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Hello and welcome to the Mic DUP show. This is the ultimate hub where the hidden stories behind the industry come to life. I'm Mike Kelleher. The other Mike right now is over in China right now actually visiting family. So yeah, crazy right? So usually we'll say the mics in every episode. Dive deep into the entrepreneurial spirit, the strategic insights and the breakthrough innovations that build the world's greatest mortgage companies. So whether you're advancing your career, scouting for industry leaders or exploring opportunities in fintech and prop tech, you're in the right place. Get ready to unlock the story behind every mortgage. And this one is actually very special. That intro really I like to say we created this show for those who cannot make it to conferences out there nationally. I always joke whether you're so talented they maybe don't want you out there. But when you're out at these conferences, this is the type of guest. Chad Turner, founder and president of Society Mortgage. It's a multi state mortgage banker and he really prides himself on serving the underserved home buyers. He has USDA roots which we are an acronym free show. So USDA's United States Department of Agriculture, amazing loan programs if you can qualify for them and maybe we'll even get into to what that is. But Society Mortgage is one of the fastest growing IMBs. It's if you search by IMBS through what we've gone through in the mortgage industry, it just keeps rising, I argue top hundred, but it certainly could be higher. And what's interesting is he has come up with a, a hybrid model but a lot of it is built around consumer direct and I think if more in this industry for you listeners out there, it is very hard for companies to have a mission statement that consumers just are driven towards. They typically need salespeople out there driving the business. So Chad, you've been doing it for a long time. Can you. And you're always like available, which I think is super cool. Is that part of your DNA and how you sort of were able to sustain such a long period of time in this industry?
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I win through relationships, I win through connections. You know, me and you have had the opportunity of knowing each other what four or five years just through contacts, whether it be we saw each other at the parties or you know, me and you sat together and had a quick chat and this is what it's all about, you know, absolutely. It's about profitability and who can grow and scale their business the right way and I'm all about all that stuff. But the True wins in life come from relationships like me and you have. And so, yeah, I think that's part of the DNA. I think that when I started five years ago, going to conferences, I didn't know what to expect or what my purpose was, but now I understand the purpose. And through relationships, I mean, think of the people I've met, just knowing you, that you've introduced me to. And so I think that it kind of has a. A web of connections that you get outside of just the conversations you're having directly. And so it's been a. Yeah, I think that's part of who we are. You know, show up at the end. We're. We're one of the very few lenders anymore that even shows up at these conferences, especially some of the more obscure ones. So, yeah, we enjoy them.
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And especially somebody at the top coming and not delegating it to someone else to go. And so you've grown. In 1996, I think you. You went in the business with. It's called Crefco, and now you've built Society Mortgage. And I think with your personality. Can you just explain. And you say relationships, maybe the growth of having your first assistant all the way up to now 102, you know, making that jump from 100 to 200 employees and what it's like managing people
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100%. I wish somebody would have sat me down and told me, here's the path, here's the journey, here's how you can succeed in this business. The negative about me as an entrepreneur is I never worked for anybody. So even in the mortgage space, I never worked as a loan officer prior to starting my own mortgage company. Prior to that, I never worked. I had an appraisal company. That was the only thing that I actually ever did. But I never knew how to do appraisals before I started my appraisal company. So I'm an entrepreneur, but I don't, you know, I don't always have the trade or know how when we start these things. And so, yeah, in 1996, we started Crefco Consumer Real Estate Finance Company, DB8S Society Mortgage Now. And I'll get to why we changed that, but the, you know, back in those days, you know, we were very much a part of the refinance activity. And, and somewhere around the 2000 mark, I just decided I didn't want to go on the ups and down swings that come with refinance. You're rich one year, you're broke the next kind of few. And I just didn't Love that. We moved to purchases in about 2000 and in about 2003 or so we decided we're going to do a consumer direct model which is because it's self sourced business is good but. But it's only as good as your last meeting or your last loan that you did with somebody. And I just wanted more control quite frankly. And so we moved to consumer Direct. To this day I don't think that there's any other group that does it quite like we do in terms of the size for consumer direct purchases. But it's been a journey. When we got into it, we spent the first 10 years of doing consumer direct purchase where we would hand out loans to realtors and they would just steal our leads. We didn't know how to secure them. You know, at that time there wasn't some of the groups that we have out there now that help you secure the relationship. And so. But you know, it took us all the way up until, gosh, it's been seven years now since we switched to Society Mortgage branded. And we did that because we moved from broker to banker. But the thing I was telling you about that I wish somebody would have sat me down and told me, Michael, is what that journey should look like. How do I get to the next step, you know, and you know I like starting with non delegated, like getting a warehouse line for the first time. These things were big and scary that I never realized. Once you get to the other side, nothing's ever as scary as it looked before. But that whole broker to banker model, you know, starts with non delegated. We then move to delegated. When we moved to delegated Michael, we had no idea what we were doing. We was Covid. So we couldn't afford any underwriters because underwriters were at a premium during that time charging 2, 250 all day for a salary. We started out with Philippines level underwriters cause the only thing we could afford at the time, it was a disaster because at the same time we were trying to get FHA to accept us delegated and they were looking over our stuff saying, you guys have no idea what you're doing. I think was the words that they used. And so just that entire journey of like, of getting to that next side of delegated, of understanding the hedging business, which MCT has been a gem in terms of getting us into that side of things. But it's been a journey and one in which really you fight through your fears to figure out what's next step. But everything has to be onward and upward. And I spent 20 years probably quite frankly and in full transparency and fear of just like saying I'm just going to stay a broker and do what I know how to do until it was time to. Maybe I grew up after a certain period of time. But yeah, it was a, it's been a great journey and most of it has been consumer Direct. You know, two or three years ago I think it's been. Yeah, two, two and a half years ago we took on a branching group up in the, in the Chicagoland area All, all the Midwest. It was our first foray into, you know, distributed retail model. That's been a fantastic thing for us. Not they do great production. They're a team that fit really well with what we were doing and matched our production. So they were doing plenty of production. But I the beauty came from what, you know, we would have guys on the consumer direct floor and we have 40 or so odd guys downstairs. Most of them are Gen Z or Millennials that are new to the business and we're showing them the way to get them. It's a grind. They spend 18 to 24 months doing that stuff. And to get them to stay here and have high tenure, we needed another journey. And I think that branching group helped us do that where we're able to stand up. And as you were alluding to earlier, the hybrid model where we take this group that's used to getting, let's call it six to eight transfers a day, we reduce that to three transfers and teach them how to do self sourced business. Especially in an industry or an economy like today, being able to work both sides of the fence has been a tremendous success in terms of that model. And then after that we can get into the next piece of it. But then after that, getting into the branching standalone branching piece is, is the journey we currently have for our consumer direct loan officers.
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I love that a career in mortgage is still something the entire industry is trying to find its identity on decades and decades later of how to sell that story of what a loan officer can do besides owning a company. I want to go back to and I think you serve the underserved, but the underserved didn't really two ways. And it hits home to me when people around here ask me for advice. I haven't been a loan officer since 2012, but I did love the fact that you could pull up a USDA map in Massachusetts and try and find maybe random places down in the Cape that were considered agriculture and educate that if you have A certain. If you can thread the needle on your debt to income ratio, you can actually do no money down and have more cash to survive. And for those low to moderate income, I wouldn't say maybe low to moderate income, but a certain median income level, that cash can go a long way. And at the same time, and this is me on my soapbox of the old generation versus the new, I feel like I'm right in the middle. That bridge it. I'd say a microcosm of some of the things maybe wrong with our country is maybe the lack of appreciation of farmers and the ability of them to get our food and what they do. And that's just as an important of a job, as a working for space X, you know, in the grand scheme of things. So you're, you have a passion for usda, you're helping on the agricultural side, but you're also helping people that just fit this. They don't have to be farmers, they just have to buy a land that fits this mold. Can you tell our, you know, listeners maybe who are beyond the industry, we have over 500 active listeners now. Every week, somebody stumbles upon it on a podcast. Give us a subscribe, let's get to 600. What this USDA loan is and why it has inspired you and been one of the pillars of society. Mortgage.
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Yeah, it started geographically. You know, we're down here in South Florida. And if we date this back 20 years, mid 2000s, nobody had a USDA product like the banks that we know, the IMBs that we know that all carry USDA. Nobody did back then. Back then it was Chase Rural Housing out of Deer Beach, Florida, which is 30 minutes up the street. And they would come knocking on my door and saying, hey, you need to sell this product. We had no idea what it was and that's how it all got started. And then once we kind of caught that USDA bug, there was a period of time in the late 2000s, early 2010s where it was 100% of our business is what was USDA. USDA loans. But to clarify what that is, and you alluded to farmers. You know, unfortunately a farmer can't get this loan. A USDA loan is a. Is. Yeah, it's kind of misleading in a way. But it's for residential only. It can't have any income producing elements. So if you have a horse barn that you're using to do whatever with, you can't do it. It's not USDA eligible. This is really for people that are outside of suburbia that want to buy housing and that's it. And they offer a zero money down option strictly based on geography and income. So if you live in, you know, outside of town and your income isn't too great, and it goes all the way up, depending on how many dependents you have, well past six figures that you can still earn and qualify for this type of loan. But that's the purpose of it was to get more people buying in rural communities. And, and, but yes, the clarity is no income producing elements can, can qualify for this type of loan.
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So in a distributed retail model, you would typically partner up with a real estate agent that knows more than I do about usda. It must be even harder on a consumer direct where you now have them working with you, trusting you. You need to go out and find maybe a real estate agent you've never met that is aligned with the usda. What was it like building that Rolodex to connect? Was it failing forward? Is there a directory like yellow pages of realtors that know usda? How does that work?
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It's a great question, Michael. And our entire consumer direct model was built on that, was built on taking in a lead that we farmed. Somebody that has an interest in buying a USDA home, for instance. And then in any town USA. And we're approved in 47 states. So we're approved in most of the United States, but we're not, we don't know everybody. We're a Fort Lauderdale company at the end of the day. But if we have to go to Anytown USA to help this borrower qualify or find a home, you know, we have to have some trust there. And we probably spent the first 10 years of our, of our existence in the consumer direct space getting 80% of our leads stolen. We would hand over lead to, you know, John Doe realtor and then he would tell us, well, they went local. And you would say, well why would they go local? We gave them the best rates, the best, like what, what, what's going on here? And so that was a, that was a learning curve that really challenged this system and still does to this day. But what you have now is you have groups out there now that will help. They have a marketplace or a network of realtors that have been vetted that play by the rules, you know. And so, you know, in a sense we send ours to news it, but there's plenty of other good groups out there. And newsip has a network of realtors all over the country, all fully vetted and we have all the Confidence in the world. When we send that pre approved buyer over to newseb, they're going to align us with an agent that's going to help the transaction. So it's a good question that you asked because we've spent a lot more losing than we have winning. Just connect and you wouldn't think that was the case, but if you think about how distributed retail and the local self sourced leads are built, well, everybody's trying to pay each other back. I'm trying to give you a lead. You're trying to give me a lead. So if I get this Internet lender that sends me a lead, well, I'll just hand that lead over to my buddy that I have a beer with down at the bar and tell me I got this from this. See if you can beat the rates and fees. That seems like normal operating procedure for them, but for a group like us it was a challenge.
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Yeah, it's like I'm never going to see them again. So Tom here,
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the only lead I get exactly.
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But I could see where news it provides value beyond the first layer in the consumer must notice when the real estate agent and the loan officer are on the same page and actually talking from the same book. And I know it's not always just obviously prime borrowers you're dealing with. Society represents probably a lot of trust because they are discouraged. They maybe went and got somebody green behind the ears, gave them a structure of a loan that didn't fit what they were able to do. Almost ready to quit. They come to you and you're able to coach them and then find a real estate agent that appreciates the fragileness of this borrower that almost went to renting, now went to buying. How do you keep your loan officers like under that vision, under that passion? I think like town hall drops. Like I think you at one point, I don't know if you still do it, but you were getting on every morning and I feel like that changed the culture for a while. You were holding yourself accountable. How do you motivate people to get over the nose and you know, really win those yeses and help those borrowers?
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Yeah, a couple good points you make there. So when you think about, you know, the, when we send the other good thing about a new zip or a marketplace that's built like that is we would call a local agent. Any town. We don't know, I mean if they're any good, they, we talk to them, we try to vet them, but we don't know. But when we send a new zip the other thing that helps is they're fully vetted as being a fantastic real estate agent. So it's like we know when we're pushing this off to the consumer that the consumer is going to get a great experience and it's just a win for everybody, especially the consumer in that situation. So I wanted to touch on that. Yeah, you mentioned during COVID if I showed you the office, we have 50 or 60 odd people in here, all in stand up desks, all banging the phone. We're here eight to five, Monday through Friday. So it's always a little different when people come in here. Like I haven't seen a mortgage company like this in a while because we're kind of traditional in that sense. But during COVID everybody was out of home and I wasn't used to that. I'm an emotional guy, as you know, just from the conference. I like to talk and figure out how you're doing and what's going on. And I didn't have that. And so during COVID I started doing what's now known as the Good Morning Society where it really, quite frankly, Michael was silly. I started doing jumping jacks to try to motivate them, like, come on guys, more like pep rally type stuff. And then it just turned into, well, okay, I'm going to do this every day and so no more jumping jacks. But I just try to tell them I can't think about what I'm going to say and I can't rerecord because I'm trying to give my staff the most transparent me. And I think what that does too, especially as we're now over 200 employees, it just closes the gap of the us versus them. We're all in this together. What's Chad thinking? And it allows me to just diffuse on what's on my mind at the time. And so that that good morning that I do every morning has been a staple for who we are. And lastly, you mentioned that the other thing that we do is a town hall each month we call it our ball drop. And it's a celebration on the first Friday of every month. If you're ever in town, the first Friday, we'd love to have you. And we just have a party. We have food, we have drinks and we talk about life and mortgages and what's going on. And the most important part for me, we're giving away prizes. But the best part for me is the anonymous Q and A that I get. So it's a town hall where everybody in the company I'll probably get 20 questions and some of them are difficult, some of them aren't fun and I don't ever prescreen them and I answer them. And this isn't about me, this is about getting to what people are actually thinking. When you have an anonymous situation, somebody's going to ask something that they wouldn't ask maybe if it was them raising their hand. And so it just allows me to dig really deep on people's concerns. Some of them aren't, some of them are applauses for like, hey look, I want to tell you that I'm having the best time. We had one person say, this is the last place I'll ever work. You know, we get plenty of that positivity too, but some of it's not positive and that's a good place to address it. So everybody hears from me and from some of the other leaders how we feel about the question being asked. So yeah, those are some DNA parts to us as society mortgage that may differ from others, but something I'm proud of.
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It sounds every time I talk to you that where you differentiate yourself from other great leaders that I speak to is you have a amazing ability to have clear sight to, to you clear sight to the top, no matter what their role is. And then once they're at the top, it's very clear what your North Star is. So it's easy to get to you and then get to where we're going. And when I was listening to you earlier, I was like, we can definitely do a spin off show. And we've done it in the past, like the journey of getting from warehouse lines, Dell, non dell. And you know, and you hear so many people going to broker today. But then when I hear like a quote I looked up where you talked about, you said remove the friction, Clear underwriting, fast turn times, dedicated processing on time closings. Everything's done in house. And I love this part. And as a boutique outfit we have fewer layers in red tape. So it's, it's, you have on the sales side the, you know, the differentiation of an amazing experience. But on the back of the house you have still that boutique type feel and you couldn't do that if everything wasn't under your purview. So the argument to not go to broker is maybe it doesn't match the mission, the North Star that you're trying to tell your teams. I think you're doing a great job there. Can you just talk about how you look at operations? And when that aha moment came that really changed According to that quote, you know, beginning to end, we're going to make it perfect.
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Yeah, I will. I'm going to start with. There was a gentleman that me and you both know, and I won't call it out by name, but he. He was doing a presentation at Digital Mortgage, and, And it was about, you know, the. The mergers and acquisition was really the topic at hand. And he wanted to know my opinion. We're on a flight both texting back and forth, and he wanted to know my opinion on, you know, big guys eating up to small guys and what are my opinion of that. And I told him, I said, it's probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but it's not about how big you are going forward. It's not about whether you're a broker or a banker. I like banker. Having been broker way more, I like banker just for the control. I spent the first 20 years of my mortgage existence making excuses for people that may have not have done things the way that I would have done them. Not said they were wrong, just wasn't aligned. And sometimes it's hard to be that middle person all the time. And I like knowing exactly who we are, so I know exactly what to put out to the community. And so I like. I like banker better in that regard. But back to that, back to that. The gentleman that was asking me that, I wrote back and I said, I think that as we go forward in this thing and what's best for the consumer is getting this, the cost of a loan down as much as you can. Right? That's the goal. If I can. If I can get a cost of the loan down in a process that's easy and frictionless for the client. And as you were alluding to a boutique feel rather than a big corporate feel, which sometimes can feel cold, I think that that's where you get the wins. And so it's size doesn't matter. It matters about process, and it matters about cost per loan. We're sitting there, historically speaking, Michael, you know, this MBA puts it out every year. What we're at $11,000 or $12,000 to do a loan in today's market. We pass that all on to the consumer. They have higher rates and higher fees because of it. Well, how do we change that? We change that through technology and through process. It's a race with AI coming and all the other technology we have coming. It's a race to see who can put up a $4,000 loan, a $5,000 loan, and the people that do. When you go to search your large language models and you say who's got the best rates or fees. I think that person is going to be the one that's sitting there winning a lot more than losing. And so I think that's the differentiator. Not the size but the process and the cost of doing the loan are going to be what separates the big from the small in the future of mortgages, in my opinion.
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I I think you just gave a big commercial for With AI coming and Grokbot coming and whatever you're, you're picking your horse behind. Having control will allow you to allow the winners to win. Whoever's going to win this game, it's probably going to come from a more controlled environment, but we'll see. You certainly mentioned you need technology to do it. Great segue. We're going to go and hear from a couple of the sponsors because this show has gotten to the point where we do need help from our sponsors to keep it going and keep getting great guests like Chad. So we'll be back on the other side of the break to hear more about society Mortgage.
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All right, we're back with Chad Turner, founder president of Society Mortgage. Just to take a pause real quick to go over the state of the mortgage industry. I'd love to hear your take on and this will piggyback on your view of the winners. But where do you see loan officer opportunity right now? Is it in somebody out of college and becoming a loan officer with tech? Is it an existing loan officer has a chance now maybe to shift to a more consumer direct model. But who's joining Society Mortgage? What are you building for? Can you just talk about what type of loan officers you believe are going to win and how society is trying to attract those
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100%. I want to start off by saying I watched all of those commercials just now and I and I loved it. Like I, I think I've out of the six or seven commercials, I think I'm on board with four of them and the other two or three I'm talking to. So you have good sponsors. I enjoyed each one of those little takes
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and I just saved you eight meetings for the next conference, right? That
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quickly. I'm good now. Yeah. But this is going to sound self serving and I promise you it is. And I'm always trying to make sure that I keep my power and ego in check. So this is not about me. It's about the rest of the world around me. I think that the future of mortgages needs to be at some level not fully consumer direct. I think that there's what when I Think about the last 20 years Michael. And I've been. I have not. There's plenty of people that have had growth and scale and have made a ton of money, more than I have. Plenty, 90% of people out there probably as I sat around and tried to learn how to do consumer direct purchase when nobody else wanted to do it. There's a reason they don't. It's very difficult to do. But I'm telling you as we sit here today, every single person including every distributed retail model that's out there needs to be considering consumer direct because there's no other way of cutting costs. There's no other way of getting your cost down unless you have a way of. Just like you're alluding to, we bring in brand new green people that we pay them a decent salary. It's not 150 basis points or 200 basis points or whatever everybody else is paying. It allows us to have cost controls that you don't get elsewhere. We have a distributed retail model. I'm not meaning to be a hypocrite with this statement but in a distributed retail model the problem is I have so many people layered into a comp plan that it's going to be very difficult for me to reduce that and get it down to a way that I can compete with the society mortgages or the rocket mortgages or the loan depots of the world. I think that becomes difficult. But when you asked me the question about the loan officer rather than the company that was more about the company, I think that the loan officer, the reason I say the consumer direct model is I think that the loan officer of if it's going to win of the future has to be a hybrid. It has to be some form of generating your own leads and your own activity whether through the company, on your own, whether that be through social media interaction like whatever your game is along with having some sort of self source business, I think that's the big win. And if I'm just doing self source I think I've got some problems by just doing consumer direct. I think that it's, you know, when you think about our journey for our loan officer, you know they're probably, they're probably on the floor 18 to 24 months then they're off to retail and the hybrid and then the goal is to put them on main street in Anytown USA so that they can build exactly what we have here and have 10 new consumer direct depending on the census of the town they're in and they can have teach them how to do retail in due time and just really organically grow the company in a very physical form where B I'm running to AI and to tech and all that stuff in one regard in the other regard I'm running to Main street because I very much want to be a part of the communities of the country. And yes maybe I'm going to be more rural maybe when I think of Main street I'm thinking 30 to 50,000 people not Main street in Fort Lauderdale kind of feel. But yeah I think that the world as we know it in the future has to have some tie in to marketing and Consumer Direct if you want to have some success in my opinion.
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Yeah and I I'll take it one deeper I think certainly you want like certainly Consumer Direct definitely works for anybody refinancing that has already gone through the mortgage process or or buying their second home and where maybe more of a distributed retail as you're starting to put it around is those first time home buyers that that want their handheld in person because they don't know just like you didn't know about warehouse and after you did it it became easy. One of the hybrid models I've seen work really well with with two lenders now is but it takes a lot. An old school loan officer has to let a centralized model call their past clients but they have this aha moment when the unobvious ones were buying a home didn't tell them yet and they were able then to refer to a real estate agent and they would it would have been too late if they had waited till the uncle told them at the barbecue they still would have got the mortgage and but so we do the core connection operations. We're now at retention. You hear a lot about servicing but you have this great view of being a purchase purchase shop which means there's really no servicing annuity. It's that relationship you talked about earlier on clients, realtors, referral partners. Can you just talk about your view of retention and of relationships and anything else that begins with our
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yeah, it's tough. The servicer is going to win and for the little guys that don't have a servicing or don't have the ability to have a servicing portfolio, you're just not going to retain. You can have CRMs and you can have all sorts of little tools that are helping you do that. We don't we're still an originator without a servicing arm. So our goal is you know we're always just trying for the next new body and not taking not looking behind and finding out how we can make money on the, on the back end. And there's a benefit to that. It's the big win. And just so you know, I haven't solicited a refinance in over 30 years. I've never paid for a refinance lead on purpose. I think it's the drug of the industry. I think that the reason that people don't get into purchase on a consumer direct level is because it's easy for us. We take a green loan officer doesn't know any better and we tell them, hey, you're going to get this lead, you're going to nurture it and in about 70 to 90 days you're going to get a closing out of it and you're going to get paid. Right? That's hard. It's also hard for a company depending on their size to say, I'm going to spend X amount of dollars every month on marketing in order to get paid 90, 120 days down the road. That's difficult. You have to have a lot of patience for it. So it's not as quick and easy as the refinance can be and therefore I think a lot of people stay away from it. I wanted to touch on one other thing and you didn't ask this question, but it just bears talking about, which is, you know, everybody's. There's a question that comes up, Michael, in my town hall meetings every single month for the past six months. Are we're in fear of our jobs? Should we be? I get that question every single month. And I, I'm a transparent guy. I'm not a person that, I don't know how to say things politically correct. I'm not built that way. So I'm just trying to give it to you straight. And I tell all of them, yes, you should be, you should be in fear what they've seen, Mike. But I tell them this, I tell them, if you want to protect yourself, you have to be become. You have to be beyond reproach. What that means is I can't afford to lose you because you're so good. That means you got to be in the top 50 percentile of the company and your department or whatever the case may be because AI is coming and it is going to chop up jobs. It will, it already is doing it. And where we're at today, it's. We're finding it more on the overseas side just because it's the lowest hanging fruit for what we're trying to do from a process standpoint but we used to have a ton of loas that we don't have anymore that would make calls for us because we have a very good company called Cella AI that does it for us. We have just a great group of people that we met in IMB Jacksonville. They're now known as Copper Lane. And Copper Lane helps helped us so much in between. Like not this out of the box AI. We've tried them all. I don't like it as well. When I met those, those guys and girls in Jacksonville, they said can we come to town and can we spend time in your office and can we learn your process? And I said sure. So they spent a month in my office, went back to Silicon Valley where they, where they're from and they, and they developed a very specific process of how we go about it. But, but when we instituted that, it took away all of our processors. We don't have processors on the consumer direct floor now. We have no loas, no processors in those last six months. That's the way it's been. And it's all because AI is bringing in tools that allow you to do more with less. When people get afraid of AI, I say you should be. But I can promise you that the best loas here, the best processors here still have jobs. It's just you got to get better. You have to be good. I just wanted to touch on that. I get that question asked me so much in terms of the AI component.
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And I think that's. That was an awesome answer. And I think. And I met the group Copper Lane at the AI summit. Fantastic people. Ones you'd want to cheer for. But so most people would replace processors loas. If you're saying you can just replace them, from what I hear from you, you found another place to put them because they made themselves big vocab word for me. We'll call it irreplaceable to you. Correct me.
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Okay.
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And. But that tells me you're in it for the long run here or you would have just replaced him. You saw somebody that's so talented. Let me find somewhere else to, to put them. So my, my question is, and this one's going to be maybe a difficult question, but what's one thing then you refuse to lose as society mortgage gets bigger.
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You broke up. Did you say refuse? What do I. Yeah,
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what's one thing you refuse to lose as AI gets more prominent and as society gets bigger, that is going to be your line in the sand for your culture.
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The tough one to answer and a really Good question. My goal post, Michael, and this is, you know, my goal posts are one underwriter and one loan officer doing 1,000 loans. Well, that's, that's rude, Chad. You're getting rid of all your people and you're just going to have, you know, this, that and the other thing happen sort of, you know, at the same time, I want to get to 400 loan officers in the next couple years. And, you know, at some level, there's going to be a curve to what my expectations are, where I'm going to be hiring and hiring and hiring, but the efficiencies are going to come where I. I won't have to hire as much, but that's where we're heading. There was a good influencer that I listened to online, Mike, when he said that. You look at AI like a barbell. On one end of the barbell, you have a guy that's just going to grab a flip phone and run off to rural America and say, get me out of this. I'm not trying to win this rat race. Then you got the other side of the barbell where everybody's, everything AI charging at it all day long. And. And he said, if you're anywhere in between, you're dead. That's just the way it is. So either you just give it all up or you chase it. And for me, I'm in the race and I'm chasing it with everything that I have because I think there's a place for it. It's not about replacing humans. It's about replacing humans that aren't getting the job done. And I think that that will always be. If you think about the history of time, this is going to sound maybe raw, but in the history of time, the weak get called. They just do. How do we win that battle? You get better at your craft. You spend more time on your craft becoming beyond reproach. And when you do that, no matter if you're in the mortgage business or any other business, you now are at a place that's safe. But until you get to that point, you got to grind. You got to put the time in and the work in. And so
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with that, with, with that insight and that perspective, and that's something, you know, you started in 19. This is the final question. You started in 1996. You've had maybe learn that because our industry goes through huge changes, huge cycles. The next one is what you just described, which is coming at us fast, and it is going to be another change. What's one lesson you would give To a young founder of a small brokerage today, that is at the very beginning of the path that you're on. Or maybe just a young loan officer that you can tell can't help but be an entrepreneur. What is that piece of advice? When they get up today,
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there's no replacing. This is going to sound so old. You know, it's going to show my, my, my true 57 year old age. There is no replacing hard work. There just is. I don't care how smart you are, how talented you are, you, you have to put in the work, you have to grind it out. When you think about us as a company, Michael, going through the recession of 2009, going through Covid where we couldn't make any money at all for at least six months of time, there's been a lot of these transitions that we've had to get through and how did we get through them? Hard work, that's it. You pick up the phone and you start banging the phone and you make enough calls that it all works out. There's just no shortcuts to success. When you're starting off in a new broker broker or you're starting off as no loan officer, it's not about who's the best salesperson. It really isn't. It's about who's willing to work the hardest. That's it. And if you're able to put in the time and you're able to grind it out and you're able to master the craft that you're doing, then you're going to win. No matter what your previous skill set was, no matter what your upbringing was. That's the difference maker. And it sounds so old school, but it holds so true even in today's day and age. Put in the time. And if you're not willing to do that, then be prepared for what may come.
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Thank you. As a nice old soul way getting to hear. You know you had your USDA beginnings. You obviously care very much about the underserved borrower mission. You've taken that mission and you've grown and grown and grown even the past year, going from 100 to 200 employees every month with a ball drop along the way. And now you've given us a vision of the future where AI and human relationships and connections matter. And I think we are all better off for this past 45 minutes of listening to you. Chad, I really appreciate you coming on. Have a wonderful day, a wonderful rest of the year and we look forward to following society mortgage throughout 2027 and beyond.
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Thank you. May I close with one item?
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Yeah.
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I'm getting ready. I'm leaving. I told you I had to leave 10 minutes prior to the hour because I need to go to my EMDR therapy. Right. And I tell everybody this in my good mornings. And that's why I want to close on this, because it's something that's dear to my heart, is we all. Every day we wake up and we have to fulfill certain buckets. I got to make enough money, so I got to fulfill my financial bucket. I need to make sure that my physical health is good. So you want to work out a few times a week. Right. In order to stay active. And I think spirituality is good, whether you believe in God or whether you believe in. For me, it's more stoicism and Buddhism, but I think you need some foundational pieces, but the one that nobody ever latches onto. And I've had macrodosing mushroom experience that has helped me. And I've had therapy, which I do two hours a week. We break ourselves, Michael. From the age of 5 to 15, we break ourselves. And you can ignore it and pack that stuff all the way and it's going to come out whenever it wants to. Or you're going to just take substance abuse to try to mask the pain. Or you do the work and you go show up and you talk about your feelings. And it's just one of those things that it has a stigma attached to it. And I want to erase that stigma and say we all need to spend as much time on mental health as we do physical health. So I have insurance. I've had two different insurance, and they all fully paid for these types of things. So I leave you with that. I want everybody. We all have these things that we're juggling and trying to do. And I would incorporate mental health, not because maybe you need it, because we all need it. We all need somebody to talk to. I'm going to close out with one of the things. Sorry for taking this last bit of time, but I couldn't be more proud of you. And I mean that. I mean that. I met you a long time ago and I've just seen your growth as a human being. Not the things that you're doing, but as your voice has gotten louder. It's been special to watch knowing, just knowing you as a. As a person that I always enjoyed talking to and. And having this platform to be able to. In LinkedIn in general, with the writings that you do. Just proud of what you become.
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I appreciate that. Thank you so much. You got me blushing here.
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No, that's okay. Yeah.
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If you're listening on the audio podcast, we appreciate you guys listening as well. And you can visualize me blush blushing. Thank you, Chad. Appreciate it.
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You're very welcome.
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I want to let you get on to to and I couldn't agree more with, with the, especially as an entrepreneur, it's very lonely at the top and you got a lot of, a lot of room in between those ears. So thank you for the reminder.
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Absolutely.
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Thank you for joining us on this journey into the heart of mortgage innovation. Every mortgage has a story, and we're here to help you write yours. If you enjoyed today's insights, please subscribe, leave a comment, share it with your network and connect with us on social media. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries and uncovering the stories that drive our industry forward.
