Welcome to Lending Leadership: The Mortgage Pros—your inside track to operational excellence in the mortgage industry.

In this episode, we dive into a topic every growing loan originator inevitably confronts: how to protect your business, your time, and your sanity as you scale. Specifically, we unpack one of the simplest, most effective systems used by top-producing teams: implementing a team phone and team email.

In this episode, we (Robert Fillyaw, Dave Holland, and Tom Mills) share hard-won lessons from the trenches and strategies proven to free up your workflow, improve client experience, and reclaim your personal life.

Too many originators run every part of their business through a personal cell until, one day, they simply can’t keep up—and the cost isn’t just in lost leads, but in missed moments and burnout. That moment, we argue, is exactly when you need to reset your mindset and leverage systems designed to support a team—not just yourself.

In our conversation, we talk about:

• The pitfalls of being a “single point of failure” and why you need to design yourself out of being the bottleneck
• Specific signals that it’s time to get support (from missed deals to family complaints)
• The mechanics and mindset shifts of setting up a shared phone line and shared email
• How to roll out new systems without overwhelming yourself or your team
• Real talk about losing (and gaining!) referral partners when you make these changes—plus, why it’s worth the risk

We also cover how to organize team inboxes, use technology like soft phones and shared lines, and set appropriate expectations for both team members and clients. Finally, we emphasize that operational change isn’t just about saving business—it’s also about reclaiming your time, your relationships, and your energy outside of work.

Key takeaways:

1. A Shared Phone and Email Are Game-Changers: Running your business through your personal phone and inbox works—until it doesn’t. Implementing a team phone and email reduces missed leads, protects your business, and makes it possible to set boundaries without sacrificing growth.
2. Recognize the Warning Signs: If you’re constantly tethered to your phone, missing out on family time, or hearing complaints from agents and clients about your availability, it’s time to take action and delegate communications to a team system.
3. Start Small, Scale Up: Transitioning from a solo setup to a team system can be overwhelming, so begin with baby steps. Forward a few calls, use a simple answering service, and gradually migrate contacts to the shared number and inbox as you (and your team) get comfortable with the new routine.
4. Change Means Losing—and Gaining—Referral Partners: Not every agent will embrace your new system, but as Dave Holland and Robert Fillyaw share from experience, the agents you lose are often replaced (and then some) by new ones who value your efficiency—and your business will benefit as a result.
5. Systems Create Work-Life Balance: Setting up these operational foundations lets you truly unplug, take vacations, and focus on the revenue-driving tasks only you can do. For the first time, you’ll have the freedom to step away without anxiety—knowing your clients and business are in good hands.

We end the episode reaffirming that change may feel uncomfortable at first, but it’s essential if you want to scale sustainably—and ultimately enjoy both a thriving business and a fulfilling personal life. If you’re ready to take the leap, access our Team Communication Playbook here: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/Team_Communication_Playbook

Thanks for tuning in to Lending Leadership. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a 5-star review if you found this episode valuable—we appreciate you being part of our community!

Robert, Tom, and Dave

doing this, the actual implementation of this, guys, with the technology, and, and it's— that's not the hard part. All like, this is very easy to do, to implement. The, the biggest obstacle is that it's changing. It's your mindset. Most loan officers that we know run their entire business off their personal cell phones until one day they realize they can't answer every call anymore. And in this business, if you're not answering the phone, someone else is gonna. Today we're talking about one of the simplest systems top-producing teams use to protect their business, their time, their sanity, the team phone and team email. With Lending Leadership with the Mortgage Pros, I'm Robert Filiau.

Dave Holland and Tom Mills joining me as usual. What's up, guys?

How you doing, Robert?

What's going on?

Good. I'm good. Listen, this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I am going to claim that I invented the team email concept and was one of the first originators to really put it in place and run with it.

What year was it?

So I'm claiming it. What year?

What year was it, Robert?

Circa 2015, 2016.

You have me beat, man.

You learned it from me, so I know I had— I don't know that I—

I don't know that I could say Robert created it, but I did learn it from him. So I'll give you that.

Sounds like I created it. So listen, let's, let's be real, right? Most originators, uh, everything runs through them. They are the end-all be-all. It's on their cell phone, they're on their email, they're on like all the calls. And that's great until it's not, until you hit a certain point, and then that system's just not sustainable. It breaks. And it actually becomes a liability at that point.

What do we call that, Robert, when one person is— it is a single point of failure, single point of failure bottleneck.

Like, pick a term, right?

Completely. I mean, you're, you're, you're being coached and taught, hey, you got to be doing income-producing activities, you got to be meeting with people, you got to be out of your office. Well, when you are, you're going to miss, you're going to miss phone calls. So it's like you're fighting to get deals, so you're meeting with people to get deals. but if you're not able to answer your phone in the middle of that meeting, you may have just lost $3,500.

And there's nothing more obnoxious than meeting with someone or talking with someone and every 7 to 10 minutes they have to take a call because they, they're so focused. And I understand it. They're so focused on missing a call because there could be thousands of dollars on the other line.

Yep. Yeah. So I, I, I looked at this this morning, right? And, and we get it. Like, we, we understand why you, you're tethered to the phone. Uh, ChatGPT told me that speed to lead within the first 1 to 5 minutes increases your conversion odds by 10 times. 10 times increases your conversion odds. So the phone has to be answered, right? So as you're building and you're growing, the solution is you have to make sure the phone's answered, but it can't always be you as you're adding that teammate in, that's when it's time to start thinking about a team phone and a team email system.

Probably 50% of referral partners give 2 names, 2 to 3 names out. So yeah, if you're not able to answer the phone, typically it's on to the next. If they answer the phone, they spend time with them, they get into an application, you, you might not get them back on and have an opportunity at it. And that, that's what's key. That's what this is about. Um, then there's evolution. It you know, you get so busy that you become— it's hard to become, you know, get in— it's hard to— you become so busy that it's hard to focus on the things that you're supposed to do because you're becoming a slave to your phone. And that's just not like 8 to 5.

That's in the evenings. It's the weekend during your kids' events. So it's really, you know, not just to save, you know, create revenue by having it in place and to save from losing deals, but it's also to save your sanity and have a a work-life balance and be able to enjoy your time outside of work, but still make sure that your clients are getting service and phones getting answered.

And we should say, before we get too deep into this conversation, some people are not able to handle this. Some people will actually drive themselves more crazy by attempting this and attempting a team email. And there's a certain tipping point, and I don't know what that tipping point is, so I'll throw it back to you guys. When do you know you've outgrown your cell phone, a single cell phone, when you're a single point of failure? At what point? I guess a lot of it depends how hard you— how many hours you're willing to put in.

I think a lot of it depends on, you know, when are you able to bring support in, right? Because that's, that's kind of the big question.

You need to have somebody else to be able to answer the phone.

Yeah. You may have outgrown it, right? But if you don't have someone else to pivot to, you might have a system. And listen, it could be something as simple as an answering service to begin with, right? But I mean, some, some warning signs, like if you're out there and you're like, I feel like an infomercial for a disease or something. Now, if you have these signs, it's a warning that you may need team email and team phone, right? If your wife's on you about you're always on your phone, like you can't disconnect. If you're, if you're missing deals, like you aren't able, if you're out Um, like, I, I used to remember I'd be at closings and at realtor offices, and I would come back to the office and I would have like 6 messages to return, and 5 of them were new leads. And now I'm calling back and they've already talked to someone, and now I'm in a, in a knife fight for the deal, right? Um, if you're— hey, listen, if your clients and your agents, most importantly your agents, are complaining that you're really hard to get a hold of sometimes, like, that— there's your sign. Like they're telling you, they're giving you the feedback. These are all warning signs that, you know, it may be time to start looking at some team phone, team email, and more importantly, it's time to start looking for some help if you don't have it.

Mm-hmm.

And what I believe, I believe you put it in place, you know, once you get to a level that your business can substantiate, you know, dedicated, some dedicated support, I think you put it in place right away.

I agree. I think once you add, once you add that next layer, you need to start moving some of the communication from your personal self to a team system. And Dave, you're spot on. Like, I've, I've made this mistake when we've tried to plug people in where they've been the one-man band, and then I try to make them a piece of an orchestra and they lose their damn minds. Like, they're not ready for it. It's, it's like taking someone from a bicycle and putting them in the cockpit of a jet. And I missed all the steps in between. So the key to this, guys, is baby steps.

Like, take, take a little step and get comfortable with it. Leave, leave your cell phone. Like, get the team line and, and have them start working on that while you're still doing your cell phone, right? Eventually you want to migrate over, but that team line— say, hey, like, you can forward your cell phone and you, you answer calls for the next hour. And start there. You can start small.

I mean, I personally don't publish my cell phone anywhere. It's only the team line and it's only the team email address. And I don't do that because I don't want to talk to customers. I still talk to several customers a day because I like it. I do it because I don't want things to get lost on my cell phone or my email. I'd rather have it go to the team. With 4 or 5 people looking at it. And then if I go away, someone else is looking at it as well, too.

And the other problem I think we all know is when you are a one-man band and it's your cell phone and your email, you can truly never unplug. You can't take a vacation. I was in South America this winter in January, and I didn't look at my email, my text, or my cell phone for 7 days. And I wasn't worried about it because I knew my team, I knew my team had it. And if I was the only person, I would have probably had to leave my cell phone at home or figure something out.

Why was—

you know, you'd have been working 4 or 5 hours a day.

It also— you're simplifying the channels of communication for the customer because they don't want to remember, you know, your assistant's number and your number. There should be one number they're calling. They know they're getting service at that number. Somebody's going to answer it. That's really important. The customer doesn't want to call around to find the person that they— I mean, hopefully they're not doing a lot of calling in your own offense, but, you know, that's really important.

Yeah. So as I think, you know, we— as you're bringing that first team member on, that's the time to start establishing it, start transferring to using that number. It's not flipping a light switch. That's one of my favorite metaphors, right? It doesn't happen overnight. And that's okay. For most of you out there, you don't want it to because you're going to clench up and try to pull it back. So start, like, start thinking about what are some of the baby steps that you take? How do you make sure that the calls get answered? You know, what systems are you going to use? The technology that's out there with the soft phones, whether it's RingCentral or LeapPad or there's a handful of them, are fantastic, right? Texting, you need to think about that as a feature, right? Like, this is something that That could be as easy as you get a second phone with the number on it and you leave it for your team so they start answering texts, right? Texts blow my day up. So there's 100 different ways that you can structure this.

There's no one right answer, right or wrong. The key is that you do it as you're starting. I think it's a whole lot easier to do it as you're bringing team members in and that's the norm moving forward. Rather than now you've got a 4-person team and you're trying to get them used to this and adapt to it. Absolutely.

Dave, what's your, um, what's your hours of operation now on your team line?

Uh, 8 AM to 8 PM Monday through Friday and 10 AM to 6 PM on the weekend. And then on the weekend, generally I'll, I'll answer calls or emails and texts early, like I'll jump in on that because usually it's not a real heavy burden. And, you know, if someone, you know, texts or emails very late at night, I'll get them like at 6 a.m., right? So at least they feel they've been heard and they can relax. And then if things roll in past 6 p.m., often I'll just jump on and say, hey, thanks so much. Here's some brief information that you need, and then we'll be on first thing in the morning or send them, you know, our online application. But I'm not doing heavy work. It's a quick 30-second message. Yeah, I get requests.

You know, some people say, can you call me at 9 PM? I say, I said, I'm polite about it. I said, 9 o'clock is, you know, I'm in bed or spending time with my family. That's not an option.

I mean, I think it's important that when you set that up, if weekend time is something you're trying to protect, if weekends where, you know, you're missing opportunities, then, you you know, you may have an assistant or assistants, and it's really important you start— or maybe you're hiring, you know, you're going to put that in place— that you set that expectation and work a schedule out that's going to accommodate that. Because people don't want to work Monday through Friday and then also work on Saturday. You know, you get some unicorn assistants, but in reality, they want work-life balance too. So you have to, you have to give that to them. You have to give them some flexibility on a weekday. So you probably do like a Friday afternoon's off or things like that on the person that's covering the weekend. It's really important to think about that and be respectful of the person on your team because you're not trying to take your life that's being wrecked and start wrecking theirs without any regard.

Yeah, this is— I mean, this really is about teamwork, guys, and it's, it's about setting those boundaries. We did an on-call day, you know, with my team. If you were on call during the weekend, you got a day during the week off. And, and you know what? They actually loved it because then they got a day during the week where they could schedule all the stuff that that a lot of times they weren't able to do during the weekend. Ultimately, my team, we moved to— we're just not available on the weekends at a point because what we found is we were just being used more often than not, right? Um, and we had trained— let me preface this with— we had trained our agents and our clients so well that they weren't doing stuff on the weekends either, very rarely. And if you were, you know, if you were a dedicated agent, they knew how to get us, but that one-off client that's just a random from that realtor that never sends you anything. We're not working— we weren't working that on the weekends. And did we lose a deal or two here and there? Maybe.

But we had that mindset it was okay. That's something else. Like, doing this, the actual implementation of this, guys, with the technology, and, and it's— that's not the hard part. All like, this is very easy to do, to implement. The, the biggest obstacle is that it's changing. It's your mindset, and it's, it's shifting it away from I own everything and it has to be me to I'm relying on someone else and I'm trusting them or my business. And going into this, you have to realize that there may be some agents you lose. May.

I can tell you guys, it's not a may.

There will.

There will.

Yeah, it's not a may. It's 100%.

100%. I can vividly remember a conversation with two different agents when I was explaining that we're moving to the team phone line, why we're doing it, all of the benefits of it. Mind you, these are two agents that constantly complained that I was hard to get a hold of, and they point blank told me, well, if we can't call you and deal with you directly, we're not going to work with you and your team. And I said, I'm sorry that you feel that way. Best of luck in the future. They stopped sending me business. One of them ultimately came back. One of them didn't.

The next year, right? Like, so 12 months from now, looking back when, when I had this conversation and I did it, my business had doubled. So I lost 2 agents, but my business doubled and my work-life balance infinitely improved.

That's what I was going to say, right? When I— if you look at my, say, top 5 realtor partners from 2018 when I made this change to 2021 when I had my best year ever, there was not a single that top 5 completely changed. There wasn't a single realtor in my top 5, and 21 that I had in 2018 in my business more than tripled, right? So it's okay. I was willing to lose a transaction or 2 to get an extra, you know, 50. I was okay with losing 5 agents to get another 50. Now, these weren't bad agents. These weren't bad people. These are great people, were so friendly. It just didn't work for me.

I couldn't do it all and I couldn't continue to work. Literally, Robert, you know, 80 or 90 hours a week. I was burning myself out.

It wasn't sustainable.

Unsustainable. Well, we did it for 15 years. I did it for almost 15 years, but it became unsustainable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and that's the reason so many of you out there, as we talk about this, you cringe, guys, because You're worried about that little bit of loss of business. You're worried about it not being you. You're worried you're going to have someone on the phone that says the wrong thing. Um, again, that's why it's the baby steps, and that's going to happen.

I'm sorry to interrupt. That's going to happen.

It's going to happen.

Yeah.

And there's nothing that they can break that can't be fixed, though.

One key thing to remember, um, you know, if you're— if it's something you're going to put in place and you're going to take your personal line and import that into your company's phone system. You really want to get an agreement signed with your company that says, you know, upon separation of employment, you know, uh, they, they will transfer, they'll port that number over within 24 hours of your request being sent. You do not want to get into a world, especially you get to where you're bringing in 80 leads in a month, that's 20 roughly leads in a week, and, and you're battling with your company to get your phone line back for a week. Um, that will cost you a lot of money and, and miss business and make sure you protect yourself. They're going to sign it, but if you don't ask them to sign it, then you're going to have to deal with the after fact of how they want to handle it.

Yeah, that's not where I thought you were going with that, Tom. That's why I laughed. But I think that is well said, and it's very important. Where I thought you were going is there's two, there's two ways to really kind of do this as you move to team number, right? The first is you just set up an entirely new phone number and you migrate people to that new phone number. That's what I did. Because I didn't want to give up my personal cell phone that I had had for years and all of my buddies from the Marine Corps had.

I did the opposite.

I can't—

I did the opposite.

You did the— which is the second way, which is you, you change your personal number that everyone knows, you make it the team line, you go get a new personal number, and then your team, you know, has the new team phone, which is your old personal phone. If you do that though, you might want to give your friends and family a heads up that you're doing it, just to make sure that You know, nothing inappropriate gets—

probably what you're like and what your friends and family are like.

Let's be clear on that. This isn't going to be a problem for everybody, right?

But if you've like— listen, if you're a guy, like some guys have those guy friend text groups where jokes get shared, memes, whatever. Like if you have that kind of stuff going on, you want to give them the new number way in advance and make sure they're all moved to it and they're not sending stuff to your team line.

Yeah, you'll carry around two cell phones for a little bit maybe, but yeah, it'll be worth it.

That's funny. So many funny stories we could share on that, but we're not— we'll get off on sidetrack. So team phone is, you know, I think it's integral. It's kind of the first part. Get that monkey off your back. I honestly think that when you are able to do this and someone is always answering the phone, and you don't have this laundry list of people to call back, you're going to capture more leads, you're going to convert better, you're going to have a higher level of service. Um, and it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable through change, but ultimately it's going to be a winning, um, a winning situation for you.

Well, what's even easier— and if I'm off topic, stop me— what's even easier than the team phone number is the team email address. That is so easy. And no one even, no one bats an eye at that.

Well, there's certainly an organization around it.

Yeah. It is and it isn't. It's easy. I think it's easy to implement and no one questions it. But from an LO perspective, from a letting go perspective, I think it's much more difficult. Um, because now, you know, are they answering the emails the right way? Is there something sitting? Is, you know, now something's in writing. Did they say the wrong, the wrong thing?

Templates.

We—

my team uses templates for appraisals, closing disclosures, sending electronic documents. We have templates for basically when there's an introduction.

It's just an efficiency time saver anyway, and it ensures you're getting the communication the way you want it communicated. I think that's really Yeah.

So, and I think, I think that's a great segue, Dave, to the next— the other half of the system is the team email, right? Email is the bane of our existence. Um, it is a huge time suck for the originator. Um, I literally remember where, you know, I'd be out all day and I would come home and I would have an hour and a half, 2 hours of just emails to respond to and, and stuff. And, you know, some of it's fluff, some of it's garbage. So for everyone that doesn't know, team email, it's a shared box, right? You, your loan partners, you can have whoever and it all comes into one inbox, and then you just, you filter it and answer it and goes from there. So a lot of different ways that this can be set up. Again, I invented it, so I kind of have a good handle on it. Um, the way, the way me and my team did it is we were all in the same account.

We use color coding, so you can set everybody with a color. Everyone's responsible for the inbox. We tried to work off of a zero inbox rule, right? So we had folders, um, leads, and then the customer, and then we would have files, and then the, you know, so you'd start as a lead with a, with a folder, and then you moved a new active pipeline and then closed pipeline. And basically the rule was if the email was still in the inbox, there was something that needed to be done with it. Informational stuff like a title update, I don't need to see that. You now Out of the gate, I wanted to see everything, right? And that's how you guys are going to be. But as you grow and learn, your team's going to know the stuff that you don't care to see, and now you only get brought in on the fires that you need to be involved with. They're going to file all the rest of that crap.

You use the color coding system. So Dave, Dave has, I think, 17 loan partners, right? So if, if one of them's in there and it's something that the other one needs to do They've read it, they put their color on it. So now when the next loan partner comes in, you look at what's new and what has my color on it, and that's all you got to worry about. Dave goes in there, the only thing he's looking at is what's new, what hasn't been read yet. We deal with that, put people's color on it, move it, whatever, and then what has my color on it. So it's got a lot of traffic, but very quickly and easily it becomes manageable because you're only working with what's new and what has your color on it. And then everything else gets filed away. Use the templates that Dave mentioned, use auto-replies, and then you have consistent, uh, intentional communication coming from your team.

And really, it streamlines everything.

So when you talk about your, your system, uh, in the color coding, it is a completely separate email box that needs to be logged into. Is that correct? It's not going to the their personal business email, if you were?

Correct. We set up a completely separate email address. It doesn't go into— it's its own inbox. So when, when, like, when I look, I have my personal inbox, they have their personal inbox in Outlook, and then they have the team inbox in Outlook. And 90% of their day is spent in the team inbox. Like, the person, they, they don't get personal email unless it's something HR related or you know, something of that nature.

Maybe this is something— see, I'm learning something here today, Tom and Robert. When you invented the team email, what was your name that you called it?

What do you mean?

What is your system called?

For team email? No, you're thinking of the Fill Your Fantastic Five.

Oh yeah, I'm getting those mixed up.

The invention of the team email. That's a whole other podcast. That's a whole, that's a whole nother thing. And that's trademarked.

That's trademarked.

Okay.

Okay. Well, maybe, maybe we should talk to my team. Maybe, maybe next week we sit down with Robert and we talk to my team, Tom. See, I'm glad I did this podcast today.

So you have it all just coming into their personal email? Yeah.

And it's like too much.

Like, like a, like a forwarding rule. Yeah. It's, that's messy. Yeah. Listen, and what, what I, the thing that I double love about the team email right, with the folder system and the way that we do it is because it, it becomes a filing system as well. So I don't know everything about every file. I didn't want to. But if a client called me or if there was something that I needed to know, I could very quickly go into that file in the inbox and find all the email traffic because we blind copy ourselves on everything.

Anything we send, any response We blind copy and we file that. So I literally would have everything, and I could go in there in real time and see what happened. Title orders used to be a big one, you know. The title company and say, oh, we didn't get a title order, throws under the bus to the realtor. The realtor's calling me, why don't we have a title order, blah blah blah. I'd go in, oh, here's our title order, we sent them on this date, here's, here's the email, here's where you acknowledge receipt of it, right? So it was a pretty cool tool.

I like it.

If I had to go and say these— what, what drastically changed the future of my business, it would be growing a team, right? Like, that's the ultimate thing. But these two elements of growing a team changed my world, uh, because now it doesn't have to be me. I can take that vacation. I can go— I can take my life— my wife to lunch on a Friday and not be worried that I'm missing a lead. And if I don't answer that call, they're going to pick up the phone and call Quicken. Like, the freedom that comes from this, it— you can't even quantify it. It is massive, and it will change your business.

But you have to be ready for it.

Have to be ready for it. And you have to be open to change. It's going to be uncomfortable to begin with. It's going to be uncomfortable to begin with.

Change is the one thing constant in our business. Embrace it. Embrace the ability to scale, get some balance in your life, don't hold back.

Yeah, I mean, you know, as your business grows, you've got to grow with it. You don't look at it— there's not a company out there that uses the same systems and processes when they were a small company that uses the, you know, the same things now, right? I mean, look at Tesla, Amazon, pick one, Coke, right? You think Coke does things the same way today that they did in 1900? No, you adapt, you evolve, you change. Team phone and team email are— they may seem like a small operational change, but they create this foundation that allows you just to rocket into the next hemisphere with your business. And what we all know in our business is communication is key. And when you can scale that, your production's soon to follow.

Absolutely.

Hey, listen, if you're out there and you're like, this sounds awesome, but I don't know where to start, I don't know where to begin, I don't know what to do, we're working on putting kind of a step-by-step playbook together. Uh, raise your hand if you want that, hit us up. I'd love to set up a one-on-one call with anyone that's interested in learning more. I just did this for a good friend of ours who's in a coaching group with us. I walked him through setting up team email and he implemented it with his team. He texted me probably 6 weeks ago and said it's been a game changer for them. So we're, we're happy to give back in that manner. Uh, just, you know, get with us.

Also, if you haven't subscribed, uh, go ahead and smash that subscribe now and make sure to leave us a 5-star review. We appreciate you guys tuning in. For Tom Mills and Dave Holland, I'm Robert Filiau, lending leadership with The Mortgage Pros. Thanks show.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks, Joe.