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This is a recap of episode 3 of our Mortgage Growth Roadmap Webinar Series. Get access to on-demand recordings, register for upcoming episodes, and subscribe for updates below: View Webinar Series
There is a moment in every planning cycle where the data stops being interesting and starts needing to become a decision. You have identified the gaps and quantified the opportunity. Now someone has to choose where to focus and figure out what it will actually take to get there.
Episode 3 of our "From Gaps to Growth" webinar series is built around that moment. CEO Laird Nossuli and COO Bernard Nossuli walk through how to prioritize the opportunities worth pursuing, set realistic goals, and match resources to the task at hand.
Opportunity is everywhere, but resources are not. Prioritization is what turns a long list of gaps into a workable strategy, evaluating opportunities based on size, fit, feasibility, and expected return before committing to any of them.
To understand the value of an opportunity, lenders need to examine it through multiple lenses:
If the opportunity stems from a gap, diagnose why before choosing a solution, and make sure it is something you can reasonably pursue. Goals should be specific, measurable, and grounded in market opportunity, with resources (people, products, partnerships, processes, and dollars) matched to both the opportunity and the size of the goal.
Before settling on a metric, these questions need to be asked: How large is the opportunity? How are we performing today, and how has that changed? Who is winning, and why? What type of gap are we trying to close? What resources would actually move the needle?
Answers to those questions point toward the right metric. Here is how different gaps map to different measures of success:
You may need to establish more than one goal to address a singular problem. Identifying primary and secondary metrics is part of the process.
Another key decision is whether to anchor goals to a geography, a borrower segment, or a combination of both. This depends on where the gap is concentrated.
Geography-based goals work best when the gap is concentrated in specific places as measured by metrics like tract-level applications, originations, market share, and LO coverage. Borrower-based goals work best when the gap is concentrated among certain groups, tracked through applications, originations, penetration, approval rate, and pull-through by borrower segment.
But the strongest goals tie both together, measuring applications and originations by borrower segment within priority geographies at the same time.
Goals also need to be specific enough that a team can act on them and leadership can evaluate whether they are working. The difference between a weak goal and a strong one comes down to specificity:
You start with goals, but you don't start with goals in a vacuum. You need to understand the market itself. In the mortgage industry, the default has often been to take last year's number and add 10%. That doesn't work, because if the market is moving faster than 10%, doing 10% means losing share, and if the market is moving more slowly, you are setting your team up to fail.
The baseline tells you where you have been. The forecast tells you where demand is heading. Together they produce a target that is realistic, forward-looking, and strategically meaningful.
Consider these six questions as goal-setting steps:
Question
Goal-setting Step
Establishes the baseline.
Determine whether the baseline is reliable or needs context.
Adjust for the market forecast.
Compare expected performance to the opportunity.
Define and quantify the strategic lift.
This becomes the opportunity goal.
Adjusting for how the market shifts is critical before setting goals, and it never stops. Every three to six months, the target should be reassessed. That’s because market conditions rarely hold still. A lender with a baseline of 20 loans faces a very different conversation depending on whether the market is growing, flat, shrinking, or shifting toward specific tracts or borrower segments.
In addition to revisiting the goal-setting process over time, you'll also want to customize goals to reflect local market conditions, and in many cases you'll want to set different targets for each market you serve.
Applying the same target across every market looks consistent, but it’s rarely actually strategic, because it ignores the factors that make each market different: opportunity size, gap width, market composition, the lender's starting position, and the resources already on the ground.
Increasing resources does not automatically mean spending money. Instead, it's about matching the type and level of resources to the specific gap you are trying to close.
Lenders tend to default to thinking about people—specifically, hiring—when the resource conversation comes up. But the checklist is broader than that. Before finalizing any goal, lenders should be asking:
The framework Laird and Bernard present is cyclical by design. Setting a goal surfaces a resource question. The resource question reshapes the goal. The goal informs prioritization. Prioritization loops back to opportunity. Done well, that back-and-forth is how strategy gets built.
The best opportunities in mortgage lending create both business value and community value, and getting this work right is what makes both possible.
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