Transforming Real Estate: How Education Impacts Client Trust and Success - Brian Vieaux

00:00:12 - Brian Vieaux

Hello.

00:00:12 - Mike Mills

Hello everybody. We are live. This is Thursday, August 10. Welcome everybody. This is Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance. My name is Mike Mills with Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance and Finance Sense. So today we're going to talk a little consumer education. Part of our job as mortgage professionals and in the real estate business because we do deal in an industry that's a little bit not complicated necessarily, but it certainly changes regularly and has things that adjust so the average consumer doesn't always know exactly what's going on of the entire process. So our job is to make sure they're educated and they know how the entire system works so that way they feel comfortable when they're ready to buy a home and bring in coming along to join me on this ride today is Mr. Brian Vieaux. Hello. Brian. How are you?

00:01:03 - Brian Vieaux

I'm doing well, Mike. Thanks for having me on.

00:01:05 - Mike Mills

So there's your fanfare. So Brian is the president and COO of FinLocker, which is a well, you know what, I'll let you explain what it is because I'm sure I'll run about a bunch of different ways and tear it up. So why don't you Brian, tell us what you guys do.

00:01:23 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, thanks again, Mike, for having me on. I'm a big fan of your podcast and love to learn from you and your guests. So it's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:32 - Mike Mills

Well, it's nice to have one.

00:01:35 - Brian Vieaux

I have my own podcast, as you know.

00:01:37 - Mike Mills

Yes, we're talking about that too, as well.

00:01:39 - Brian Vieaux

I always joke with my guests that they should be saying hello to my mom and my aunt right now because.

00:01:45 - Mike Mills

They'Re say hi to my wife, say hi to a couple of friends of mine that'll listen from time to time and that's it. We do a little bit better like you do. We talked about this before. We come on. When we do these live versions, I like it just because I just think it's more real and authentic. But it tends to do okay after later on down the road, which you get a little bit of personal satisfaction from it that somebody cares out there.

00:02:09 - Brian Vieaux

So you asked about FinLocker. We're a B to B to C. Technology software company.

00:02:17 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:02:18 - Brian Vieaux

And we today focus almost exclusively on real estate and real estate finance as a vertical. And our typical client is a lender, IMV, mortgage broker, bank or credit union focused on mortgage as an outcome or an objective. What we built is I'll describe it this way. We're like the Mashup of Mint.com meets credit. Karma meets Rocket. Money meets Zillow. If you want to think about those individual piece parts that consumers go to those tools for. So they go to Mint for budgeting and goal setting and they go to Rocket Money to understand their spending. They go to Credit Karma to check and monitor their credit and improve their credit. And of course, we know they go to Zillow for real estate search. We have engineered the experience to bring those features together in one app. And then our secret sauce is that on top of those features, those functions or features, those tools, if you will, we built an experience for the consumer who's typically in the early journey of home buying. Another way to say it is early, young, first time home buyers is a good example.

00:03:38 - Mike Mills

Right. Everything we do, can they find you on their own as a consumer, or is it usually through a bank or a mortgage bank?

00:03:48 - Brian Vieaux

Yes, 99.9 times it's through one of our clients. Our business model is B to B to C. So we're a private white label solution. So if we were working with Mike Mills, it would be your own branded version of the product that you would use as a tool to reach, engage, and assist consumers well up the funnel.

00:04:11 - Mike Mills

It's a way to help mortgage professionals bring people into their sphere, essentially, and then provide them with all the tools that otherwise they would have to go out to other websites, which, again, you never want your clients leaving your sphere because then they can find others. And not that, hey, competition is good, but if you can keep the eyeballs in one place, that's always a desired result. How did you get started? I know you've been in mortgage. Looking back at your history, you've been in it for a while. So not to make you sound old, we're all old here, but how did you get started in mortgage? What brought you in there? And then how did you ultimately land to where you started your own company and got this stuff rolling?

00:04:54 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, so 1991 is when I got into mortgage. It's also the year I graduated college and the year I got married. So I tell this story of how I got into mortgage, which is not too different than how just about everybody else got into mortgage.

00:05:10 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:05:10 - Brian Vieaux

And the constant is none of us planned.

00:05:13 - Mike Mills

Right? You just end up there.

00:05:16 - Brian Vieaux

Everybody has that story.

00:05:17 - Mike Mills

Nobody's like, man, I really want to sell home loans one day. That's no child's dream.

00:05:23 - Brian Vieaux

No. So it would have been like late summer of 1991, back from the honeymoon. I was working for a home builder, more or less just as a laborer out of college. Frankly, I was getting paid more than I would have gotten if I would have done an entry level job at the time.

00:05:40 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:05:40 - Brian Vieaux

And one Sunday at the family dinner at my in laws, my father in law kind of pulled me aside and said, okay, here's the deal. And he was self employed. He's a self employed entrepreneur. He's like, you're married and you married my daughter, and you need to get a job that has benefits. I'm like, what are benefits? I don't even know. What are you talking about? I don't understand.

00:06:05 - Mike Mills

What are we talking about? I just got married I don't know. What do you mean? What do you mean?

00:06:11 - Brian Vieaux

So he explained what that was code for, which is, get her off my insurance. Yes.

00:06:16 - Mike Mills

Take over the bills, boy. Yeah.

00:06:18 - Brian Vieaux

This is also pre LinkedIn. So I did what you did back then is I created a resume, printed dozens of copies, and then did the drive around, like, a ten mile radius from where we lived.

00:06:30 - Mike Mills

Was the careerbuildersandmonster.com around at that time?

00:06:33 - Brian Vieaux

No, I don't even know if there was a.com at that time.

00:06:35 - Mike Mills

Yeah, I guess that's true.

00:06:37 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah.

00:06:37 - Mike Mills

91. I'm a little younger than you. I graduated 97. So I think I was still in junior high then.

00:06:45 - Brian Vieaux

After driving around and papering HR departments with my resume, and by the way, not caring what business it was, I just looked at the building and the sign in the building, I'm like, oh, that's a business.

00:06:55 - Mike Mills

I'll go need A-J-O-B man, whatever that looks like. Yes.

00:06:58 - Brian Vieaux

So one of the companies that called me back or responded or whatever, was a company called Fireman's Fund here in Michigan, and they're a mortgage company now, you wouldn't know that driving by the building. It was just a big red fireman's hat on the building. But this is 91. The prevailing power rate was probably in the ten ish handle somewhere around there. And within a day of dropping my resume off, I got a call to come in the next day for an interview. And within 2 hours of the interview, I got a call back. If I could start the next day, and I'm like, yeah, absolutely. But one question. What are the benefits?

00:07:38 - Mike Mills

Yeah, father Luck told me to ask, what are the benefits? Do I get insurance?

00:07:44 - Brian Vieaux

That's it. Exactly. So day one on the job, I was handed a stack of little papers, right. With a name, a phone number, and a number with a percentage after it. I didn't understand what that meant. Yeah. My job was to pick up each of those papers, call the person and say, I see you're at 12.5%. If you could get 10% today, would you be interested? And if they said yes, I put it to the right. If they said no, I threw it away.

00:08:17 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:08:18 - Brian Vieaux

So I was like, lead gen for a group of loan officers that were doing kind of a portfolio refinance retention strategy.

00:08:27 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:08:28 - Brian Vieaux

And that was day one.

00:08:30 - Mike Mills

They had you in the trenches right.

00:08:31 - Brian Vieaux

Out of the gate, and that was it. Pre licensing. And I wasn't doing I was not originating at first, but within 60 days of being there, we had kind of the first precipitous drop in rates. The ten and a half prior became like eight and a quarter, eight and a half. So enough of a drop where business booming, shit starting to happen, right?

00:08:54 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:08:55 - Brian Vieaux

So I was 60 days on the job, one of the more tenured folks at that point. And so I got promoted from the call guy to the loan guy. And then three months later the loan guy became the team lead guy and it just grew from there. And so I originated, managed originators for my first five or six years in the business.

00:09:21 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:09:21 - Brian Vieaux

And then same company moved into the third party Origination side, which is where I spent the bulk of my 30 years in mortgage is managing AES across correspondent and wholesale lending channels.

00:09:38 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:09:39 - Brian Vieaux

Most recently I was at Flagstar Bank where I ran the TPO division, which is where I learned and got to know a lot about what was going on at FinLocker at the time. So I invested in FinLocker, kind of liked the vision that they were pursuing. And then I've been here now for four years as president and chief operating officer and one of the investors. And I get to leverage my 30 years of not just experience but relationships in this business. So it's been a pretty seamless transition, but it happens at a very interesting time. COVID wasn't our friend and post COVID hasn't been our friend either.

00:10:21 - Mike Mills

Yes. Well the weird thing, and everybody knows that's experienced this market, is it went from one that was, I guess you could say prior to Coronavirus it was fine, right? It was busy, it wasn't crazy, but it wasn't slow. It was an average. Everybody was kind of humming along and then Coronavirus hits. And then for the first probably four or five months, we all wondered if we were going to ever sell another house or do another loan again, right? And then it just exploded. Right. And then it's the busiest any of us have ever been. And I'm sure you recognize this too at the time, and I've only been in the business now about 1213 years, but you see that kind of situation occur and I knew at that point I was like, hey, this is awesome, this is great. This is like winning the lottery. But this is not going to be forever, okay? This is not sustainable. This will not continue. So even with my wife, I was like, we got to save our pennies because there's going to be a turn in the other direction. And I'd been in the business long enough to see not quite the highs and lows that we're experiencing now, but still the market peaks and then the market falls and then the market peaks and then the market falls. And that's the cyclical nature of what real estate is, depending on other market conditions. But you've been through a lot of those turns, especially. I wasn't even really in the business prior to 2008 and then the build up to that and then the fall off. But can you speak to the similarities between what happened then and what happened now? And I know it drives me crazy because I'm sure you experience this coming into this. If you go on the Internet, go on YouTube, everybody's like, the housing market is going to crash, it's going to crash, going to crash. And I call that recency bias only because the most recent downturn that we experienced was because of housing specifically, and that's why it occurred. But this has nothing to do with that. And it's related, of course, and it's adjacent, but it certainly was not the cause. So what have you seen? Just experiencing both of those?

00:12:20 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, one thing that's interesting, and through the crisis, I was impacted from an employment perspective because I was employed by one of the banks that wasn't too big to fail, so they let us fail.

00:12:36 - Mike Mills

Then you failed. Yes.

00:12:38 - Brian Vieaux

So I have a different perspective because I live through not only the horror of the crisis itself, but then the repercussions, the real impact of employment being ceased. To me, there's a couple of differences. One is the 2007 through nine or ten or however long it lasted, you saw it coming in late six, early seven. It was starting to happen because it started with products starting to go away. Right. The risky products started to get cut and go away and then everything seized up. So it was happening over 16 1824 months.

00:13:23 - Mike Mills

So being in the business, you actually could see it. Maybe people from the outside didn't see it, but if you were in the business doing it, you could get that the vibe was changing, is what you're saying.

00:13:31 - Brian Vieaux

Totally. Especially if you were in the space that was mostly impacted early, which was I was. Which is the alte product space.

00:13:39 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:13:40 - Brian Vieaux

This cycle hasn't had that kind of long build up. Right. It actually had the opposite.

00:13:47 - Mike Mills

It just happened overnight.

00:13:49 - Brian Vieaux

And one could argue, you and I talked a little bit about this before we went live, but our industry, the mortgage industry specifically, was ripe for consolidation and COVID and the pandemic and all of the programs that came about really bailed out the industry again. And so what's happening today from an industry perspective, with consolidation and loan officers leaving the business and realtors leaving the business is something that was due to happen and frankly, those of us that survive it. And by the way, guys like you and I, we talked about this as well before we went live, we tend to be more optimistic and more positive and think about opportunities versus gloom and doom. And woe is me. If you wake up and it's all about your Eeyore walking around complaining about everything, guess what's going to happen? You're going to get what you're asking, right?

00:14:55 - Mike Mills

Is what you make it.

00:14:57 - Brian Vieaux

Actually, I believe that our industry needed to kind of have a culling, and it's happening. I do believe that people are always going to buy and sell houses. It happens no matter what. It's just a matter of at what level, at what scale, and there'll be another quote unquote, boom or boom lit that happens. And companies that are using today to prepare for tomorrow are going to be the winners. It's happening. I'm talking to people that are literally investing maybe not a lot of dollars, but a lot of energy into how to be prepared for this business and the next generation home buyer and home financer.

00:15:40 - Mike Mills

Yeah, that's the thing that when you look across the industry as a whole, there's a couple of different type of people that exist, right? You have the doom and glooms people that are sad. I understand the sentiment, but at the end of the day, if that's going to be your mentality all the way through, you're not going to last very long. And maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, maybe you weren't meant for it. That's what it is. Then you have people that are in a little bit of scramble panic mode. That because we were in the land of plenty, right? There was plenty of business to be had, to the point almost. And we experienced this in our company, where all of your day to day managing of your marketing and your pipeline and developing processes and solidifying your business better all kind of went away for a little while because you were just in triage mode. The phone's ringing. It sounds today like it'd be a great problem to have, but the phone's ringing, people are calling. You're trying to work up loan quotes, you're trying to put everything together that you can. You're talking to clients, working through files, you're even building teams more and more because now I need an assistant to help with this because so much volume is coming in. And it was great place to be, but we got away from the core tenants of managing your business, managing your marketing pipeline, making sure that you stay in connected with your agents, because all of that stuff was just like I said, you're in Triage. You're just trying to come and go and what the slowdown has happened, or what has happened with the slowdown, I should say, is that you've done one of two things. You've either gone into sad mode and trying to figure out another job or another company, because obviously if I'm not doing enough business, it's not my fault, it's my company's fault. So I'm going to go somewhere else, right? Or you said, okay, I'm in a place where I'm going to continue to try to feed the family and do the activities to try to get the business in. But now I have a little more space for planning, right? I have a little more space to what is the market going to look like when it does turn around? And how do I position myself in a place to where I'm going to be the person that people pick up the phone and call when they're looking to buy or sell or refinance or whatever the case may be? The people that are working right now to put those things into place and coming up with the processes and systems that are going to allow for you to handle that volume, I think, are the ones that are ultimately going to position themselves in the market in a place where they're going to be able to take advantage of it when it hits. And the person that's just sad all the time right now but somehow manages to make it through, they're going to be right back in that triage mode again and not be able to handle it.

00:18:10 - Brian Vieaux

Agree. The other thing I would add to that, that I'm seeing, which is super cool and I think it was the reason we were going to get together and talk today was I'm seeing because people aren't inundated with fat pipelines and tons of applicants and all the stuff that goes with this, you have the best. Loan officers now are able to play an additional role and resource in their communities. Yes, and that's delivering financial education and financial literacy still with a focus on homeownership and building family well through homeownership. But that's really been kind of where I'm getting excited these days is watching a lot of loan officers really embrace this local source of financial education for their communities.

00:19:04 - Mike Mills

So where are you seeing from your company's point of view, the loan officers and the banks that are really having success with this? And success is measured in a lot of different ways, so it's very difficult to say exactly what that means. But what are you seeing, the ones that you feel like are having success, where are they focusing their efforts? What is it that they're doing when it comes to the education of the consumer, when it comes to putting out information so people can take it in and see them as a resource? Where are you seeing the success occur in that kind of space?

00:19:35 - Brian Vieaux

So probably the most obvious place to see it is just what you and I are doing right now. We're having a conversation, we happen to be recording it and it's live to millions of people internationally as we speak.

00:19:51 - Mike Mills

Millions upon millions. I call it tens upon tens, that's what.

00:19:56 - Brian Vieaux

But it'll live on on your podcast channels and it'll live on in this LinkedIn post. The power of social media will make this available for other people to watch and hopefully learn from. What I'm seeing is loan officers kind of just picking up their camera or their phone as it may be, turning it around and talking into it. A loan officer that has 510, 1520 or 30 years of experience can now take that experience, take real life examples of people that they've talked to and helped and coached through situations and start to educate at scale using tools that they walk around with all day long like their phone and their social media handle. So I'm seeing social media as kind of the number one place that loan officers and this is really interesting because this is also a place in time where I'm seeing there's as much or more value in the personal brand of the loan officer as there is in the shingle that they've hung their license at.

00:21:10 - Mike Mills

Right? Yeah.

00:21:12 - Brian Vieaux

I'm not discounting the no.

00:21:14 - Mike Mills

Well, people buy from people they don't buy from, at least because real estate is a personal transaction, it's not a B, two B transaction. So it's very personal. So the person that you're going to use to represent you as the realtor, the person that you're going to use to do your loan better be somebody that you feel comfortable with and that you have a relationship with on some level. Right. Or else you're not going to work with them. Because it's not like people buy Nike because Nike has a billion dollar ad campaign and it looks cool and it's a shoe that you wear, but it doesn't impact anybody other than you. So you're not necessarily buying from the sneaker guy down the street, you're just buying Nike because you want Nike. But your house is where you house your family. It's a big financial decision. It's a decision shrouded in. Like I said in the beginning, it's not mysterious. It's really quite simple when you boil it down. But same topic. We're here. The education of the consumer, of understanding what it is and how it works. There's such a big gap and it's always surprising to us as people in the industry. But I also tell when I bring on new loans, I was like, look, we do this every day, right? This is our job. We see it every single day. We know what we're doing. We've been through the ups and downs of it. If you're coming in to buy a house, you're going to do this three or four times in your life at the most, right. Your standard home buyer that's not an investor or whatever. So it's always a new experience for them every single time. So what are you seeing as far as like, the education gaps? And I'm sure you guys keep data on this to some extent. When you look at what people are searching for on your platform budgeting and everything, where are you seeing the biggest disconnect between reality and what the consumer thinks when it comes to buying a house?

00:22:52 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, so there's some obvious ones and we see this a lot, right. Which is shocking to me. There's still a misnomer that you have to have 20% down to buy a home.

00:23:03 - Mike Mills

That's always crazy to me. I still hear that all the time and I'm like, still? Really? Still?

00:23:10 - Brian Vieaux

The first home I bought was 1993 and even then I knew, well, of course I was in the business two years by then, but I think I did my first loan was 10% down with private mortgage insurance.

00:23:22 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:23:24 - Brian Vieaux

So anyway, it's things like that. It's the tried and true 28 36 ratios is another one that there's just some old for whatever reason, there's these old kind of truisms that are out there. And I think part of the issue is if you think about personal finance as a curriculum, it's not taught in high schools. It's not even taught really as a college course for people not required.

00:23:54 - Mike Mills

No. You can take those classes and learn it, but it's not a core curriculum class. No.

00:24:00 - Brian Vieaux

And then if you think about where most consumers where most consumers get their financial advice from parents is family. Parents. Now the Internet and the Internet. And or if you're lucky enough, if you have enough assets to make this worthwhile for somebody from a financial plan.

00:24:19 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:24:20 - Brian Vieaux

So the average first time home buyer, let's just say someone between 24 and 30 years old, we'll just block them out. That way. Most of them don't have enough assets yet to get on the radar of a financial planner, so they're not going to have the luxury of an advisor. And so my belief is that for aspiring first time home buyers, one of the best resources for financial education is a loan officer. Because if you're 22, 23, 24 years old, there's probably some thought in your head that someday somewhere I'm going to buy and own a home. But if you're screwing things up when you're 22, 23 years old, you're going to make it that much more difficult. I think loan officers today, again, what I'm seeing is they're finding ways to leverage themselves through social. Our product tends to help a little bit because this younger generation, they want a tool. They want something that's on their phone, 24 7365, that they can access. So digital financial tools are important, but the loan officer can play that really interesting role early in a consumer's financial life, but they have to change their mindset. The typical loan officer, and I hate saying typical or generically, whatever, but a lot of loan officers are very transactional in nature because we eat what we kill, right?

00:25:47 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:25:48 - Brian Vieaux

And what I'm seeing is loan officers and lenders start to support loan officers to help them think longer term and not be intimidated by potentially having somebody in your nurturing pipeline for 18 months before they're ready. I argue that they're going to get ready somewhere.

00:26:09 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:26:10 - Brian Vieaux

Just because they're not talking to you doesn't mean they're not going to be talking to somebody else. So they might as well be talking to you. And by the way, if you've just spent 18 months with them, whether it's mostly digital or however that's happened, you built trust, you built a relationship, doesn't mean you're going to get the deal when they're ready, but you at least earned the right to be in the conversation when they're ready.

00:26:31 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, and also, too, this is the thing that I think realtors and loan officers lose sight of to some extent is that one person is not one transaction, right? One person could be 100 transactions because they have a brother, they have a sister, they have a child, they have a parent, they have a best friend, they have their baseball coach. They have all of their sphere of people. And so I am a big preacher of treat every person like a human. Just don't treat them like a transaction. Treat them like a person that you would talk to on the street or a friend or a family member or whatever, and be always in the position of trying to help with whatever it is that they need. It could be just, I tell agents that we work with that. It's so important for them to be the resource for all things related to real estate, okay? If somebody calls and says they have a question about their roof, right, if you pick up the phone and call your realtor and say, hey, we just had a hailstorm, do I need to get my roof replaced? Well, if your immediate response as the agent is to say, I'm not a roofer. I don't know anything about roofing, call this guy, right? Well, then the next time that person calls you and says, hey, I was thinking about refinancing my house. I heard rates got a little bit lower. Is this a good time to do that? And the realtor is like, I'm not a mortgage person here's. Call this person, do whatever. Well, if you do that enough times, what eventually happens is that person that was calling you for their questions, they stop calling because you're just kicking them off to somebody else, right? And I always say the flip of that is someone calls you and says, hey, I have a question about is this a good time to refinance? Right? And then what I tell my agents is like, take that call and say, hey, look, I'm right in the middle of something. Give me, like ten minutes and I'll call you back. Let me wrap this up. And then they pick up the phone and call me and go, hey, my client is asking about this, this, or this. What should I tell them? And then I'm going to give them some information, right? I can't explain all of it in five minutes, nor can they. But then they can turn around and pick up the phone, call that client back, and go, sorry about that. I was tied up. But here's from my understanding, this is the time if the rates have changed this much, you look at how much it costs you versus what the savings are, et cetera, and that's it. And then if the questioning continues, then you can say, now we're getting a little bit out of my depth. Let me let you talk to this person over here. But what you've done in that circumstance is you've solidified to your client that you're the person to call with all things related to their home, right? Which is what you want to be, then you've also, because you have valuable partners that you can pick up the phone and call without expecting them to get a transaction and you can ask questions. Well, now you've added to your knowledge base. So now you understand mortgages a little better, you understand roofing a little better, you understand insurance a little better. So now you truly are building this world where you're the expert on all things related to real estate within your sphere. Right. And as loan officers, we have to be the same thing. And so if your agent calls you and asks you a question on deal that they're working on, that they're the listing agent on, for the buyers, realtors saying this and the lender saying that, answer your phone, talk to them, explain to them what's going on. Because our job is to educate them on the process of doing the loan just as much as it is to educate the buyer. And when you operate with a transactional mindset where everything's about, well, what am I getting out of this? Then you're doomed for failure. And you have to look at each conversation and each person as an opportunity, solidify a relationship a little bit more, help them out, because that's what good human beings do. And then hopefully, the way everything works out, it tends to come back. Would you agree with that?

00:30:05 - Brian Vieaux

I agree not to talk about karma, but if you do enough good, yes. You will get your share of good back. It's the law of the universe, right?

00:30:20 - Mike Mills

Yeah. Call it the law of the universe, call it karma, call it God, call it whatever you want to call it. That's how it works. And if you've experienced that in your life, you know that, hey, if I just keep trying to do the best I can do, then it's going to work out.

00:30:35 - Brian Vieaux

So that's kind of what I'm seeing. I like to think about what I'm watching loan officers today, and I'm studying like 200 loan officers on social. Some have been there and doing it for a while. They have thousands of followers. Some are just getting started. They have tens of tens, as you said. But what's cool is if you ignore the number of followers, the good ones, you can't tell the difference whether they have thousands or tens of tens. And they're not on social saying, apply now, here's my rate. They're truly giving value to the community.

00:31:15 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:31:15 - Brian Vieaux

And I'll call it the digital community, but it's the community, their community, and they're not expecting a deal to come from that.

00:31:22 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:31:23 - Brian Vieaux

But they will get it. They will win. It just may not happen today.

00:31:28 - Mike Mills

Yeah. It's a long term strategy. Yeah, well, and that's the thing too. We were on a call with my company the other day, and we have shareholder calls where we talk about the business and everybody's what are you doing here? What are you doing here? And I do a fair amount of social media stuff, and so we'll get questions like, well, how's that working for you? And I will tell them, look, I can't translate this into like, oh, I got this deal from that, or I got this deal from that, because that's not really the point. The point is that what I do when I do that is I try to become the point of reference that someone goes to when they want to know something related to money or the economy or finance or whatever, because that's what I do. So that's what I'm trying to create. Because the idea is that you're not trying to again, it's transactional versus relational, right? If I'm looking for transactions, then I'm giving out my phone number. I'm telling them to call me today because I've got the lowest rates and why you need to buy a house tomorrow and all that kind of stuff. But if I'm trying to be more relational, then I'm providing information. I'm providing education. I'm providing whatever you want to call it. So that person exists in my world in some form or fashion, right? I exist in their world, and they exist in mine. And those worlds intersect. Well, not only do I intersect with them, but I also intersect with everybody else that they're associated to. And as you start to build an and I don't like that word because I don't know. Do you know Gary Vee is yeah. Okay. So I love him in that he's got a lot of great ideas and concepts about how things work. He's on the extreme side of things, which I don't always jive with 100%. But one of the things that he talks about is building an audience. He's like, when you build an audience, there's so many things that can happen from that, right? Whether it be your business or there's so many opportunities that create themselves when you become aware or in the awareness of people. And so if you start with, hey, here's what I know about mortgages. Here's what I know about how your down payment works. Here's what I know about what interest rates are and how they impact your payment and how much money you need and all the education of what it takes to go through the process of doing a loan. And then that morphs into, hey, here's what's happening in the real estate market. Here's what's happening in the economy as a whole. And all those things those give you eyeballs, and then those eyeballs turn into transactions in ways that you can't even imagine. But it doesn't happen in a day. It takes time. It's not something that happens overnight. So what are you seeing as far as people's frustration? And they're trying to create the education. They're trying to put it out there, but maybe if their patience isn't there or they don't understand what it is, what are you all doing to combat that.

00:33:59 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah. What I'm doing is having these conversations with you on these channels and just trying to do my part to educate, because I'm a good example of this FinLocker. We're a pretty small company. We're still kind of scrapping our way through things. So I don't have a massive marketing budget and a massive marketing team. So about six or eight months ago, and I've always been on LinkedIn, but wasn't as active as I have been in the last half a year. But I was challenged by a friend, and he said, Just commit to one video a week on LinkedIn. Kind of stay on topic, but one a week. And I did that. It was like, leading into before the holidays, early last December. And I'm like, I did it for, like, three weeks. I'm like, that's not that bad. Now, the first two times I did it took me 2 hours for each video. It had to be perfect. Stupid.

00:34:57 - Mike Mills

And they probably will still. If you go back and look at them, they're like, they're terrible.

00:35:00 - Brian Vieaux

What was I doing? And then over the holiday between Christmas and New Year's, it was quiet, and I'm like, what if I started to do two or three a week? And so I spent that week and created, like, ten unique short 32nd videos, and I accidentally discovered that you could schedule your stuff on LinkedIn. I'm like, Whoa, that's pretty cool.

00:35:27 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:35:28 - Brian Vieaux

And so that week, I scheduled, like, the next two weeks out, right? Six posts every other day, or whatever it was. And then slowly again, it didn't happen overnight. Slowly, the views were growing and the engagement was growing, and then confidence was growing. I felt more comfortable. And so then I was like, well, what if I did one a day? That's kind of getting out there. Well, fast forward to today. I have four posts every day on LinkedIn. Not all of them are brand new, right? At least four a week that are new video content. But I have my podcast, and you and I were talking about this before we went live. My podcast creates every episode I record creates ten pieces of ten clips that I can use.

00:36:20 - Mike Mills

Micro content.

00:36:21 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, I'm getting smarter as I go, but one of the byproducts of this is being super comfortable, having these conversations today. It's like, no anxiety going live with you. Six months ago, I'd have been freaking out. I wouldn't have the ed, grimley hair going, hey, well, at least you got some. I got the other side of know. I think it's made me a better public speaker and private speaker, just having these conversations a lot of times, having it with myself and my phone. But what's happening is, in my business, I'm doing the conference scene and doing the booth thing at conferences and exhibit halls and whatnot, and people are now coming up like, hey, I saw you. Exactly. Hey, man, I know you. And I'm like, oh, I don't even know you. But there's that. And I think loan officers have the same opportunity in their communities. I say communities generically because it's not the old school. This is my neighborhood where I'm going to do loans. Right. When you start to commit to educating at scale and using tools like social, your community is going to get a little bit wider. And guess what? You're also going to interact with people that maybe you can't transact with from a regulatory perspective. And now all of a sudden, you have the opportunity to make an introduction potentially to somebody else and build your network that way. There's just so much power.

00:37:49 - Mike Mills

Go ahead.

00:37:50 - Brian Vieaux

I was going to add one thing because you had a guest on a few weeks back, maybe a month back, Allie, allie Cardi. And if people aren't following Ali, they need to, because her generation is the next generation homebuyer and she's got her finger on the pulse of that generation. And A, because that's who she is. She's 24, 25 years old, she's right in it. But she's also committed in that to better understand and help bridge the gap between her generation and folks like us in our cohorts. And she's just doing a great job of I've learned so much from her in the last few months on how that generation expects to learn.

00:38:34 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:38:35 - Brian Vieaux

And they want to learn on their own first.

00:38:37 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:38:38 - Brian Vieaux

And guess what? If you're creating content, educational content, on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, you're talking to people. But they're going to consume it when they want to consume it in their own environment, at their own digital. They want tools at their fingertips when they want to use them, but they also want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to Mike Mills when they have a question that they're just not finding the answer to. So they want both. They want the tech and they want the touch.

00:39:09 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:39:09 - Brian Vieaux

And that's why I think loan officers are so uniquely positioned for this next generation homebuyer to really be a valuable resource.

00:39:19 - Mike Mills

Well, the problem I think that loan officers have in realtors too, is when they look at social media and the education aspect of providing videos and whatever, there's a couple of things that come up. Number one is they're like, well, so and so is already doing it and how am I ever going to impact on that side because they do it better than me and I'm terrible, blah, blah.

00:39:35 - Brian Vieaux

Right.

00:39:35 - Mike Mills

Then the other part is there's this and I think it's perpetuated a little bit by the media and by what we see on TV every day. There's this idea that you're going to be Jake Paul or you're going to be the goal is to be this massive influencer that shells products and all this kind of stuff. And what people lose the sight of is there's 320,000,000 people in the united States, okay? And they're all very different. And there's all these little pockets of unique ideals and know whatever. And so if you can't find your niche in that, then you're not trying because there are so many people in this world that think the way that you think, that look the way that you do that, believe what you believe. And if you can start finding that audience and educating to those people, you don't need 5 million followers or 2 million followers. I use this guy as an example all the time on YouTube. His channel is called Real Clear Value Tax. Right? He's a CPA. He's out of California. He lives in San Francisco, I think. And he's as dry and boring as you could possibly like when my kids come in and watch me watching because I'll watch it on my TV instead, know my phone, they're like, what are you watching? TV? I'm watching YouTube on my TV, okay? I paid for this big ass TV. Watch it up there. I'm not watching on my phone. But they see just this guy in a know, Oxford shirt with a blue tie holding pieces of paper. And kind of he's not reading, but he's just kind of, here's what happened here. And he'll every once in a while be like, look, I told you this was going to happen, and I'm sorry if you didn't know. Tell me what you think, but tried to warn you, okay, onto the next thing. But his information and his content is so good. And what I pick up after seeing the first four, I was like, I watch every single video he puts out. And he puts out probably three or four, maybe two a week, okay, depending on the market news and everything that's happening. And it's from housing, it's from stock picks, crypto, I mean, everything you can imagine related to finance, right? Well, he has a Patreon page. And if you don't know what Patreon is, it's a website that you can publish content on that people can pay in order to see that content. Right? Now, his gimmick and this is why I'm not suggesting people do this, but he's taxed or excuse me, stock picks. So here's my stock pick for this. Here's my crypto. And it's not even like the guy here's the hot pick. He's like, no, we're doing an options call. And this one gets real into the weeds about what it is. But he charges $7 or $15 a month to access the content, depending on what level you want, right? For his $15 a month service, he's got 2500 people. Because you can see on Patreon what that is, how much that costs. Okay? Well, if you do the math, 25, which my calculator is 25 times, or, excuse me, 15 times 2500, that's $37,000 a week. Or excuse me, a month that that dude's bringing in just from his Patreon page, not from his YouTube channel, not from all the other stuff. That is that's just from his patreon page. So my point of that is that you don't need 20 million people to grow your business. You can do it with 1500, 150, whatever, but you have to be in front of people as often as you can. And it's a long term game. It's not a short term thing. And it has to give value, which is where the education piece comes into play, right.

00:43:06 - Brian Vieaux

And I think it has to be authentic. Yes, we hear that a lot and people are like, okay, I get it has to be authentic. But I'm still amazed that I see a lot of posts because, again, I study a lot of loan officers on social and I still see I could tell when one of the big wholesale lenders drops their content on a Monday.

00:43:26 - Mike Mills

Morning because all the memes come out.

00:43:28 - Brian Vieaux

And it's, yeah, this is the authentic.

00:43:31 - Mike Mills

The infograph, it's all the same post. Yeah.

00:43:34 - Brian Vieaux

And those aren't working. They're not hurting you, but they're not helping you. The thing that's going to help you is this is my belief is get your face and your voice on camera in front of people and share your knowledge. That's what's going to be, it's going to be authentic. And don't try to be somebody you're not. None of us can be Gary Vee. He's got that kind of corner. Let him be Gary Vee. We all can exist and be ourselves and add a lot of it's.

00:44:05 - Mike Mills

The the key is whatever you're has, like you said, it has to be authentic and it has to provide some level of value to somebody watching it, right. They have to get something from it. And you standing there saying, see, that's how I know. The market lately is last couple, by the way, any realtors and mortgage people out there? If you don't know, August is never a great month, okay? Because people are going back to school, all right? People are coming back from vacation. August is the month where everybody's getting ready to get into the fall and the school year and everything else, right? So if your phone isn't ringing as much as it has been, even though it's been less the last couple of weeks, that's why. So don't panic. It's going to be okay. It always turns around. But whatever you're providing to people and the information that you're putting out, it has to have something that has value to them. And if it's just, hey, I'm going to serve you the best and communicate amazingly and you need to use me, that's just a commercial for your business.

00:45:04 - Brian Vieaux

That's all that is.

00:45:08 - Mike Mills

Our entire civilization has tried to figure out how to get around to commercials since they started, right? We went from late night television or the three channels and everything was a commercial about how cigarettes were healthy for you and how you should eat this cereal with 800 pounds of sugar in it to all right, well, now we're doing streaming, so there's no commercials, and now you're paying for it. I'm okay to pay for it. I just don't want commercials. And then now the streaming goes up, and they're like, oh, and hey, by the way, there's commercials in here. And then we go to online, and we're like, all right, now we're going to go to YouTube because now I don't have to watch. Nobody wants to see your commercial, okay? They don't what they want to see is they want to see you. They want to see what you think. They want to see what you know. They want to know what you can provide to them to help them make an educated decision on what they're trying to do and if they should buy a house, if they shouldn't, and if they feel like you're selling them or they feel like you're not being genuine with them, they're going to keep swiping. And that's the way it works.

00:46:03 - Brian Vieaux

And I think Allie, on your show together, she hammered that home specifically for Gen Z. They do not want to be sold. No, they won't be sold. They will not be sold. They'll sniff it out, and they're going to keep going until they find what they're looking for.

00:46:21 - Mike Mills

So I'm curious, what do you think being in it for so long? Why do you think what is it about our system that has not provided the education on a financial level that kids and adults it's probably one of the lowest, if you want to call it financial IQ, I would say people's financial IQ is probably on the lower end of all other things that people know about. You know what I mean? It's mind boggling to me why there's such a disconnect. What do you think?

00:46:55 - Brian Vieaux

It's a great question. It's one that I haven't really thought about in terms of how did we get here and why are we here, because it actually doesn't make any sense when you think about how much information is available to each of us as consumers on our own finances at our fingertips. Right. There's dozens, if not hundreds of apps that you can go get your credit score from. Right. We already talked about the ability to see your finances on your banking app and on platforms like Mint and others. So it's not for lack of tools. I've never seen in any kind of formal education, any preparation around what does it look like when you're 30 years old and you're buying your first home? There's never been any conversations around that. I mean, I'll be honest, those conversations weren't happening in the house I grew up in.

00:47:51 - Mike Mills

Yeah, me either. Wasn't going on. I figured it out on my own and still figured it out.

00:47:56 - Brian Vieaux

Sadly, as I think back, my kids are 29, 27 and 25, and two of the three are now homeowners, but we weren't really having those conversations, mainly because I didn't want to talk about that stuff after 06:00, because that's what I did all day long.

00:48:11 - Mike Mills

Well, I mean, I think there's a certain amount of I've tried this with my kids, because if you were to ask my kids, they probably would tell me that I talk too damn much. Like, can you please shut up and stop telling us things? I would really appreciate it if you would stop. But they don't want to hear it. Really, they really don't, because if you're a 16, 1718 year old kid, you don't care. School is school, and it sucks, and you don't want to be there. You don't care about the War of 1812. You don't care about calculus. All you want to do is hang out with your friends, or maybe you're obsessed with a sport or whatever. That's what children do, and that's why I have a whole problem with the whole school system as it is just in how we teach kids. It's like teaching them to be employees, but that's a whole other thing. But it's not exciting, right? Money is not exciting until you get to an adult age and you realize, okay, wait a minute. I got to pay rent. I got to pay my utilities. I got to buy food. I got to pay gas. Because mom and dad may have been because it's ironic. The kids that have the least in many cases when they're growing up tend to be the best with their money when they get older, because they come from a place of famine, and they know, I'm not going to do I got to buckle down. That's why I think the Gen Z talking with Ali and all that, I believe that they're better equipped in a lot of cases to kind of get to a place where they understand this better because they went through with their parents or in their household. That seven, 8910 where mom lost their job, dad lost his job. The retirement account is nothing. Dad's working in his 70s now because all of that occurred while they were in that impressionable age. And so now they're getting out into the workforce, and they're going, I don't need the fancy car. I don't need the credit card. I don't need the nice clothes. I can make it all work and do what I want because I want to have freedom. And I think you see that more and more with that generation.

00:50:04 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, I love that because it's such a vivid vision for me, because I think about, like, my grandparents were kind of the they were growing up during the recession, right? Not the Great Recession. The recession.

00:50:18 - Mike Mills

Yeah. The depression.

00:50:20 - Brian Vieaux

Depression, rather. Didn't matter how much money they made. They didn't spend anything.

00:50:28 - Mike Mills

Right? Yeah. They kept every piece of paper, every piece of tin.

00:50:32 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, exactly. We always joked, my grandpa, we always called him MacGyver because if something needed to be fixed here comes a recycled piece of spearmint chewing gum wrapper that he was going to repurpose into something.

00:50:47 - Mike Mills

That's right.

00:50:49 - Brian Vieaux

But that was the mindset. And then his kids were like, I don't want to live like that. And so they went the other way.

00:50:57 - Mike Mills

The other direction.

00:50:58 - Brian Vieaux

It's amazing how that works.

00:50:59 - Mike Mills

Well, you had the world of plenty in the 80s, right. The financial strings were off, banks were unregulated. I mean, we went crazy. And that led to kind of where we are now.

00:51:10 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah. So I never answered the question because I just don't know how we got to where we are. But I am a firm believer. We are where we are, and we know what the next generation home buyer who they are, and we're learning every day what's important to them and how they like to be communicated to. And if you're in this business and you plan on being in this business for the next 510 years, you need to be paying attention today to that cohort and start thinking about how you can better communicate with them. Because if you don't crack that code, you're done. It's over. I don't care. What is the average age of a real estate agent? It's like north of 50. So that train is ending here. Soon you're not going to be getting referrals from them when they're 80.

00:51:58 - Mike Mills

No. What are you seeing, since you guys fintech is your world, so what are you starting to see that is newer technologies that are coming online that companies are starting to adopt or maybe adopting in the near future. When it comes to real estate in general, mortgage, what kind of new things are you starting to see that you think is going to impact how we do things going forward?

00:52:20 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, I think we're not that far away from this concept where each of us is walking around with our financial thumbprint, DNA, QR code, whatever you want to call it. So we're probably inside of five years where today we have point of sale, which has come a long way from the paper. 1003, right?

00:52:46 - Mike Mills

Yes. To fill out.

00:52:49 - Brian Vieaux

I broke loans on 1003. So the POS was like revolutionized mortgage origination. Well, it's going to happen again. And the next revolution is going to be I'm already walking around with my credit, my assets, my employment and income. All right.

00:53:09 - Mike Mills

Yep.

00:53:10 - Brian Vieaux

Always live, always connected. And Mike, when I'm ready to get my loan from you, it's not going to be an application anymore. It's going to be a facilitation.

00:53:21 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:53:21 - Brian Vieaux

Because I'm already going to know, based on my own direct source data, what I qualify for, what I'm approved for. Now I just have to share the data with you and do the docs. That's what's right around the corner. And if we really want to think about the role of the loan officer, this is why I keep talking about education. That's the role. The role isn't going to be facilitating the paperwork. No, it's going to be educating on the right product for that particular situation and circumstance.

00:53:53 - Mike Mills

Well. And that's where I'm glad you said that, because that's kind of where my head is and has been. For really and truly is the reason why I really steered my business, my personal marketing strategies into the social media. And doing the podcast and everything is because do I think that people are going to stop buying and sell selling homes anytime in the near future? No, that's not going to happen. Do I think that people are just going to have loads of cash and be able to buy homes without getting a loan? No, that's not going to happen. You're going to need the loan to buy a home in the near future. What is going to happen is the process that you go through to get that loan and buy that home is going to change dramatically because of technology and the old days of, I'm the only guy that can do this for you. Or I always love it when I hear other lenders say, I got his credit score up 70 points. And it's like, everybody could have gotten his credit score up 70 points, because we all know what it takes to do it, because we all pay for the same service that you pay for. We all have the same information. Okay? There was no magic wand that you waived to do that. It's already there. Right. But the consumer doesn't really know that quite yet. They know it to a certain extent, but they don't fully know it yet. It's going to become more and more evident as time goes on, and especially in a market like this where there's such contraction, that the efficient banks, the ones that have the least cost in order to get the loan from the consumer to the secondary market or whatever, those are the ones that are going to be successful. And if you have the technology and the tools in place to be able to do that at low cost, then you're going to do well. That also comes to the value of the loan officer, right? Because the value of the loan officer used to be, to some extent I know this program, I looked this up. I can tell give the right information, I can do all that. Right? But now that's not really the case because technology will do that for you. Now, what you have to do, your job, is to get people to trust you. So they call you when they want to do their loan because they're going to have a lot of other options and nobody's really going to be doing it any differently than anyone else. So are you the person they trust or are you not? And you may not feel it today, right? Right now there's this old school thing that's still kind of happening. But if you're not positioning yourself today to. Be in a place to be that person tomorrow, then you're going to have to find another thing to do.

00:56:13 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah, 100%. That's the reality.

00:56:16 - Mike Mills

Yeah. And it's companies like you guys that are giving those tools to people that they need to start embracing.

00:56:21 - Brian Vieaux

And that's what's exciting. That's why I'm really energized by what being at FinLocker and having these conversations. Because I do believe A, the combination of the tools, the tech and the loan officer together is what makes the difference for the consumer. I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's the combination and it's getting validated every day by having these conversations. So it's like we're inching closer to this reality. And for now anyway, I think folks like FinLocker, we're at least on the cutting edge of it and happy to continue to advance these conversations.

00:57:03 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, the human element is never going to go away, I don't feel like, especially with, again, back to where we started. Real estate is a personal transaction. It's the largest investment most people will make in their life. It is the largest purchase most people will make in their life. And you're not going to do that. And people have never felt comfortable doing that with a computer. Right. There's always going to be a personal touch to it. And I don't see that changing where the value of that personal touch is will change. And what you bring to the table. And if your skill set isn't one of education, isn't one of communication, isn't one of being able to know ways to build your sphere and grow around it, then you're going to have a really tough uphill climb. And I hope that more and more people in our space start to realize that because there's plenty of business to go around for everybody. It's not this feast of fame. I mean, it seems like that right now, but when the business triples overnight and the people doing the business have to triple overnight, there's going to be some contraction that's going to happen. And that's kind of what we're experiencing now. But in the long term and if you're in this game for the long play and you're not just here to make a deal tomorrow, then these are the types of things that you have to focus on. I believe if you're going to have success. And look, we could be wrong, maybe we're stuck in this paper 1003 doing my commercial on Facebook in 20 years and we're completely wrong. I don't think so, but that's what it seems like. Well man, I really appreciate you coming on. We're already in an hour, so we're moved right through this thing really quickly. Is there anything that you want to kind of leave people with before we go? Just as a especially from you guys? Obviously you do a great podcast, watch a couple of episodes of that myself. There's a lot of good people that you bring on that have good insight to stuff. And on top of people providing education to consumers, the other layer to that is you have to educate yourself every day on things like this.

00:59:06 - Brian Vieaux

Yeah. So, Fintech Fridays is the podcast. I have a LinkedIn page for it. It's on YouTube channel. It's on spotify and whatever. There's also another cool thing that we launched in May. It's called fintalk. Fintalk is a newsletter, and it's targeted to loan officers. And I've brought together around 20 people from the industry who each has kind of their own skill set, education and expertise. And the objective of the newsletter is we publish it every Tuesday on email. I publish it every Thursday on LinkedIn. The goal of the newsletter is for a loan officer that subscribes and reads it to have at least one actionable takeaway, even if it's a cut and paste that they can then go and put on a post or weave into a conversation. Our goal is to help loan officers be better financial educators of consumers in their community. So that the whole objective is to kind of raise the bar for all of us on how we deliver financial education to our communities and consumers who are in that home buying journey.

01:00:20 - Mike Mills

You're pulling away the barrier for someone that feels like they don't have anything to post.

01:00:24 - Brian Vieaux

There you go. There's that. There you go.

01:00:26 - Mike Mills

Yeah. You're giving them insight. So that's a valuable tool, especially based on the importance of what we talked about today with education and everything. I don't think it could be understated. Well, Brian, really appreciate your time, man. Thank you for popping on here with me for a little bit. I appreciate anybody that stuck around, watch this or listen to the end if you're on Spotify or Apple. We'll be back next week doing another episode every Thursday, usually twelve or one. We had to vary a little bit today because I had something come up. So I appreciate you being flexible with me, but everybody have a great week and we'll see you next time.

01:00:57 - Brian Vieaux

Thanks, Mike.

01:00:58 - Mike Mills

Thank you.