ATTITUDE

ATTITUDE

I’ve had a ball for the last couple of days. Not possible, you say? Indiana is bitterly cold and expecting 2-4 inches of snow, and we have weather warnings. What am I doing to be so giddy? Well, if you have 20 minutes, I’ll tell you all about it.

While I may not be traveling to far-off places, Paris, Rome, and London, I was able to get out of the house and have lunch with friends. In fact, I had three lunch dates in the last week.

What are the stories about? It’s always about people. Yes, the places we have lunch are interesting too. I’m not sure I can tell all three lunch date stories in this post, but let’s see how far this story unfolds.

(This is the part that will take 20 minutes) I was a mortgage lender most of my professional life. If my mother (Lucy) were alive today, she would refer to me as a Banker. (Capital “B”) She always wanted me to become a banker. Mom always expected me to be an accomplished, communicative, detail-oriented, resourceful, and organized professional so she could put her collective thumbs under her suspenders and prove to her piers that she raises an exemplary human being who just happened to occupy the corner office, with a big mahogany desk, a high back leather executive desk chair, a long plush leather couch a coffee table with a full bar hidden behind a movable wall. (Do we consider that a run-on sentence?)

(The bar is my idea, I don’t think Mother would approve of a bar in any office on the top floor of the highest building in town.) But if Mom was fantasizing, why can’t I have a few perks too?

I was required to wear a dark blue pinstriped suit, a freshly starched white button-down-collared dress shirt, a clean matching tie, with knee-high dark socks (Please don’t wear ankle socks and show leg-hair when you cross your stone white legs. This will be a sure sign I was a rube), oh, and shiny black patent professional shoes. The boys in Florida at Wednesday Garage Guys would call those shoes Yves Saint Laurent $900 black patent-leather shoes. Maybe someday I will tell you that story.

After all, when I started in the early 1970s, John T. Molloy had just written a book called “Dress for Success.” He presented himself as a “wardrobe engineer.” And if you were going to be successful, you had to dress the part. And the book was considered the Bible for the way businessmen dressed back then.

Unfortunately, the truth is I was a street rat. Nothing more than a commissioned sales grunt. My job as a mortgage lender was to lend money to people who wanted to buy a house, as many people as I could, on a monthly basis.

Sounds simple enough: lend money to people who want to buy a home. I can buy into this job. Why this line of work sounds the message I get from the pulpit on Sunday morning, do what’s right for my fellow man, for humanity, it’s practical, and the American way.

How could I go wrong with a job like this?

Once I was hired, I had to ask the question. How do I find these people who want to buy a house? Do they walk in the front door? Will they sit at my desk, and I talk to them? What do I do, say, when they are sitting across from me? How does this work?

Then reality became a challenge. I was given two charge cards. One card for gas, the other for entertaining. Entertaining? Gas?

I was told I need to leave the office and “call on” real estate offices in my territory. My territory? I have a territory? It is all mine. My boss was very supportive. “Go get-um tiger.”

I was told to create a sheet with our current interest rates for FHA, VA, and Conventional loans for 30 and 15-year terms. I need to drop the sheets on real estate agents’ desks. Talk with them, get to know them, do what you have to do. Ask for the business. I needed my name and my number on the sheet so they knew how to call me when they have a buyer who needs a loan. Well, that sounds easy.

I don’t want to be melodramatic, but when I pulled up to the first real estate office, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how to sell, what to say, or how to act in their office. I was pushed into the Lion’s Den and expected to come out unscathed.

I don’t remember, but I assume I was a walking zombie. I was making my rounds, and nothing was happening. I was failing. I didn’t have one request to make a loan. I was laying my rate sheet on everyone’s desk, along with a dozen other lenders. No one told me there would be other mortgage lenders wanting the same thing I wanted.

There are a couple of sales rules I was unfamiliar with. First, the 80-20 rule. Let me put it this way: when you walk into a room full of Realtors sitting behind their desks (Let’s say 40 agents), you need to check the activity board in the copy room. The whiteboard will tell me who is selling real estate and who isn’t. I wish I had known this sooner.

Here is another rule: 20% of the agents sell 80% of the houses. 80% of the agents sell the other 20% of the homes. That means a lot of agents have a lot of time on their hands to go to lunch with me. And allow me to use my company credit card for lunch and cocktails. I was spending my time entertaining people who were not selling homes. I was in that uncomfortable position of “not selling money” in my office. Oh, sure, I was getting a loan here and there, but I was average. I was focusing on the wrong people. I was making a living, but I was not a top-tier sales guy.

The other rule I discovered was,

“You can’t make the sale unless you are talking to the decision maker.”

This rule applies to all walks of life. When I took a mortgage loan application, I realized very quickly that most of the time, the woman, the wife, was the decision maker. If she liked me or believed that I could get them a loan, she was in my corner.

If I focused on the non-decision maker, I would be passed over. I find this rule to be valid in almost every aspect of life. Family, church, business, buying a car, buying a refrigerator, and home improvements. You name it. Who is the decision maker?

As I traversed life, I discovered all kinds of interesting rules for business success. I got to know the competition. One of the most valuable lessons for me was sharing a cup of coffee with the competition. If you do it often enough, you find out they are not as confident about business life as you perceived them to be. What did I learn? Stop worrying about the competition. Focus on my own wants, needs, and desires. Over time, the rough edges of my presentation improved. I remember my son once asked,

“How can you be a salesman, forcing people to buy stuff, people don’t want?”

That was another eye-opener for me. I never felt I was “selling” anything; I was offering a service. Home ownership is foreign to most people. They want a home but are unsure how to navigate the hurdles to acquire it. I sometimes noticed the man was afraid he wasn’t good enough and fearful he would be turned down for a mortgage. He was worried he would disappoint his family. Sure, this doesn’t happen all that often, but about 10% of all mortgage loans are rejected for one reason or another. So, for some, there was anxiety.

Okay, now let me turn our attention to a group of mortgage loan professionals. After 30-plus years of banging around the world of finance. Or mortgage lending. I acquired some rock-solid friends. We (five of us) decided one day to have lunch together. They were my competition at one point, and we all ended up in the employ of a big savings and loan. All of a sudden, we were all on the same team. The market had gone to hell, and interest rates for a thirty-year mortgage were around 16%. Our companies had been merged into one large financial institution. Frankly, no one was making any “real” money during this period. The Savings and Loan industry was going down the tubes.

So, we decided to “do lunch.” Aaron, George, Bob, Richard, and I decided to call ourselves “The G-5.” Which “G” stands for “Group.” We had a very pleasant lunch, and we decided to set a time to have lunch again. I propose that, for us to show up each month, I will pick the next restaurant and pay for the meal. Then the next guy could pick the restaurant, and he would be responsible for paying for the lunch. Well, this was fun for a while. We ate at some of the down and dirty, cheapest places in town, in areas you would not enter in the dark of night. To find the most affordable places we could find to eat.

We decided to change the rule and go Dutch. We were all craving a little more ambiance and elegance. Over the years, we have been to restaurants as a group that we collectively didn’t know existed. It’s a fun way to be exposed to places none of us would go to on our own.

A few years ago, we lost one of our members. Richard was having health issues, and he had stopped coming for a while. We later learned he had passed. We didn’t know he had passed. We found out by accident that he was no longer with us. We were all concerned that his death had slipped by us without notice. This is not the way freinds need to act. The remaining four of us decided to continue to call ourselves G-5—our way of keeping his memory alive. And we decided not to let that happen again.

Well, here we are, and I still have not mentioned a single restaurant I enjoyed this week. And looking at my screen, I think I’m running close to the bottom of the paper. So let me save my experiences at

The Parlor PS,

Daddy Jacks,

and Taylor’s Pub

for our next post. I’m anxious to tell you about a Pentecostal preacher and his wife who started a restaurant. Meet you back here for my next post. Do subscribe, and don’t miss the story about me asking the preacher,

“Did you talk in tongues?”