Notice my sidebar? It’s dummy data for now, but it is dynamic; it works, and it’s reasonably fast. It’s uploading information based on what I have in a Google Doc, and looks OK in my sidebar. (Width: 178 in lieu of Google’s 500 standard).
This means that I can use Google Docs to track my personal goals pretty easily. I’ll get into How I did that soon–as I near completion of the project. I’ll talk a little about WHAT I am doing, and WHERE I want to be.
I like the mortgage business. I like a lot of the business a whole lot. It’s entrepreneurial, it’s fun, there’s a ton of upside. As a mortgage broker the market {sill} allows us to make $3600-3700 per deal (based on a 180k average, and price it as good and better than the banks. But–here’s the but–there’s nothing in being a loan officer that I have to do. There’s nothing in doing it that is a ‘must do’ for me, and that is something that I can’t live without.
I’m passionate about helping people…but being a loan officer is a conduit to that, and not an outlet.
I’m passionate about marketing, learning, and watching something grow; and doing this job is a good canvas, but there are many other jobs I could and would do.
Right now, though, I need the six figure income that I have been earning in real estate to support the leap to another job.
Track Your Goals With Google Docs
So, if I want to cut down on the time I spend as a loan officer, and increase my contributions in business where I’m really passionate. I’m not passionate about being a coach–that job to me has many, many built in conflicts (i.e. a coach’s job should be to get the client through and move ‘em on, and not have an ongoing relationship). What I really want to do is to help companies leverage current tools (i.e CRM).
So getting focused [oh, and I'll get to why in a second post]
My income goal for the rest of the year is $150,000 in the loan business. I want to work no more than 25 hours in any particular week, and I want to cut this down to 10 hours/week of Chris time by the end of the year.
Oh, and I want to provide the industry’s best service, and take 5 weeks off this year, five weeks all the way off.
If a closing nets me on average of 2500 buck–after all is said and done–then this means I need 60 of those puppies to have the year that I want. That means–that all I need to do–is to have March-December average 6 closings per month. 1.5 per week.
There are a lot of numbers I really don’t know: contacts to aps, aps to closings. I know what I want them to be and what I think that they are. But I don’t know the rest of it.
Anyway–I can track things, and I’m going to keep them in the sidebar. The public Accountability will help me stick to what I’m doing; I have roughly 100 readers–they will keep me in line.
I’ll track:
- Hours Prospected
- Hours Worked
- Realtor Contacts
- Other Contacts
- Consumer Contacts
- New Leads
- Leads To Follow Up.
- Purchase Aps Taken
- Refi Aps Taken
- Total Applications Taken
- Submissions Made
- Deals in Process (a different type of goal)
- Closings
- Gross Fee
- Volume
- Quality Contacts in Database (A quality contact is someone that might know me)
- Mailers Out (?)
- Cancellations
- Turndowns
- Gross Fallout %
One spreadsheet page, updated when needed, should be all I need. I should be able to total everything and have one that keeps the formatting I dig.
I don’t think of anything else that I should be tracking ‘top of my head,’ and even with 25 things I may be tracking too many. Usability means we must use it, right? Units, Fee and Volume are the important part of my business.
Now: In the effort to be 100% transparent, I’m going to track some other things.
- Total Debt
- Charitable Giving
- Weight
- Money in our checkbook (The IRS has us hard core hammered, but the deal is: you it’s a metric, you gotta know)
- Books (or pages) read
- Cardio Done (minutes?)
- Resistance Done
- Blogging Done (Get to, not have to).
Google Docs has all of the database features that Excel has, more or lesss, for those people like me that use Excel Docs for what a Database would be more suited for. Plus, I can probably set it up so I can convert it later. But for now, keeping track, measuring and charting this stuff is going to help reign me and my often useless flights of fancy.
Buy Why Am I doing this? Cutting my Job Down, Etc?
Look–the real why is a bigger post. It’s important. My life’s work isn’t going to be a mortgage loan originator. I’m here to give something more than that to everyone. I’m here to help with more than that. That’s not to say that when I’m spending time as an LO there’s any excuse for listless narcissistic disengagement that people get when they are too good for their jobs. I’m not too good for the job; the job has qualities that aren’t for me. Being an originator is the career of many high quality people, and it’s a good destination. It’s just not mine, and I see that clearly. I don’t think I’m leaving this year, but I do think that I need to establish boundaries, and having an income/hours goal does that nicely.
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- How to Set, Measure Share and Track Goals on Google Docs Part 1 of 6 I’m not gonna be all paranoid like my...
