WE’RE HEARING that I learned a new word recently and that word is “selfie.” It’s something one does to oneself with a smartphone. It can get one into serious trouble, as Anthony Weiner will tell you, but that’s not its common usage or purpose. At least I hope not. In fact, mortgage executives need to be careful about any Weiner-style use of their camera phones since it would surely get you fired from your management position despite the fact that you could still run for the office of mayor of New York City, apparently.
So even before Weiner hijacked the concept of the self-taken picture and took it to the gross extreme, teenagers were doing this in a more innocent way, turning it into such a mainstream practice that a new-age word was coined to describe it. The “selfie” is now defined as the process of taking a picture of yourself and posting it on the Internet for others to view. If you have never heard this word, you do not know a teenager with a smartphone. Perhaps you are a member of that older generation that still texts in complete sentences and thinks that actually talking to a fellow human being is the appropriate way to communicate. As teens would say—“Whatever!”
The Internet age has taken us from simple webpages where we posted brochure-like marketing material (what we do), to social networks (focused on who we are) and now to the world of selfies (what we look like, right now!).
When did we decide we needed to put an image of ourselves on the Internet, every day, in every outfit, at every party? The publicity photo of me posted on this page was actually taken over 10 years ago. This image is the very antithesis of a selfie. It involved a professional photographer, a few thousand dollars’ worth of lighting and camera equipment and makeup (I’m not too proud to admit that I look better with a bit of foundation and some powder). And my old employer ABN Amro paid for it, so it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
I could get a new photo and move closer to the world of the selfie, but in addition to the new headshot, I’d gain 10 years’ worth of worry lines and much more than 10 pounds of everything else. No thanks! You’ll get no selfie from me. In fact, selfies always make you look bigger than you are, which is something I would rather avoid and Weiner obviously embraced. You’ll have better luck with the new generation. They’ll grab their smartphones, stick their arms out as far as they can, smile and snap.
But wouldn’t you agree that we as mortgage professionals are often guilty of doing the same thing? We often take snapshots of our businesses like teenagers take selfies.
Many of the mortgage company owners I’ve visited will lay a spreadsheet on the table and act like that is the image of their business at that point in time. Without context or consideration of the competitive environment, this is a real representation of their corporate health. That’s not any different than a smiling teenager’s face filling a smartphone screen with no idea of where she is or who she is with.
Here’s a case in point. Right now, many lenders are suffering with lower volume and compressed margins. They see it in the closed loan reports and the month end financials of their company or business unit. But this is only one view of what that business is doing, and it is not viewed in the context of the market that is changing around them. We are getting approached by a lot of clients that are asking, “What is going on out there?” It’s a good question and a good illustration of the point that they need more information than their own data can provide.
Knowing that your volume is going down is the selfie view, but knowing what your market share is doing gives you a much broader view. Knowing how your market share is changing on a county or city level, by product, by loan type, gives you a real view of how the market is changing around you. Knowing how purchase business is growing in your market gives you much more information than just knowing how your own purchase money numbers are changing. This is the type of information you can ask for weekly, not just at the end of the month, and it gives you the broad view of your business, not the selfie view.
The other reason our industry’s business management techniques mirror a teen-aged photographer is that we keep the image of our business at arm’s length. Like self-focused kids, we rely on our own perspective and rarely reach out for feedback from our customers or stakeholders. At Stratmor, we introduced MortgageSAT to measure the borrower’s satisfaction with the mortgage process because we saw such a gap in the analytical ability for lenders to truly understand the customer’s satisfaction and know what to do about it. We included benchmarking to be sure that the tool provides not just the satisfaction level of your own customers, but also the satisfaction level of the industry as well so you are not just getting a picture of your own performance, but a much broader picture of how you are doing compared to your peers.
Peer interaction is one way to avoid the selfie perspective. I was on the road this week visiting a potential client that I had only talked to a couple of times. I was amazed at what I learned. I knew a bit about them from emails and conference calls, but I learned a lot more by visiting. This multibillion-dollar online lender has a lot of good things going on. I got to see the culture, see the systems and learn about ways they operate that I was not aware of before. I think they learned a bit about what I do, too, and gained a new perspective on their business through my observations of them. We even had an M&A discussion and they admitted that they did not know we were involved in M&A. That alone was worth the trip.
When I attend the various industry conferences and other industry
Garth Graham is a partner with Stratmor Group, and has over 25 years of mortgage experience, from Fortune 500 companies to startups, including management of two of the most successful mortgage e-commerce platforms. He was formerly with Chase Manhattan Mortgage and ABN Amro, where he was a senior executive during the sale of its mortgage group to Citigroup.
