#
163
Ciao from Italy
Amir Syed
|
August 8, 2026
Ciao from Italy.
That image hangs framed in my home office.
The first time I saw it posted by some guy on Instagram, I got goosebumps and thought:
“Yes. Now THAT is winning.”
I'm writing this from a month in Italy with my wife, my daughter, and my niece.
We hit 10 years of marriage a few days ago.
Our book of the month at GO! Coaching was The Psychology of Money.
The line that stuck with me: “The highest dividend money pays isn't the car or the house. It's waking up and deciding what you'll do that day.”
Housel backs this up with research on happiness:
The strongest predictor wasn't income, wasn't education, wasn't geography. It was the sense that you control your own life.
Most people get the order backward.
They think freedom shows up after the production.
2019. Same country, one month, no laptop.
I closed $12M. My branch funded $30M.
2012. My then-girlfriend, now wife, went to Scottsdale for a few days. I packed a laptop, a docking station, two double monitors, and a headset.
I closed 6 loans that month (after already being in the business for 10 years…)
That guy in 2012 wasn't less committed. He just didn't have anybody.
He wasn't a Loan Officer. He was an alone officer.
Too scared to invest in human capital. Too scared to hand anyone anything.
By 2019, I'd hired the best Loan Officer Assistants I could find, and I trained them every single week.
Train, and you shall receive.
Those training blocks were color-coded purple on my calendar.
The color of royalty.
That's how much weight I gave them, and they didn't get moved; they didn't get "we'll catch up next week."
Everything we trained on got recorded on Loom and turned into a Google Doc playbook.
No AI back then. We just did it. You have no excuse now.
Here's exactly how it works.
Hire the absolute best for every seat. Not the best you can afford, pay up, sacrifice.
Whatever you think the pay is for that role, market it 20% higher.
The number in your head gets you a warm body.
The number above it gets you someone who makes you look slow.
Then invest time with them. Weekly. On the calendar. In purple.
Steve Jobs said it better than I can:
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."
Most Loan Officers don't hire at all.
The ones who do hire cheap and try to train the cheap into great.
That's telling a duck to fly like an eagle.
They pay peanuts and get monkeys.
(Shall I keep going with the animal analogies?)
One more, and it's the cheapest one on the list: embrace the technology.
My team has been on Zoom, Loom, Slack, and Calendly since 2019 (yes, all BEFORE the pandemic).
There are Loan Officers right now running an entire team through email and text message.
Low TQ (technological intelligence).
Your ability to teach someone else is an audit of your own skill.
So leading up to this trip, I doubled down.
30+ team members at GO! Coaching, plus 15 active player-coaches, all trained to take great care of our almost 1,000 members.
They're going to crush it. Zero doubt.
I left them with John Maxwell's Two-Week Vacation Test:
“Until you actually leave for two weeks, you'll never know how good your team is — and they'll never know how good they can be.”
Well, they got four weeks.
Four weeks to find out how incredible they are, so I can show my family how incredible they are to me.
Ciao,
Amir
Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you!
- Book a call to speak with one of our advisors about joining the Growth Only Community.
- Join our Facebook group for Top Producing Modern Loan Officers.
- Connect with me on social.