How to Build Affiliate Relationships with Credit Hero Troy Hitt!

Hey, credit Heroes, we have a very, very special guest today. Credit repair industry veteran Troy Hitt is here. He built a credit repair business doing over a million dollars annually with over a thousand affiliates. And today, Troy is going to share some amazing real world examples of how affiliate relationships can really grow your credit repair business. So you better stick around. My name is Daniel Rosen, and welcome to Credit Repair Business. Our most successful credit heroes, the ones who make a great living and change a ton of lives, they all have a few things in common. They all know the power of affiliate relationships and how to use them to grow their business. Troy Hitt ran a hugely successful credit repair business for many years. He's designed countless sales funnels and he's an expert at building affiliate relationships. In fact, he is so smart and so talented, we hired him. He now works at Credit Repair Cloud. He's our head of customer success here at Credit Repair Cloud, and that's how I know you are going to love this interview. So welcome to the podcast, Troy.

Wow, what an intro. I love it. Thank you so much. I've been so excited to come on this podcast.

We've been excited about it, too. And because this is about marketing, I also invited Keenan here. So come on in, Kenan, because he's responsible for all the marketing. Marketing we do here at Credit Repair Cloud. So, Kenan, thank you for traveling all the way from your office next door. Hey, Keenan, of course we want to know all about affiliate relationships and you're the king of that, but can you start by telling us about your background and a little bit about what your life was like before credit repair and what got you into credit repair?

Yeah, that one's a pretty easy story. Before credit repair, I was in the Air Force. So when it came to credit, there wasn't much talk of that. So we easily. Anyone who's listening out there that's been in the military knows that all a bank is concerned about is your rank and time and service. They know when you get paid, they know how much you get paid, so they just automatically deduct it. So that was the kind of credit lines we had back then. When I got out of the Air Force, there was this whole new credit world, getting a house and things of that nature. So I'll never forget the first brand new car I ever bought. I was really excited. And a guy goes, hey, don't worry, you can come back in six months and try to get a better interest rate. I'm like, what are you talking about? And so that's when I discovered I had some dings on my credit. I'm like, I never even knew that. So that was my world before. Credit repair is really not knowing anything about it, to be honest with you, or credit for that matter.

So what spurred the interest in diving into credit repair?

So the naturally. And it's such a great segue for affiliate marketing down the or, the guy referred me to someone he knew that helped people improve their credit situation. I had no idea what that looked like. And it was a. A very small office. And I was like, where's it at again? Like, yeah, go. Go talk to this person. And. And so I did. And that's when I'm like, what do you do now? How does this work now? And so I began to start ask questions. And that's how I was introduced to the world of credit repair and what it can do for you.

And what did it do for you? Was he successful with you?

Well, that person that I went to go see is. Is my wife. So. So having bad credit got. Landed me the most beautiful woman in the world. So that was good. That's one of the positive things about having bad credit. She was doing it out of a little office with a friend at that time, and we saw an opportunity that, hey, this could be a pretty viable business.

Wow. I had no idea that's how you met your wife. That is fantastic.

She prides herself in that one. Wow.

See, I remember you because you were one of our first customers, but I only knew you. I knew you because you were the loudest customer.

Yes, I was pretty loud myself. Yes, Tammy. Yes, you were.

I was Tammy. Sometimes it got escalated from Tammy to Daniel.

Oh, yeah. You knew Tammy was in trouble when it went to Daniel, but, yeah, it just. It started out very small. It started out as. As many folks do, it starts out really small. And it's the aha moment. You're like, wow, if. And it wasn't even being naive. It's like, if I don't know about it, how many other people don't know about it? Like, your financial responsibility is a big thing that they focus on in the military. But at the same time, when you transition into the civilian world, there are so many offers out there. And that's ultimately what got me in trouble, but it's ultimately what landed me and my wife too.

That's amazing. And I forgot to say earlier, thank you for your service.

Absolutely, my pleasure.

How long were you in the Air Force?

Nine years, one month and 12 days. But who was counting, right? Wow. Amazing.

Now, one thing I remember about your business back then because I was fascinated by this. You had kiosks in malls. I always thought that was really, really, really cool. And I never seen anybody else doing that.

I thought it was cool too. So we did. We literally had iPads in malls and people could request consultations. It was definitely revolutionary during its time. But that was back when they started, you know, number one, when malls were popular and they did get a lot of foot traffic. But that's when they really started putting those rolling advertising kiosks in the malls and start paying for those. And so we're like, wouldn't it be cool if, you know, we're in a. We're in a place where people are probably running up their credit or they just got turned down from a department store credit card or something like that. It just opportunity to meet them at that pain point.

Sure. Was that successful?

Actually wasn't that successful, but it, I think for anything for, for the business at the time, it's kind of like it was really cool to be in a mall and have your sign there. I mean we did have people visit, but I wouldn't say that we got the ultimate return on that.

What did you learn from that experience? Like why do you think it didn't work or what? What do you think the business ultimately learned?

Yeah, I don't, I don't think the technology was there for it to actually self service its kiosk. We had to man somebody to be there. And when you start manning it, you start looking like that person with the clipboard that's trying to sell you something. Right. Which we ultimately weren't. And that's one of the keys to having a good affiliate relationship is you don't sell anything. But you would get like avoided like the plague. You know, you see it nowadays that go around those people. And so I think it was this. And credit's a sensitive thing. It's not really easy to share in a public location. All these factors we didn't think of when, when putting there. We just thought really be cool to have our name in the middle of a mall.

Yeah, certainly lots of people saw it. But I know your business was very successful because you had well over a thousand clients. Right. And you making well over a million dollars a year, am I correct?

Absolutely. A couple million dollar years.

Yeah, a couple million. Wow, that's amazing. So what was it that grew the success?

I think to appreciate what grew the success, you got to start a little bit about back to the beginning. One of the first investments that we ever made Was an investment of our time to get the opportunity to improve people's credit situations. And my wife at the time, this is why they really had the office at the time is they used to do. When mortgage loans were processed, they used to do processing. Loan processing. Right. And they get these big old files. Sure. And they would process them. Well, at some point or another, she stumbled upon these. These turn down files. This is like she picked the wrong stack up or something. Right. And it's like, well, what do we, what can we do about these? And then that's when it opened up and had that one relationship that, that opened up the potential of improving everyone's credit situation. But that one relationship obviously wasn't gonna, you know, build a business. So we had to put our name out there. I remember we paid $300, which was a lot of money to us at the time. And we got a billboard and we put it at the high traffic location. We put it at the end of the row with neon letters on it. It's like, need your credit improved? Or something like that. And had the phone number. And then that began our first ever marketing effort in the very early stages. But that one relationship is what allowed us to do that, is to invest money back into.

Troy, I know you have like a wealth of experience with affiliates. I would love to know before we get into the tactics of how to get affiliates and, but like explain a little bit from your own perspective, like why. Why were affiliates important? Why they. Why should credit heroes think about creating relationships with affiliates before we get into the tactics?

Yeah, the, the most important thing, and especially when you're starting out, they don't cost anything but your time, but they end up being more valuable than any kiosk you can put in a mall. Any sign you can put on the road, they end up more valuable. Your return on investment on an affiliate relationship is 100x. You have to start with just that one. But the reason for that is it doesn't cost you any money. It might if you, if you stay local and it's just someone's local. I mean, it might cost you a tank of gas a week to go see them and develop a relationship. But that's why I think it's so valuable for. For those CROs out there, not only to grow, but to start your business.

Starting to get a little bit into tactics. So you explain a little bit like why it's valuable. It's. It's really like, it's cheap is what you're. You're saying it's Like a, it's a. Yeah. Easy way to start getting clients or start getting more clients in the door in a cost effective way. It sounds like if someone's just getting started, they want to get affiliates. They don't know where to go or what to do. I mean, what would you tell them? What are some tactics you would, you'd start giving to a credit hero that doesn't have their first affiliate.

Yeah, well, I don't know about any of you, but I love donuts, probably more so than I need. And you know, I say now like back then, open up the phone book. Nowadays just Google and you could Google mortgage brokers or real estate offices in your area and, and get in your car and drive and you know, spend a couple bucks on a box of donuts, staple a few business cards to it and do this thing we like called donut drops. That was it. You just walk in, say, hey, I'm a local credit repair industry. Love the opportunity to help your clients improve their credit situation if at all possible. But we don't need to talk about it today, just enjoy donuts on us. And that's literally it. You know, think about those expensive billboards. Think about that kiosk in the mall. Think about that sign. It's all about visibility. Well, at that time, I think those, in order to establish a relationship, you're only going to be successful if you establish that in person. And you can only establish so many of those in person before you're doing things virtually. But you can create a big business just local contact with your real estate agents and your mortgage brokers.

Were those the two categories that the business focused on, that you focused on realtors and mortgage brokers?

Yeah, the real estate agents were kind of like the feed, right? They're the, you know, they're the ones, they're the boots on the ground. They're out there, they're hustling to try to get the sales. And mortgage brokers are the ones that have the loan officer contacts and things that nature that hold their license. So they were your in to get to, you know, the big fish, the golden goose, however you want to call it. They were your end but, but you always treated them the same, you treated them equally because that relationship wouldn't exist if it weren't for them, you know. But yeah, those were the two ones. You know, you think of, you think of that transaction, you think of that sphere. Real estate agents are like the first point of contact in most of those transactions. Sure, you could go into a new home sales office and probably speak to somebody, but that. That real estate agent. Realtors are that first point of contact.

You talked a little bit about starting that relationship. You walk in the door, give them some donuts, pique their interest, start to give them some value. What's the next step from there? What does it look like to actually kick off that relationship and really get it going? What did you do to activate those affiliates?

You have to constantly give value. And one of the biggest ways you can give value, there's no better gift to a Realtor or mortgage broker than a qualified applicant. That's what they live for. That's the lifeline of their business. So how cool is it when you look through your lens of improving someone's credit situation that, hey, it looks like your credit situation has improved? I have a Realtor that might be able to find you a place in your area, because now, remember, you went around and you've got names and offices of all the people in the area. Oh, you're looking in, in our case, northeast Houston. Well, I know a Realtor in northeast Houston. Why don't I connect you to you Continue to give value. And if you give them a qualified applicant who's really serious about looking for a home, there's no greater gift than you can give. And again, you're not looking for anything in return. That's you're just giving. You know, the law of reciprocity will take care of itself, but you have to trust that process.

What about when one of these mortgage brokers or Realtors is sending a client to you, and then you get them ready, it may be a few months later. Do you make sure you send it back to the very same one who sent them to you?

100%. That's a good point to bring up. That one of the things is not only are you giving, you're also establishing trust. Because, you know, I will say the biggest hurdle for some of those affiliates is actually give us their turndowns because they look at that like it's money. They look at that like it's their client. And they look, you know, they look at that situation like. But we, we make it clear to them professionally like they're nothing to you right now. They can't buy from you. So why don't you at least give us a shot at it? And so we began to talk terminologies, like pipeline business. You know, we're not talking referrals. Right? Referrals is a big name. That's. It's given. It's overused and referrals is I'm referring somebody and people are expecting, you know, kind of that law reciprocity. But when we talk about pipeline business, the law reciprocity for them is they get a qualified applicant out of it. I didn't give them anything other than a qualified applicant. So you start talking things like pipeline business, like, what are you doing with your turndowns? Do you have someone in your back office? Does someone to do that? Or you just tell them, you just tell them no. Give us the opportunity to improve their credit station. What do you have to lose? Right? You don't have anything to lose. And oh, by the way, I'm going to keep them in touch with you whether they like it or not and keep you updated their process the whole way through. So you have to be transparent with that. The big discussion is that pipeline business and that pipeline business has a couple customers that it services. It's not just that primary customer. So when you start improving their credit situation, you have to think of everyone. You need to keep informed in that process. So you want to keep obviously the primary customer, that's the one that's paying you the money to improve their credit situation. The secondary customer is that affiliate who gave you that business. And the internal customer is me, the person working there working on that file. I have to know what their status is at any time. I log into my credit repair cloud account. Right. You know, hopefully it's not your only client one day and you have multiples and you need to log in and see what their status is at a moment's notice. You can give that client, you can give the affiliate their update and where they're at in their process so that pipeline business will service itself. But the big question we used to always ask, and this is what would drill them in, this is the one you got to ask the big golden nugget. Be like, what would one more closing per month do for you in your business? Ask that to a realtor. The answer is different. You ask that to a mortgage broker. Like one's not a big deal. A hundred to a mortgage broker is a lot. Well, if you got 10 real estate agents or you have a hundred real estate agents, Now I've got 100 real estate agents that I'm saying, what would one more deal a month do for you? Now you've got 100 of their real estate agents is holding their license. Now they got a hundred deals more a month on people that they would have normally turned away. It's maximizing their marketing dollars because it took it Took them money to get that applicant in the door, right? It costs them advertising dollars to get that person in the door. And so you don't want to just set that money on fire and let it go to waste. Let us maximize your marketing dollars for you.

With all these affiliates that they're attracting in, we have the tactics of starting to get them in the door of Donut Drop and just going into the office and seeing them. How do you keep those affiliates engaged on an ongoing basis? Because I imagine you get in the door, you tell them, hey, refer your declined applicants, we'll start working on them. But I imagine that relationship is any relationship's hard work to keep it active and keep it healthy. So what do you do to keep all those relationships healthy once you started expanding into more affiliates?

The first thing you have to do is set an expectation for yourself. We know that it's not going to be 100% return every time there are affiliates that it's a full time job, it's their livelihoods, how they put food on the table. And they're definitely more into it, intuitive as to what we're trying to serve. So prepare yourself. I don't want to say lower your expectations, but prepare yourself for the outcome of your efforts. You know, I can remember at one time looking into our affiliate portal and having a thousand affiliates in an affiliate portal, right? A thousand. But when we did our report for active affiliates, what we call active affiliates, at best, we may got 300 active affiliates, right? So that's 30%. So if you've got 10 relationships, you can maybe expect three of those to engage you, but it doesn't change your effort. That's how you keep them in tune. You create a process that's a consistent effort. You consistently network with them, whether it is, whether it is the donut drops, whether it's just a simple email, whether it's a client update sent from your software, like hey, look, I just thought I'd let you know their score increased 20 points. They might not be ready yet, but just to let you know, we're making progress. Oh, by the way, just to let you know, they established a credit card. It's informing them, keeping them informed in the process and it increases the likelihood of them staying engaged with you. There's no guarantee, but it increases. I would, I would say that I would prefer to have, you know, those three versus none. And it doesn't take you that much more effort once you establish those relationships. And the last thing I would say to keep them engaged is don't just leave it to emails, phone calls, text, Find a way to network with them. Find a way to, to bring people into their sphere. That's important in their industry. Home builders, carpenters, plumbers, electricians. You know, we call it like the real estate power team. You know, connect them, be a connector for them and not just connect with them for business. Because if, if you're one sided that way, it'll. It's just a matter of time before it'll fizz it out. It's like, oh yeah, Troy's calling again. He's won another referral or he's wanting another, you know, turn down or whatever that is. And you don't want to be that person, you want to be known something other than that. So you position yourself as a resource. My business partners, Joe Orsek at the time was really good at that. He was just a networking king, right. He would be out in events, pressing the flesh, connecting, grabbing cards and you know, he was always a connector. He was a really good connector. And so aside from your systems and processes to keep your affiliates informed and your clients informed, you gotta, you got, you gotta again, that's bringing that value, giving more value. So it's more than just closing the deal. Don't be one dimensional because if you're one dimensional, if your relationship depends on this person getting a loan, you're gonna fail more times than you succeed. And that's a given. It's just because of, that's how the process works. Not everybody's gonna get approved for a home loan. It just doesn't happen 100% of the.

Time as you're continuing to network. I know you told me prior to the interview, something around you had like the business had dominance in like the four corners of Houston. How did you get that market dominance to just have all the clients everywhere?

Yeah, so the first focus was dominate your zip code. Right. Like if you, if you have an office, if you have an area that you frequent, office, just dominate that zip code. Well, once we began to what we refer to as dominate the zip code, we found way we wanted to find ways to duplicate ourselves. It's hard to do. Again, those in person relationships are hard to duplicate. We discovered an organization called bni. It's Business Networking International. It's just a networking group and it's across, it's international. And it just happened to have a really good traction in the Houston area because you can only have one representation from one industry in each of these chapters. Right. So if there was a credit repair person in that Chapter, you couldn't be in there. You know, there's going to be a real estate agent in there, there's going to be a mortgage broker in there, there's going to be a plumber, there's going to be a carpenter. There's probably going to be all those things I mentioned. So we paid our money. It's like 500 bucks a year or something like that. We paid our money to say, yes, we'll come every week. And so we were a member of four chapters at one time and begin our networking process of being present again. We only have a, you know, certain small pool of money. When you're just starting out, you're like, okay, well, 500 bucks each. That's two grand. That's a lot of money for all of us to do that. But we get to meet every week with our sales and marketing team for an hour and a half a day and let them know the type of person we're looking for, what referrals we want, and in return, we get to do the same. I would say that that was probably the big catalyst that took our affiliate program to the next level. You know, there was only so many donut drops, right. You can do. There's so many times you can go and pass certain things out. We still did those. You know, as we grew, we had. We had credit consultants that we hired that went out and did the same thing. They did the same activities. We never abandoned them because we don't want to discount what got us here and how many referrals you could give. It was more important as how many you could give. And so that's why throughout this, you hear me talking about give, we found out the importance of giving definitely far more than receiving at that point. When it comes to business relationships and affiliate relationships, if you have nothing to give a value and you can't continue to give value, then that relationship will die.

With. With the affiliates, you had to imagine those 300 successful affiliates. There were some different characteristics of how you worked with them. And you mentioned prior to this interview, too, you had this quote, don't give your affiliates another job. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What does that mean to you, and how does that help with building a relationship with them?

Yeah, when you. Anytime you approach the idea of credit repair with somebody, it looks a lot like work. If anyone's ever sat down and done a credit consultation with a potential client, you can see the angst on their face, like, oh, this isn't. I come in and get it fixed. Situation. No, it's not. It's an investment of your time too. So it look, not only does it look like a lot of work by the client, again, we've got three customers we're serving here. So your primary client, it looks like a lot of work, but also your secondary client, your affiliate, looks a lot like, looks a lot like work. So they don't want a job. I'm not trying to propose a job. What I'm trying to do is can you just bolt us onto your process and we'll take care of everything for you. You only have so many hours in a day and you're really good at what you do. I don't want to take away from that. All I want to do is add to that. You make it as easy as possible for them to, to give you the opportunity and notice I didn't say easy as possible to give you their turndowns, make it as easy as possible for them to give you the opportunity. Because all you're looking for is the opportunity to improve one client, improve one person. Because once you have that opportunity, you will treat that like it's, this is it, this is my audition, this is my one shot. And you take it and you run with it and then they get to see everything that you're doing and then they're going, well, man, I wouldn't have time to do any of that. Exactly right. I'm not asking you to do that. I'm asking you to do this one thing and that one thing is just give us the opportunity.

Talking about making that process as easy as possible for the affiliate, how did you, as the credit repair business, make it as easy as possible for them to have it as a bolt on in.

In most larger offices there's a front desk person in a lot of offices, right? And we develop a relationship with the person at the front desk because they're always usually the easiest one to get a hold of. Because again, real estate agents are out there, they're hustling, they don't always have time to, to get on their phone. I'm like, you know, if it's Susie, hey, look, if you're doing a consultation and you have someone that's having a hard time, give it to Susie. Susie knows what to do with it. Susie answers the phones all day. She does a lot of administrative stuff. She's not a realtor. She can help out and she can just give us all we need. It's bare minimum. We need a name and a phone number. And if you can give us an email, that'd be great too. But a name and a phone number and we'll take care of the rest. So we asked for as little information as possible. And then our introduction to that follow up. The introduction to that follow up was putting them first. Hey, Troy over at ABC Mortgage, you know, just talked to you about getting the home and we want to help you get there. We didn't tell them about you got turned down or anything like that. We'd like to help you get there. It may take three to six months. Are you willing to invest that time and to get into your, into your home, you know, that's a. So we made it as easy as possible and we just took it from there and we would follow up like crazy because we didn't want to miss out on that opportunity because it took some conscious effort to give Susie at the front desk that phone number and give it to us or make it even easier and put it in online, which some reason was hard to do. They just wouldn't enter it in there and submit it. So it would go into our system. But, you know, keep it simple, whatever works best for you. Are you a texter? Just text it to us. We're fine. You know, are you a heavy emailer or you, or would you just like to call? Because you can call our office. I promise you someone's going to pick up the phone. We don't, we always answer the cash register. We always answer that.

Amazing you had such a successful business. I'm curious, what percentage would you say of your clients came from affiliates?

I mean, it was, it was a huge percentage. You know, last I can recall, it was probably in the 30 to 40%. 30 to 40% around that came from referrals. We could always attach it to somebody, you know, and we were very diligent on tracking that. If we weren't directly referred to us by, you know, Susie at the front desk or whatever, we'll be like, hey, how'd you find out about us? We, you know, as a business, you want to know that. And there was always a name that popped up and we would load that in there. We would make sure that we load that in there because we want to be able to track that. Because it wasn't just a one person job to maintain those affiliate relationships. We needed to know who our biggest referral, you know, who's, who's one of our biggest fans out there and take care of them. And sometimes they don't even know, right. Hey, Tom, did you know you sent us, you know, 11 people came over last month looking for their credit. He's like, no kidding? Like, yeah, man. Hey, we're looking to take you out to lunch. What's your favorite joint?

So it sounds like affiliates were a component of the business. And I'm curious, just help people understand too, what, what was it like working with a client that came from one of your realtor mortgage broker affiliates compared to someone that came from the internal marketing of the business? Like, well, what was the sales process like? What was, what was, how different of experience was that for the credit repair business to work with someone that came from a warm affiliate?

Yeah, well, the closing percentage was a lot higher. I could tell you that. That's definitely the first telltale sign. Even though our sales consultant sales process was really good and they were really good, it didn't always come out that way. But the sale was going to be a yes more so than it was going to be a no. So that was the first step. We always knew that those warm referrals because we're borrowing from their credibility. So if they're a good person, again, you know, oftentimes it's those folks that are hustling out there. They can see that, their clients can see that. But it also the reason why I think it was more successful compared to the others. And I'll tell you the biggest difference. But the reason why it was more successful is because we help educate our affiliates on what to say. It's not a bad thing. Like there was a negative connotation when it came to credit repair, credit improvement. It's like you have two choices. You can, you can continue to accept no or you can accept my not yet and try this process. We want to help you out. We're just here to help you out. Yes. We don't do it for free. It is, it's going to cost you a little bit, but it's definitely going to save you money in the long, in the long run. And so we gave them this little script with just a little three, four liner to tell. Hey, look, it's not a no. It's not yet. I've got some great relationships with this organization. They've helped out many of my, my clients and they've helped that many others. And I want them to have an opportunity to help you out. Just go talk to them. It doesn't cost you anything. And so that was it. And so we kind of, they teed it up for us. So anytime they dropped a name, we knew that we could, we wouldn't approach it any Differently, but we had a different expectation versus the tire kickers, let's just call them that. The window shoppers. Oftentimes they are looking for that quick fix. That is, that is the biggest difference is when someone's looking to seek credit repair out, they're looking for immediate gratification. And that's what you would find a lot of. If they weren't referred over. You'd find those people looking for that immediate gratification. You can't. Anyone who has been in the space even a week knows you can't do that. We would take the opportunity to fire our clients in advance. Like, you know, this is your. That's what you heard me mention. Three to six months. Well, when you tell someone it might take you three to six months to buy a home, that's worth the wait. When you tell your people it's three to six months before you can get approved for a Macy's card, that's not worth the wait.

Love to know a little more about another note I took beforehand, which is you mentioned that you had a crazy eight follow up process with these leads coming in. I'd love to learn a little bit more about that. An affiliate sends over a lead, you want to treat this lead really well and obviously convert and really help them. So what did that process look like?

Yeah, I can already see my business partners when they see this podcast, they're going to be rolling their sleeves. They know all about it. I used to give that thing as a free download too. Again, it all goes back to maximizing those opportunities. There's a book I read by Chris Smith called A Conversion Code back in the day and kind of opened my eyes up to a follow up process and how key that is to converting leads. And in his book he talks about that sixth attempt and how successful that is and how you can look at that. So I said, well, we can do better than that. Let's do eight. We had a system and a follow up process that we put into our CRM. At the time that CRM was Credit Repair Cloud. We put those task reminders, appointment reminders. Our credit consultants would come in every day and they would have a list of follow up tasks. And our cadence of our follow up was really simple and I'll tell you some of the tactics we use, but it was always, I love a good steak, I love a good marinade. And I used to always say, just let your leads marinate. The more they marinate, the better they will be, I promise. Right. Or if you let them marinate too long, they'll just go back. So one or the other. Right. But at least you'll know because you tried. So we used to do day one, day three, day five, day seven, day 14, day 30, and then 60 and 90. Like we never let them die. I mean we'd surprise them 90 days out and you'd be surprised. But we had, we basically had an eight touch points throughout that process and back to the beginning of who you're servicing. When your affiliates, and this is notated in our system when we do these things. When your affiliates see the effort that you're putting, you want a receipt for your work. Because again, when you're walking into their office and say I want the opportunity, they don't want to see that you squandered it away. Right? Troy, I've sent you 100 people. You haven't converted any. Well, isn't lack of trying. Have you looked in your affiliate portal and seen all of our notes and our attempts to follow up with them? So you want them to see that effort. It's one thing to have the words come out of your mouth, but it's another thing to be able to show them that effort. And that's what we did. We got a receipt for our work. We showed them how hard we were working for them. Even, even if it didn't pay off for us. Because if it didn't pay off for us, there was no chance it was going to pay off for them. And it would kind of put their mind at ease as an affiliate and go, okay, well I guess they weren't ever going to close on a. Whatever it is, a home at that time. If they were tied to affiliate, we'd say, hey look, you know, do I need to let Keenan know that you're no longer interested in purchasing a home? That way we can take you off the follow up list. Kind of that takeaway again, tying the credibility. They went to go see Keenan for a loan and tying the credibility to us. Hey look, I'm just checking on behalf of Keenan, if you're still interested in the home, you know, I'll take you off their follow up process. You know, won't bug you anymore situation.

Amazing.

That's really cool. Yeah, with, with that crazy follow up process. So it's eight touch points over 90 days.

Those are the standards. And later on we started some LinkedIn situations. We started some Facebook messages because a lot of folks were fans of our Facebook page. We started branch out in social media because I believe in Chris Smith thing. He used to say three Three to the left and three to the right. Even the Xerox days, if you look at Xerox, how they got launched, they used to kick three doors down to the right. Kick three doors down to the left. That was their motto. That's when they, those Xerox guys in the red shirts, that's how they would sell copiers. We just kept that in place. And I mean, it was without fail, we just enhanced it with other touch points and maybe other automations. It was, it was later on that we got some automations in place that would help us fulfill those. But yeah, it was, it was at least 3 touch points every time.

No excuses. Reach them any way you could. Basically.

Basically, yeah. Basically without, you know, yeah, we stayed within those. The, the, no, the nuisance of it. I mean, if it finally got a hold of them and they said, quit calling me, we're like, cool, no problem, we'll quit calling you. I'll let Keenan know that you're no longer interested in buying a home. I will never. I can't tell you how many times they would say, like, well, no, no, wait, that, that doesn't mean that I was like, hey, well, that's only, that's the only reason I'm here, just to let them know that. And then they would, they would either come back in for a second consultation, but we just, we just never let them die on the vine. Our conversion rate was really high. I don't remember what it was, but it's really, it was really high.

Was there anything else you systemized in really helping that affiliate program scale?

We had one person that was designated and they had the golden egg. And that's what we called it around the office. They had the golden egg and what a golden egg was. And this was like, like, hey, you know, we have someone in the 700s or we have someone in the 620s or the 650s, and they're looking to buy a home, who do we call? Right? And so traditionally we'd go through and we'd sort out our affiliates and our top performing affiliate, guess what they would get. They would get a golden egg and we would refer that out to them again, giving. That's another opportunity. We, we had one person designated. That was their job, to get all the golden eggs and farm up the golden eggs every day and begin to distribute those. And that's why one of the qualifications for a lot of our affiliates is to be responsive, because if they don't pick up their phone, they're not going to pick it up. For our clients. So you know it, that was a, that was a big temperature check for our affiliates.

Wow, awesome. That's some great motivation. So they was that part of the sale initially that hey, if you give us some and you're, you're good to us, we'll be good back to you that hey, we may send you over some people ready to buy homes or ready to buy get mortgages.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, again we was like, we have relationships all over Houston. I would love to put you on our list for people who come in that get, you know, mortgage qualified. That's, that's a term we use. We mortgage qualified. They come unattached. And I love for you to be one of those people that are on our, our top of our list. We said everything we were going to do and then we delivered. That was the most important part about it. We had sit downs with some really large mortgage brokers to, to systemize their process. And you know what's crazy is their systems are not really that efficient. Coming to them with a bolt on situation like this is all I got to do. I'm like, yeah, that's all you got to do.

I think this is a little more on the client management side, but I'd love to know a little more about your five factor update system because I think it touches the affiliates too. So can you tell me a little bit about that? Like what, what that process was like in the business.

This is one of those things that we found early on. One of the challenges, this is really before credit monitoring services and this is where the five factor kind of birthed from that. You can't let your, your clients control the story. You can't let your clients control your results. And back in the early days, what did we wait for? We waited for the responses from the bureau's. They would bring them into the office, we'd go through the report and then we'd update the dispute and we'd send it out time and time again. I can't tell you how many calls I had. They were like, hey, I haven't got any results. I went and applied for this and I'm still not approved. I'm like, I'm like, larry, we haven't seen you in two months. You did you get anything in the mail? Yeah, I got a stack of these things, you know, and so very early on we knew that that was a big part of the business and that we can't rely on the customers to. Before credit monitoring services, we would, we would do blind disputes and just to let you know how antiquated was in the back then we should draft the letters and we'd send it to them to sign. Literally back in the early days, we'd send the letters out to them to sign. So rather than waiting on them to come in, bring the results and we, at that time, we print the letters and have them sign right there in the office, we would send them to them. And so we started doing that on a regular basis, even when they didn't come in. So that was kind of the birth of we can do this without them, they'll still get the results. Results is all they're looking for. And so fast forward, you know, when, you know, we started adopting softwares for credit repair and then start adopting systems, we took that same approach. And not only did we send out what we would deem as blind disputes, right. But we would update their file with everything revolves around the five factors of your credit score. You know, whether it's a mix of credit would be like, hey look, we noticed you didn't open that secure credit card. You know, we need a good mix of credit. You don't have anything on here, you need to open it. You don't have any payment history, you need to open that. So we would give this five factor update that went around, it went with inquiries. Hey, these inquiries are bad on your, on your credit report. You need to stop me having inquiries while we're trying to get qualified for this mortgage. So this five factor update went around all the five factors it takes to, to impact your credit score. And we would put that into their file and that would go out to them simultaneously, not only to them. So the round of disputes would go out, the update would go out, they would receive the update, the affiliate received the update. So the affiliate knows now what this client needs to do to be mortgage ready. And if I'm saying that they don't have any established credit, that affiliate knows they're never going to get qualified if they don't go out and get a secured credit card or whatever they need to do to establish some credit or if they catch up their car payment, like they're late on their payment history. Right. They would know the good, the bad and the ugly about every client that they referred to us. And, and that's how again, getting a receipt for your work, even though we're not, you know, pulling FICO scores for everybody every day and putting a hard, quiet, a hard inquiry on there now, you know, fast forward, we have monitoring services when we say, hey look, they started out was at a 600. They're now at a 670. I know this is Advantage, but it definitely is going up, so you may want to take a look. And so we just show the receipt for that work every month, month in, month out. I think we had our ticker set at 35 days. And so our ticker at 35 days, we sent another round of disputes. The login credentials for their monitor service weren't available. Again, every communication, I would say every communication, but certain communications we would include the affiliate on, like, hey, need this person to something, something or whatever, you know, but yeah, it's. It was just painting that, getting a receipt for that work, showing that effort. Like, we're not squandering the opportunity to improve this person's credit situation. And we don't want you to be blindsided when they come into your office and say, hey, T.R. said that I'm ready, and be like, it's not what I heard. I heard. I heard that you still got some work to do, but, you know, tell me something different. I'm listening. So it would keep them informed the whole time.

Like, in summary, it sounds like this five factor update. You were letting the client know the factors that would. If they're on the right path or not to success. You're letting the affiliate know that, too, at the same time, so that everyone's all on the same page. Everyone that you have relationships with really understands where this person's at. And so it sounds like they could. They could take their own responsibility, too, whether it's the affiliate nudging the client or the client knowing that they have a responsibility in the process, too.

Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing how in some instances, you know, an affiliate would reach out and say, you know, John, it's been three months. You haven't established a credit line yet. I thought you were serious about buying a home. You know what I mean? Like, sometimes they invest in that. They put some investment into that because that may be an affiliate who's already seen the benefits of that pipeline business that they've been giving us. And so they're helping us out a little bit. Right. Because we've got a strong enough relationship and we've maybe proven that we're not just saying stuff for the sake of saying stuff. It all means something. The team was amazing at delivering that. And again, not every affiliate responded as they should, but the ones that did well, they definitely benefited from that process.

I want to make sure I get all the gold nuggets out of you. Troy, because you're amazing.

Thank you.

So those 300 active affiliates you had, what made them different than the other thousand you had in the system? Was there anything else that you were doing with them that really kept them engaged, active, or, or made you pick them successfully that made them be the engaged affiliates that they were?

Yeah, I think more so. They picked us, right? That was the key is we, we. We would give everyone an opportunity. Right. And I think those ones that were more engaged and more active picked us because we proved ourself. I will say that we, again, going back to being a resource and being a connector. I can remember, you know, a couple of the higher end, you know, affiliates, some, maybe some big builders and some big loan officers, stuff like that. They would, they would sponsor events and we'd sponsor them with them. Like, oh, this is important to you. We would sponsor. We began more of an affiliate relationship. It more gradually grew into a partnership. If you're sponsoring a new home buyer seminar, we're sponsoring it with you. If there's a networking event, you're a sponsor, we'll sponsor it with you. Because we wanted to show that we're, you know, we're not a fly by night organization. We're in it for the long haul. We want to, you know, support you and whatever's important to you. You know, whether that was charities didn't necessarily be a networking event. So I think some of those more active ones understood the process. And then they picked us. They said, you know what team? This is our CRO. This is the one we're going to. It wasn't like we signed an agreement with anybody, right? It wasn't like, oh, you exclusively, whatever. It's like one of the large mortgage companies said something like, hey, look, this is who I recommend. This is who you should use. If you use anyone else, that's on you. Yeah, it's on you. Like, I'm like, awesome. And this is, you know, this is. You're talking about a company probably had 100 plus real estate agents. So it was good. But I think it more so how we picked them is more so that after, over time, they picked us.

Well, sounds like it's a little bit of a numbers game too. You just, you got to get out there and got to get a lot of affiliates and some of them are not going to work out, but some of them that pick you will end up working and have a good relationship.

It's Networking 101. When you think about it. You know, there's a, there's a honeymoon Stage they got to get to know you, got to have a cup of coffee and next thing you know you're, you're going out to events together, you're having dinner together and you know, next thing you know you got a long term relationship. You have to be patient and let that process happen. But if you just sit back and wait, well it's never going to happen. You have to be engaged, you have to be active and we have that presence to do that. And you know, speaking of numbering games, the, the affiliate pipeline is a number game too. And you know those expectations, you know, you send me 100 people, I'm not saying I'm gonna give you 100 back, they're gonna be mortgage ready. There's too many variables for me to control. As a matter of fact, I don't control any of them. But I just want the opportunity to control this one little piece of what makes them qualified. We understood what it meant to be mortgage ready. You know, we, we talked to them about down payments, what you would be prepared for down payment. It wasn't all credit driven, right. It would talk about down payments. Like hey, if you, are you working, saving down payment, looks like you're gonna have to have 3,000 towards closing costs. That's what John over ABC Mortgage told us. So are you working towards saving that up? Yeah man, I got like 300 towards it. Awesome. Okay, that's on the right direction, you know. So we knew what it talked what it meant to be mortgage ready. And so before we grabbed a golden goo, a golden egg, we knew what it took to be mortgage ready. Like they checked all the boxes but like hey, like we knew what it took to be mortgage ready. So I think one thing I didn't mention is like they, no one knows their industry better than they do, but it definitely helps if you know too. You're not an expert, but you just have an understanding of how things work that way when you're going out making those relationships and people are talking about like that doesn't add up. I don't think that's the way it works. But yeah. So knowing the industry you're going after and the state of that process helps as well.

Is there anything else you think credit heroes should know about mortgage brokers, realtors, that make them sound more knowledgeable and better informed as they go into those conversations to potentially partner with someone to make them feel like, feel more comfortable as they get in that room with the, the potential affiliate.

This is probably the best understanding you will need when it comes to anyone in the mortgage industry, they're only focused on the people who are qualified. That's the only place they want to spend their time. So respect that, because that is the only. That's the only thing that puts food on their table. That's the only thing that pays their bills, is the qualified people. You have to respect that as you're trying to get into the door. And you can even say it aloud. Say how? Respect the fact you're only interested in closing qualified deals. But I also respect the fact that they're not all qualified. Right. So just know that it's really. And take advantage of any time you get with them to sit down with them, acknowledge their pain, provide a solution that'll help ease their pain a little bit and make their process better. But just know that they're only focused on qualified people. Yes, they are looking for qualified people for you to give them back. But just know that that's all they're concerned about. That really is it. And it's okay. That's their job. And you just want an opportunity to do yours. That's it.

Awesome. That's really, really, really good advice. Lots and lots of gold nuggets.

I knew Keenan was going to pull them all out of me. He's good at that.

Okay, so I want to switch gears now, and I want to ask you a few rapid questions. So answer with the first thing that pops into your head. Ready?

I am ready.

What is your business? Superpower.

Process.

Awesome. What's your business? Kryptonite. The area that gives you the most trouble.

Design graphics. I can't even make a pretty slideshow.

What did business ownership mean to you?

Learning. Endless learning opportunities.

Good one. What drives and motivates you?

Impact. Specifically the impact what I do towards my family.

And what's your definition of success?

I think I share this with a lot of folks. It's freedom.

Awesome. And last question. If you could go back in time to tell yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

I.

As I take a breath, just take a breath and take it all in. Because it's all you can learn from every experience. And it does go by so fast. As. As I was getting ready for this, I was like, it's been 20 years. It's, you know, in since I've first touched this industry. And now it's come full circle. And now I feel like I've finally had an opportunity to appreciate all that. And so it was really cool to bring it all back out.

Amazing. Yet really, this is a full circle moment for me. Too. Just having this conversation with you, this is really, really wild. Well, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for your time today, Troy. We sure appreciate you. This was a lot of fun, wasn't it, Keenan?

Yes, definitely. Thank you for all the gold nuggets, Troy.

Yes. Thank you.

Amazing.

We're so glad you're part of the team here at Credit Repair Cloud. And thank you, Keenan, for being here. And I'll end by saying, if you want to learn more secrets to growing a successful business, check out my episode, top five Credit Repair Affiliates. And if you'd like to get certified in the disputing process and gain confidence and grow your very own credit repair business, check out our Credit Hero challenge. Doors are closing soon, so sign up right now@creditherochallenge.com and start changing lives.