When you’re busy with the day-to-day work of your mortgage business, it can be difficult to find time to work on your business and the activities that will propel growth. Investing in your business is just as important as the work you do with your clients.

That’s why it’s so important to carve out time to work on growing your business instead of spending all your time in your business. Focused activities like the ones we’re talking about can allow you to have much-needed time to find ways to make your business more efficient and able to scale.

Here are some ways you can regularly invest in and focus on your mortgage business.

Attend Industry Events

Mortgage industry events are one of the best ways you can learn about and connect with all things that are happening outside of your own business. The industry is constantly changing, in everything from technology to marketing to consumer behavior, so staying abreast of how others in the industry are adapting and finding success in a face-to-face environment is important.

In fact, at APM, we think it’s so important to have industry events for our employees that we host two large-scale ones each year for all our loan officers, managers and guests. We have an annual spring summit as well as a fall symposium.

Spring summits are regional events where our leadership team, partnering economists, and experts in the industry come to an area and provide a full day of content designed to help you take your mortgage business to the next level.

The good news is that our spring summits are just around the corner. APM will be hosting six of these Summit Events throughout the spring of 2020 in the following locations:

• San Ramon, California
• Sacramento, California
• Salt Lake City, Utah
• Costa Mesa, California
• Renton, Washington
• San Antonio, Texas

If you’re interested in being our guest, we’d love to have you! Just click the link to get more information about each event.

Industry events like these are crucial for staying connected with everything that’s going on in the industry and interacting with like-minded people who have the same desire to learn and grow together. Plus, these events are just a whole lot of fun.

Build a Network of People Who Inspire and Motivate You

Building a network of people to inspire and motivate you is of critical importance in any industry. These are the perfect people to bounce your ideas of off and get new ideas from them about what’s working and what’s not working in their businesses. You can help each other remember why you love what you do and support each other in good times and bad. Having a support network can make all the difference.

If you have a hard time being accountable to people to make changes in your business, spending time with like-minded people will motivate you work as hard as they are and give you someone who can help hold you accountable. They’ll encourage you to learn and grow, and you can do the same for them. This is all positive for the growth of your business!

Find your group of people by attending local networking events and masterminds. In fact, you may even propose starting your own mastermind group with other mortgage professionals in your area. You should also prioritize attending community events that may allow you to network.

Another idea is to mentor up-and-coming mortgage professionals in your area. Not only is this a way to give back to the industry, but you also may be surprised by what you learn about your own business when you mentor someone else.

Stay on Top of Industry News and Trends

It’s important to portray yourself as the expert in your field to everyone in your audience. The only way you can do this is by making sure you’re constantly on top of mortgage industry news and trends.

Subscribe to mortgage publications that you enjoy skimming through and give you all the most important information about what’s happening. Then, share tidbits of this information with your audience, keeping in mind that you should only share things that are relevant to them and their needs.

You can also stay on top of industry news by setting up online alerts so you know when something has happened that you need to be aware of. Several services that do this are (some of these are free, too):

• Google Alerts
• Talkwalker
• Mention
• Meltwater

These monitoring services can help you stay aware of certain topics and help you stay on top of what’s being said about you and your business online.

Attend Continuing Education Classes and Workshops in Your Area

There are likely many continuing education classes and workshops in your area that can enrich your business and your mind. Good classes and workshops force you think outside of what you’re already doing and consider the possibilities of how your business can grow and evolve. These are also a wonderful way to grow your network of like-minded people like we talked about above.

It’s also worth thinking outside of the mortgage box. Consider attending a marketing seminar, an online webinar about ads, or a coaching course about email marketing. All of these topics (and many more) can be very helpful for growing your business.

Take the Time to Evaluate Your Business

It can be easy to get into the day to day of your business and not come up for air. Before you know it, a year has gone by and you haven’t had a chance to look at what is really working for your business and what isn’t.

If that’s the case for you, make sure you set aside some time each month or quarter to assess your business in a very honest way. This means looking at what’s working so you can allocate more time and resources towards those things, but it also means taking a hard look at what isn’t working for you (even if it’s something that’s worked well for you in the past).

These evaluation times are so important for making sure you don’t spend years doing something without looking at how it’s actually impacting your business.

Some of the key things you should do are:

• Assess your business’s efficiency
• Review financial goals
• Review marketing goals and performance
• Analyze your competitors
• Analyze your customers
• Review your core activities
• Review and refine business goals
• Assess your team’s ability
• Look at what success means to you (this can change over time)

All five of these activities will help keep you forward thinking in your mortgage business. No matter how busy work is in the day-to-day, it’s important to come up for air every once in a while to recharge, refocus, and recommit to being the best loan officer you can be.