How to Recruit Loan Officers: The 13-Person Tipping Point

If you want to know how to recruit loan officers who already produce, start with this: the pitch is not about money. Michael Most, co-owner of Most Home Loans and a 26-year mortgage veteran, sat down with a friend named Jeff, showed him he was leaving roughly half a million dollars a year on the table, and heard back, “I don’t know if it’s worth the stress.” That conversation reset how he recruits.

Most planned to bring 10 producers with him when he launched his team inside United American three years ago. Three came. Eighteen months later the roster was close to 30, and he believes the whole thing hinged on crossing a headcount threshold where the team itself becomes the proof of concept.

This guide covers what actually moved the needle: the objections producers won’t say out loud, the four-stage funnel he built after generalizing from his first handful of conversations, the 13-to-15 person tipping point, how he uses AI as an ego-free sparring partner on recruiting reads, and why the fulfillment infrastructure had to exist before anyone joined it.

Why the Money Pitch Fails on Top Producers

A comp comparison does not move a producing loan officer. Michael Most learned this in a single meeting with a friend named Jeff, where he walked through the economics line by line and showed Jeff he was giving up roughly half a million dollars a year by staying where he was.

Jeff’s response: “I don’t know if it’s worth the stress.”

Most left that meeting knowing he was missing something structural. When he pressure-tested his own reads on prospects, a consistent set of unstated fears surfaced — none of them financial:

• Disruption. There may be a ton of money on the other side, but the transition itself is the cost they’re weighing.
• Reputation. A move gets noticed by referral partners and past clients. Producers protect that.
• Origination mechanics. Can they actually originate on your platform the way they originate today, or does their whole workflow break?
• Small operational fears. Will their email still work. These sound trivial and they never say them out loud, but they genuinely concern people.
• Personal circumstances. Sometimes something is going on in their life that has nothing to do with your offer.

The practical shift: stop treating a no as a pricing failure and start treating it as an unaddressed objection you haven’t surfaced yet. Most describes himself as “a very black and white, literal type person” who assumed nobody turns down free money. The work of recruiting, in his framing, is pulling back layers, listening better, and either addressing the fear directly, reframing it, or accepting that you’re not aligned and letting it go.

The Four-Stage Recruiting Funnel: Identify, Cold to Warm, Warm to Hot, Close

Most did not start with a system. He built one after his first five or six conversations, once he could generalize about what was working and what was not, then kept tweaking it as patterns emerged. That sequencing matters — the model came out of real conversations, not off a whiteboard.

The four stages:

1. Identify. Who is actually a fit, based on production, market, and how they originate.
2. Cold to warm. Get from a name on a list to someone who takes your call.
3. Warm to hot. Surface and work the real objections, not the stated ones.
4. Close. Which, done right, is barely a step at all.

“I tried to spend a lot of time on the middle, and then the close just happens naturally, when they’re ready, if they’re ready,” Most says. The two middle stages are where the time goes. He describes giving hundreds of hours to the first people who joined — sitting with them, helping in any way he could, being laser focused on it.

This is the operational point most recruiting programs get backwards. If you build your process around closing technique, you’re applying pressure at the exact moment a producer is weighing disruption risk against a spreadsheet. If you build it around the middle, the decision is already made by the time the conversation gets there.

The caveat in Most’s own phrasing is worth keeping: if they’re ready. Part of the middle-of-funnel work is identifying which prospects are never going to be ready, and stopping.

I showed him how he was losing a half a million dollars a year. He looked at me and said, yeah, I don’t know if it’s worth the stress. And I was like, oh my God, I’m missing something.

— Michael Most, Most Home Loans

The 13-Person Tipping Point and What the First Year Actually Looks Like

Most told Al Hensling he was bringing 10 loan officers with him. Three came. “I couldn’t have had more egg on my face,” he says. Hensling never said a word about it.

What followed was not a growth curve. It was months of nothing working. LinkedIn outreach that produced bad introductions. Chasing people who turned out to be the wrong fit. Chasing strong producers who would not return calls. Calling recruiters. Asking the owner for ideas and getting a version of no one will do this job for you, go figure it out.

He also had a non-compete, which every loan officer leaving a shop has. That meant he could not directly solicit his former colleagues. Prospects had to either reach out to him organically or come from other companies entirely. His reputation carried some of that weight — he had been the number one loan officer in Southern California at his prior firm and was regularly on national leaderboards — but reputation only generates inbound interest, it does not close anyone.

The number in his head was 13 to 15. His reasoning: at 13-plus people, the roster stops being a promise and becomes a demonstrated result. Recruits start telling other recruits. You have proof of concept.

It played out roughly that way. “I went from 15 to 22 like this. I went from 22 to 27 very quickly.” Only at that point could he get selective about who joined.

The planning implication for anyone building a mortgage team: budget for a long, unrewarding first stretch, and do not read the lack of early traction as a broken model.

Using AI as an Ego-Free Sparring Partner on Recruiting Conversations

Most credits a large share of his recruiting improvement to arguing with ChatGPT about his read on people. The workflow is unglamorous and repeatable.

• After every meeting, take notes — handwritten, or dictated into his phone.
• Keep a separate folder per prospect so the context accumulates.
• State his read of the person, then let the model push back on it.

A representative exchange: “I just went through the economics, and this guy could make another $100,000 a year working with us versus his current place. How are they not signing on the dotted line tomorrow?” The pushback he got — repeatedly, across prospects — was what surfaced the disruption and reputation fears described earlier.

His argument for why it works is about ego, not intelligence. “You lose your ego. The one thing chat gives you that the world can’t give you — no ego. It’s a machine.” A spouse or a mentor who tells you what you did wrong triggers a defensive reaction even when they’re right and they love you. A model does not care, and you cannot take it personally.

The nudge to start came from an 83-year-old woman he met through his son’s friend’s family, Mrs. Lefkowitz, who was running a successful company and firing off emails from her iPhone. Her line: as soon as you see things changing, you either adapt to the change or fight it, and she adapts as fast as she can.

Worth noting for anyone trying to roll this out: Most has pushed his own team to dictate post-meeting notes into a model and, in his words, no one wants to hear it.

Build the Fulfillment Machine Before You Recruit Into It

Most, Al Hensling and Dean built their processing system for their own loans first, then recruited people into it. That order is the whole point.

A mortgage is a sequence: loan officer meets client, gets data, substantiates it with paperwork, it gets underwritten, processed, docs drawn, transaction closes. They defined it as eight explicit steps and treated it like a Rube Goldberg machine — not identical dominoes, because in mortgages you sometimes have to climb a hill before something drops. The operational benefit is diagnostic. When a file stalls, you can see which step it stalled at and who owns that step, usually the processor or the loan officer.

What they did not do is mandate a workflow. Hensling calls it Build-A-Bear. “We didn’t create a system that tells you how you have to do it. We give you all the tools so that you can use them.” A loan officer who wants 200 automated touch points on a file can plug in a CRM and build that. Someone who wants four touch points does four. The fulfillment center processes what you put into it — garbage in, garbage out.

The contrast Most draws is with larger shops where a loan officer’s escalation path is a salaried middle manager. In his description, that manager is “doing a psychoanalysis on you, deciding if you’re mad or happy or if he should just give you some free marketing dollars. He’s not solving your problem. He’s just making you go away.”

The credibility anchor: all three owners still originate. They built the machine for their own files, which is why it survives contact with real loans.

Carrying Inactive Producers and What Actually Gets You to Scale

Of roughly 30 people on Most’s team, about 10 do very little. Another eight are strong producers who need nothing from him — he names one, Mike, who is excellent with process and systems and whom Most calls mostly because he likes him. The real management work sits in the middle band.

He is untroubled by the bottom 10, and the math is why. On 100% commission, an inactive loan officer costs no overhead and no time. “They’re not taking up any of my time. They’re not using the system. They don’t cost me overhead.” One person on the roster does about three loans a year for side income, and that arrangement works for both parties. Nobody is required to do anything, and nobody is pressuring them.

That structure is what makes the wide-roster approach viable. If headcount carried salary or management burden, selectivity would be mandatory. It doesn’t, so the constraint on roster size is your own attention, not your P&L.

His stated path from here to a billion in production has three components:

• Lift existing team volume 15-20%. He considers this the most attainable piece as people get more acclimated to the systems.
• Add a handful of producers with momentum. Not headcount for its own sake — people already carrying volume.
• Product edge. They hold exclusive retail relationships with a handful of credit unions, meaning no other broker has access to those products.

That last one is concrete. At the time of the interview, a borrower calling a large national lender for a 30-year fixed was getting quoted somewhere around 6.5% to 6.75%. Most had a credit union pricing the same loan around 5.875% to 6%. On a Southern California book where the average loan is a million-plus, a half-point spread is a recruiting argument in itself.

Frequently asked questions

How many loan officers do you need before recruiting starts to compound on its own?

Michael Most’s working number was 13 to 15. His reasoning is that below that, you’re asking a producer to believe a promise; above it, the roster itself is the proof of concept and existing recruits start referring other recruits.

His own numbers tracked that. Growth was painfully slow up to that range, then he went from 15 to 22 quickly and 22 to 27 faster still — and only at that point could he be selective about who joined.

Why do top producers turn down a compensation increase to switch firms?

Because the objection usually is not economic. Most identified fear of disruption, reputation risk with referral partners, uncertainty about whether they can originate the same way on a new platform, and small operational worries like whether their email will keep working — none of which a comp spreadsheet addresses.

He also notes that sometimes there is simply something personal going on. His conclusion after showing a friend he was leaving half a million a year behind and still getting a no: address the real fear, reframe it, or accept that you’re not aligned.

How do you recruit while you’re still under a non-compete?

Most’s practical answer was that prospects had to come to him organically or come from firms other than his former employer. He could not go out and pull the people he had worked alongside, which removed the easiest source of recruits at the exact moment he needed them.

What filled the gap was reputation — he had been a leaderboard producer at multiple companies, so people knew the name and reached out. Non-compete terms vary and are governed by your specific agreement and state law, so get your own counsel’s read before you plan around one.

What should a mortgage team build before it starts adding loan officers?

A defined, sequential fulfillment process — built and tested on your own loans first. Most, Al Hensling and Dean broke the mortgage down into eight explicit steps so that when a file stalls, they can identify exactly which step and which person it stalled on.

Just as important is what they deliberately did not build: a mandatory workflow. They supply the tools and let each loan officer assemble their own process on top of the fulfillment center, which removes a major objection for producers who fear losing their way of originating.

Is it worth keeping low-production loan officers on a 100% commission team?

On a 100% commission structure, yes — they cost nothing. Roughly 10 of Most’s 30 loan officers do very little, and his view is straightforward: they don’t consume his time, they don’t use the system, and they don’t create overhead.

One person on his roster does about three loans a year for extra income, and Most has no interest in changing that. His time goes to the middle band of producers who actively need help, not to policing activity levels.

The bottom line

If you are early in building a mortgage team, the single highest-value move is to stop refining your pitch and start documenting what each prospect is actually afraid of — then handle those objections one at a time until your roster crosses the point where it sells itself.