Why the Mortgage Business is So Hard to Exit & How One Leader Did It On His Own Terms w/Tom Tousignant

This is Real Estate Team Builders and I'm your host, Lars Hedinborg, the founder of Real Estate B School. The real estate team building world is driven by big egos who boast about how many homes they've sold or how much GCI they've earned. We don't hear much about their low profit margins, the long hours they put in each week, or the unbearable stress they endure. In fact, I've discovered that most real estate teams are losing money when you consider the amount of personal production their owners must do to make ends meet. I believe that if you want to profitably scale your real estate team without working crazy hours, enduring unhealthy levels of stress, or coming up short at home, then thinking like a business owner, building sustainable systems and empowering your team are absolute musts. You won't find any smoke and mirrors or hype here on my podcast, just the real world tools, systems and strategies that work. So if you struggle to balance growing your real estate business with, with focusing on the areas of life that truly matter, then this show is for you.

Welcome back, Real Estate Team Builders. Welcome to another episode. This is gonna be a good one. A little bit of a change of gears here, but it's gonna make sense as I unpack it. I've got Tom Tusi on today. Really good friend of mine, Tom. We probably met over 10 years ago, I would say, back in the real estate team. So Tom, at the time, I think you were just starting your sort of mortgage team, I would say, or I don't know if you had opened Fairway, the Fairway branch yet. But Tom, here's the punchline to the story is that Tom, you know, left a corporate job, right, flying commercial jets for a living and, and got into. To peddling loans, right? So we peddle houses. Tom peddled loans and went from, you know, no, no loan volume in 2003. I think you got into industry to 540 million last year with a lot of freedom, super high culture team and a group that, that absolutely loves you, I got the pleasure to go to your retirement party. I say quote unquote, because I can't, I can't envision you just sitting on your butt. And he's a brother of mine in Christ, which is also awesome, and he challenges me in many, many ways. And Tom, so, so unpack a little bit when you look back on the journey, you know, because every real estate agent knows loan officers and they're grinding, they're working, they're doing the, you know, the pre quals while you know, buyer's agents are going out on weekends and evenings and it's all insanity on both.

Sides of the world.

But let's, let's talk about the, the major sort of building block or mindsets around the, this pivot that you were able to make into true freedom in your business, in an industry that doesn't have a lot of freedom, which is the mortgage industry.

Yeah. So that's good. So I just ask any listeners from the real estate world, don't tune me out. You know, you might hear like, oh, it's a mortgage guy, he's going to ask for referral. I'm not, because as Lars mentioned recently, I just retired from the, from the mortgage industry. So not asking for any referrals, not going to pay for your Zillow leads. And we can learn from each other, you know, so my grandfather, my dad, three my uncles, also real estate. We go back our real estate history and our mortgage history and our family goes back to 1922. So it's actually the 101st of that, which is kind of cool. But yeah, 2003, got a job as a loan officer. I got zero training. I brought my own laptop and the guy said, go find somebody that needs to borrow money. And a couple years later I counted that up as eight word training program. And so went from there. And fortunately, 2003, the rates had dropped. So I got a quick start and four months later, rates popped up and I found out that I was, had just closed my last loan on that Friday afternoon. I was laying in a tent at night with my family and the kids were all asleep, my wife was asleep. And I laid there in bed at night and I woke up and I was like, man, I'm out of business. I was focusing on refis. The market changed, refis went away and I've got, I had nothing in my pipeline, you know, going from, from hero to. From zero to hero to zero in five months. You know, it was a great, great career success to start out with there. So jump forward. Did okay in a loan business though. Figured out, found some new. I needed not just one stream. I couldn't just do, you know, my Air Force buddies, VA refinances anymore. So I found some other streams of income, you know. And what I mean by that is other sources of stuff. So partnered with real estate agents, work in the neighborhood, sphere of influence, friends networking group. And then in 2007, struck out on my own and started my own company. The day I got my broker's license, two of the top five wholesale Lenders in the country went out of business because that was the peak of the mortgage crisis. Looked through that for a year and a year later in 2008, I joined a national firm as a branch manager and a producing branch manager and we're in Charlotte, N.C. and then was with that group for 14 years and transitioned from a producing branch manager. The first step was to get out of personal production. So brought in a production partner that helped me out with that and then along with that got really specific. Probably the granddaddy of them all is in terms of business building books is the E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and Lars. I'm sure you've mentioned that before. I know you and I have talked about that book many times. But trying to build a franchise business and what that is is basically a replicatable business. You do the same thing every time. You know you're referable, right. You've met those standards and you can be referred to customers tell their friends about you, the real estate agent tell their next client about you, you're referable. That's kind of the career path. And you know what happened just recently was I got to a place where my, I built my team up. They were looking for more opportunities, greater things. I was looking for other opportunities and I decided to basically to retire from the industry a couple years ahead of schedule. So we can, we can dig more into that. So within the past month or so I've had a whole lot more free time because I'm not doing the day to day in the, in the mortgage industry anymore.

So, so let's go, let's go back to you know, the, the mindset that, that, that you embodied. You know, knowing that it was a seven day a week job and you wanted freedom that, that a typical sort of mortgage officer didn't have. And then let's talk about goals and how you've seen you know, some loan well even for yourself back in the early days. What was, what was different about your approach to this business that led you to. And it didn't take until just recently for you to have freedom. And you've sort of been sort of getting out of different parts of the job ever since I've known you, you know, so talk about mindset, you know, vision and goals and all of that.

Yeah, so my, if I was going to do a workshop on goal setting, it's really pretty simple so that you know everybody, the first level is the level zero is everybody has goals level zeros. You don't know you have them. And so what that means is somebody else setting goals for you or the guy who founded your real estate company, you know, has goals for you, your manager has goals for you, your spouse has goals for you. That's kind of level zero. So level one is, you know, all right, well, I'm going to set my own goals. And now you're working to accomplish your own goals. And that's good, right? Because now I don't care what Ray Kroc is saying. I care about what I say, and maybe I move up to be an assistant manager. I get my own franchise. The problem with Level 1 goals is that you don't look at them, say, okay, with the end of my life looking backwards, is this going to be a meaningful goal? So I accomplished my goal, but who cares? And for me, the number one level one goal is people saying, I'm going to be the top producer in my marketplace, or I'm going to be the number one producer at my company, the number one loan officer on the rank, and they can spend their whole month, year, career, so that when the spreadsheet gets posted their names at the top, and you look back at the end of your career and you look at everything that accomplished in Yale, you go, ah, guess what? Meaningless. Where you want to be is like, okay, now I'm working for my goals, but I can also look back on them and they're meaningful. So it really led to significance. Where I impacted other people's lives, it impacted my marriage the way I wanted to. I was consistent with my faith, raised my kids in such a way that I still have a relationship with them. I'm proud of them, and they learned the key lessons that I needed to teach them as a father. So those are your kind of level two goals, right? And I actually won the award one year as the largest branch at our company. It was kind of funny. I finished the end of the year as number three. During the next five months, the top two branches left. And so we get to the awards banquet, and I get up on stage as the number one branch in the company. So not the best way to win it, but I still want it. And there was a. You know, there were people who set goals that night saying, I'm going to be the number one branch in the company, or I'm going to do a billion dollars in volume or things like that. And what I decided my goal was is I'm going to build a team that allows me to reach my financial goals without needing me to be there. And so I didn't really care How I compete against other people, I competed against myself. I didn't care who was number one, which is. Which is hard to do. Right. You see your name on a scorecard, you never want it to be number, number three. And if you're number two, you don't. You're watching out for number three, and you want to be number one. Right. So hard to do. But I really forced myself not to focus on where I was compared to others. Where am I at? Where's my team compared to where we were and where do we need to go? And so my goal was to build a team that allowed me my financial goals, but didn't need me to be there. And so, you know, I did have probably a lot more time off than many people did. There are many weekends I come back to come back on a Monday morning, and I missed the entire conversation because that weekend I was camping with my sons or out flying an airplane or sitting on the dock doing something but not reading emails. That was important to me. And then what I found with that is extending that goal beyond myself was really, hey, can I create opportunities for other people to achieve their financial goals and their career goals? Because I get out of the way, right? So instead of just me hanging on as the old man branch manager forever, you know, I've run into a lot of people that are like, I'm never going to retire. I'm going to do this till I'm 90. And I'm like, man, nobody wants to work for me when I'm 90. You know, some old man with an oxygen hose in or something. You know what I'm saying? So I thought it better to create opportunities for others. And that's where we got to a place where I'm looking at my leadership team saying, hey, you guys don't need me around here, so let's step this thing up. Let's free up my time even further to go do something else. And let's give you guys the position, the title, and the financial rewards that come with running a branch. And so stepped out early, which was really kind of the ultimate myth there, the entrepreneur's myth that you don't need to be at the office every day.

Yeah. So having just spent time with the team, four or five of them, I think, I think they all shed tears. I know I shed a couple tears sort of speaking about you at your retirement party. But let's dig in a little bit into team development, because you didn't necessarily. You came out of the Air Force, right?

Yeah.

So Air Force to then Find commercial jets to then doing loans and then sort of having this vision to build a company. But you didn't necessarily come into the mortgage industry with a bunch of business building experience, right? No, I believe as you do that 80% of success as anything comes down to the mindset and the psychology which we just spoke about and the E myth and beginning with the end of mine and the franchise prototype. But let's talk about two or three things that you learned or failed or pushed through in terms of team development. That it's like 85% of real estate agents and probably loan officers, maybe less so with loan officers, but 85% of real estate agents don't even have a single administrator. Over 80% of what a real estate agent does is, is administrative in nature. So let's talk a little bit about like the first couple hires, you know, getting that, you know, sort of quote unquote business partner to take some of the production off you. What, what did you learn? How did you lean into these sort of uncomfortable parts of building a team?

You know, delegation. And that's where I've seen so many people struggle with, is like, well, I can't let my assistant do this or I can't let anybody else do this because I do it better. And being able to, mindset wise, being able to overcome, it's like, you know, what if somebody does it 80% as good as me, but they can do it all day long, that's a lot better. They spend eight hours doing something 80% as good as I do, and I'm 100 percenter on it, but I can only do it an hour a day. 80% times 8 hours is a lot better than 100% times 1 hour. One of the tools, you know, one of the things that helped out a lot with delegations, just getting really clear on the finished product, the expectation and what is, what does this look like? So when I'm, when we're finished with this, you know, what of all, what do all the people feel like? What do they see and, and writing that stuff down and setting expectations. I remember a first one, you know, an early one for me was, you know, we had an issue with copiers because there's tons of paperwork in the, in the mortgage industry and you need a, you know, do you need a printer only? Do you need a copier only? Do you need a print fact scan copy, you know, and, you know, first hired my assistant. I go, I don't want to deal with the copier man anymore. You know, which is a terrible Way to delegate. So what I said was like, hey, when I am at my computer, I need to be able to hit print, and paper comes out. I want it to be white, not pink, and I want the ink to be black, not colored, you know, so my computer needs to be set up to default. And I just gave her enough vision of what the end picture looks like. She was able to run with that. And I've never talked to a copier salesman. I haven't talked to copier salesman since I hired an assistant, which is awesome. You know, that's. You know, if you're a copier salesman. Sorry, but I don't want to talk to you. You know, I'm not trying to offend you or anything like that, but that's not my. Not my gig. That was a delegation thing. But the leverage on that delegation that people don't realize is with is it. It took me longer to explain what I wanted the print outcome to look like, but once I described it once and we put it in writing, we never had to talk about it again. So should we be buying our paper from Dunder Mifflin or from Staples or where all those things. So just do it once, set really clear expectations, and then you don't have to do it again for the delegation. So kind of recognizing the benefit of. The leverage of doing that is huge.

Yeah. And the default, like you said, is like, it's just a copier. Like, I know how to change the cartridge. It's not that big of a deal. It's only every other year. Or, you know, the copy maintenance guy only comes, you know, also often. I can, you know, the. The default is that you can do all those things, but there are likely several hundred things that you've delegated. You know, ultimately, for you to be able to gracefully exit a business and, and, you know, and have your leadership team take over in. In the ultimate exit, which is. Which is retirement, everything. Thousands of things, like, every day, thousands of things happen because you have how many LOS all over the place. So it starts with the mindset, because you can totally screw yourself from the beginning. Just saying the. That property's on the way home. I can drop off the brochures on the way, or I can, you know, I can just grab the lockbox. It'll only take a few minutes to get a lockbox. I'll grab lunch while I'm out. And you do two or three of those things in a day, and, you know, it's. It's two to three hours, and that's all of your new business development time. So anything more that you can sort of. This is the point. This is the E myth. If you ever want to have freedom from your business, what else can you tell us about this core process of just doing less in the business, getting more freedom, making more money, having more of an impact.

Yeah. So forcing yourself to have free time. Zig Ziglar used to talk about speaking of guys that worked in their 80s, and I'm so glad he did, because the guy was amazing. But, you know, Zig Ziglar talked about the day before vacation and just how productive we are. And when you force yourself to have time off, you force yourself to get very productive. You force yourself to be okay with delegating, you know, so you're like, hey, I'm going to be out for a week. One of the best trips I had, I went out with. I went out 20, 2014, I think it was. But in the springtime, I went out with six other guys, all in the mortgage industry, would go climb Mount Whitney in California. So we were off the grid for five days and came back, and we're driving down this twisty mountain out of the. Out of the Sierra Nevadas, and we got to the first cell phone tower that could ping our phones, and everybody's phone blew up, as you might imagine, because they've been out of service. We've been to service for five days. And so just like everybody else, including the guy driving the car, unfortunately, we all look at our emails and. And after about 30 seconds, I go, huh, I only got five emails. And everybody in the car looked at me like they wanted to throw me over the next cliff, you know, because they had. Literally, it was just pinging and alerts and all this stuff happening, you know. And so, you know, knowing that I was going to be off the grid, it forced me to develop a system saying, hey, you can read my emails first. You can forward them to the right person, you can reply to them, or you can tell them that I'll be back in five days. And it turns out there's a whole lot of stuff that people on my team were better at doing anyways. And so that was a. Was a watershed moment for me there. Just, you know, if you force those days off, Dan Sullivan talks about free days, you know, but if you put those free days in your calendar and you force yourself to have time off, it really helps focus you. Like, I don't have time to go, you know, go out and pick up lunch and drop off a lockbox or I don't have time to run these papers over to somebody's house. Or maybe I don't have time to go to the closing. The money's there and the papers, work papers there. So I don't need to go to closing for an hour and a half. You know, the important stuff's there. Like they don't need a pretty face like me at the closing table. Sorry. Enough, enough people in the office, in the, in the room there, they need the money and they need the paperwork to sign so the keys can slide across the table if you're in a live closing state like we are, you know. And so yeah, that free time builds, builds on itself. You know, it forces you to get productive.

Right, that, that's really good. I want to, want to cover one more thing and then I think we'll probably wrap it up. So how about like the really dollar productive activities? So, you know, as a real estate agent, you could probably figure out that, you know, running a yard sign, picking up a lockbox, you know, basically running business errands and justifying that, you know, it's not a big deal. It's all. We live in a major metro market where we can run an ad for nine to ten dollars an hour. We get 100 responses for a courier. They don't, most of them won't take drug tests, so you got to sift through them. But, but you're doing the $10 an hour work all the time. But let's, let's get into like I'm trying to think in the loan world, like when you were trying to exit bigger parts of the business, like the dollar productive stuff, was it more. Tell, tell us about that. Agents think that even showing homes is like, who else would show the home? You know, it's, it's the most important thing and it's not the most important thing. But give us a little bit more on like how do you get out of even more sort of quote unquote, important things?

Yeah. No. So the corollary in the lending world is you'll talk to people have been in the industry forever and they're like, I will never give up my loan officer license and I will never stop doing loans. Cause if I can always do loans, I can always make a living. And it's like, yeah, but if you're always doing loans, you're not doing the next thing I remember, I was at a. It was pretty impactful. Darren Hardy, who was the former publisher of Success magazine, I think he's former. Haven't read it in a Couple of years. But he was talking to us and he said if you look at highly successful people and he's interviewed hundreds of them, he said they'll only do three things and they'll work it down. But he says if you look at the very top of it, they'll only do one thing. And so what are you the best in your team company, best in the world at? Dan Sullivan calls it unique ability. Darren Hardy, you know, there's the one thing is another book that's out there, you know, but that's what is the one thing that I do for my team better than anybody else. And for me, you know, giving up doing loans was really radical because everybody in the mortgage industry does loans up to the highest levels in the industry. You know, they just never stopped doing loans. And giving up loan. Giving up doing loans freed up a ton of my time. And I boiled it down to like, all I should be doing is talking to loan officers that either work with me already or should come work with me, which is recruiting and retaining loan officers, right? So coaching loan officers, helping them, helping their jobs be easier or bringing them onto the team to help the team grow. And if all I do is talk to loan officers, you know, that, that. And that eliminates the ability for me to do a loan. It eliminates the ability of me to talk to the copier man, to order office supplies, to go to a closing all those things. And I could spend my time just focused on the highest dollar producing activities. And then when I was able to delegate that to where my business partner became the better coach, she actually was better at me at coaching and recruiting. That's when I'm like, hey, it's time for me to go. You don't need anymore. Because that was the one thing I was able to do better than anybody else. And now we've worked together long enough. You get my vision, you get my values, my culture. You're buying into it, you're. You refine them to match yourself. And you're better at it than I am. So awesome.

So let's, let's end with this. So we mentioned E. Myth revisited. What are another couple really good resources, books that are like indispensable if you want to make the pivot from like hardcore number one. I want to be number one producer to more of this business owner journey and mindset. What's two more good books that you'd recommend?

Anything by Robert Kiyosaki, but it started out with Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That was one of the first books I read About Robert Kiyosaki and E. Methods are not how to do books or how to think books. And it took me a number of years to realize what Robert Kiyosaki was saying and thinking. And I'm sorry I said think grow rich. I meant rich dad, poor dad, think and grow rich is another one out there too. Napoleon Hill is one that you've got to read. But rich dad, poor dad is be really good at your job so you generate excess income, then use that excess income to buy assets, not experiences. So don't go to Greece and pay 90% of the cash and 10% on your credit card, which takes a year to pay off. Buy something that's going to put cash in your pocket, then use the cash that that asset generated to do your Greece trip and be able to pay cash for it. So an example for me, I realized after the fact is I've got a love of aviation. Well, I bought an office building, rented it back to myself because I had to rent office space anyways and then did a refinance on that three years later when the market changed and the values went way up, I bought a second office building and an airplane. So I could have just bought an airplane with payments up front, but instead I was able to get two office buildings further leverage the office buildings through a 1031 exchange into more rental properties. But what do you do with the money outside? Having a plan for it? And for me, when I got to a place where for me it turned out to be single family home investment real estate is what I really love, enjoy, got passionate about and that started generating cash for me so that my 7am to 7pm day job was no longer required because I had this other cash flow coming in. So it's not about building up a big store of cash. It's not about spending everything you have, including money you haven't earned yet called debt, but figuring out what assets you like. A shiny car out front might look like an asset, but it's going down in value and it's costing you money. It's a liability. So figuring out what assets you love, finding ways to get those assets outside of work and let those I've got houses that work for me now so that I don't have to work as hard. And I think that's a real important thing that I was able to accomplish which allowed me the freedom. So building a great leadership team and run the company without me having investments on the outside, being able to build assets over time, that was very fortunate. Obviously with buying real Estate was certainly great to do in 2017 and 18 compared to what, based on what happened the last couple of years. But I still think invest in real estate, you can tell up front if it makes sense. It's kind of where it's going.

Yeah.

Awesome.

And you kind of just hearing you talk through that, I mean just knowing your heart and the way you've sort of lived your life and raised your kids, I mean there's a really good book, Millionaire next Door as well. I don't know the author, but I remember reading it and you know, it's, it's, it's not the path you think, you know, it's the top producing agents, the top producing loan officers that are out there driving the twelve hundred dollars a month lease. You know, Mercedes or you know, where I'm okay, buying a four year old Mercedes, still super nice. Bought it with cash. So that's, that's awesome, Tom. This has been really, really awesome. I appreciate your time and your heart and so I usually let the person that's on, like how can they get in touch with Tom? Do not get in touch with Tom. He has nothing to sell you a loan for you. But I will say, you know this.

I'll interrupt you there, Lars, if you want to, if you want to find me on LinkedIn, that's where I'm, you know, I just, actually just deleted Twitter off my phone because the dopamine hits for Twitter, I realized that they were the negative influence on me. So Twitter's not there anymore. You know, Facebook, if you're not sending me pictures of flying airplanes, I don't want to see you on Facebook. But LinkedIn, it's Tom T O U S and I'm going to, I'm going to, as time goes on, I'm going to post more stuff about what to do outside of work in terms of, you know, assets, building those assets up, creating those other streams of income. It's kind of where, that's where it's going next is helping other people figure out how they can, you know, work your job. If you love it, make sure you love your job. But also you don't have to because you've got other things working for you. Awesome.

I love that. And if you're, you know, as, as this market is shifting, the only thing I'll, I'll sort of say, if you're listening and you've heard me say it before, I'm looking for agents that want to scale their real estate business to a million GCI and beyond in the shift storm that is coming. So this is the Great Recession years is when I got into real estate and it was hard and I figured it out and I made all the mistakes you could possibly make and that's when I launched Real Estate b school in 2013. So go to the getbusinessfoundations.com I'm looking for the next case study, so go to getbusinessfoundations.com Tom, I appreciate you and we'll talk to you soon brother.

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