Dave: Thanks for the question, it is a great one and I could go on for a long time answering this question. However, I will try to keep the answer as short as possible.

• First, stop thinking that your market is any more competitive than any other. No market is any more competitive than another—especially with the national lenders and Internet “competition.” Here is the real key: you need to understand that you will have no competition. It is the elimination of this “so-called” competition through positive differentiation that is the key to a business model.
• Second, stop thinking of yourself, and referring to yourself, as new. You are not. The key to positive differentiation is figuring out what you bring as an individual—your skills, experience, education, relationships and such. You may be “new” to someone you don’t know, but for someone you have served for 10 years, are you new? If a 100-year old company moved into the business for the first time, would they advertise themselves as new? I think not.
• Third, you are responsible for learning what you need to learn to get the deals done in the right way. Plenty of experienced loan officers mess up deals. It has nothing to do with experience. It has to do with diligence and education. From there it is setting out a plan to master your skills. The key is becoming an expert in all areas that are necessary to bring you positive differentiation.

In reality it is more than having experience and becoming an expert. The key here is something I have termed becoming a “backwards” investigator. Here is a brief ex-planation of what we cover in the OriginationPro Mortgage School.

You know what an investigator does. On the TV, there are a ton of crime shows. Someone dies at the beginning and the entire program is dedicated to investigating and solving the crime. A backwards investigator is dedicating the same amount of energy to preventing the crime from happening.

When you are presented with a scenario, what might prevent the file from closing or prevent roadblocks that will get in the way of a smooth process? There are a ton of things that could go wrong in a file. But in my experience, most of these are preventable if a loan officer acts as an underwriter at the beginning of the process instead of waiting for the underwriter to find out what is wrong with the file. Underwriting is not magic, it is often common sense. Well, a lot less common sense now that AUS systems have taken over the process.

Again, in my experience in the industry, 95% of the crises are preventable upfront—by getting more documentation, asking the right questions and getting issues addressed upfront. If you solve these—the 5% of things that will popup that you can’t prevent will be easier to deal with.

Dave Hershman is Senior VP of Sales of Weichert Financial and the top author in the mortgage industry. Dave has published seven books, as well as hundreds of articles and is the founder of the OriginationPro Marketing System and Mortgage School – the online choice for expert mortgage learning and marketing content. His site is www.OriginationPro.com and he can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..