October 30, 2024Shant Banosian shares his journey to becoming one of the nation’s top mortgage professionals, breaking down lessons from the 2008 crisis and how these shaped his approach to leadership, team-building, and business growth. Shant digs into why sticking to the basics and working tirelessly were essential to his success, even during the toughest times, and explains how tools like EOS and Traction helped scale his business. He also tackles the often-overlooked value mortgage professionals bring beyond competitive rates, giving insights into talent attraction, client retention, and the real, on-the-ground work that fuels long-term success in real estate and mortgage.
Links and Resources:
- Reside Platform
- Suneet Agarwal on LinkedIn
- Reside Platform Website
- Shant on LinkedIn
- Ep 36 | Navigating the Market: #1 Loan Officer in the Nation | with Shant Banosian
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to the Reside Platform Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube to leave us a review!
Episode breakdown: running a production team like a business
Shant Banosian opened his retail mortgage business in 2008, after the subprime lender he worked for went out of business in a single day. He has since closed about $9 billion in mortgages and leads a team with its own sales, marketing, business development and operations leaders. In this rewind episode with Suneet Agarwal and Nick McLean, he explains the structure behind that growth and how it holds up when volume drops.
Work on the business and in it, on a fixed schedule
A lot of leaders are told to work on the business and stay out of it. Shant does both, on purpose. Almost every day he blocks an hour or two that is only for working on the business. The rest of his day goes to business development, marketing and sales.
Staying in the work is where his material comes from. Talking to clients and meeting partners face to face feeds his social content, his client communication, his coaching and the changes he makes to systems. It also means he can answer almost any question his team brings him when products and rates change, which he says matters more during periods of change.
Everybody thinks they want to have a business and be a CEO, but they spend too much time acting like salespeople.
Shant Banosian
Pick an operating system and stick to it
When the team hit a ceiling, a friend recommended the book Traction. Shant read it, interviewed an EOS implementer the next day and hired him on the spot. He has run the business on EOS for seven years, with one break when coaching went virtual. The team sets goals by quarter, year, three years and five years, and tracks weekly metrics so a problem shows up within a week.
The result is volume of completed projects. Each quarter the team usually finishes 12 to 15 big items, or 50 to 60 over a year. Without the system, he thinks they might have finished two or three. He doesn’t claim EOS is the only answer. His point is that you need some system and you need to be strict about it, which he admits was hard for someone who just wanted to go and sell.
Build departments, then hire the opposite of yourself
Shant runs his team around a short list of functions: sales, operations, marketing, branding, client retention and customer fulfillment. Each week he asks whether something is improving the systems in every one of them. The leadership team meets weekly on actions, metrics and quarterly priorities. He also holds one-on-ones with each leader and lets them run with their own ideas until they hit a roadblock. Suneet breaks down the full real estate team structure he recommends.
His hiring rule came from mistakes. He sorted his work into what he loves and is great at, down to what he hates and is terrible at. He then hired for the tasks furthest from his highest and best use first. He calls “I’m a control freak” a false badge of honor that sets a ceiling on growth. Clients and partners also get better service when every person they talk to enjoys their part of the job.
Development on the team comes from coaching, reading and discussion. When a book is recommended to him, he reads it, gives it to the whole team and they discuss it. He credits that, along with steady recognition and accountability, for long tenure on his leadership team, including through the first period when he had to scale the team back.
It’s really hard to implement 10 really amazing things all at once, but it’s really easy to get good at one or two and then just keep stacking on top of it.
Shant Banosian
Stay in front of past clients on every channel
Shant tells his team that one transaction risks being only a transaction, while the second, third and fourth make you that client’s person. Once his team has a client’s contact information, it runs email campaigns, social media, text campaigns, annual review calls and mail. He doesn’t know which channel will land with each person, so he uses all of them. His database now holds 100,000 previous clients, and past clients have passed real estate agents as his largest lead source.
He records the videos himself because he is the brand. He didn’t enjoy it at first and now treats it as a skill he keeps working on.
Compete on value when everyone else competes on price
Most borrowers open with some version of “what’s my rate?” Shant sees the wider industry trying to make mortgage and real estate professionals compete only on price. His answer is to communicate value on every call and meeting, and to build systems around it. One way he does that is by offering to teach at real estate teams’ meetings, sharing how he builds his own team along with market data. Teams now call him back and recommend him to others.
The biggest thing I learned was hire the opposite of yourself.
Shant Banosian
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Block a set time each day to work on the business, and spend the rest close enough to clients to know what is working.
- Choose one operating system, such as EOS, and run it strictly with weekly metrics and quarterly priorities.
- Organize around functions like sales, operations, marketing and client retention, and check each one weekly.
- Hire first for the work you are worst at or like least.
- Touch past clients through every channel so the second and third transaction come to you.
- Add one or two habits at a time and stack new ones once they stick.
