Tim Braheem: Year to date, it is a mix of 28 percent Realtor, 57 percent past client, and 14 percent, what I call center of influence, accountants, stockbrokers, and 1 percent misc. Last year was much higher for Realtors and center of influence but much lower for past clients. Past clients were at 22 percent. This year with the refi boom, my past client database and contact management system is really paying off.

Boni: Have you changed your marketing strategy, given the market conditions?

Tim: Well I haven't done as much marketing. I don't do any business in a direct marketing type capacity anymore. I use to do an awful lot of telemarketing, which is how I built my business and my database in the first place. About four years ago I just kind of turned the spicket off, and now all of my business is by referral. My marketing strategies remain the same - I hit my existing database 8 times a year. But I have probably done less marketing this year, than in the past because I have been so busy. So I'm not out there setting up meetings with accountants and Realtors and like I normally would.

Boni: How did you get started in the mortgage business?

Tim: I got started when a friend told me he was doing refinances and making good money, and thought I would be good at it. I committed to working full-time 40 hours a week as an understudy of his but didn't get paid for it. For 90 days I treated it just like a job. I showed up at 8:30am and left at 4:30pm.

Then I would go to my night job at Vons' Grocery Store, and work until 1:00am. That is how I learned everything that there is to learn!

I think you are always going to be a much more productive and successful person if you're an entrepreneur and have no limitations. I think that working for a bank, for instance, sets too many limitations. You get caught up in kind of an "employee" mentality, rather than an independent, contract or entrepreneur mentality.

In this business there are very few formal training programs and most loan officers never make it out of the starting block before they have to get out of the business all together. They are scrambling to try and earn a living, day one. Even if you are extremely successful it is going to take you 60 days to get your first paycheck from the day you start. So you have to go 60 days minimum without any money - in most cases many, many more weeks than that.

What ends up happening is the loan officer cuts corners and develops bad habits, because they are working out of desperation, rather than working from a perspective of being able to be patient and doing all of the right things to build their business correctly. It is this lack of a training system within our industry that creates a significant separation between the masses and the "elite."

There are a lot of loan officers that do two to three deals a month because they are still struggling to get out of the starting block, in many cases two to three years into the business, because they were never taught correctly and they are not building long term relationships.

If somebody is starting in the business it is critically important that they understand that if they can, kind of "moonlight" it, and have some income coming in while they are going through the process of learning the trade - it will be of great benefit to them.

Boni: You said that you built your business initially by telemarketing? Would you elaborate on that a little bit?

Tim: I did a lot of telemarketing and direct mail when I first started. The company I was working for was doing a lot of inserts into the Los Angeles Times, Sunday edition. They split the cost with me, so I would pay around $500.00 and I would have 15,000 flyers go out in the LA Times. And that got my phone ringing - I did that for about a year and half to two years.

Then when we came out of the lazier year of 1994 the direct marketing campaign I selected was telemarketing. I found it to be far more penetrative than direct mail. By that time, direct mail was over saturated and stale and telemarketing was a very new thing. Now, telemarketing is stale, and people hang up on telemarketers all of the time.

But for about a year and half I literally worked ridiculous hours, I worked about 70 hours a week. I would work all day on my loans, and then at night from about five to six o'clock at night until ten, I would go upstairs in the office where all of my telemarketers were, put my headset on, and when they would get a hot lead they'd transfer it to me.

We would call it "floor time on speed" - floor time in the real estate industry is when you take on calls and this is like hyper calling, you constantly get calls transferred to you. The amount of benefit that I gained from that, in learning how to present myself and counter objections, and develop scripts and dialogues that would be beneficial to me long-term, was unbelievable!

Boni: When you look at other originators who are brand new in this business, what mistakes do you see them making?

Tim: They just kind of wing it and it still shocks me to this day to realize the problem is more from a mental perspective than anything else. You can learn all of the tools and techniques of being a good loan officer, how to read a rate sheet, how to quote rates, all of that, but what in many cases cannot be taught or is difficult to teach, is the proper mentality.

And that mentality is everything from not expecting your company to do everything for you, to treating it like Tim Braheem, Inc. Todd Duncan said something a long time ago on a tape I was listening to which had a profound impact on me, "that critical mindset shift is for a loan officer to think of things along the lines of 'I am not a loan officer in business, I am a business man that happens to be a loan officer.'" That very subtle shift in thinking is very, very important.

I don't want to sound overly critical but that is the big problem that comes to mind when I talk to bank loan officers for instance, because most bank loan officers think like an employee, and their company does everything for them.

It kind of creates a lazy minded mentality, rather than somebody who is out there trying to break holes in the ceiling above them, and escalate themselves to higher levels. So, that coupled with the mentality that many loan officers have which is a transactional mentality - they think about the deal and nothing else - "I need to close this loan."

If you look at an accountant for example - their client base consists of the client, and then the client's sister, their kids and maybe even the grandparents. Well that's a totally different mindset than many loan officers have. Accountants are taught in school to think "relationally" rather than in a transactional way because an accountant makes their money over time by building up their client base via referrals, and then they get this repeat business year in and year out that is associated with doing the tax return for the client, and then they make $250.00 off that person every year.

Most loan officers don't think of "what am I going to do for this client two years from now?" In many cases they are not looking at things from the perspective of "down the road." The great loan officers, the ones who do the big volume, think relationally rather than transactionally. I think that is a really important mental shift that a lot of loan officers need to make. I think that my business this year is the best indication of that type of thinking - 57 percent of my closed loans - about 600 loans are from past clients.

I had a guy call me up a couple of years ago trying to get me to sell Priamerica Insurance to my clients and said, "Tim, the problem with the loan business is you don't have a residual income, like an insurance agent, you don't have people who renew." That is wrong, you do have people that renew by coming back to you and referring their friends and family to you if you do a wonderful job for them.

Boni: Do you think that veteran loan officers make any different mistakes than rookies?

Tim: I think the risk that a veteran loan officer is always faced with is staying hungry; I think that you can get lazy as a veteran loan officer. Right now is not the time to be blowing off your real estate agents and accountants; right now is the exact time to be pursuing new real estate agents. Yet most veteran loan officers are so caught up in getting all the refinances closed, that they are not thinking about March, April, May and June of next year, when there probably won't be as many refinances, and they will be needing those real estate agents. I guarantee you that will be the that exact time when everybody else is going to go and hit up those real estate agents, and you are just going to look like everybody else.

Boni: If you had a son or daughter entering this business, what advice would you give them?

Tim: Be patient; don't cut corners, it really all begins with building long term relationships with clients. Anything good comes through hard work. You are not going to be great at this if you think of it as a part-time job. There is absolutely no substitute for wowing the customer and providing phenomenal customer service.

Everything must begin there, you could do all the great marketing things and have the greatest presentation and all of that, but if you don't do a great job on the service platform you are nowhere. You are just going to be constantly pounding the pavement, because that is where the referrals come from.

And last but not least is to practice your presentation over and over and over again. Most loan officers don't understand how important it is to evolve and constantly make their client presentation better. Most loan officers will do ten deals a month right now yet they may want to do twenty and they unfortunately they think, "How do I get twice as many leads?"

Maybe they are closing 25% of all leads that they get, which is a pretty decent ratio. So if they get forty leads a month and they close ten of them, and they want to go to twenty, they will think they need to get eighty leads.

What they don't realize is that it might just be a couple of sentences they might use in that initial dialogue every time that they talk to a new client. If they changed their presentation and made it more profound with more of an impact, they might get twice as many people to say yes, and therefore double their business by doing nothing other than subtly changing a few things that they are not saying correctly.

Boni: Talk a little bit about how you "wow" the client.

Tim: I used to "wow" the clients personally, because that is my strength and I think everybody has their own individual strengths. I certainly have a lot of weaknesses, but the one thing I do well is communicate. I'm pretty social and I have the ability to be type of a chameleon, meaning I could have an engineer in front of me at 2:00, and a marketing manager in at 4:00 and I realize right out of the gate that I need to treat these two people differently.

I did the initial wowing at the time of application by building a friendship with the client. I used to take a long time to process applications, at least two hours. By the time they walked out of there they thought of me as "Tim their friend" who happens to do mortgages. You have won the war, if you can get them to think that way!

When I started to take my business to a higher level and realized that I couldn't meet with all my clients, I met with very few of them actually, maybe 15 %. I realized that I needed to build a team around me and impress upon them the need to wow. The wowing that currently takes place is done mostly by my team.

I have managed to get them to buy into the vision of the big picture, and to understand it. Their long term job security and bonuses and things of that nature, even in the bad times, will be greatly insulated if we blow people away when we do their loan for them.

So we do everything from sending out personal handwritten note cards to people, to exercising just extreme patience with them when they have lots of questions even when we are busy.

I wow them personally to this day by trying to exceed their expectations in what I provide for them. Mortgage Coach is one of the great tools that I have to wow people.

When I speak to the client for the first time, I downplay everything; I am not interested in overpromising and underdelivering. I am interested in the opposite actually. I say to them "Let me do a little bit of research on some different loans, I'm not one who likes to throw a bunch of numbers at you over the phone because I believe that creates confusion. What I would like to do is take a little bit of time if you don't mind, to put together a comprehensive analysis of some different loan scenarios that might make sense for you. May I have your email address, and may I get back to you tomorrow?"

And I don't know if I have ever had anybody say no to that, because I am basically offering to work for them for free. And then I use Mortgage Coach and I usually get back to them that day, when they aren't expecting it until the next day. And then it is a far more complex and detailed analysis, taking everything into consideration, from term reduction to tax benefits.

I really have had many clients say, "Wow! This is great! This is more than I expected." I have a very, very good brochure that I send out to clients in the mail that really blows them away when they get it. It is kind of hard to describe, but my ex-partner designed it, did a spectacular job frankly and I am proud to say that I think it is the best brochure that I have seen in our industry.

I try to really sell my team and their strengths. I try to match up clients with processors on my team that I think match their personality. Those are all little components that add up to the "Big Wow." We never have a client go in to sign loan documents if their estimated HUD One has not been reviewed with someone in advance. Because I can't wow a client if they go in and are surprised by the amount of money that they need to bring in.

So just really thinking through the things that I would want if I were a client. I have used a mobile notary, who is absolutely fabulous. She basically works on my team at this point and my clients don't go to escrow to sign. She goes to their house to sign. That wow's people. They don't have to leave their family for 45 minutes, to sign all of these documents. They can do it in the comfort of their own home. So it is just the overall system.

Boni: How long did it take you to build the system that you have today?

Tim: Well, it's never finished. I think that is an important point, it needs to continually evolve. It's a constant work in progress. I think that's another thing that most loan officers don't take as seriously as they should especially with the presentation that I alluded to earlier. My presentation is so different now, from what it was two years ago. I have changed it, and I am constantly changing it.

Boni: Tim, what was your most successful marketing campaign?

Tim: The brochure without a doubt. It is very personal and it allows me to not meet with my clients and have them feel like they know me. That's very important. I am a tangible entity to them not just another loan officer. My newsletter is a very, very successful marketing piece as well. But I would say that my brochure, which cost me $7,500 five years ago, has made me more money than anything.

I made that money back in the first month. When a real estate agency asks, "Can you send me your card?" I don't send them my card I send them my brochure. When a client is comparing me to a couple of other loan officers, and the other two loan officers send their business card, and they get my brochure, I stand a very, very strong chance of getting that deal.

Boni: Do you do your own newsletter?

Tim: Yes, actually I write the whole thing at this point. I used to have other people write it, portions of it for me in other business fields like accountants, financial planners and what not. But, at this point I write the whole thing. And it is also very personal.

I use a lot of recipes because I like to cook and trivia questions, I have a section on "What's new with the Braheems" which is a little dialogue about what's going on with my family. When Anna went out on maternity leave a few years ago with our first child, I was sitting in my office one day writing the newsletter and one of my employees walked by and asked "What's wrong?" and I said "I can't think of the 'Did you Know,' for this quarter's newsletter."

"Did you know" is just a quick little section, like maybe the next newsletter will say, "Did you know the conforming loan movement has been raised to $300,700.00?" That is typically what I put in there. And she said "What about did you know that Tim and Anna are going to have a little boy?"

I said, "That's a good idea, that's something different, I like it." So that was the "Did you know" for that quarter. I had 37 return phone calls from clients congratulating me. And it was at that point that I realized they needed to know about me. I need to not be this robot loan officer; I needed to be a person to them that they will hopefully like.

So I spent the first half of my career, trying to get to know as much about my clients as possible, and now what I have realized, it's just as important, if not more important, for loan officers to expose who we are.

Boni: Who or what was the biggest contributor to your success?

Tim: My ex-partner, from a marketing perspective, Bill Hilstad. From an overall career perspective, my exposure through the Todd Duncan group has been invaluable. Todd provides a platform that allows loan officers to have access to so much information - it is just terrific!

Over the last year and half or so Barry Habib and Dave Savage have been very influential. Their two products, Mortgage Coach, and The Mortgage Market Guide have done huge things for my business and I use both of them religiously. They have allowed me to posture myself as a strategist and a financial planner that specializes in mortgages rather than just order taking loan officer.

Boni: If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your current business?

Tim: I would like to continue working towards making the business less dependent on me - to where it could run it with less of my time, so I can spend more time with my family and other projects that I would like to work on. I say that not from a perspective of somebody who's working any more than 40 hours a week, that is about how many I work. Yet I would like to get it down to about 20 and keep the same production level. That's very possible, but it requires me doing a better job of training my people so they are clones of me.

Boni: Is there anything else you would like to impart to loan officers everywhere who are aspiring to the kind of success that you have created?

Tim: You have to attach yourself to a passionate objective - know why you're doing this before you can be great at it. It needs to be a passion. About five years ago, when my accountant asked me what my long term retirement plan was, I told him I wanted to be retired by the time I was 40. He laughed at me.

He said, "You don't have any idea how expensive it is going to get when you have kids and all of these things." And I have just never forgotten that, it was a very nice thing that he did for me, I don't resent him for it at all. All he did was to inspire me to prove him wrong. And that has become my passion; to be able to not have to work at all by the time I am 40 years old.

So I can spend time doing things that I am passionate about on a personal level. I think that for any loan officer it doesn't have to be retirement - it could be impacting people's lives or owning their own business. You need to have a goal; it needs to be one that's not just a surface goal.

A lot of people who set goals for themselves, for which they don't really have a passion, need to really ask themselves, "Why am I doing this?" and "What is it that I really want from this?" And then once you have identified the real passion that you have for doing it, then you need to go for it.

After 12 months in the works Tim Braheem is excited about the recent release of the much anticipated LoanToolBox.com, it is the Mortgage Industry's first e-learning and training resource for loan officers. For a free demo of the product log on to www.Loantoolbox.com

• Setting Up the Next Deal
• Eloquently Labeling Your Competition as Unprofessional
• Addressing the Tax Benefit Issue and The Total Cost Analysis

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