Welcome back to The Art of Connecting Podcast. This is your host, Haydynn Fike here, back with another episode for you. And today I have my friend Chris Kloc here around the clock, around the clock, baby. And today we're gonna talk all about how Chris has built his very large, really relationship built lending business. So super excited to have you on the show today. Why don't you just go ahead and start and introduce yourself to the audience out there. Cool. Yeah, Chris Kloc been with summit funding the whole time I've been in lending, so it's a little bit over four years now. 36 years old. Got a lot of kids making some more, so I've got a seven, five, 3-year-old, another one on the way. Been married for 10 years. Love what I do. I think overall, I mean, you can build businesses different ways. You can build it transactional, you can build it relational. You might. You might end up feeling like sometimes it's bigger when it is transactional, but I don't think it has the same depth. And honestly, when you look at the books, you don't end up netting as much either. Yeah. Imagine that. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, awesome. So how did you get into the lending business? How did you get started doing what you do? Yeah, I'm positive that you know about bigger. I, I do. Yeah. Okay. Met, met the be man myself. Oh, there you go. See? No. Well, little bit, little bit cooler than me. I I was actually, it, it is weird because it was kind of this, I always feel strange saying it was a, a spiritual thing, but there was, there was a spiritual component to this whole thing. So I had been got outta school. I sold door-to-door cancer, heart attack policies for two months. It's not 1950. You can't do that. I mean, you can, and there were people that did it, but it completely burnt me out. I didn't want anything to do with anything that even remotely s smelled like sales. I went to a trucking company for two years. I ended up being at Unum for seven years as an underwriter and insurance here in Chattanooga. And about six years in, I was just, I just kept thinking to myself about the parable of the talents and that I was sitting behind a desk. Kind of wasting my wife a little bit. Little bit. I don't know if, is it a midlife crisis if you're 30, 31? It's like a quarter life crisis. Yeah. A quarter. That's what they call it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I, I was just thinking to myself, I need to do something else. And so I started searching started praying about it for about a year and looked into different avenues, selling contact sales for acube medical device sales. Even Unum being a sales rep at Unum. And we even considered relocating to Kentucky at one point, which was, it's crazy to think about now, but my wife was on board and she said, yeah, I mean we need to like, you could figure it out. And we were fine. I mean, we weren't making crazy money or anything, but we lived super meekly and, but I just knew I needed to do something else. And I ended up finding BiggerPockets somehow and read the Bur book and. Looked into house hacking and we actually got onto Zillow. Ended up putting in an offer on a property that was a duplex and it was a little bit nicer than what we were living in. We owned a little single family and we were gonna house hack for a year and then move into the next one. So we were pretty fired up about that. And. I had a bad experience with the real estate agent and the lender, and it was just, it was actually right in the midst of these, changing these rules for a while you had to put 15% down to being a duplex for about a year and a half conventional. Okay? And it was the month that that changed and the guidelines changed. So I asked a friend referral base, Hey friend, I know you're in the real estate. His name's Parker Horn. He flipped a bunch of houses. He connected me with his real estate agent, and she connected me with her lender. That lender is my now boss, Clarence Hor. Walked in, sat down, did a consultation with them, spent about, I don't know, hour and a half. We ended up going to the bathroom at the same time. Standing at the, yeah, it was not too graphic. Alright, this is Fiji. You, you're just like sitting there like, Hey, what do you think about that duplex? I, it's not that far off. Literally, I literally we're standing at the urinal together and I said, Hey Clarence, are you guys trying to hire anybody? And he said, keep your eyes over there. He said, yeah yeah, we are actually, who do you have in mind? And I said, me. He said, oh, I was gonna call you. And we sat in the bathroom and talked for about 15 minutes about like, yeah, I mean I think you'd probably be a good fit for this. And I was a professional soccer referee at the time, but I had a game at Duke in Carolina that weekend. So I drove from Chattanooga to Duke, Carolina. On the way there. I listened to Load Officer podcast. They had like 550 episodes now. And just a bunch of other stuff, stuff on Summit. On the way back, I was halfway home. I remember the podcast Todd had done a town hall. He said, here's the 10 things that you need to be a good loan officer to be a great loan officer. And it felt like he was talking to me and I went, whoa, this is it. And it just, I already kind of knew, I think this is the direction I want to go, but I said, this is it. And I sent my wife that podcast or the little YouTube video and I said, listen to this and call me back when you're done. And we talked about it. And by the weekend, that was the weekend, Sunday night, I wrote Claire. It's a long email that said, I will ask you if you want cream or sugar, hire me. He called me five minutes later and said, we're gonna hire you, man. Calm down. So hit the ground running April 26th of 21. So it was right when rates were super low. I did about 10 refis and they jumped, baby, they jumped real quick. Wait, when, when did you start again? Sorry? April of the end of April of 21. 2021, okay. Yeah. So I did 28 loans in 21. Got it. Did my first one in June. And where are you at now as far as like the scale of business? We're on pace for 60,000,200 this year. 200 loans. 200 loans. Awesome. Last year we did 1 55 for about 40 million. Right. At 40. Perfect. Okay, cool. So you're constantly growing. Right, and that's, I love it. That's just something that every, every time I get on the phone with Chris, it's like he's at some kind of conference or he's writing something down. He's fired up about his business and growth. And what, what is your opinion? With you know, a lot of people were talking about how things are slowing down right now, things aren't moving. What is your opinion on that as far as like, when you want to do something? In my opinion, you, you figure out the way to do it. Mm-hmm. Like, our buddy Ashley's already sold a hundred houses this year. Yeah, right. Exactly. Like the market does not really change you, right? Mm-hmm. It's just so how, how do you look at that? How do you look at when there's a slowing market when people aren't. Necessarily buying as much of the product that you provide, how do you deal with that and keep your volume up? I think it's, I, I honestly just think you create your own market. I don't think it's any more complicated than that. You have to do sales producing activity. If I know that I need to close a loan and I want to help somebody build wealth, like that's, I'm constantly thinking, I wanna help people build wealth through home ownership. Am I a good fit to help you build wealth? And if I'm not, I have a lot of partners, like there's plenty of people that come to you. You potentially could help them, but you know, somebody else is the better fit. And if you do the right thing and you connect, I mean, it's, it's crazy. I don't necessarily believe in karma and the universe like that, but I do in the sense that like there is, it's a biblical principle. I mean, you end up, you end up giving away and it will end up coming back and it's, it just seems like that that's pretty constant. I mean, you have a lot of really awesome bank relationships in town because of that. But going back to the building your own market. Just sales math. If I know I need closings, that means I need contracts, which means I need pre-approvals, which means I need in-person meetings, which mean I need referrals, which means I need referral sources. Go get more referral sources. It constantly, when you have a big market shift like this, there are people that are really, really past client and maybe waiting for business to come to them. Right? So they're huge businesses. All past clients, they've been in the business a long time. You've seen a lot of people that have went from. I've been in the business 20 years, and this is my worst year ever because they've stopped prospecting, they've waited for it to come to them. Mm-hmm. So somebody like Asher's, an example. And there's, there's a good amount of them out there right now. I was just talking to, you probably know Carter Robinson, and he's, he's building this business. He's doing it the same way. He's calling expired's, calling FSBO's, calling cancels, circle prospecting, doing things to where you are going and creating opportunities as opposed to waiting for opportunities to come to you. There's way more competition when you're waiting for the opportunities. Right.'cause that's everybody you know who isn't, yeah. Who doesn't want to. When I sold cars, you know, I would always be like, well, no one walked in today. Ain't selling cars. And now looking back on it, it's like there's so much more that I could have done to sell cars. Right. Your job is to create that. I mean, talk about your podcast. Create that connection. Yeah, exactly. Be original, like social media. I could have done social media, made funny reels, right. There's so many different things that you can do to, to be the person to go to even when things are slowing down, right? Mm-hmm. Because what really happens with that is the people who are good get, stay as busy as they are. Mm-hmm. Or maybe they lose a little bit. Some of'em get busier, but what it does is it knocks out the people who are not all about it. It it when a market slows Oh yeah. It, it totally rips. You know, it's a tide coming out and you're figuring out who's swimming without pants on, because there's people just taking market share, just market share over and over and over again. And in some sense, I mean, I kind of feel bad for those people that have been in there a long time and stuff, and they're, it, it's just the, the pressure's getting to'em, but activity ends up getting rid of anxiety. You get out there. And I think piece of it too is you have business coaches. I have coaches, yeah. Todd is my coach. I have, Robin is my coach. I have some people that are, have been where I want to be that are my coaches. They've been through this before. It's not the first bad market or, and I don't, I don't even think of it as a bad market. I really don't. Right. And I don't know any, I'm busy as crap. And we hired somebody this year, like we have three people on the team. We're on pace to, to set the record for the office. Like we're number. Two or three in units in the company right now, out of 250 loan officers. And it's, you know, the people will ask me kind of that same question and it's just, we're constantly focused on how do I make my calendar green? And green means in front of somebody or with somebody. And how do you 10 x an activity, right? So a podcast would be a 10 x activity. It can be seen or heard by a lot of people. We have How to Train a dragon We're Doing Next Saturday. It's a way that we can stay in contact. Generate business, but also give back. Like, Hey, we're doing a movie. I'm gonna dress up as a female Viking. It's gonna be incredible. We can take some pictures together. You can make fun of me. I don't care. But it's like, it's a way to be highly active and highly visible. And so I think any business should have some sort of sales test that is a proven way that you generate referrals and that you do sales producing activities. We, at Summit and our coaching program, we have a 21 part sales test. Literally you can determine what your income is based on what you're actually doing. On the sales desk, there's 21 things. Right now I'm doing 17 of them and I'm constantly thinking, how can I add the one? Can I just add one more by continuing to do this and what do I, how do I do it? Do I do it through leverage? Do I, does I need to create more time? Do I need to buy back more time and shift some things differently? But yeah, it's just being highly active and highly visible all the time. Yeah, I love that. So I want to like talk about. I wanna talk about connections. Yeah. And you, you were, you were a connector in SMI when, when we we met up and had a cigar the other day, and after that you fired off several emails. It started a chain of really great connections. I actually just met again with Chad yesterday, so That's awesome. You know, it it, to me, obviously connections are everything. I started the show. Mm-hmm. But I wanna talk to you about how, how did connections play a role into what you do and. When, when you make a connection, are you looking to get anything out of it or are you just looking to help someone grow? Hmm, that's a great question. I, I think that, you know, in the back of your head the philosophy of givers game, right? So I'm in BNI started BI three and a half years ago, and that it works. I mean, the reason why it's so impactful is because it works. I don't know if I ever go into connecting, you know, when we met and I knew that, I was like, oh, you need to be this person. You need this person. I'm just thinking. Man, I, I feel like you're gonna bring each other value. And I know maybe the psychology behind it is, well, you know, it'll end up increasing your own business stature is, Hey, I'm connected to this person. I'll connect you and see if you can have mutual benefit and mutual value. But I think when you meet good people, you just want them to meet the other good people. Yeah. So I kind of, an example, I have a birthday party at my house every year. It's crazy. We have 175 to 200 people there, and. I don't know. I've thought for a while. I'm like, why do I like this? Is this an ego thing? Is it, do I want people coming and singing happy birthday? I really don't. I don't. I don't want people, I don't want presents. I don't want anything like that. I love, I love, it's my favorite day of the year because I love that my real estate people will meet my church people. We'll meet my book club people. I got a book club where we smoke cigars, we'll talk about theology. They'll meet my soccer on the weekend people, and they're all together and connected. And I can say these are one of my favorite people over here from real estate. And they can meet one of my favorite people from church and they can have these cool conversations and hopefully they can have some sort of, you know, stemming relationship that comes from it. And. All of, pretty much everything we do, we see commonality. Yeah. Right. So, oh, I know Chris. It's like an automatic, like, oh yeah, where did you meet Chris? Yeah, you can, there's so many conversations that you can have off of a commonality. Mm-hmm. Right? And so I think that that's part of our wiring that we seek is. Automatically, if you have a commonality of knowing someone else, it makes you way more comfortable. Mm-hmm. Right? So if you go into a room and you're like, if you know one person in that room, you're gonna feel so much better. A hundred percent than if you didn't know anyone. Right. And, and I think being a connector, you can be a surrogate, be a provider of that commonality for people to say like, Hey, you have this in common with this person and you guys should get together. Yeah. And sometimes people are really thrown off by it. There's a, there's a CEO of a company in, in the office. And I connected him with Josiah, the guy? Yeah. Josiah Davies. And he was like, he came, he was like, dude, why, why'd you connect with that person? I was like, oh, he, he has a bunch of marketing stuff, you know, he, he spent over a billion dollars on advertising. He's like, oh, okay. Interested why? And I'm like, you guys just, you own us. You run a social media company. Yeah. Like, I figured it'd be good for you guys to meet and some people don't like. They're wondering what you're getting out of it. Yeah. He just was so confused about like, why, and he's from California, so it's, I guess maybe not as normal for people to do that, but yeah, he's, but that's so nor that's so normal for us in the southeast, and I mean, you're one of the best connectors. I know. There's not many, like, you know, this and I'm not just, I'm not just pulling smoke. Like you're one of the best connectors. Thank you. Yeah. And, and I love that because it's, I don't, yeah, I think, I think that there's, there is a. You break down all the psychology of it. There's a dopamine hit that you get when you can see people. I like this person, I like this person. And they like each other. Yeah. Sweet. Like triangle relationship, baby. It's all good. Or you connect someone together and they come back and they're like, yeah, we bought a house together. Yeah. Or we bought a apartment complex together. We did this. And it's like, that's awesome. Yeah. It just is like, it's so cool whenever you hear the good stories, and it kind of sucks when you hear the bad stories, right? Mm-hmm. Some of'em don't go Well. Yeah, it doesn't always, yeah. I mean there's, and, and hopefully if you do enough of it, you'll have enough relational capital that if there was one connection that was made and you go, Hey, the guy was a little, I'm thinking of one, but maybe there's the, it was a little bit uncomfortable or he's a little bit newer in his sphere or he kind of fumbled it or whatever. Yeah. It's like, okay. But it probably was still like, it wasn't a complete waste of your time, at least. Maybe you've, you even can pour into him and give him some advice in that, you know, whatever sphere that they're in. Well, a lot of times whenever that happens, if someone's asking me for a connection on something like a contractor or something, and it doesn't go well with that specific customer, then they'll come back to me anyways and ask for another one. Yeah. Like, and that guy didn't work out. But you have the relational capital, that's why. Right, exactly. Yeah. And relational capital leads to business, you know, getting done what you wanna get done. Right. If you, if you have a problem, but you know the person that can solve it, you don't have a problem. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If they owe you something, right. I don't even wanna say owe you something they just like, like you Yeah. In general. So, well, and you asked about that. How does that, how did that build the business too? I mean, my, I ended up, we have a sales summit where we have, you know, 250, 300 loan officers that show up. Once every six months we do a, an offsite retreat and it's awesome. And I, this last time I spoke on leveraged events and how I do leverage events. And the time before that I spoke on how do you end up creating your business through buddy introductions, which is, I mean, that's what it is. It's referral based stuff. And I didn't realize I was supposed to actually speak on something else. I was talking to my coach and he said, well, you're gonna do this. And then we went through our top 40 list of the people that sent us business and stuff, and I realized that 32 out of my top 40 were a buddy introduction. Hmm. So I'll just give you an example. If you know Daniel, stop. Dan stops a great agent. I bought my house with him. He was one of the first agent, he was the first really good agent that trusted me. And so I called everybody in my database and I said, Hey, who did you buy your house with? Will you do me a favor and will you call them and say, will you meet my friend Chris? He's a loan officer. Todd did that. Todd, Carolyn did that, and he had bought his house. He wasn't even in real estate yet. He's an agent now. Great agent. He bought his house with Daniel and Daniel said, yeah, sure, I'll meet him for lunch. He shouldn't have, he'd been in the business six years. He closed a bunch. I was brand stinking new. But he didn't end up having a relationship and he did a favor for his friend, for his past client. And that was kind of the, I think that might have been the unintentional genius. I'm not a genius, but that was the unintentional genius. And I look back on it now and they will do a favor for a past client. And so because of that, we got connected and he said, I think I see something in you. He gave me a shot and you know, we've been, we've probably close 17 or 18 families, you know, help families buy homes in the past three and a half years or so. And so it's just, it's really cool to see that, that, that is in that introduction, turns into this introduction. And, you know, we just had two deals that went really great that are in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. And this guy used to be a huge agent in Texas and he has another huge agent in Tennessee and he had a deal that fell apart and he said, I got a lender you should talk to. She closed 176 deals in the last 12 months. And I'm driving up to Jamestown, Tennessee to talk to her in, in a week. Nice. Like, that's the cool stuff is when you do a good job and then you're also intentional about like, Hey, I am trying to grow my business. Right? Like I told him, that guy, I was like, Hey, you know, if you know anybody that you think would be benefit from this, like, let me know. I'd be glad to help him. And so if you're trying to offer value and continually offering value and asking to be connected while simultaneously connecting, then that's where the, that's how the business grows. So how do you deal with that fear of the ask? And I know for you this isn't a thing anymore, but like when you were first getting started, I coach a lot of people and I talk to a lot of people that are like, I, I don't know what to ask. Like, how do I ask someone for something without like having, having value in return. So how do you present value? What do you ask? What kind of ask would you be? Like for, for an introduction, like to, to someone else? Like when, when you ask for an introduction to someone else, how do you, when you were beginning and when you're getting started and I'm, I'm assuming, yeah. At some point there was a mindset where it's like you didn't feel like you had a lot of value bring'cause you were brand new. You just, yeah. I honestly, I didn't know, I didn't even know what I didn't know. I just knew that I was gonna take care of people and I was passionate about building wealth through real estate. And so there, there was a confidence in that. I didn't know that. I was not a loan expert at all, and I figured it out. And I mean, now we've helped 450 families, like we know what we're doing. Yeah. And I also have resources too. I mean, I have people on my team that know loans better than I do. They're just not. They're not the connector, they're not the person that's gonna be able to present properly. I'm the technician as far as putting the money where it goes, the guidelines piece. I have people that have been doing this for 25 years that if I have a, a question about how do I interpret this? I'm not, I'm gonna tell you, Hey, I have an expert. Let me make sure I check on this first. There's no reason for me to go, oh yeah, it's no big deal. And then the deal falls apart and you crush your, your reputation. That's a perfect example. I mean, as a connector. You don't need to be the subject matter expert on really much of anything. For, for me, like I know a lot about lending. Oh, hey there. It's me again. I know you expected Morgan Freeman to come on and talk about the biggest company in the world. Well, I'm sorry, but you get the next best thing. This show is sponsored by the company that I co founded, Acadia Capital, and acadia is a hard money lending fund originating loans in Southeast Tennessee and Northern Georgia on residential one to four unit renovation properties. We are regulation D five Oh six C fund and are actively seeking accredited investors. We provide fantastic first position real estate back returns. If you're ready to get your tired and lazy capital to work with a minimum 8 percent return, go to Acadia loans. com backslash invest. Not only do we accept standard investments, but we can also accept self directed IRAs and other self directed retirement accounts to take advantage of tax advantage investing. Thank you so much for listening to Art of Connecting now back to the show. Mm-hmm.'cause it's, it is my business, so I would consider, I wouldn't consider myself a lending expert, but I'm very knowledgeable in it. Mm-hmm. But I don't need to know everything that there is to know about lending. Yeah. Because if I do, I'm not doing what my highest and best use of my time is, which is, like you just said, the green calendar, sitting down in front of people, connecting to people, figuring out what they need and how I can help them get it. Because if I'm not doing that, if I'm sitting there jabbing about lending all day long, I'm not growing my business. My core business is build on relationships. Mm-hmm. And talking to people. Well, and if you end up having, like our model is more of a doctor nurse model. So for instance, I have three people on my team. I have somebody that's more of an intake specialist. So I'll have a conversation with somebody for a couple minutes and just set expectations. Hey, Ian's gonna give you a call. She's just gonna get some basic information and set up a time for us to meet. Now Neon does that when they come in. My next step is to make sure that I'm involved in the consultation piece. The actual, we'll call it the doctor part, where I'm looking at the chart and making sure I'm diagnosing from there. We have people that, you know, I still stay connected, but we have people, Amber or Alex, that help them get to the closing table because their expertise is in this area and it's the logistics of getting it to the closing table. So my jobs, I have my job, I have three job duties. I need to generate referrals. I need to do consultations and I need to manage my team and managing the team would be delegating inside of that. Everything else I have delegated into a particular person based on what their job role is. And all of them have three different main job roles. If you end up having 95 different things, and guess what? When you start out, you're everything. Yep. But when you grow and you have to generate enough business and there has to be some pain to go through it. I mean, I was on the back porch. Smoking cigars and drinking energy drinks until midnight, three to four nights a week for a year and a half. And it's very uncomfortable. I'm coaching my social media team. They, they do our social media and I coach them in their business side of like growing their company. Mm-hmm. Super proud of'em. They're gonna hit 10 K this month. Oh, that's awesome. And they just started the company a few months ago, so it's, it's fantastic. But anyways, I was talking with them and, you know, we were really just talking about that growth period of when you're trying to figure out can I hire someone? Can I, like, can I even afford this? And I, I was, I'm still kind of there right now in my business. So I was little baby, this little baby business in my lending company. And you know, you're looking at the revenues and you're like, I need to grow'cause I'm at capacity. But also at the same time, I don't have that, like, I don't have five grand to pay someone full time. Yeah. So I got super creative and I hired an intern. I've already promoted her to my director of operations and I'm turning her into a referral machine. She's gonna start being a connector. Mm-hmm. She just has that, she has that personality and so. I figured out a way to do it.'cause it's never gonna be the ideal time to hire. Mm-hmm. Right. And maybe there was for you, but for me, well I was busting out of the seams so that, the problem is, is when I was, when I was growing like crazy, the business was contracting. So there, there was a good, healthy tension with my management here where I was never contentious, but there was tension. Because it was, everybody else was shrinking like crazy, and we were growing like crazy and I needed to hire, and in a normal market, I would've hired way sooner. But I, it was good. I don't, I don't look back on it with any sort of resentment or anything. Yeah. It's just, hey, that was part of it, right? Like, I'm happy to be here and it's part of the journey. Yeah. I want to answer, I didn't, I didn't mean to sidestep the question about asking. I'm just coming back to that. No, you're good. So asking, feeling comfortable with asking for the connection. I think if you know that you will represent the person that you're asking. Well, so if I asked for it to be connected to whoever, and if I asked you, if I knew that I wasn't gonna be a slimy snake and I was going to go in and try to add value and not waste their time, I don't think it would bother. I mean, it doesn't ever bother me. No. Okay. You know that guy. Do you mind introducing me and I, there's no. If there's no sales language that I would use in that particular way, like would you be opposed? Or is it a bad idea if you introduced me? I think it's just as simple as like, Hey, I wanna meet that guy. Do you mind me? Do you mind introducing me? And that I don't think raises the sales resistance of the person there, especially if there's, I don't just ask to be introduced if I don't know the person often, right? If I know when I have a relationship, that's when I potentially ask for an introduction. But sometimes too, you can blame a third party. So part of the business growth was I would call somebody and I'd say, Hey, my coach challenged me and I did. I wasn't lying. My coach challenged me. I have to meet 10 new agents. Do you Who's like you like Josh Walker is an agent I've worked with for a long time, and Jeff Ramsey's team Josh who do you know? I asked him, he introduced me to his friend. We couple close a coup close a couple deals together. You know, that's the, the piece of, that's the coaching piece and that is the stretching pieces. Maybe I probably wouldn't have just called and asked him intentionally because I was already a little bit at capacity, but it was, I'm, I'm a soldier, so coach said to do it, I had to go do it so he wouldn't get mad, you know, like, right. That was kind of my thought process, and it was like, it pushed me and it continued to help me grow. I mean, one of his challenges was in the next two weeks you have to meet a hundred agents face to face. I just did that. My episode with Kim White just went live I think last week. And I just emailed her today.'cause I, I asked her at the end of the show, I was like, we'd, we'd finished recording. We talked for probably like 30 minutes afterwards. She's such an amazing person. And I was like, if you knew of anybody that would be a good fit to come on the podcast, I would love the connection she's connected to. Mm-hmm. I mean, senators, presidents. Oh wow. She's, she's done very well. And so I emailed her again, you know, today'cause I just followed up, you know, and I was like, Hey, just wanted to. See if you happen to think of anybody, that'd be a great connector. That would be a great, you know, good to have on the show, and I'm gonna implement my team. Every guest that I have on, you'll get an email from Autumn or Linley asking you, Hey, is there anyone that you know that you think would be a good fit to be on the show? I'm automating that into the process because believe it or not, it actually can be difficult to find guests on a podcast. Like it's, you have to constantly be thinking, right? They don't just come to you. Yeah. You've gotta think about who is gonna be a good guest on the show. What are they represent? You're regenerating. Right? Exactly. That's what you're doing for the podcast. You're intentionally lead generating and not waiting. You're creating your own market. It's the same thing. And, and you have to, because people aren't just gonna come to you mm-hmm. And say, Hey, can I be on your podcast? And, and maybe when I get bigger, it will be that way. Mm-hmm. But right now, you know, we have 52, a hundred people a week to listen to this show. So it's like no one's fighting over Yeah. Fighting over themselves to come on the Art of connecting podcast. So I'm constantly looking for. People who are connectors that just really embody what the show's all about, they can bring value. Mm-hmm. And so anyways, I don't know where I was going with that. It's really cool though, because you, you implement the exact same strategy that I do. Mm-hmm. Just asking the people you already know. Do you know of anybody that's like this? Yeah. And then you could get 1, 2, 3 connections out of that, that's your ideal client. And asking for referral sources. Mm-hmm. As opposed to. I'm looking for this person that will sit down in front of me and potentially buy a home loan. Right? So like I've been in BNIA long time. I am, I have always asked for real estate agents or builders or real estate teams or brokerages or divorce attorneys or financial advisors. Those are people that are connected with other secure, increasing your, your sphere of influence to them, right? Yeah. Because if you say, Hey, do you know anybody that's looking to buy a house? I honestly, I can't say that I do know anybody right now. Maybe there's this one couple at church, but besides that, I don't, probably don't even know anybody that's looking to buy a house.'cause how many people share with you? Like Yeah, they just don't say it that loud. Oh, I'm looking to buy a house. You see a closing picture. Right, exactly. You are like, why did my sister buy a house with somebody else? Whereas you could say, do you know any real estate agents? Those are the people who, the people who are looking to buy a house come to them. And then you're exactly right. You know? And there's this book that I'm reading right now, finishing up soon called Big Game Hunting that Christopher Cairo talking with this guy you might coach me. And it's all about like getting around the right people. Mm-hmm. Right. And the, the name is, is called Big Game Hunting because it's like, don't, don't, don't shoot for a little rabbit if you want to, if you want to go home with a piece of big game. Mm-hmm. Don't shoot for the rabbit. Because you're gonna go home with a rabbit. Well, you've met Todd, so my CEO he's worth almost$200 million. He built a business from scratch, like it's an incredible man. Constantly curious and, and aggressive salesperson, just constantly thinking about how do I add value and learning, constantly learning and adapting. That's why someone's been so successful. But he he has this thing called jolt, and it is literally. Hiring American VAs to call and set appointments with qualified referral partners. And I've been doing it for six months. We had three closings this month and it was with people that I had never met. I wouldn't have met. I mean, it's, one of'em is up in Knoxville, one of'em is in Athens. A couple from in Cleveland. I mean, I've been able to expand my reach a ton into Cleveland. I've been a bunch of connections there.'cause there's only really one, two, maybe two good lenders there. And Cleveland's growing a lot. The, one of the lenders is really, really heavy into just being super connected with the people that are Zillow focused. And I don't, I don't focus on, I don't work with almost anybody that does Zillow. I just, the ROI just, I don't think it's there for the, on the real estate side or on the lender side at least, but it's been, it's really interesting'cause that's the same concept. It's like, Hey, look at your top 40. You want your top 40 to be filled with people that do at least, at least at least six buy sides over the last 12 months constantly. And they're referring you because you'll close. A certain amount with each one, and you don't want to just, you end up calling on the same people. And I am constantly thinking when I'm calling my referral partners of adding value, it's all value add. I don't wanna call and ask, I don't know if I've ever, ever called and asked for a lead from somebody. So how do you add value to the agents when you get on a call with them? That's a great question. So I literally have, I'm, I'm pretty metric focused and, and very systems and process oriented. So I literally have, for each of the agents I work with, I have a piece of paper and it's in four quadrants and it talks about either leads pre-approval, so leads maybe I'm following up with, right? So that's a category. Pre-approvals. So that would be people that are already pre-approved shopping, a sales tip. So maybe something I've learned that I think I could share with their business to help them grow or an invite to an event. And that's. Started keeping it on a piece of paper because I realized there was a couple people I had called and invited to 19 events in a row and I was like, I don't want to just be the event guy. I need to make sure I'm adding value in a different way. So I have a happy hour every month. That's a value add. I don't really even invite agents as much anymore. I mean, they come it's first Tuesday of every month at Southside Social. I pay for, you know, bowling, bowling shoes and food. So I have pizza and wings and some tacos. Like that's a, a way to give back. That has become a little bit old on the realtor side. Just you go once, you're probably not gonna come all the time. But I've started to shift that and move that more towards past clients. So we have like 15, 16, 17, 18 people that show up now. But just different ways to add value. Like I have, they had a train a dragon, think on figuring out what it is. So an event could be something, Robin came in town, Todd's gonna come next year. I'm gonna, you know, when you get passionate about it, you invite everybody. I had a hundred people show up last year when, when Robin La Bass, our head of sales. Came in. But yeah, just thinking about what are, how are the ways that I can add value and not, and that's the giving thing. Like you're talking about how can I give And it ends up coming back. It does, yeah. Now there is a time to ask. I wanna be clear. When you're establishing the relationship initially when you don't have it, I have learned, Todd has taught me over the last several months to see if we agree that it's a good fit to have a verbal confirmation that hey would. Listen, Hey, would you think at this point it seems like if I do these things, you know, if I have good communication, if I close on time, if I am a hundred percent approved in underwriting and I'm not worried to your clients, those are the things that you said were important. Would it be crazy if the next three leads you sent to me just so I can just have a audition, let's say, and honestly, at the end of it, if you don't think I'm a good fit for your clients, like we can partway as friends, hopefully you'll still accept. Things as a listing agent, but I, I do see alignment here and I just wanna see if, if this is a good fit. There's a lot of sales languages in there. I'm under, I understand like there's a takeaway close. I don't know if it's a good fit, all that, but I am asking and getting somebody to verbally say it does result in the sales math where you will get more referrals, especially if you restate it and have them say it twice. Mm-hmm. So you're, you're we're, so, I, so what I hear is you're providing value in the manner of. Events that you do, and also maybe you invite some other events that other people do as well. Mm-hmm. Right? And then you also have Prequalifications that come to you to say, Hey, I wanna buy a house. I know you're a lender. We go to church together. Who should I talk to for a realtor? So you can kind of dole those out a little bit. Mm-hmm. And so that's kind of an opportunity then an agent could get working with you. Yeah. We sent back 20 deals for$150,000 in commissions last year. Nice. To different agents. It wasn't just one. And I have some big ones I work with, but. Divvied up between different ones. Awesome. Cool. So in an industry where arguably you could say it could be pretty difficult to figure out where you provide value, in my opinion, there's a lot of lenders out there. Y'all do the same thing, right? We can be commoditized a hundred percent. Yeah. And so, but you found out a way to actually provide real value that you feel good about providing. Hundred percent. And that's what's really important no matter what industry you're in. In my opinion, you gotta figure out a way to provide value.'cause if one time this person DMed me on LinkedIn and was like, it was literally just a straight sales pitch. Mm-hmm. Like no, nothing. And I was like, I only texted back. I was like, you should probably provide some value before you just rolled into the sales pitch. And then they went off on me. I just told like, thanks for your advice. And they blocked me. But I was like, I love it. How? If all you're doing is just saying, Hey, I'm Chris and I do loans, so here's something Robin taught me within the last year that that was really impactful for me. My goal is, I never wanna say I'm better than X. They're good lenders in town. There's probably, I think there's about eight of them, eight to 10 of them. I'm not better than I am different than, mm-hmm. And we are like, nobody sits down with every single client for an hour. Goes over the process, the monthly payment, the cash to close rates, answers, questions, structure, the loan, and you leave with a clear understanding of what's going on. And the real estate agent knows exactly how to write the offer. Nobody else does that, period. And so that is different. And so when I say people are motivated by three things, time, joy, money. So when I'm meeting with a referral partner, I'm trying to uncover what their motivation is and what they're motivated by. And so if they're motivated by time. We can save them time, because guess what I mean? If, if you send a client and I'm gonna get them pre-approved, or I'm gonna give them an action plan and you literally don't have to worry about it and you can go do more sales producing activity, less headache, that's gonna save you time. It also bring you more joy because you will, A, make more money. And B, you won't have as much chaos with trying to organize this. I don't want you to have to pay the, or, you know, be the person that's orchestrating everything. And then the other piece is making more money. You have more time for sales producing activities, or you can choose, at least you can choose. Go have more time with family, or I can choose as some of the people we know, somebody like Asher's gonna choose to go do more sales producing activity. So it's more of positioning it as a partnership where I am an extension of you. I'm gonna reflect you in competency, character, and communication. Those are my three C's, and that's how I'm gonna be different and not better. I love it, man. So if you had a piece of advice to give to someone who's listening to this right now. On how to just start growing their connections. Hmm. And I know this is very general, but what would be the first step that you would take like it to start meeting more people, to make meaningful connections that can help'em grow their business? Well, I'd say you just have to start with who are the people that you are deeply connected with. Like how do you expand your circle with that? So it might be somebody that's in your small group, it might be something that's at your soccer team. What if you. It's gonna be really challenging if you're not actually connected to people. So if you're a hyper introvert and you don't have a lot of friends, it's gonna be really hard to go get connected and start being a connector. So I think it's an internal motivation where you actually have to be passionate about the connection. Hmm. And so when you are, you're gonna talk to those people and you're gonna say, Hey, like I, I want to meet more people like you. And if there's a genuine, if that's genuine. I think it comes across genuinely, which then they're gonna refer better, whether it be in the business world or it's just getting connected more. Yeah, I completely agree. And also just not being afraid to ask. Yeah. Like it can be really scary to ask for some reason. I really don't know why it is, but like mean even now, like if, if you tell me like, go talk to that pretty girl over there, it's like, yeah, but you know, it's like, do I have to like clenching, you know, the arms of the chair? But you asked me to go talk to a billionaire waltz right up and say, Hey, I'm Hayden. You know, I don't know what it, what it is about that, but you know, that ask can be really, in the beginning, I guess it's really practice, right? Mm-hmm. Like feeling confident.'cause it's something that's repeat. If you repeat something, you become more confident in it. When you see that it works, especially well, then it results, you do something. Results, results, results. Yeah. And then you're like, oh. You know, I just need to do like more of that, right? Mm-hmm. And so in the beginning when you have never done an ask before, it's kind of awkward. You don't know what to say. You don't know what to ask, but then you do it a few times and you're like, oh man, I'm really starting to like build. So getting over that fear to ask, I feel like is so important because fear is, you know, you're just, your success is on the other side of your fear. That's what like all it boils down to. Action overcomes anxiety. Yeah, that's right. Awesome. Well, Chris, we're almost outta time here. So I wanna ask you our final question, and that is, what is a connection to a person or group of people that's changed the trajectory of your life or business? Man, that can go in a lot of different ways. I'm gonna give you the Bible answer. So there's the Jesus connection. I mean, I became a Christian when I was 19. That is, I mean, that would be the most impactful connection for sure. I, and it would overcome everything. Mm-hmm. I mean that on, honestly, that was a, a door that would not have been opened for marriage or, you know a deacon at my church or any of that stuff. That's completely changed my life trajectory. There's a personal side that my wife is such a rock that I, I think of her as. I, I always, I won't let her, we can't call each other best friends. You can't do that. I just don't, that's a different category. Wife is a different, you're not, you're not friends owning your life. Not, yeah. You can't friend zone. But I always, when I'm at in this setting, I always think business. But I want to take a step back and just say as a caveat, it would, those would be two things that are actually the most important things in my life. So they're definitely building blocks in, maybe in the business world. It's it is Asher. I mean, Asher's my best friend and it's. It's really cool to, and he's way younger than I am. I mean, I'm 36, he's like 23. But it's, it's really cool to find somebody. It's, this is super weird, but it's kind of like dating, right? You're dating, you're moving in the same direction, and you look next to you and you're like, oh, this, this person's doing the same thing. Yeah. Like they're moving in the same direction. They're running at the same pace. Yeah, they're running at the same pace. Yeah. And it's just really cool to see that there's people out there that are hungry to take over the world and serve at a high level and are. Highly motivated to be the best and not to crush everybody in their wake for the sense of crushing them, but Right. To just like, Hey, I'm just gonna do the best I possibly can. And I'm passionate about taking care of people at a high level. Hmm. And they also have a big business mind. Like I want, like, okay, we have the ability to think about it, to be connected, and then just take a step back at different points and say. I need to evaluate the data and figure out what I need to do. That's a totally different skillset. Being a salesperson that generates is totally different than managing a business. Yeah. I love that. Well, Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Yeah. If people want to get connected with you, what's the best way to do that? Yeah couple ways. I mean, you can gimme a call 4 2 3 7 5 5 3 0 3 8. That is my personal cell. And then. I think, I don't even get on the, on the gram and all this stuff, but I have a guy helps me manage it. I am, I'm on there. But it Instagram's around the clock mortgage team and on Facebook's around the clock mortgage team. So yeah, we do a whole lot of loans. We love it and we're passionate about it. If we're not the right fit, we'll connect you with the right people. Love it. Awesome man. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Sounds. Yeah. And guys, thanks so much for listening to the ARB Connecting. This show is just me talking into a microphone into the void without you listening, so I really appreciate it. If you guys can leave a five star review on the podcast, if you enjoyed this show and got value out of it. And the best way for a podcast to grow is me asking you for a connection. If you could send this podcast to two or three of your friends, that's how we help grow it. So with all being said, thank you so much for listening to the Art of connecting. We'll see you on the next show.