Happy Sunday Everyone-
If you’re responsible for anyone else in our industry right now, you have to acknowledge it’s a challenge. I just looked up “how many loan officers have left the business?”….It suggested 37% of all loan officers have left (i thought it was higher) and then it also gave me this “According to data from Ingenius, tens of thousands of loan officers exited the industry in 2023. In October, 67% of current LOs produced less than one unit of closed loans in October. An additional 21% closed 1.5 units per month and only 12% closed greater than 2.5 units”. Those are crazy numbers. So, if you’re a branch manager, a regional, a divisional, an owner…whatever, how do you figure out where to help? Truth is, most LO’s need help right now.
Our team has been working on a quadrant to help identify who needs help, how to help, and how much time to allocate to help. Like T charts, in helping make decisions, quadrants help identify and clarify. Stephen Covey with the ultimate example of quadrants, came up with Urgent, not urgent, vs. important & not important. Every quadrant I’ve ever come up with comes out of that thought. So here is the quadrant we’re working to help identify loan officers working with us.
- Positive and producing
- Negative and producing
- Positive and not producing
- Negative and not producing
I’ll keep our metrics of what we consider producing and not producing in our division for now but we’re working to identify our team members in these 4 buckets, and we’re going to ask them what bucket they think they’re in. Our thought around this project is to make sure we’re helping each quadrant move up the chain. I think any good human/leader wants to help everyone they can, but it’s not possible. You have to be aware of where you allocate the time to help and you can’t do that without understanding who deserves the most help, and who wants it! If I was inside the head of the 4 buckets, this is what I think they’d sound like:
- Positive and producing. “This market is hard but I’m gaining market share, it’s a grind but I’m growing, and I appreciate the challenge. My efforts today will pay off down the road. My business partners and clients believe they’re better off with me as their lender and I’m gaining traction. I’m looking for advice/input, I’m listening to others for what is working and what is not, I’m open minded”.
- Negative and producing. “Thank God I have the will power to grind it out even though I can’t stand this job or this business right now, I’ve been around long enough where clients still come to me, but I’m burnt out. I maintain a positive face but any chance I have to bitch to someone else, I’ll take it. I’m close minded and not interested in what others have to say, my job is a necessary evil”.
- Positive and not producing. “I’m hopeful I can survive this business, I like what I do, but I’m not sure what to be doing on a daily basis to succeed, I’m drifting through my days trying to figure out how to work with business partners and clients, I probably need to spend more time executing on what I need to be doing vs. thinking about it”.
- Negative and not producing. “This business sucks, my company sucks, the people I work with suck, no one has any good ideas, and I’m not willing to try anything, I take no advice because I know it won’t work, and I know more than anyone. I’m completely closed off”.
It would appear I’m only talking about sales above, I’m not, ops are going into the same quadrants, you can replace the words “producing and not producing’ with “helpful and not helpful”. Just line people up in your head, I can identify loan officers and ops team members that fit in all 4 buckets.
I’m not sure how many of our divisional people are on this, the goal is not to scare everyone, but to take an honest assessment of where you think you fit. I can guarantee this, there are a lot of people that think they’re in box 3, when we would consider them in box #1. From my perspective, when you see these quadrants, we start to figure out where we allocate our time to help. I have no idea if I’m right but if I went off of percentages, I’d allocate 50% for helping box 1, 30% for helping box 2, 19% for box 3, and 1% for box 4. For what it’s worth, I want to make sure I’m clear, “negative” is very different than challenges you have to work through, not suggesting everyone needs to be Pollyanna to be in categories 1 or 3.
Why am I sending this? I think it’s worth sharing. I think it’s worth self-reflection for anyone in our business to consider where they currently fit, where they want to fit in the future, and what it would take to get there. I think anyone that has any type of leadership role also needs to consider the value they’re bringing right now. If that 37% is accurate (I had heard up to 60%), I believe it will continue to grow. There is nothing easy about this business right now. I only know it’s a very smart exercise to be deliberate on who needs help, who deserves help, what help they need, and how you solve for it.
I like the idea of walking around the office with a number attached to you, what number would you be? For what it’s worth, I come in and out of 1-3 but try to stay in 1 as much as possible.