Sarah Wolak: What inspired you to dedicate yourself full-time to Momentum Builder after four decades in the industry?
Don Goetling: It actually started as a passion project to help more people. I have been in the industry for 39 years now and have always had a business coach.
My coach said at one point, “Don, you run a division of 163 people with nine offices doing $1.5 billion in business. I can’t really teach you more about the mortgage industry. After so many years in the industry, what do you want for your legacy?” And I basically said, “I would like to provide all the resources that have changed my career.” I almost quit the business because I didn’t have those resources, so I traded hours for dollars and was running out of hours.
And luckily, ironically, someone introduced me to Todd Duncan and Sales Mastery, and it changed my entire life and career, because I was now aligned with the right coaches, the right technology, the right people, the right inspiration, and the right business planning. Todd has been my mentor for decades and I just wanted to give back to the community and provide resources.
I created Momentum Builder to provide that and now I’ve decided that this is my true passion. And to really take it to the next level, I need to spend my time full-time growing it and creating more partnerships and more value.
SW: It’s been a year since Momentum Builder Sales acquired Mastery. Can you share how you’ve worked to maintain the legacy of Sales Mastery while modernizing the Momentum Builder experience for industry professionals who may be feeling as challenged as you once were?
DG: We’ve just had three of the toughest years I’ve seen in my 40 years in the industry. It’s more challenging than ever, and people are more confused, lost, and in need of inspiration, direction, and community.
We obviously lost a lot of that community during COVID. Now we’re trying to bring back the community, not just for the mortgage, but for real estate as well. Now more than ever, the mortgage and real estate communities must work together to capture their market share as we all compete with the large marketing budgets of the Rocket, Zillow, Redfin and so forth.
We provide these resources, inspiration, and community through more events and workshops. We have a new podcast coming out and we are creating a new website that will be a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to be successful, not only in business, but in life.
SW: Can you talk about some of the pain points people in the industry face, and how your role helps alleviate them?
DG: Being in the industry for so long and managing so many loan officers, I have been in trouble. I know the challenges, concerns and needs of mortgage professionals and real estate professionals because we align with them.
The challenge is the length of this delay. There is usually a delay of 18 to 24 months, after which the cycle becomes cyclical again. Last year we thought this would happen in the spring. And when, unfortunately, tariffs hit and rates went back up, it slowed the economy to the slowest summer shopping season in decades.
And what I see is that as good as COVID was for our industry, in terms of income and volume, it really hurt our industry because it actually made a lot of the sales professionals a little bit lazy. They had it easy for a few years, and now if we try to get them to do what made them successful in the past, it’s very difficult to get them to do it again.
What I hear a lot of people in the sector say is: ‘I’m waiting for the market to return to normal’, when there is no normal. It has all changed and we need to help our industry understand that it has changed. There are people who are very successful, so we bring to light all these great professionals who are successful… and how they get their mindset in the right place.
SW: What types of resources, tools, and experiences does Momentum Builder plan to offer or hone to help people thrive and become part of a community again?
DG: The great thing about Momentum Builder is that we are the only agnostic platform that doesn’t sell a product. We are brand ambassadors for the best in the industry.
What we do is research the best of the best that we can find, and then bring them into our community and give them the options. They may not even be aware of some of these technology platforms and how they work. They may not know about some of these coaches, so we just say, “Here are the top six to 10 coaches. Choose who speaks to you.”
We’re going to do monthly workshops with all these professionals and we’re going to collaborate with other professionals for more events throughout the year. We will create experiences – that is, intimate, small mastermind groups that go to a resort location and really walk away with something tangible to implement in their business. But we will also create an experience and a mastermind group that will hold each other accountable.
SW: A theme that resonates in our industry is choice. How do you provide your audience with information about, for example, mortgage coaches to choose from, without your personal biases showing through?
DG: That’s a very good question, because there is always bias. And that’s why, after seven years of organizing events, we’re very unbiased, because we don’t have a product.
All we do is actually let them represent their value proposition – whether it’s technology or coaching. And a lot of it will be done through our podcast interviews, so people can learn more, or through workshops, if they want to learn more about a product that will help them join more brokers as a value-add to co-create more clients. It gives them the opportunity to make the decision.
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