How Top Mortgage Producers Scale With Systems, Teams, and AI | Nicole Perrone

Nicole Perrone (00:00)
we have one of the best helpers that we could have ever dreamed to have. We’re in the luckiest time ever to do business, right? Between phones and our devices and our access to the internet and social media and now AI. ⁓ AI is just another, it’s like having an employee. And so it can help you do all those things, put together your standard operating procedures for your team, your communication roadmap.

how you wanna, you how you wanna, building your schedule out, making sure it’s organized. ⁓ It can help you just with scaling business, recommending books, putting things together.

Dylan Silver (02:03)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today we’re joined by Nicole Perrone, top producing mortgage banker, entrepreneur, and industry leader with almost 20 years of experience in the lending space. Throughout her career, she’s overseen more than 10 billion in mortgage fundings while helping loan officers and producers scare the businesses and improve performance across highly competitive markets. Nicole, thanks for joining us today.

Nicole Perrone (02:28)
Thanks for having me, Dylan. Hi to all your guests. We’re looking forward to chatting with you today.

Dylan Silver (02:33)
You’ve been involved in over 10 billion in mortgage fundings. What separates top producing teams from the rest of the pack?

Nicole Perrone (02:41)
Yeah, so in the mortgage business, just like any other sales career, would say it’s number one, it’s about having systems and setting up what those systems look like, starting with your sales and marketing, and then digressing into your client interactions and just everything you’re literally gonna do. You really wanna map out a plan, execute that plan as flawlessly as you can, keep learning and tweaking as time goes. Obviously work ethic and ambition have to be the driving

kind of force behind all that. That’s what’s gonna keep you continuing to do those kind of tireless tasks of how do want our client communication to sound and what does it look like and what events are we gonna participate in? How much are we gonna be outreaching? How are we gonna meet new people? How are we gonna stay connected? So you really gotta dive into every piece of your business. The top producers, are just the kings and queens of following up and staying connected. I read this book a long time ago. It was called The One Thing and they said, what’s the one thing?

that if you could choose just nothing else that you’d focus on for your business and growth. And it came down to relationships. And I don’t think I’ve met a top producer that hasn’t had a very successful book of business and clients that consistently refer them. relationships are everything. These podcasts are great to share that message. Networking organizations, just being involved in your community. I think that that’s the key to success.

Dylan Silver (04:03)
You know, you’ve been involved in several different market cycles over many years, right? When things are challenging, how do the top teams separate themselves specifically in the lending space, right? Where you often see people leave when things become challenging.

Nicole Perrone (05:06)
That’s a great question because in training, coaching, mentoring, hiring loan officers and helping them with their business, I’ve successfully helped many top producers navigate through these changing environments of refi heavy markets to purchase heavy markets, markets where we have very limited inventory, which is the case in some metros and states across the country, although that’s not the case nationally. At the end of the day, they have to be ready to pivot.

I’d say the biggest thing you need to be ready for in any career, it doesn’t matter if you have a restaurant, if you own a music label, it doesn’t matter what it is, you gotta be ready to pivot. Change is inevitable in all of our businesses. So the faster we recognize what’s in front of us and where we need to go and we actually do it, I think that’s really gonna be the biggest determiner of success as we look forward to, Dylan, because we’re looking at a world that’s changing so fast.

And so we really don’t have the option anymore to like sit back and wait and see, we gotta really take action quickly. everyone talks about EQ, emotional intelligence and IQ, but I think AQ is really the thing that I see as the biggest thing for top producers and business owners and entrepreneurs is to be adaptable, that adaptable intelligence, the learning, relearning, unlearning, and that stuff’s not, it’s not very fun, right? It’s not fun to do those things. It’s fun to.

close a deal, get a client, put up a new sign in front of your business, whatever those things are that bring you joy. But the learning and the relearning, you really gotta fall in love with learning and constantly being willing to evolve your business. ⁓ Loan officers today, I’d say also, anyone in business in general, I think there’s something to be said about being really good at one thing, but it also, it exposes you, right? Because if that one thing goes away, then what do you have left, right? So I think diversity,

of where your business is coming from, who’s referring you, diversity of geography, what states are you lending in, what states are you doing business in, what counties, whatever your thing is, how geographically diversified are you, how diversified are you in where your business is coming from, where you’re just relying on one lead source, and what if that goes away?

and then diversity in products and offerings and what you have available. I think the better that you do those three things and you stay consistently adaptable, you’re gonna succeed in this business and quite frankly, in any business.

Dylan Silver (07:23)
Now, if my math is correct, you were getting into the business during a difficult time, right? Either during or shortly after the global financial crisis.

Nicole Perrone (07:32)
Yeah, it was a great time to learn when things are bad because you know what could happen, right? And you appreciate the better days even more. So, I’ll say to people today, we have to remember the market that we’re in today. We’ve been in this kind of cycle after 21 and having the lowest rates in record history to being in this space where, gosh, we got close to high sevens, eights, back down to sixes, but we’re still in a place where affordability is tough for a lot of people today.

And I think having options and alternatives and how they can finance is important. But yeah, think, you know, if I’m thinking from the mindset of an originator or someone in sales or business, you gotta be ready for those bad days. My mentor taught me that early on because, you know, if you’re in any entrepreneurial journey, you know, it’s not always like this, right? And it’s certainly not always like this. Sometimes it’s up and down like this and you wanna make those peaks and valleys.

you know, a little bit in that zone where it’s not gonna hurt so bad when you hit that valley, right? So, ⁓ you know, that being said, you see a lot of people that are out there today right now, 30 % of the market, I think, last stat I saw is investors that are out there buying up properties, despite what the markets are. Dylan, I’m sure you see this with all the guests on your show. Investors, they don’t stop. don’t, you know, the cycle isn’t gonna deter them. We’re working with a tremendous amount of them and we still have a lot of first time home buyers out there too.

They’re big part of the market as well.

Dylan Silver (08:58)
Now, having to pivot after the global housing crisis really eliminated everyone who was just relying on people with a pulse being able to buy homes, right? And so coming out of that into a totally different market, what was those early days like in your career?

Nicole Perrone (09:50)
Yeah, it was a grind. ⁓ I recently recorded a podcast on my show about remembering the wins, right? And I talked about this quote by Tony Robbins who talks about people oftentimes overestimate what they can do in a year and significantly underestimate what they can do in five. And I think we’re growing up in this culture where

At least it looks like everybody’s getting things very quick and easy. And it’s like, my gosh, everybody on social looks like a deck of millionaire, right? Nice cars, great vacations, beautiful homes. But there’s a patience game that’s involved in this. ⁓ maybe we didn’t see that season in a lot of those people’s stories and their life, but at the end of the day, you gotta look at the long-term, right? You gotta be willing to build, willing to sacrifice, willing to.

to have those quiet hours in your office where you’re like, why is nothing happening the way, what do I need to look at? What do I have to change? So it’s that relentlessness. It’s that desire to keep going even when you’re not yet seeing the results. And there’s so many spaces in our lives where we can make these analogies, right? Like, you know, whether it’s personal things in your life, but it takes time to see results. But that compound effect over time is huge. And I share the story about how I worked for a large national lender, started in my twenties.

was just a mortgage banker that found a career that I felt like I really liked. I liked people, I liked helping people, and I enjoyed the business. And in my early years, I had to really grind. by the time I was in my late 20s, I was running a $500 million team for the nation’s number one lender at the time. And by the time I was in my early 30s, I was running the number one team in the country. And I remember when I started, I said to myself, one day I wanna work in Manhattan.

I wanna be a manager in one of the biggest teams in the country and I got there, but it was a slow crawl. It took a long time. For a while, I didn’t feel like I was completely fulfilled in everything that I was doing in my job. I had leadership ⁓ aspirations, wanted to do more. So you just gotta be patient. If you’re an investor out there today, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re in sales and you’re not seeing the results, you gotta assess, you gotta take inventory, what can be done differently and pivot like we talked about before.

but you also have to be patient and realize things don’t happen quickly. They take time.

Dylan Silver (12:06)
Now, for folks who are producing but may not be thinking about scaling a team, and I think a lot of people will fall into this category. Maybe they have scaled a team and felt like there was not a fair degree of stickiness and that people would come in and come out, or maybe they’re thinking, well, I’m successful as a solopreneur, if you will. Scaling a team is entirely separate from that. What’s your feedback on team building in the lending space?

Nicole Perrone (12:32)
I’d say that if you don’t have a team, you’re really not a business, right? You’re just ⁓ somebody that is generating opportunity. You’re a mortgage banker, but you’re not a business. If you wanna grow into being a business, right? And really operate as such, you have to scale. And it’s probably one of the things that maybe this industry does not a very good job teaching, training, and helping loan officers scale their business.

I have a lot of people that work for me today that are in this space where they know what they have to do next, but scaling takes sacrifice. Okay? So here’s what I’ll say. And I think this is why there are a couple of reasons why most people will never scale. Number one, they can’t let go of the control, right? They have to do it all. They want a hundred percent of everything and they want to do a hundred percent to get that hundred percent. And then there’s people that are just…

really not willing to put the time in, right? They realize like, how am gonna find someone? The process just seems kind of overwhelming, right? I gotta find someone, I gotta train them, I gotta do all these things. So the reality is, is I think people that see the big picture back to big picture thinking, usually when you’re scaling, you’re okay with doing a little bit less today to do a lot more tomorrow, right? So you’re okay with doing 80 % of the work and having someone else do 20 and giving a little bit of that 20 % away, right?

So you have to be ready to,

sacrifice money a little bit, right? Because you think about it if you ran a business, right? If you owned a business today, would you be reinvesting in it? Other than marketing, right? Other than let’s say the broker’s open or the event or the thing that you sponsor, what are you doing to invest in your business today as a loan officer? What are you contributing back to your business? And one of the greatest areas you can do that in is people, the right people that are gonna help you to be able to do more of the things that you’re good at doing and less of the things that aren’t.

income producing activities. So you got to be able to hone in on your ability to delegate, your ability to assess what does your business look like today? What are the things you need to stop doing? And then you got to find the right person to do it. And I’ll tell you that like in the beginning, it’s going to be more time that you’re spending, not seeing the results right away, because you’re training someone, they’re shadowing you, you have to be involved in that. Sometimes the person you hire doesn’t work out. You got to be able to get back up and get the next person going. I’ll share a story. When I came here to Cross Country Mortgage,

After a while of not producing, I was just running a team at the time. I was like, you know what, we’re gonna produce again. We’re gonna start helping some of our old clients and our referral partners. And I started hiring a team and I hired two people that were great. They were phenomenal, ⁓ but it just didn’t work for them completely the way that the business was set up and the kind of amount of time you have to really put into it to see what comes out of it. But we had to rebuild. So I had two people with me for almost seven months. One ended up getting a full-time job. The other one,

ended up staying with the part-time job she was with and I had to hire again. And those moments, like I wanna tell everyone, those moments are draining, right? You’re stressed out, you’re like, this is horrible. You start questioning things, maybe this wasn’t the right path, maybe, and then you have that moment and that spark and you take action and it kind of puts it all to the side. so today we have a phenomenal team that we grew. have 15 bankers in our group as a part of.

my transition here three years ago. And then we have our own production team. have two phenomenal assistants and a great processor and serve a lot of awesome clients. But it came with a lot of like, shit, right? A lot of stuff that happens along the way that just sucks. So you gotta scale your business. If you’re getting to that point where you’ve just hit your capacity, that’s the time where you gotta say, okay, I’m gonna make a little bit less. I’m gonna take a little bit less from me and I’m gonna invest more in the business.

And then it’s back to systems again, Dylan, then you got to put the systems in the playbooks in place. And this is what we teach in my coaching program, how to help people do this, because many people are lost. Being a good loan officer or a great employee or a good salesperson does not make you a great leader or manager or business owner. And those are skills that now you need to start honing in on, back to what we said before, being adaptable, right? You may say,

This was never in the cards for me, but today I gotta learn how to be a great leader. I gotta learn how to put a team together and I gotta put all my eggs into this basket until I’m ready to execute.

Dylan Silver (17:22)
There’s so many people who are producers, but are almost going about things like cowboys, right? And so they may not have the best systems in place, even for themselves to be repeatable. If someone was to just step into what they’re doing and it wouldn’t just be like plugging a square peg into a square hole. It’s only them that can do it, right? And so developing these systems based on what they’re doing that someone else can do is almost tedious to

some of these people.

Nicole Perrone (17:51)
Yeah, it’s really tedious, but we have, you know, we have one of the best helpers that we could have ever dreamed to have. We’re in the luckiest time ever to do business, right? Between phones and our devices and our access to the internet and social media and now AI. ⁓ AI is just another, it’s like having an employee. And so it can help you do all those things, put together your standard operating procedures for your team, your communication roadmap.

how you wanna, you how you wanna, building your schedule out, making sure it’s organized. ⁓ It can help you just with scaling business, recommending books, putting things together.

I mean, it’s incredible if you’re not using it today. We’re having a conversation the other day in a team meeting about how, you know, AI can be like that employee that you’re not using the right way. You don’t have any systems for it. You’re just constantly just throwing little tasks at it, asking it to do random stuff throughout the day as you need it. Or AI can be something that you really automate and systemize.

if you know how to use it the right way. So like similar to an employee, you can give them a list of what all their priorities are monthly or yearly or weekly, and then they go do it and you inspect it, or you can just be throwing random stuff at them all the time. It’s the same thing with AI. It’s all about how you’re gonna utilize your support and your help, and it is gonna take time. And it’s not fun, Dylan, it’s not fun, but it’s back to the long picture. Where do you wanna be in five years? Do you wanna be doing the same thing you were doing 10 years ago, 15 years ago?

Or do you wanna be in a place where you’re like, you’re doing the first 20 % of the work and then you have a whole team that kind of funnels through to get the rest of the job done after, I don’t know, 20, 30 years in the business. So you get to a point where I think you deserve it. You deserve to take a little bit of a step back to get a little bit more balance and focus in your life and to have a great team that works under your supervision executing on the process.

Dylan Silver (19:39)
We are coming up on time here, Nicole, any new projects you’re working on and then as well, anything you’d like to mention directly to our audience.

Nicole Perrone (19:45)
Yeah, I appreciate that. We’re a growing obviously mortgage company. We’re the number one retail lender in America. Very proud to work for cross country mortgage. We’re doing one in every 33 home loans, a hundred different investors we work with. I hire and recruit loan officers. I train them. We help them succeed. That’s the biggest part of what I do. It’s what I’m most passionate about. And then obviously helping our clients. But we host a podcast called the Billion Dollar Banker Podcast where we share kind of similar conversations to what we’re talking about today, Dylan.

Just things that are on our mind. We’ve had some incredible guests that come on and share perspective. I think podcast is one of the best things that we have at our disposal today. Dylan and I probably would not know each other if it wasn’t for podcasts being around. Maybe we would have met for a coffee, I don’t know, but it might’ve been hard depending on where we are in the world. the level of connectivity we have today is incredible. I’m so blessed to be on the show, Dylan, and thank you so much for having us on.

We’d love your guests to come over and check out the Billion Dollar Banker podcast. We’re a billion dollar banker on all platforms and we’re a show for high achievers by high achievers and we’re just looking to keep sharing and doing more.

Dylan Silver (20:48)
Nicole, thank you for your time today. Thanks for joining us.

Nicole Perrone (20:51)
Thanks for having me, Dylan.