last time i told you about henry. the guy who walked away from a two million dollar real estate deal because his phone wouldn't stop ringing. and i told you the ugly little secret that the do not call registry doesn't protect business lines. that's the legal reason the calls don't stop.
this is the human reason.
because every one of those calls comes from a room. and i worked in one of those rooms. so let me tell you what it looks like from the other side of the phone.
you just needed a pulse
january 1st, 2023. that's the day i walked into the MCA industry.
i wasn't trying to become a broker. i'd just been fired from a marketing job in october (getting fired was kind of a habit for me, five jobs in two years, that's a different story) and my resume was a nightmare and i needed something fast. and here's the thing about the MCA world. it's the one industry where nobody asks for a resume.
you just needed a pulse.
sit with that for a second. the person calling your business seventeen times a day, offering you tens of thousands of dollars in "funding," pitching you numbers that will decide whether your business lives or dies. the only qualification for that job was that they were alive and willing to work for commission.
that was me. day one. no license, no training, no background in finance. a computer and a lead list.
the empty office
and i mean literally no training. my first two weeks, the entire office was away on a company retreat. i sat in a room with 25 desks and maybe three people in it. one guy was so sick he shouldn't have been there at all, but he came in every single day anyway — and slept in his office. the whole day. he genuinely wanted to help me and physically couldn't. that was my mentor situation.
so i figured it out from a group chat. a team of people i'd never met, answering my questions between their own calls. and here's what i learned about that world: the culture inside those rooms is actually helpful. warm even. brokers teaching brokers, everyone rooting for everyone.
it's just that all that warmth points inward. none of it is for you.
my first deal was against the rules
in my first week, alone in that empty office, i closed a deal completely by myself. pitched it, got the guy to sign, sent him to his funding call.
what i didn't know was that this was against company policy. new brokers weren't allowed to pitch. we were "openers" — our job was to find you, get you interested, get your application in. then a veteran closer takes over while you watch and "learn."
that's the official version. the real version is about money, because everything in that room is about money.
when a vet worked your deal, you split the commission. and the vets only wanted layups. easy files, big numbers, sure things. the slightest complication and they'd kick the deal back to you — sometimes after literally one phone call. and if they didn't formally take themselves off the deal? they could still be owed half. i had my own run-ins over exactly that.
so why did i get to pitch my very first application, against policy? nobody stopped me because nobody was there. but also — nobody wanted it. it was a $10k deal. the merchant wanted $25k, only qualified for 10, one offer on the table from a super high-risk lender. to a veteran that file was worth less than the phone call it would take to work it.
i didn't understand any of that yet. i just worked it. pitched him down from 25 to 10, gathered the docs, got the signature, sent him to funding.
the deal died in final. turned out the merchant was fraudulent. the vets' instincts were right and mine didn't exist yet.
what this means for your phone
here's why i'm telling you all this.
that room had 25 seats. every seat was commission only. no salary, no safety net, no resume required. which means every single person in that room eats only if someone answers the phone and says yes.
now do the math on what that does to your day. a hungry rookie will call you because he has nothing else. a veteran will call you because you look like a layup. and the guy in between will call you because he's three weeks from not making rent.
and the pitches are engineered for exactly one thing: getting you hooked. "you're preapproved." you didn't apply for anything. preapproved by who? for what? doesn't matter. it's a hook. and there's a whole menu of these — products with names like "reverse" that sound like solutions and work like traps.
i'll break down those pitches one by one in the next post. because once you can hear the machinery inside the pitch, it stops working on you.
but the short version is this: your phone isn't ringing because 40 different companies think you're special. it's ringing because rooms full of unlicensed, commission-only salespeople — some of them on day one, like i was — are working through lists, and your number is on them.
henry thought the calls meant something was wrong with him. nothing was wrong with him. he was just on the list.
so are you.