’s like, it’s a common trait for sure.

Michael Moorhouse (22:26)
There was a study of CEOs and they top tier CEOs and I think that there was a very high percentage that got up somewhere between 4 a.m. and 4 30 in the

Bobby Palmer (22:37)
Mike shared some stuff with me as we were getting prepared for this about your background and the one thing that stood out to both of us was just the wide range that you have, like even going back, like you mentioned earlier, you know, kind of it when you were in sales originally or, you know, even getting into the financial planning and, you know, the high net worth financial planning world for a little while and then coming back. Like, what is there any experiences that that stood out to you that you learned in all those kind of early years or different areas that you then applied when you’re trying to grow MBS Highway or

or maybe even just kind of help you connect with people with different types of people better. Like what stood out to you from those past experiences that have really helped you get you to where you are today.

Dan Habib (23:15)
Well, I mean, I guess it might be helpful to give you almost like a lineage of my like professional career, right? So I was, I mean, I am blessed. My father is an incredible human being, Barry Habib. You know, he’s very well known in the mortgage and real estate space. And he’s done some other fun stuff, like produce plays on Broadway, like rock of ages, but he’s just like a brilliant man and he’s a great man. And he has always been like my best friend and mentor.

Bobby Palmer (23:38)
I didn’t know that.

Dan Habib (23:45)
I’m very aware that I am extremely blessed and lucky and not everybody has that. ⁓ But with that being said, you can do ⁓ two things with that, right? You can like run with that opportunity and make the most of it or you can throw it away, which a lot of people do that that have a great opportunity like that. So when I was younger, I was a little bit of a wild man. I like to go out. You know, when I was in college, I was like I had a lot of ability.

Bobby Palmer (24:03)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (24:15)
And I was still doing good sales numbers, but I wasn’t necessarily like setting the right example and that’s something that my dad was always very big on and He fired me and this was a big life lesson that I think kind of shaped where I am today ⁓ He wasn’t easy on me. He was very very hard on me because he I think Thought that I had a lot of potential but that I wasn’t really maximizing the potential and I think one of the things he would say is like Dan you’re so smart, but it’s like

You’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back and it’s self-inflicted, right? So, you I was having fun in college. I was in a fraternity. Some days I wasn’t showing up on time and stuff and he fired me. And for like maybe a year to two years, I was working and this nothing against this profession, but I was, it was very different than what I was doing. I was working at sports authority, merchandising shoes. And it was a big life lesson that.

You know, probably thought that my dad wouldn’t fire me very publicly the way he did, but it was a lesson I needed to learn. And, um, certainly was grateful to have another opportunity and kind of get my stuff together.

But that was a big learning lesson for me. ⁓ And I bet a lot of people can probably relate to maybe not doing the best that they can at times. And ⁓

Bobby Palmer (25:32)
Absolutely.

Dan Habib (25:38)
I worked through college with Mortgage Market Guide. And I started doing sales. And then I created the sales team. I recruited

about 10 or 11 of my fraternity brothers and we were this young, fun sales team. And then we grew mortgage market guide to be pretty ubiquitous within the industry and then had a successful exit. And then we had a non-compete for two years. And that’s when I went to Morgan Stanley and I became a financial advisor.

I got all my licenses, my seven, 63, 65, ⁓ life, health, you name it, right? And then that was tough industry to kind of crack into.

what I thought was really hard was you get into the business, you get your licenses, and then you wanted to go ahead and it’s all about getting assets under management, right? And you’re calling these people that are very successful. And the last thing they want to do is give all their life savings to some green, brand new person, right? That’s not proven. So.

Michael Moorhouse (26:31)
Mm-hmm.

Bobby Palmer (26:42)
True.

Dan Habib (26:43)
That was, I have a lot of respect for people getting into that business because the first beginning years are very, very tough, but if you grind it out and you get a nice book of business, it can be a wonderful career.

And then my father came and approached me and said, Hey, Dan, a lot of people want us to create another company. Now that the non-compete is up, would you like to create? It became MBS highway, ⁓ with me. So, you know, I kind of jumped all over that opportunity and, you know, kind of the rest is like history there,

Bobby Palmer (27:12)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (27:16)
And then we grow, grow, grow, grow. We’re live. And then all of a sudden we kind of hit a wall and we’re like, man, what are we doing wrong? And one big difference is this is post Dodd-Frank. So before the alerts that we would do, we track mortgage backed securities, tell mortgage professionals when to lock or float their loans before Dodd-Frank.

you could quantify the service extremely easily because you don’t have to pass along that savings to the consumer. So we could give somebody an alert and they could literally make tens of thousands of dollars from that one alert after Dodd-Frank a little bit different, still important to keep your customer happy and such, but not to the same degree. So we were like, man, what are we doing wrong? And that’s when we pivoted where we said, okay, we’re not only gonna do the market insights, we’re gonna provide the best in class data as far as like real estate data and such goes and tools.

Bobby Palmer (28:04)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (28:06)
And that was a very, very big moment for us that helped us to grow. And then of course, as

You know, you have success. acquired list reports a couple of years ago and created home report. And now we, we really have like the solution that is a one-stop shop best in class for that helps you to consolidate a ton of different services that helps the loan officer education and presentation type materials, illustrating the opportunity to home ownership helps you to find the agents you want to work with as well as provide marketing content for them, pretty much everything they need for their listings automatically.

Michael Moorhouse (28:24)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (28:42)
and something to go out to your database of customers to stay in front of them and really uncover opportunities, whether it’s interested in refinancing or they want to move or they’re looking at these listings. But back to your original question, Like things that I’ve like, I think it was based around things that I’ve kind of learned through my history. ⁓ You know, it’s that

Bobby Palmer (28:59)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (29:05)
You need to take advantage of the opportunities that you have. mean, listen, most people, maybe they wouldn’t have the opportunity that I had, but most people have some opportunities throughout their lifetime that they can or can’t take advantage of. And you need to take advantage of those opportunities. ⁓

Bobby Palmer (29:15)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Dan Habib (29:21)
You know, there’s no replacement for hard work. Something my father has like really taught me is, I mean, this is a man that

Michael Moorhouse (29:25)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (29:30)
I mean, he’s always, as I mentioned before, he’s always been my hero, but he’s been battling cancer for the last like almost two years. And this is like a serious cancer and the guy doesn’t miss anything. I mean, he went through very aggressive chemo and all kinds of treatments. And it’s like, he wants to set the example for us. He doesn’t have to work, right? But you want, he really feels that he has a gift that he’d be wasting if he wasn’t sharing it and utilizing it.

Bobby Palmer (29:52)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (30:00)
And that, you know, whether that’s speaking or doing MBS highway and stuff. talk about like a role model. I mean, it would be such an easy and understandable scenario for him to mail it in. Right. Or maybe take a step back and I’d be like, dad, you could take a break here. You know what I mean? Like, like relax a little bit, but that’s, that’s the role model that I’ve had, which, uh, you know, has been incredible.

Bobby Palmer (30:17)
Yeah, you’ve earned it. Yeah.

Michael Moorhouse (30:24)
Yeah, you know, and I

Bobby Palmer (30:25)
That’s beautiful.

Michael Moorhouse (30:26)
I want to push back a little bit on something, go back to when you talked about you pivoted. How did you guys go, ⁓ we need to change what we’re doing? And how did that all come about?

Dan Habib (30:37)
Yeah, so this was kind of early on with MBS Highway where we started growing and then all of a sudden we kind of hit a wall where we were like, man, we’re not growing anymore like we were expecting. And we kind of looked at what we were offering and we’re like, man, maybe it’s just not enough anymore to have the market insights and the alerts. And what else can we do to help kind of fill a void that’s out there?

I think one of the things that we’re very good at is looking at the points of friction in the market that our customers are experiencing and then creating a solution for that. And that’s what we really began to do. And we said, well, okay, how can our customers showcase the financial opportunity in buying a home? Because that changes the whole conversation. All of a sudden, if somebody’s an eighth in rate cheaper, that becomes less important if I’m showing them $150,000 opportunity over the next several years.

We started to give the best data. It’s been a lot of money on the data, but then give the best data out there in the industry and then create tools for each of these scenarios where our customers were facing friction and gave them an eloquent way to illustrate.

why it’s better to buy versus rent or whatever the scenario was, maybe it’s comparing different loans in a way that they could understand. With loans, it’s like nobody else does what we do, but when all of sudden a mortgage professional goes to the customer and says, hey, there’s these three loans, the customer doesn’t know what the heck you’re talking about. At the end of the day, they’re like, can you just tell me which one is best? And it’s a loaded question because many of them can be best.

Bobby Palmer (32:16)
Yeah.

Michael Moorhouse (32:17)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (32:21)
It depends on when, right? How long are you gonna be in the home with the same mortgage? So we put it on a timeline that very clearly illustrates this loan is best for this amount of time, this amount of time, this amount of time. And I think, you know, one of the things that is tough to do that I think we try to really walk the tightrope on is, is sometimes you wanna give all the data or you wanna fix like, or create a tool for every scenario, but there’s a balance, right?

Simplicity and also having the solution, like if you can marry those two together in the right blend, I think that’s really the most effective rather than having something that can solve every problem, right? Because then it’s too complex for the customer to even understand. So I think we do a good job of identifying the pain points and then coming up with a solution and the data and the tools, that was really part of the pivot.

Bobby Palmer (33:15)
You mentioned adapting, which made me think of ⁓ something else I was going to ask you about. We got to see your little guy on here right before we hit record and talk about having to adapt. Nothing like ⁓ adding a little person to your life. How’s that going? And maybe how has that changed your kind of view on either personal success or you’ve talked a lot about your morning routine and having consistency and hard work. How’s that all kind of changed with your little guy entering the world?

Michael Moorhouse (33:27)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (33:46)
Well, you know, before having Hudson, you people tell you, ⁓ it’s life changing. It’s the best thing. Like, you know, you, you think, you know what love is until you have a baby. It’s all true. ⁓ I was like really excited to have my son and, you know, people are always like, Dan, you’re going to be such a great dad. could tell. Cause I love kids. Right. I mean, I love kids.

Bobby Palmer (34:00)
Absolutely.

Dan Habib (34:12)
I’m always very good with like my sister’s kids and like, you know, any, any of our friends kids. And, I guess I have like kind of a fun personality with them, but man, once I had our, our kid, our son Hudson, it was just like, Holy, Holy cow. It was like, ⁓ I don’t know. Everything kind of just changed in your brain. And I was like, what was I living for before?

Because, ⁓ cause it just felt so meaningless until I had him. And now I’m like, wow, like this is, this is what life is about. I mean, this chapter it’s incredible. It’s rewarding. I certainly love the kid more than anything in the world.

Bobby Palmer (34:39)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (34:52)
But it is the best thing that I’ve ever done by far and it makes me so happy. I like light up when I talk about him. He’s such a good kid. And by the way, you asked about the morning routine. I’m going to knock on wood here. Okay. But we are blessed. This kid he’s eight and a half months, but since three months he’s been sleeping 12 hours a night every night and he hasn’t missed one night and he eats like a champion like his father, which is probably why he sleeps so good. But

Bobby Palmer (35:03)
Yeah.

Michael Moorhouse (35:07)
⁓

Bobby Palmer (35:20)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (35:20)
I’ve really made a point of trying to be like as present as possible. So every night I put him to bed and every other night I’m giving him like a bath and you know, we spent a lot of time and right now dad’s his favorite person, which I kind of like. ⁓ but, but we, we, we like have a great time like together with them and ⁓ it’s, it’s amazing.

Bobby Palmer (35:28)
That’s awesome.

Nothing better, buddy, nothing better.

Michael Moorhouse (35:39)
Yes.

Yeah.

But you’re also you’re getting a minute your workout routines too, right? Because I’ve seen the pictures of Hudson strapped to the front of you when you go out for a walk.

Bobby Palmer (35:53)
I’ll deal with the squats with

Dan Habib (35:54)
we do

miles. We do miles. you know, right now it’s like pretty hot to wear weighted vests, right? Like I see a lot of people it’s trending. Well, Hudson is my progressive weighted vest. So I got this great, by the way, the brand is called tactical baby gear. It’s a lot better than like the baby bejorns out there. This is like made for men. I put him in this thing. He loves it.

Bobby Palmer (35:54)
him. I’ll do it.

Yeah.

Michael Moorhouse (36:17)
So it’s a manly outfit is what you’re telling me.

Bobby Palmer (36:20)
I love it.

Dan Habib (36:21)
It’s like so nice because it’s like me and him like close time, but like I’ll put him in there and he just chills and he just looks around and he loves it. Like we’ll go for like hour, two hour walks. I’m getting like a couple miles a day usually with him strapped to me and now he’s over 20 pounds. So, you know, that’s, it’s pretty good workout, you know, but it’s, it’s, it’s like my favorite time. Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (36:38)
Yeah?

Yeah.

Michael Moorhouse (36:42)
Yeah, Spartan race. Yeah,

yeah, a little sandbag with arms and legs. That’s awesome.

Bobby Palmer (36:46)
training for the.

Dan Habib (36:47)
That’s it. That’s it.

Bobby Palmer (36:49)
That’s awesome. That, gosh, that brings

back memories. That’s how my first one was. Same thing, going for, I loved getting home from work and getting that one-on-one time, which is just awesome. That’s probably why he’s in dad mode right now, but that’s, that’s awesome. Now how, I mean, you, you still obviously have a business to run. You got a lot of responsibility there. And this is something I imagine a lot of people listening will probably relate to. Like, how do you find that balance? Cause it sounds like you kind of have the same mentality that I had when I had my first ones. Like I want to be there.

them to bed at night, you know, getting up with them, whatever. But like, how do you find that balance now of still continuing your responsibilities with work? And like you said, you’ve got new motivation now, man. Like you’re you’re working for this kid. But like, how’s that gone for you? Find that balance.

Dan Habib (37:35)
Well, I’m sure there’s no right answer, but the way that I do it is I try to be really effective and efficient during the work day. Right. So there were times previously where, you know, I could be working really late, but maybe there’s like room for more efficiency during the day where I could still get the same amount of work done, but not have to work maybe as long where, sometimes I’d be working till six, seven, eight, whatever. So what I do is, is

Bobby Palmer (37:38)
through.

Dan Habib (38:04)
I get up, I do my morning routine. I’m getting up at 4.45 or so. My son doesn’t get up until 7 a.m. So sometimes when I’m done with my workout, I’ll pop by to see him and say hi, or sometimes I’ll just go right into the office and my wife will get up with him. And then I work. Sometimes if I have, I mean, I’m blessed where my house is like across the street from my office. So if I have a little gap in the day,

I’ll like run home just to give him a squeeze for like 15 minutes or something like that. Like, you know, maybe during lunch or whatever. And then I’ll come home if I’m really like on my game and like I can finish my day by let’s say 5 p.m. Well, then I come home and then I have a good hour and a half with him until I have to bring him up to bed. And then I am doing the bedtime routine bath, putting in the bed every single night. So I feel like I’m really being like as present as possible, but it’s like not really impacting my work.

Michael Moorhouse (38:38)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (39:00)
as long as I’m doing what I gotta be doing effectively and efficiently. So I feel like it’s a good balance. And then of course the weekends, I try to spend as much time with.

Bobby Palmer (39:00)
That’s awesome.

Michael Moorhouse (39:08)
Yeah, I think you know a lot of people have extra time I know I do in the day that if you just sat down and you know started just not clean down I’ve I’ve carved out two hours a day for writing over the last three months and I didn’t know where I was going to get it it was pretty easy I’m just pretty disciplined about you know what I do it’s still not easy but it’s but it you know you get it done.

Bobby Palmer (39:09)
That’s

Dan Habib (39:31)
I agree with you though, we all have extra time in the day that if you really look at it, if you do like an exercise of like, what am I doing each day and time blocking it, right? Like you look like you have, you have waste that you can, you can be more efficient with.

Michael Moorhouse (39:31)
Now that’s.

Bobby Palmer (39:34)
That’s true.

Michael Moorhouse (39:46)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (39:47)
I’ve got two

hard-hitting questions before I turn it back over to Mike and let him finish this out here. ⁓ One, and he’s probably a little young for this yet, but have you discovered the joy of Bluey yet? You will, you will. It’s awesome.

Dad with a little bit older kids to you, one day check out Bluey, you’ll be happy you did. The other question is I’ve heard your little bit of a, this is from Mike, so check the sources, but I’ve heard you’re a little bit of a grill master. What’s your favorite thing to grill and tell me a little bit about that.

Dan Habib (40:22)
Well, I’m passionate about cooking. My wife is too. And I mean, I love to grill steaks. Now I don’t just throw them on the grill. I do a reverse sear technique where I’m either putting them in the oven at let’s say 200 degrees or the smoker, depending on what flavor I’m going for. And I cook them, you know, up until about 115 degrees, take it out and then sear them.

Michael Moorhouse (40:37)
Ciao.

Bobby Palmer (40:44)
Attaboy. Yep.

Dan Habib (40:52)
on a very, very hot grill, or it could be a cast iron with some butter in there and maybe some garlic and baste them up nice. But either way, you wanna do it that way in my opinion, because you’re guaranteed, and you use a thermometer, you’re guaranteed to have crust and then edge to edge, perfect medium rare, which is the way I like a steak, but you could do any temperature you want. Now, my claim to fame, I like to cook a lot of things. I cook fish, I cook ⁓ a beautiful sauce with meatballs.

These hands were made for meatballs. But my claim to fame is my beef Wellington. Now, my stepfather, he passed away from cancer ⁓ several years ago. But every year for Christmas, he would make a beef Wellington. And then after he passed away, it was like important for me to keep that tradition alive for my sisters. have, boy, I have a twin sister. I have three sisters on my mom’s I have two brothers on my dad’s side. But the…

Bobby Palmer (41:23)
Atta boy.

Dan Habib (41:50)
sisters that lost their father especially, I wanted to keep that tradition alive. So I take a lot of pride in my beef Wellington. And every year it’s gotten just better and better and better and better. And I mean, this past year, I gotta tell you Gordon Ramsay’s got nothing on me. I literally, I made like seven of these things. It took a lot of the day, but I mean, I was up the night before making homemade crepes because I noticed an issue where

Bobby Palmer (42:06)
Just nailed it. Nice.

Dan Habib (42:18)
You know, I would make this beef Wellington and then no matter what I did, you would still get some leakage that would hurt the crust, right? Like meeting the juice from the filet would leak and then it would ruin the bottom of the crust. The homemade crepes fix that. Cause remember I had a homemade crepe, I had prejuice, you have the doucel, which is the mushrooms, right? That you get all the water out of. And then you have, you know, the filet within the English mustard. And then of course you wrap it all in the dough. And then I even got a lattice.

Bobby Palmer (42:33)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (42:47)
which you take an extra piece of dough and you use the lattice and then it looks like the netting on top. Let me tell you something. I don’t know that I can prove it. I got, I got, I got.

Bobby Palmer (42:52)
Yeah, yeah. I need pictures, buddy. I need pictures.

Michael Moorhouse (42:56)
Yeah, yeah.

Bobby Palmer (42:58)
All right. All right, send them to me.

Michael Moorhouse (42:59)
Dan,

your whole tone changed as you’re describing the Wellington. It went into this very calm, detailed ⁓ account. On Instagram, I see his stuff come up and it’s like I started salivating. just like, that literally looks good.

Dan Habib (43:04)
You

Bobby Palmer (43:04)
I love it. I love it.

Dan Habib (43:07)
Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (43:09)
So.

Well, it’s lunchtime here, buddy. You guys, you guys, it’s past

lunch. I said lunchtime here. You guys are killing me. But, but send me a picture and I will put it on the video portion of the podcast so people can check it out. But, and I had a very selfish reason for asking that question is I want to have a barbecue segment of this podcast every, every episode. And so I’m showing Mike, yeah, I’m showing Mike how this could work out. let’s see. ⁓ man. All right.

Dan Habib (43:19)
I gotta pull up a fake.

Michael Moorhouse (43:20)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (43:23)
I’m gonna pull up a picture.

So just so you could see, I don’t know how this is gonna come across, but look, I mean, I don’t know if you could see good in there, but I mean, it

Michael Moorhouse (43:38)
that is beautiful.

Dan Habib (43:41)
was about as good as it gets. And like, you could see the six Wellingtons here.

Michael Moorhouse (43:46)
And that’s the other thing, it’s not just a Wellington.

Bobby Palmer (43:50)
Yeah, yeah, cooking for family. right.

Dan Habib (43:50)
yeah. Yeah, we,

yeah.

Bobby Palmer (43:53)
Mike, I’ll let you get us back on track here.

Michael Moorhouse (43:55)
Yeah,

yeah, no, you know what, I’m salivating, but you know, maybe just touch a little bit on sort of this, you you talked about your dad and there’s sort of a legacy that you’ve become part of and you’re definitely carrying the torch, but you also work with other family members. Have your brother, Jake, is at MBS Highway, am I correct?

Dan Habib (44:16)
Yeah, so you could definitely say mortgage is in the blood because my twin sister, she originates. So she works for cross country mortgage. And then I have two younger brothers, Jake and Jared, who both work with us and they both do sales, but Jake is actually on the morning updates. So if you’re a member, you see Jake on there and Jared helps a little bit in the prep for the morning update, but he’s not on camera yet.

Michael Moorhouse (44:25)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (44:45)
And actually my cousin Avi works at the company as well in a different role. So it’s definitely ⁓ like a family type scenario.

Michael Moorhouse (44:55)
⁓

that’s awesome. So what’s it like to work with family like that? I mean, you talked about your dad, but everybody is it? I know there’s pluses because I’ve worked with family and sometimes there’s minuses, not horrible, but there’s minuses.

Dan Habib (45:07)
Yeah. No,

it can be tough. mean, my father can be difficult sometimes, right? And he expects, ⁓ you know, near perfection. And it’s because, and he expects people to work as hard as he does. And sometimes, you know, he’s more of the older school generation where he’s not, you know, sugarcoating things. mean, you know, he could certainly upset some people, but ⁓ obviously successful.

mean, everything he’s done, he’s been successful in. But sometimes working with him can be a little bit challenging sometimes, because we’re both kind of A type personalities, we can butt heads, but I would say by and large, for the most part, we work really, really well together. And it’s like, I know what he’s thinking, and he knows what I’m thinking almost without it even being said. And like, you know, I think that we compliment each other. And also like, I truly mean it where…

Michael Moorhouse (45:52)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (46:03)
He’s like my best friend and you he’s my hero. He’s my mentor. ⁓ And man, if I could be, you know, even like half as successful as him, that would be a really successful outcome. Obviously he looks at it he’s like, Dan, you’re like version 2.0. You’re better than me, right? But ⁓ you know, he’s, he’s incredible, but I love working with them. I love learning from them. And I think that we probably do it better than most.

Michael Moorhouse (46:23)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Habib (46:32)
as far as like getting along and understanding each other and things like that. And then working with my brothers and stuff is cool too. ⁓ You know, because like one day it’s probably gonna be like the scenario that I’m experiencing with my dad, but with me being in his position and them being underneath me, ⁓ you know, to some degree there, so.

Bobby Palmer (46:34)
That’s awesome.

Michael Moorhouse (46:38)
No, I think that’s…

Bobby Palmer (46:55)
You’re have to fire them.

Michael Moorhouse (47:00)
Yeah,

it could go to Jake. Jake, look, this was a pivot point for me when dad fired me. I think everybody should go through that process. It’s going to make you much better. I don’t know if you’ll take it that way.

Dan Habib (47:05)
Yeah, yeah. They’re a lot calmer than I was.

Bobby Palmer (47:08)
Yeah, they’re gonna hear this.

You’re gonna get more productivity out of them the next two weeks after this comes out.

Michael Moorhouse (47:14)
Yeah, yeah, the

Dan Habib (47:15)
You

Michael Moorhouse (47:16)
good news is you’re going to be better, but it’s going to take two years of you working somewhere else before we get you back. Yeah, but it brings its own challenges. And I ⁓ grew up working for my dad, started working in packing sheds. so it was sort of the same thing. I think the term that was used for me was stubborn, and he was stubborn too. probably the best person, my hero, learned so much from him.

Bobby Palmer (47:20)
Yeah.

Michael Moorhouse (47:42)
A lot of wise advice and sometimes we also get to see them make mistakes. We choose not to make those mistakes.

Dan Habib (47:48)
And

you know, I’ve, I’ve tried to not only learned from him with in the mortgage business that we have in, in MBS highway, but I would say another good learning experience was as I tried to take the model that he created and taught me, which was a subscription kind of SaaS model, right. And look for like he’s done so many times, look for the pain points in the market.

and try to come up with a solution. So I am a very, you know, I’m very big into cryptocurrencies and yes it is. So I created a company called crypto charged that is kind of like the MBS highway for crypto investors. And what I saw and noticed was, is when I got involved in investing in cryptocurrencies, most people had no idea what the heck they were investing in.

Michael Moorhouse (48:26)
This is crypto charged, right? Yeah.

Dan Habib (48:47)
Right. They hear about a coin that’s good. They’re investing in it. Or they, you know, see a coin going up a lot, you know, ⁓ most people don’t understand what the coin is, if there’s utility, what they should be doing. So I really got deep into it and I’m a good researcher and such. know, after being invested in that market for a few years, felt that I

new enough to be able to take some of this complex stuff and make it easy to understand and give some guidance to some crypto investors that maybe don’t know what coins are investing in, don’t know about these crypto cycles, these four year, let’s say Bitcoin cycles and such. And really most people invest the wrong way, which is, mean, you could pull up a million sayings about, you know, you want to be a buyer on the most pessimistic day and a seller on the most optimistic day, but with crypto, it’s almost more magnified where

You you start seeing Bitcoin going up, setting new all time eyes. And that’s when your retail investor wants to get in when it’s down at, you know, most recently, the low was like, let’s say 15,500 or so. Nobody wants to touch it. Everybody says it’s going to zero. Boy, you would have been pretty happy buying it then because right now Bitcoin’s, know, hundred and one hundred two thousand. So ⁓ being able to kind of explain some of that stuff, but then also something that was cool to me was the on chain analytics.

because it’s not something that’s available to you with, let’s say a stock because Bitcoin for instance trades on a blockchain, which is transparent. You can see investor behavior and activity so much more where you can see what’s happening with short-term long-term holders, what’s happening with cost basis. It’s very, very cool. And I really got into that.

Michael Moorhouse (50:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (50:30)
you

Michael Moorhouse (50:34)
Yeah, that is awesome.

Bobby Palmer (50:34)
I’ve got one last question

for me and then Mike, can throw out there if you have anything else. But I wanted to go back just one more time to when you and Mike were talking about both working for your dads. Was it difficult or how did you kind of find your way of kind of creating your own voice and not just getting kind of getting out of that shadow of being very son, especially being in the same industry? how did you was there a moment or was there a process where you kind of were able to like become your own voice and your own

source of like, you know, authority, so to speak, or is it just over time, just being consistent ⁓ is kind of what did that for you.

Dan Habib (51:12)
So that’s a great question, Bobby. And that is something that I’ve thought about through the years a lot. And like I wouldn’t change anything as far as having Barry as my father. But one challenge is that when you have somebody that’s such a big figure, that’s so well respected, and for many years I was not Dan Habib, I was Barry Habib’s son. And naturally,

I wanted to create my own mark on the industry. I wanted to have my own name. I wanted, you know, to not just be Barry Son. I wanted to be Dan Habib. And it was certainly not an overnight change. It was just putting in the work consistently every single day to the point where I’m doing presentations and people are like, man, you’re just as good as your dad. Or man, some people are like, I actually like the way you do it better. Or now they’re calling.

to have me speak instead of Barry and paying me to do so, right? And it’s just over time, just showing up, putting in the work, and then eventually making a name for yourself. listen, it’s still probably a little bit of a work in progress, but I’m proud of the progress that I’ve made there for sure. I mean, listen, that’s a good problem to have that, you your dad’s Barry. But nonetheless, it still was a challenge. And it was something that I was like, and it was still something that I wanted to try to.

Bobby Palmer (52:32)
It is, absolutely.

Dan Habib (52:36)
do my best to kind of create my own name and make my own mark.

Michael Moorhouse (52:41)
Now, you’ve and I you know what, Dan, I think I think you’re there. sort of a sort of to wrap this up. ⁓ You know, do you have any particular takeaways or advice that you would give people? And we’ll just say, you know, what is it that if you wanted to give some advice to somebody about how to be successful, what are the things that you’d want them to do?

Dan Habib (53:04)
Well, think like universally it’s no matter what that they want to get into, right? I mean, you got to figure out what you want and then you have to relentlessly pursue it. And I think you need to have discipline in whatever you’re doing, right? I mean, it doesn’t necessarily have to look like getting up at 4 30 or whatever, but whatever it is that are the right actions you need to be taking, you need to be disciplined. I think if, if you’re disciplined and relentless, I think it’s hard for you to not eventually.

Michael Moorhouse (53:29)
Thanks.

Dan Habib (53:34)
be successful, but people give up too easy or they give in and they don’t stick to the things that they know that they need to do. Most people I think know the actions that they need to take. It’s just hard to continuously do them ⁓ every single day. Also, I would, you know, try to ask people for help, like somebody that’s done it before. You’d be surprised like the mentors that you can find out there. ⁓ You know, one of the best feelings in the world is helping somebody else. So.

⁓ Don’t necessarily deprive somebody of that opportunity You’d be surprised that people if they see that you’re hungry and that you’re willing to put in the work a lot of times those people that you think maybe wouldn’t help you will ⁓ and You know, I also think like your partner is ⁓ very important, you know, like if I think a lot of people have probably said this in the past, but if you’re with ⁓ you know a partner that

Michael Moorhouse (54:04)
you

Dan Habib (54:32)
isn’t supportive in your goals or that’s almost like against your goal. So it makes it very hard for you. ⁓ like, you know, going forward, you need to find somebody that’s on the same page as you, that’s going to support you in your goals and understand those goals and, and help you to achieve them as opposed to almost working counter to them.

Michael Moorhouse (54:52)
Yeah, you know what, that is great. And I think a great way to wrap up the podcast. So, know, again, thank you very much for being on the podcast. This has been a lot of fun for me. And like Bobby, I think you’re probably sort of in the same boat.

Bobby Palmer (54:53)
That’s awesome.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I do want to, I want to give a quick shout out to some of the list reports folks. I met them long time ago when they were kind of not first getting going, but pretty early on Matt was all a J there. don’t know they’re still in orange, but ⁓ you know, orange is where I grew up. It’s my hometown. So I, you know, going down to the office used to see them and spend some time with them. So shout out to them. Loved it. Loved everything they were doing there. I was actually just talking to somebody on the Acuma community. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Acuma, but somebody asked a question about ⁓ marketing

Dan Habib (55:19)
Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (55:37)
and it was right in the wheelhouse for list report. I left a comment on there like, hey, go talk to them. It’s awesome. So yeah, great, great crew there. Great to get to meet you, Dan, and get to know you little bit. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been fantastic. And have fun with that little guy of yours, man. I can’t wait for you to teach him how to grill some steaks. Teach him how to make the Wellington.

Dan Habib (55:42)
Well, thanks, man.

⁓ I can’t wait, man. You know what I’m looking forward to?

Michael Moorhouse (55:55)
Yeah.

Dan Habib (55:57)
You know what I’m looking for it to now with him. You know, I like the golf and with him now it’s tough to get out there to golf, especially like on the weekends. You know, that’s kind of our time. So I’m to get him into golfing as soon as possible so I could be like. So so I could be like, babe, Hudson wants to golf. We got to go. I can’t deprive him of this, but but guys, thanks for having me. This conversation was the.

Michael Moorhouse (56:12)
About two years old is what I’ve heard.

Bobby Palmer (56:15)
Dude.

Michael Moorhouse (56:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bobby Palmer (56:19)
You know what? There’s nothing better. I coach

my kid in hockey and baseball and I’ll tell you what, nothing better. Totally do it. It’s gonna be awesome.

Dan Habib (56:29)
Yeah. Well guys, I had a lot of fun on here. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it. And Mike, I think, I think we got to schedule something. We got to schedule a Spartan race and make Bobby come.

Michael Moorhouse (56:34)
Thank you.

you know, we didn’t talk about his incredible photographer so he can come out there and document the incident. You know, when I get halfway up, up the rope climb and don’t make it. But yeah, I think we need to do that. And ⁓ now this has been fun.

Dan Habib (56:45)
the incident.

Michael Moorhouse (56:53)
you guys will probably have to exchange some sort of barbecue recipes and things like that. Yeah.

Bobby Palmer (56:56)
100%. We’re gonna do a segment. We’re gonna bring you

Dan Habib (56:57)
I got you Bobby.

Bobby Palmer (57:00)
in for a segment every episode.

Mike Moorhouse (57:01)
Wow. That was incredible. That’s that was just a great, great chat with with Dan. There’s so many so many things that I got out of it. I’ve been taking notes throughout the whole ⁓ the whole process and you know, just going through it. ⁓ I mean, Bobby, where do we start? Wait a second, Bobby. What the heck happened? ⁓ I see the meat, the meat, the meat part of the ⁓ podcast got to. Yeah.

Bobby (57:23)
I was inspired. I was

inspired. For those of you not watching on YouTube, I’ve got my official chef coat on here. ⁓ And I tell you what, man, all that food talk from Dan, I was like ready to go cook something right now. So I had to go grab the chef coat. But ⁓ no, it was fantastic. Like I mentioned before, I hadn’t met Dan before. And you know what? By the end of the conversation, I felt like he was one of my good friends.

Like that’s just the personality he has and the insights he shared, I think can really help anyone, whether you’re starting a business, you know, the way he has or, or going through adversity the way he had to. So, ⁓ one more thing that stood out to me, Mike was, I don’t know if you caught this, we asked him, I think something about like, what have you learned or what would you do different or something like that? He said, ask for help. Just like Eric did in episode one, these are two guys that

have started businesses, incredibly successful, and both of them, that was their recommendation to anyone was ask for help, it’s okay, that’s how you get better. And that was just a huge thing to me.

Mike Moorhouse (58:33)
Yeah, no. And know, if you think about Dan, too, he sits in this position where he’s talking to world class economists, he’s talking to people, just, you know, loan officers at the whole range. And he gets to see a lot. So I’m sure that, you know, part of that is not only his own personal experience, but probably the people that he’s talked to. You know, and I’m sure that this is something that happens. A lot of people don’t necessarily always ask for help, but he’s got a unique view of it. You know, I think the other part that that really stood out to me.

is just the, you know, the idea of family, not only with the team, because, you know, he talks about him as family, but also just with his dad and his siblings and all of that. And you can tell that his dad had an incredible impact on his life and very, very fortunate. know, I met Barry, I can’t even tell you how long ago it was. It was when I lived in California, but, you know, just a real, real gentleman and

Bobby (59:19)
yeah.

Mike Moorhouse (59:32)
incredibly intelligent. you know, think Dan, Dan has really benefited from that, but you can tell he just loves his daddy. You know, it’s just, it’s just hero and it’s always great to see that.

Bobby (59:40)
Yeah.

And then to see how much he lit up talking about his newborn son, Then, you know, I’ve got my kids are eight and 10, so not quite, you that age, but I still, it’s just the coolest thing to see someone else like Dan going through it. you know, hopefully he’ll take me up on my Bluey reference I gave him when he’s old, when they’re older.

Mike Moorhouse (59:47)
yeah.

Yeah, no, I, yeah,

you know, I think, think one of the things that’s been great about ⁓ this, this interview with Dan, but also with Eric is you can just see a side of people that you normally don’t. ⁓ And, you know, I think that part of the, part of the goal of the podcast is to get more to the human side. And, you know, many times we go through the day and we have these relationships, business relationships with people and, they’re, they’re important and they’re real. But in a lot of ways, we only scratch the surface. We really don’t.

get to know people real well. And I think that’s one of the things that you and I have, through the years, we’ve always been very curious about people and encourage people, go out there and find out a little bit more about the people that you do business with, that you talk to every day. There’s some great wisdom, there’s some wonderful people out there.

Bobby (1:00:46)
You know, you nailed it. That’s what this podcast is all about for me, right? Is sharing stories, helping people, but also just getting to know people a little bit better. And you sometimes we go to these conferences or, you know, we see people online, you know, the videos that they do, people in media, and you just think, you know, they’re this, this person that’s just so different or whatever. And then you get to know them and you find out they’re just like you, right? They have the same challenges that you’ve gone through in your life. And maybe they just,

maybe frame things a little bit differently to be able to push through and be as successful as they are and super approachable and yeah, I loved it. It a great conversation.

Mike Moorhouse (1:01:23)
And you can take solaces that many of them made the same mistakes that you’ve made. So yeah, just really enjoyed it. Just looking forward to, you know, having a little bit more interaction with Jan, Dan, and, know, one of the things too, that ⁓ immediately afterwards, just this goes back to the food part and Bobby, the chef there, ⁓ there’s a lot of talk about barbecue. So there’s already been some exchanges. ⁓ There’s a, there’s a, call it a thread.

Bobby (1:01:28)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

yeah.

Mike Moorhouse (1:01:53)
that has had a lot of meat going back and forth, barbecued and cooked meat. Yeah, I think it’s awesome.

Bobby (1:01:56)
yeah, no, we’re putting those pictures in the podcast for sure. Or doing that.

Which I think, obviously you heard me promoting having a food or a barbecue section of this podcast. So maybe we’ll get some feedback. Let us know in the comments if you guys think that’s a good idea, something you wanna hear. But obviously something I’m passionate about and Dan is as well.

Mike Moorhouse (1:02:15)
Yeah, it

may it may happen whether the feedback is forward or not. Right, Bobby? Yeah.

Bobby (1:02:20)
This is true. This is true.

That’s the beauty of having our own podcast. We can do whatever we want.

Mike Moorhouse (1:02:24)
Yeah,

absolutely.

Bobby (1:02:28)
Well, anything else going on, Mike, before we sign off here?

Mike Moorhouse (1:02:32)
No, no, just I think I’m like a lot of people getting ready for 2026. I think it’s going to be a fantastic year. It’s going to be challenging, but you know what? That’s what we have to get up and do every day. Just rise of the occasion.

Bobby (1:02:45)
Very true.

that’s it. We’ll wrap up episode two here, Mike. I want to wish everyone a very happy holidays. Be safe out there. Enjoy your time with your loved ones. And thanks again for listening. We’ll see you guys on the next one.

 

Well. Hey, everybody. Now we’re going to talk to a man who really needs no introduction. But I’m going to do it anyway. He’s the co-founder and current MVP of Model Match, a leading business development and talent acquisition platform, and I’m sure I completely undersold that. So, we’ll let him talk more about what Model Match does here in a second.

 

He also serves an executive leadership role with his local YMCA. Is one of the owners of the Hickory FC or Hickory FC, the 2024 conference champions in the National Premier Soccer League, just to name a few things. And now he can add one more title to his impressive resume. He is the first guest ever on the Changing Circumstances podcast.

 

Welcome, Mr. Eric Levin. How’s it going, man?

 

I am honored to be the first and as we were speaking somewhat offline, the if this is a failure, it’s my fault. If it’s successful, you can just forget about me and act like I was never. One correction, though. You ready? Okay. Correction. You. You said conference champions.

 

 

No national champions. National champions. Well, update your website, buddy. No kidding. Right here. Let’s do this. Although everybody might imagine the most important. But let’s just in on the celebration of where we sit. I love it. National champions as well. Well, we will get to that in one second. Okay, good. Because that is like top of my list.

 

 

But before we do, you guys may notice for those of you watching and not just listening, we have matching attire today, which was kind of planned. Kind of not planned. But these are all shirts we got from Eric. So tell us a little about the shirts. Yeah. So the, the, the football club was something that we started a couple of years ago and, and so last year was our first year.

 

 

This was our second year. We could talk about that more. When you’re ready, Bobby, and you can pepper me with questions on that. But as part of the club, you know, last year, as many know, Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina and, did a tremendous amount of, of damage. And so we decided to manufacture an 8 to 8 strong on the back.

 

 

It says, recovery. And, and just a little, some, some hickory FC logos. But we sell this on the website, we sell this at our games, and 100% of the proceeds go back to, to support the rebuild and recovery effort from Hurricane Helene. So we’ve already written a really pretty big check to Samaritan’s Purse, which a lot of people know internationally.

 

 

They happen to be headquartered in western North Carolina. And then, at the end of this year, we’ll write another check, something I’m really, really proud of. That’s amazing. That’s awesome. And, I found out about it on LinkedIn. I saw you posted about it. I think, Mike, you might have done that as well, too. You know, to be able to use your, you know, your connections in your platforms and things like that for something like that.

 

 

 

That’s awesome. Dude, I’m happy to showcase it today. And, if you guys haven’t already, go check out what website should they go to if you get it to go to Hickory FC. So Hickory Football Club, Hickory fc.com. And there’s a store and I think the 8 to 8 shirts are still kind of prominently located on the store.

 

 

Yeah. And again, I, I do sometimes go to conferences or will speak at an event and somebody will have the 8 to 8 strong on and it makes me really happy especially, you know, for those that have been in areas that have been impacted by storms like that, it gets a lot of a lot of attention for three months or so, and then all of a sudden that attention goes away on a national level.

 

 

And but locally it’s going to take years, if not forever for some of these towns to really recover businesses that probably won’t come back, homes that might not get rebuild rebuilt. And so if we can have a small positive impact on western North Carolina and use the football club as a conduit for that, it’s something that I’m real proud of.

 

 

For sure. That’s awesome man. Yeah. So get to the website. Get your shirts. Mike was talking great before we jumped online. His wife was commenting on how nice he looks in his shirt. So, you know, they are definitely good quality. And I encourage everyone to go do that. Sweet. Thank you. So, so before again, and I know at the beginning I think I said soccer team.

 

 

And I know it’s football, but I didn’t want to confuse everybody. Oh. It’s confusing. I’m glad you said soccer. It would have been. Yeah, yeah, they were confused. Anyways, before we get to that. Not that you actually have time for anything else, but tell us a little about yourself. What are you doing when you’re not, you know, working for model, match managing the team, you know, doing the 1200 other things that you do, like what is was Eric 11 like to do for fun?

 

 

Man, I’m, I’m like such a boring, simple kind of dude. I’m a, I’m a I’m an avid gym rat. I work out and train every day. Not because it’s really an emotional thing for me. It’s the hour out of my day where I can actually think without being spoken to, if you know what I mean.

 

 

Yep. Wildly therapeutic. It’s something I’ve done for a long time. I live I live on a really, like, comfortable piece of property for me where I can open up garage doors. My gym is my one side of the garage, and we’re basically in the woods surrounded by a creek so I can have, you know, I can have Wu-Tang playing as loud as I want and nobody cares.

 

 

And I can be out there training in the in the sun I really like I really like that. I like quiet, you know, I, I like doing yard work. I like my own, my own grass. Like it’s I guess it’s Bobby. It’s the things that. I mean, you guys are the same. I’m sure a lot of people in our industry, you work really, really hard.

 

 

You know, you’re giving out, you know, your serotonin levels are depleted because you’re giving it all out all the time. And, Mike, I know this is something you’ve spent a career researching. Not only the, the, you know, the professional outcomes, but the emotional side of things as well. And as I get older, I really, really, seek out those moments on a Saturday to just go mow the grass or just go clean the gutters, all the things you didn’t want to do when you were 25, 30 years old.

 

 

Now I like I look forward to those moments. So Bobby, probably a pretty boring answer. But there’s your answer. I love it. I will say I enjoy that as well too. But then, my wife and friends just tell me that because I’m getting old, so, maybe that’s part of it too. But, speaking of which, family you have, kids.

 

Yeah. So I have two boys, 25 and 22 that live out in, Utah. They, they both one went to school. Kovid kind of threw him off, and so he started working. He’s probably going to go back to school and then. And my youngest, he just started school here recently. He did, he was out of the country for just a little bit after high school and, so.

 

 

Yeah. And then married to my wife Nikki, here in, the western part of North Carolina and Hickory. She’s how I ended up in Hickory. This is where her family’s from. And, Yeah, we’ve been together for close to 30 years now, so that’s my family. That’s awesome. That’s amazing. That’s fantastic. Well, so Mike and I, we’re really excited to have you as our first guest.

 

 

I mean, you have such a wide variety of experiences and we’ll get to those in a second. Things like whether that’s personal development, building teams and cultures at companies, you know, recruiting obviously technology with model match. But like I said before, before we get at all that, I got to ask you about the soccer team and who goes out and just decides to start a professional soccer team or football team.

 

 

Like, there’s gotta be a good story there. So I, you know, model match was really starting to expand four years ago or so, five years ago. Mike remembers what I did before with hammer House and building a recruiting company, a business development platform, and then Model Match became the tech version of that. And then we’ll talk about it later.

 

 

But we really started making bigger investments into and MLS data, real estate data, borrower intelligence. And again, we can get into that. But I hired a guy named Tom Deeley, and Tom Deeley was a recruiter. He was hired to be a recruiter. And again, this is before we were making our transition away from recruiting and towards SAS. Right.

 

 

Tom was 25 or so at the time. He was a former All-American soccer player at a college here in western North Carolina. He’s from Oxford, England. He played semi professionally and was really, really good. Could have gone back to Europe and played for money, but he met a girl and, didn’t want to go back and got married.

 

 

And, but there was a point when he worked for me where I just said to him, we need to keep you close to the game, because that’s where his fire and his belly comes from, right? Yeah, yeah. And whether that was connecting him to do clinics for the local YMCA or with the local rec group, I just wanted to make sure that he had like, you guys were asking me, what do I do outside of work?

 

 

Well, you know, I knew what was bringing him, passion. And I wanted him to stay close. Well, about a year later, he came to me and said, do you think a semiprofessional soccer team could work in Hickory? And I didn’t know enough about, like, I had really gotten away from soccer, to be honest with you, when I was growing up, I played everything football, basketball, baseball, soccer, you name it.

 

 

But I’d kind of gotten away from it. And, other than the youth experience here locally and how youth sports, of course, you know, positively impacts the community. But, he, he wrote up like a little business plan. And at first I told him that, hey, this looks like a hobby, and I’m a little busy for a hobby.

 

 

Like, I don’t have time to play golf or go fishing or whatever. And there’ll be a moment in my life for that, probably. However, there were some things happening in our local community, like we were one of those towns that really got even more on the map during Covid because we have a lake, we have a river, we’re close to the mountains.

 

 

We have a very family friendly downtown square. Everything’s within walking distance. There’s 40,000 people that live in Hickory. And so I was watching some of the development that was happening in downtown Hickory and some of the businesses that were coming in, and then you start thinking, well, you got the World Cup coming to the United States in 20, you know, in the next year, maybe we should take this off the shelf.

 

 

So we pulled it off the shelf. We did some research. We started the LLC, we got the approval from the league. We met with a local facility, which is the football stadium here locally for our for Lenore Ryan University. And everything was yes, yes. And then we went out and raised a little more money just to fund it higher, at a higher level than we needed to, because we all have full time jobs, right?

 

 

We needed to go hire staff. We need to do it a little bit differently. So anyway, and then Bobby, I tell you, man, it’s been a lot of work. I mean, it’s early mornings, late nights, weekends. I love it so much, man. Like, I was telling somebody the other day and again, Mike, this is probably stuff you have a lot of experience too with some of the consulting you’ve done.

 

 

But working really hard at something where there’s no there’s no intention of monetary reward income is. I didn’t realize how special that was until doing. Now let me let me preface this. I am not a wealthy guy, Bobby. We’ll talk about model match we’ve never had around. Like I’ve never taken gotten equity out like I, you know, drew and I could have probably made a lot more money doing something else over the last 6 or 7 years.

 

 

I love model Match. It’s going to pay off where I’m super proud of what we’ve done. But I’m not a rich guy. Like I can’t. Doing work for no income like didn’t seem like something I would want to do, but yeah, oh my gosh, it’s made me a better husband, has made me a better father. It’s made me better at model match.

 

 

It’s brought me a lot, man. That’s awesome. Yeah. What? So. So running, and I don’t know how hands are. You are with running the club, but like, running a club like that. How what? What’s different than, say, running? Running model match. Like running a business. What? What’s the difference between the kind of a sports club and like a business?

 

 

Or are they the same. Yeah. Great question. I think the consumer experience is very different. You know, with software, you of course you get feedback and you have a little thing on your app that says, rate us on a scale of 1 to 10 and give us, you know, some, some, you know, score back and we can do that.

 

 

But it’s very, it’s very vanilla when you get that kind of feedback back. Fans at a sporting event will tell you immediately what they think of something. They will tell you that the chicken sandwich is soggy and concessions. And I mean, you know, I mean, you know, out of the gate and they will tell you as if they’re a part owner of the club.

 

 

And I love that because that’s what a fan should think. I bought a ticket. I own this event. Right. I’m owed something back. I love the I love the instant feedback. But you know, I’ve never been in retail. I’ve never been in merchandise, I’ve never had to deal with alcohol sales or concessions. I’ve never had to deal with, you know, assets relative to sponsors as an example and managing those things.

 

 

I mean, you turn into an event management company, essentially, and what you touch from a business perspective is everything that you’re probably taught in school, but you never actually get a chance to experience. So Bobby, it’s really a little bit of everything. And then in addition, you know, hiring coaches and learning to stay out of their way.

 

 

My job is not recruiting. My job is not the game plan. My job is not figuring out who the starting 11 is going to be. My job is also not to complain about it. You I mean, you hire people to do their job and you got to let them go do their job. So it’s across the board.

 

 

I try to really make sure, Bobby, that, you know, I spend 12 to 14 hours a day at model match. That’s my that’s what I do. I still have a life. I have a wife. I’ve run the board at the YMCA. I have other things I do as well. So we have a wonderful staff that does a really, really good job.

 

 

But I’m pretty involved because I’m a little bit of a control freak. So do I really need to be at the stadium at 3:00 on a Saturday when the game’s not until seven? Hell no. I don’t need to be there, but I’m there. Yeah, it sounds like you get a lot of energy out of this. I get so much, like, tell me to take the trash out at the stadium.

 

 

I’m happy to do it. Like, I get so much energy out of it. And we should all be so lucky to have opportunities where people that you’ve never met, you don’t know you have no relationship with, stop you and tell you thank you for something that you helped create and that thank you, because our relationship with our children is better than ever, because we go to games every Saturday night, or because we logged into the stream to watch you guys play a national championship game in San Francisco.

 

 

And we have videos of the boys, the kids jumping up and down, and that video is going to live in perpetuity. Yeah. All right. So it’s hard to get that back if you’re a loan officer, if you’re an account executive, if you’re a regional ahead of production, a real estate agent, you deal with a lot of complaining to get to the point where there’s a transaction that’s complete.

 

 

You don’t expect a thank you note back. Yeah, because it doesn’t happen. Yeah. But to get that feedback in both directions, I’ll take the negative all day long. Because when that mom comes up to me and says, thank you for this family experience, they get and drop the mic. Yeah. You know, you just said something that’s really important.

 

 

You’re probably getting this because you know that you’re providing an incredible experience and you really like being part of that 100%. And then so I start thinking more than ever, how do you provide that same experience in technology where you don’t build the same type of relationship? The relationship is very, very different. It’s at a distance. You may never meet these people.

 

 

You might not be able to give them a hug. Right. How do you how do you build trust? How do you build stickiness when you’re talking about a product that you could consider a commodity versus a relationship that starts with getting to know someone, getting to like someone, getting to trust someone, and then eventually going into business together.

 

 

It’s a very, very different experience when you so one of the one things I know, some of the topics we’ll cover on today, you know, leadership development, things like that. But I’m curious about crossover, you know, kind of like what has what has the sports team taught you about leadership? You know, kind of human development that is maybe often missed in the corporate world.

 

 

And in boardrooms and company leadership and things like that. Is there anything that’s kind of, jumped out to you like, hey, man, I never really thought about this in the in the corporate side of things. Yeah. Bobby, I think there’s a lot, actually. I’ll give you one. I’ll give you one recently. So we were out in San Francisco on Saturday, so the team flew 2900 miles, had to, you know, stay in Sacramento, take a bus up to San Francisco, and play against the defending national champion.

 

 

That was the number one team in the country in enemy territory. Our coach, Carlos Rubio, was a former player. He’s a fantastic coach. He’s a he’s a tall, strong Spanish footballer. During the game, especially in the first 20 minutes, it was really heated, very emotional, very physical. Their game plan was to punch us in the mouth over and over and over again until we just didn’t get up anymore.

 

 

Our game plan was very tactical. So you had two different sort of game plans. And so as a fan, it owner but fan for sure, man, I’m screaming I’m ready to fight somebody. My I’m screaming and yelling and I’m thinking I need to calm down because I’m surrounded by people that I’m the enemy, like I’m in their home right now.

 

 

Enemy territory. Yeah. But I look down at Carlos and his emotion and his body language never changed. Not once when the players were running up to him screaming about something. He wasn’t pointing. He wasn’t yelling. He was directing traffic. He was sticking to the game plan, and he was keeping people on an even kind of keel. And so, Bobby, I think about that a lot now because there’s plenty of times where I’m on calls, where I’m, I’m, I completely disagree with negative feedback that maybe I’m getting on something.

 

 

 

Right. Yeah. But guess what? That feedback is the user experience. That is the user experience. Maybe they’re not using the tech correctly because of support that they didn’t get, or training they didn’t listen to. Or maybe they did get training and they never listen to the recording. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter in the moment. That is their experience.

 

 

It’s my job to listen. And I say my it’s model manager’s job. What’s change has its model matches job to just listen and put yourself in their shoes and always think about what is the desired result, what is it that we’re trying to get to? And fighting or disagreeing or arguing or showing emotion is not the way to do it.

 

 

And I’m an emotional guy, right? Like I will I will lay down in traffic for you if we’ve got that kind of relationship. Carlos is one of the toughest human beings I know, and watching him be calm in those moments was like a customer support. Masterclass is what it kind of was. Yeah, yeah. No, there’s actually sounds very similar.

 

 

A lot of the training we got at Disney, you know, back when I was there and, you know, I don’t know if they still put you through that training today, but back then it was a big deal. You didn’t step foot on stage until you’ve gone through this. And a lot of it is focused on that, being able to stay calm, being able to focus on the guest experience and not worrying about whether you’re right or not.

 

 

It’s about the guest experience. So oh my gosh. Okay, so you just said something that is something I had to complete live by Bobby and I live by it through some negative experiences. Right. Some failures which if you know, I’m a big believer in like go break something, go fail at something because it’s a fast track to learning how to do it.

 

 

Right? Right. A long time ago, I had a falling out and a failure on something, and I. It hit me when I talked to this person, I said, for us to get to a solution, I have to ask a question. Do you want credit or do you want this to be successful because they’re not necessarily the same thing.

 

 

And that person wanted credit and we weren’t successful. And so we had to shake hands and move on. We can’t be good together. But that is something we should always ask ourselves. Do you want credit or do you want success? And look, I’m dealing with this a little bit with the with the football club now, because with the national championship, we’re getting a lot of attention and some are getting more attention than others.

 

 

So all of a sudden, do you have an assistant coach that says, well, how come I’m not getting interviewed when Coach Rubio’s getting interviewed? Well, hold on, man, we’re the national champs and you’re a huge part of that. I’m sorry if you feel like you’re not getting as much credit as the head coach, but what is it that we’re trying to accomplish here in team sports is maybe the best educator for things like that?

 

 

Yeah, absolutely. I’m a huge. That’s why I’m such a huge, team sports fan. You know, with kids, I think gets a little out of control these days. You know, with all the, you know, the money and the, you know, travel teams and things like that. But the core of team sports, I think is still amazing, like you said.

 

 

Well, you got money and you also have, you have you have participation medals, that teach us the wrong thing. You know, should a kid get credit for showing up 100%? They should get credit for showing up 100%. They should get a pat on the back for showing up. But if you didn’t win the tournament, you don’t get a medal.

 

 

Like, I don’t know what to tell you. And the losses along the way just motivate you that much more, in my opinion, to separate the ones that are capable of now going and getting that that medal. By the way, you know, learning from this incredible season, do you think me winning a national. It’s me. Do you think us winning a national championship is going to make us want it less or more next time?

 

 

Oh, once you’ve had that taste, man, do. Oh my gosh Bobby. Right I know what it tastes like now man. Like I want it every year. And it’s not going to happen every year. But I and I think with employees we’ve kind of done this a little bit. I think remote work is screwed up. The, the, the that competitiveness feel that understanding of, like what it really feels like to lose and to have a failure and to make a mistake, like we should be around each other.

 

 

Bobby should tell me you really screwed that up, Nate, right? Yeah. And then you then that sort of message capable of fixing that and moving to the solution. And I think delivering that kind of message in person, you know, versus over zoom or over a phone call, I think makes a big difference, you know, in terms of how it’s received and how that team, you know, the culture.

 

 

And, Mike, I know that was something you were and dive into a little bit, you know, whether that’s culture or even, you know, follow ups in terms of how to deal with failure. But, so I’ll, I’ll shut up for a second, let you look, you know, you know, it’s interesting. You’ve touched on quite a few areas, you know, we wanted to, to delve into and maybe we’ll stick with, with failure.

 

 

Since most of us are very familiar with it. You know, when you, as you’ve gone through all of this and, you know, you talked about the, the, the partnership that you had, what do you see out there in the business world? You sit at a very unique, sort of a point. You know, you have a business that you’re building.

 

 

You’ve got this all consuming hobby football club, thing going on. You’re the YMCA. You deal with businesses at a strategic level. You deal with individuals at their own strategic level. Also, probably at a very intimate level. And, you know, with failure, I always think there’s a couple of ways that you can you can look at failure.

 

 

One is either a learning lesson or it’s going to just set you back and you’re going to sit there. What do you do to process failure or what do you see that other people do. Due to process failure that’s going to end up being moving them forward versus just sort of sitting there and just taking it really hard.

 

 

You know, you made me think of, and, the podcast I did with Ken Perry, I think we all probably know who came up with college coop. And I really credit Ken for being the, the, the pioneer when it comes to, video content. And, they just they did they do such a great job.

 

 

But, we had this conversation several years ago. Mike and I asked him, what do you do? Like when your staff is frustrated, when you’re noticing negative emotion or you yourself have a failure, what do you do? And he smiled. He goes, we go for a walk. He literally takes them for a walk. He can feel it brewing.

 

 

And he says, let’s go for a walk. And I’ve been to his office, actually, he’s just moved into a new office, but his old office, and it’s a nice neighborhood where you can just go for a walk around the block. And his point was, by the time we get back, usually everybody’s emotions are much better than they were when we when we left.

 

 

I think some of it, Mike, is so simple. You know, yesterday, you know what I did? I cleaned my desk for the first time in six months and I was multitasking. I was on a call with a customer while I was cleaning my desk, and they asked me a question, and I should have been in front of model match, and I wasn’t because I was cleaning my desk and I said, oh man, I’m sorry, I don’t have the app pulled up.

 

 

You’ll think this is funny. I’m cleaning my desk right now. And his question was, did you need a moment? I was like, yeah, I did, I did, I felt clutter in here. I’m feeling some stress and some pressure. And by the time I’m done cleaning off my desk, it takes me 20 minutes. I’m gonna feel a whole lot better.

 

 

I think it’s some of those. Some of those simple things, Mike. I like to work out like that, get that that relieve stress for me. But just go for a walk, go outside, remove yourself from the situation for just a minute and take a breath. And usually that seems to help. It does. You know, there’s some interesting neuroscience around the walk.

 

 

It is actually it, you know, if you tend to be emotional, it helps you access the logical side of your brain. And, sometimes we see it as when it calms us down. Or you have probably you probably experienced this when you go for a walk. Sometimes you collaborate better with people or there’s a problem that you’ve been working on.

 

 

All sudden it pops into your head. It’s yeah, it’s one of the things that when I work with people, if you’re feeling a little bit stressed, you know, get up, take a walk. Two minutes is all it takes. If you have a difficult conversation, do a walking one, if at all possible. I have a I have a buddy that I had breakfast with this morning.

 

 

I only see him every 3 or 4 months. And he’s, he is a partner with KPMG international. So he really big jobs. Been there forever, makes a bunch of money. You never know it by looking at him. Lots of stress with what he does for a living. And I asked him, Mike, like, how do you find that there’s something that brings you relief to that, to that stress.

 

And he does Spartan races and he says every and every morning he does like either yoga or tai chi or something for like ten minutes. That’s it. And, I said, do you find that you get things more than just stress relief when you do it? And he said what I thought he might say, because this is my answer.

 

 

He said, I solve problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s true. Sometimes you like, I if I sit here and just pound through this freaking list that I have right all day long, which I’m going to do as soon as we hang up, I’m gonna get right back on to this list again. I’m. I’m managing a list. I’m managing a pipeline.

 

 

I’m working things forward in workflows, on projects. But there’s problems I’m not solving. And I need to walk away from this list and have quiet in an effort to solve that problem. So. So when you work with organizations or individuals, do you see any consistent through lines that that somebody has where they’re either successful at it, you know, overcoming failure, solving problems or through lines that where people just get stuck?

 

 

I mean, and I think, you know, particularly with being in the, servicing that mortgage side of the business, it’s been sort of an interesting few years. I was in the business for a long time. It’s the most challenging environment I’ve seen at so many levels. Do you do you see consistent things at work that that move people forward?

 

 

And then, you know, without naming names, things that get people stuck in and regardless of the advice you might give or try to guide them, that they just don’t seem to move, a couple things come to mind. And Mike, again, you’re an expert when it comes to that some of this stuff and you know, you know the, the this statistics and maybe some studies to support.

 

 

I’ve read enough and I’ve experienced enough to know that, depression not clinical. I can’t talk about clinical because I don’t I can’t relate to it. But depression, normal depression I find, is generally solved by action and not rest. So there’s this there’s this response to, I’m depressed. I’m sad. I’m tired, I feel negative. And what do you say?

 

 

I need a break. I need a break. I need to take a day off. I need to sit on the couch. I need a break. I would just ask whoever says that. What are you doing on this break? Is it an action break or is it. Was it a do nothing break? Because I think could do nothing break I have found only adds to that emotion.

 

 

It actually doesn’t make it better. So number one, I would say don’t lose the value of work in the midst of getting over whatever that hump is, right? Make the other one. And maybe this is a product of my age because I didn’t have one, although I do now. Make sure you have mentors in your life. Make sure you have people that you can pick up the phone, and they’re not going to tell you what you want to hear.

 

 

They’re going to tell you what you need to hear. Yesterday I had a moment. And it’s funny you bring this up. I had a moment, and I texted a guy in the industry who I consider a friend and certainly a mentor, and, I just said, hey, I need some help on something when you have a second.

 

 

And then I texted him again. I said I should, I should say, this is not urgent. This is not a family emergency. I’m fine. Yeah, yeah. He called me back in two minutes. We spoke for five minutes. That’s it. And I was fine. I just needed to hear from someone else to say what you’re about to do is wrong.

 

 

You already know it’s wrong. Take a breath and call me tomorrow. I’m good. Yeah, I love that. Love that I probably helped that he called you back right away. To which what a mentor. You know, there’s these people that I mentor. And if they text me and say, I need you for a minute, well, that’s not somebody that’s doing this to me every five minutes like that might be somebody that hasn’t asked me for anything in six months or three months.

 

 

I know who those people are. You guys know who those people are? That’s the bat phone for people that remember Batman. Like, that’s the bat phone they just hit me with. And I got to call him back. Yeah, I think that’s good. You know, I want to maybe move over to something, you know, go back to model match.

 

 

You know, I’ve seen the product from when you guys really first launched. It is conversion one. Yeah, yeah, it’s come a long way in. And, you know, I think originally it was it’s going to help organize what you do during the day. Right. It was I’ll just say it, it was guiding you. But it’s come such a long way.

 

 

What kind of things are you learning about bringing technology into what I’ll call a very intimate human, interaction, which is recruiting and, you know, retention, all those things. So what are the things that are working? What are the things that that balance out? Well? And what are the things that you guys have tried or maybe not working because it is, you know, you’re trying to bring automation into an intimate relationship.

 

 

So what do you see that’s good. And some things you guys have struggled with. Well, without saying it directly, you kind of said it right. It’s that balance between humanity and automation, right. That it’s that balance between, you know, emotion. And I almost write something that has no emotion. For those that see the value of a platform like ours as something more than data visualization, you see, you see the path to outcome, right?

 

 

For the ones that, are building, projects are actioning. Those projects are setting, future tasks are tracking the building of a relationship the same way that a loan travels through the loss, for lack of a better comparison. I love that comparison. Well, and Bobby, we when we started model match Mike might remember that is what we did.

 

 

You know, we thought if I don’t know Bobby Palmer, but I know that I just got his name off of a park bench because he’s advertising that he’s a loan officer. Well, that’s a tier three connection. It’s not tier two, meaning I don’t know him through somebody else. He’s not tier one. We don’t know who each other is, but I plug him into a project, you know, and I go start making phone calls.

 

 

Well, that’s like a prequel. All I have is data. I have a name and I have a phone number, but once I once I have an initial connection with Bobby. Even if you’re not saying let’s talk again next month, well, now you’re in processing. There’s actually a relationship there. There’s a loan potentially in there. And then when we start meeting, you’re in underwriting because you’ve agreed to a compliance or, you know, an agreed upon time and location and topic.

 

 

And then we get to offer and you’re at clear to close. And then you hire and you’re at funding servicing at that point. Our brains are already wired for that. So if we can track the progression of relationships, whether it’s a new agent or a new recruit or even a borrower for that matter, that may be you’re reaching out to that makes sense.

 

 

Mike. The challenge has been the adoption to the process, because this industry, and maybe the world we live in is, is attempting to teach us. You can do the same amount of volume and not do any work. And if you talk to the top loan officers in this industry, go to Scotsman’s guide. Pick out pick out the guy who I won’t name names, but he’s with a company that changed from the initials GR to just R, right?

 

 

The guy that’s always at the top of the list. People that don’t know him probably think he just automated something, and he’s sitting on an island all day long, sipping Mai tais and not doing any work. That couldn’t be further from the truth. A dude works his face off, and he has a very specific follow up process that involves physically doing something, making a phone call, going to a meeting.

 

 

And so, Mike, I think our challenge, which I’m happy to accept, is that balance between data intelligence, automation and then action. And the action part of it involves the value of you building trust with someone or some opportunity. Yeah. Now I agree with you. And I think it’s been interesting because, if we take Covid, which had a severe impact on the business in a lot of ways, but I think one of the ways that it impacted everybody was that there’s a lot of loans to be done, and people went from the face to face interaction, or I’m just going to call it grinding it out.

 

 

You know, I know who you’re talking about and, whether it’s him or somebody else. And, you know, Bobby and I have known people and places we’ve worked together. You look at what they do is they’re there every day. They’re going through a structure, and it doesn’t have to be the same structure as what somebody else is going through.

 

 

Just has to be something. But they go out and they grind it, and they build relationships and build trust. They get to know somebody, understand them, and that goes to trust. I think the challenge for a lot of companies, and this is regardless of what business you’re in, is that we are now looking for the technology solution to make up for the fact that we really don’t want to go out and do that.

 

 

There’s Bobby and I were talking about this. Got it. Bobby, I don’t remember how you’re how many years ago it was, but we had a loan officer at this one company worked together. Said ask Bobby to come up with a flier that would generate 5 to 6 loans for him a month, and, Bobby. Bobby didn’t do it for him.

 

 

But, I think he told them he had to actually go out and talk to realtors to things, but. Well, I think that’s one of the, by the way, if Bobby can do that, we can all go visit Bobby on his private island. Oh, yeah. It’s like being able to predict interest rates. Right? I’ll be trading my own accounts right.

 

 

So do you see generational differences with the adoption? And I’m going to say maybe younger ones are going. I love the technology, but they don’t want to go through the human side of it where some of the people that are, you know, maybe a little bit older and I’m generalizing here or saying, look, I really want to call people, but I don’t want to take notes.

 

I used the technology. I spoke at an event within the last year, and I was lucky enough. But as the president of this company, are there any rookies and rookies, meaning 18 months, 20 months or less? Right. And so he said, yeah, there’s actually three here. So three had qualified for this sales trip where they were probably, you know, 100 loan officers in the room, all branch managers, regional managers, executive ownership, the whole nine.

 

 

And, I did not speak to them before I got on stage. I just knew who they were. And of course, I went to model match and I looked up their volume and I was like, oh, okay. You know, these, you know, here you’ve got rookies and they’ve all done at least 14 million in the last 14 months.

 

 

Right? Wow. I saw your eyebrows go up. Right. Yeah. So towards the end of my speaking I said, hey, are there any rookies in the room? Of course I already knew the answer. And the three that I knew were going to raise their hand. They raise their hand. I said, hey, would you would you mind standing up and answering a couple of questions?

 

 

And they did. And I said, tell me three things as basic as you can. That’s the reason for you getting to 14 million in the last 14 months. And their answer was, I identify opportunities. I put them into a project and I action those opportunities. I said, okay, hold on. There’s got to be more though, right? And they said, oh yeah, yeah, there’s definitely more.

 

 

I follow up and I follow up and I follow up and I said, so did you do 14 million? The majority of that in the first half of the seven months or the second half of 14 months of the second half of the seven months, and it was like, oh, is mostly the second half because it took me time to build this up.

 

 

And then I said, anybody in the room who qualified for this trip, but whose volume has dropped by 20%, raise your hand. It was like, what, 50% of the room? Or at least I said, look at her. She took 14 million away from you because you’re not doing what she’s doing. So I’m like, I think the young want the younger folks are they’re actually not afraid to do the work, but they don’t want to do the amount of work that maybe ten years before you had to do.

 

 

Right. So they see the value of I identify the opportunities that meet my criteria. I go look at past transactions, I know what to talk about. Now I it’s not a cold call. I plug them into a project and then two hours a day I action the project. But action to them is not just an email. And if a drip cam campaign goes out, well, they have a workflow to say the drip campaign goes out on Monday.

 

 

I make a phone call on Wednesday. Yeah, I love it, by the way means your drip campaigns can’t be 2000 people at a time. No, no, they’ve got to be targeted. You know, it’s interesting. I’ve always thought that model matches really in the mindset business in the sense that, you know, you’re providing a framework that if you follow it, it changes your mindset over time.

 

 

It’s one of those things that, you know, and you also get a dashboard. It says, hey, what I’m doing is working or it’s not right. And I think that to me is one of the things that’s been really interesting. Well, and that’s got to be frustrating for you, I bet as a consultant over the years where companies may or individuals may be sure of why their why this isn’t working, they’re sure of it.

 

 

But when you start asking for reports and metrics and they don’t have any, they don’t have any. So I know I can go into the loss and we can pull a report to see what’s falling through, what’s working, what’s not working, what are we chasing that we shouldn’t be chasing? Where is something breaking in the manufacturing process? But if I go to you and say, well, give me the same answers relative to your agent outreach, then you can’t answer the question.

 

 

The only thing you can say is, well, let me go talk to my CRM administrator to figure out how many emails went out in the last 30 days. Yeah, but you know, do you find this in leadership to where maybe a leader is struggling, moving the organization? I always look at leaders. You know, the job is to move people, which move the organization where they’re struggling.

 

 

And when you get down to it, you find that maybe they may not be doing some of those things. Going back to the failure side, companies failing, you might observe that is that a leadership problem is a connection problem. What do you see out there? I think it’s a little bit of everything, Mike. I think that, I think the business probably needed a bit of a purge, you know, post Covid, when it came to the amount of non producing leadership in this industry that weren’t really creating value for the originators and the branches that they were, that they were supporting, I think it’s also a motivation problem.

 

 

I notice a lot of times that compensation models do not do not direct motivation properly. Right. So if you’ve got a trigger in your compensation plan as a branch manager or regional manager, and it’s so weighted towards something that doesn’t really support the street, right then they’re not motivated. Why would they do it in that case? So yeah, I think there’s a I think there’s a compensation slash motivation challenge in this industry a little bit.

 

 

And I think that then relates to some of our leadership issues. You know, we did a I kind of throw this out a little, little test. We did a little test. And we’re about to do it on a larger scale. I hope my product team is okay with me saying this, but I can we will afterwards, I’ll edit out, we, we as part of Model match, we built an environment called Borrower Insights.

 

 

Mike, I think you and I have talked about Borrow Insight. Borrow insights is essentially I can go to my past transactions and I can filter those transactions by anything. And then I can get equity, payoff amount, rate, borrower contact information, the whole night. All the things that people were generally skip tracing with other platforms. You can just do everything inside a model match.

 

 

Now you don’t have to go somewhere else. So I could literally go find 5 or 10 loans that, oh my gosh, I forgot these were here. Here’s one that just crossed over 20%. I could go had them drop PMI now and maybe do a little consolidation. Maybe when the rate environment changes it’ll create some refi opportunities. But one of the things that we did when we did it was MVP, but it wasn’t public yet.

 

 

We threw some leads to a handful of loan officers that we knew. We just gave it to them. We spent the money to then get the contact information, the equity, the payoff amount, the, the AVM, the calculated rate. And we just gave it to them and we said, go do something with this. And then, of course, we got a phone call saying, you gave me five leads and I got to revise out of it or I got it.

 

 

One of them was ready to put their house on the market. And so now I got I’m going to get two transactions out of this whole thing. So we then said, okay, there’s a point at which we’re probably going to pick a whole bunch of fellows in this country, and we’re just going to send them leads for nothing.

 

Let’s go give it to them. And then we’re going to say, click here to learn more. So instead of trying to talk them into doing something with a fancy button or a pretty graphic or a testimonial that was made up, and is it true? Which, by the way, we’ve never done, but I’m sure some people do that sometimes doesn’t.

 

 

It doesn’t happen. Yeah, right. So I’m actually going to give you a loan. I’m going to give you a loan now and borrow insights. It’s not just your past transactions. You can say show me every transaction in Charlotte, North Carolina. That was a VA loan two years ago that has an equity above 20%, a rate above 4.5%, the borrower still in the home, they haven’t refinanced yet, right?

 

 

Like you could just do that across the board. Okay. Here’s what I’m getting at though. So I think we’re going to see huge results from that. You’re just giving something away. You’re creating value without asking for anything in return. From a recruiting perspective. Could you imagine now, and I say this because this is what I’m seeing younger people doing.

 

 

So somebody texted me last night at 11:00 while sit on the couch because we released a new feature and he said, oh my gosh, I know exactly how many users. And it’s a 35 year old low. That’s one of the top LO’s in this company from a recruiting perspective. Could you imagine? I’m recruiting Bobby and he’s with another company and we’ve spoken and we’re about to have our first face to face with some really nice phone calls though, right?

 

 

And I know a lot about him. He knows a lot about me. Now we’re going to get face to face and really talk about what would it be like to work together. I’m going to show up to that meeting with three loans that I paid for trade, past transactions that were from Bobby’s transactions five years ago that are all ready for some sort of consolidation.

 

 

But based upon the metrics that I ran, I already paid for the equity, the balance, the AVM, the borrower contact information. And I just bring it to Bobby and he says, what’s this? Like, oh man, I use this tech platform, to kind of review opportunities that maybe get missed, right, that we don’t want to lose. We don’t want to turn to another, another loan officer, another company.

 

 

And I just found these on yours and I just won’t give it to you. But there’s a caveat. If you don’t make these calls in the next two weeks, I’m to. But it also shows you that as a manager, this is what I’m going to do for you. If you join me. Don’t just ask me for a sign on bonus.

 

 

That’s great, but that takes care of you for a little bit. I’m going to help you do one more loan a month. And Mike, that’s. Yeah. If you’re a manager, ask yourself, what are you doing? You not the tech, not the CRM, not the company. What are you doing to help your Lowe’s do one more unit a month?

 

 

Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting if you just do the math. One more loan. That was a tagline years ago in a company that we came up with. It’s just one more long, it really adds up. It’s big numbers. But, I mean, what you’re doing is very powerful because it is now. It is now. You’re showing that you can do something for somebody and it’s, you know, it’s almost a little bit of like, Bobby creating a flier that’s going to create 5 or 6 loans a month.

 

 

Somebody gets truly engaged in that. It goes beyond one more loan. Right? Absolutely. And not only one more loan. That was already your loan to begin with, by the way. So we have a template on Borrower insights. That’s just a button that you can click that says show me my churn. Now, that’s a painful report to look at because you open it up and you see all these loans that you could have done that were your past borrowers that somebody else got because you didn’t.

 

 

It’s sort of like recruiting, right? I talked to Bobby in January. We have a nice conversation. He’s not ready to talk anymore. It’s like I’m happy where I am. Let’s stay in touch. 90 days goes by and you don’t set a follow up task, so you forget to call another. 90 days goes by and you see on LinkedIn that he just joined your competitor.

 

 

Well, it’s the same thing with your borrowers. It’s not just because, oh, they must have had a better rate or oh, it’s because they’ve got better tech than we do, or it’s because they’ve, you know, they’re on some retention, you know, cycle that I was not. No. It’s because you’re not managing. What was that? I was in an event I went to the EPM event and Chris Vinson with Windsor.

 

 

Man. How did he say this? I think he said something like, stop calling it your database, call it your pipeline. Yeah. And it hit different when you say it that way. Your database is this static list of nothing. A pipeline is something that you’re actioning. And he was like, there’s activity tied to a pipeline. Yeah. Now what’s your point?

 

 

Earlier too, it kind of ties back into that industry mindset of, you know, let’s say it’s recruiting. But tying that to stages the loan process because that’s kind of how people are wired. They’re in the industry. I love that. You know, real quick Mike. All right. So we’re at 50 minutes right now. Eric, how are you on time?

 

 

I, I love it. I have many good on time, actually. Let me, I love that you’re asking me while we’re on the podcast, right? Oh. I’m good. No. I’m good. We can keep going. I can edit, buddy. I can edit. Yeah. But yeah. So, yeah, I had a couple questions I wanted to ask about culture because I think, you know, a lot of what we’ve led up to, comes from, you know, a core level of culture.

 

 

So if you’re good, it’s gonna ask you a couple questions about that. Mike, is there any other I, I just I just want to make one, one comment on what you, you talked about, you know, going to you’re trying to recruit Bobby’s a loan officer and you walk up with three deals and you go, look, if you don’t call them, I’m going to it’s also going to give you a pretty good idea of how dedicated Bobby is.

 

 

It’s almost like a litmus test to be able to go. I’ve gave him three deals. Did he call them? If he didn’t, you’re going to go, you know, I may still want to hire him, but. But it’s going to give you an idea of how motivated they are to act on pass pipeline. Yeah, it’s a note to self moment.

 

 

And by the way, you know, you should be tracking that somewhere. Like you as a manager should be tracking that somewhere. So you can go back and say, hey, I remember when we spoke back in January last year, this was not something you wanted to do. So now that now that you’re bringing it up as a reason why you’re not doing enough volume, I guess I have to ask you, has you have you changed?

 

 

Like have you changed your mindset on that? And it reminds the person, oh yeah, I’m pissed off at you. But the truth is, it was my decision not to move forward on some of these things. And so yeah, Mike, that’s a good example. The other thing I would say is, Mike, you know, it’s my mission and I’ll never pull this off.

 

 

But the word recruiting, we got to change what that means when we say it. I’ve got for the last ten years, I’ve spoken in front of so many different groups, and I have, you know, slide decks that literally the first slide, it’ll say, Eric Levin and on the agenda, recruiting and business development or something. And my first slide will say here, I’m going to help you be better at growing your business.

 

 

And here’s the first thing you need to know. And the first slide says stop recruiting. Because the second we say recruiting that word, there’s this emotion that’s tied to it. And it’s and it’s the emotion of cold calling. It’s the first thing that comes up. It’s the emotion of someone telling me no, right? It’s the emotion of will.

 

 

They must be they must have a better rate than us right now. Their price better than we are. So why should I even make this phone call? Yeah, but if you if you didn’t ask that to those same people in the room to think back to when they first started in the business, their first 2 or 3 real estate agents, first of all, it’s easier than ever to identify the agents that you should be building relationships with.

 

 

Obviously, that starts in model match. Back then you didn’t have that. But when I would ask that question, I would say, how many people remember the first three agents that they ever worked with? The whole room raises their hand, everybody raises their hand, and I’ll say, hey, Bobby, tell me, give me a name. And they’ll say, Sally, who was Sally with Keller Williams?

 

 

Was Sally married? Do you know what kind of car she drove. Do you know where she vacations. Do you know her favorite football team. Yep. Okay. Now let’s go to your recruiting pipeline. Who’s top on the recruiting pipeline. Oh Joe. Well you have Joe at the meeting stage right. Yep I said so when did you meet with him last.

 

 

Oh we met a week ago. Great. What’s the next action? Oh, we’re going to get together in a couple weeks. Not in action. You already have a black hole. You have a problem right now. But let me ask you a couple of other questions. What kind of car does he drive? I don’t know, is he married? I don’t know, where does he vacation?

 

 

I don’t know where was he before the current company that he’s with? I don’t know what happened. Why is it that you could do that with the agents? But you can’t do that with the people that you’re recruiting. Stop recruiting. Yeah, it’s really. I mean, the reality is it’s relationships. I’ve been in the business long enough to know that you.

 

 

I could talk to. I want to, recruit your. I want you to be a loan officer for me. Three years later, you might come to work for me. Some people, a lot of the people that that you get right away are it’s they’re in crisis mode. They’ll make a switch that once in between. But the really good ones for many, many times as you if you see it’s a relationship building and so years.

 

 

So let’s talk about that for a second. Yeah. If you call that low and you say, hey I’d love to work together, let me just tell you what that low here’s before they’ve built trust with you. Let me change. Instead of saying, hey, Mike, I learned a little bit about you. I’d love to talk to you about the possibility of joining my company.

 

 

I think it’d be great to work with you. Here’s what they actually here. Hey, Mike. I want you to join my company so I can get an override off your volume. That’s what they hear. So it takes time to get to a point where they’ll hear you the right way. And sometimes that’s you got to go through friction to actually get to that place.

 

 

But the friction is decreased. If you have a work flow that reminds you, you have to make a phone call right now, you have to follow up with this person, ask them about their kid’s birthday, ask him about the trip to Cancun that they went on. Ask them, did you get that build a relationship that you told me about three months ago when we caught up in the last?

 

 

And by the way, guess what? Loan officers, your agents that you’re reaching out to, that you’ve never done business with before. They’re here the same thing. So if you walk in the door and ask them for the next deal, all they hear is the commission that you’re going to make off of it. You’ve got to build that trust.

 

 

And one more thing I’ll say, Mike, because you brought this up, the ones that happen quickly, I wish I could pull statistics on this better. The ones that happen quickly. I will guarantee you the churn rate on the borrower side is greater than ever. And the attrition rate on the recruiting side is bigger than ever because you never built stickiness and trust.

 

 

Yeah, I had somebody describe it as a divorce. You know that the that that the first date after, you know, you want to get a divorce, you go on the first date is you’re excited about it. But three weeks into it, you realize they’re not a fit because they’re not used to work in that environment. You know, one thing that that sort of stands out that I’ve always looked at is that if you think about everybody wants to be heard and understood, if you think about that, that to me is if you just focus on that.

 

 

Because if I’m telling you, I want you to come here, it’s going to be a good fit. I’m going to do this. You’re going to be able to do that. And I’m broadcasting. I’m not listening. I’m not hearing. Yeah. And then you talk about all those other things as understand the individual. Everybody seems to look at it from their point of view because, you know, Bobby, my president of the company, I’m a regional manager.

 

 

He’s just beaten the cheese out of me to get more people in. And so I tend to be clumsy sometimes about the way I approach it. And I can go, I’m going through the motions. And then the excuses come up, which are, you know, they’ve got this obscure program that they’re the only one that does, you know, ten loans a month of it.

 

 

There’s all the excuses. But, you know, it just comes down to, you know, hearing somebody heard and understood. If you can do that, I think you build that relationship and the trust comes from that. So much of success of business development is just doing the next thing that I mean, it, it really how many times do we hear speakers to youth that will tell them the value of just showing up?

 

 

Like if you just show up, you’re already going to beat 50% of your competition. You know? So you’re already you’re already in the top 50%. Now, the next thing might get you into the top 10%. And I think that’s what is really missing from business development in general, is people just aren’t showing up like they used to.

 

 

Now, here’s the beauty of that. For the 10 or 15% that are showing up, the ones that are savages, they’re winning a lot of business. I heard an old saying from when I was a kid that I’ve never forgotten, and I don’t know what exactly applies, but it says something along the lines of like, it’s not so much what you do, it’s what everyone else doesn’t do that makes a difference.

 

 

And I think that’s kind of like where the showing up thing comes, or even just some of the little things you guys have been talking about on here, which I think are great insights for everyone listening that sometimes it’s just the simple little things where you take that extra step, you make that extra phone call. Eric, to your point, you take the time or invest a little bit of money in, you know, generating some like, you know, call ready loans for some of you you’re meeting with.

 

You think anybody else that’s recruiting them is doing those things. Probably not. Right. So if you do that and everyone else is not doing that, you’re going to stand out so much more. Who do you think they’re going to remember at the end of the day when maybe a year from now, they are ready to make a change, they’re going to remember that, you know what I mean?

 

 

Like, yeah, it just I’m a big believer in little details. And maybe again, that comes back to some of the Disney training we had. But let’s just like do the things that no one else wants to do, even if they’re little, because it’s going to be such a such a huge lift for you. And, you know, I’ll try really hard, Mike, as we go for the podcast not to reference Disney too many times because I’ll probably get sued, but, you can have to bleep it out.

 

 

Yeah, I will, but you know, that comes from a culture, right? And I think, Eric, you’re in a unique position. As Mike said earlier, you’ve worked with people across different industries, different belief systems. You know like what do you see if you were going to build a culture of a company from scratch, like whether it’s a company, a football club, whatever kind of where do you start?

 

 

What’s the first thing you define when you want to build a culture in the business that we’re in, the first thing that comes to mind is, setting expectations and meeting those expectations. So in the process of business development, just using that as example, the amount of times that I see people say something like, you know, I’m going to the next step is I’m going to send them the pricing log in or whatever or whatever it could be.

 

 

I’m going to send them a list of our products. And by the way, I’m not personally involved in recruiting anymore. Right. But I get it. I get a lot of these calls where people just want to pick my brain on, hey, will you look at my pipeline with me and tell me where you think I’m missing opportunities?

 

 

And it’s very easy, usually for me to pick someone out and say, why is this person still at the meeting stage? As an example, you have no future meeting set, so you’re they’re not at the meeting stage. But then secondly, I’ll see a note that says, good meeting, send product info. And so I’ll say, did you send the product info?

 

 

Oh no, not yet. I’m going to get that done by the end of the week. I said, okay, you met with him on Monday. Did you tell them when you were going to send the product info? And they said, I just said I would send it this week. You want to know one of the little things that’s a huge differentiator, Bobby, I’m going to get you that in the meeting with a call to action.

 

 

Okay. Hey, before we break, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to get you that product info. I’m going to have that in your inbox by tomorrow morning. You will have it no later than tomorrow morning if you don’t have it there by tomorrow morning. Is it really that big a deal? You might not think so, but let me tell you what you just showed this person.

 

 

You set an expectation and you met the expectation. Probably not what they’re getting from their manager right now, by the way. And so you’re already doing something that’s exceeding their own expectations. And Bobby, I think that then relates to culture. Right. Like the if do we know what the expectations are, are we meeting those expectations? I had a meeting internally with some of our team the other day, and there was a there was a disagreement around process relative to something.

 

 

And what I realized was the culture felt bad in that moment, like the culture, the emotion felt bad. It didn’t feel bad because anybody did anything wrong. It didn’t feel bad because anybody broke something. It didn’t feel bad because anybody was mad at anybody. They was mad, but they were mad because we didn’t have a process for what it was they were asking for.

 

 

Us and then and then I go to another thing. Mike, you said this a little bit earlier. Once you pick a process, just stick to it for a while. Don’t assume that just because it didn’t work this week means that that’s a trend that might not be a trend. It’s like go to the football club. If we get 400 comments on a post and three of them are really negative.

 

 

Dude, I’ll take that all day long. Really? Three out of 400, there were 6000 people that came to the game. And there’s three people that are pissed off about a moist chicken sandwich or something, which, by the way, I made that up. There’s no chicken sandwiches that at our games necessarily, although there might be, there might be in the future business idea.

 

 

Yeah, but I think culture is a slippery one. Bobby. But I do think I do think expectations, the setting of expectations. And then and then meeting or exceeding those expectations, which, by the way, I fail at that often. I know, like, you know, Jeff Linden’s a buddy of mine. He runs wholesale at Plaza. You guys probably know Jeff well, I missed expectations for him on something today.

 

 

But you know what I did? I picked up the phone. I told him I missed the expectation. I just told him, yeah, I said I missed that. I told you I would have it for you by Wednesday. It’s Friday. I don’t have it for you yet. And you know what? He’s okay with that now because I pick up the phone and I own it, and now I gotta.

 

 

I gotta go meet expectations. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. There’s, something I’ve thought about to me, it’s a culture of execution, right? That, that. And if you look at top producers, anybody with talent, they want to be around a place that executes because that’s what they do. And I think, you know, to me, that’s one of the things that has held a lot of people back because there’s a lot of excuses.

 

 

This is, you know, the mortgage business and we’re talking about the mortgage business, but all businesses are hard. Mortgage business is cyclical. It’s you’ve got all kinds of challenges. It is a hard business. But if you grind away at it, you know, and I will say people that don’t have as much talent as, you know, Bill over here who’s extremely bright and talented, but he doesn’t he doesn’t grind away a lot of times or much better at the business, and they’re much more successful.

 

You know, it’s about how much you commit and push through. You made me think of a couple of other things as well. You know, people join people and people leave people. So a lot of times when you think the reason we lost this person was because of a product, now that’s not why you lost him. The reason we lost this person was because, you know, we’re using a loss that they don’t like.

 

 

No, that’s not why you lost him. The amount of times I’ve heard of people that have told me they changed companies, I want to ask them why. And they say, oh, it’s because, I needed this product. And I know that the company that they left has that product. You know it like it happens. It happens all the time.

 

 

So number one is, you know, people join people. People leave people. And you should think about that in your relationship building process. Number two, our industry likes to act like they don’t want this, but it’s not what I find when I talk to people. And that is people want to be led. Yeah, people do want absolutely. People want to be led.

 

 

And they they’ve they think they don’t. Because for some reason this industry has become so entrepreneurial. You know, you and for example, again go back to motivation. As soon as you hire somebody that’s 100% commission. You’re starting that off with them. Like I own this company, I’m 100% commission. So I get to complain about whatever it is I want to complain about.

 

 

Why is a bank loan officer so much different than an I and blow? Well, the bank gets paid very differently and their motivation is very different. And if they decide, you know what, I don’t want to use the CRM. I’m going to go sign up for a different one, then go work for another company. But this isn’t this isn’t the right platform for you.

 

 

I’m not suggesting 100% commission is wrong, but what I am suggesting is that when things go wrong, those loan officers are taught to think, it’s not my job to give you everything that you need. It’s your job to go get out of what you have the most possible. But then that creates islands and people are on their own.

 

 

Yeah, they want to be led more than people think. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. So one of the questions I was going to ask as we kind of wrap up here, Eric, is that, you know, obviously you’ve come a long way. We’ve talked about a lot of different experiences you’ve had. If you could go back and you could walk alongside your, your younger self.

 

 

And I don’t know if that’s as a teenager or the teenager, because that’s around the time I think, that a lot of people are trying to figure out, okay, what do I want to do? What’s my future hold things like that? Like, what would you say to a teenager, Eric might ask for help. I like that it’s easy.

 

 

I didn’t ask for help. I just I just was like, give me the damn shovel and I’ll dig the hole. And I still like doing that. I still like having the shovel and nobody telling me what to do and just digging the hole. But I’ll tell you, the football club does not happen without me asking for a whole lot of help.

 

 

The success of Model Match, by the way, I’m one of, you know, three day to day founders, right? I, I’m lucky enough to work with who I think is the best head of product in the industry. And his team is unmatched. I ask those guys for help every day, you know, and it doesn’t matter. The seat that I sit in, I don’t, I don’t care.

 

 

Titles don’t matter. Anything to me. Yeah. And I’m fortunate enough now that there’s a lot of people that are willing to help me if I ask. Right. And I’ve learned I’ve learned that that’s a super power. And I think growing up I thought it was a weakness. And so, Bobby, that is 100% two things.

 

 

Ask for help and find mentors. That’s what I would do different. So I love that. And I think that that hopefully will resonate with a lot of people because especially to even, you know, when you’re young and stuff and you’re trying to find your way, you don’t want to ask for help, you don’t want to ruffle feathers, you don’t want a quote unquote bother, you know, the people that you see as higher ups and you’re sure are very busy.

 

 

And then I think once you hit a certain level in your career where maybe you’re trying to take that next step, you don’t want to ask for help because you feel like maybe that would disqualify you from moving up to that next step. Oh, he doesn’t know how to do this. Or he must. He or she must not be ready to, to take the next step.

 

 

So I, I love that you brought that up. Mike. Anything else? I this is an amazing conversation. Other than, you know what? I didn’t ask for help. It was because of ego, so. Oh, just say it. You know, it was it was it was just like, yeah, I, I probably smarter than everybody else, but I found out I was it, but no, no, this is this has been awesome.

 

 

I really I really appreciate you being with us, Eric. Well, I appreciate you guys asking me to be the first one. Man. That’s, It’s a it’s that I don’t take that lightly. That’s, It’s an honor. I think a lot of both of you guys and, and really sort of honored and happy to be in your, your sphere of influence.

 

 

So thanks for thanks for asking me on. I’m happy to help you guys anytime you ask. So I appreciate it. And like you said, if it doesn’t work out and totally be your fault and, but hopefully the 1st of many. And just one more reminder, everyone go to, Hickory fc.com and, pick up one of the 828 T-shirts.

 

 

It’s a great cause. And, and you look great at them. So thanks again, Eric. Appreciate you having you on. We’ll talk soon. I’ll see you in Boston. Yeah. All right, buddy, you have a great one.

 

 

 

Listeners, we’re in for a real treat. I know I say that all the time. But we really are today. We’ve got Erin Dee, she’s 20-year veteran of the Financial Services area, she’s worked in a number of companies in a wide range of areas. She is the COO of Loan people. And we’re very excited to have her and who’s really sponsoring this all of every one of our sponsors, every podcast, but it’s really Byte never really said, you need to have Erin on now, I’ve known Erin for a number of years. He’s truly one of the top professionals in our industry. And I got to meet her earlier in her career and her journey. And there’s just someone when you meet them, you spot them, you go pay attention to this person, they’re going somewhere, and she has it is. So one of the I was wondering if you’re in the industry 50 years, and you’re there 20 She’s one of the up and comers you said 20 years, is she really an up and comer seems like she’s well established from from my perspective, 50 years, she has a lot more to give into our industry. And so we’re really excited to have a couple of perspectives coming out. First of all, she started with a partner in the business. And we’re going to hear about that. And there’s many phone calls that are coming into me right now and 2024 that we want to start your own, our own business. And is it possible what do we need to do? So we’re going to hear from someone that’s two years into their journey, I believe they get that correct. And we’re getting if four years into their journey, oh my gosh, four years into your end of the journey. And we’re gonna get some perspective on that and all of what it takes to get a business up and running. Erin Dee, So good to have you here. Joining me on the microphone today. What a pleasure.

 

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. It’s great to see you again.

 

You and I know each other and I think a good number of people do know who you are. And you’ve been involved in the MBA you’ve been involved in at conferences and things like that. But for those that do not know you, if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself, to our listeners a little bit about your background and your journey to where you’re at today.

 

Yeah, absolutely. I would love to. Hello, so as David said, I’ve been in the business for a little over 20 years now I was one of those few people that got in on purpose. I took a real estate law class at the University of Central Florida Go Knights fell in love with it. And so very intentionally sought out a position when I graduated and I was lucky enough to obtain a position with option one mortgage as an underwriting trainees. Those of you who were around during the subprime days probably remember that name, we had all the best swag in town at the time. So they taught me how to be an underwriter and we had to do it with basically a breath and a credit score above 500 trades. Those of you who learned exactly what I did, there was no ADUs when I learned how to underwrite, we had to do legit credit risk analysis. Since I learned from some of the best in the business at option one, I was actually there until they turned the lights out in December of 200. Yeah, I loved working for them love the people I met and I learned amazing lessons there. And then from there, I went back to school to obtain my MBA in finance and then started working moved to Austin started working at a local company here in capital markets. And from there, I really just built a career on finding a need and filling it really just raised my hand anytime somebody needed something. So that taught me how to become an LOs administrator that taught me how to obviously capital markets and secondary, I was able to get into investor relations, operations, management, compliance, all of those really just raising my hand whenever somebody needed something has led me to this day where now I’m co founder and chief operating officer here at Loan people in Austin.

 

Love the name of the company going back to your option one days, I got to give a shout out to my old buddy Bob, we both have mortgage companies doing the same thing. Back in Southern California, Bob was just one of those people I’ll never forget, we all showed up at the same subprime conference. At the beginning of when the whole subprime thing started. It was based out of the Southern California market where I had a mortgage company as partner in the mortgage company back then, and we met Bob of all places at one of the conferences out on the Florida Keys at Key West and she went to a really decent human being as a great leader. And I hope he’s still doing well I’ve lost touch with him and definitely want to talk to him a bit his slide deck that he did providing information about the subprime crisis is one it was little used in the movie The Big Short his slide deck was actually the one used in the movie. So there’s a lot of stories around about that. If you go back to the time where we did not have a you and you learn by the old fashioned way. Now granted, optional loans underwriting standards were different deviated from Fannie Freddie, but it was still it was written underwritten from a credit basis. And it was underwritten from a chance they were a just outside of agency lender more of a plus instead of the BC hard BC money, but it was such a great career. And so I go back and as you talk about that, it’s just brings back some wonderful memories of many years ago. What did you learn from those experiences? And again, all the subsequent experiences you had you went through and have been very purposed about your education, purpose in your journey, I’m impressed that you decided to get a mortgage lending and there wasn’t an accident that makes you unique and unusual in that sense, in a positive sense. But what are some of the things that you’ve learned along that journey, starting with option one that you would say has been really contributing to your career where you’re at and success that you’re enjoying today?

 

Yeah, first, I’ll say I’m Bob. He was amazing. My first day at option one, he sat and drank like an entire beer with me and just talk to me. And here I am a newbie, to fresh out of college and the CEO of the company is talking to me, him and Steve, they both just were amazing, a great impression for me on day one, and taught me like, Hey, you can run a company and be a human being. And it was just a wonderful experience to be with them. And it was really great working in option one, because I realized that I was helping people who normal banks, normal lenders would turn down and that couldn’t get a loan. I was helping them achieve the American dream. And that really made me fall in love with what we do, and realize how important at the end of the day, you’ve got emails and this and that. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing is helping people achieve wealth and achieve the dream that they come here from all over the world for so I just absolutely love that. During my interview, Tom, I believe interviewed me and he said, I hope you’re ready for this industry. It’s crazy. It’s a roller coaster every month, and every year, it’s just your ramp up, you get crazy busy. And then it’s the first of the month and nothing again. And for me something about that I’m an adrenaline junkie. And I was like, Yes, that sounds amazing. Let’s go to me, I’m like similar to like engineers, they’re like born to do a certain job, like an engineer couldn’t be a cook, right? Like, it just doesn’t work. For me, I’m born for mortgage, that’s just the way it is. There’s no other career for me. And along the way, really a couple of things I learned one is this is a very small industry, don’t burn any bridges, because it’s a big country, but a small industry. So always treat the people that you work with the utmost of kindness and respect, because you never know when you’re going to come along that person again. And I still run into people that I’ve met throughout the entirety of my career. And for me, remembering to just always be kind and humble. And remember, it is a small industry. I think that’s one. I think also, hard work really does pay off, you can come to mortgage and make more money than doctors. Without a degree, I have hired people, some of my best employees that didn’t graduate high school even right, they come in, they put their nose down, they work really hard. And to me that’s another thing is mortgages are really great industry with a very low barrier to entry, where you can make an amazing living for yourself, you can make a million dollars in mortgage without a college degree. So the hard work really does pay off. Then also, like I said before, just find a need and fill it always raise your hand in this business. There’s very few people that do that. And you can take yourself in your career very far by just saying, hey, I’ll help out with that project. Hey, I’ll do this. That’s literally how I got to where I am.

 

Yeah, I love it. I had a doctor who had a supplement line, he called it phenoxy. Find a neath and fill it. And so he made that an acronym for nothing. I like that. It’s so true. And I really share your passion about what this is all about. And I think we lose sight of that. And yes, you can make great money and that is wonderful brings benefits of it gives you privileges that you wouldn’t otherwise have, sir, like I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, I’d rather be rich, thank you very much. But what really gives you the big greatest amount of fulfillment is putting someone in a home for the first time and doing so in a responsible way. You say yeah, that was the subprime days that then that come back and Byte and people that ain’t got insane people. One of the problems of the day that I think is we’re not going back to what some of the products option one offered, we need to get back into that now. We’re seeing a resurgence of the non QM, which is a good thing. I think if it’s done responsibly and done in an intelligent way. So I think for those who want to go back and look at how it was done, right, at least in the earlier days, go back and study option one story. It’s a very important one. I think then you talk about some of your journey through the Educate how important is getting a master’s degree in this? I know we I should give a shout out to Andy Schell, my old business partner, who is your thank you. He’s an advisor to serve as your board. Also your contract CFO, if I understand correctly, your friend one of the brighter guys out there, he’s working on a second doctorate degree right now. And I always tease him about that people die by degrees. But how important is that? And I’d love to get your perspective.

 

Yeah absolutely. And I’m sure there’s educators out there that will scream at what I’m about to say but I find the degree has been better for me in terms of hate, like I have legitimate credentials, right? So it helps some people look at me in a way like okay, she went through this, she did this extra she’s somebody to be taken seriously. And as somebody who’s a general goofball, I need all the help I can get and taken being taken seriously sometimes. Anybody who knows me knows that did mostly 95% of what I say is a joke. So that helps. But also honestly going through and getting my master’s degree, I did learn a lot specifically, how do I work with people of differing opinions, different viewpoints, different thoughts, right. So for me, the collaboration aspect of it and learning how I can work with people who have different backgrounds, different ideas, and different opinions, and take that in for what it’s worth, learn from it, grow from it, and also on a team, leverage that and people’s different strengths to do things, I’m not good with words, if you ask me to write a paper, it’s mostly just going to be bullet points and hope I get away with it. But I have other strengths that are really great. And so really learning how to work with teams and saying, hey, I can help with this. If you can help with this. And really, in business and anywhere in life, being able to collaborate with other people and see other people’s differences and their strengths. And you see how you can use those along with your strengths is really critical. And that was something that I absolutely got out of the master’s degree.

 

Yeah, there’s so much within the MBA educational programs and all of the stuff that’s going on, we could go on and on about that. But I really want to start getting into the journey of you launching your own business with your partner. What was the catalyst for that? Was it just something that you had to do you just felt that was in you? What drove you to launch? Loan people?

 

Yeah, absolutely. So I have always had a bit of an entrepreneurial bug about me, I’ve always wanted to do my own thing. I think my mother would probably say it was more like a dislike of authority. But I always had that bug. And I was always scheming in my head, if I could do it this way. If it was my company, this is what I would do. But as an operator, granted, I feel a very sales friendly operator, but an operator nonetheless, started my own company without the sales piece was always a challenge clearly, right. That’s what you need. You need customers, you need revenue. So in 2018, a local originator Max Lehmann, who is a top producer, he has been at the top of every Scotsman list ever respected in the community. He is here in Austin. And we had met each other a couple times. He reached out to me and said, Hey, I want to go grab a beer. And he texted me out of the blue. I was like, oh, what’s going on here? So we met up, and he said, here’s the thing, I want to start my own business. I think this is something I’m ready to do. And I think you’re the person to help me do it. And the one thing I love about Max is he’s very honest about his strengths and weaknesses. And he’s, I’m a really good originator, I can bring the loans in the door, but I don’t know what I don’t know about the rest of it. We talked for a couple months, we really spent time to make sure that he and I had similar viewpoints, perspectives, all of that I’ve made mistakes in my career where I jumped into something a little too quickly without vetting it out properly. So we took a good six months to just get to know each other, make sure we have the same vision for what this new company could look like. And then finally, in May 2019, I took the risk and left a very secure job with a wonderful company, and came to start Loan people. So we spent the latter half of 2019 getting everything set up and run Max was still running his team at his other company and we basically lived under the threat of okay his other company could find out at any given time, so everything had to be done quickly in an in secret. So I had to do everything from get my own license. So the company could be licensed to finding systems or finding people to hire it getting an office space health insurance, everything from May to December 2019. We somehow made it all the way to the very end. And on January of 2020, we were able to start as a full fledged banker and we were not brokering they have warehouse lines, investors. And it was just absolutely amazing to see something that started out as literally like scribbles on a cocktail napkin at Bartlett’s in Austin, Texas become this full fledged company. It was amazing.

 

It’s such an exciting journey, I’ve had the privilege of helping so many people go through that journey, have gone through three times myself. And it’s just so exciting to do that. And when you own your own baby, I think that’s what’s so compelling. So anyone listening to this, and I gotta tell you listen to the journey, look at this into the preparation, there’s so much about that. And we probably have another podcast. But one of the things that goes into this really gets to the Byte sponsorship of this podcast. And the reason we’re sitting here, I would love to interview you anytime because of this, but they said you got to really interview Erin Dee because of how she went about establishing this company. And the selection of that now you had been an LOs administrator of other companies. And so a lot went into this and the tech stack is such a critical thing these days. And I want to get to why did you select Byte and having the experience that you had with other companies and other technologies?

 

Yeah, absolutely. The easy answer and like you said, there’s so many decisions that have to be made in order to go live. It really honestly would have been the easy solution to go with the LOs that I had seven years experience administering, Max had a years worth of working in, that would have been really the easy decision to make right? In the short term. In the long term, that was not the right decision. And we’re so glad we did not go that way. So what we did is really Max came at it from a, I need to be speedy, quick, fast for an originator Max thinks and the number of clicks it takes, but how can I get 15 estimates out to this one client in under five minutes, right, that’s what he’s trying to do. For me, I’m trying to have a system that I can administer in a compliant manner that I can configure to make it so that Max has fewer buttons to click. And that can easily seamlessly work talked to all of my other partners that I want to integrate with and we sat down and from his perspective and my perspective, we looked at, I think, 10, or more different loan origination systems, we had them do proofs of concepts. We got into test environments, we played around Anons, Max beat them all up. Yeah, it was incredibly thorough, and we couldn’t make many other decisions on other tech until we had this one dialed in. So that was like a really big priority for us. It’s super funny because he was doing his part in secret and he would log into these webinars and demos as some other name. It was super funny. These guys had no idea they’re talking to one of the top loan officers in the country. It was great. But we really came at it when both of those perspectives that we had Byte quickly rose to the top of kind of the marriage of the easy to use people just love point calyx everybody. Originators love that one was super easy to use, the marriage of that and some more some other kind of maybe more sophisticated systems. It was the beautiful baby of both where it was simple, easy to use for an originator, but it was compliant. It was fast, and it was configurable, and we just fell in love with it.

 

Yeah, when you look at the cost structure or other LOs is comparing it to Byte did that enter into your decision at all?

 

No, it did not. It was a happy result. However, because Byte was also the most affordable of all of them. My monthly PPE bill is more than my monthly Byte bill. And that is correct.

 

That is a major test, especially when you consider the product leader out there is at least they’re the biggest the number of installs, their costs are through the roof. And that’s one of the things I like pointing out when you’re looking at Byte that it’s affordable. And it’s good for a startup, we have some of the largest companies, CMG, Atlantic Bay, other big companies, enterprise companies, that not that you’re big, not that you’re growing fast and do well but you went from startup picking that. But it also works at the enterprise level, I think that’s really an important point to bring out about Byte. And then also talking about the configurability of it, the API integrations if you could talk about how important was some of those attributes that they have to your decision?

 

Yeah, again, as a seven year prior administrator, I knew I was dialed in on what I wanted to be able to configure again, I don’t like authority, I don’t like being told what I can’t do, I want to do what I want to do. And as an admin, that was incredibly attractive to me about the bytes system, and that the API was so easy to use. So much easier to use than other systems I’ve worked in, that we did not have the restrictions or limitations it was here you go, do it, have fun, you’re allowed to do what you want to do. And that has been absolutely wonderful. We’re able to create our own business rules. We’re not limited on the business rules that we can do custom fields, custom screens, custom printed forms, macros, things like that calculations, we were not limited at all in what we were able to do. So we were able to build our own very sophisticated system out of this amazing, very affordable LOs base, and it’s wonderfully compliant. We don’t have compliance issues, any of that. So we really got the best of all worlds with it. And we’ve just been so happy.

 

There’s many wonderful benefits of having that. And how would you say, do they partner with you? Do you sense? Is it a true partnership? Because I know some of the other ones that are out there. The biggest one is I’m sorry, this is the way it is the partnership sense is not there. Talk about it with Byte. How was that?

 

Yeah, that was really important to us. And really quick. One thing on the configurability I forgot to mention is they offer when you go to purchase them multiple different levels of assistance and getting set up. And so for me is literally it was just me for a while. And then eventually I had two other people to help me. But with everything else the three of us had going on. They had this like super high level, it was a little more expensive, but it was worth it because they helped us build pre made business rules, things like that, which was awesome. And then but if you have a more sophisticated team, you can get the less expensive package and kind of do it on your own. So a configurability like they offered us those options, which was nice. So in terms of the partnership and the support, again, it’s unlike other LOs that I have worked with. I actually know the names of the people on their support desk and they’re fantastic. They’re amazing. They know my name I’ve talked about oh look you just went to Fort Worth, that’s so cool. That’s not far from us. And so you build a relationship with these people who and they’re just there for you. They’re there. They help you. They talk through things. They’re supportive. I’m part of a key group where they’ve connected us, with administrators from other companies around. So we can actually sit there and talk and they come to us for ideas. Hey, what do you guys think about this? Or what do you think about this, and that’s a kind of sense of community that like I felt was almost dis not encouraged in with prior regimes I’ve worked with and I really love that I know I can get on the phone and call Mark if I need to. I don’t do that. But I could if I needed to write Bobby’s around the fact that I have easy access to people that run that build the LOs I use day in and day out. And I feel comfortable calling them by their first name and that they’ll respond to me, it’s been great. They really are all about building a community without doing big expensive events that just add to the cost of my doing it. I really like the way that thread the needle there and building a community, but doing it in a way that keeps their system very affordable.

 

Yeah, there’s so many things we could talk about that but I want to go back to talking about you launching this business, and the journey you’ve had over the last four years. What was things that you’ve experienced that you go, I did not anticipate this? Fortunately, you launched this thing at a particular time where you had such wonderful markets, and this and now the last 18 months has been a bit of a challenge to that. But talk a little bit about what are the things that went according to plan and what didn’t? And what are those things that did?

 

Yeah, absolutely. I would say according to plan, we were able to get rolled out on the timeline that we wanted to that to me was probably the biggest coup of the whole thing. We all know in this business. Nobody keeps anything quiet and secret in the fact that we were able to somehow stand up a company in secret with warehouse banks investors at full LOs accounting system bla bla bla bla bla bla bla, with without being caught and doing it on our timeline. Honestly, that was to me like a miracle of God in and of itself, right, it was so great that we were able to get that accomplished in this business. That being said, I think obviously, the pandemic, we did not expect that and we went live January 3rd 2020. We on boarded 26 people for Max’s team. So literally overnight, we went from a company of three people to a company of almost 30 people, when and that was another great thing about Byte is having to train 30 people in one day, some process or some underwriters loan officers, closers, funders, we had to train all these people literally in a couple of days, so that they could just start doing loans and access team as a high producing team. We locked five loans our first day going live, but it was that easy to teach people they were able to come in and learn so quickly, that helps make our ramp up hearing not so bad also. But then you go into the pandemic, right? If your plans are, OK, I’m going to start originating, then I’m going to go, I’m going to start as a best effort basis, then I’m going to go hedging, and then I’m going to do this and then I’m going to do that and you have a natural progression of things, then the pandemic hits, and now all of a sudden, everybody’s remote, and we’ve got more business coming in, then we know what to expect with and then the Fed drops rates to zero and right at the time we’re wanting to make that journey of flipping from best efforts to hedging and mandatory. There were no broker dealers that were willing to even talk to me, I will always love Jerry Levy, he spent an hour and a half on the phone with me and let me tell our story. And he gave me my first $10 million trading line. And that allowed us to start our hedging journey and then the warehouse, some of the warehouse banks started cutting capacity. And so that first year, were we trying to just get a business going sell loans that we did not have defects, make sure we were being compliant, making sure people knew how to use the system, all of that. Then you get all of these other things just in the broader economy, dealing with a pandemic dealing with these crazy interest rates, businesses, hedging, all of that was also thrown at us at the same time. And it’s the easy answer for me to say what went wrong, and ultimately, it went great. And we did great fundings and we shoved every single penny we made in the bank, we didn’t take anything. So we put it on the bank. And that’s because we knew this time was coming. And so that’s allowed us to sustain ourselves and still be in a really strong position today, even after the last 18 months.

 

I think that’s a really strong point. A lot of people spend during the good times they enjoy that they spend their earnings they do not put it away for the signs. This is a very cyclical market man. This has been such a pronounced reminder this last 18 months of just how severe things can turn and change. How’s business going today? How are you doing overall? How are you doing?

 

I’ve stopped drinking as much. I’m just kidding. I haven’t. I’m not a chicken counter. I am hoping for the best that November was the worst of it. I just went through all of our statistics yesterday. I do it every day. Yesterday. We’re up 80% month over month on leads. We’re up big on locks. Our pipeline is over 10 million more than it was this time last year. Locks leads by They’ve all been stronger than they have been. I’m a little concerned that about the bond market a little bit. But I think that it’s starting to feel like we’re coming out. And I don’t think it’s going to be a quick come out of it. But I’m hoping that we’re starting that climb back up to a more normal sense of the business.

 

You guys have been so successful. And I love the intentionality of this. I love how your career path intentionally got in the business, intentionally prepared yourself for this, you got attention, we got into some great companies starting with Option one, learn some basics, you continue to reach out to get some great and counsel and advice Andy Shell, a business partner tear dear friend of mine, I love that guy. I’ve won smartest brains in the mortgage industry out there. And it’s been just such a great asset to you as you’ve gone through this. And I think you just can’t surround yourself with enough good counsel, when it comes, especially in the markets that we’ve gone through here just recently, because those of us who have been at it for as long as we have been, do have bring a perspective. But it’s so refreshing to find something like you that you and Max had decided to make this decision to move in and open up your own business. So excited about moving for where do you see Loan people going in the future is the vision to become the biggest mortgage company? I think this is important, especially as I’m talking to so many new businesses that are starting up. What should they dream about? Is it the next two years, five years? Or is it important to have the big B-hag? The big hand hairy, audacious goal that’s out there? What’s your thoughts on that, Erin?

 

Yeah, so first, I just want to say I agree with you completely on Andy. He was literally the first phone call that I made when I knew we were going to do this. And I was like, Andy, I need your help. He’s absolutely fan fantastic. And I love that you use B hag, I actually use that with my loan originators every year when I talk about their business planning. And they’re forecasting. I’m like, Alright, what’s realistic? And then what’s your B hag? Let’s try to get there. But what can we realistically do? So I love that you use that expression as well. I think it’s different for everybody. Honestly, for us here at Loan people, we know that at a certain point, when you get to be so big, you lose your soul really like you’ll lose who you are, you lose your founding principles, you lose why you really did this in the first place. Unless the reason you do in the first place is to get super big and go public and move on. Great. That’s some people’s goals. But for us, we built something that we intentionally left other companies to come and build something that we believed in, to follow a philosophy. And so really, our goal is to be able to be big enough that we can surround ourselves with those people and people around the country originators and operators, both that follow our same philosophy and make really good livings for ourselves, right. And we don’t need to be $100 billion a month, but 5 billion would be great. That’s to me is a really nice size, where you’re not losing your sense of who you are. I love that I know everybody’s name at this company. I love it. I don’t get to talk to everybody every day. But I love that I know everybody’s name. And to me, I want to continue in a way that allows us to stay true to our founding principles, but still grow big enough to where we’re able to make good livings and do good things for our communities.

 

That’s awesome. How can people get a hold? Do they want to learn more about you and your business and possibly join your company? What’s the best way for them to reach out to Erin?

 

Yeah, it’s my email address is [email protected].  I am constantly on that email and happy to respond. So that’s really the quickest and best.

 

Thank you so much for taking some time out of your busy day to join us and sharing the journey that you’ve gone through literally from the very, very beginning and forgotten that you’re at Option one, New Bob. So Well, that brings back some wonderful, great memories from my days in Southern California. We wish you the very best you, Max and continued success. And I know that as soon as the one guy say see you at the top I’m certainly we will be seeing you at the top you’re continuing to grow. And kudos to you and your success and hope we can stay in touch. I’d love to have you back. There’s so many parts of your story that I want to go back and dive deeper into and share. Especially as we’re seeing a new season opened up where so many new companies are forming because they’ve become disillusioned with the lack of vision and how problems are handled. What I like about what’s in the middle of your name is people and it’s a loan people but it’s people it’s a people based solution. So way to go Erin wish you manage the very best thanks for jumping in a call with me today and the audience.

Anytime for you sir. Thank you so much.