Well. Hey, everybody. Now we’re going to talk to a man who really needs no introduction. But I’m going to do it anyway. He’s the co-founder and current MVP of Model Match, a leading business development and talent acquisition platform, and I’m sure I completely undersold that. So, we’ll let him talk more about what Model Match does here in a second.

He also serves an executive leadership role with his local YMCA. Is one of the owners of the Hickory FC or Hickory FC, the 2024 conference champions in the National Premier Soccer League, just to name a few things. And now he can add one more title to his impressive resume. He is the first guest ever on the Changing Circumstances podcast.

Welcome, Mr. Eric Levin. How’s it going, man?

I am honored to be the first and as we were speaking somewhat offline, the if this is a failure, it’s my fault. If it’s successful, you can just forget about me and act like I was never. One correction, though. You ready? Okay. Correction. You. You said conference champions.

No national champions. National champions. Well, update your website, buddy. No kidding. Right here. Let’s do this. Although everybody might imagine the most important. But let’s just in on the celebration of where we sit. I love it. National champions as well. Well, we will get to that in one second. Okay, good. Because that is like top of my list.

But before we do, you guys may notice for those of you watching and not just listening, we have matching attire today, which was kind of planned. Kind of not planned. But these are all shirts we got from Eric. So tell us a little about the shirts. Yeah. So the, the, the football club was something that we started a couple of years ago and, and so last year was our first year.

This was our second year. We could talk about that more. When you’re ready, Bobby, and you can pepper me with questions on that. But as part of the club, you know, last year, as many know, Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina and, did a tremendous amount of, of damage. And so we decided to manufacture an 8 to 8 strong on the back.

It says, recovery. And, and just a little, some, some hickory FC logos. But we sell this on the website, we sell this at our games, and 100% of the proceeds go back to, to support the rebuild and recovery effort from Hurricane Helene. So we’ve already written a really pretty big check to Samaritan’s Purse, which a lot of people know internationally.

They happen to be headquartered in western North Carolina. And then, at the end of this year, we’ll write another check, something I’m really, really proud of. That’s amazing. That’s awesome. And, I found out about it on LinkedIn. I saw you posted about it. I think, Mike, you might have done that as well, too. You know, to be able to use your, you know, your connections in your platforms and things like that for something like that.

That’s awesome. Dude, I’m happy to showcase it today. And, if you guys haven’t already, go check out what website should they go to if you get it to go to Hickory FC. So Hickory Football Club, Hickory fc.com. And there’s a store and I think the 8 to 8 shirts are still kind of prominently located on the store.

Yeah. And again, I, I do sometimes go to conferences or will speak at an event and somebody will have the 8 to 8 strong on and it makes me really happy especially, you know, for those that have been in areas that have been impacted by storms like that, it gets a lot of a lot of attention for three months or so, and then all of a sudden that attention goes away on a national level.

And but locally it’s going to take years, if not forever for some of these towns to really recover businesses that probably won’t come back, homes that might not get rebuild rebuilt. And so if we can have a small positive impact on western North Carolina and use the football club as a conduit for that, it’s something that I’m real proud of.

For sure. That’s awesome man. Yeah. So get to the website. Get your shirts. Mike was talking great before we jumped online. His wife was commenting on how nice he looks in his shirt. So, you know, they are definitely good quality. And I encourage everyone to go do that. Sweet. Thank you. So, so before again, and I know at the beginning I think I said soccer team.

And I know it’s football, but I didn’t want to confuse everybody. Oh. It’s confusing. I’m glad you said soccer. It would have been. Yeah, yeah, they were confused. Anyways, before we get to that. Not that you actually have time for anything else, but tell us a little about yourself. What are you doing when you’re not, you know, working for model, match managing the team, you know, doing the 1200 other things that you do, like what is was Eric 11 like to do for fun?

Man, I’m, I’m like such a boring, simple kind of dude. I’m a, I’m a I’m an avid gym rat. I work out and train every day. Not because it’s really an emotional thing for me. It’s the hour out of my day where I can actually think without being spoken to, if you know what I mean.

Yep. Wildly therapeutic. It’s something I’ve done for a long time. I live I live on a really, like, comfortable piece of property for me where I can open up garage doors. My gym is my one side of the garage, and we’re basically in the woods surrounded by a creek so I can have, you know, I can have Wu-Tang playing as loud as I want and nobody cares.

And I can be out there training in the in the sun I really like I really like that. I like quiet, you know, I, I like doing yard work. I like my own, my own grass. Like it’s I guess it’s Bobby. It’s the things that. I mean, you guys are the same. I’m sure a lot of people in our industry, you work really, really hard.

You know, you’re giving out, you know, your serotonin levels are depleted because you’re giving it all out all the time. And, Mike, I know this is something you’ve spent a career researching. Not only the, the, you know, the professional outcomes, but the emotional side of things as well. And as I get older, I really, really, seek out those moments on a Saturday to just go mow the grass or just go clean the gutters, all the things you didn’t want to do when you were 25, 30 years old.

Now I like I look forward to those moments. So Bobby, probably a pretty boring answer. But there’s your answer. I love it. I will say I enjoy that as well too. But then, my wife and friends just tell me that because I’m getting old, so, maybe that’s part of it too. But, speaking of which, family you have, kids.

Yeah. So I have two boys, 25 and 22 that live out in, Utah. They, they both one went to school. Kovid kind of threw him off, and so he started working. He’s probably going to go back to school and then. And my youngest, he just started school here recently. He did, he was out of the country for just a little bit after high school and, so.

Yeah. And then married to my wife Nikki, here in, the western part of North Carolina and Hickory. She’s how I ended up in Hickory. This is where her family’s from. And, Yeah, we’ve been together for close to 30 years now, so that’s my family. That’s awesome. That’s amazing. That’s fantastic. Well, so Mike and I, we’re really excited to have you as our first guest.

I mean, you have such a wide variety of experiences and we’ll get to those in a second. Things like whether that’s personal development, building teams and cultures at companies, you know, recruiting obviously technology with model match. But like I said before, before we get at all that, I got to ask you about the soccer team and who goes out and just decides to start a professional soccer team or football team.

Like, there’s gotta be a good story there. So I, you know, model match was really starting to expand four years ago or so, five years ago. Mike remembers what I did before with hammer House and building a recruiting company, a business development platform, and then Model Match became the tech version of that. And then we’ll talk about it later.

But we really started making bigger investments into and MLS data, real estate data, borrower intelligence. And again, we can get into that. But I hired a guy named Tom Deeley, and Tom Deeley was a recruiter. He was hired to be a recruiter. And again, this is before we were making our transition away from recruiting and towards SAS. Right.

Tom was 25 or so at the time. He was a former All-American soccer player at a college here in western North Carolina. He’s from Oxford, England. He played semi professionally and was really, really good. Could have gone back to Europe and played for money, but he met a girl and, didn’t want to go back and got married.

And, but there was a point when he worked for me where I just said to him, we need to keep you close to the game, because that’s where his fire and his belly comes from, right? Yeah, yeah. And whether that was connecting him to do clinics for the local YMCA or with the local rec group, I just wanted to make sure that he had like, you guys were asking me, what do I do outside of work?

Well, you know, I knew what was bringing him, passion. And I wanted him to stay close. Well, about a year later, he came to me and said, do you think a semiprofessional soccer team could work in Hickory? And I didn’t know enough about, like, I had really gotten away from soccer, to be honest with you, when I was growing up, I played everything football, basketball, baseball, soccer, you name it.

But I’d kind of gotten away from it. And, other than the youth experience here locally and how youth sports, of course, you know, positively impacts the community. But, he, he wrote up like a little business plan. And at first I told him that, hey, this looks like a hobby, and I’m a little busy for a hobby.

Like, I don’t have time to play golf or go fishing or whatever. And there’ll be a moment in my life for that, probably. However, there were some things happening in our local community, like we were one of those towns that really got even more on the map during Covid because we have a lake, we have a river, we’re close to the mountains.

We have a very family friendly downtown square. Everything’s within walking distance. There’s 40,000 people that live in Hickory. And so I was watching some of the development that was happening in downtown Hickory and some of the businesses that were coming in, and then you start thinking, well, you got the World Cup coming to the United States in 20, you know, in the next year, maybe we should take this off the shelf.

So we pulled it off the shelf. We did some research. We started the LLC, we got the approval from the league. We met with a local facility, which is the football stadium here locally for our for Lenore Ryan University. And everything was yes, yes. And then we went out and raised a little more money just to fund it higher, at a higher level than we needed to, because we all have full time jobs, right?

We needed to go hire staff. We need to do it a little bit differently. So anyway, and then Bobby, I tell you, man, it’s been a lot of work. I mean, it’s early mornings, late nights, weekends. I love it so much, man. Like, I was telling somebody the other day and again, Mike, this is probably stuff you have a lot of experience too with some of the consulting you’ve done.

But working really hard at something where there’s no there’s no intention of monetary reward income is. I didn’t realize how special that was until doing. Now let me let me preface this. I am not a wealthy guy, Bobby. We’ll talk about model match we’ve never had around. Like I’ve never taken gotten equity out like I, you know, drew and I could have probably made a lot more money doing something else over the last 6 or 7 years.

I love model Match. It’s going to pay off where I’m super proud of what we’ve done. But I’m not a rich guy. Like I can’t. Doing work for no income like didn’t seem like something I would want to do, but yeah, oh my gosh, it’s made me a better husband, has made me a better father. It’s made me better at model match.

It’s brought me a lot, man. That’s awesome. Yeah. What? So. So running, and I don’t know how hands are. You are with running the club, but like, running a club like that. How what? What’s different than, say, running? Running model match. Like running a business. What? What’s the difference between the kind of a sports club and like a business?

Or are they the same. Yeah. Great question. I think the consumer experience is very different. You know, with software, you of course you get feedback and you have a little thing on your app that says, rate us on a scale of 1 to 10 and give us, you know, some, some, you know, score back and we can do that.

But it’s very, it’s very vanilla when you get that kind of feedback back. Fans at a sporting event will tell you immediately what they think of something. They will tell you that the chicken sandwich is soggy and concessions. And I mean, you know, I mean, you know, out of the gate and they will tell you as if they’re a part owner of the club.

And I love that because that’s what a fan should think. I bought a ticket. I own this event. Right. I’m owed something back. I love the I love the instant feedback. But you know, I’ve never been in retail. I’ve never been in merchandise, I’ve never had to deal with alcohol sales or concessions. I’ve never had to deal with, you know, assets relative to sponsors as an example and managing those things.

I mean, you turn into an event management company, essentially, and what you touch from a business perspective is everything that you’re probably taught in school, but you never actually get a chance to experience. So Bobby, it’s really a little bit of everything. And then in addition, you know, hiring coaches and learning to stay out of their way.

My job is not recruiting. My job is not the game plan. My job is not figuring out who the starting 11 is going to be. My job is also not to complain about it. You I mean, you hire people to do their job and you got to let them go do their job. So it’s across the board.

I try to really make sure, Bobby, that, you know, I spend 12 to 14 hours a day at model match. That’s my that’s what I do. I still have a life. I have a wife. I’ve run the board at the YMCA. I have other things I do as well. So we have a wonderful staff that does a really, really good job.

But I’m pretty involved because I’m a little bit of a control freak. So do I really need to be at the stadium at 3:00 on a Saturday when the game’s not until seven? Hell no. I don’t need to be there, but I’m there. Yeah, it sounds like you get a lot of energy out of this. I get so much, like, tell me to take the trash out at the stadium.

I’m happy to do it. Like, I get so much energy out of it. And we should all be so lucky to have opportunities where people that you’ve never met, you don’t know you have no relationship with, stop you and tell you thank you for something that you helped create and that thank you, because our relationship with our children is better than ever, because we go to games every Saturday night, or because we logged into the stream to watch you guys play a national championship game in San Francisco.

And we have videos of the boys, the kids jumping up and down, and that video is going to live in perpetuity. Yeah. All right. So it’s hard to get that back if you’re a loan officer, if you’re an account executive, if you’re a regional ahead of production, a real estate agent, you deal with a lot of complaining to get to the point where there’s a transaction that’s complete.

You don’t expect a thank you note back. Yeah, because it doesn’t happen. Yeah. But to get that feedback in both directions, I’ll take the negative all day long. Because when that mom comes up to me and says, thank you for this family experience, they get and drop the mic. Yeah. You know, you just said something that’s really important.

You’re probably getting this because you know that you’re providing an incredible experience and you really like being part of that 100%. And then so I start thinking more than ever, how do you provide that same experience in technology where you don’t build the same type of relationship? The relationship is very, very different. It’s at a distance. You may never meet these people.

You might not be able to give them a hug. Right. How do you how do you build trust? How do you build stickiness when you’re talking about a product that you could consider a commodity versus a relationship that starts with getting to know someone, getting to like someone, getting to trust someone, and then eventually going into business together.

It’s a very, very different experience when you so one of the one things I know, some of the topics we’ll cover on today, you know, leadership development, things like that. But I’m curious about crossover, you know, kind of like what has what has the sports team taught you about leadership? You know, kind of human development that is maybe often missed in the corporate world.

And in boardrooms and company leadership and things like that. Is there anything that’s kind of, jumped out to you like, hey, man, I never really thought about this in the in the corporate side of things. Yeah. Bobby, I think there’s a lot, actually. I’ll give you one. I’ll give you one recently. So we were out in San Francisco on Saturday, so the team flew 2900 miles, had to, you know, stay in Sacramento, take a bus up to San Francisco, and play against the defending national champion.

That was the number one team in the country in enemy territory. Our coach, Carlos Rubio, was a former player. He’s a fantastic coach. He’s a he’s a tall, strong Spanish footballer. During the game, especially in the first 20 minutes, it was really heated, very emotional, very physical. Their game plan was to punch us in the mouth over and over and over again until we just didn’t get up anymore.

Our game plan was very tactical. So you had two different sort of game plans. And so as a fan, it owner but fan for sure, man, I’m screaming I’m ready to fight somebody. My I’m screaming and yelling and I’m thinking I need to calm down because I’m surrounded by people that I’m the enemy, like I’m in their home right now.

Enemy territory. Yeah. But I look down at Carlos and his emotion and his body language never changed. Not once when the players were running up to him screaming about something. He wasn’t pointing. He wasn’t yelling. He was directing traffic. He was sticking to the game plan, and he was keeping people on an even kind of keel. And so, Bobby, I think about that a lot now because there’s plenty of times where I’m on calls, where I’m, I’m, I completely disagree with negative feedback that maybe I’m getting on something.

Right. Yeah. But guess what? That feedback is the user experience. That is the user experience. Maybe they’re not using the tech correctly because of support that they didn’t get, or training they didn’t listen to. Or maybe they did get training and they never listen to the recording. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter in the moment. That is their experience.

It’s my job to listen. And I say my it’s model manager’s job. What’s change has its model matches job to just listen and put yourself in their shoes and always think about what is the desired result, what is it that we’re trying to get to? And fighting or disagreeing or arguing or showing emotion is not the way to do it.

And I’m an emotional guy, right? Like I will I will lay down in traffic for you if we’ve got that kind of relationship. Carlos is one of the toughest human beings I know, and watching him be calm in those moments was like a customer support. Masterclass is what it kind of was. Yeah, yeah. No, there’s actually sounds very similar.

A lot of the training we got at Disney, you know, back when I was there and, you know, I don’t know if they still put you through that training today, but back then it was a big deal. You didn’t step foot on stage until you’ve gone through this. And a lot of it is focused on that, being able to stay calm, being able to focus on the guest experience and not worrying about whether you’re right or not.

It’s about the guest experience. So oh my gosh. Okay, so you just said something that is something I had to complete live by Bobby and I live by it through some negative experiences. Right. Some failures which if you know, I’m a big believer in like go break something, go fail at something because it’s a fast track to learning how to do it.

Right? Right. A long time ago, I had a falling out and a failure on something, and I. It hit me when I talked to this person, I said, for us to get to a solution, I have to ask a question. Do you want credit or do you want this to be successful because they’re not necessarily the same thing.

And that person wanted credit and we weren’t successful. And so we had to shake hands and move on. We can’t be good together. But that is something we should always ask ourselves. Do you want credit or do you want success? And look, I’m dealing with this a little bit with the with the football club now, because with the national championship, we’re getting a lot of attention and some are getting more attention than others.

So all of a sudden, do you have an assistant coach that says, well, how come I’m not getting interviewed when Coach Rubio’s getting interviewed? Well, hold on, man, we’re the national champs and you’re a huge part of that. I’m sorry if you feel like you’re not getting as much credit as the head coach, but what is it that we’re trying to accomplish here in team sports is maybe the best educator for things like that?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m a huge. That’s why I’m such a huge, team sports fan. You know, with kids, I think gets a little out of control these days. You know, with all the, you know, the money and the, you know, travel teams and things like that. But the core of team sports, I think is still amazing, like you said.

Well, you got money and you also have, you have you have participation medals, that teach us the wrong thing. You know, should a kid get credit for showing up 100%? They should get credit for showing up 100%. They should get a pat on the back for showing up. But if you didn’t win the tournament, you don’t get a medal.

Like, I don’t know what to tell you. And the losses along the way just motivate you that much more, in my opinion, to separate the ones that are capable of now going and getting that that medal. By the way, you know, learning from this incredible season, do you think me winning a national. It’s me. Do you think us winning a national championship is going to make us want it less or more next time?

Oh, once you’ve had that taste, man, do. Oh my gosh Bobby. Right I know what it tastes like now man. Like I want it every year. And it’s not going to happen every year. But I and I think with employees we’ve kind of done this a little bit. I think remote work is screwed up. The, the, the that competitiveness feel that understanding of, like what it really feels like to lose and to have a failure and to make a mistake, like we should be around each other.

Bobby should tell me you really screwed that up, Nate, right? Yeah. And then you then that sort of message capable of fixing that and moving to the solution. And I think delivering that kind of message in person, you know, versus over zoom or over a phone call, I think makes a big difference, you know, in terms of how it’s received and how that team, you know, the culture.

And, Mike, I know that was something you were and dive into a little bit, you know, whether that’s culture or even, you know, follow ups in terms of how to deal with failure. But, so I’ll, I’ll shut up for a second, let you look, you know, you know, it’s interesting. You’ve touched on quite a few areas, you know, we wanted to, to delve into and maybe we’ll stick with, with failure.

Since most of us are very familiar with it. You know, when you, as you’ve gone through all of this and, you know, you talked about the, the, the partnership that you had, what do you see out there in the business world? You sit at a very unique, sort of a point. You know, you have a business that you’re building.

You’ve got this all consuming hobby football club, thing going on. You’re the YMCA. You deal with businesses at a strategic level. You deal with individuals at their own strategic level. Also, probably at a very intimate level. And, you know, with failure, I always think there’s a couple of ways that you can you can look at failure.

One is either a learning lesson or it’s going to just set you back and you’re going to sit there. What do you do to process failure or what do you see that other people do. Due to process failure that’s going to end up being moving them forward versus just sort of sitting there and just taking it really hard.

You know, you made me think of, and, the podcast I did with Ken Perry, I think we all probably know who came up with college coop. And I really credit Ken for being the, the, the pioneer when it comes to, video content. And, they just they did they do such a great job.

But, we had this conversation several years ago. Mike and I asked him, what do you do? Like when your staff is frustrated, when you’re noticing negative emotion or you yourself have a failure, what do you do? And he smiled. He goes, we go for a walk. He literally takes them for a walk. He can feel it brewing.

And he says, let’s go for a walk. And I’ve been to his office, actually, he’s just moved into a new office, but his old office, and it’s a nice neighborhood where you can just go for a walk around the block. And his point was, by the time we get back, usually everybody’s emotions are much better than they were when we when we left.

I think some of it, Mike, is so simple. You know, yesterday, you know what I did? I cleaned my desk for the first time in six months and I was multitasking. I was on a call with a customer while I was cleaning my desk, and they asked me a question, and I should have been in front of model match, and I wasn’t because I was cleaning my desk and I said, oh man, I’m sorry, I don’t have the app pulled up.

You’ll think this is funny. I’m cleaning my desk right now. And his question was, did you need a moment? I was like, yeah, I did, I did, I felt clutter in here. I’m feeling some stress and some pressure. And by the time I’m done cleaning off my desk, it takes me 20 minutes. I’m gonna feel a whole lot better.

I think it’s some of those. Some of those simple things, Mike. I like to work out like that, get that that relieve stress for me. But just go for a walk, go outside, remove yourself from the situation for just a minute and take a breath. And usually that seems to help. It does. You know, there’s some interesting neuroscience around the walk.

It is actually it, you know, if you tend to be emotional, it helps you access the logical side of your brain. And, sometimes we see it as when it calms us down. Or you have probably you probably experienced this when you go for a walk. Sometimes you collaborate better with people or there’s a problem that you’ve been working on.

All sudden it pops into your head. It’s yeah, it’s one of the things that when I work with people, if you’re feeling a little bit stressed, you know, get up, take a walk. Two minutes is all it takes. If you have a difficult conversation, do a walking one, if at all possible. I have a I have a buddy that I had breakfast with this morning.

I only see him every 3 or 4 months. And he’s, he is a partner with KPMG international. So he really big jobs. Been there forever, makes a bunch of money. You never know it by looking at him. Lots of stress with what he does for a living. And I asked him, Mike, like, how do you find that there’s something that brings you relief to that, to that stress.

And he does Spartan races and he says every and every morning he does like either yoga or tai chi or something for like ten minutes. That’s it. And, I said, do you find that you get things more than just stress relief when you do it? And he said what I thought he might say, because this is my answer.

He said, I solve problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s true. Sometimes you like, I if I sit here and just pound through this freaking list that I have right all day long, which I’m going to do as soon as we hang up, I’m gonna get right back on to this list again. I’m. I’m managing a list. I’m managing a pipeline.

I’m working things forward in workflows, on projects. But there’s problems I’m not solving. And I need to walk away from this list and have quiet in an effort to solve that problem. So. So when you work with organizations or individuals, do you see any consistent through lines that that somebody has where they’re either successful at it, you know, overcoming failure, solving problems or through lines that where people just get stuck?

I mean, and I think, you know, particularly with being in the, servicing that mortgage side of the business, it’s been sort of an interesting few years. I was in the business for a long time. It’s the most challenging environment I’ve seen at so many levels. Do you do you see consistent things at work that that move people forward?

And then, you know, without naming names, things that get people stuck in and regardless of the advice you might give or try to guide them, that they just don’t seem to move, a couple things come to mind. And Mike, again, you’re an expert when it comes to that some of this stuff and you know, you know the, the this statistics and maybe some studies to support.

I’ve read enough and I’ve experienced enough to know that, depression not clinical. I can’t talk about clinical because I don’t I can’t relate to it. But depression, normal depression I find, is generally solved by action and not rest. So there’s this there’s this response to, I’m depressed. I’m sad. I’m tired, I feel negative. And what do you say?

I need a break. I need a break. I need to take a day off. I need to sit on the couch. I need a break. I would just ask whoever says that. What are you doing on this break? Is it an action break or is it. Was it a do nothing break? Because I think could do nothing break I have found only adds to that emotion.

It actually doesn’t make it better. So number one, I would say don’t lose the value of work in the midst of getting over whatever that hump is, right? Make the other one. And maybe this is a product of my age because I didn’t have one, although I do now. Make sure you have mentors in your life. Make sure you have people that you can pick up the phone, and they’re not going to tell you what you want to hear.

They’re going to tell you what you need to hear. Yesterday I had a moment. And it’s funny you bring this up. I had a moment, and I texted a guy in the industry who I consider a friend and certainly a mentor, and, I just said, hey, I need some help on something when you have a second.

And then I texted him again. I said I should, I should say, this is not urgent. This is not a family emergency. I’m fine. Yeah, yeah. He called me back in two minutes. We spoke for five minutes. That’s it. And I was fine. I just needed to hear from someone else to say what you’re about to do is wrong.

You already know it’s wrong. Take a breath and call me tomorrow. I’m good. Yeah, I love that. Love that I probably helped that he called you back right away. To which what a mentor. You know, there’s these people that I mentor. And if they text me and say, I need you for a minute, well, that’s not somebody that’s doing this to me every five minutes like that might be somebody that hasn’t asked me for anything in six months or three months.

I know who those people are. You guys know who those people are? That’s the bat phone for people that remember Batman. Like, that’s the bat phone they just hit me with. And I got to call him back. Yeah, I think that’s good. You know, I want to maybe move over to something, you know, go back to model match.

You know, I’ve seen the product from when you guys really first launched. It is conversion one. Yeah, yeah, it’s come a long way in. And, you know, I think originally it was it’s going to help organize what you do during the day. Right. It was I’ll just say it, it was guiding you. But it’s come such a long way.

What kind of things are you learning about bringing technology into what I’ll call a very intimate human, interaction, which is recruiting and, you know, retention, all those things. So what are the things that are working? What are the things that that balance out? Well? And what are the things that you guys have tried or maybe not working because it is, you know, you’re trying to bring automation into an intimate relationship.

So what do you see that’s good. And some things you guys have struggled with. Well, without saying it directly, you kind of said it right. It’s that balance between humanity and automation, right. That it’s that balance between, you know, emotion. And I almost write something that has no emotion. For those that see the value of a platform like ours as something more than data visualization, you see, you see the path to outcome, right?

For the ones that, are building, projects are actioning. Those projects are setting, future tasks are tracking the building of a relationship the same way that a loan travels through the loss, for lack of a better comparison. I love that comparison. Well, and Bobby, we when we started model match Mike might remember that is what we did.

You know, we thought if I don’t know Bobby Palmer, but I know that I just got his name off of a park bench because he’s advertising that he’s a loan officer. Well, that’s a tier three connection. It’s not tier two, meaning I don’t know him through somebody else. He’s not tier one. We don’t know who each other is, but I plug him into a project, you know, and I go start making phone calls.

Well, that’s like a prequel. All I have is data. I have a name and I have a phone number, but once I once I have an initial connection with Bobby. Even if you’re not saying let’s talk again next month, well, now you’re in processing. There’s actually a relationship there. There’s a loan potentially in there. And then when we start meeting, you’re in underwriting because you’ve agreed to a compliance or, you know, an agreed upon time and location and topic.

And then we get to offer and you’re at clear to close. And then you hire and you’re at funding servicing at that point. Our brains are already wired for that. So if we can track the progression of relationships, whether it’s a new agent or a new recruit or even a borrower for that matter, that may be you’re reaching out to that makes sense.

Mike. The challenge has been the adoption to the process, because this industry, and maybe the world we live in is, is attempting to teach us. You can do the same amount of volume and not do any work. And if you talk to the top loan officers in this industry, go to Scotsman’s guide. Pick out pick out the guy who I won’t name names, but he’s with a company that changed from the initials GR to just R, right?

The guy that’s always at the top of the list. People that don’t know him probably think he just automated something, and he’s sitting on an island all day long, sipping Mai tais and not doing any work. That couldn’t be further from the truth. A dude works his face off, and he has a very specific follow up process that involves physically doing something, making a phone call, going to a meeting.

And so, Mike, I think our challenge, which I’m happy to accept, is that balance between data intelligence, automation and then action. And the action part of it involves the value of you building trust with someone or some opportunity. Yeah. Now I agree with you. And I think it’s been interesting because, if we take Covid, which had a severe impact on the business in a lot of ways, but I think one of the ways that it impacted everybody was that there’s a lot of loans to be done, and people went from the face to face interaction, or I’m just going to call it grinding it out.

You know, I know who you’re talking about and, whether it’s him or somebody else. And, you know, Bobby and I have known people and places we’ve worked together. You look at what they do is they’re there every day. They’re going through a structure, and it doesn’t have to be the same structure as what somebody else is going through.

Just has to be something. But they go out and they grind it, and they build relationships and build trust. They get to know somebody, understand them, and that goes to trust. I think the challenge for a lot of companies, and this is regardless of what business you’re in, is that we are now looking for the technology solution to make up for the fact that we really don’t want to go out and do that.

There’s Bobby and I were talking about this. Got it. Bobby, I don’t remember how you’re how many years ago it was, but we had a loan officer at this one company worked together. Said ask Bobby to come up with a flier that would generate 5 to 6 loans for him a month, and, Bobby. Bobby didn’t do it for him.

But, I think he told them he had to actually go out and talk to realtors to things, but. Well, I think that’s one of the, by the way, if Bobby can do that, we can all go visit Bobby on his private island. Oh, yeah. It’s like being able to predict interest rates. Right? I’ll be trading my own accounts right.

So do you see generational differences with the adoption? And I’m going to say maybe younger ones are going. I love the technology, but they don’t want to go through the human side of it where some of the people that are, you know, maybe a little bit older and I’m generalizing here or saying, look, I really want to call people, but I don’t want to take notes.

I used the technology. I spoke at an event within the last year, and I was lucky enough. But as the president of this company, are there any rookies and rookies, meaning 18 months, 20 months or less? Right. And so he said, yeah, there’s actually three here. So three had qualified for this sales trip where they were probably, you know, 100 loan officers in the room, all branch managers, regional managers, executive ownership, the whole nine.

And, I did not speak to them before I got on stage. I just knew who they were. And of course, I went to model match and I looked up their volume and I was like, oh, okay. You know, these, you know, here you’ve got rookies and they’ve all done at least 14 million in the last 14 months.

Right? Wow. I saw your eyebrows go up. Right. Yeah. So towards the end of my speaking I said, hey, are there any rookies in the room? Of course I already knew the answer. And the three that I knew were going to raise their hand. They raise their hand. I said, hey, would you would you mind standing up and answering a couple of questions?

And they did. And I said, tell me three things as basic as you can. That’s the reason for you getting to 14 million in the last 14 months. And their answer was, I identify opportunities. I put them into a project and I action those opportunities. I said, okay, hold on. There’s got to be more though, right? And they said, oh yeah, yeah, there’s definitely more.

I follow up and I follow up and I follow up and I said, so did you do 14 million? The majority of that in the first half of the seven months or the second half of 14 months of the second half of the seven months, and it was like, oh, is mostly the second half because it took me time to build this up.

And then I said, anybody in the room who qualified for this trip, but whose volume has dropped by 20%, raise your hand. It was like, what, 50% of the room? Or at least I said, look at her. She took 14 million away from you because you’re not doing what she’s doing. So I’m like, I think the young want the younger folks are they’re actually not afraid to do the work, but they don’t want to do the amount of work that maybe ten years before you had to do.

Right. So they see the value of I identify the opportunities that meet my criteria. I go look at past transactions, I know what to talk about. Now I it’s not a cold call. I plug them into a project and then two hours a day I action the project. But action to them is not just an email. And if a drip cam campaign goes out, well, they have a workflow to say the drip campaign goes out on Monday.

I make a phone call on Wednesday. Yeah, I love it, by the way means your drip campaigns can’t be 2000 people at a time. No, no, they’ve got to be targeted. You know, it’s interesting. I’ve always thought that model matches really in the mindset business in the sense that, you know, you’re providing a framework that if you follow it, it changes your mindset over time.

It’s one of those things that, you know, and you also get a dashboard. It says, hey, what I’m doing is working or it’s not right. And I think that to me is one of the things that’s been really interesting. Well, and that’s got to be frustrating for you, I bet as a consultant over the years where companies may or individuals may be sure of why their why this isn’t working, they’re sure of it.

But when you start asking for reports and metrics and they don’t have any, they don’t have any. So I know I can go into the loss and we can pull a report to see what’s falling through, what’s working, what’s not working, what are we chasing that we shouldn’t be chasing? Where is something breaking in the manufacturing process? But if I go to you and say, well, give me the same answers relative to your agent outreach, then you can’t answer the question.

The only thing you can say is, well, let me go talk to my CRM administrator to figure out how many emails went out in the last 30 days. Yeah, but you know, do you find this in leadership to where maybe a leader is struggling, moving the organization? I always look at leaders. You know, the job is to move people, which move the organization where they’re struggling.

And when you get down to it, you find that maybe they may not be doing some of those things. Going back to the failure side, companies failing, you might observe that is that a leadership problem is a connection problem. What do you see out there? I think it’s a little bit of everything, Mike. I think that, I think the business probably needed a bit of a purge, you know, post Covid, when it came to the amount of non producing leadership in this industry that weren’t really creating value for the originators and the branches that they were, that they were supporting, I think it’s also a motivation problem.

I notice a lot of times that compensation models do not do not direct motivation properly. Right. So if you’ve got a trigger in your compensation plan as a branch manager or regional manager, and it’s so weighted towards something that doesn’t really support the street, right then they’re not motivated. Why would they do it in that case? So yeah, I think there’s a I think there’s a compensation slash motivation challenge in this industry a little bit.

And I think that then relates to some of our leadership issues. You know, we did a I kind of throw this out a little, little test. We did a little test. And we’re about to do it on a larger scale. I hope my product team is okay with me saying this, but I can we will afterwards, I’ll edit out, we, we as part of Model match, we built an environment called Borrower Insights.

Mike, I think you and I have talked about Borrow Insight. Borrow insights is essentially I can go to my past transactions and I can filter those transactions by anything. And then I can get equity, payoff amount, rate, borrower contact information, the whole night. All the things that people were generally skip tracing with other platforms. You can just do everything inside a model match.

Now you don’t have to go somewhere else. So I could literally go find 5 or 10 loans that, oh my gosh, I forgot these were here. Here’s one that just crossed over 20%. I could go had them drop PMI now and maybe do a little consolidation. Maybe when the rate environment changes it’ll create some refi opportunities. But one of the things that we did when we did it was MVP, but it wasn’t public yet.

We threw some leads to a handful of loan officers that we knew. We just gave it to them. We spent the money to then get the contact information, the equity, the payoff amount, the, the AVM, the calculated rate. And we just gave it to them and we said, go do something with this. And then, of course, we got a phone call saying, you gave me five leads and I got to revise out of it or I got it.

One of them was ready to put their house on the market. And so now I got I’m going to get two transactions out of this whole thing. So we then said, okay, there’s a point at which we’re probably going to pick a whole bunch of fellows in this country, and we’re just going to send them leads for nothing.

Let’s go give it to them. And then we’re going to say, click here to learn more. So instead of trying to talk them into doing something with a fancy button or a pretty graphic or a testimonial that was made up, and is it true? Which, by the way, we’ve never done, but I’m sure some people do that sometimes doesn’t.

It doesn’t happen. Yeah, right. So I’m actually going to give you a loan. I’m going to give you a loan now and borrow insights. It’s not just your past transactions. You can say show me every transaction in Charlotte, North Carolina. That was a VA loan two years ago that has an equity above 20%, a rate above 4.5%, the borrower still in the home, they haven’t refinanced yet, right?

Like you could just do that across the board. Okay. Here’s what I’m getting at though. So I think we’re going to see huge results from that. You’re just giving something away. You’re creating value without asking for anything in return. From a recruiting perspective. Could you imagine now, and I say this because this is what I’m seeing younger people doing.

So somebody texted me last night at 11:00 while sit on the couch because we released a new feature and he said, oh my gosh, I know exactly how many users. And it’s a 35 year old low. That’s one of the top LO’s in this company from a recruiting perspective. Could you imagine? I’m recruiting Bobby and he’s with another company and we’ve spoken and we’re about to have our first face to face with some really nice phone calls though, right?

And I know a lot about him. He knows a lot about me. Now we’re going to get face to face and really talk about what would it be like to work together. I’m going to show up to that meeting with three loans that I paid for trade, past transactions that were from Bobby’s transactions five years ago that are all ready for some sort of consolidation.

But based upon the metrics that I ran, I already paid for the equity, the balance, the AVM, the borrower contact information. And I just bring it to Bobby and he says, what’s this? Like, oh man, I use this tech platform, to kind of review opportunities that maybe get missed, right, that we don’t want to lose. We don’t want to turn to another, another loan officer, another company.

And I just found these on yours and I just won’t give it to you. But there’s a caveat. If you don’t make these calls in the next two weeks, I’m to. But it also shows you that as a manager, this is what I’m going to do for you. If you join me. Don’t just ask me for a sign on bonus.

That’s great, but that takes care of you for a little bit. I’m going to help you do one more loan a month. And Mike, that’s. Yeah. If you’re a manager, ask yourself, what are you doing? You not the tech, not the CRM, not the company. What are you doing to help your Lowe’s do one more unit a month?

Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting if you just do the math. One more loan. That was a tagline years ago in a company that we came up with. It’s just one more long, it really adds up. It’s big numbers. But, I mean, what you’re doing is very powerful because it is now. It is now. You’re showing that you can do something for somebody and it’s, you know, it’s almost a little bit of like, Bobby creating a flier that’s going to create 5 or 6 loans a month.

Somebody gets truly engaged in that. It goes beyond one more loan. Right? Absolutely. And not only one more loan. That was already your loan to begin with, by the way. So we have a template on Borrower insights. That’s just a button that you can click that says show me my churn. Now, that’s a painful report to look at because you open it up and you see all these loans that you could have done that were your past borrowers that somebody else got because you didn’t.

It’s sort of like recruiting, right? I talked to Bobby in January. We have a nice conversation. He’s not ready to talk anymore. It’s like I’m happy where I am. Let’s stay in touch. 90 days goes by and you don’t set a follow up task, so you forget to call another. 90 days goes by and you see on LinkedIn that he just joined your competitor.

Well, it’s the same thing with your borrowers. It’s not just because, oh, they must have had a better rate or oh, it’s because they’ve got better tech than we do, or it’s because they’ve, you know, they’re on some retention, you know, cycle that I was not. No. It’s because you’re not managing. What was that? I was in an event I went to the EPM event and Chris Vinson with Windsor.

Man. How did he say this? I think he said something like, stop calling it your database, call it your pipeline. Yeah. And it hit different when you say it that way. Your database is this static list of nothing. A pipeline is something that you’re actioning. And he was like, there’s activity tied to a pipeline. Yeah. Now what’s your point?

Earlier too, it kind of ties back into that industry mindset of, you know, let’s say it’s recruiting. But tying that to stages the loan process because that’s kind of how people are wired. They’re in the industry. I love that. You know, real quick Mike. All right. So we’re at 50 minutes right now. Eric, how are you on time?

I, I love it. I have many good on time, actually. Let me, I love that you’re asking me while we’re on the podcast, right? Oh. I’m good. No. I’m good. We can keep going. I can edit, buddy. I can edit. Yeah. But yeah. So, yeah, I had a couple questions I wanted to ask about culture because I think, you know, a lot of what we’ve led up to, comes from, you know, a core level of culture.

So if you’re good, it’s gonna ask you a couple questions about that. Mike, is there any other I, I just I just want to make one, one comment on what you, you talked about, you know, going to you’re trying to recruit Bobby’s a loan officer and you walk up with three deals and you go, look, if you don’t call them, I’m going to it’s also going to give you a pretty good idea of how dedicated Bobby is.

It’s almost like a litmus test to be able to go. I’ve gave him three deals. Did he call them? If he didn’t, you’re going to go, you know, I may still want to hire him, but. But it’s going to give you an idea of how motivated they are to act on pass pipeline. Yeah, it’s a note to self moment.

And by the way, you know, you should be tracking that somewhere. Like you as a manager should be tracking that somewhere. So you can go back and say, hey, I remember when we spoke back in January last year, this was not something you wanted to do. So now that now that you’re bringing it up as a reason why you’re not doing enough volume, I guess I have to ask you, has you have you changed?

Like have you changed your mindset on that? And it reminds the person, oh yeah, I’m pissed off at you. But the truth is, it was my decision not to move forward on some of these things. And so yeah, Mike, that’s a good example. The other thing I would say is, Mike, you know, it’s my mission and I’ll never pull this off.

But the word recruiting, we got to change what that means when we say it. I’ve got for the last ten years, I’ve spoken in front of so many different groups, and I have, you know, slide decks that literally the first slide, it’ll say, Eric Levin and on the agenda, recruiting and business development or something. And my first slide will say here, I’m going to help you be better at growing your business.

And here’s the first thing you need to know. And the first slide says stop recruiting. Because the second we say recruiting that word, there’s this emotion that’s tied to it. And it’s and it’s the emotion of cold calling. It’s the first thing that comes up. It’s the emotion of someone telling me no, right? It’s the emotion of will.

They must be they must have a better rate than us right now. Their price better than we are. So why should I even make this phone call? Yeah, but if you if you didn’t ask that to those same people in the room to think back to when they first started in the business, their first 2 or 3 real estate agents, first of all, it’s easier than ever to identify the agents that you should be building relationships with.

Obviously, that starts in model match. Back then you didn’t have that. But when I would ask that question, I would say, how many people remember the first three agents that they ever worked with? The whole room raises their hand, everybody raises their hand, and I’ll say, hey, Bobby, tell me, give me a name. And they’ll say, Sally, who was Sally with Keller Williams?

Was Sally married? Do you know what kind of car she drove. Do you know where she vacations. Do you know her favorite football team. Yep. Okay. Now let’s go to your recruiting pipeline. Who’s top on the recruiting pipeline. Oh Joe. Well you have Joe at the meeting stage right. Yep I said so when did you meet with him last.

Oh we met a week ago. Great. What’s the next action? Oh, we’re going to get together in a couple weeks. Not in action. You already have a black hole. You have a problem right now. But let me ask you a couple of other questions. What kind of car does he drive? I don’t know, is he married? I don’t know, where does he vacation?

I don’t know where was he before the current company that he’s with? I don’t know what happened. Why is it that you could do that with the agents? But you can’t do that with the people that you’re recruiting. Stop recruiting. Yeah, it’s really. I mean, the reality is it’s relationships. I’ve been in the business long enough to know that you.

I could talk to. I want to, recruit your. I want you to be a loan officer for me. Three years later, you might come to work for me. Some people, a lot of the people that that you get right away are it’s they’re in crisis mode. They’ll make a switch that once in between. But the really good ones for many, many times as you if you see it’s a relationship building and so years.

So let’s talk about that for a second. Yeah. If you call that low and you say, hey I’d love to work together, let me just tell you what that low here’s before they’ve built trust with you. Let me change. Instead of saying, hey, Mike, I learned a little bit about you. I’d love to talk to you about the possibility of joining my company.

I think it’d be great to work with you. Here’s what they actually here. Hey, Mike. I want you to join my company so I can get an override off your volume. That’s what they hear. So it takes time to get to a point where they’ll hear you the right way. And sometimes that’s you got to go through friction to actually get to that place.

But the friction is decreased. If you have a work flow that reminds you, you have to make a phone call right now, you have to follow up with this person, ask them about their kid’s birthday, ask him about the trip to Cancun that they went on. Ask them, did you get that build a relationship that you told me about three months ago when we caught up in the last?

And by the way, guess what? Loan officers, your agents that you’re reaching out to, that you’ve never done business with before. They’re here the same thing. So if you walk in the door and ask them for the next deal, all they hear is the commission that you’re going to make off of it. You’ve got to build that trust.

And one more thing I’ll say, Mike, because you brought this up, the ones that happen quickly, I wish I could pull statistics on this better. The ones that happen quickly. I will guarantee you the churn rate on the borrower side is greater than ever. And the attrition rate on the recruiting side is bigger than ever because you never built stickiness and trust.

Yeah, I had somebody describe it as a divorce. You know that the that that the first date after, you know, you want to get a divorce, you go on the first date is you’re excited about it. But three weeks into it, you realize they’re not a fit because they’re not used to work in that environment. You know, one thing that that sort of stands out that I’ve always looked at is that if you think about everybody wants to be heard and understood, if you think about that, that to me is if you just focus on that.

Because if I’m telling you, I want you to come here, it’s going to be a good fit. I’m going to do this. You’re going to be able to do that. And I’m broadcasting. I’m not listening. I’m not hearing. Yeah. And then you talk about all those other things as understand the individual. Everybody seems to look at it from their point of view because, you know, Bobby, my president of the company, I’m a regional manager.

He’s just beaten the cheese out of me to get more people in. And so I tend to be clumsy sometimes about the way I approach it. And I can go, I’m going through the motions. And then the excuses come up, which are, you know, they’ve got this obscure program that they’re the only one that does, you know, ten loans a month of it.

There’s all the excuses. But, you know, it just comes down to, you know, hearing somebody heard and understood. If you can do that, I think you build that relationship and the trust comes from that. So much of success of business development is just doing the next thing that I mean, it, it really how many times do we hear speakers to youth that will tell them the value of just showing up?

Like if you just show up, you’re already going to beat 50% of your competition. You know? So you’re already you’re already in the top 50%. Now, the next thing might get you into the top 10%. And I think that’s what is really missing from business development in general, is people just aren’t showing up like they used to.

Now, here’s the beauty of that. For the 10 or 15% that are showing up, the ones that are savages, they’re winning a lot of business. I heard an old saying from when I was a kid that I’ve never forgotten, and I don’t know what exactly applies, but it says something along the lines of like, it’s not so much what you do, it’s what everyone else doesn’t do that makes a difference.

And I think that’s kind of like where the showing up thing comes, or even just some of the little things you guys have been talking about on here, which I think are great insights for everyone listening that sometimes it’s just the simple little things where you take that extra step, you make that extra phone call. Eric, to your point, you take the time or invest a little bit of money in, you know, generating some like, you know, call ready loans for some of you you’re meeting with.

You think anybody else that’s recruiting them is doing those things. Probably not. Right. So if you do that and everyone else is not doing that, you’re going to stand out so much more. Who do you think they’re going to remember at the end of the day when maybe a year from now, they are ready to make a change, they’re going to remember that, you know what I mean?

Like, yeah, it just I’m a big believer in little details. And maybe again, that comes back to some of the Disney training we had. But let’s just like do the things that no one else wants to do, even if they’re little, because it’s going to be such a such a huge lift for you. And, you know, I’ll try really hard, Mike, as we go for the podcast not to reference Disney too many times because I’ll probably get sued, but, you can have to bleep it out.

Yeah, I will, but you know, that comes from a culture, right? And I think, Eric, you’re in a unique position. As Mike said earlier, you’ve worked with people across different industries, different belief systems. You know like what do you see if you were going to build a culture of a company from scratch, like whether it’s a company, a football club, whatever kind of where do you start?

What’s the first thing you define when you want to build a culture in the business that we’re in, the first thing that comes to mind is, setting expectations and meeting those expectations. So in the process of business development, just using that as example, the amount of times that I see people say something like, you know, I’m going to the next step is I’m going to send them the pricing log in or whatever or whatever it could be.

I’m going to send them a list of our products. And by the way, I’m not personally involved in recruiting anymore. Right. But I get it. I get a lot of these calls where people just want to pick my brain on, hey, will you look at my pipeline with me and tell me where you think I’m missing opportunities?

And it’s very easy, usually for me to pick someone out and say, why is this person still at the meeting stage? As an example, you have no future meeting set, so you’re they’re not at the meeting stage. But then secondly, I’ll see a note that says, good meeting, send product info. And so I’ll say, did you send the product info?

Oh no, not yet. I’m going to get that done by the end of the week. I said, okay, you met with him on Monday. Did you tell them when you were going to send the product info? And they said, I just said I would send it this week. You want to know one of the little things that’s a huge differentiator, Bobby, I’m going to get you that in the meeting with a call to action.

Okay. Hey, before we break, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to get you that product info. I’m going to have that in your inbox by tomorrow morning. You will have it no later than tomorrow morning if you don’t have it there by tomorrow morning. Is it really that big a deal? You might not think so, but let me tell you what you just showed this person.

You set an expectation and you met the expectation. Probably not what they’re getting from their manager right now, by the way. And so you’re already doing something that’s exceeding their own expectations. And Bobby, I think that then relates to culture. Right. Like the if do we know what the expectations are, are we meeting those expectations? I had a meeting internally with some of our team the other day, and there was a there was a disagreement around process relative to something.

And what I realized was the culture felt bad in that moment, like the culture, the emotion felt bad. It didn’t feel bad because anybody did anything wrong. It didn’t feel bad because anybody broke something. It didn’t feel bad because anybody was mad at anybody. They was mad, but they were mad because we didn’t have a process for what it was they were asking for.

Us and then and then I go to another thing. Mike, you said this a little bit earlier. Once you pick a process, just stick to it for a while. Don’t assume that just because it didn’t work this week means that that’s a trend that might not be a trend. It’s like go to the football club. If we get 400 comments on a post and three of them are really negative.

Dude, I’ll take that all day long. Really? Three out of 400, there were 6000 people that came to the game. And there’s three people that are pissed off about a moist chicken sandwich or something, which, by the way, I made that up. There’s no chicken sandwiches that at our games necessarily, although there might be, there might be in the future business idea.

Yeah, but I think culture is a slippery one. Bobby. But I do think I do think expectations, the setting of expectations. And then and then meeting or exceeding those expectations, which, by the way, I fail at that often. I know, like, you know, Jeff Linden’s a buddy of mine. He runs wholesale at Plaza. You guys probably know Jeff well, I missed expectations for him on something today.

But you know what I did? I picked up the phone. I told him I missed the expectation. I just told him, yeah, I said I missed that. I told you I would have it for you by Wednesday. It’s Friday. I don’t have it for you yet. And you know what? He’s okay with that now because I pick up the phone and I own it, and now I gotta.

I gotta go meet expectations. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. There’s, something I’ve thought about to me, it’s a culture of execution, right? That, that. And if you look at top producers, anybody with talent, they want to be around a place that executes because that’s what they do. And I think, you know, to me, that’s one of the things that has held a lot of people back because there’s a lot of excuses.

This is, you know, the mortgage business and we’re talking about the mortgage business, but all businesses are hard. Mortgage business is cyclical. It’s you’ve got all kinds of challenges. It is a hard business. But if you grind away at it, you know, and I will say people that don’t have as much talent as, you know, Bill over here who’s extremely bright and talented, but he doesn’t he doesn’t grind away a lot of times or much better at the business, and they’re much more successful.

You know, it’s about how much you commit and push through. You made me think of a couple of other things as well. You know, people join people and people leave people. So a lot of times when you think the reason we lost this person was because of a product, now that’s not why you lost him. The reason we lost this person was because, you know, we’re using a loss that they don’t like.

No, that’s not why you lost him. The amount of times I’ve heard of people that have told me they changed companies, I want to ask them why. And they say, oh, it’s because, I needed this product. And I know that the company that they left has that product. You know it like it happens. It happens all the time.

So number one is, you know, people join people. People leave people. And you should think about that in your relationship building process. Number two, our industry likes to act like they don’t want this, but it’s not what I find when I talk to people. And that is people want to be led. Yeah, people do want absolutely. People want to be led.

And they they’ve they think they don’t. Because for some reason this industry has become so entrepreneurial. You know, you and for example, again go back to motivation. As soon as you hire somebody that’s 100% commission. You’re starting that off with them. Like I own this company, I’m 100% commission. So I get to complain about whatever it is I want to complain about.

Why is a bank loan officer so much different than an I and blow? Well, the bank gets paid very differently and their motivation is very different. And if they decide, you know what, I don’t want to use the CRM. I’m going to go sign up for a different one, then go work for another company. But this isn’t this isn’t the right platform for you.

I’m not suggesting 100% commission is wrong, but what I am suggesting is that when things go wrong, those loan officers are taught to think, it’s not my job to give you everything that you need. It’s your job to go get out of what you have the most possible. But then that creates islands and people are on their own.

Yeah, they want to be led more than people think. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. So one of the questions I was going to ask as we kind of wrap up here, Eric, is that, you know, obviously you’ve come a long way. We’ve talked about a lot of different experiences you’ve had. If you could go back and you could walk alongside your, your younger self.

And I don’t know if that’s as a teenager or the teenager, because that’s around the time I think, that a lot of people are trying to figure out, okay, what do I want to do? What’s my future hold things like that? Like, what would you say to a teenager, Eric might ask for help. I like that it’s easy.

I didn’t ask for help. I just I just was like, give me the damn shovel and I’ll dig the hole. And I still like doing that. I still like having the shovel and nobody telling me what to do and just digging the hole. But I’ll tell you, the football club does not happen without me asking for a whole lot of help.

The success of Model Match, by the way, I’m one of, you know, three day to day founders, right? I, I’m lucky enough to work with who I think is the best head of product in the industry. And his team is unmatched. I ask those guys for help every day, you know, and it doesn’t matter. The seat that I sit in, I don’t, I don’t care.

Titles don’t matter. Anything to me. Yeah. And I’m fortunate enough now that there’s a lot of people that are willing to help me if I ask. Right. And I’ve learned I’ve learned that that’s a super power. And I think growing up I thought it was a weakness. And so, Bobby, that is 100% two things.

Ask for help and find mentors. That’s what I would do different. So I love that. And I think that that hopefully will resonate with a lot of people because especially to even, you know, when you’re young and stuff and you’re trying to find your way, you don’t want to ask for help, you don’t want to ruffle feathers, you don’t want a quote unquote bother, you know, the people that you see as higher ups and you’re sure are very busy.

And then I think once you hit a certain level in your career where maybe you’re trying to take that next step, you don’t want to ask for help because you feel like maybe that would disqualify you from moving up to that next step. Oh, he doesn’t know how to do this. Or he must. He or she must not be ready to, to take the next step.

So I, I love that you brought that up. Mike. Anything else? I this is an amazing conversation. Other than, you know what? I didn’t ask for help. It was because of ego, so. Oh, just say it. You know, it was it was it was just like, yeah, I, I probably smarter than everybody else, but I found out I was it, but no, no, this is this has been awesome.

I really I really appreciate you being with us, Eric. Well, I appreciate you guys asking me to be the first one. Man. That’s, It’s a it’s that I don’t take that lightly. That’s, It’s an honor. I think a lot of both of you guys and, and really sort of honored and happy to be in your, your sphere of influence.

So thanks for thanks for asking me on. I’m happy to help you guys anytime you ask. So I appreciate it. And like you said, if it doesn’t work out and totally be your fault and, but hopefully the 1st of many. And just one more reminder, everyone go to, Hickory fc.com and, pick up one of the 828 T-shirts.

It’s a great cause. And, and you look great at them. So thanks again, Eric. Appreciate you having you on. We’ll talk soon. I’ll see you in Boston. Yeah. All right, buddy, you have a great one.