Full Transcript is Below:
– Welcome in to our Top Producer series for the month of August, 2021. I’m NFM TV’s, Greg Sher, and we are so excited to bring you one of the top originators and people in the country, big statement, but you’ll see in a moment why it rings true. Jeff Miltenberger joins us right now from the Pacific Northwest. He runs a branch for NFM Lending in the Lynnwood, Washington area. Jeff we’re long overdue. Please forgive me, it was a long line, but you’re finally at the front, look forward to talking to you. Congratulations on being our top producer for the month of August.
– Hey, thanks for having me here, Greg. I appreciate it, look forward to chatting with you as well.
– You’re a grizzly Veteran. You’re in the Northwest right now, but you started out in Minnesota of all places. You might be one of five people I’ve ever met, in this long life of mine, from Minnesota. How do you get from there to Washington state?
– You marry into it. You find a beautiful woman in college and she tells you you’re going, you’re moving to the Pacific Northwest and you don’t say no.
– Okay, well you know what, that makes sense. So with that said, let’s jump right into the production. 200 million was your number, you eclipsed that in 2020 you’re well on your way to doing it once again in 2021, but it hasn’t always been easy for you at one point in your career, you thought about getting out of the business, but then you stuck it out. Tell us why, and what did you learn?
– Well, I mean, the story goes 2008, the market crashed. It was pretty ugly and lending got negative, man. It was just hard to do a loan, you couldn’t help anybody. And I’m in this business to help people. And I remember driving by a salt factory that’s in Woodinville, Washington, and they do gourmet sea salts. And I thought to myself, you know what, maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe I’ll go sell salt, I love gourmet food. I inquired in and it got into the interview and I asked them how much you make, and I said, ‘Hmm, mortgages sound pretty damn good right now.’ So went back in mortgages, I kind of had a mind shift change after that, realizing that we do have a really great opportunity in this business to not only help people, but also, you know, make a lot of money.
– But even though you decided to stay in the business, your struggles personally, and your journey was just beginning. Talk to us about that, what that experience was like for you.
– A big change in my career, I think one of the best things I ever did was finally joined coaching, got into 2016, full CORE, and just blew up my business to a high level. But during that blow up, it took a huge toll on me personally, not only mentally, but also with my family. And, you know, I kind of restructured my life and got things back on track. And I, and I refocused in on being grateful and that one change, that one tweak of focusing in on others rather than myself, was a massive change in my business, and it’s really catapult us to the next level.
– So, you were in the CORE for a handful of years, but recently departed the CORE, because I know you felt like you really grew in the ways it could help you grow. And more recently you’ve joined Kaizen Coaching. And that is with the focus on helping you grow as a leader. Why the change from the CORE to Kaizen and what are you looking to accomplish now?
– Core was really powerful in developing my systems and my processes that I’ve been using to develop my business and bringing in the right people and showed me how to run a good mortgage business or branch. And really got me directed to where my volume started to increase and started to get me to the point where I needed to hire more and more people. Well as I started to hire more and more people, I started to realize that leadership was something that I needed to focus in on. I started to look at some different coaching programs and fell into, kind of a coaching session with Kaizen Coaching. Isaac Stegman is the president over there and he started coaching me. So I was doing the CORE as well as Kaizen. And I started to realize that Kaizen was having a much bigger impact on me.
– If anyone’s interested in looking at that program. It’s Kaizencoaching.com. K-A-I-Z-E-N. So Jeff you’re on the other side of a half a century now, welcome to the club, by the way. What are you hoping to accomplish? I know you’re early on into your fifties, but what lies ahead for you in this next decade, or so?
– Right now, my goal is to empower the team around me, to help them develop their own leadership, and I want to help them grow in their personal and financial lives. And then the same with my family. I really have been focused in on my kids trying to teach them financial, financial direction, investing and things like that. I even got, my oldest daughter is in Kaizen coaching, by the way as well, so I wanted her to start off in coaching. I thought, you know, if my biggest regret is I didn’t start coaching 25 years ago, why not start my kids off in coaching now?
– If I asked you on the mortgage side, what do you think you do best? What is that?
– I think I’m really good at creating a relationship and building rapport in a very, very quick manner. So if I get someone on the phone within the first few, you know, probably 30 seconds to a minute, I’ve established rapport with them.
– You’re also someone that likes to smile a lot, we’ve got a lot of pictures of you that we’ve shared, and that we’ll share right now as I’m talking, look at that smile, oh my goodness. How are you able to just turn that on so fast?
– I mean, I’m overall, I’m a happy dude, man. I like to be funny, I like to have fun and, and you know, at the same time I can turn it off and get to work and get busy.
– Well you joined NFM at a time where you could’ve either, you had two choices, smile or cry. Because when you joined NFM, the pandemic was literally just hitting, and it was hitting in your backyard in Washington state. What’s the experience been like at NFM now that it’s smoothed out?
– Funny story Oleg was, you know, him and I moved over at the same time and every time I’d come to him and I was like, ‘dude, I’m not going to make it, man, I got tears in my eyes, this is, I’m over, I can’t do this.’ And he’s like, ‘dude, you’re right where I was 30 days ago. Just hang in there and it’ll get better.’ We did finally smooth out towards the end of last year. And now that we’re in full swing with NFM like, I don’t see anything stopping us.
– Jeff Miltenberger with that unbelievable million-dollar smile and that great production to go with it. We thank you for your time.
– Thanks Greg. Appreciate it, man.
– All right, we’ll talk to you real soon. That’s Jeff Miltenberger, Branch Manager of NFM Lending up in the Pacific Northwest, Lynnwood, Washington. We’ll see you next time right here on NFM TV.