Top of Mind Networks Geeked Out Development update 5/21

About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

Top of Mind Networks Geeked Out Development update 5/17

By: Sherwood Lawrence

Status:

Realistically, we’re another couple of weeks away from releasing suREFIre 2.0 enhancements.

Reason:

Last week we took a very long, very hard, and very painful look at what we were doing from a technology perspective and ultimately decided that our technology approach was no longer serving our business objectives, even should we be able to meet our 5/14 deadline. Because of that, we decided to scrap our “re-engineer a new platform” approach in favor of simply building on the already working platform we have. Said another way, the technology objectives we were driving towards since last year were no longer serving our business objectives and were actually starting to get in the way of progress. On one hand, it was a very difficult decision; on the other hand, it was an easy one; nevertheless, at the end of the day, the technology objectives had to go.

If I thought it wouldn’t bore you to death, I could write tirelessly for hours upon hours about all the lessons we learned and pitfalls we encountered in attempting to re-engineer our technology solution, but that wouldn’t be a blog, that would be a book; and a large one at that… J

Our Action Plan:

Ok, so all sentiments aside, what are we doing now and where are we going from here? How do we re-wire our heads to make sure we don’t lose any more time? How do we keep from setting long target dates for complex coding terrain and then make sure we can hit the dates we’ve set?

This is our moving forward plan.

Build on the platform we have. Simple enough.
Re-alignment of development resources. With a bit of resource and task sharing and reconfiguration, we now have the right people spending time in the right places so that we can accomplish what we need to do.
Smaller feature releases. We’ve broken down our entire desired feature set into much smaller, much more incremental components. So instead of us targeting large feature releases like before, what you’re going to start seeing from us is very small, incremental feature enhancements/releases, built directly into the current interface that you already know and love.
More realistic target dates. Because we’re no longer trying to re-engineer the platform, everything we are doing is essentially going to be a feature enhancement or a feature fix. It should be much easier for us to plan towards realistic dates without a big X factor somewhere that could pop up and delay things. We’re going to set out initially with one date in June and fine tune the target dates more as we reconfigure ourselves.
Continued communication. Ideally, we want to be in a place where we are communicating on a more regular basis, both on roadbumps and delays, as well as feature releases, updates, and improvements. This blog is part of that strategy, but we will be brainstorming on ways to keep our clients more informed moving forward.

So when is our next target date and what will be in it?

Keeping with the new idea of realistic target dates and incremental releases; our next release date is 6/1 and it will contain enhancements to the “contacts” area. Currently, the site is geared and wired almost exclusively towards borrowers. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be de-coupling many of the hard coded assumptions about contacts in the database.

Here is the short list:

Release 1 Enhancements planned:

Ability to add/edit/delete notes for a contact
Simplified data entry process for contacts without loans
Ability to store custom data for a contact
Ability to assign a referral source link for a contact
Ability to create a simple email template
Ability to send an email “blast” to your list of contacts using an email template

Target Date: 6/1/2010

Release 2 Enhancements planned:

Ability to create a static group of contacts
Ability to create a dynamic group of contacts
De-couple industry partners from organization (put them at client level)

Target Date: TBD

Release 3 Enhancements planned:

Smarter opportunities list with expirations and context sensitivity
Personal Calendar with Outlook Synchronization of Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks

Target Date: TBD

Release 4 Enhancements planned:

Ability to schedule and modify Email campaigns
Ability to schedule emails, postal correspondences, and phone calls for contacts

Target Date: TBD

That’s our short list of releases for now. We will be able to fine tune the target dates for each planned release soon and provide a bit more guidance as we take the lessons from last year and apply them to this year.

Final Thoughts

We appreciate your patience with us. Everyone here at Top of Mind Networks is greatly motivated to continue to bring as much value to our clients as we possibly can. Ironically, we’re so enthusiastic about providing great value to our clients, we sometimes get in our own way. That’s a really odd place to find yourself in when it happens; but nevertheless, we’re all taking the steps we feel are necessary to make sure we keep our eye on the ball and continue to provide great value and exceptional service.

Sincerely,

Sherwood

PS, next update in a couple of days.

About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

Top of Mind Networks Geeked Out Development update 5/6

By: Sherwood Lawrence

New Deadline: 5/14

Code Complete: 70%

Momentum: Medium

Current Roadblocks: none

Confidence Level: 85%

What’s going well?

The Javascript jungle has been mostly tamed… at least a bit (it just took me 6 days instead of 4). I’ve successfully ported over all our code to external files so we can more easily debug any issues in Visual Studio (sweet). This is a huge step forward. If any of you have ever tried to debug 3000+ lines of inline javascript, you know what I’m talking about. From a non-geek, practical perspective, it means I’m very likely NOT going to have to cut groups or campaigns, which I’m pretty thrilled about! We DO still have to track down some email issues, but I’m reasonably optimistic about the whole area now.

There is also a reasonably good chance that we will be code complete on contacts and calendar by the end of day tomorrow. Just depends on how many minutes of sleep we think we can afford.

Area	Status	Coded	Details
Dashboard		0%	Fluff, might cut
Call List	Green	100%	In testing
Calendar	Green	95%	Just need to add “client admin” views
Groups	Green	100%	In testing
Contacts	Green	85%	UI fixups
Campaigns	Yellow	70%	Javascript converted, UI fixups, etc. needs more fine tuning
Email Service	Yellow	70%	Debugging issues with the send service and SQL calls
Company	Red	0%
Account	Red	0%
Help		10%	Help forms completed, but this area has a large vision attached to it

What could be better?

Well, I wasn’t particularly thrilled to be short one developer going into our “fast and furious” redo, but I’m really not thrilled it took me six days to straighten out the Javascript mess that was left behind. I will likely be spending another couple of days on the groups/campaigns pages just to get them ship shape. That doesn’t leave much time for Company, Account, or Help.

Final Thoughts

When we roll out again on 5/15, we will keep both sites up and running so that the switchover can be gradual and clients can learn the new system while having a safety net of the old available. We absolutely want this to be a positive experience migrating to the new site, not a negative one. We will continue to work on the new site to get things tight, easy to use, and really start to fill out the Help areas. We will also completely rethink and reconfigure our feature release process. One of the many key lessons I’ve learned is not to try and release tons of stuff at once. We will be working on and releasing micro features on a regular basis instead of waiting a year to release a huge clunker. It’s been a tough year and a tough release, but it’s also been a huge learning experience. There are some things I know I want to go to the drawing board on, but we won’t be biting off huge feature sets like we did initially. Small, containable releases, are definitely the way to go from now on.

About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

Top of Mind Networks Geeked Out Development update 5/4

By: Sherwood Lawrence

New Deadline: 5/14

Code Complete: 60%

Momentum: Medium

Current Roadblocks: Web of Intertangled Javascript

Confidence Level: 80%

What’s going well?

It’s been a couple of days since my last update because we’ve hit our first major roadblock (which I’ll discuss below). The good news is that this roadblock is not related to call list or contacts pages, so the fast data access and quality assurance we are looking for when accessing contact data is not impacted. That code is moving along well and is nearly done. We had a few days delay since last week writing that code (scheduling issue not a technology issue), but we’re at 90% complete and should be 100% complete by end of day tomorrow. The help area is not fleshed out, but I have created email help forms to at least assist people in identifying and sending in problems. The help area will be an ever growing area and never really done. The dashboard also falls into that category. If we don’t get to it, we don’t get to it, but it’s not a critical piece of functionality at this point.

Area	Status	Coded	Details
Dashboard		0%	Fluff, might cut
Call List	green	100%	In testing
Calendar	green	90%	Almost done, working on integration, shared views
Groups	green	100%	Conversion postponed, integration completed, In testing
Campaigns	red	40%
Contacts	green	80%	Working on all the detail pages
Email Service	yellow	60%	Review complete, now testing
Company		0%
Account		0%
Help		10%	Help forms completed, but this area has a large vision attached to it

What could be better?

I was hoping by the end of last week to have 60-75% of this work done. While I think I’m there from a practical perspective, the problems we are having with porting over the Campaigns area makes the practical kind of a moot point because I consider Campaigns to be a critical part of our feature release.

Campaigns is essentially written as 5-10 large pages of functionality melted into only 1 page, with thousands of lines of javascript code tying it all together as one unit. In retrospect, this turns out to be a terrible way to build a complex campaigns/template model. It is too interrelated and complex to simply take apart like legos and rebuild and expect to have anything work right (which is basically what has happened). I’ve spent basically a week trying to tease apart all this code and separate it into more easily digestible pages and while my initial tests seemed positive, I ran into some very hard to track down problems related to “cutting these strings apart”. For the non-technical crowd, I’m kind of trying to get the eggs back from the omelet and it’s much more difficult than I anticipated. It also looks like we introduced a few bugs right there towards our release date that we didn’t catch and now I need to troubleshoot those.

The short story is I don’t feel like I have enough time to try and build a new solution, so I’m going to use the old one and just try to make it more “debugable” and fix the issues we have. This, as I like to say, is still somewhat “non-trivial” as I didn’t write the original code.

Now I’m just writing out loud, but depending on how much progress I can make in this area in the next 2-3 days, I “might” consider releasing our new CRMS without the Campaigns component until we can get it re-written. Although not ideal (certainly not ideal for the company), there would be two main benefits.

1) Primarily, the CRMS system is going to be used to enter new clients and borrowers, view opportunities, etc. (same as the website is used today). This will help clients get used to the new interface and comfortable with it before I throw Campaigns into the mix. That could be a good thing.

2) Second, if I’ve learned anything over the last year it’s that trying to build and releasing a whole new toolset of widgets can actually cause more confusion and discord than releasing small, incremental improvements over time. That would allow us to devote the appropriate amount of energy to each incremental release instead of throwing a whole pile of spaghetti at you and hoping you enjoy and appreciate every noodle.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. My goal (obviously) is to get Campaigns completely solid in the next couple of days so we don’t have to go back to the drawing board on a rewrite. I think what we have, once tweaked and fixed, is still good with a bit of training. We’ll just have to see, we should know by my next update.

About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

Top of Mind Networks Geeked Out Development update 4/27

By: Sherwood Lawrence

New Deadline: 5/14

Code Complete: 40%

Momentum: Strong

Current Roadblocks: None

Confidence Level: 95%

What’s going well?

For this update, I wanted to switch gears and focus more on the individual components as we refactor them to be better/faster. The new site is made up of the following areas with status indicated next to them.

Area	Status	Coded	Details
Dashboard	RED	0%	Last thing we’ll do
Call List	GREEN	100%	In testing
Calendar	GREEN	80%	Almost done, working on integration, shared views
Groups	GREEN	100%	Conversion postponed, integration completed, In testing
Campaigns	YELLOW	20%	Conversion postponed, integration started
Contacts	YELLOW	40%	Working on all the detail pages
Email Service	RED	0%	Needs review
Company	RED	0%
Account	RED	0%
Help	RED	0%

Overall, the conversion back to server side code is going well. We haven’t run into any roadblocks yet. It’s really been a matter of just churning out code. I think by the end of this week, we should have 60-75% of this work done, as company and account are not large components to rewrite, and campaigns is a integration, not a rewrite.

What could be better?

On Thursday, we unexpectedly lost a developer for this project. This meant we had to look back at our feedback and determine which UI elements were going to get the “rewrite for fast access” treatment and which UI we were just going to have to port over till later. The areas owned by the “no longer with us” developer were not UI components that require super fast access, so we’re just porting that code over now as is. This is in groups and campaigns. Fortunately, the loss does not impact our schedule at this point; it just delays rewrites of less critical UI elements.

About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

suREFIre 2.0 CRMS Geeked Out Development Update

By: Sherwood Lawrence

CRMS Geeked Out Development update 4/21

We came, we released, we got great feedback, and as Mark said Monday, we went back to the drawing board. While this is true, we didn’t really have to go all the way back to the “dragging our knuckles” stage of development and we actually have a lot of evolved and reusable code that fast tracks our User Interface transformation over the next few weeks.

To help keep you more informed and better able to understand our progress and/or delays as we furiously race towards 5/14, we wanted to share more of our internal development operations with you; partially to provide more transparency to our work, but mostly because Mark gets hernias and internal bleeding every time he tries to explain our development process (ha ha ha, just kidding Mark) .

Seriously though, it makes a lot more sense for development updates to be coming from me and I’m happy to oblige every 48-72 hours. So, here is my first development update for the CRMS system since our early adopter release was jettisoned.

New Deadline: 5/14
Code Complete: 20%
Momentum: Strong
Current Roadblocks: None
Confidence Level: 95%

What’s going well?

The User Interface (UI) – the UI transformation is going well. We’ve torn apart our dense pages and gone with lots of little pages. I’m almost completely done with the entire UI framework, next just comes putting all the code into the pages.

Back to basic controls – Most of the proprietary (and heavy) controls we were using are going to be ripped out in favor of lightweight vanilla asp.net controls. This creates a little more work on our end to get the functionality we need, but the performance improvements are already noticeable. The initial work the last few days was finding adequate asp.net replacement controls for all the proprietary ones we were using. We have a solution for all but one, the email editor.

Back to basic layout/style – All image elements have been ripped out. Now we’re just using cheap and free styles (like “background-color:blue;” to differentiate objects and layout, instead of loading images from web pages which increase load times. Another area creating load time benefit that is already noticeable.

Code conversion – We’re slowly moving all code back from javascript/ajax to C# code behind files. My long term plan is to use Javascript/Ajax “when appropriate” to help with page navigation, layout, etc. I think we tried to overdo it on the client side to compensate for heavy controls on the server side and just bound ourselves to a sinking ship. I still definitely think there is a place for Javascript/Ajax and I continue to look for ways to use it sparingly, but I’m generally staying away from it for now until we get data access right and it’s no longer necessary for me to support two different codebases (We currently run C#/ASP.NET code for the CRMS and we’re in the process of converting ColdFusion code that runs our backend operations).

Browser compatibility – Making all of the above changes has fixed a number of compatibility problems we were having between IE and Firefox. I was more relieved than surprised by this, but it’s a win all the same.

Dev team is kicking on all gears – We recently brought on help to speed up and improve our development process. We’ve taken a divide and conquer approach and everyone is busy on their tasks. We’re still early on in this “complete overhaul in sixty seconds” project, but signs are favorable that things are moving smoothly and we’re going to be able to roll out code on time and on schedule.

What could be better?

This is my section for honest dialogue about what’s not going well with the project. We’re only about three days in and everything seems pretty positive right now, so I don’t have anything to share at the moment that is concerning me. My hope is that I won’t end up needing this section very much, but if I run into roadblocks or issues, you’ll hear about it here first.

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About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

The Red Flags Rule and benefits of using 3rd party vendors

By: Sherwood Lawrence

250px-red_flag_ii_svg The Red Flags Rule as set forth by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is due to go into effect May 1st, 2009. The FTC guide “Fighting Fraud with the Red Flags Rule – A How-To Guide for Business” indicates that it’s important to fight the battle against identify theft on two fronts: “First, by implementing data security practices that make it harder for crooks to get access to the personal information they use to open or access accounts, and second, by paying attention to the red flags that suggest that fraud may be afoot.”

As part of the implementation of your Identity Theft Prevention Program, you are asked to address how you’ll protect the personal and confidential information of your clients. You’ll want to spend time documenting how you will prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data during the loan process. You’ll also want to spend time documenting how you will prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data after the loan closes.

One excellent suggestion for how to accomplish the later is to use a data archiving service to preserve and protect your physical loan files after they are closed. Physical loan files are a goldmine of sensitive data and should be handled with great care for as long as they exist. The benefit to using a 3rd party vendor for archiving is that loan files (and the personal and confidential information contained therein) are no longer stored in your office and are no longer in reach of employees and staff. This reduces your security footprint, risk of identity theft, and provides secure online access to loan files only to those who have proper authorization.

In this partnership model, your role is to preserve and protect your customer loan file until the loan is closed. The data archiving vendors role is to preserve and protect your customer loan file after the loan is closed.

A data archiving service or vendor should provide the following:

A trackable shipping mechanism to send loan files to them
24×7 secure online web access for authorized personnel only
24×7 secure physical storage
Multiple levels of physical and electronic security measures
Email notifications when a borrower or authorized person accesses a file
Safe shredding of documents after mandatory storage requirements have been met
Full background and security checks on every hire, inc. criminal, credit, and drug screens
Substantial Criminal Theft and Errors & Omissions insurance policies
Committment to aggressively cooperate with authorities to prosecute offenders

The security of your borrower’s data and private information should be everyones number one concern and the Red Flags Rule reinforces this by now requiring you to have documented plans and procedures in place. The benefits of integrating a 3rd party vendor into your business model to mitigate the risks of identity theft are very real and very compelling. It also allows you to focus on what you do best, which is closing loans, instead of trying to become a security expert.

At Top of Mind Networks, we consider the security of borrower data to be an absolutely critical and vital business function. If you’re not using a data archiving service like ours as part of your Red Flags Rule implementation, please make sure you have fully and completely understood what is now required of you to satisfy these new regulations.

About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

Leading a horse to water and the politics of thirst in the desert

By: Sherwood Lawrence

horseindesert

The environment within the mortgage and finance industry has improved “a bit” the last month or two, but don’t allow this to change your view on whether the thirst for regulation and enforcement has slackened in the minds of the public, especially since mortgage late payments and mortgage defaults are expected to continue to rise in the next 12 months. The mortgage broker is still in the desert and they can still be sacrificed for the “greater good” on the way to economic recovery.

Leading a horse to water…

Mortgage Brokers, did you know that…

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) has developed a proposal “for reforming lending and servicing practices and streamlining and improving consumer protections. This proposal, the ‘Mortgage Improvement and Regulation Act’ (MIRA), would establish a new, comprehensive framework for national regulation of mortgage lending to protect borrowers and improve the mortgage process nationwide”? – MBA website.

Did you know that the proposal contains numerous provisions that would impact the mortgage broker, including, but certainly not limited to, further restrictions on YSP and possibly new criminal penalties for enforcement of these restrictions?

Did you know that the MBA has been actively sharing this proposal with Congress and that the proposal has been sent to both the House Financial Services and Senate Banking Committees in an attempt to gain widespread support for its passage into law?

This is a concerted effort by the MBA to define the landscape of the mortgage industry and regulation in the very near future. If you want to know who is leading the congressional horse to water, it’s the MBA.

The politics of thirst in the desert…

It’s pretty simple actually, if you’re in the desert and you’re really thirsty, and someone offers you a direction that will lead you to water, you’re going to go, and you will be grateful when you get there. Do not maintain a belief that the horse won’t drink deeply at the well.

Where is The National Association of Mortgage Brokers (NAMB) comprehensive proposal to Congress that would equally protect borrowers and protect the freedom of competition in the mortgage industry? Where is the concerted and coordinated effort to define the landscape of what mortgage regulation should look like? Usually what I hear about is lawsuits and defense funds and how NAMB is going to “respond” to proposed legislation.

If brokers want to shape and define the direction of the mortgage industry toward one that is not going to sacrifice them to necessity, I think they have to do their fair share of “proposing” legislation and offering to lead the horse to water as well. They obviously need to be part of every dialogue going on in Congress and they need to communicate much better about what they are doing to their members and what they want their members to do.

On NAMB’s website for instance, there is no mention of MIRA in their weekly briefs and their stated policy agenda for Congress (under government affairs) is dated from 2007 for last year’s 110th congressional session. Quick news flash, we’re in the 111th congressional session now and it’s 2009. That’s just weak representation and coordination of resources. As a broker, you should be alarmed by this level of organization and be angry; that is of course, if you’re contributing at all. If you’re not, you have no right to complain.

Mortgage brokers, grab the reigns and help drive the direction of the policies being implemented in this industry. And by that, I mean don’t just try and pull up on the reigns of a thirsty horse and say “whoa, slow down, those are just mirages out there”. I mean lead by understanding the thirst for change and the abuses of the past and take part in helping to choose and mold this industry in a way that will work for everyone involved. That also means knowing when someone else is leading your horse in a direction you may not want to go.

Make no mistake, the horse is going to charge ahead somewhere and in some direction to slacken a dire thirst, it WANTS to be lead to an oasis in the desert. Brokers need to be an integral part of that change and direction or risk ending up abandoned in the desert without a ride.

About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.

Does your mortgage association wield political clout or inspire political doubt?

By: Sherwood Lawrence

In the last few weeks I’ve attended two legislative Lobby Days at the state capital here in Atlanta, Georgia. One was hosted by the Georgia Association of Mortgage Brokers (GAMB) (Correction by Sherwood: It turns out Brokers Lobby Day was actually hosted by the Georgia Mortgage Brokers Political Action Committee (GMBPAC) and not GAMB. While it doesn’t change the core message of this post for GAMB and its lobbying efforts, I do owe GAMB an apology for the mis-attribution and have made corrections in red.) and one by the Mortgage Bankers Association of Georgia (MBAG).

The contrast in preparation, organization, attendance, and overall professionalism was dramatic and cannot be overstated.

GAMB (GMBPAC)

In my first lobby day experience, we met in a room; there was a general sense of disorganization. Attendance was not impressive. I don’t know the actual number, but I would be surprised if more than 20 brokers showed up. We were given handouts and a brief overview of some of the key elements of a new bill that the group wanted to oppose and told we were supposed to go talk to our representatives about “our” opposition. The overview of the bill was good, but no position statements or talking points had been written to help the group stay on message and provide a unified front. In fact, we were asked to look at the overview and try to determine what our own talking points were going to be when we went to talk to our representatives. Interestingly, 8 of the 10 overview points of the bill I was actually in favor of, so I wasn’t personally sure how to lobby against it. Anyway, I tried to take the issues that I did oppose and determine what a concise communications strategy would be for a legislator. I suggested that we at least do a “rude Q&A” before people went into the field so that people would be prepared to counter some possible objections a legislator might have, like hypothetically, “uh, why is accountability bad?”, but since there were really only two or three other people in the room at the time, I don’t know how effective that was. No appointments with senators or representatives had been scheduled for the attendees, so we were all kind of flying by the seat of our pants.

One noteworthy item; there was one meeting with the bill sponsor that some people went to, but some of us kind of missed that window because we felt so unprepared and didn’t want to embarrass ourselves. I did hear later that this meeting went well, but it’s unclear to me exactly how “constituents” like us influenced the result. The few senators who were tentatively scheduled to come by the room and meet the group, well, they just didn’t come; I guess more important things came up. There wasn’t much structure to the day, so me and two other individuals just went Rambo and ended up cornering a poor senator from our district in a dark hallway for five minutes and tried to present an ill-practiced and ill-prepared set of talking points on why the bill was flawed (made more difficult because this particular senator wasn’t even aware of the bill yet). After that really awkward experience and somewhat feeling like an imposter in the capital, our task was thankfully over with and we just went home. I’m not sure why, but our lobbyist was pretty much quiet the entire time and provided no guidance to the attendees. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure who was running the show.

MBAG

In my second lobby day experience, we met in a room, it was very well attended, 70+ I believe, including individuals from Savannah, Macon, Augusta, and other places from around the state. Our lobbyist took immediate control of the day, told us exactly what was going to happen and when. First thing on the agenda was a legislative overview from both:

Rob Braswell, Commissioner, Georgia Department of Banking and Finance
Rod Carnes, Deputy Commissioner, Georgia Department of Banking and Finance

Next was an overview of the entire legislative process, starting from when the lobbyist got wind of something in the works, to the legal review that occurred next, to the actions the legislative team takes upon getting involved in the process, etc. etc. The legislative team was asked to stand and be recognized, nice touch when there are 7+ people who stand up in the crowd in addition to the 4 at the head of the room (and the lobbyist got slightly peeved because by his count, they were missing some people, another nice touch!). This was followed by general remarks about the bill at hand under discussion, what was good, what was bad, what was happening to it, etc. as well as some of the background to how the legislative process works during the rest of the year mixed in. Somewhere in there was a pep talk about how great next year was going to be for everyone. While all of this was going on, we would have occasional interruptions as various high profile politicians dropped by to share their perspectives on the current bill(s) under consideration, sharing their respect and admiration for how well the organization was represented within the capital, and how they hear the associations concerns on a regular basis. These were individuals like:

Casey Cagle – Lieutenant Governor of the State of Georgia
Chip Rogers, Chairman, Senate Finance Committee
James Mills, Chairman, House of Representatives Banks & Banking Committee

There were a few others, but sadly, I neglected to write down their names. All had glowing statements for the association and iterated several times that the issues and concerns of the association were being heard at all levels of government; most offered a few minutes time to answer any questions from the group. The Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner from the Department of Banking and Finance stayed the entire time to help with any questions as the day progressed. After the high profile guest politicians had come and departed, the entire room got up and walked down and took a group picture on the Senate floor of the capital (Initially, I didn’t think that was going to be cool, I was wrong.) This time I didn’t feel like an imposter, I felt like a guest. Apparently, there was also supposed to be a picture with the Governor, Sonny Perdue, but that was cancelled at the last minute (but, maybe next time!). At no time were we ever asked to go find our local representative and lobby them with a personalized, random, off-message, and un-rehearsed set of talking points, because, well…

… you could tell things were being handled. The three politicians and two regulators I mentioned above are probably the most influential in the state in terms of passing, modifying, and/or killing finance regulations, and they were clearly involved. You also had at least 11 other people in the room (and apparently there were more) on the legislative committee who were actively working issues throughout the year. This association felt confident enough in its lobbying position that they could afford to spend their time during Lobby Day educating their members, inviting high profile politicians to come by and share their thoughts, and schedule fun photo opportunities for the group. It felt like a fieldtrip and not an incursion into enemy territory.

Now, if this had been your experience, would you have felt it was then incumbent upon your short time in the capital to go brace some poor legislator from your district, in a dark hallway, without an appointment, who may not have even heard of the bill yet?

Yeah, I didn’t either.

In Agreement

Interestingly, in this case, both associations were opposed to the same bill. But what a world of difference organization and leadership make to the success of an organization.

Which group would you rather be a part of?

These are both volunteer organizations, both important constituents in the mortgage industry, and both driven by member donations and time. So which association would you rather have at your back? Which one do you feel would be able to get your interests heard at the capital? If GAMB (GMBPAC) and MBAG were ever on opposing sides of a bill, who do you think would win the hearts and minds of legislators? Who do you think would get the royal shaft?

Judgment Day

Mortgage brokers are being assaulted from all sides right now, from state and federal regulators, consumer groups, mortgage insurance companies, and lenders. Your role in this industry is in serious jeopardy. To slightly augment a Terminator line, “Listen to me if you want to live”.

Get active in your lobbying associations, for mortgage brokers in Georgia, that’s GAMB and nationally that’s NAMB. (Correction by Sherwood: Although GAMB and GMBPAC can support each others lobbying efforts, they are technically separate legal entities, thus leading to my original attribution mistake. Join and/or participate in either one, they both seriously need your help). I am telling you; you are not being represented well enough right now for you to survive the public onslaught because your role in this industry is an abstraction, your association doesn’t have the right message or enough resources, your leaders are floundering, and you are not involved and accounted for. You will be regulated out of business if your state and national presence doesn’t radically change. Give these organizations your money, but more importantly, give them your time; right now, or you won’t be around in twelve months. And if you find your leaders aren’t getting it done, raise bloody stinking hell until those leaders are replaced. And if you can’t find quality replacements, step up and lead yourself. I’m completely convinced that your survival in this industry depends on it.

And don’t mistake this as broker bashing and jumping on the public bandwagon. While our company does enjoy a healthy roster of lender clients, mortgage brokers still represent a majority of our business. We have no incentive or interest in seeing brokers fail. We would very much like to see you succeed and our involvement in your associations over the years reflects that commitment. But the sober analysis of our balance sheet is crystal clear; lenders are thriving and brokers are dying.

For you to survive, you must radically and immediately change the conditions on the ground, you must improve:

Your lobbying
Your messaging
Your involvement

To be clear, your state and national associations are the only advocates you have right now against a tidal wave of opposition. Without GAMB (or state equivalent) and NAMB, you are alone and you will be swept away by the coming tsunami. You must vigorously and rigorously get involved, right now, if you want to continue to survive in this industry.

Otherwise, in the court of public opinion, you will be weighed, you will be measured, and you will be found wanting. You will also be out of a job.

< Flame Retardant Suit: ON >

Comments/feedback welcome.

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About the author:

Sherwood Lawrence

Sherwood joined Top of Mind Networks in November 2004 after working seven years at Microsoft; providing rare but powerful evidence that it is possible for an individual to emerge from the collective even after full assimilation has occurred. When he is not listening to ambient, electronica, dance music or reading a scifi/fantasy novel, he loves to transform great ideas into compelling products and services.