Shane: You are not urgent enough. If you think you’ve got tomorrow, you’ll lose to someone who’s actually acting today. So our deals die in slow motion. And if we ignore the power of immediate action, We will inevitably fail and we’ll be left out in the dust. Hello and welcome to the Lords of Lending episode three.

You are not urgent enough. I’m Shane Pearson, and we see it time and time again. Endless emails, calls, and tasks. Yet we forget to move the big needle right now. Out that you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. So that means if your system lacks urgency, you’ll keep pushing important tasks off today. We’ll show you how to real urgency focused daily execution can transform both your SBA deals or your business. And beyond 

Steph: I

Shane: I’m joined today by stephanie dunn steph the banker aka queen wolf She’s an sba pro that has been pushing leadership boundaries and brian congelier who is the lord of law aka I’ve seen your cocoa leche and sharing every detail is thorough and swift, but if you haven’t subscribed already, do it right now, we’re here to help you ditch pointless delays and seize real opportunities. Steph. You’ve championed women’s leadership. And so let’s talk a little bit about your role in urgency and how that applies to that space.

Steph: Well, I’m not going to, I promised myself I’m not going to be the quintessential feminist on every episode, but I might, I might.

I promised myself, which I break promises to myself on a fairly regular basis. But I would say that. As everyone knows, when you want something done, give it to a busy woman.

Shane: Oh, I thought you were going to throw in a pun. Like if you want something done, come to done.

Steph: I like that though. Uh, yeah, so, so yes, um, I, I would tend to think that busy people get stuff done on a more regular basis. And what came first, right? Were they busy first or are they always just more productive because they stay busy and are more and are timely and have that urgency that you’re talking about.

Shane: So the, the idea of busy compared to what the topic today is of urgency. How do those two relate? How are they not intertwined? What are your thoughts there?

Steph: Well, I think productive, busy people get stuff done on a more timely basis. So I think you’re more, you’re in essence, more productive, the busier you are. And I have a theory about this, but maybe I’ll bring up my theory here after Brian gets to, gets to opine.

Brian: Well, from my perspective, I think it’s a, you follow the 80 20 rule, right? So being productive versus busy, those who are just busy. Are not productive. The 20 percent of everything that you need to do in a day that doesn’t actually get you further along what we need to do in order to actually be, have the urgency, which means you’re actually getting stuff done as an attorney.

I remember learning this. You know, learning the ropes as a new associate, you get thrown into the wolves and you get a stack of documents this high, and you got to go through every single thing and you don’t have a choice but to be busy. Now I could spend a lot of time maybe doing things that weren’t productive to get that stuff done, or I could get in and grind hard.

And get it done and get, get things out the door. So I think that’s, there’s a difference there. We see a lot of people in our industry who are, they’re busy, but are they working on the most important things to actually further a deal along? Or are they spending their time doing things that, that maybe don’t get that accomplished?

Shane: It’s hard to actually tell, in my opinion, like. I remember having conversation with you years ago while you were an attorney, like you would literally come home from work, help put the kids to bed and then have to go either back to the office. I’m not sure if they even gave you a laptop, go back home, but you’re working until 12 o’clock, one o’clock in the morning, what was actually driving you to have to do that?

Was it just your overzealousness and then the need to have to perform better? Was it some like pain in the ass boss? Who’s saying you have to have it done executed by a certain time and there’s no other choice.

Brian: so it’s, I think it’s a little bit of both, honestly, I mean, as a new associate in a big law firm, you want to kick butt, you want to be doing well and perform well so that, you know, you’re, you’re in line for moving up the ladder. But at the same time, the bigger concern was always this client who’s a huge.

You know, billion dollar REIT said, I need this thing done by this date. There’s really no other option. You literally just get it done and you work until it is done.

Shane: Well, you’re what you’re identifying was a, a customer need, right? There was a customer need that was identified and, and requirements set by the customer, not by the internal attorney partner that said, Hey, customer, go pound sand. I’m going to do it my way. They’re saying, no, we’re going to perform to your level.

We’ve made, we’ve made your requirements, something that’s urgent, something that has to happen. And my whole team’s going to execute on that. This is, this is a failure I’ve seen at multiple institutions and places that I’ve worked. Even within myself, if I’m not set, if I don’t have that kind of a, that deadline, that urgent, urgent framework built into how I process every single engagement that I have with a customer. Steph, you and I have been working together for a long time. And I think back to some of the early days and even beforehand, where you were, you, you had said you worked from in the stock market. You were working in like the bond market in Chicago. Tell me, talk a little bit about your background there, like where you came from and kind of what’s built you into the person today and how you approach. Most of the things we need to get done on a daily basis within SBA lending and, and just our lives with, with that level of urgency that’s needed to keep things progressing

Steph: Yeah, sure. Uh, yeah, I started in my twenties in Chicago, living the dream, boiler room, cold call, dial in for dollars, but I was on the stock market and financial advisor in training at Prue. Uh, so, uh, definitely think there’s a difference, however, between being busy and winning. All right? But guess what? In order to win, you have to be busy. I think they belong together. You, you can’t work on one project only at a time because you will never win. You have to work on 50 projects at all times and you have to execute. So I want to bring up this one thing too, that has always been my secret sauce. My secret sauce is this, just like you said, Brian. It’s, even though I have 50 projects, every project has a deadline and every project has a deliverable and an exact deadline for that deliverable. All right. So the, here’s this thing that I was going to bring up. It’s this, the theory of, it’s called the Parkinson’s law. And I’ve talked about this before for a lot of people that have worked with me.

So Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. All right, so think about

that, there you go. So people procrastinate if they have a lot of time to complete a task. However, they GSD, get S done, if like Brian said, it’s due by the morning. It’s funny how people all of a sudden have this unrealistic deadline, but they hit it every time because they find a way to do it. And so it’s the same with. People fill their time with trivial tasks if, if they don’t have deadlines, so they putz around or maybe are not as productive and like you like to say, Shane, they’re busy, but they’re not, they’re active, but not productive.

Shane: Proactive, yeah,

Steph: Right. Difference. And then unrealistic deadlines, however, causes unnecessary stress, as we all know, but people find a way to turn the paper in if the paper’s due Friday. The kids turn the paper in Friday, that’s it. That’s how, that’s how this is going to roll. So that’s been my tempo, my entire career as a stockbroker and, and through the ranks and banking it’s, I’m busy. I have 50 projects. Every project has a deadline and I hit the deadline. There’s no option.

Shane: when they were driving you in the, uh, back and work, working on the star wall street, kind of a work, I should say, uh, it was it, did they give you a set number of calls? I mean, was there any type of regulation from a day to day basis of what you had, like, you have to execute this regardless of what all you have to do.

This is the daily. Requirement of what needs to be that needs to be done in order to drive what the results out of you Was that was that imposed but there are those kpis those benchmarks requirements that kind of thing?

Steph: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think when you’re younger in your career too, benchmarks are set for you because

that’s part of the training. So the training is all right. You are expected to make a hundred phone calls a day, five days a week, you are expected to bring in 10 appointments from those a hundred phone calls every day, five days a week, and then you build out the model for the KPIs, right?

It’s, it’s a science. It really is. And it’s all math. Numbers game, as we’ve heard many times. And then over the years, you’re so trained to do that, do it that way. It’s like going to the gym, you do the same workout, right? You’ve done it every time. And so you’re so trained to doing it that way that you don’t longer need to be babysat.

You no longer to be asked if you made those a hundred calls, you just do it. Because that’s how, you know, the game is played. And so I think younger in your careers, you probably need to have KPIs set for you. And you need to be managed as you become more and more of a leader. You don’t, you set your own levels of expectations because you know what you’re capable of and you execute on.

Brian: So I was a transactional attorney, which means I was not going to court. I was mostly working with, um, businesses, uh, institutional funds who were. Looking to either buy and sell real estate, develop real estate, or, um, uh, lease up their buildings. So, in a lot of that, it’s, it’s really on a transactional basis.

I mean, you’re kind of beholden to the deal that you have in front of you. So it’s, it’s less about, hey, you need to hit these certain metrics. And it was more so we have this much work that just came in, we got to divvy it up among the attorneys and among, you know, the paralegals, whoever’s on staff on a deal and everyone needs to do their part.

And from there, you know, we, we kind of work backwards, right? We would start with the contract and we would go through and basically do an outline of what’s in the contract. What are the important. Um, things to note in the contract, key dates, deadlines, things that we need to hit, and then we would work backwards from there.

So if we have a closing date of X, then we got to do these 10 things before we get to that date. And before we do those 10 things, we got to do these 20 things. And so we would proceed in that fashion, little by little, just chipping away, working at a deal. So you mentioned something at the beginning that made me think with all of this and what Steph was saying too, a lot of it comes down to the systems that you establish for yourself and that you establish for your team as a leader on the team, you know, I can’t expect someone who is either brand new or who hasn’t been trained in our system to step in and immediately know our system.

Right? You watch sports, every team has their system that they play with because it’s based on who they have, what each person’s role is, the coach, the managers, everybody’s got a say, and it gets implemented down the chain. And I think without that sort of system in place, then you can’t set KPIs for people.

You can’t set SLAs or, you know, make sure that people know what they’re supposed to do on a given date. And so consequently, everyone’s kind of scrambling. And at the end of the day, everyone’s feeling, Oh, I’m, I’m feeling frantic. Why are you feeling frantic? Well, because you’re not organized. You’re not following a system.

There’s no system in place to accomplish the goals in a, in a steady and, um, consistent way.

Shane: Honestly, something that’s freaking measurable as well. I mean like when a system has to have those measuring instruments It’s not so much to try to keep people busy Instead like we’ve been talking about a little earlier The idea is to make sure that the way that it’s executed is consistent across every transaction that might come in front of you Any any required like requirement any customer that touches the table and is trying to get a deal done is going to be approached with the same vigor with the same Uh focus that That will produce the the result as quickly as possible Now we we work in an industry that and we’ve talked about this probably on the daily We work in an industry that is riddled with timeline adjustments I would constantly find we have to pivot because we’re always relying on third parties to try to come in and get deals to Actually get executed and oftentimes they’re not executing at the speed that we want to and it holds things up or we hit bumps in the road, I mean anybody within the sba industry could Very quickly walk you through all of the nightmares that they’ve run into that things that they just can’t control sales guys tend to be the let’s call it the bitchiest about all of those things when they pop up because there’s always something that We might have been able to do To prepare for that the expectation setting from the beginning and so it feels like that emergency mode tends to kick in down the road and and it becomes less about urgently resolving the issue and more so how to stop the emergency and I think that that Prevents a lot of, uh, frantic chaos that loses focus on what, what we really need to do, which is just get the thing over the front, the finish line, everyone gets too stressed about it.

And the emotions start flying. Shane starts sending crappy emails. Everybody gets pissed off. And that’s the nature of what, what tends to roll out. So how do we step from your leadership perspective? Because we follow you for a reason. How do we slow that down? How do we correct course, correct from day one from sales and set a tone? And what, what does that system need to look like to actually be able to execute on that flawlessly on a deal by deal basis?

Steph: Well, this is controversial, but I’m going to say this. I don’t think we need to slow down. Everyone always says, Oh, you need to slow down. The problem is people going too slow. The train is moving. And, and guess what guys? In America, there are what 3000 banks, someone somewhere can do it faster than you’re doing it.

All right, what we’re doing is a commodity here. We’re offering a commodity. So we have to keep up with the entrepreneur or the borrowers timeframe. We have to keep up with contract expirations. We have to keep up with key dates. Seller wants out. If the seller doesn’t get out by June 30th, the deal’s dead.

So we got to keep up. So there is no slowing down. We got to move at this pace we need to move at. And so the key to that, however, is exactly like you mentioned earlier, anticipation. So if a close date has to be set for June 30th, It is the team’s responsibility. And this is how you get more and more in a stealth mode as a team, as a team, everyone understands their position, knows how to play that position to the best of their ability, but anticipates what they need to anticipate to perform at their highest level.

Right. And it’s kind of like being a musician. I compared this to being a musician. If anyone has ever played an instrument or read music before. The key to being a good musician is you anticipate the next bar, the next bar, the next bar. As you’re playing, you’re not looking at the notes of the notes you’re playing right now.

You’re looking at the notes you’re about to play in the next bar. We’ll apply that same mentality to business. Everything we do, what you’re working on a day. You need to be thinking about two, three steps forward and how that’s going to impact what you’re doing today. So if there is something key that will impact that June 30th close date, you better anticipate it now and do something about it right now.

And that’s what you’re talking about. The frustration when a salesperson comes in and is frustrated. Because salespeople are thinking about what needs to happen for June 30th. We’re not living just in the moment we’re living on June 30th. So let’s train the whole team to think about June 30th. And what do we need to do to anticipate my role here on that June 30th deadline? That’s the disconnect. And that’s, what’s really hard about working on a team of 30, 50, 100 people, right? How do we get all 30 people here? Anticipating June 30th, staying on track in the moment. It’s a, it’s a multitask.

Brian: , so Steph touched on something, um, that I thought was really interesting. You were saying about there’s 3000 banks out there. And if, if we’re not doing it, or if, you know, bank Y is not doing it, then there’s going to be another bank that does it. Right. Just as well. And I was looking up this quote that Shane had sent over from Thomas Edison.

And it literally says this opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. If you procrastinate on that work, someone else is gladly taking the deal. And how true is that? Right. For us, if we don’t get a term sheet out, if we don’t turn something quickly enough on the front end, especially then there’s five other lenders.

With a paper in hand saying, Hey, I’ll do your deal. No problem.

Shane: that sense of anxiety is built from trauma because of the, the torture we put ourselves through and the stupid decisions that we’ve made historically.

I think back to the beginning of my career, my hotheadedness and how often I push granted that hotheadedness still has kind of stuck around, maybe a little bit more channeled now, but I think. In the end it’s in that that i’ve kind of redirected my focus and drive towards Solutioning as opposed to just avoiding the the cliffs that I tend to want to jump off of with my stupid mouth So the uh early on in my career I would i’ve been burned like left and right and I think we’re all there and it’s it’s from those failures that we’ve kind of figured out how to Not to set up the framework to build urgency because we know that if we don’t put heat on it from day one that it Will inevitably just hit monotony It will fall into one whether whether or not we it might even hit monotony for ourselves but to the point where if we’re not putting Constant pressure on a transaction from the moment we receive it and try to execute the same way every single time even to the point where it gets handed off down the line to underwriters or closers and not keeping that sense of pressure on the transaction That it will fall by the wayside doesn’t because the whole squeaky wheel concept Is not an not an application and so that the transaction inevitably dies.

Nobody really understands the urgency Unfortunately, I also think that that builds a sense of if we’re not being that loud all the time Does that mean that the transaction we’re working on now? Is not an urgent one and that this idea of the people that we have to work on are they lost in this sense of? Um, I’m only going to react if I’m being, if, if the outside force of the BDO comes in and is telling me I need to react or I get pressure from the manager, or is there something underlying that helps me to act that same way? Every single time I got, I’m fixated on this now. And then after 19 years of doing this, it seems like going back to the Stephanie’s earlier comments, we need KPIs. As as youths to be able to actually like learn the habits What happens when you’re 25 years in business and from everyone’s perspective you’re not performing Like I talk me through that stuff. Like if it’s you’re in this we call those the dinosaurs I sometimes even feel myself being pulled into this fossilized environment where I can’t change and i’m always trying to do Stuff the same way thinking that I I know all my crap. So how do we? How do we transition out of that? How do we build back out? Cause my head keeps telling me I need cape. I need something back in stone. That’s pushing me and driving me just like I had from day one and to be able to execute that mastery. So how do we change? How do we do something different?

Steph: Well, I think that, um, people don’t change. People are who they are. And I think as leaders, that’s where difficult decisions come into play. And when you’re, let’s just pretend this is a sports team, right? When you’re running a professional sports team, our job is to win championships. Our job and the job of all the athletes on the team is to be the best every day, not to be mediocre. These people are making big bucks to be the best every day. And like you said, Brian, it’s competition pressure, right? Competitive pressures. Will motivate you or should, and if they’re not, then that means maybe you don’t want to play the game anymore and you just want to go work in the back rooms. That’s fine, you know, but yeah, there are thousands of banks in this country with competitive, uh, value seeking bankers out there wanting to make a difference every day. And that’s still who I am after doing this for 25 years, I wake up every day and I want to do my best. I don’t wake up in the morning and say, Oh, I sure hope I have a pretty mediocre day. It’s just not who I am. I’ll never be able to live that way. So if you want to keep being the best, you have to surround yourself with other people that want to be the best too, because we’re on a team here.

This is a team sport. I can’t be the only one dribbling that ball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth all day. That’s not sustainable. We’re not going to win, right? So we need a team of, of like minded winning mentalities every day. And, and as a leader, if you wake up in the morning and half the team doesn’t want to win that half needs to sit on the bench then and we’ll find players that do want to win because the beauty of living in this country is talent is everywhere. And hunger, believe it or not, is also everywhere. And it doesn’t matter what age or how long you’ve been doing it. I’m hungrier today than I’ve ever been.

Shane: Interesting. I honestly think I disagree with you when it comes to the very first thing you said that people can’t change. And I say that because if people can’t change, if they don’t want to change, therein lies a problem, right? Or they can’t change if they’re constantly looking outside of themselves and blaming outside forces for the reason why they can’t change, right?

There’s no sense of internal locus of control. So this, this, this sets them back and prevents them from really ever being at a point where they will. And unfortunately, I have this conversation on the weekly at church on Sundays. and and I’m because I spend that time looking internally to figure out what the hell am I doing that’s actually stopping me from being a better person.

And then Brian gets the recipients of some of the text that I send him apologizing for being a giant idiot during the week because he gets to witness it firsthand. And then emailing Stephanie, I email you, come on, 

you get 

Steph: get the, where’s my apologies? I never got an apology. Not one time.

Shane: blindly, let’s call it that I

Steph: I still would like a nugget of apology every once in a while.

Shane: apologize for the frustration that I cause you on a day to day with my. Belligerent rhino charging attitude and inability to not rhino hoof my keyboard and send out messages that I shouldn’t send out. But in the end, I think that the, the changing ability, 

Brian, that’s your word, the rhino hoofing, I’m using it now, right?

That’s okay. As opposed to fat fingering, we decided amongst ourselves via my provocation that I I’m no longer the fat finger. I’m now the rhino, rhino hoofer 

on 

Steph: Wait, but Brian, this morning I told him he’s like the donkey. You can’t be a rhino donkey. You know, like the donkey in Shrek?

Shane: It works. It works. It’s okay. We’ll go 

Steph: Ah, I don’t know. 

Shane: trigger back to that. And I, because I think honestly, both senses, both of those mentalities are needed. If you’re in a company, if you’re in an SBA department, that that philosophy is necessary. We have to have a balance of both. We need team players. We need cultural players, guys who are going to fit our box and think like we do. And if that assessment isn’t constantly being looked at or being like brought back to. We’re going to have a department full of dead weight, and that I, so I agree with that element of it. I think the other side of this equation is really understanding that are people of the right mindset that they could change.

And you can test that. I mean, it’s honestly having dialogues and having rant, you know, performance reviews and, and, and just constant manager follow up. You can really test to see if people want to do better, or if they’re just satisfied with what they’re performing, they think that they’re hitting the status quo. Um, and some of those, if those measurement tools aren’t being implemented, they tend to become complacent. Which is contrary to what we’re talking about today, which is the necessity for urgency, this constant, like, productivity pull that we’re trying to reach out to those around us. To help customers to help us be more profitable to help what we’re doing in a daily day to day actually sync up Because it really I think when you have one person that’s driving With that level of urgency and then the next person it falls down on that is it becomes immediately Visible like you can actually almost almost tangible where you can touch The, the lack of movement that is actually happening on a transaction.

So I don’t know, Brian, what do you think about, about the, the balanced approach to it, as opposed to I’m going to fire your ass. If you don’t perform this, that’s, that’s my interpretation of what Steph said.

Steph: I like it. I like fear. Fear’s good. Fear’s a motivator.

Shane: It’s one way of motivating. This is for sure.

Brian: I don’t know. It’s tough, right? Because, um, you know, on the one hand, you want to be empathetic with people and try and meet them where they are. But on the other hand, uh, in a professional environment, if you are, you know, we’re all trying to make ends meet, right. We’re all trying to make enough to support our families or do whatever our goals are.

And to some degree, it kind of falls back to that, like, Hey, if we’re not, if we’re not taking care of the customer, if we’re not operating on their playing field and helping them at what they do, not making them conform to what we do, then I don’t know that we’re really helping them very much, right? We’re, we’re kind of, um, we’re just not being helpful to them in, in focusing on what needs to be focused on.

It’s a, it’s a tough position to be in, but overall you have to, like you’re saying, Shan, you got to find that balance. And I think it comes from, again, having all of your systems set up, having things in place so that you can see who’s performing and who’s not. And you try and get the best people you can, just like that, you know, that book I remember reading in college, Good to Great, right?

Getting the right people on the bus in the right positions is like, is the biggest challenge a lot of times. And I know we’ve seen that in, since I’ve been in this industry, it’s, it’s tough to find the right people. And when you do, man, you got to hang on to them tight.

Shane: Move freaking 

Steph: know what 

Shane: Go ahead, Seth.

Steph: yeah, I’m back to urgency though and a tie a little bow around all this is is in summation urgency comes from those who put in the effort effort you don’t always have to be the best or Perform the best or no have all the answers, but you know what you need to do showing up is not enough You got to show up and want to perform, want to try, want to put an effort.

So when I say you have to have that hunger in your belly, that’s what I mean. I mean you want to, you need to show up every day and want to at least try to be good, want to at least try to help that customer, want to at least try to be a good teammate. If you don’t show up with that eagerness to want to try, that’s when it’s time to sit it out and look, you know what?

The hard thing about life is this as you mature and now I’m getting into my, you know, golden years now it’s, which is fantastic. Cause now I’ll be able to really say what I think and get away with it. Like Betty white, you know? Um,

so as you get older, you start to realize not everyone has the knack to play ball. But guess what? It takes all kinds of people in this world for the world to be a beautiful place, right? You don’t necessarily have to play in that position. Maybe you’d be happier playing in a different position. It’s about finding your happiness and where you excel and when you wake up every morning you really want to try to excel and if you don’t have that in the morning Then you need to do some soul searching on is there something different I want to do with my life because I feel like I’m not Maximizing my effort here. I think that’s if everyone woke up with that question I think that the sense of urgency would probably naturally fix itself.

Shane: Yeah. And I think that it’s, people are not, I feel that, that. Maybe people are just maintaining the status quo because they don’t care enough about their job. Like, it’s a means to an end. When all is said and done, the job really is a means to an end. And if you’re working for a bank, or you’re not the owner of a company and you’re listening to this podcast, but you’re somebody who’s actually working in a system, somebody else’s system, As sad as it sounds, like you’re, you’re just a means to an end of making other people more money, like, and you’re getting paid to do that.

So you are, you’re getting paid to execute a certain level amount. And it’s sad that I think that there is this burnout that, that tends to kick in with people. Urgency tends to be a little bit easier. It was a hell of a lot easier when I was in my thirties. Maintaining it in my forties has taken some real freaking effort.

I don’t know about any of you, but I got to wake up thinking and think that I actually want to like engage on a day to day basis, as opposed to it just being something that like autopilots out of me with all the flow of testosterone that was kicking in at those, at those years. 

So 

Steph: So there you go Shane Maybe that is sorry to interrupt you, but maybe that’s your answer to the age question, you know, maybe you’re right. There is some A little bit of a fatigue component, right? As you get into your fifties and into your sixties,

Shane: Oh, absolutely a hell. I mean fatigue is kicking in at 40s Have you been doing the same damn thing for that long? I mean Like an underwriter in sba loans. You’ve been an underwriter for 25 years I’ve talked to plenty of 20 to 25 year veterans in this and there’s some damn burnout I mean you can only do 40 page credit memos so many freaking times 

before you just 

like wanted to help 

Steph: there’s a topic. All right. How to maintain stamina with your sense of urgency in your golden years. You know,

Shane: so 

let’s let’s Pull off of that as kind of a final thought through all of this and brian I want to hear about this because You and I have, have, uh, have come to the realization that we work best when we’re around other people. It seems like the, the burnout kicks in a little bit quicker and even the sense of urgency tends to fall off when I’m just working out of my garage by myself, as opposed to having somebody around that can kind of rally with you and finding ways to, to like rally one another, to, to kind of step up to the plate, you tend to fall down. So how can we utilize our team? And create a culture that allows us to, to excel going back to an office, like James Diamond, we were talking about maybe for a future episode, kind of exemplifying some of our thoughts about people actually being back in the office again. And we’ll, we’ll get into that in a later episode, but even, even then, so, like, what are the elements that, that can help trigger new urgency in you if, if you don’t really have it and your managers are barking at you for it.

Brian: that’s a tough one because if you don’t have it and there’s been plenty of times where I haven’t had it, even as an attorney, I didn’t, that’s, 

Steph: think that’s a 

Brian: why I stopped doing that because I was like, okay, something’s got to give here. So here I am, but I think honestly that in and of itself, switching gears, changing things up.

You know, you gotta, you gotta do some introspection and figure out, okay, well, there’s, there might be something wrong here because I’m no longer attacking this with the same vigor, right? Is this, you know, is, is it a sign of something else? Do I need to make a bigger change or is it simply, you know what, I got to put into practice some of these self help books that I’ve been reading along the way and get my accountability partner and come up with the system, the, the habits that I want to.

That I want to, um, take on. I know, I remember reading, actually, I think it might have been you and I, maybe you, uh, referred this book to me, Atomic Habits, but it basically centers around setting up systematized habits that you’re going to do every single day. And little by little. Those habits compound over time.

I mean, I, I go back to sports cause I played a lot of sports growing up, but, uh, you know, if you’re looking to get better and level up, you got to hit your, you know, 10, 000 hours or 10, 000 shots, however many repetitions. And in order to do that, you got to break that down into small chunks. And so finding a way to, uh, at least at a minimum, motivate yourself, except some of the responsibility for.

your actions and what you’re doing, and then allow that to propel you forward and say, Hey, I’m going to set up this one thing. I’m going to do this one thing differently every single day. I’m going to do this one thing. I’m going to tell this person about it. And that person’s going to help me stay accountable. 

That I think can be a simple way, at least of going at it and attacking it. Little by little, and then, you know, you take on another, another item you want to change, another goal you want to set, and little by little, over the course of a year, if you’ve done these things, over the course of a year, that’s a lot of change you’ve affected in your life or in your career or whatever it is, right?

Shane: Well, so we’ll pull off this with a solution. Then. So what you bring up is this idea of a system that we need to put into place. But we’re going to let’s let’s finish it off with like, what we could implement. This is something we’ve been talking about within our own group and understanding how we operate with 1 another, how we respond on transactions and what what system we’ve built. And from communication day one is the, in my opinion, is the most imperative. So there was a Harvard, Harvard business review research that showed that responding to a new lead within five minutes could actually be a game changer. That’s how quickly like momentum can, can make or break a deal to the point where it’s like you’re 100 times more likely if you respond within the first five minutes, that phone call, whatever it might be to actually win that transaction. So. Simple things with an SBA, SBA lending that the lead tends to be a 60 day process. At a minimum, it seems on app for the larger transactions, the 500 and up things that get more complicated when you have to, to buy a property or buy a business. And you have a lot of third parties that you have to chase around. So we wanted to try to, we want to try to shrink that. And so some of the things we’ve been discussing about implementing are that customer is talked to on the phone live, whether it’s teams call or a phone call. At least every 48 hours. So that means that from the day we hear there’s a, there’s a transaction on the table. All the way to the point of where the deal closes, the final funding, every member of the party that’s involved in helping that transaction proceed, which, which are all sales, I don’t know how many times, Stephanie, we’ve talked about this multiple times, underwriters are not back office, closers are not back office, if you have a touch on a file, you are part of the sales organization, and you are part of that origination team, so finding a way to implement something small and consistent, that’s measurable, such as you just have to talk to the guy every two days. Even if he’s out of town you try to hunt him down you do whatever you can to show the tenacity to attack people And actually get them on the phone to make sure that they’re understanding what’s going on and to identify a problem that might be in That business owner’s brain that they haven’t told you about yet because heavens knows There are things that are happening in their day to day business that distract them from really getting all the mountain of paperwork done on a transaction So finding a way to institute something as small as that could help move mountains and it’s something we’re trying right now And we’re going to see if it really can can can push over so we’ll return and report on How that could be successful and really how that, how, how that helps us move files quicker. But I think the customer service element and implementing a simple system, even as small as that, that doesn’t require a whole new digital system or a loan operation system or buying new technology. It literally is just hell. You can open a damn Excel file as terrible as that sounds. I know that’s almost a bad word, Steph.

We had this conversation. Don’t use Excel. It is the modern banking world. La la la. But that little element could be the difference between something taking 30 days or something taking 60 days because you’re removing obstacles, you’re having conversation with that customer, they feel guided, they feel cared for, and that helps to transition and portray that sense of urgency.

It’s the one element that I think that I’ve never seen consistently done historically, even with myself. That pushes me outside of my comfort zone. To not let a deal sit and, and rot on the side and not go anywhere. So I think finding a way to implement that kind of a tool can really help change something.

So identify and look for ways that you can, uh, that you can implement small adjustment systems that push you outside of that comfort zone to be able to really see the mountain move. 

So what do you think about that, Steph?

Steph: I’m conflicted because as we discussed here on this earlier on our conversation, if you’ve been in this business for a while and now we’re having to impose SLAs on you. My question is this, how do you, how do you take a step back and reflect on, do you want to be here? And is this something you want to do?

Because by now you should already know your SLAs, right? Like we all learned in our twenties and thirties. And now here we are, and if someone has to impose SLAs on me, I personally, if someone said, I need you to make a hundred phone calls today, I need you to report back on your phone calls. I literally would take a step back and say, Whoa,

Shane: Screw this 

Jeff. 

Steph: why do I have someone that feels the need to babysit me at this level?

Because I’m, that means I’m way out in left field doing the wrong thing. And, and I am not performing the way I know I need to perform. So that’s my conflict. I’m conflicted right now on have a mature team, is it time to reassess the team? Because this I’ll go back to Brian, your analogy to sports teams.

All right. Me too. I’ve played sports my whole life. And you know, what’s interesting is when you play on a team with a bunch of players that are better than you, all of a sudden your game is better and the same, and the same is true. Conversely, if you play on a team with a bunch of people that can’t hit the ball, I’m sorry, but there is nothing more frustrating than playing on a team.

With a bunch of people that can’t play because then it downs your game. So I think the takeaway is this, if you know how to play ball, you better make sure you’re on a team that ups your game. And if your, your game is not upped, you have to ask yourself, is it me or am I on the wrong team?

Shane: Well, and it’s the whole asking yourself part because everyone just wants their damn job, those stuff. So is it really the leaders that got to make that freaking call? Do I have the right person in the right place? It’s like Brian. So little, little background, Brian and I used to play volleyball years and years ago. And Brian was, he ended up going on. He was the division one setter for, for BYU and, uh, had the hands of gold as I would have said, I was an outside hitter. We would, we’d play all the time, but you wouldn’t put me in to be the damn setter. So. I could maybe cover it if Brian got hurt or went down or something like that, but the team would very quickly realize that something was seriously wrong if Shane had to go start running around the court as aggressively as that guy had to run around the court. Where would Shane go? where would you put him, if anything? Benches ass. ’cause it’s, he’s not gonna, he’s not gonna hold that up. You gotta move him off the game. He’s gonna play a different sport. So there, there is completely agree with you. There is, there is movement that has to happen. So how do, how do we instill that change then?

How do we actually get people to do any different? So you say, you, you say that that’s, it’s gonna be one thing. It’s gonna be, we gotta, people gotta go. People don’t, they don’t fit the process. I think in order to present that data effectively, it requires. Good leadership. It requires somebody who can stay and say, look, I’m not judging you on your performance. I’m judging our performance for the customer. You have a part to play in this, and this is something I’m instituting. It’s not a way for me to control you. It’s a way for me to control output output for what actually needs to be executed. And I want my customer to feel this way all the way through. So as a leader of the organization, you set that tone. Everyone should step up. That, that would weed them out. That separates the weed from the chaff in this part, right? Like, you have to have somebody that just says, this is where we, I want us to point, we all need to point. If you don’t point that direction Then you can move on because this is where we got it Like how we have to execute and what I expect out of our organization If that’s in play and I have somebody come tell me that that rallies my ass I don’t know about anybody else on this call, but that like that’s the difference between me falling you’ve you’ve done it to me Steph, I mean, we’ve been on phone calls again.

You say no we’re doing it this way and I want it executed All right, fine I’ll go put it in place. I think that’s why I, that’s why I followed you for so many years. And that I, I’m going to continue to is that you have the ability to put that into play for us.

Steph: Yeah, that’s exactly. And that’ll be our next podcast probably is making those tough decisions, right. And how to lead people. You know, I heard the CEO of Airbnb in an interview last week. That said, anyone who does weekly one on ones is completely missing the point of leadership. A one on one does not allow for collaboration and team growth.

A one on one just gives an employee an opportunity to bitch about why they can’t do their job. Well, if you need to come tell me every week you can’t do your job because of all these reasons, that means you, that means you can’t work here. Because I need people that know how to do their job every day and then can show up and do it. Not someone who shows up and tells me why they can’t do it. So I thought that was an interesting perspective about the, the one on one.

Shane: I mean, what do you think about that, Brian?

Brian: there’s a lot of good points you’re both making. Uh, I think it’s a very, very tricky thing, but. Yeah, it, uh, I was talking with a good friend of mine and he was telling me, you know, he, he does a little bit, I guess he wasn’t consulting for a little bit and was telling me how they would go in and have conversations with people and invite them to make changes, invite them to, you know, first accept what they were doing and present the plan, help come up with the plan and then commit them to doing it.

So, hey, we feel this way. I know we really want to do this. If I was able to do this for you and get every other roadblock out of your way, would you commit to doing your part? And at that point, the person has made a commitment to you. They know clearly what they’re supposed to do. And if they don’t perform, then they can either opt out.

Or, find another home for him, as you said, Steph. So a lot of times it comes down to if you’re in a situation where things for us, for example, in, in a bank, if you’re at a bank, or if you’re in a business where you’re not reaching that next growth level that you want to hit. Then clearly you have to self assess and figure out, okay, why are we not hitting that growth level?

And so many times it comes down to product market fit. Do we have this product market fit? And if not, what do we need to do to change it? And is our team able to, and willing to implement the changes needed in order to get to that point where our product is, you know, move in and, and we’re, everything’s selling off the shelves.

If not, then like you’re saying, Steph, change has got to be made. There’s 

Shane: aggressive, 

Brian: yeah, there

Shane: to, to finish this off tomorrow is really, it’s an illusion and only what you do right now actually shapes the, the results of what that’s going to happen. So it’s the ownership, right? That, that Brian’s talking about the idea that changes that need to happen. We have to, we have to instill a sense of ownership on what we need to do to better fit.

So whether you’re on the receiving end of a performance review or the one giving the performance review, are you setting yourself up or setting that individual up for the ability to instill change for them to be able to, to try to do things different and using it as a measuring tool to know if they’re willing to change. That humility goes a long way within the jobs that we take. And so, so many times we, we, uh, we back out because of pride and some of the other elements that are, they’re common that prevent us from growing and prevents us from getting better. So here’s the bottom line. Subscribe to the Lords of Lending and we’ll bring everything that we brought today and additional actionable insights every episode. Act on urgency today. Send that email, make the call, finalize the deal. Share this episode today with a colleague who needs a nudge to just kind of be pushed in the right direction. Don’t keep urgency to yourself. Remember what Proverbs 27 one teaches. Do not boast about tomorrow. We don’t have infinite time. Thanks for joining us. I’m Shane Pearson with Stephanie Dunn and Brian Congelier reminding you, you are not urgent enough. Go prove otherwise now, not later.