Sean Murray:
Hello everybody. My name is Sean Murray and welcome to deBanked TV. I have a special guest today. I’m here with Oz Konar from Business Lending Blueprint. Thanks for being here, Oz.
Oz Konar:
Great to be here. Thanks, Sean.
Sean Murray:
No problem. So Business Lending Blueprint, for those that don’t know who you are, what can you tell me about your company?
Oz Konar:
Business Lending Blueprint was created back in 2018 as a result of demand, honestly. So I’ve been in the lending industry for over a decade and one thing we noticed over and over, and you had mentioned this before, too, that people lack is source to understand how the industry works. This is almost like a very secretive industry. People know that it exists, but not many people know how to get into it, how to make money, how to build a career out of that.
Oz Konar:
So I own a marketing agency and through that, we got exposed to a lot of people who want to purchase leads and build this business through that method. They wanted to get some kind of training, which we didn’t have any and I wanted to find a place to refer people out to like a training organization.
Oz Konar:
I couldn’t find any that would be sufficient to my needs and satisfactory to what I think they should be learning. Finally, in 2018, we did an email blast announcing the launch of, back then, what was Merchant Cash Advance Success Blueprint. So that brought in a lot of interest to the company and ever since then, I believe in having enhancements to each program.
Oz Konar:
So this is like the V3 of the program. It’s now called Business Lending Blueprint. So what it does is it provides people with all the resources they need, so they can become an independent business loan broker and alternative lending industry, which has been growing massively in the past couple of years as you know.
Sean Murray:
So you’re training brokers for this particular industry?
Oz Konar:
Correct, but what we’re doing differently, is there a lot of training companies that are training brokers for themselves, for their own benefits. So either as employees or affiliates, or it could be like a multi-level marketing structure. Where we differ is we’re training them to be independent brokers. So they know who the lenders are. They can build the business without needing any middleman. They can get access to leads. They actually learn how to generate leads, and that separated us so much that people are referring to us as a platform where they can independently ask questions and get an unbiased opinion about things and how things work, and that led to hundreds of people building successful businesses through the platform.
Sean Murray:
So you train people to do this, but how many people have actually come to you and signed up for this?
Oz Konar:
So I don’t know the exact number, but we have over 3,000 brokers right now in our platform.
Sean Murray:
3000. So that would tactically … By my calculations, that would probably make you the largest broker ISO in the country, even though that’s not what you’re doing.
Oz Konar:
Even though we’re not an ISO broker. I call ourselves, we’re the largest training organization in the country, both in United and Canada for alternative lending brokers.
Sean Murray:
So out there in the world of alternative finance, 3,000 plus people have come through your program. So there’s a good shot out there, if you’re working with a broker that they’ve at some point went to your school.
Oz Konar:
Yeah. Either they’re employees or they’re managers, or they built their own organizations that are employing other people right now, there’s a very good chance that they’ve either seen our program or have been through it.
Sean Murray:
So you said you were in marketing beforehand, but how did you yourself come upon small business finance, MCA business lending? How did you get into this industry?
Oz Konar:
Well, I did it. I used to be a broker in New York city. So I used to have a corporate job for over a decade, and I used to sell door to door, like credit card processing, payroll. Then one day I came across a lender in New York city and I had this portfolio of businesses that I’ve sold credit card processing to. and he introduced me to the concept of merchant cash advance, which I had no idea what it was.
Oz Konar:
I said, “Wait a minute. So this is like the sexiest product on earth. I can sell money and make money with that.” He’s like, “Yeah, basically pretty much.” So I called a bunch of the businesses that I knew, restaurant owners. We funded one of them and I received my first $4,000 check, which is what I used to make in a month.
Oz Konar:
So that was like a moment of epiphany for me. I’m like, whoa, can I just repeat this process and I did it over and over again. So it was good, and it built me a nice portfolio of clients, but one thing I noticed in the industry is that everyone was doing the same thing. Either you’re out there hunting businesses, or you’re sitting in the office dialing 300 to 500 people to book appointments.
Oz Konar:
That was the only form of marketing and since I was really interested in technology and marketing, I noticed that that’s a pattern. Something is broken here because the entire world is going towards online marketing, whereas alternative lending is trying to get stuck on their ways of doing offline marketing, like direct mail marketing, or phone marketing.
Oz Konar:
They’re all adapting this Wolf of Wall Street mentality. Either you buy or you die, and I didn’t like that and that’s why I started a marketing company first, teaching people how to do paid advertising and organic lead generation and SEO. That kind of transitioned me into a marketing role. Then just a broker which I started out with. So I am from the industry. That gave me a clear advantage and understanding what’s lacking in the industry.
Sean Murray:
So you’re training people. This is not an advertisement. I’m just asking you questions. Are they signing up for this program at the school? When you say you train, you teach, how are you doing it? Is there like a classroom? What happens?
Oz Konar:
So for them to understand how to sign up, they have to jump through hoops because we only want people who are serious about building a business, because this is not a get rich quick scheme that you’re going to sign up and get rich in 30 days. So they have to watch, we require them to watch like a 70 minute video, like a little movie about the industry that informs them how it works, why people fail, why people succeed and how they need to follow a proven pattern, a system, which is the Blueprint.
Oz Konar:
At the end, we asked them to purchase it. So it’s not a free training. They pay to get in and they become a part of this exclusive community of 3,000 brokers. Some of them are lenders. Some of them are syndicators. Some of them are working from home and they’re making 50, 60K. Some of them became our moderators. So that’s what they do pretty much and they get access to an online course.
Oz Konar:
[inaudible 00:06:34] has that. So you log in, you have access to content that’s specifically created for them to follow, and they follow that model and it’s created in a specific format, even if they know nothing about it. At the end of that, they come out as an expert, understanding the industry and how to proceed to fund deals.
Sean Murray:
So you mentioned some numbers in there before. I think it was dollar amounts, like 50, 60 K. I talked about it on here before about what’s realistic for a broker to make in a year because I think when people are evaluating the opportunity, they want to know what’s the potential. People don’t want to put in a lot of hard work if the ceiling is low, but at the same time, if they hear an advertisement or they listen to some marketing guru and they’re like, “You can make a billion dollars,” it almost sounds unrealistic.
Sean Murray:
So one thing I like to pick people’s brain about is, what’s realistic if you work in this industry. I watched some of your testimonial videos because I was checking out to see are people actually benefiting from the course, and it looked to me like they work, but what could people expect? Let’s say they go to your school. What could people expect to make if they follow your program and your plans and your training?
Oz Konar:
Great question. So just like any business, you get out what you put in. If someone wants to buy in and in 30 days make a lot of money without putting in the effort, it’s just not going to work. Nothing works that way. We had our record moments. Someone joined, not from the industry, they funded their first day within a week. Then someone else funded a couple of deals within a month. So the projection we give to people, if you really follow it with the way that we designed it, giving at least three or four hours, focused hours per day, you can build a five figure business in 30 to 60 days. Because in this industry, even one deal could bring you three to $5,000 and the average income of people in US is 40 to 50K.
Oz Konar:
So just technically one deal can replace or come from the job. So I don’t like the mentality of people focusing on the ceiling. Can I become a millionaire? You can become a millionaire doing anything pretty much. So that’s not the real question. The question is, what are you trying to accomplish? A lot of times, you’re not happy where you are, which is point A. You’re trying to get to point B. That be making 10 grand, because you have a job right now that’s paying your 5K and you’re barely paying bills. So you need to replace that income first. So you get rid of that draining job. So I want to make it super realistic. People ask this question, can I become a millionaire? That’s a very broad question.
Sean Murray:
I get that question.
Oz Konar:
You get it all the time. Everyone asks that question. I’m like, “What are you trying to accomplish?” It’s funny that most people haven’t even thought about it. I ask them, we call it [inaudible 00:09:23] BAM, is the first part of determining the goal setting part. They’re asked minimum. What is minimum you need per month to cover your expenses and keep a roof over your head and food on the table. It’s surprising that people do not know that.
Oz Konar:
They’re like, “Oh, probably like five to 7K.” Probably? How much do we need per month? So it takes a while to get that number out of people. Once we do that, our first goal is all right, so what do you need to do to reach that level? Then we can talk about making 10K, 20K, then the seven figures, because you’re not going to jump from zero to seven figures in two months. It just doesn’t work that way. There needs to be a lot of personal transformation and business transformation needs to happen for someone to become a millionaire.
Sean Murray:
Do they need to be self-motivated people or are you going to wake them up every day and motivate them?
Oz Konar:
Motivation wears off. So if you’re going to need motivation to change your situation, probably your why is not strong enough. If someone needs to wake you up every morning to build your own business, that’s just not going to work. That’s why we focus a lot on helping people determine what’s your why? What would happen? Why would you change your current situation? If you can’t really find it, you might be doing okay actually.
Oz Konar:
If you hate your boss, go change your job and find another boss. If that’s what’s causing you to look for something, but we usually look for things like, listen, I’m getting older. I can’t do this job. I have no retirement. I’m a single mom with three kids. I don’t like this neighborhood. I got to move out, but I can’t really do it. I have to commute back and forth.
Oz Konar:
I’m behind like $1,000 a month on bills or I’m making on this current business, 30K. I definitely want to make a million dollars because of X, Y, Z. So I can’t find that for people, but if someone is needs bare motivation to even start a business, I tell them something is not connecting. That’s not how you start a business, and I definitely do not claim to be a motivational coach or anything like that.
Sean Murray:
I’m feeling pretty motivated.
Oz Konar:
Thank you.
Sean Murray:
So you just gave a few examples of people who might or might not be interested. You gave some circumstantial information. Are these primarily people who plan to work from home or do any of these people intend to eventually open up their own company and hire people or this is a work from home type craft?
Oz Konar:
It is 60-40. 60% of the people, they want to work from home. 40%, when they join us, they already know that they don’t want to build a broker shop, but those numbers are skewed because people change over time. I have many people who join. They want to work from home. As they make more money than they ever made in their lives, their goals shift. Now they want to become a broker. They want to hire people. They want to be the boss.
Oz Konar:
So our initial feedback from them is like a 60-40, but over time, certain individuals, they definitely changed their perception on the current reality of their business and they decide to grow a shop and hire virtual people. We had someone who’s from the real estate industry, for example. Within six months, he moved out and he now has like 17 employees in office.
Oz Konar:
That’s what he wanted to accomplish. I have my opinions on in-office employees and things like that, but that’s their business at the end of the day. We’re not managing them.
Sean Murray:
So you have people working for you?
Oz Konar:
I do. We have a full team of people. We used to be actually not far from you here in midtown New York city pre pandemic, but at some point we had 11 people in the office. That always bothered me because it’s always better to give people freedom to work from wherever they want. It kind of opens up the talent pool too, and pandemic gave us the excuse to be remote 100%. So now I work from home and everyone of my team members work from home too.
Sean Murray:
So here’s something that I just thought of. You’ve trained 3,000 plus brokers. Now, in my experience, because I tend to interact with a lot of business development people who are trying to recruit brokers. They are typically looking for, because it’s easier for them, large broker shops, companies that can produce volume for them.
Sean Murray:
They’re looking for, can I get a million a month from you? Can I get 2 million a month from you? That’s how they think. Not all of them, but most of them. Do these brokers that you’re helping, do they suffer from any type of difficulty and working from the funders and the lenders because they’re working independently? Are they just able to sign up with anybody, like, hey, I took Oz’s training and right now here’s my deal. How did that all go about? What’s the transition?
Oz Konar:
Great question. So every lender that we recommend, they know who you are. So they know how particular we are about which lenders we allow in our platform. We don’t accept any monetary benefit from any of the lenders. So you can’t pay your way into being a recommended lender in the Blueprint. So you need to be running an ethical organization. You need to be funding volume. You need to be in business for a certain amount of time. A lot of my training on specific product and lending options are done together with the lender actually.
Oz Konar:
So either they’re a CFO or someone from the C-level suite, we do the training together. So they know who BLB members are. So it’s not like some random person is sending them an application. We usually tell them, “Do not try to send an application to sign up with them unless you have deals going on.”
Oz Konar:
So we make it really realistic. A lot of times what happens is people, Google lenders, and they just call them. “Hey, how do I close deals?” Well, it’s not lenders have to train you. Hopefully you’re trained enough to know how to do that. They’re a business to make money off of their money. So because of that reason, although our brokers have the freedom to work with anyone they want.
Oz Konar:
We want to give them a good baseline of lenders on different products, and all of them know me and we sometimes meet in person. We do update a training sear in there in the Blueprint. So they all get an assigned representative from that specific lender. So they’re not just calling the 1-800 number. So we have those deeper relationships with every product that we represent.
Sean Murray:
So these lenders, these founders, they know it’s essentially coming from your group-
Oz Konar:
From my network, and they know that they don’t need to split anything with us and they know that we’re not going to be like, “Hey, if you don’t pay us, we’re going to kick you out,” type of thing. I’ve kicked out lenders before for different reasons. For backdooring. They lied, and eventually, every lie resurfaced and you figure out the truth and we kicked them out. That’s why I think it’s important for us to keep the relationship that way for our brokers too. So that way they can have confidence in our ability to recommend somebody and that person being legitimate.
Sean Murray:
I can just tell you from, and I totally agree. I can just tell you from my experience that there are too many people that do what you just said before that they Google random lender and they have like a one deal. They don’t have any relationship with them and then whether or not it gets funded, they’re at pretty high risk of possibly not getting paid.
Oz Konar:
Sure.
Sean Murray:
Because who are they? They’re nobody.
Oz Konar:
They’re nobody. They just got a lead. It’s probably their uncle or someone. So it’s this family they’re trying to fund. They have no idea about the business. So you’re just looking to be taken advantage of, and these lenders, obviously not all of them are bad, but even at the salesperson level, they kind of know that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Oz Konar:
They say, “Sure, we’ll fund that deal for you. We’ll let you know when it’s funded,” and you pass it off to them and meanwhile, you call 10 other lenders and it’s a horrible way to build a relationship anyways. So you’re kind of deal shopping, but at the end you get taken advantage of, and you’re mad and now this puts us a label to the entire industry.
Oz Konar:
Oh, in alternative lending, they take advantage of you. Not really. It’s like be mutually destructive process, unfortunately because you haven’t either done your due diligence or you just had one deal. You had no intention of building an actual business.
Sean Murray:
I’m just trying to picture right now, if a funder is watching, what they might be thinking about the man that has trained 3,000 plus brokers that are out there in the wild, because they’re always trying to figure out how do I get more deals. How do I find more brokers? They’re always looking for the list of them. We get emails, calls like, “Hey, can we buy your list of brokers?” We won’t sell it, and they’re always curious who is out there. Apparently, you’ve created 3,000 plus. Are these people all over the country and by the way, are they only in the US or do you have any outside of the country too?
Oz Konar:
Mostly US and also about 30% are from Canada.
Sean Murray:
Really?
Oz Konar:
Yeah, and we have about 100 people or so in different, and our requirement on accepting people from different countries, as long as they can manage to open a business account in the United States, they can target businesses in US and fund it. So people from Russia, Denmark, Philippines, India, Europe, UK, New Zealand, who are funding deals in the United States. Again, we tell them, “Listen, we’re not lawyers, we’re not accountants. So you’ve got to figure out how it works for you to open a business account here. Once you do it, you’re free to join our program and take advantage of the network that we have.”
Sean Murray:
Do you have anyone doing deals? I get that you have people who are located in Canada. Is there any funding happening in Canada too, or are you kind of staying out of the Canadian market?
Oz Konar:
No, we are not. We have actually actual lenders from Canada. Again, we’re not just focusing on merchant cash advance. We’re focusing on invoice factoring-
Sean Murray:
That was going to be one of my questions.
Oz Konar:
Not just merchant cash advance because honestly, if that’s all you’re doing, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table and you’re not being really consultative because the product is not a good fit for most people. You’re trying to fit that into a box that they don’t belong to. So in Canada, the Canadians are actually more fortunate than people in US. They can build their business in Canada, but they can also build a United States. So they have this double option. A lot of our Canadian brokers are also getting clients in the United States and also in Canada.
Sean Murray:
What about COVID? I imagine that this type of business probably did really well during COVID. I know just from firsthand, I was telling you before off camera that I noticed that there was a lot of activity in social media groups where people were getting together. I don’t know if some of them might’ve been motivational, others, might’ve been work-from-home concepts but it was my perception that there was a lot of this type of activity going on. How did it impact your business? Did it grow? Did you see more people wanting to work from home and become a business loan broker or what happened with you?
Oz Konar:
It was totally unpredictable, obviously when I first started, because I haven’t been through a pandemic in my lifetime and didn’t expect it, and we didn’t know how that would affect anything and everything. I think that sums up everyone’s ideas on what happened. I’ve been saying for years that what you think is safe might not be so safe, which is your job, because I always believe that good is the enemy of great.
Oz Konar:
A lot of people assume that their situation is good. I’m doing fine. I got this job and I get my pay every single week. It’s not that bad after all, but they’re sacrificing the potential of being great, and I talk a great deal about that in my weekly calls, too. So every one of us have the potential to build something. It’s just sometimes, especially after our 20s, we give up on that idea and buy into this corporate mentality of, hey, we can just settle. Why push so hard, type of thing.
Oz Konar:
I think pandemic reminded that fact to people. Hey, I’m really not that safe on what’s going on. I’m not really ready even for a recession, let alone pandemic. That realization led a lot of people coming back to us. They looked into us before, but they were like, “I’m fine. After all, I’m not doing that bad.” They’ve seen that potential, oh, being good is not really enough. So I got to do something to be prepared, have some money, save it up, or be able to do something from home, even through the recession. Because alternative lending, certain products slowed down, but others still did okay. Other industries, they just died off, like totally stopped. So when you did that comparison, where would you want to be?
Oz Konar:
This industry has survived 2008 recession and came out with flying colors and it strengthened after that. We know the same thing is going to happen after the pandemic, which we’re I think getting the end of it. So that changed the perception for a lot of people. So it’s not so much, do I want to become a business loan broker? It’s just, oh crap, what do I do with my life now? Where do I see myself, five years, 10 years and what happens in times of chaos like this?
Sean Murray:
How do they find us during the pandemic? I get that people were thinking about their lifestyle and their career and stuff, but how does someone find you? Because I know you have a YouTube channel, and a lot of videos, a lot of followers on there, but how did they end up in your world?
Oz Konar:
It’s quite magical, actually.
Sean Murray:
It was magical.
Oz Konar:
Sometimes we’re surprised how they find us through different … Some of them through you, your network, they hear of us. Others is through our YouTube advertising. We do a lot of advertising. So far, my ads have been seen by like 4 million people.
Sean Murray:
I’ve seen an ad for you on your own video. I was watching an Oz video and then an ad for you was the ad I had to watch to get your video. I thought that was amazing.
Oz Konar:
That’s amazing, but it gets really awkward when you have a family get together and you’re trying to watch a video on YouTube and everyone, they have to go through their own ad and should skip it or should we keep it? It gets real weird.
Sean Murray:
What’s the protocol for that?
Oz Konar:
I skip it. I can’t stand my own face because I see it so much.
Sean Murray:
You know what I’m talking about? Okay, everybody.
Oz Konar:
This is the moment that you find out more about me.
Sean Murray:
Who’s ready to sign up?
Oz Konar:
The kids, they want to watch simple cartoons and they have to skip five times. We have family struggles.
Sean Murray:
Dad’s videos are on.
Oz Konar:
They think that every video they watch out there, I’m going to show up at some point. They truly do believe that evidence. The other day, they were watching Brad Pitt. They’re like, “Is he your friend?” I’m like, “Sure. Why not? I’ll take that.”
Sean Murray:
I’m his opening act.
Oz Konar:
To answer your question. So our ads have been seen by more than 4 million people in United States alone. So it’s primarily YouTube ads and YouTube ads really, we don’t have any pushy styles. It’s like, hey, check out my content. You might enjoy it. That’s how we drive traffic to our YouTube channel and those who are interested, they stay with it. Usually people before they join Blueprint, they spend about two weeks checking out different content and watching the webinar, jumping on a call with us because we truly want to make sure that this is the right fit for them because like you, I’m playing the long game. I’m not here to all right, let’s just build a business, make a bunch of money and disappear type of thing. So it’s important for people to do their due diligence.
Sean Murray:
It’s interesting. I’ve never actually done any YouTube marketing before. I was telling you before we don’t even have like a real YouTube channel. What about Facebook? Because all right, so oftentimes when we talk about social media marketing, for whatever reason, this industry tends to be different than a lot of others.
Oz Konar:
Yes. Interesting.
Sean Murray:
I don’t know why. Other businesses like real estate and so forth, they have YouTube celebrities, YouTube stars, and it’s like part of the … TikTok and all this stuff and for whatever reason, this particular business, at least in my experience tends to be a little bit more old fashioned. I don’t know what your take is, but YouTube for whatever reason, tends to be one that people don’t take that much advantage of. Is there any value for, let’s say like a broker or a lender to use YouTube as part of their marketing? I know you use it, but what about a lender or broker?
Oz Konar:
One thing about YouTube that’s different than other social media platforms is that the half-life of content is really, really long. So I create a content in 2017. People still find me through that and become a part of our YouTube channel and watch other stuff. So that doesn’t happen anywhere else. So the content gets really old and aged in any other platform. Like Instagram, you post a story, gone in 24 hours. It’s just not there.
Sean Murray:
You spend all this time on your story.
Oz Konar:
Exactly, and TikTok, look at TikTok. So your preparation probably takes like two hours to shoot that video, and it just gets old in like 30 minutes.
Sean Murray:
What’s the call to action there. You know what I mean?
Oz Konar:
What would you be accomplishing here? If you want to be this online influencer celebrity, that’s fine but what are you really building? So I’m not anti-social media, but I definitely limit my time spent on certain channels. I have a Facebook newsfeed blocker, so I don’t have to scroll. Same thing with, I do use Instagram, but a team handles that. I don’t handle it. Same thing with Instagram, even if you’re not doing a story, the post people see it algorithmically, and then it kind of … Unless they come back and look at your profile, it’s not there.
Oz Konar:
So if you compare all of that against YouTube, YouTube is the winner and will be the winner for the next five, six years. So anyone, any business and like you said, alternative lending industry for whatever reason. I don’t know if they’re afraid to show up on YouTube or whatnot, but there’s a lot of valuable content that needs to be shared and they don’t need to be involved every single day, unlike other channels, because you can’t build an Instagram following unless you’re shooting stuff every single day. That’s not YouTube, but you can do like a live stream or invite everyone that you know on your email list and just answer questions.
Oz Konar:
That’s pure value content. You can redistribute over and over again. You can use it in your email campaign. So I agree with you that people are not … Especially in alternative lending industry. They spend a lot of time on their website and a lot of money on the website, but not so much on other platforms that will be very easy to reach their target audience because millions of people are searching online, especially through YouTube, on how to get funding for their business. To me-
Sean Murray:
They’re searching on YouTube?
Oz Konar:
No, they’re searching on Google.
Sean Murray:
That was going to be my last question-
Oz Konar:
But the content consumption behavior has shifted. People search on Google, but they don’t want to read a blog on it. They don’t want to read the 5,000 word blog on it. They switch to YouTube to watch content.
Sean Murray:
Wait, you’re saying people want to watch videos?
Oz Konar:
Yeah, what a concept, and short content. Two to three minutes. So especially if they sit down and shoot 10 videos and put it out there, I can guarantee you that over long-term, it will be beneficial. You can’t do that in any other platform. So I think anyone watching it, they don’t need anything fancy. They you can just show up and talk about their business and will be fine.
Sean Murray:
So you’ve actually made videos, you said three, four years back that people just find now and then they’ll catch up and see the newest stuff or reach out to you.
Oz Konar:
Because once they’re in that channel, they keep seeing it. Actually, my first video is when I got really aggravated. I got off a phone call with a broker that we were doing marketing services. This guy was persisting and arguing with me that the future isn’t telemarketing. Like I’m here. I can pick up the phone and make deals happen.
Sean Murray:
What year was this in?
Oz Konar:
This is 2017. I was like, all right, that’s interesting and this was like the 10th conversation I had that week. I got really pissed off. So I pulled up a whiteboard, little tiny one. I said, “Here’s how are we going to fail in this industry.” It was a really negative video.
Sean Murray:
Is it still up?
Oz Konar:
It’s still up. A lot of people were like, whoa, and I started getting emails. No one called out this industry like this. If you do this, you’re going to fail. If you do this, your turnover will be like 60%. If you keep doing direct mail, guess what? The open rate on direct mail is 1/10th of 1%. Keep doing that. So it was like 16 minutes or so and I’m like, wow, I can’t believe I just did that. I offended a lot of people.
Oz Konar:
I post it out there and even to this day, they used to they’ll see that and say, “Good job, man.” So again, it wasn’t planned. I didn’t have any content or strategy.
Sean Murray:
You were just angry.
Oz Konar:
I was just angry. I just wanted someone to listen to me and the first year, only like 20 people have watched it. I’m like, ah, that’s pathetic. No one to see it.
Sean Murray:
No one was there to witness your anger. You wanted the whole world to see how angry-
Oz Konar:
I even thought about deleting it. I’m like, I’m not angry anymore. Should I just delete it? But then that’s what I mean. This is like the biggest evidence of content on YouTube never dies. Especially if someone is a lender, let’s say they’re comparing you to some other competitor. Don’t you want him to find more information about you?
Sean Murray:
Sure.
Oz Konar:
That makes a lot of difference.
Sean Murray:
All right. So you mentioned a few things in there. You mentioned telemarketing, direct mail. What is your opinion on them? Do you think they work, do you think that they are the future?
Oz Konar:
Future. Yes. If they were, they would not have been replaced with something else. The market works that way. If something is not really working, something else replaces that, and market has its own rules. I’m not against telemarketing as long as the owner, and I’m talking to the brokers, is not doing that. So what happens a lot of time is owner want to set the example.
Oz Konar:
Listen, I can dial 400 people and make two appointments. Well, how do you double that business? Are you going to dial 800 people a day? Are you going to hire more people, then your entire marketing walks out at 5:00 PM. You have 10 people dialing and they walk out. Your marketing’s done. So you’re not going to market after 5:00 PM? That’s silly. So as long as the part of a bigger strategy, I’m okay with that, but it is so inefficient.
Oz Konar:
It is better to have people call on the inbound leads that you can generate really economically. For example, generating leads on Facebook for alternative lending is less than a dollar. They can have an entire opt-in form filled out with the person’s name and phone number, their address, how much they need and all that stuff for less than a dollar, if you’re doing paid advertising.
Oz Konar:
So then instead of having 45 people dial, you can get the same results with like four or five people. So to me, that’s how I look at telemarketing. Same thing with the direct mail. I used to run a direct mail company. Direct mail is not dead. It still works, but the strategies have changed. In fact then, you would just do one blast and still make money. Right now you need three, four consecutive direct mails of same type to remind yourself because the attention span of people, they came down.
Oz Konar:
So back then in 2015, it was like a minute and a half, right now it’s like 16 seconds. Then some claim is less than that. So we don’t know the real number actually. So you have to match the right marketing method to the right audience. So for that reason, you can still use them as long as that’s not your go-to option because there’s no way you’re competing with the rest of the market. You’re just going to make money … You just bought yourself a job, let’s just say that.
Sean Murray:
So the dream is, you mentioned the dream. It’s inbound marketing. You don’t have to do telemarketing. People just call you.
Oz Konar:
Call you. You get the leads.
Sean Murray:
It sounds amazing, but how do you get those people to find you and call you? You mentioned something about Facebook. Is that part of your course?
Oz Konar:
It is. We talk a great deal about organic marketing and paid advertising. So you need to develop certain skills for that to happen. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow and people are going to go crazy over you. So you need to learn how to generate demand or channel demand to your channel. That’s done organically. You can do through Instagram, through LinkedIn. There’s so many strategies that we train our members on, but if you want the volume, if you want to add fuel the fire, that’s paid advertising because you can literally pay to purchase leads, which is another topic that it’s talked a lot about in this industry. We get a lot of calls. “Just, I don’t want the program. Can you just sell me leads?” No, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Oz Konar:
Because if I give you leads, you’re not going to do much about it. Well, I’m a closer. I close everyone. Well, that’s the problem right there. You shouldn’t be closing everyone. That’s the first thing. So if you’re into buying leads and if you have somewhat of a budget, it’s way better to generate your own leads that you own, than purchasing a lead list that’s been sold 5,000 times to other people.
Oz Konar:
That’s not the best way to build a business. That’s what I’m saying. So yes, it might sound like a dream, but if you learn the skills, you will never give that up to go back to phone sales. I’ve done phone sales for three years. I’m not missing a day of that.
Sean Murray:
I did that too. I did telemarketing in this industry as well. At this point, it was honestly like more than 10 years ago. I burned out from it. There are people who can do it their whole lives, who can make the 400 dials per day and they’re totally fine doing it when they’re 50, 60 years old. Hopefully by then, they have people doing it for them. They’re not doing the dials, but I did burn out after about three years.
Sean Murray:
I want to go back to this video you talked about before, where you were mad, because it’s my understanding you also have worked with people who were already brokers. These weren’t random people, because there’s some people that I know personally, who were already in the business, who then went to your school, even though they already understood the product. So I’m wondering what type of things do brokers get stuck on that they feel like they need to learn more from you or take a course? What areas do they get stuck?
Oz Konar:
We focus on what they need to stop doing first, instead of giving them more things to do. That’s kind of counterintuitive. People think that I prescribed them to do this and do that. I take a look at what they’re currently doing. They’re usually doing a lot of that that’s not efficient. We stop them. We have a lot of existing brokers that used to do 15, 20K a month, and they think it’s great. Well, yeah, it is great actually. It’s not that bad, but the potential could be 30 to 40,000 and 50,000.
Oz Konar:
We have probably six, seven brokers who still work from home with one virtual assistant and they break 50K per month because of that mindset shift. I look at their business model, I’m like, “How do you keep track of your leads?” Well, on paper.
Oz Konar:
Some of them were still doing it on paper. I’m like, “That’s not going to work out.” Spreadsheets, no. Make everything efficient, even if you’re improving your process 1%.
Sean Murray:
There are still people using paper.
Oz Konar:
100%, because it works. They think it works. Then it gets to their end goal, 15, 20K but that-
Sean Murray:
Per month we’re talking?
Oz Konar:
Per month. That’s commission. It’s not funded deals. Money in the bank, but if you want to jump to that next level, you need efficiency in your system. So you can’t have just paperwork, just losing that and losing your deals and things like that. So what we focused on is looking at what they do to generate leads. For example, one broker, they were doing telemarketing and LinkedIn, and he was not tracking the proportion of the leads, where it comes from. We find out that 60% of the funded deals were coming from LinkedIn.
Oz Konar:
I asked him to stop telemarketing, do more LinkedIn and add something else, which is Facebook advertising. Right now that same broker is doing 45K per month with one VA, not doing telemarketing for the past two and a half years.
Sean Murray:
That must be nice.
Oz Konar:
Oh yeah. He was like, “Wow, how did that happen?” Just the magical moment that we talked about, but once you have those skills, it’s transferrable to other things too. Now you’re thinking more like a marketer. I tell my students all the time, “Don’t think of yourself as just a business loan broker. Think of yourself as a consultant. You’re out there to help people. Second, think of yourself as a marketer. If you’re a marketer, you’ll never run low on leads. You’ll get creative. You’ll do something to generate leads, but if you consider yourself as Jordan Belfort,” nothing against him, but I can close everybody and I got to close everybody.
Oz Konar:
Give me a list and I can dial it. You’re burning the candle from both ends and that doesn’t lead to scale. It will lead to some money. You’ll be fine, but if you want to scale a company, that’s a whole different structure than what you could be doing.
Sean Murray:
Every time you use the word students, I’m tempted to think that your name was actually Dr. Oz and not Oz. has anyone ever said that to you before?
Oz Konar:
A lot.
Sean Murray:
They have?
Oz Konar:
Yeah.
Sean Murray:
Okay. So you have all these brokers that you trained. Do you ever get together with them in person or is this purely a Zoom, an email and stuff? Do you ever have like an Oz get together?
Oz Konar:
Yeah, we used to. We tried that. We had done three events in the past and a little mastermind format, like a mini event for like 10 to 15 people. We were going to do one big one then we got hit with the pandemic. So we’re planning one this year, but it is too early to tell if we can pull it off because of what’s happening. So our plan is to add more of that so we get to … Because our community, it’s interesting.
Oz Konar:
They have their own local meetings before the pandemic. Like BLB members, we can call them BLB members or students. They would get together in Atlanta, Georgia, in California. They started having their own local get-togethers which was not organized by me. They just decided to do it on their own. Some of them run their own weekly calls for other brokers. They have accountability partners. Like they match up with each other to practice certain things and answer questions.
Oz Konar:
So we have a lot of that going on, but obviously we want to host it to bring all of these people. So I want to get to know them. They know me, but I don’t know who they are a lot of times. So we have something in the pipeline, but let’s see if we can pull it off.
Sean Murray:
Cool. Okay. Well that sounds great. Is there anything … I’m going to give you the opportunity. Is there anything that you would like to plug about Business Lending Blueprint?
Oz Konar:
Whatever business you’re looking into, just do your due diligence. I’m not going to pitch Business Lending Blueprint. I think we talked enough about it. One thing I’m a big advocate of, just don’t buy into the hype. You might see a video of mine saying that this guy made $40,000. Just listen to the video, just watch it to see how it worked out. Go through the content.
Oz Konar:
We have a lot of content. Honestly, we answer probably 50 emails a day. People are emailing us saying, “How do I start?” We’re like, “Go watch this, go watch this, go watch this.” We want them to watch the webinar because the last thing you want to do is buy into something you don’t really understand what’s going to happen because then we can’t really lead you when you come in like that. It’s really difficult. So it’s not a plug, but it’s just whatever you decide to do, know that you can jump from good to great, but do your due diligence and check out the content.
Sean Murray:
Okay. Well, Oz, appreciate it. If you were listening out there, there’s a good chance that one of the brokers you work with possibly came from this guy right here. Thank you for coming into the office today, making the time and-
Oz Konar:
Thanks for the invitation. This was a lot of fun. Appreciate it.
Sean Murray:
No problem. I appreciate your time here. So everyone, thank you so much again. Oz Konar, Business Lending Blueprint, and I’m Sean Murray from deBanked TV. Thank you for joining and tuning in, and we will see you next time.
