I have some questions for all the owners of small mortgage origination shops: are you running your business like it is a business? Do you have the systems in place to examine what is succeeding in your business and what needs to be dropped or even eliminated? Or are you doing things by the seat of your pants, lacking the proper data to back up your decisions?
Most people opened their own shops because they wanted to be their own boss, working in a field they knew and loved, without fully understanding what that entailed.
There is a show on the Food Network called Restaurant: Impossible. The host, Robert Irvine, goes around to failing restaurants and develops a business plan to be implemented in 48 hours designed to bring customers back.
In developing that plan, Irvine has to first understand what was causing the restaurant to fail in the first place. In numerous occasions, a big part of the problem involved failure to run the restaurant like a business.
These owners had the tools in place to determine what was happening and failed to use them properly, or they never had those tools in the first place.
For example, at one restaurant, while there was a point of sales system utilized to get the kitchen orders fulfilled, the owners were not taking the data from that system and analyzing it to see what was working in terms of offerings and what wasn't.
Another case had the owners not using the expense data they had easily available in order to properly price their menu, eating into profits. Nor did these owners, among several others, had any idea about their cost structure, both fixed and variable.
Small mortgage company owners need to be cognizant of what their costs and expenses are versus what brings in income. There are third-party tools out there that help do this.
Also, they can tap their own customer relationship management system to see what product niches are working and which should be dropped.
Utilizing data properly can be the difference between keeping the doors open or shutting the doors.
