Why faster can be more expensive

The efficiency trap

A buddy from college texted me last month. He needed a mortgage.

This is the easy part of my job, and the part I like. I told him I’d put him with one of our best originators, a guy I’d stack up against anybody in the country.

I told him: “This is my friend; take good care of him.”

I wasn’t sending my originator a lead. I was lending him my name.

My originator texted my friend back a link to the online application.

My friend called me immediately. Dude. Are you kidding me? He wants me to fill out the app before he’ll even talk to me?

So now I’m on the phone. First, I call my friend and cover for my guy. He’s good; I promise it won’t feel like that again. Then I call the originator.

He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, and his logic was good. He gets the loan amount, the credit, the property before they ever talk, so when they do talk, he’s sharp, he’s prepared, he doesn’t waste anybody’s time. And he’s right. For him, it is a better and smarter use of his day.

I told him it doesn’t matter what he thinks, and it doesn’t matter what I think. There’s exactly one person scoring this, and it’s the borrower. And the borrower didn’t feel prepared. He felt processed. He wanted to feel understood and important for about five minutes, and then he’d have filled out that application top to bottom without a word of complaint. My guy optimized his own file and skipped the person, and the person could feel exactly which one had come first.

Now the four seconds that felt so good produced nothing but a mess. The only real work in the whole story was the hour I hadn’t planned to spend on the phone. But that hour saved the referral, kept my friend, and handed my originator a blind spot that had been costing him for years.

My Own Fingerprints

I’d like to make this about my originator. But I can’t. Because I am guilty of this as well.

For years, I cleared a stack of emails before anyone else was awake. I got the pleasure of an empty inbox. I called it efficient. But if I am being honest, A good chunk of those emails was me taking something I didn’t want to deal with, moving it off my desk and onto somebody else’s, and calling that handoff productivity.

You probably do the same thing when a file stalls.

You start banging out emails, cc’ing the processor, the underwriter, the manager, and the agent, and it feels like action. It feels like a relief. It feels like you did something. But it usually doesn’t move the loan. It just moves the feeling of being stuck from one desk to seven others.

And if the only way you can move a loan is to manufacture some urgency and then ride in and solve it, then the loan was never the real problem. You got hooked on being the hero of a broken machine, and the hero part feels a lot better than fixing the machine.

I’ve also used efficiency to cover a lot of sins.

I’ve used it for meetings too.

I built what I thought was the perfect one-on-one platform. Same day, same time, same three questions, every week, with my direct reports. Perfect on paper. That should have been the warning. Because both of us started dreading it, and the questions were answered the way you fill out a form. But fine. Good. At least things are on track. But the truth is nothing that actually mattered ever came up, because the meeting wasn’t built to get at what mattered. It was built to get through.

Then I did it again on LinkedIn.

I set up an automatic message a while back. If somebody accepts my connection request, they get a warm little note from me. Thanks for accepting. I hope our paths cross one day. Set it once, runs forever, costs me nothing.

A big producer reached out to me directly, by text. We talked for close to an hour, a real conversation. A day or two later, he got around to accepting the LinkedIn request I’d sent him earlier, which fired my note. Thanks for accepting. I hope our paths cross one day.

He texted back:

“Our paths already crossed.”

The problem was that the automatic reply was built for me. Not for the people I speak with. But I wanted credit for being personal without being there. So in the end I wasn’t saving time. I was skipping the part I didn’t want to do.

With things, efficiency removes waste.

But with people, it can remove the part where I’m supposed to care.

And that’s where it gets ugly.

Because when I start optimizing a person for what I want out of them, I stop seeing them. But I still need them to feel like something happened between us, so I fake the part I skipped.

Skip knowing the person; fake the familiarity.

Skip earning the yes, manufacture the urgency to force it.

Faking trust to get to a yes is manipulation. At least that’s the word I use when somebody runs it on me.

But when I run it, I call it efficient.

One of my favorite examples of this was when a coaching CEO called me and told me how impressed he was with everything I’d built.

He told me I’d be perfect for his top program. He also happened to have one spot left. I still didn’t know what the spot was, but he was certain I’d be perfect for it. Then, fifteen minutes in, he asked how many loans I closed last year. I told him I don’t close loans. Then he asked about my branch. I told him that I don’t run a branch. I own the company.

That was the moment I realized he didn’t know anything bout me and that every warm thing he said was manufactured on the spot. If you asked him why he did that, he would say he was just trying to be efficient. That’s what he would call it. But when it happens to you, it feels more like manipulation.

I don’t think he’d agree. He probably got so good at rapport that he turned it into a process, and the process runs without him in it now.

But it also doesn’t matter whether he agrees or not.

Because once someone feels handled, you don’t get a second chance to unhandle them.

The Fake Yes

We had an originator who couldn’t figure out why Realtors kept ghosting her. She’d get one to agree to coffee, and then they wouldn’t show. She was furious about it.

I told her I didn’t think the coffee was ever real. I thought she’d pushed them into a yes they didn’t mean, and that agreeing to meet was just the fastest way to get her off the phone.

She said, then they’re cowards.

I tried again.

Maybe the process was repelling the exact people she was trying to win.

And she said it:

“I actually like when they don’t show; then they feel bad, and I’ve got leverage.”

I told her that that isn’t a sales process. That’s a resentment machine. She thought the no-show handed her leverage. But it did the opposite. It handed the realtor a story about why her client didn’t want to use her. So, guess who that realtor is never going to refer again. Ghosting is not always the other person being flaky. Sometimes ghosting is the receipt for a yes they only gave you to escape the pressure.

This is the whole reason I recruit the way I do.

I used to have a recruiting team that was very good at closing tactics, but closing tactics produced exactly what closing tactics produce. No-shows and offer letters that went out and vanished, even people who ghosted us a week after saying yes.

So we slowed the whole thing down and stopped pushing, and most of the ghosting stopped.

Today, I don’t send an offer letter until the person has already told me, out loud, that they’re in.

I don’t use closing tactics. I don’t create FOMO.

The offer letter confirms a decision. It does not create one.

The Goose

Everybody knows the story about the goose that lays a golden egg every day, and the guy who kills it to get all the gold at once. No more goose, no more eggs.

Every story in this piece is somebody grabbing an egg and pretending the goose won’t notice.

Every fast move in your business gets you an egg. The egg is the thing you can point at today. The application started. The yes. The signed offer. The doc was uploaded. The task is cleared. The meeting that ended on time. Real, countable, satisfying. The goose is whatever keeps laying the eggs. The borrower who trusts you. The Realtor who keeps sending deals. The recruit who actually decided instead of getting closed. The reputation that makes the next intro easy. None of it shows up on today’s report. It’s just the reason there’s anything on next month’s.

Efficiency gets very good at grabbing eggs.

Effectiveness keeps the goose alive.

And every tool you can buy is built to count eggs.

Nobody sells a dashboard for the goose.

So the egg gets measured, managed, and rewarded, and the goose gets whatever’s left, which, most weeks, is nothing.

The app link gets the application moving. It also taught my friend that he was a file before he was a person.

The automated note got me the reply. It also told a guy I’d just spent an hour talking to that perhaps not everything I say is authentic.

The recruiting close got the yes on the phone. But the offer letter went out and vanished, because a pressured yes is an egg with no goose behind it.

The portal keeps your pipeline clean and your dashboard green.

It also makes you look cold to the borrower who needed a person before the homework.

The CRM touch checks the box that says you followed up. But it doesn’t tell you if the relationship is approved.

The egg is easy to measure.

The goose is easy to ignore.

And that’s what makes efficiency dangerous.

It lets me point at the egg and never look at what I did to the goose to get it.

You can run on eggs for a while. It looks great on the board, right up until the goose stops laying,

And in a way, the whole mortgage industry ran this play with a lot more zeros on it. We bought technology by the truckload and put a button on every step we could find. A hundred steps got faster, and the loan got more expensive.

The demo shows you the steps. But it can never show you the system, and the cost per loan is the receipt that tells you whether you made the business more productive or just found a more expensive way to feel efficient.

This is a hard habit to break.

I still catch myself reaching for the golden eggs. I’ll be halfway into an email about something I should be saying to somebody’s face before I catch it. And the reason this happens is that if you run the fake version long enough, it stops feeling like a shortcut because it becomes the way you do things. In the meantime, you lose the muscle for the phone call, for asking the real question, for knowing when to pause, or when to let the other person get a vote. So now, when I catch myself, I ask who the fast version is really for.

If it’s for the client, the originator, or any of the people I serve or do things for, then I use it.

But if it’s only for myself, I don’t.

Rich Weidel
CEO, Princeton Mortgage