On Overseas Staffing

BY JOEL HENRY

It’s the golden age of virtual work. My office is retrofitted with a microphone, ring light & staged background to impress my fellow coworkers on Zoom. I get up each day, walk down the hall into my office & plug in.

In recent years, virtual work has surged in popularity. This shift has not only transformed how businesses operate but has also redefined where we find our employees to run & scale our mortgage companies.

Many of the people I work with are now on the other side of the world. Even though they’re based in the Philippines, I still spend my days with them mostly face to face. We use the term “virtual assistant,” but the reality is my employees are underwriters, loan o cer assistants, processors & compliance experts. They are structuring files & processing them with a high degree of accuracy. Am I the only one doing this? Not even close. JP Morgan Chase alone has 15,000 employees in the Philippines!

How do I manage everything? For one, I’ve built a very structured company where every role has an SOP. Even though we’re a small company, we run like a big one. Every person knows how they are measured, what measured success looks like & are given access to the reporting on how they are doing at any given moment.

I also mastered the basics of building a virtual company, which most importantly, revolves around requiring that everyone turn their video on in meetings during working hours. It’s simple, but it’s the main ingredient in building a virtual culture where everyone knows each other.

Explore how to build a mortgage ops team using cost effective & talented overseas staff! First, know that there are many talented U.S. mortgage professionals overseas, specifically in the Philippines, where the major U.S. banks and mortgage companies operate. Second, know that you can get a compliant overseas assistant by going thru companies like BrokerVA to meet state regulations for licensed loan activities for LOA’s & processors. Third, trust that if you invest time in training & onboarding, overseas staff perform incredibly well.

And fourth, be willing to point the finger at yourself when things are not going as planned. Most of the time, it’s the management structure, process or SOP that needs improvement when things are not going as you want them to.

Licensed in 20+ states, BrokerVA empowers smaller mortgage teams to compete with banks & direct lenders who lower their operational costs by staffing highly trained mortgage professionals from overseas. Joel Henry is BrokerVA’s operations manager. brokerva.com