Boo!

Some tough love for Originators going though tough times

There’s a monster under your bed. And you’ve been pretending it’s not there for way too long.

Not the kind from childhood. Worse. This one is the hard conversation you’ve been avoiding. The decision you keep postponing. The path your heart keeps whispering about—the one that makes your stomach drop every time you consider it.

I don’t know what it is for you. But you know exactly what I’m talking about.

And you’re not stuck because you don’t know what to do. You’re stuck because you know exactly what to do, and you’re hoping you won’t have to do it.

When the mortgage industry collapsed.

Interest rates went from 3% to 7%. Volume plummeted 80% overnight. Every expert said the same thing: “Sit tight. Don’t change anything. This will pass in 6-12 months.”

I listened to them for exactly one year.

And it cost me millions.

As my last two newsletters pointed out, the mortgage industry is about to go through its first reset in over 30 years. Things are going to change rapidly. It’s going to be chaos. Even for originators. Actually, especially for originators.

But here’s what I learned about the difference between people who break through during chaos and those who get buried by it.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves When Everything Falls Apart

January 2022.

The Mortgage Bankers Association predicted rates would hit 4% by the end of the year. The actual rate ended up being 6.8%. They were off by 170%.

And it happened again the next year. They predicted rates would come back down. Everybody held on. And the fairy tale cost companies like mine millions and millions of dollars, and billions across the industry —because they kept telling us we didn’t have to do anything. Rates were going to come back down and save us.

And there I was, staring at my spreadsheets at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday. Staring at another huge loss for the month. My wife was asleep upstairs, trusting me to figure this out. All I could hear was the clock ticking in our kitchen below.

At first, I got mad. I was mad at home sellers, then at buyers, then at the government. It felt great, but it got me nowhere. So I then blamed myself.

And that’s when everything changed.

Because that’s when I realized that my current failure wasn’t about any surface-level stuff, it was about something deeper. Something that a lot of the male and female alpha types that make up the originators in the mortgage industry do not like to talk about.

It was psychological.

I wanted to believe the fairy tale the MBA told us because confronting reality would have required doing hard things. Things like firing people I’d just spent three or four years hiring. Dismantling systems I’d built while making big promises and pitching the vision. Dismantling the infrastructure we’d. I admit I was wrong about our entire strategy.

But as it turns out, those are the things I actually needed the most.

Or as Ray Dalio put it: “The team that sees reality the best wins.”

Most originators don’t see reality clearly because reality demands uncomfortable action. They’d rather live in comfortable delusion than face the hard truth:

You’re not stuck where you are because you don’t know what to do. You’re stuck because you know what to do, but you’re hoping you don’t have to do it.

The Moment Everything Changed

I remember the exact moment I stopped lying to myself.

It was that same Tuesday, staring at those spreadsheets. My coffee had gone cold. The numbers hadn’t changed in the three hours I’d been sitting there.

I was bleeding money every month. My team was getting restless. Other companies were pretending everything was fine, saying “Look at us, we haven’t done layoffs, we’re doing great”—while quietly laying people off behind closed doors and destroying their balance sheets. They were full of it. The ship was sinking while they were lying.

And there I was, not wanting to let people down. I’d just spent years hiring people, building teams, making promises, painting the vision. Now I had to dismantle it. And I avoided doing it. I avoided it because of ego, insecurity, and fear.

Until finally, I hit a point of clarity.

I remember sitting there going: All right, we’re losing money. The whole industry is losing money. If the market doesn’t save us, the logical end result of this is that we run out of money. All the originators leave. And I’m stuck with no originators and no money.

Or I say screw it and take responsibility and start disrupting things. We may lose originators because I get it wrong—but at least I’ll have no originators and my money. And I can rebuild.

So I asked myself: Which is better, Rich? No originators and no money? Or no originators and money?

And I decided that I’d rather have no originators and money.

It was such a silly way to think about it - but it gave me the psychological courage to take responsibility and move into action.

That clarity gave me permission to do what I’d been avoiding for months.

The Hidden Psychology of Avoidance

The average originator switches companies every 2-3 years, always chasing the same fairy tale. They think the next company will magically solve problems they’ve carried to four different companies.

But if you’ve been at four companies in five years and gotten identical results, the problem isn’t the business cards.

Most people think they have a skills gap. Or a knowledge gap. They don’t.

They have a courage gap.

They know exactly what they need to do:

• Make those prospecting calls they’ve been postponing

• Build their social media presence despite feeling exposed

• Change their product mix

• Let go of control and start delegating

• Take the risk and make the career move they’ve been avoiding

But knowing and doing are separated by an ocean of fear.

I watched one of my top originators (let’s call him Tom) struggle with this exact problem. He could produce $30 million but was stuck there. Why? He believed his value was working until midnight, personally handling every detail of every file, doing all the communication to all his borrowers and realtors.

“Rich, if I don’t do it myself, they’ll work with a different originator,” he’d say.

And I get it. That attention to detail is what made him successful in the first place. But now it had become a limiting belief. A cage he’d built for himself.

The hard truth was that he was terrified of letting go. Terrified that delegating would expose him as less valuable. Terrified of training someone who might mess up.

That terror was keeping him from the $75-100 million he could actually produce.

The thing Tom needed to do was let go a little. And once he did—once he hired his first assistant (and then second when the first didn’t work out) and actually trained her to handle client communication—scary as hell at first—he’s now on track for $80 million and planning for $100M next year.

It took him 10 years of inaction to do it.

The Competitive Advantage of Hard Things

A friend’s dad—guy built a $100 million company from scratch—once told us: “Is it going to kill you or put you out of business? If the answer is no, then relax and just work through it.”

While everyone else is frozen by fear, you can gain a massive competitive advantage by doing the things they won’t do.

That’s why I started making cuts. Rebuilding systems. Changing everything that wasn’t working.

My personal motto became simple: Whatever scares me most is probably what I need to do next.

Something interesting happened.

The more I did things that scared me, the more courageous I became. Each hard decision made the next one easier. Things that used to keep me up at night became routine business decisions.

A few years ago, if someone had screwed up, say, a marketing launch and cost me money, my ego would have exploded. I would have made it personal. Made them pay for making me look bad. It would have pricked my insecurity of not being perfect, of not being great, of screwing up, looking foolish.

Now? It’s water off a duck’s back.

Just last week, I found out about a mistake someone made that was going to cost me $150,000. My old self would have spiraled. Now I just ask: Is it going to put me out of business? No. All right. Deal with it. Keep moving.

And now I think of it as another $150k in tuition, because we’re going to get all the learning possible out of it.

This is the magic of doing hard things: You develop thicker skin. What once terrified you becomes second nature. The things you were scared of become beloved to you.

The Technology Leap

Here’s another story about avoidance.

For years, I told myself I had to make the existing technology work. I couldn’t afford to build our own stuff. I found all these data points to back up that limiting thinking.

But really, what was behind it? Fear. What if I spent money, time, and energy on something that didn’t work? What if I hired people and figured out contracts and security and all this stuff I didn’t understand—and it all went nowhere?

So I was hoping I wouldn’t have to figure it out.

Finally, I hired a software programmer to build something. It worked.

Then I got the contracts wrong. And the guy stole it from me.

First pothole. That could have been the moment I quit. “This isn’t worth it. Too complicated. I just wasted all this money building something that worked, and the guy stole it.”

Instead, I said: “Okay. I just learned a lot and paid another tuition bill. Now that I know more, let’s find the right people to work with and do it again, but better.”

We rebuilt everything. Took it to the next level.

And now? That “impossible” technology has led to a co-founding opportunity for an entirely new mortgage technology company. We’re raising money. Building something that could change the industry.

And still my brain told me not to do it. What if I don’t raise the money? What if we do raise it and the product doesn’t work? What if the product works but I can’t sell it? What if it all works and then I have to deal with the added responsibilities?

It’s so much easier not to do this stuff because of the fear.

But I have goals I want to achieve. And I’m willing to go through the pain, the doubt, the insecurity. Because the thing that gets me over all of it is this question: Well, Rich, do you want to achieve the goal or not? Because if you don’t do this, just admit you’re a fraud. You wanted it, but you weren’t willing to do what it takes.

And it all started by deciding to start. Taking one step. One decision. See what happens.

I wasn’t stuck because I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck because I knew what to do, but I was hoping I didn’t have to do it.

The Originator’s Courage Framework

Here’s the systematic approach I’ve developed for building this capability:

Recognition: Identify Your One Goal That Changes Everything

Not your comfortable goal. Not your incremental goal.

The goal that, if you achieved it, would solve multiple other problems in your life. The one thing that would unlock everything else.

For me, back in 2023, it was getting our total non-sales cost per loan under $3,000.

Industry experts said it was impossible. Pretty much every other company is north of $5,500 per loan.

According to the MBA and public company financials, the total cost per loan is $12,500. The total sales cost is around $7,000 per loan, everything else is $5,500.

Even my internal team gave me a hard time: “Rich, it’s impossible.” We were at $5,500 per loan also.

That goal forced me to change everything about how we operated. Which was the point.

Your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you’re getting right now.

If we don’t change anything, we should expect the same results. So the right goal should force you to change your behaviors.

For originators, this might be:

• Doubling your volume without doubling your hours

• Building a referral network that works without constant nurturing

• Creating systems that let you take actual vacations

• Getting out of your loans and being the rainmaker

Reality: Print It Out, Make It Physical

Not in your phone. Not in an app.

Analog. Physical. Unavoidable.

I printed that $3,000 goal and taped it to my wall. Every morning when I sit down, the first thing I look at is that goal staring at me.

What’s the biggest bottleneck today? What’s the biggest lever I could pull to move toward this goal?

No complicated tracking systems. No KPI dashboards. Those are tactics.

What you actually need is to make the decision that come hell or high water, you’re going to figure out how to do this thing.

Just a simple question every day: Does this move me toward my impossible goal?

One originator I know printed out “50 new relationships this quarter” and put it above his coffee maker. Every morning ritual reminded him what actually mattered.

And now? We’ve overachieved our goal by $500 per loan. No one thing did it. Just every day asking: What’s the biggest bottleneck? What’s the biggest lever? Chipping away.

And over two years, everything unfolded in the pursuit of that ONE GOAL.

And it was soo worth it! Now we have tons of optionality because we’re outperforming everyone by $3,000 per loan in costs.

We can pay originators 50-75 bps more and still have lower rates.

Or pay them the same, and have way lower rates.

It’s a win/win.

Risk: Run Toward What Scares You

I made this my personal signal: If something scares me, that’s probably where I need to go next.

Want to build technology but terrified of getting the contracts wrong? Go build technology.

Scared of firing underperformers because you might lose everyone? Fire the underperformers.

Afraid of leaving your branch to be on your own because of the ‘support’? Bet on yourself.

Terrified of delegating because someone might screw up? Delegate anyway.

The treasure you seek is always in the cave you fear to enter.

Resilience: Start Before You’re Ready

Ready isn’t a feeling you wait for; it’s a decision you make despite the feeling.

I spent months waiting to “feel ready” to build our technology. I finally just did it because I realized that to achieve our $3,000 goal, we couldn’t do it with existing tech. I had to.

I didn’t know how to manage software developers. Didn’t understand contracts. Didn’t know anything about security.

All true.

And I was hoping I wouldn’t have to figure it out because I didn’t want to go through the discomfort.

You’ll never feel ready. Because ready isn’t a feeling—it’s a decision. The important thing is deciding to start. Take the first step, and you don’t know where it’s going to lead. But you start.

Results: Embrace The Downgoing

If you will forgive me for getting philosophical for a moment, Friedrich Nietzsche had this concept, preferring people he calls “down-goers.” People willing to descend into difficulty to become something greater.

Most people try to improve their tower by adding floors.

Down-goers are willing to tear down the tower and rebuild from a stronger foundation.

Nietzsche said he preferred downward-going people to upward-going people because the treasure you seek is in the cave you fear to enter.

The people who can not just bear discomfort but love it, seek it even, purposefully “ruin” their current life in order to build something better. Those are the people who actually transform.

As the saying goes, you cannot reach the promised land without the courage to lose sight of the shore.

It’s going to ruin you one way or another. You might as well be the one to make it happen.

The Philosophy Behind Hard Things

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of building businesses, managing teams, and watching people either break through or stay stuck:

Life responds to courage most of all.

Not to planning. Not to optimization. Not to wait for perfect conditions.

Courage.

The willingness to sacrifice who you are for who you could become.

Most people live their entire lives as an elaborate coping mechanism, avoiding the transformative experiences that would set them free. They optimize the prison instead of finding the key.

The key is always courage.

Your biggest professional weakness is often your personal strength overextended. That attention to detail that made you successful? At scale, it becomes the bottleneck that limits your growth.

The K-curve we’re seeing in this industry, where top performers rise while others sink, isn’t driven by skills, tactics, or knowledge. It’s driven by the originators, who are doing what they don’t want to do. And those who aren’t? Everybody knows what to do. They won’t do it.

Your Cave Is Calling

Right now, there’s something you’re avoiding.

Some hard conversation. Some difficult decision. Some scary change that you know needs to happen.

You’re researching instead of doing, planning instead of starting, and optimizing instead of transforming.

Stop.

The thing you’re avoiding?

That’s your next move.

Because each time you do a little thing you don’t want to do, your skin gets thicker. And before you know it, the things that scared you start to become routine. And then you’re operating on a different plane than everybody else.

Courage is the only competitive advantage that compounds.

While everyone else waits for permission, you can take the ground they’re too afraid to claim.

While they optimize for comfort, you can optimize for growth.

While they make excuses, you can make progress.

The treasure you seek is in the cave you fear to enter.

Enter it.

And when you do reach out, because we should talk.

Live dangerously,

Rich

CEO, Princeton Mortgage