Credit Union Lending: Learning To Hustle

I remember as a boy going to spend the night with a friend.  His mother worked evenings and had not been told I would be spending the night and was naturally put out with her own son for inviting me over.  She handed her son one dollar and said, “Fine, he can stay but you are going to have to hustle for your supper.” With that she showed us a bare refrigerator and left for work.  My own mother was a waitress so I was not alarmed by the empty refrigerator. However, I was concerned over the whole concept of “hustle for your supper.”  My friend then flashed a big smile and said, “Come on, it’s time to hustle.”

Before long we had turned the house upside down looking for spare change. Our one dollar had grown to five dollars in spare change found under beds, in dirty clothes, and behind the cushions on the sofa.  I was amazed so much money was literally just waiting to be picked up.

We got on our bikes and peddled to the corner store where we bought a “soup bone” and some carrots and potatoes.  I also insisted on a can of “mixed vegetables” to round out our “hustle soup”.  As we headed back to his house I was so excited to see how our soup was going to turn out. We boiled the bone with the vegetables and added the can of extra veggies at the end.  As I recall the soup was one of the best I had ever had. It was part water, part scrawny carrots and potatoes, and a great deal of “hustle”.

I have given a great deal of thought on two recent blog postings, “Credit Union Culture Cooperative or Cut Throat” and “The New Credit Union Mantra: Stop Breathing”.  Both posts got a tremendous response on the blog and on various credit union discussion groups.  The comments clearly showed people who longed for the “old days” of when credit unions truly thought of themselves as cooperatives.  So that led to the idea of the “hustle soup” from my childhood memories.

What we need is to each add a small tip to the soup. Since we are all in lending season I thought it might be worthwhile to throw in “lending tips”.

So my tip is that of using chat to generate loan volume.  Many financial institutions use  web chat so this is not cutting edge technology. However, most use chat as a general member service tool.  I think this approach adds complexity to your call center operations. Chats typically take twice as long as a phone call. So while you have added another channel for your members you have added a channel that takes twice as long to fulfill the same type of service request.

Rather than using chat as a general member service function use it only on your rates page.  Change the title of “Chat” to something more specific, “Connect with a Loan Specialist.”  Instruct your chat specialist to turn every chat into an outbound phone call when possible. 

Just this week I had an agent come up to me so excited about a web chat that he had earlier in the day. The member started the chat off the rates web page and asked about our lowest rate.  The agent asked if he could call the member to more quickly cover all his options and give him the solution that best fit his need. As they were talking the lending agent offered to review his credit history prior to taking the application so that they could present the best possible application to the underwriters.  As the agent went over the CBR he noticed three trade lines that could be refinanced at a lower rate. The end result was that this web chat generated three applications for a total of 65,000 dollars that booked that same day.

That brings up my second tip which is training your lending agents to take double and triple applications. Too often loan officers become order takers and they forget that their primary role is that of saving the member money by borrowing money at a lower rate or helping a member refinance to a lower rate.

This primary function requires people who love to help people with loans. Only the best of the best should be loan officers.  Once you have these people you need to remove all non sales duties from them.  You don’t have your most passionate lenders doing the paperwork. You give the paperwork to people who love paperwork!  Make sure you prioritize call routing in your call center so that you have a pure application queue. Contrary to what you may think all calls are not created equal.

You can do this in your branches as well. Use your first impression station to funnel lending opportunities to your best lending specialist. Try to keep them as busy as possible taking application after application. You have other people in the branch who like to balance checkbooks and open certificates.

Lastly, you only use web chat on your lending page.  You make sure it is the highest priority. Think about what you have here.  You have a person on your web page wanting to talk rates! That is a golden opportunity you have to make the most of.

I typically see centralized lenders who have focused duties generate as much as a whole branch.  I kid you not. A good phone lender who is set up correctly can generate around 2-3 million in applications and book between 450,000 to 900,000 thousand in a month. I realize that this depends on the volume you have.

My main point is that you don’t have your best lending officers balancing check books for people. You have other people who would love to do that but have no desire to do lending. You want people to do lending who are not afraid of having to make their own “hustle soup”.

Alright, I have added my two tips for lending success now it is your turn.  It is time for each of us to act like we are all part of a cooperative.  This might be hard to believe but this blog has readers from all over the world who can add something and gain something. Each of you can contribute and make this posting the ultimate cheat sheet for lending success.  Each of us has Big Banks or other giant competitors we have to go up against each day. Let’s all add something here. Small credit union or large we are in this together…. it's time to hustle for our supper. 

Credit Union To and Fro: How Focused Is Your Credit Union

A story is told of two men who formed a partnership. They built a small shed beside a busy road. They obtained a truck and drove it to a farmer’s field, where they purchased a truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. They drove the loaded truck to their shed by the road, where they sold their melons for a dollar a melon. They drove back to the farmer’s field and bought another truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. Transporting them to the roadside, they again sold them for a dollar a melon. As they drove back toward the farmer’s field to get another load, one partner said to the other, “We’re not making much money on this business, are we?” “No, we’re not,” his partner replied. “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”

In today’s credit union there are thousands of things to focus on. Thanks in part to modern technology the contents of various reporting services and other database resources are all at the fingertips of many of us. Too often it is easy to find ourselves spending countless hours mindlessly following data streams down various rabbit holes or scanning other avalanches of information. One would be tempted to ask, “To what purpose?” Those who engage in such activities are like the two partners in the story, so busy loading and unloading melons onto a truck and then hurrying back and forth to the roadside store. They spend each day hauling more and more but failing to grasp the essential truth that we cannot make a profit from our efforts until we understand the true value of what is already within our grasp.

As many of us are in the middle of our lending season we followed all those reports down the rabbit holes to conclude lending growth is more of a challenge and so we are all looking for the magic bullet that will give us the loan growth we budgeted last fall. The temptation is to go to the product manual and come up with a new gimmick or product feature that will create a new wave of member lending. However, a less glamorous solution is to look at our leadership teams and then consider the amount of focus they have. Are our teams acting like the two men in the story trying to decide to buy a bigger truck or maybe keep the same ole truck but just “paint it'?

Yet, if you were to pull your leadership team members together and have them list the top challenges and tasks for the week would you find them focused on the items that are your most pressing goals?

This topic of focus has been on my mind since I read the story of Army Ranger Joseph Kapacziewki who was injured when an enemy grenade was dropped into his armored vehicle in Iraq. His body was severely injured. His lower right leg was shattered and his right arm left useless with extensive nerve damage. It seemed that no part of his body was spared by the blast from an enemy’s grenade.

In 2005 when doctors worked to help mend his shattered limbs the easy prognosis was that this was a Ranger who would not run into battle again. That prognosis was not one that Joseph shared. It certainly was not the prognosis he choose to focus on.

His story is a testament to the ability to focus on a singular goal. When he learned that his body had a natural intolerance to morphine he endured countless hours of pain as he mended from each surgery. I marvel that his first thoughts on getting his finger to twitch was to have his wife wheel him down to the hospital's practice firing range with a laser-equipped M-4 rifle. For hours every day, he would lie behind sandbags and fire the weapon, retraining his hands and fingers that had lost feeling how to once again handle a weapon.

There are no comparisons between what this man endured and with what we endure in our day to day lives. However, there are lessons to be learned on the power of focus. We can learn to see past the potholes in the road and focus instead on the blue patch of sky ahead of us.

I have seen leaders like this who refuse to accept the status of just being good. They drive for results and have the expectation that those around will also drive for results. They have the ability to see past the mindless activities of day to day operations and ask clarifying questions that help others zero in on the core mission of what the group is trying to accomplish.

My challenge to you is to ask your leadership team, “What are we trying to accomplish?” The next question is what can you do to remove the clutter that is on the table so that the only thing your team is looking at is the very thing you are trying to do?

As credit unions we are at times so preoccupied by what the bigger credit union or the Big Bank is doing we forget to take a hard look at what we ourselves are doing. We work in a time when it is easy to focus on why it is too hard to succeed due to a tough economy. We read blog articles that make excuses so that we can settle on just being “old fashioned” credit unions. The price of not knowing what to focus on is measured in credit union members having to settle for less...to expect less from you each and every day.

Are you like the two men in the story who spend each day hauling more and more but fail to grasp the essential truth that they cannot make a profit from their efforts until they focus on the true value of what is already within their grasp.

To read more about the real hero of the story please visit

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