Lead to opportunity for Mortgage

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this is mitch and welcome to the 1000 houses dot com podcast i'm here with luke shankula and he's where are you at luke i'm here out of san diego san diego beautiful san diego we have san diego-esque skies and uh temperature here in san antonio to texas today but that's only one day out of the year that ever happens the rest of the time it's just hot exactly so uh luke's looks in the mortgage business in the mortgage lending business and you know he's an entrepreneur he's learned how to scale more importantly he knows how to market and i think no matter what business you're in you have to market so we're going to talk to him a little bit about that and how he how he uh how he runs a marketing side of his business so luke how you been today i'm doing awesome i'm doing awesome thank you so much for having me man it's my pleasure to have you on uh so tell us a little background and then kind of how you got to here and then i want to jump into really i think i think marketing is where we're headed perfect perfect yeah so um how am i doing today or how am i doing in general oh no well how how did you how did you get to where you're at right now and yeah yeah so so um i will say uh the journey's been a little interesting so i do run a marketing company specifically for mortgage loan officers um however what got me here was i worked for a mortgage company i worked as an account executive for a lender um way back in 2016 uh 2017 january they laid me off uh it had been quite a bad experience and i was like you know what i'm gonna go off and do it on my own i try to just i tried to start a contract processing business and if you know anything about loans obviously that's the people that are detail-oriented and uh you know they they they're organized and guess what that just wasn't me uh so after doing two loans i was like never doing that again um and then i got my license to become a loan officer um i started running ads to or i started learning how to run ads for myself to essentially figure out or how to get leads for myself right so in that time i learned that i didn't really want to be a loan officer i wasn't in love with it but i had fallen in love with marketing and so you could say the rest is history the reality is the the next couple years were pretty uh up and down i didn't make very much money for i mean i would say really two years uh before i was really making any money i almost lost it all in uh you know 2019 i had gotten my biggest month in february of 2019 in uh april of the of the next april of 2019 i had lost about 60 000 in monthly recurring revenue uh within a six-week period and i almost lost it i was almost said hey you know what maybe i should go back to corporate maybe i should go back to doing what i did before uh but i wasn't in the cars i just wasn't going to do that again i basically promised myself that i was never going back to corporate so you know double back down you know continue to grow and you know here we are we're working with a little over 50 loan officers at the moment and you know just really loving it and and just growing right so it's been exciting and uh definitely an up and down journey though well i want all the listeners you know my book is my life in a thousand houses failing forward to financial freedom and it's a book about falling down and getting back up and about painting yourself in a corner so hard that you're not gonna come out unless it's gonna be the way you wanna come out and that's what you did you know i want everyone to to hear you backed yourself up in a corner you tried a lot of things that didn't work out you kind of kept morphing kept morphing kept morphing kept morphing right uh and kind of in in and stayed with what you really had a passion for and didn't give up on that passion to just get a paycheck because you needed some money well well i i will i will say there was a time there in november of 2017 that i did have to go back get a job uh from november of 2017 through april of 2018 and then i got laid off again so i got laid off twice in 14 months that second time i was like now i'm really never going back to corporate right so now i really have to make it work so you know that's a little part of the story i skipped past um but yeah you're right i was back against the wall i invested in a couple programs some training programs uh just about how to grow grow what i was doing grow business and um you know i was completely broke i told my wife i wasn't going to uh she didn't have to go back to work after the fall because she was uh she was a teacher so she i was like you're not gonna have to go back to work after the summer i mean um and i was like how is this gonna happen because you know as of like may i still was only making a couple grand a month which you know in san diego that's not even my mortgage payment right right right um those are some sleepless nights yeah yeah i will i will say there were some stressful moments um stressful moments uh and and like i mentioned in 2019 uh you know i had my best month and went down to like one of my worst months within about a six week period and got to be at about a hundred thousand dollars in debt uh and i was just like how am i going to get out of this i had no idea what i was going to do and it was funny because at that time instead of throwing in the towel i actually invested in in a mindset coach that cost me 1500 a month it wasn't a small investment and i didn't have the money but you know what i knew that that what needed to get me to that next level uh was to get my mind right and to understand you know what was holding me back from you really taking that next sort of leap and uh you know interestingly enough that really moved me through it all very smart person that changed my life said to me um if the water if the if the body gets just enough protein and just enough water and if the mind doesn't go it'll figure everything out no matter how bad it is but you got to keep your mind that was the key the key thing and so uh man i love your story so talk to me about marketing what did you discover about marketing uh when you're you're sitting there trying to get leads for yourself i guess to be a mortgage lender right am i got that yeah yeah yeah correct so um you know towards the beginning i was doing some stuff for myself as far as uh you know learning marketing right and so when i first got started it was like you know i was like i need to learn how to do this everybody was talking about facebook ads at the time i was listening to the podcast entrepreneur on fire he was talking about that you know there was an entrepreneur i'm sure people have heard of him if they do any sort of marketing but russell brunson with clickfunnels they're talking about that so i just started kind of observing what was going on what they were doing and i was like man this is this is awesome so i started just absorbing as much content as i could i was just you know just literally just consuming uh course after course and and youtube videos and just as much as i could about marketing and what i learned was um even three years four years later now uh i still don't feel like i know much right it's like the more you learn the more there is to learn right and it's just crazy because there's so much growth there's so much opportunity there's so many different ways to market uh you know one of my things i learned was that early on i got very much distracted with shiny objects right and i think it's really easy in any niche really to get distracted by shiny objects right the shiny object syndrome so it's like oh chatbots and this and facebook and google and youtube and seo and this it's like man if like how how are you ever going to learn all of that stuff so i just got really dialed in on on what i wanted to do when i decided what niche i was going to work it with i was like alright i'm going to get really good at doing facebook ads for mortgage professionals using long form uh survey funnels where they're filling out 10 12 14 questions to qualify them and just go as deep as i could into that because what i found is by doing by just being like okay at all these other things i never was able to get the results that i wanted until i focused on one thing so i mean that's one thing that i even tell you know my clients as well is like just be focused like you know there's the gary vee thought it's like just put out 60 pieces of content a day on 400 platforms but it's like the reality is that the average person can't do that right unless you have a six-person media team or something that can just put out content all day for you but the reality is you're probably better off just getting really good at one or two or three platforms and just focusing really really hard on those platforms yeah so do you have a big organization or is it just you or how many people make your world go around right now yeah i mean at the moment we're it's about eight to nine people right now uh so we have a couple people we have a little call center that we have that just just started we have a couple client support people have some virtual assistants out of uh the philippines a couple sales people so so we have a decent organization up until it was just me up until was it uh december i think november of 2018 i hired my first virtual assistant um and then really it was towards the end of last year when i just started bringing people on to kind of help uh things things go on right because what one of the things that i realized pretty quickly was i didn't like certain parts of the business i didn't that wasn't like what really fired me up so i was like how can i replace myself in these pieces of the business so that i continue to grow and work on the vision and and grow the organization versus getting stuck in the weeds right and so i think that's the biggest thing there is well and the other thing too is managing people that's a whole another skill set and that's one skill set that 2020 has been a huge growing uh pain slash opportunity for me it's just learning how to manage people learning how to get them to to perform because the reality is as an entrepreneur like i just feel like everybody just is gonna go out and get the stuff done but the reality is a lot of people need direction they need exactly kpis exactly what they need to do and sometimes you think you're like the bad guy by like being too clear of like this is what you need to do but some people need that right some people need to be micromanaged some people need these things and it's weird it kind of blows my mind because obviously i'm just very self-motivated and i just do my own thing and figure it out but not everybody's like that right and i've had to learn a lot about you know leadership and stuff like that just just you know just bringing on a team right yeah so so you specialize in in uh marketing for mortgage lenders right yep exactly correct residential residential mortgage lenders okay and and you're using uh pay-per-click is that what it is so we use primarily facebook and instagram uh currently we're also testing some youtube stuff uh google is another avenue that in 2021 is probably going to be added into the sort of foray of um you know different ways that we market uh one of the things we found pretty early was facebook was you know the cheapest way to do it especially at the time it was it was easier it's getting a little harder uh the one thing that people make a mistake and there's this kind of this misconception that facebook leads are bad um the general reality is that you know the intent isn't always as high or the or the you know the uh they're not usually as ready to buy right away but there is there's a way to do it the correct way uh one of the things i found is having long form you know increasing intent by asking more questions and by qualifying people you're able to generate a higher intent higher quality lead via facebook at a much lower cost and you can generally do that on google right so um you know i forgot to ask you this so i don't want to put you on the spot but sure sometimes we offer something free to the audience or some kind of giveaway just so they can kind of get to know you do you have something that we can offer the audience oh man um you could say yes you know like it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't come out like next minute or no it takes about three weeks for your thing to get out there so so if you have any ideas you can still make it or get it together or whatever sure sure yeah yeah at the moment no but yeah maybe we'll uh maybe we'll throw something together and i don't know you can put it in the show notes or something like that right now i'll put in the show notes i just people go to one thousand houses dot com forward slash luke l-u-k-e and then there'll be contact information over there i mean if you're a mortgage lender and you're in you're struggling with lead generation maybe you ought to just give them a call have a consult you know or to find out what it's about because i don't think it can hurt anybody and then maybe you connect and maybe maybe you know luke can help you and you can get to where you're going faster you know so that's the whole point i've hired a lot of coaches in my life i still have coaches um i like to hire specialists you know there are all kinds of coaches out there and we need different ones at different times so i try to have uh usually a different coach about every six months for something because you really need to immerse yourself in it too so you don't want to cut yourself too short but um i don't think you'll ever ever ever get enough face time with someone who understands marketing i don't think you can get too much face time for that because one it's always changing you know so yeah i i agree mark marketing you know and one thing that i tell people if they're if they're struggling to find a job even if they're just you know if they're just a normal sort of citizen that doesn't want to be an entrepreneur it's like the one thing that is always going to be a need is marketing and sales so if you can get good at marketing sales or both you're always going to have opportunities and you're always going to have jobs because reality as organizations can't grow without those two things and so if you can get good at some aspect of copywriting or marketing or you know running facebook ads or whatever that looks like organizations are always looking for people that are on the cutting edge uh of that stuff and also obviously sales right sales is huge as well and if you can learn both both of those you know sort of skills per se uh you're always going to have opportunities yeah i noticed that um you know my dad was a professional salesperson always commission only he didn't want a paycheck because he wanted he didn't want a ceiling on what he could make or you know he wanted a very high ceiling right anyways so you know sales is about as close to a entrepreneurial job as you can get if it's straight commission and some of the some of the most successful people in the world launch themselves from very lucrative sales jobs that they got very good at so yep absolutely well anything you you want to talk or say to the listeners out there who are struggling with marketing yeah i mean so um i'll say a couple different things right the first thing is if you are you know if you are even an investor that's that's looking to to generate leads on online on facebook uh one of the things that that people don't do uh that i find a lot of times is uh i find that using survey funnels right like using long increasing intent by asking more questions is a much better way to generate leads on on facebook especially because what we're doing with facebook is it's interruption marketing right versus uh google which is more like uh you're essentially siphoning the demand somewhere whereas we're actually creating demand on facebook right we're actually finding uh audience that may have a need uh for something like that so so using something like that um is is huge for increasing intent and increasing the quality of the leads uh but to be honest the the marketing the the front end of of marketing is important but the reality is if you don't have a system for converting the leads into closed deals it doesn't matter how much money you spend on marketing it doesn't matter right because like and that's one of the things we teach with with our stuff is we actually have a full coaching program training stuff like that for our loan officers because a lot of times people think that by buying more leads they're going to miraculously close more deals and the reality is if you if you put more leads into a broken system you're going to get just that broken results right and so it's hugely important that you have your sales process dialed in what's your follow-up process do you have automations in place uh who's responsible for calling the leads the the opportunities uh you know are you picking up the phone how quickly are you picking up the phone what are you saying on the phone calls all of these things matter right this is this is probably the most important part of the customer journey is the reality is people online they don't know who you are and they're looking for for opportunities they're looking for reasons to not buy and so if you don't have it dialed in at any point in this this funnel let's call it a funnel in any part of this customer journey if you mess up at any of these pieces and they get red flags that go up because you're not dialed in they're going to just go away even though they could have been a closable deal so i think that's the biggest part here especially if you're coming from you know getting most of your deals from referrals and trying to go into buying leads a lot of times there's this negative stigma about leads all leads are bad whatever regardless if you buy them or if you're generating your own the reality is most of the time it just comes down to the follow-up process and who the end user is that's like 90 of the business right like 90 of what we do is trying to teach our loan officers how to follow up with them quickly do the work like don't just like try to sell people over text message you know things like that people are trying to do things that just aren't they just aren't natural right and they just don't understand because they don't they're not able to perceive a conversation it's like well text message based conversations like you're just gonna have short conversations back and forth you're not trying to sell them via text you're trying to get them onto a phone call right and then on the phone call you're trying to you know what are you trying to do what's that next step that you're looking to accomplish are you looking to to see the house are you looking to you know as a loan officer obviously take an application over the phone but as an investor you're probably looking to go see you know get some information about the house whether it's worth for you to go out and and uh you know see the house setting an appointment to do that obviously i think for for investors if you do get someone that's interested it's kind of nice because you can get their address and you can show up it's kind of hard for them to flake on you when you have their address right so yeah yeah yeah yeah so you guys i want you to go to one thousand houses dot com forward slash luke l-u-k-e and check it out if you're a residential mortgage loan officer and you're ready to ramp up or you would like to get a new injection into your lead generation system maybe you should check out luke and and see what he's got to offer i hear that there's going to be a giveaway somewhere in the show notes over there so i'm sure it'll be interesting uh uh you know don't kill yourself luke but i'm i'm sure there's something that you have a value that would be uh interesting to people out there i would like to thank you for taking the time to come on luke yeah and thank you so much mitch for having me it's it's been awesome and uh you know have a great show here thank you thank you i'd like to thank all the listeners for taking time to get you some luke shankara sankula did i say right okay uh thanks for stopping by to get you some luke shankula and we'll see you on on the next episode thanks a lot you guys bye luke bye