How to be a Successful Originator For About $25,000

by Brian Brady

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Blogging for business is NOT the most efficient use of your time. Your time is better spent mining your database. This is a topic near and dear to my heart; my database is a mess. Had I properly maintained it these past 7-8 years, I’d probably be retired today. If I employed the 33-touch system, suggested by Gary Keller,  I’d not be hunting for the next batch of loans. I certainly wouldn’t be, as one online marketing vendor called my strategy, “puking all over the internet” , sifting through inquiries, to find serious borrowers.

That is not to say that blogging doesn’t have it’s place; it does. As Greg suggests, it is an excellent way to connect “viscerally” with your database. Creating a cozy community may be the focus of my online marketing efforts once I practice the “Law of the Broom” and clean house. This is not a reversal of my claim that keyword-rich text gets search engine results; it most certainly does. Blogging for your customers, employing a few basic keyword search terms, can attract more like-minded people which makes your business proposition more efficient (READ: I want more people that are just like my best clients). By playing to your strengths, you can hit more balls out of the park because you’ll start seeing the same kind of pitches.

Enter someone like Ray Cobel. Ray runs an outfit called Cobel Target Marketing. I met him on Active Rain and realized that he knows a helluva lot about mining databases. Ray has agreed to let me interview him for a podcast, to be hosted here on Bloodhound Blog. I’m still working on my questions so you can e-mail me if you have one for him.

I have some advantages as I start to apply the Law of the Broom. I’ve been in business for some twenty years, thirteen as a loan originator. I have a lot of people’s name in the computer, on business cards, or on cocktail napkins from Durant’s or the Poseidon. I also have some 200 contacts from the past year of blogging. I’m a serial schmoozer; you know the type. I back slap, I chat it up, and I connect people with other people.

Maybe you don’t have that sort of advantage. If not, I have a solution for you; buy leads. Everybody I know HATES the concept of buying leads to establish a database but I’m not so sure it’s as bad as it sounds.
I obtained some 200 leads in the past year from blogging. That doesn’t mean that I closed 200 loans, it means I connected with 200 different people who may or may not use my services in the next five years. Most of them closed a loan with me or are thinking of doing something pretty soon. I’ll probably close 100 loans in a 2 year period from that slew of 1000 inquiries this past year. What did that cost me?

Time- those 1000 inquiries cost me time, a lot of it. I estimate that I’ve spent some 100 hours a month developing these inquiries. That’s about 3-4 hours daily. What would have happened if I spent $100/day for five leads and dedicated those 4 hours to aggressively trying to connect with those leads? I would have spent some $25,000 over the course of a year but I think I might have closed twice as many loans. Moreover, I’d have added some 500 names to my database- not a bad number. Those 500 names, when properly mined, should produce some 50 more loans each year from turnover and referrals.

If you watch the Gary Keller video, you’ll understand that repetition, not quality is the secret to owning customers’ brain cells. You just need the leads to start the mining process. If money were not an issue, which would you do?