Mortgage Mastery: How One Broker Built a 20,000 Loan Empire

Welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, your host, Jim James. Now, if you are building a business and you're finding you're giving a lot of margin away to intermediaries and brokers, you probably want to go direct. You probably want to go direct to the customers and have the relationships reduce cost of acquisition, better loyalty, better customer service and all the things that go with that. But of course, building a brand that gets customers come directly to you is not easy. So we're very lucky that today we've got a guest who's built a business from a small loan from his mum and dad, just 10k. And he's built that into a business that's now converted over 20,000 mortgage loans for customers here in the UK. We're going to Southampton and we're going to talk to the founder and CEO of a company called MortgageArt, Chris Shoutrups. Chris, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. What an honor.

My honor. And you know, first of all, have I pronounced your surname correctly?

Said it perfectly. You did me proud for sure.

Okay, great. Thank you, Chris. So you're in Southampton, but tell us about the Mortgage Hut. Because you've built a business without funding from the ground up in a very, very competitive business and also one that's subject to regulation and people interest rates, a lot of external variables that must make or break a business too. So I'd love for you to share with us how you've been building this brand. Maybe some challenges you faced and maybe a mistake that you might have made on the way and a sort of a key tip and a key learning for those of us who would like to emulate your success. So a little bit first about Mortgage Hut.

So the Mortgage Hut as it stands Today is a B2C mortgage advice brand. It's regulated. We have somewhere in the region between 70 and 150 customers a day. Contact us looking to discuss about their circumstances. I have a team of qualified regulated advisors who offer advice to the customers from over 110 lenders and 12,000 mortgage products and most of the UK mortgage market. And they're able to look at customers, individual circumstances which normally are relatively complicated and individual to themselves, offer them advice and then take them through the mortgage journey and hopefully either help them get their dream home or if they already have a home, make sure that they get the best deal possible in this rising interest or what has been a rising interest rate market.

Yes, it must have been very, very competitive because we've seen the number of transactions reduce. But the number of brokers presumably has not reduced, so it must have made it even more competitive for companies like Mortgage Hut. Chris?

Oh, sorry, I was going to say, actually I think brokers have had a very good time for a long time and so it was a of a shock for them because if you think through Covid, people were buying properties still upsizing because they wanted that extra bedroom. So actually it was a relatively resilient industry compared to others. So when in, in the, as the interest rate started to hike up, I think there were definitely some people that found that the new world was one that they weren't necessarily used to.

Well, and presumably that's where scale and brand really create some business continuity and sustainability. So you started mortgage hunt in 2012, so you're well past those initial speed bumps. Tell us some of the obstacles that you face though, because to build a company with that much infrastructure, that many agents, presumably a lot of tech as well, enabling those agents to give custom and real time updates on those. I think you said 12,000 products, a lot of information management required, isn't it Chris?

Yeah.

What were some of the obstacles from a brand building perspective that you faced?

I guess, you know, to start with, it's the capital's a real challenge because you know, personally I have a lot of investments across a lot of industries. Financial services one of the most challenging for cash flow because unlike say if I owned a restaurant, you come in and you eat a steak today in my restaurant and you think that was great, I'm going to pay the 30, 40 pounds for your meal tomorrow, that money's in my bank account. But if you come today, Jim, and you talk to me about a mortgage that you're looking to buy a new house somewhere, generally speaking, if we take an average, I don't see any income for up to nine months. So if I am looking to scale a business from just me for example, when I started it to, you know, now we have most of our advisors are employed, which is actually relatively rare in financial services because how people overcome this challenge of cash flow is they will self employ the advisors and so they will pay the advisors as they get paid. The challenge with that model and we started like this, is that you have little control because as self employed advisors they say, you know what, I want to go on the golf course on Friday or you know, I'm planning to take a long weekend. And actually as you get scale and as you get busier, you need your colleagues to be sat there all of the time and you need to be Able to resource plan to create that resilience. So, you know, cash flow is a challenge. To be able to scale in financial services lead. Getting quality leads is a challenge as well. And, you know, when I started, remember, you know, Google marketing was just starting ppc, Facebook marketing wasn't a thing. You know, Instagram didn't exist. TikTok was, you know, definitely not there. And so, you know, we started that journey by going, I would say, on the conventional path that people tread, where we went to local estate agents. You know, it was literally me, a suit, walking up the sort of slightly dirtier ends of town, knocking on the door, saying to the estate agents, look, I'll do your mortgages, and finding the ones that no one else wanted to start that journey. And as we grew that and got more estate agents, we were able to get more advisors. The benefit of, for example, real estate agents is that you generally pay them when the deal completes. So that creates a little bit less burden on your cash flow. But the downside to it is that you pay them a large proportion of the pie in income terms. So an estate agent may want somewhere between 25 and 40% of your gross income to give you that name and number, which is obviously a fairly sizable amount. And sometimes, if you think about individual branches or units or real estate agency offices, if your listeners are in the States, they do only have an element of scale themselves because they might only sell 10 houses, 10 properties a month. So that's the journey that we started on. And I would say lead acquisition and cash flow are definitely the two hardest. The two initial hurdles, should we say, that you have to overcome. And like all businesses, I suppose this was my first big business and I guess probably what I achieved in the first five years, if I did it again, I could probably achieve it in a year. But you don't know what you don't.

Know at the time, that's for sure. And later on, Chris, hope you're going to give us a number one, you know, marketing tip about what you would do in those five months instead of five years when you went in to see those estate agents, presumably they already had brokers. Chris, I know this is a 2011, you say there wasn't the prevalence of Google and the Internet, but they'll have had relationships presumably with existing mortgage companies. The banks, I'd have thought as well, would probably have their own products to sell. How did you overcome their objections? Because you're presumably creating an element of risk for them that if you can't create the mortgage and get it funded for their client, they lose the transaction, the whole chain falls down. So it's a very mission critical role, isn't it? The mortgage broker?

Actually, yes. I think it's like all marketing. It's being in the right place at the right time and playing the numbers game. If you knock on, my uncle, way before the Internet was a sales director in the Netherlands for an encyclopedia company. Okay. And they used to sell them door to door. And he said the hardest door for the salespeople was their own front door. And you know, that was very similar on my journey of trying to get real estate agents where I just had to knock on enough doors and the probability, the chance of probability was one of them at that point in time was a bit annoyed with their current broker, you know, and it was that numbers game of just being right place, right time, understanding your sales pitch. You know, my pitch was pretty simple because as we've all people brokers are salespeople. And as salespeople get fatter and less hungry and less agile, they start to slip and their behaviors start to go. And so I used to say to the real estate agents, it was a very simple picture. I'd say, well, first of all, I will actually call the leads that you give me because some of the brokers just didn't bother. They would cherry pick, they pick the good ones. The second thing is, I promise I'll give you feedback on how that lead goes because as a the real estate agents in that journey, in that transaction, it's important that they know, can the customers afford to buy that house? Are we going to submit an application? What are they going to offer, you know, all of that information. And if they pass a lead and one, you don't call it, but two, maybe you do call it, but you don't give them feedback that doesn't allow them to achieve their main objective. And actually the mortgage income as, as large as the split is for the broker is still a very small proportion of the real estate agent's income. You know, it may be hundreds of pounds rather than thousands of pounds. So still their primary objective is to sell some houses. And so if the broker can enable that, then that's great. And the third point I used to say to them was I'll actually pay you your commission because you would have brokers who would be slow at paying or who would quibble about money or you know, when I used to, in the uk, we, as you know, Jim, you will exchange on a property which means you're legally bound to buy the house, but you then complete a week later, generally speaking. And then the brokers normally get paid sort of four to eight weeks later. Well, I used to pay all of the real estate agents when it exchanged because I was guaranteed the money. So for me it was, you know, I got, I paid it out maybe up to eight weeks before I received the money. But again for cash hungry real estate businesses I was able to say, look, I'm going to pay you quicker than anyone else. And those three things. Normally if there was someone who was unhappy with a broker that hit 90% of the pain points, that's great Chris.

And in a way you were doing, as you say, doing all the right things, but in the right way. Yes, that other brokers may have done, but in as you say, maybe a more, more lackadaisical way if they didn't need the business, especially if, if everyone's making money, then those people that have made the most, as you say, that creates an opportunity, doesn't it, for the young and the hungry, which plainly you were and still are.

Of course I was very hungry at that time. You know, I'd gone from a job that was paying me 30 odd thousand and this is quite a while ago and I was young 30 odd thousand pounds till I was earning 200 pound a month with a pregnant partner and a rental property to pay. So I was pretty damn hungry for sure.

Yeah, there's nothing like the motivation, is there, than a bit of hunger and children to feed? Yes, you've come a long way plainly, so you got to that first number of customers. But what about the inflection point where you've now got a brand and where you're no longer doing the sales yourself? Chris, how did you then go from, you know, those knocking on doors to where you are now with 150, 200 leads per day, which is a lot, a lot of leads, isn't it in the market?

Yeah, it's, you know, it's an awful lot of leads and it's a journey, you know, as a business owner you have to at some point take, I would say growth of businesses like stack cases, you'll go forward and then you have to take that step up and take the pain to grow to the next level. And it got to a point relatively early on, probably about 2014, 15, where I realized that if I was going to really scale the business and step away from the business because ultimately what I wanted to do was have a team who earned me money rather than being at the coal face all of the time and So I took that step back, which was an expensive step back because I generated about 20% of the overall turnover of the business still, even when we had six people. And so for me to stop was a pretty big step back. And, you know, I don't think we were making 20% profit, put it this way. So, you know, it was a bit of a risk, but I knew that I had to go there. And, you know, in 2016, I reached probably my peak number of advisors I've ever had, about 30 advisors. And I'd grown it too quickly. And I would say the quality of the people that I had, I had some great people, but I also had some people who weren't amazing. And one business leader taught me a lesson and he said, if you wouldn't let your mum deal with them, then you can't have them work for you. And that's very true. And you're only as good as your weakest team member. And that's really important to know as a leader because, you know, no one's going to judge you based or. Well, they will, but people are going to judge you based on that worst team member. And if you can't be proud of them, then you need, you either need to upskill them or off board them, really is the truth.

Yeah. And it's also really interesting the impact that a bad player has on the rest of the team and that no one tells you that until you've let that person go. And then everyone says, yeah, we should. You'd done that earlier, right? No one tells you that.

Yeah, well, they either bring down the quality and the expectations or we've all had in businesses, the mood hoover, you know, the one person who can change the whole dynamic, just sometimes not without even speaking, you know, they can ruin the vibe. And so, you know, it's team morale and building a good team and, you know, it's all one. You know, a business leader once taught me, he said, chris, your job is to be the chief storyteller of this business and that is it. And once you get the right team and you have that vision and you have that dream, it's really important that your whole team understand where you're going and what you're trying to achieve.

Chris, you've mentioned story, which is great because I was going to come onto that next because as you build the brand and you have people work for you, then as you say, you go from being the person who's kind of the actor in the story to being the storyteller to get other people to play their parts. What's the Mortgage Hut story? How do you pitch Mortgage Hut to be different to the other brokers? I mean, you talk from a tactical point of view about the selling, but from a brand proposition. What's your story?

I guess we try and have a positive tone with our customers. A lot of our customers who come to us will have complicated circumstances. They might be self employed, they might have adverse credit, they could be foreign nationals on visas, they could be expats. You know, they generally are a bit downtrodden sometime, if I'm honest. And our job is to have a really positive outlook. I try and motivate the team and show them that our number one at the hub of the wheel, our number one outcome that we're trying to achieve is an incredible customer experience. Because actually from one, from a marketing point of view, but two, from a business point of view, because our customers do come back, they do need to refix their rates. It's important that we stand up above everyone else, you know, and really show them that we care. And you know, that goes from everything, from the way our sales process is set out, the way we target our team members. You know, all of our customers get an email from me during the process and they have the ability to reach out and speak to me directly. You know, so those say 150 leads a day will at some point in the first week actually get an email from me. And although that is an automated process, the replies that I get I read personally and I reply to personally. And so you know that, that when you're a customer in that journey and the advisors are motivated to have amazing customer outcomes and you've got the founder emailing you and checking in everything's okay and knowing them, that that's there. I guess the story is, you know, we just want to be the best to have the right outcomes to ensure that the customers get absolutely the best experience and that we are the ones in reality that can place the mortgages that others can't in the right way.

Chris and I think, you know, you've mentioned there about going after people that may be off piste a little bit and you had a background as an ex patriot yourself, didn't you? So is that a niche strategy that you've got to go for if you like the not distressed mortgage? I've met people that do sort of distressed loans and so on.

Yeah, yeah.

But is that a strategy to go after the niche that maybe the more traditional conventional loan companies are not interested? Is that part of the strategy Well.

I guess if you look at the larger brokers in the uk, okay, most of them will go after what I would call the vanilla customers. Okay, the sort of two doctors, relatively high incomes, large deposit, no adverse credit, and that's what they're trying to chase down. But the cost to acquire the customer is very high. You know, part of our challenge I guess as a brand is we try and get our customers to buy them because actually sometimes online we can appear like a larger company than we are. You know, what we try and do in our marketing during the customer journey is to sort of make it highlighted that we're family owned, privately owned, you know, all of those things. We're not a large corporate, we're not owned by a credit reference agency. And so to answer your question, we try and go for the customers who maybe aren't vanilla. And that's because, you know, as AI and other technology moves forward and 15 years ago I was telling people in 10 years time I wouldn't have a job because of technology. And I've survived a little bit longer than I deserved maybe. But you know, actually mortgage lending hasn't changed a lot because we deal with a lot of legacy bank systems that are very old, that are very complicated and mortgage criteria is complex. And so as technology evolves forward, I guess maybe more customers will transact via automation. There is regulation that means that, you know, it's hard for AI to guarantee a great customer outcome every time, you know, with how it hallucinates and.

Yeah, well, that's right. It could be quite, quite dangerous, couldn't it? Well, I wouldn't mind hallucinating my credit score.

Yeah, well, exactly. Add a couple of zeros on to the end. But I think, you know, there is a benefit in marketing in having niches. So we have two brands, we have the Mortgage Hub, but we have two smaller brands, one being Police Mortgages where we deal with 23 of the UK's police forces or federations and help police officers with their mortgages, which is a very successful brand that we have. And we have another brand called Airlines Mortgage Shop where we deal with some of the UK's leading airlines in helping their staff get mortgages. And you know, if we touch on that pain point of what for example, a pilot's pain point might be, is their income could be say 120,000 pounds, but half of that could be flight pay which is non taxable. So most UK lenders will not take that pay into account because as a rule of thumb, generally a lender will not Take into account money that you haven't paid tax on because they don't want a reputational risk of the tax issue. So if you went to a normal bank, you might be able, in the example of 60,000, you might be able to borrow £300,000. If you come to us, you may be able to borrow up to £600,000. So those type of niches, we've not just from a branding point of view, identified a niche that we can target easily because we know the companies that they work for on their job roles, but we've also identified a pain point of a problem that we can help solve.

Yeah, that's really interesting. As you say, each niche has got its own particular profile. Chris, you've got all these leads coming in. I've got to ask you, how has that happened? I mean, you've been going now for what, 13, 14 years, so you've got some organic word of mouth. But what about brand building and leads inbound? What have you been doing to get those?

Well, I suppose, you know, first of all, it's just about anything across all of the business, not just marketing. It's about trying to be consistent, you know, and what we've done with our marketing approach is we've been consistent. We generate, at some point we went from generating more leads off of our website than we did via our introduced business. And, you know, you touched on it at the start of the show in that, you know, when you start, when you rely on, for example, real estate agents to introduce the majority of your leads, you do not control your own destiny. It's an expensive way to do it. You don't control your own destiny and you can't control or improve quality easily because those decisions are outside of your hands. As you pivot across, for example, to SEO organic lead generation, what you're able to do is to define a process, to filter out and to get the customers at the right point in the funnel. You're able to nurture those in that journey, create the right systems and processes, then to be able to track them, to understand what converts, how it converts. We're lucky enough that we over time and it is just time and being consistent. One of my personal goals is I try and introduce one quality system into business a week that will allow, generally, I want all the systems to not have me involved because I'm the inconsistent one in the business. But the amount of data we now have allows me to make really good decisions. So, for example, say I work with a police federation, for example, I'm Able to track the number of leads that come through, what converts, how engaged they are, and then I'm able to make decisions on who I focus on, how I support them, stuff like that. And having that data and understanding not just where the leads come from, but what type of leads they are. We talked, you know, I mentioned expats, I mentioned, you know, customers on visas. Understanding, okay, well, we might have 150 leads, but of those, 30 of them will create 50% of the mortgages, for example, maybe. So it's understanding those and knowing. So investment, you know, we've invested a long time in SEO. We invest a lot in being able to generate more leads. I guess it's also about just going out there and trying things out, you know, testing and measuring and giving things go. I would say that has been the secret to our success is just going, you know what, we'll give that a go. And if it works, great. If it doesn't work, we're not going to be embarrassed, we're not going to worry, you know, because that's the path of discovering what really does work for us. Because most people chase the same broken methods.

And you've mentioned there that, you know, you've been doing SEO and is that then largely a sort of a content led, or are you doing advertising and outbound marketing as well then? Chris?

So we do the SEO is predominantly content led, you know, because we'll look at longer tail search terms, we'll understand what people are searching for and create content based on that. We use different outreach. So we obviously have a lot of data that we hold ourselves about 100,000 subscribed potential customers that we'll market to. We will use some ppc, we'll use email outreach, like instantly is the, the new big thing, you know, and marketing really, as you know, more than anyone, Jim, marketing is about blending, you know, because I always knew when I looked at businesses when I was just that guy with the briefcase with no money, you know, and a sandwich in my pocket, you know, I would look at the bigger companies and I think I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket. So we still deal with real estate agents, I'll deal with real estate agents that can provide quality to me, that can provide consistency to me. You know, I'm able to pick and choose house builders, you know, house developers, house builders, house developers in the uk we deal with them, but I will only deal with ones that I perceive build quality homes. Because if I'm going to have to deal with customers, I'm not going to deal with them whilst I know that I'm putting them into a substandard product and I'm not going to sell my soul to the devil for it. So, you know that blend of where the customers come from, if you think about like the police that I talk about, you know, about the airline, all very different industries, different types of customers at different points in their careers. So it's really about blending the marketing for sure. And, you know, the secret with being ahead of the curve is just listening out, listening to what people are doing. I spent a month in Chiang Mai in Thailand at the start of the year and I was surrounded by some incredible young marketers, all digital nomads. And I just went around and asked them what they were doing for the clients, what was working well, what wasn't working well. And you know, sometimes I know from this podcast you think he never shuts up, but it's about listening and understanding and trying to work out what may work. Because once everyone is telling you. You know, when I was a stockbroker in the city, my boss said to me, when the postman gives you tips on shares, you know, you're screwed. Okay. And it's similar with marketing. If everyone's telling you to do something, you're too late to the party.

Yeah, that's right. But it sounds like you go to the party nice and, well, nice and early, you've built it and you got that have sustainable business. But I do like how you are going into the different niches and really staying very personally involved as well in the company and in the products that you're offering. Chris, you know, I do like to ask successful entrepreneurs like you that may be a little bit unnoticed or they know you've got a great profile. Any anything that you've done from a marketing point of view that you might consider to be a mistake that you wouldn't recommend anyone to try at home.

Well, I guess I had a very tough lesson which nearly resulted in this company failing. And so in 2014 I discovered I still had the police niche. And where that came from was I had been a volunteer police officer here in the uk, special constable, and I'd worked with amazing police officers. And every time I went to the police station, people say, oh, you know, the other guy that does the mortgages. And it was a great lead generation strategy for me there as well. But as I 2014, I discovered Facebook marketing and the marketers were not talking to me about it. And at the time, you could really tightly demographically target credit which you can't do anymore in the uk. And so I was able to scale my leads up very, very quickly at a very low cost. I mean, a very, very low cost. And I did so. And, and that's what allowed me to scale the team up to where I was in 2016. Now, the challenge that I had and through, you know, inexperience, naivety, I'm not sure I didn't necessarily see this coming, which was that at some point Facebook reached saturation of advertisers. And so what started to happen was the cost of acquiring the customer up significantly. I mean, significantly, it cost me single digit pounds to generate a lead prior. And by the time that I was screwed, it was costing me like 25 pound, you know, and it really was hitting me straight in, in the nuts. And it got to the point where I had two choices because I had a load of advisors who were on salaries and I had to pay their wages and I needed to pay them. But I. The leads that I would buy, that I was buying at the price I was buying, I was losing money. But I had to essentially keep buying the leads because otherwise I definitely had zero income. And so I got to a clif edge in 2016 where I had a 50k a month cash flow gap and no money.

Ouch, ouch.

No credit facility. And you know that. So at that point, you know, I look back and I thought to myself, you know, I don't want to put myself in this position again where I've got. I still had a diverse lead source, but I was heavily weighted on Facebook marketing and you know, that really caused a big problem for me. And it was only because I was able to raise finance that the business didn't go bust. So that would be, you know, my number one would be, I guess, plan as if those leads, either you can't afford them tomorrow or they're not there. Because there is disruption in markets, you know, and generally, especially when you're early adoptering stuff, you know, you've got to realize people do catch on to what you're doing.

Yeah. And I think that idea that you become overly reliant on one source of anything that's not under your control, whether it's staff or sales or any factor of production. And congratulations to you for soldiering on there. That must have been a fairly heady moment.

Yeah.

Chris, what about the successes that you've had have also taught you many lessons. If there's one piece of advice, one tip you'd give to an unnoticed entrepreneur.

What would that be, you know, I think one of the things I did relatively early on was I worked out who did well in my industry and if I could get out and speak to them, I would, you know, and you know, I was very unintimidating as a one man band broker, 21 year old, you know, sitting there and saying, oh, how do you do this and how do you do that? But I listened to what they did and I took just one bit from it. And it's a little bit like listening to a podcast. If you can just take one thing from it, you're moving forward. So you know, get out there, understand your competitors, understand how they do stuff, what they do, what they do well and acknowledge that, don't be, you know, ignorant, acknowledge what they do well, but also acknowledge where you can do better, you know, and getting out and speaking and understanding competitors, understanding their models, speaking to people is definitely the number one thing that you can do when you're scaling business up and understanding the market around you.

Chris Shoetrop, that's great advice and you have mentioned podcasts as well. And you know, I like to ask if there's a podcast or a book that you found inspirational that you'd like to share.

So I have recently actually read a book by Dan Martell, I think his name is called Buy Back youk Time. So one of the challenges that I faced was I am actually a very good delegate as my team will attest with all the stuff that I pass across. But you know, I got to a point a couple of months ago where I was still getting three and a half thousand WhatsApps and emails a day and it was sort of disrupting my brainwave and although I could delegate them and I could have a great PA who works alongside me, I going to visit my auntie in Rotterdam and I was driving there from the uk which is about an eight, nine hour drive and so I listened to, I'd met someone else and they said you should listen to this book called buy back your time. And so I did and I now don't do any emails. So I employed a full time assistant to do my emails for me. I set up the processes, you know, I set up lots of different MI processes. So if you're a busy entrepreneur and you know, we're all busy from that first day because you wear multiple hats, but I would definitely recommend taking some time out to listen to the book. It's a really good book, read it, listen to it. Obviously I'm a fan of your books as well.

You're too kind.

Thank you. Because you know that I have have I'm looking forward to your third one coming out shortly. So yeah, that was a very enjoyable book that helped me actually, you know, a lot of the time you will listen to audiobooks and podcasts and there's a lot of theory that is sometimes harder to apply to business than they make it seem. But that is that I would say the book's well written for that first solo entrepreneur all the way up to the CEO of the 3,000 person business for sure, Chris Shutrup.

That's fantastic advice and I'll put the course that book Buy Back youk Time in the show notes Chris, if you want to get hold of you. Where can they do that?

So I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very, very active on LinkedIn. So Chris Shutrup's on LinkedIn. You know, feel free to reach out, connect if there's anything that I can help with. I'm always, you know, I'm super passionate about business. I enj getting out there and speaking to people. So yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn.

Great. That's just for anyone listening. Shoe trips. It's s c h u t r u p s and it's the mortgage hut so I'm sure you'll be able to find Chris very easily. Chris, thank you for coming in. You've had such a long and varied career. We've had to kind of squeeze such a long journey in such a short time. Thank you so much for sharing with me.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. John him.

It's wonderful. So you know what I've loved about Chris's story is the humility and the success, the attention to detail and yet the desire to get away from the detail, which is really the hallmarks of a great entrepreneur and someone who really cares about the clients as much as about the business. If you've enjoyed this show as much as I have, then do forward it to a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. Chris's wisdom is well worth sharing and until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.