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Show Summary
In this conversation, John Donnelly, the executive director of sales at Service First Mortgage, shares his extensive experience in the mortgage industry, discussing the cyclical nature of the market and the importance of communication and leadership during challenging times. He emphasizes the role of mortgage professionals in assisting home buyers and the significance of building teams for business growth. Additionally, John recounts his inspiring journey to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, detailing the training and challenges faced during the climb.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
John Donnelly (00:00)
Yeah, for sure. If you don’t prospect a little bit every day, eventually your pipeline is going to shrink. So in order to grow your business, you’ve got to prioritize certain activities. I do recruiting, if I don’t send at least a couple messages to somebody I don’t know every day, every week, then eventually my pipeline is going to shrink and I’m going to have no new candidates. That’s no different thana real estate agent prospecting for buyers or sellers or a loan officer prospecting for new referral partners, you have to prioritize the money making ⁓ activities, right? If I don’t…
get focused and have on my calendar the most important things that are gonna make me money and grow my business, then I’m just gonna be subject to the whirlwind of the day And so what I say is if at least, my goal is to send one message to somebody I don’t know every day.
Dylan Silver (02:31)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is the executive director of sales at Service First Mortgage, where he drives growth through speed, service, and excellence. He helps top producers build scalable, values-driven businesses. And aside from this, he recently summited Mount Kilimanjaro. Please welcome John Donnelly. John, welcome to the show.John Donnelly (02:53)
Hey, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.Dylan Silver (02:56)
Great to have you on here. I definitely want to get to Mount Kilimanjaro. We were talking about that a little bit before hopping on here. But let’s back up all the way to the beginning. How did you get into real estate?John Donnelly (03:08)
Yeah, so I started when a friend of mine, my wife had a friend in a mortgage company that said they need to hire a loan officer. And I just went and started working in a call center. And this was in like 1996, 97. And so I started taking loan applications over the phone and doing 125 second lien mortgages, which is a crazy idea. So we were loan and doing loans over the value of houses.And that didn’t last too long. And I decided I wanted to be a real loan officer and talk to real estate agents and work with purchases and be out in the street. So I did that for years. And I just kind of developed my own personal business and grew a traditional mortgage business. And then I kind of kept getting pulled to recruiting and coaching and that type of thing. So leadership was really strong for me. And so I’ve evolved over the years into ⁓ leading sales.
coaching, ⁓ regular coaching calls with my team, ⁓ speaking at events and training people and then doing a lot of recruiting as well. So that’s kind of what I find myself doing today in the mortgage business.
Dylan Silver (04:18)
I want to ask you about being in the business through all this time. mean, you’re talking 25 plus years, but getting into the mortgage space, you talk about late nineties, right? Totally different time, totally different time. At that point in time, what was the, the, the,John Donnelly (04:31)
Yes.Dylan Silver (04:37)
vibe, the sentiment in the mortgage space, the same as it was in the early 2000s where it was kind of in a lot of ways like everyone was qualifying for mortgages. What was the energy like? What was the environment like at that time?John Donnelly (05:38)
It was a little bit when I first started and then in 99, 98, 99, there was a compression of credit and a lot of companies closed down. Not anything different than we might’ve been feeling over the last couple of years. That was my first taste of like what happens when your company goes out of business. I had to move companies quite a few times early on in my career. And then eventually I was like, I want to control my own.Destiny and have my own referral business. I was relying on companies to drive leads to me to make money and but the I was still learning the business right? I feel like those times then and Then like 90 like if you go fast forward to 2008, you know you think about that crash It felt very similar to the last couple years. It was just a lot faster today’s like a death of a thousand cuts compared to 2008 9 it was like
We just wiped out three quarters of our business, real estate agents, loan officers, everybody and reset. And then if you made it through 2010, it was a heyday until a couple of years ago. It’s been great. And so we’re going through that pain again. So I’ve seen these cycles multiple times.
Dylan Silver (06:40)
Yeah.I want to ask you…
I want to ask you about being able to pivot and being able to weather the storms because I’ve talked to so many people in the traditional mortgage space, so many guests on the show from across the country and most of them got in after the 2008 crash. But the ones that were in beforehand talked to me about how
There were so many people who were in beforehand. was like making money hand over fist and almost everybody or so many people were wiped out. How have you been able to weather these storms? And then also, do you have any strategic advice for folks about going through times like that?
John Donnelly (07:32)
Yeah, I the first thing I think of personally is I did a good job of not spending all my money when it was great. You know, I saved money. I put money aside in our business, all of this real estate mortgage. We have these great times. We make a lot of money. Well, a lot of people spend it also. And so I did good enough to not crash myself and go bankrupt, you know, and II maintained my family and my lifestyle because I had my priorities right. I would blame that on the fact that I’ve been writing life plans for a long time and really focused on the things that are important to me and having long-term plans that helped me. It doesn’t mean I made all the right choices, don’t get me wrong, but you know, looking back at it, ⁓ I saw people make a ton of money, completely have to start over, even lose their houses and that type of thing. And it’s brutal, it’s devastating, it’s hard when it’s your friends.
And I’ve been in this weird situation. I’ve only worked at two companies since 2001. I’ve been in my companies for 17 years. And I think that’s an important part of the story because just because things get hard doesn’t mean you should change companies all the time. A lot of people do that. It’s not always the company. A lot of times it’s the market. If you lose faith in your leadership, then you might change your company. But I’ve had faith in my leadership.
especially at the company I’m at now, I like the people I work with, it doesn’t mean it’s great all the time. If you trust those people work with, you’re gonna navigate through some challenges. Right now, today, in the last couple of months, couple of years, we’ve really been challenged as an industry, in this housing industry. As our company, we put this ⁓ word on everybody’s desktop over the last few months, this last year called reimagine.
And we’ve challenged our company to reimagine, you know, how our processes work. And we do an all hands call every other week where we get the leadership team on a Zoom or Teams and we have every employee where they can ask us questions. tell them what’s going on and we’re navigating through all the changes of AI and a harder market and all that together. And I just think that type of…
Open communication and transparency is a game changer. We don’t always get it right. It doesn’t mean it’s always perfect. Still loans are hard. It’s hard to get stuff done sometimes, but I feel like when you have the right people on the bus, as a team, you’re just gonna get through it all together.
Dylan Silver (10:42)
I think the lending space, traditional mortgage is so important right now. And maybe I’m saying this with some degree of selfishness as someone who’s looking at buying homes and a lot of peers of mine are looking at getting their first home. And I think oftentimes people may run into an obstacle, a hurdle when it comes to buying their first home and they give up. But I think that we need moreJohn Donnelly (11:04)
Yes.Dylan Silver (11:06)
⁓ professionals in this space so that people can not just have someone to go to but someone to go to that they know. I think there’s a lot more people that know and I could be wrong about this but I think there’s a lot more people that know maybe a realtor than there are people that know a lender.And so with some of this, it’s like, okay, well now there’s a degree of separation. How do I go about this process? You know, I was told no elsewhere and now I feel maybe deflated in it. But with all the down payment assistance programs and then regionally where you’re at, things can be very regional and specific to that area. You need someone with high degree of regional knowledge based on where you’re at. And I think that’s where great mortgage professionals come into play.
John Donnelly (11:21)
Yes.Man, you are speaking my language. There’s about 80,000 licensed loan officers in the country now. I don’t know how many realtors there are, but I know there’s a lot more. What you’re saying that is so important to me is sometimes a consumer gets so caught up on an interest rate that they’ll just shop around and get this lowest rate, but then they’ll be frustrated through the entire process because they’re dealing with some call center or some person in another state.
Dylan Silver (12:01)
Yeah.John Donnelly (12:18)
It doesn’t really know what’s going on. They’re just offering this low rate to try to, you know, enhance them to come use them because that’s their only value they provide. I just think it’s so important that especially if you’ve never bought a house to have somebody that you can talk to to hold your hand through the transaction that knows your community, knows the options. The market is always shifting right now. There’s a lot more inventory available. And so you’ve got to haveYou know, obviously you’ve got to know how to negotiate that purchase, right? But somebody’s got to know, if that house has been sitting there six or eight months, you need the realtor’s expertise to get the right price, but you need the loan officer’s expertise to maximize how you’re going to put your down payment in it. Maybe you shouldn’t drop the price and make a lower offer. Maybe you should ⁓ have them pay closing costs. And how much would that bear? And how much would that save you? There’s just a lot. It’s complex, you know?
Dylan Silver (13:17)
Yeah.John Donnelly (13:17)
And mortgage isn’t just theinterest rate. sometimes it feels like that with some buyers.
Dylan Silver (13:24)
I do want to pivot a bit here, John, and ask you about scaling a business in the mortgage space. I think there’s some parallel to scaling a real estate brokerage as well. You can focus on production. You can focus on building the number of people in the brokerage. You can focus on both. You can also focus on specific areas or states. know there’s a lot of ⁓ brokers that are active in multiple states. What’s been your approach to scaling a business?John Donnelly (13:35)
Yes.Yeah, things are great question. It’s very similar to real estate. If you’re talking about personal production, I’m big on building teams. like, there’s a book called the E-Myth Revisited that I use as one of my teaching points to talk about how to scale a team and go from one individual to a team of people and then in a large team. The thing I find that’s difficult for most people
is when they hire their first assistant, their job is to give them all the things they do today and then go focus on marketing and prospecting and growing the business. Well, they have to give up something and know what to turn to. And a lot of times they don’t let go of that stuff because it feels good to be able to do all the things they hired their assistant to do because they feel productive. I know that makes sense. so a lot of times you become your assistant’s assistant if you’re not careful. So you need somebody that has
Dylan Silver (14:41)
Right.John Donnelly (14:49)
that can help kind of put your system in place and coach you up so you know what to turn to to grow your business. And so what I focus on more is building teams. ⁓ Teams mean you have a loan officer that’s kind of the face of it that’s out doing all the prospecting and then the leads come in and we have a team behind it that are working with the buyers and the customers. Their job is more the referral partners and then the team’s job is to have a great customer experience and so.I don’t know if that answers your question exactly, but that’s how we grow.
Dylan Silver (15:20)
⁓ yeah.I want to spin off that and ask you a granular question about identifying where to allocate your time. You people talk about you know what’s the most profitable activities that I can be doing. It’s not always black and white because there’s so much that’s involved that is intangible. You you talk about interactions you talk about follow up. You don’t necessarily see an ROI today on follow up. But if you eliminate follow up completely you’re eliminating whatever majority of your business. How do you
as someone who’s scaling a business, what to allocate your time to and do you feel like this is replicable to others who are maybe not where you’re at, they may be getting started?
John Donnelly (16:46)
Yeah, for sure. If you don’t prospect a little bit every day, eventually your pipeline is going to shrink. So in order to grow your business, you’ve got to prioritize certain activities. I do recruiting, if I don’t send at least a couple messages to somebody I don’t know every day, every week, then eventually my pipeline is going to shrink and I’m going to have no new candidates. That’s no different thana real estate agent prospecting for buyers or sellers or a loan officer prospecting for new referral partners, you have to prioritize the money making ⁓ activities, right? And you gotta think there’s certain things that they say in my role, I wear 15 hats. This kind of in our industry, we talk about that, that’s too many hats. From recruiting to putting out fires to managing people to all these things. If I don’t…
get focused and have on my calendar the most important things that are gonna make me money and grow my business, then I’m just gonna be subject to the whirlwind of the day and the day is gonna dominate me of all the people that are calling me. And so what I say is if at least, my goal is to send one message to somebody I don’t know every day. Let’s break it down to something very granular. At least I can look up at the end of the month, at the end of the year.
and still have some prospecting going on if I’m really busy.
Dylan Silver (18:14)
I wanna…⁓ pivot a bit here and would really like to have more time to talk about this because of how ⁓ I think it’s such an amazing thing that you did but you you summited Mount Kilimanjaro and we were talking about this before hopping on here I was aware of Mount Kilimanjaro I think a lot of people are but I was unaware of exactly all that is involved it’s actually quite dangerous to embark upon this walk me through what made you decide hey I’m gonna summit Mount Kilimanjaro
John Donnelly (18:44)
Yeah, in 2015 I went to a conference and I heard Bob Goff speak. He has a book called Love Does. He’s an amazing speaker and he tells a story about climbing Kilimanjaro. That’s a whole other thing. And so it kind of planted the seed in my head. Like I could do Kilimanjaro, you know, I think that would be cool. And Sean, the owner of my company, Service First, was with me and he goes, let’s do it. I know somebody that actually guides people up it, which is kind of crazy.And this was in 2015. Well, we never did it. And fast forward, I read this book called The 12 Hour Walk, and it challenges you to just walk for 12 hours, no music or anything. And I did that. I actually walked 30 miles that day. And I thought if I could make it 30 miles, I can make it up Kilimanjaro. I’m turning 50. This is my time, right? Like this is my moment. I’m ever going to do it in my life, it’s going to be now. So I made that goal and I contacted this lady, Gabrielle. We got a plan in place.
It took me about a year of training and I did, I really prepared hard and I climbed the mountain in June. It was seven days climbing with a group. You have to have guides, have to have porters and you you climb this mountain. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done on the summit night. The very summit night you start at 15,000 feet and you go to 19, so 4,000 feet up.
I started at 11 p.m. that night and I got to the top at 730 in the morning and then I had to come down. And so was like I was awake for like 36 hours. I gave everything I had to get to the top of that mountain. You just don’t have any energy when you’re at that altitude. You can’t breathe very well. It’s a glacier on the top and so it’s cold. It’s challenging and it was awesome. Like it was great.
Dylan Silver (20:28)
youI wanna, I’m a big fan of alternative training methods. I’ve done jiu-jitsu, long distance running. Of course, gone to the gym. But when you talk about scaling a mountain, you’re talking about altitude sickness, right? But there’s so much else that can go into it. I mean, these are, how long did it take from front to back to go from the bottom to the top of Kilimanjaro?
John Donnelly (20:59)
It took five and a half days on the route we went on. And the reason I did that route was because the success rate is 75%. Because you could go faster, but if you don’t acclimate to the altitude, then you’re done and you gotta come down. And so you kinda go up for a couple days and then you come down and sleep. And you go up and you come down and sleep. So your body’s acclimating to the altitude.Dylan Silver (21:03)
ThankAnd so, sorry, I you out.
You talk about 75 % success rate. mean, this would be one thing if it was in Colorado, but it’s in Africa. Where is it in Africa? Which country?
John Donnelly (21:33)
Right.Tanzania
Africa, yeah, kind of the middle of Africa right on the eastern side.
Dylan Silver (21:43)
And so you’re out there, you’re thinking, okay, I mean, everyone who’s attempting to summit Mount Kilimanjaro is probably going out there with a fair degree of training and still, you know, 75 % are passing. So there’s a good number of people that are not. You’re out there for five days. I mean, you’re talking, you could get physically sick in five days time. You could, you know, eat some bad food. Something could happen, right? And so there’s so many different variables that go into this.John Donnelly (21:52)
Yes.Dylan Silver (22:10)
lack of sleep, exhaustion, you might be dealing with aches and pains, but then also the training itself. Walk me through some of the training. I I imagine a lot of hiking, lot of ⁓ scaling, various hills and this type of thing.John Donnelly (22:21)
Yeah.Yeah, I found a gym by my house that kind of put together a plan for me where I did. I did a circuit three days a week where I go for an hour and I do upper body and lower body. Lower body was really the most important. I did ski machines, row machines, but then I would do lots of lunges, know, squats, all kinds of things. you know, weighted step ups for tons of weighted step ups. And then outside of that, those days I was going and I was walking.
or hiking. I have hiking trails by my house and so I was doing a lot of miles. You know, I’d go really long miles like maybe eight to 10 miles on a Saturday. You know, I’m really far and then I would go. We don’t have altitude like high enough, but I would go up to places where there’s hills, you know, about every three months or a couple months, you know, maybe six weeks and I’d do like a long like 12 mile hike with altitude.
Dylan Silver (23:09)
Right.John Donnelly (23:22)
I did get to go to Colorado and I did actually go to France to the Alps to my son’s a ski instructor. So I went to ski with him and we got up to almost 15,000 feet one time. And so they say the best thing that you can do to adjust the altitude is simply being in it. You don’t even necessarily have to like challenge yourself too hard, but you, the fact that you can just be at altitude will help you deal with it. So I tried my best to get to some altitude before we went. Luckily I did okay.I took Dynamax, it was my secret.
Dylan Silver (23:50)
want to ask you two more Chilinjaro questions.First, when you got there and you’re touching down in the airport, what was the feeling? Were you thinking like, my gosh, I’m about to do this? Were you worried? Were you super confident? What was the feeling?
John Donnelly (23:58)
Yeah.Yeah, I think it kind of reminds me of that feeling you have. Like, I don’t know if you’ve ever been a speaker and you get up on stage, you got the butterflies, like you kind of had butterflies, but there was also this excitement that you’re like, this is going to be amazing. When you land, you could see the mountain coming in on the airplane and it’s massive. mean, 19,000 feet, you’re like, holy smokes. And when you were at the top, it was the same view you have out the window of the airplane.
You see the tops of the clouds for miles and it’s the same kind of view. It looks the same. And so it was really just excitement for me. We had a couple of days to kind of acclimate and then it was go time and we had this long bus ride to the trailhead. And next thing you know, you’re going and you’re in the middle of it. And you’re almost like, I can’t believe this is real. Here we go.
Dylan Silver (24:58)
In your group, summoning Mount Kilimanjaro, was there ever any moments of concern where it was ever any people who you were like, I don’t know what’s going to happen if they’re going to be able to make it. Was there any propagation during that summit?John Donnelly (25:09)
Yes, verymuch. Yeah, we had we I joined a group climb. So we had 11 climbers total. I had a friend of mine join me that lives here in the Dallas area. And so he went with me. But we had ⁓ one person completely struggled like they had to get off the mountain, had got altitude sickness, needed oxygen, was throwing up all the bad things on the way up on summit night. The summit nights where you’re going to get it like
The days were like eight to 10 mile day climbs, like kind of more trails. Some of it was climbing, but it was all doable for the most, most people were ready. But when on that summit night, when you’re going up over that 15,000 feet up into 19, man, it was hard. And that’s when we had people really struggling. Mark, my friend that was with me was feeling kind of an irregular heartbeat and shortness of breath. And when he was thinking about going back and.
Another girl had to be taken down and put on oxygen. Two of the other people, was two of them that barely, had porters dragging them over to the top. It was a struggle to just at the top.
Dylan Silver (26:15)
Yeah.My goodness, man, I can only imagine that scene. I don’t know if I’ll do Kilimanjaro, but my hat goes off to you. We are coming up on time here though, John. Where can folks go if they would like to reach out to you? Maybe they would like feedback, they’re scaling their own business in the mortgage space, or they may have questions, they may be looking for a mortgage for themselves. How can folks get in touch with you and your team?
John Donnelly (26:37)
Yes.Yeah, you can go if you have my name here JohnDonnelly.com. I’ve been building out my own personal website. My favorite place is LinkedIn. I live on LinkedIn a lot. The John Donnelly is my handle on there. If you just type it in, you’ll find me, shoot me a message. ⁓ Either way, it’s a great place to connect with me, whether you’re a home buyer, if you’re in the mortgage industry and you want to talk about opportunities or you just want to have a friend to visit with to, you know.
console you because this industry is hard right now. Let’s connect. So thank you.
Dylan Silver (27:14)
John, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.John Donnelly (27:17)
Absolutely, thanks for having me.
