In the sport of athletics, a four-minute mile means completing a mile run (1,760 yards, or 1,609.344 metres) in less than four minutes. First achieved on May 6, 1954, by Roger Bannister in 3m 59.4s, the elusive "four-minute barrier" has since been broken by over 1,400 male athletes, and is now a standard for male professional middle distance runners. For years the four-minute mile was considered impenetrable; the longer the limit remained the harder it became for anybody to believe it could be broken. However, just 46 days after Bannister broke the barrier John Landy, an Australian runner, broke the barrier once again with a time of 3 minutes 58 seconds. Then, just a year later, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.
In the book The Power of Impossible Thinking 
Jerry Wind and Colin Crook explain how your "mental models stand between you and reality, distorting all your perceptions...and how they create both limits and opportunities". The writing duo wondered how and why so many runners smashed the four-minute barrier after Bannister became the first to do it? "Was there a sudden growth spurt in human evolution? Was there a genetic engineering experiment that created a new race of super runners? No. What changed was the mental model. The runners of the past had been held back by a mindset that said they could not surpass the four-minute mile. When that limit was broken, the others saw that they could do something they had previously thought impossible."
The four-minute mile wasn't the first time a collective conscious imposed arbitrary and shallow-minded limitations on the human condition; there was a time where crossing the Atlantic was impossible, heavier-than-air flight was never going to happen, and harnessing nuclear energy would "never be obtainable" (quoted on 29 December 1934 by Albert Einstein himself in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, no less, and only echoing popular sentiment; Robert Millikan, and American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, made the same claim in 1923). The list goes on and on. Anything is only impossible until it's not. Even those on the frontline of innovation are often blinded by self-imposed limits; Orville Wright said in 1920 that "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris".
The notion that "extraordinary is the opposite of what everybody else is doing" isn't derived from what a business does, but also how it thinks. Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.
The Mortgage Broker Four-Minute Mile
We deal with brokers routinely that feel like a 100-million dollar business is a threshold that is somewhat unattainable or challenging. We see yearly volumes of 100-million as just another transient goal in building a business into a large and sustainable multi-broker empire; in fact, last year every single broker that competed our full Growth program saw volumes that exceeded this arbitrary volume. You'll rarely see or hear us talk about 100-million as any serious goal because we feel it's a debilitating limitation that is contrary to a growing business. In fact, we drafted an article some time back about how we generated 350-million for a business in just four months... but we're reluctant to post it (just yet) because it reveals a few too many proprietary secrets.
There's an army of marketing pretenders that share our space in the financial industry that promote "leads on tap" through their own targeted Facebook and other advertising. What they're usually not telling you is that their lackluster programs consists almost entirely of a typical and low-end landing page (funnel and email) experience that books an appointment into your calendar (a system we've used for twenty years). While social media advertising is unquestionably an effective means of generating leads, the idea of relying on one source of incoming leads in isolation is dumbing your business down into the cesspit of mediocrity that has become somewhat of a trademark for the industry (our ads perform, on average, three times more effectively than our three closet competitors, so it's a program that we absolutely do endorse).
When we engage with a new client and we talk about a true and holistic marketing strategy we generally point them towards the (flawed and incomplete) list of high-performing mortgage brokers. Few of them - if any of them - will ever be using the typical Facebook advertising many brokers have been told is necessary. If they're not using online advertising then what are they doing right? At the time of writing not one of them is running a single ad anywhere. What many of these top-performers have done is employed our genuine marketing program that returns as much business as they can handle; many of them use Facebook advertising and lead generation simply to manage their growth (rather than relying on it for growth).
The mortgage industry needs to unshackle itself from what many consider best practice, and it certainly needs to completely obliterate the ridiculous and low-level 100-million dollar limit. We need to engage true business techniques that don't just feed us with these "autopilot leads" but instead generate a true business with real brand recognition. It might be worth looking to the Michelin Restaurant Guide or the The Manure Crisis of 1894 for a little inspiration.
Getting Started
The fact that many brokers have broken that 100-million dollar barrier individually makes it a more attainable and realistic goal, but many still struggle identifying the specific techniques required to reach that level. For us, and for an individual that is participating in our program, volumes that diminish around the 100-million mark is the sign of a broker that hasn't properly implemented our Matrix plan.
Our proprietary lead generation Gravity Framework (the sources of incoming business) is a mindmap of over 1000 elements that deal with opportunities well outside the realm of social media or social advertising. If our instructions are followed, it's not uncommon to see us generate an additional 10-15 million of business in the first week of our relationship.
In the last 5 years - and of those financial practitioners that have implemented our full program - not one business that has worked with us has generated less than 150 million in yearly business volume (we generally don't work on the volumes of an individual broker because the idea is that you'll often end up running a business and managing brokers rather than writing loans). Occasionally the volume is less when delays are introduced by way of custom development, or when a broker has a phone fear or similar. In late 2018 we introduced our proprietary Gateway Program to all brokers (rather than just high-paying franchise clients) that consistently delivers 100-million per year alone without any social media.
If you're ready to unlock the true potential of your Mortgage business with tools, techniques, and premium support that truly stands alone in an industry defined by marketing mediocrity, please call us on 1300 235 433 (1300 BELIEF) and learn what impact your finance business can and will have on the finance industry.
Featured Image: The Apollo 11 Saturn V nears the end of its trip to the launchpad, May 20, 1969. "A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere" - New York Times, 1936.
