From Law School to 7-Figure Mortgage Entrepreneur with Abdel Khawatmi

In this episode, Ryan Naylor sits down with entrepreneur and mortgage industry leader Abdel Khawatmi, founder of Got Mortgages, to talk about what it really takes to scale a business in today’s market.

From almost going to law school to building a nationally recognized mortgage brand, Abdel shares the systems, routines, mindset, and leadership strategies that helped him grow a high-performing sales organization while staying grounded in family, fitness, and faith.

Ryan and Abdel dive into:

• Building scalable sales systems
• The “SCALE” framework for business growth
• Creating consistency and accountability within sales teams
• Leveraging AI and automation without losing the human connection
• How personal branding and social media drive modern business growth
• The realities of entrepreneurship, loss, leadership, and legacy
• Why authenticity is becoming the ultimate competitive advantage

Abdel also shares practical insights on content creation, KPI tracking, team culture, and how entrepreneurs can use social media to compete against larger companies with massive marketing budgets.

Whether you’re building a sales team, growing your personal brand, or navigating the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways for business owners and leaders alike.

Connect with Abdel:
Instagram: @got_mortgages
Website: gotmortgages.com
YouTube: Got Mortgages

Follow Ryan on IG: https://www.instagram.com/ryan.nylr/
Follow our Podcast on IG: https://www.instagram.com/built.to.grow.podcast/

Learn more about AvaHR and get a free trial of our ATS: www.avahr.com

Watch the live Interviews on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@avahrsoftware

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Tell us a little bit about where you're from. I'd love to hear your background and maybe we could start right there and how you kind of came into the entrepreneurial journey yourself.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Met my wife at Rutgers University, which is a hyperlocal state university. I'm sure most of us know it in um in Jersey. Been together for 18 years. We're originally going to law school. She got pregnant senior year of college. So talk about a oh my moment, right? We totally made the best of it. Ended up gearing away from law school and kind of diving in a little bit into the just traditional nine to five of working at a firm. Did it very successfully for a little over five years and then kept getting a lot of consumers who came to me and was like, hey, I want to buy a house. You know, it was a PI-driven firm, personal injury. And I was the face with settlements and settlement distributions and relationships with your Kairos and PTs and getting your surgeries done. And I was doing a little bit of the handoffs, right, to John Doe and Mary Smith, who I knew back in the day. I had picked up two properties personally myself by 24. I just despised the process, right? And people ask me all the time, as an entrepreneur, what makes you successful? And I just say I just pick this damn thing up and I communicate and set proper expectations. And we've done that since. Been in the business for a little over eight years now, which anybody who's in sales, eight years is like 50 dog years, right? We've been blessed to grow our business nationally in multiple different you know footprints now, not just in New Jersey and have an awesome team behind us.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Awesome. Well, I love your background. You've got a plethora of experience here. And today we're gonna talk a lot about kind of the people side of the business, right? The sales, the efficiencies. And then I want to dabble into a little bit of AI as well and how AI is making their people operations a little bit more efficient along the way. But tell us a little bit about your sales team and if you wouldn't mind, like tell us a little bit about the responsibilities. And then I want to dig into like what it takes to recruit a great and build a kind of a great sales vehicle inside the company.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

I always say most loan officers are working harder and they're not scaling their business, right? So I always speak, and when we're speaking, we speak in acronyms of scale. Scale starts off first with systems before sales, right? And many professionals are usually trained to do the reverse, where they're usually practicing their scripts and practicing what to say and stuff like that, and not knowing the operational background. So systems for us was critical, and it may come from a little bit of the background of college, of eventually going to law school and building out those systems and knowing your briefs and knowing what's happening towards the case. So systems is first consistency over um intensity, like I say. We're doing the same thing repeatedly, right? So when we're training our originators and we're teaching them that stuff, it's be have your regimented time blocks, your regimented opportunities, take those small reps. We go to the gym just a little bit. So it's making sure that you take those small reps and do it on a consistent basis that's eventually going to get you the necessary, you know, fitness that you're looking to accomplish. Automation is important as well, especially in today's day and age, with you what you said with AI, it's never gotten easier, right? The common complaints we get from our sales guys is I don't know what to talk about. Well, the the power of it now is you don't need to, right, right? Is you just think about, hey, go to it, whatever AI platform and say, hey, I want to shoot content for the next 30 days and give me some tidbits to do so. We do that. L would leverage, right? Leverage your team. You are one individual person, you're not gonna have the possible ability to call, text, email, do those consistent follow-ups, not physically possible. Delegate to your team and leverage that support and last execution, right? And I think that's where many professionals tend to uh fall is you got all these great ideas and then you end up failing to execute. Everyone, to an extent, has that playbook. If you're an originator or any sales professional, you're usually given what, a laptop, maybe a pen and a pad, and told here are maybe some seasoned liens to call. We get that playbook. I think a lot of them, most of us probably fail to actually end up doing it.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

So I really like that acronym scale. I think it's really, really creative. I like the consistency. I want to talk about that for just a minute because uh I think a lot of times what I've observed is a lot of small businesses. They start to build a sales team, they'll hire their first sales guy, two, three, four guys. But they don't really build a playbook around it. They kind of leave it up to them. Here's your market, here's your territory, here's some first level script, and then they tell me after it. Tell me about what you have seen be effective to building consistency in the sales process.

SPEAKER_00 4:43

I spoke earlier about consistency, it's about taking the reps, right? And you know, I'm a big sports guy and fitness guy. So breaking it down into reps, right? It's routine expectations, pipeline, and standards. So what is your routine day in, day out? What time do you wake up in the morning? We're unfortunately waking up before the sun goes up. So um it's 4 a.m. immediately in the morning, practicing my morning meditation in the sauna at home. And it was annoying because we just go to a local gym crunch. It would always be cold by the time we got in. So it was like annoying to be like, you're screwing up my whole routine, because then I got to go on the treadmill and I gotta get my workout and then think about this. So we ended up just buying one at home. And now every single time we wake up, we kickstart it on for it to turn on, right? So that routine, think about that. Now, when you get into the office, if you're supposed to get in by nine o'clock, or generally you're a sales 1099 professional, are your guys or gals ready to go two clock in by 859? If they're not, then that's a crack in the system that you need to be able to iron out. And what are they supposed to do, which is the expectations, the E part?

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

What are the expectations at what they're supposed to do? How many phone calls do they need to meet? How many touches do they need to have? Does your sales employees who are, you know, commission-based employees know their hourly range based on what they made last year? And do they have that calculation? And I love doing that math with people because it's hey, all right, so you made you know 75 grand for the year. How much did you actually work? Did you do the 40 hours a week? Did you do 50 hours a week? Did you do 30? If you did 30 and you made 75 grand, it's better than that professional who's in the office all day. That means you're being a little bit more productive, not necessarily busy as the other person, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:24

I like how you break that out. I like how you break out the finance part. I think a lot of sales people start to miss that when they start to really look at their overall compensation. The feedback that I get too much routiny on the sales process leads to higher attrition. Uh a lot of sales guys are kind of your go-getters. They just want to kind of have the freedom to go and do what they need to do. But tell me a little bit about your retention. Like when you build that consistency, that framework, that training, how has that helped with your retention at your company?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Yeah, I mean, listen, our standards are always staying the same, right? So whether you're doing 10 deals or you close three, right? We just were blessed, we just wrapped up our the month of April. I always try not to talk months by the time this gets dropped, but the month of April was our best in my entire career. Um, even during COVID, right? And I think it was just finding that rhythm, finding that routine, and then end up, you know, tweaking it. And every single person's rhythm is going to be unique from an enterprise perspective. It's almost impossible to take that individual and try to mold them the same way, right? Some of my loan officers maybe don't wake up at seven because they may necessarily not have kids. And, you know, my kids got to be on the bus by 7:15. So I gotta wake up in the morning and I have to be able to get my workout in because that's my me time, right? And then be able to now translate that to where we talk to our employees. We do a Friday huddle every single time. 9 a.m. like clockwork. I finish a B and I at 7 a.m. Usually goes for about an hour and a half, leave about a 30-minute window to network, and then 30 minutes for me to drive to get to the office to host the call. And we always talk to them about that attrition, right? We're we're retaining our originators. My operations team and sales staff have been with me to the start of my career. Originators surely come and go, and then they boomerang back, right? Because it's they're so sold the song and dance or given those golden handcuffs, as I call them, of a sign-on bonus, and then they come to find out that their margins are higher or they're being told something that necessarily was a little bit too much, right? And you know, you wake up every single morning, we had our best month, we woke up just as much as if we started back at zero.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Um and we take it from there.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

I I really like this, and I I think that in the loan mortgage, any sort of the finance sales things, it's it's pretty easy to build a sales vehicle that feels a little bit toxic. How is it that you're able to build a culture to remove any sort of that toxicity that might creep in there?

SPEAKER_00 8:58

For me, it's branding, right? Okay. And we have fun with the brand, right? Hence like, you know, the got mortgages, everybody's got their little jerseys. We have fun. We're actually going to a Knicks game after this, you know. Knicks are crushing it right now. We're going to enemy territory in Philly. But having that brand culture, right now on the East Coast, the weather gets nicer. So our originators come into the office at 8:30. We will work until 12:30. Then we all actually go to my house and we're all literally plugging and playing in our backyard. And there's about eight, nine of us literally, which was on Tuesday a couple days ago. And it's funny because you look at our ring camera and there's like six or seven guys like walking to different sides of the house, taking phone calls and having opportunities and holding each other as to, you know, a client says, Hey, you know, I've already bought a house. Great, and just hang up. I'm like, Whoa, dude, talk to them. Like, did you talk to your financial advisor? How did everything go? Did your loan officer follow up with you? It's about it's now the hot season. Did you get a pest control person? Did you have a power? Build that culture, right? That reputation. And we talk about branding, so it's being visible everywhere, both online, both relationships with Zahar, repeating that message, being authentic with your audience, right? I'm walking in the same way, speaking, you know, we were in Washington, D.C. about two weeks ago with uh Dave Savage and First Home IQ, which is just a you know strong organization on the mortgage front. And we were speaking authentically to, you know, the House and the Senate who were we are meeting with the congressional parties because we're bringing that boots on the ground, rolling up our sleeve trenches, pushing for housing reform in an effort to make it more affordable for the consumers to translate it back. So networking and delivering to the public is thereafter.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

So how do you have the balance? You know, I think that's always a big concern with entrepreneurs is I know you've probably got your own book of business. You're probably out there still originating your own loans, you want to be your own sales and have your own pipeline, but how do you have that balance between being a coach, mentor, owner, and holding people accountable versus doing your own pipeline?

SPEAKER_00 11:01

I think the biggest difference what we've learned is leading from the front. You know, when we're sharing some of the strategies of what we're asking the originators to do, dude, it's because we're doing it, right? And and and we're building like what I say, you build that stack where you're leveraging your speed, you know, your tools over your toys, right? You're having those opportunities where you're having automation help you, right? Where you probably got from me like a couple automation telling you, hey, the podcast is coming up. I hope it did. If it didn't, then there's a crack in my in my system. But you know, having those touch points there, and then what ends up happening too is I may have touched on this, but there's three freedoms in life, right? It's time, relationship, and financial. Since we've embedded some automation and technology and delegation, I've never spent more time with my children than ever before, right? And we've never been busier than ever before. Uh, relationship, I've never been like cooler and tighter with partners and with we do client appreciation events. When it's a summer, we've got a suite set up at home. So we actually have like some like really tight clients that we know come and bring their kids. Um, and they're all hanging out in our backyard, and we're doing like renting out movie theaters for Willy Wonka and Mufasa and uh you know the minion movie that's coming out. So we're gonna have some, you know, another one. Some originators get, like I say, sold that song and dance. And then with us, the ones that I think realize that we push them to track those KPIs, right? Data over drama, as we say, track those KPIs, right? Know what metrics you're going to do. So if you're a business owner out there and you have a sales professional, aside from you wanting to know their numbers, let that sales professional know that number, right? Maybe calling from nine to twelve may not be a good metrics because your consumers may be working a nine to five. So maybe you track it for one month and then the following month you maybe start tracking it from five to eight. And listen, we're not nine to five if you're in sales, right? You're as I say, eyes open, eyes shut. Find that number, find that metrics, and I think really, you know, technology gives us an opportunity to make that decision for us.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

I like that a lot. You know, I want to switch gears just a little bit because I like your background. I like how you went from corporate America, you were in the education, higher ed, went into corporate America, then kind of doing your own thing. Maybe you could talk through just a little bit, uh, a little reflection here is what is entrepreneurship given you that money can't buy or a nine to five, eight to five job couldn't have given you? What has it meant to you to be an entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_00 13:36

I've said this before. For me, there's four F's in life that help me accomplish freedom and it's faith, which is my relationship with God. Uh family, my relationship with my family, fitness, actually making sure that I'm there every single morning to take care of that. And then finance, right? Being blessed with an opportunity to make seven figures and have those conversations with clients and just have fun, right? I mean, some of my Zoom calls with some certain clients, I mean, I'm in a tank top in our backyard, right? And we're just being completely authentic and having those conversations and kind of allowing that, you know, really experience that a client is looking for to translate through technology. So doing a full-blown total cost analysis for a client, doing a nice AI presentation, sharing the interest rate options between paying a point or not paying a point, explaining the market difference of what's happening when it comes to you know inflation and unemployment and what's happening with some of the geopolitical stuff overseas and how that's impacting, you know, inflation. But if we strip away energy and we strip away food, which is the core producer consumption you know, personal consumption expenditure report, then that means that we're actually on a pretty flateau rate, which is what the Federal Reserve is looking, which is why they haven't hiked interest rates, they've kept it flat. Right. It's also knowing my audience too, right, Brian? So then I know what type of conversation am I going to maybe get into it with a client. Is it going to be a little bit more analytical, or is it going to be a little bit more, you know, I say it respectfully, like with a blue-collar consumer, it's going to be driven by monthly payment catch-to-close, right? So I want to make sure I hone in on that focus because I want to make sure that first-time homebuyer or that first-time investor knows what they're getting themselves into and they're making that best cognitive decision from there.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Yeah. Sticking on to that entrepreneurship theme, talked a little bit about kind of what it means to be an entrepreneur. You've had a lot of success since being an entrepreneur, but I'm sure it hasn't always been roses all the way through. What are some of those maybe obstacles or kind of bumps in the road that you didn't anticipate that you've kind of experienced?

SPEAKER_00 15:38

I won't get emotional, but my father, you know, we just reached his two-year anniversary of him passing. Talk about a bump in the road, right? That was huge because I started thinking to myself, is this a legacy I want to leave behind of a hardworking individual who their definition of love and taking care of the family was work? Or is it my physical presence of being at every single lacrosse game for my daughter, every single jiu-jitsu tournament that my son goes to, every single opportunity to grab him literally this morning and be like, hey, you know what? Let's go to a nit game. Another common thing I could share for those who are listening is have your spouse involved in every single thing that you do and make sure you guys share calendars with one another. My wife probably knows my calendar better than me because I have a dedicated teammate who's responsible to know my calendar. But my wife would be like, Hey, oh, um, you've got a networking event in Red Bank, right? And then I'm like, I do. Uh, okay. And she'll be like, Yeah, you know, I want to take, you know, we want to go to this restaurant. Can we come? And I'm like, sure. So that was a huge shift, Ryan, in our business, right? Because I think most of us who are successful entrepreneurs sometimes don't find that quote unquote need to let your spouse know what you're doing. But dude, get them involved, man, because I think that only helps support your vision as to what you're looking to accomplish. And if there's anything I've seen, you know, being with my wife for 18 years now, meeting each other's at 18. So we're literally at that halfway point of my entire half of my life has been with my significant other now being 36. And that was a big difference maker for me about three years ago, right? When my father got sick, my wife didn't know half the stuff that we went through, right? And turn we just knew that we got kicked in our teeth all the time. The market has shifted a little bit, obviously, post-COVID when rates went up, and she didn't realize that we were having about 15, 16 meetings daily. It was just so if there's any recommendation I can have for that entrepreneur and understand there's going to be highs and lows. Always live on that low budget, if that makes sense, right? Never spending more than you necessarily need to. And the second you think that you can, because just as quick as you're up is just as quick as you could fall flat on your face, have that security cushion because you're certainly going to need it in times when things get tough.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Yeah, that's the absolute truth. Uh well, Abdul, you've been a tremendous influence out there. I know you've you've worked on your personal brand quite a bit. You do a lot of content, do your own recordings and big in social media. How has that impacted your business? Can you talk through a little bit about like maybe why you started it and kind of what impact you've seen with your business as you've been doing it?

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Social media is so critical, right? It's the art of being found online. You know, nowadays people are no longer going to Google and asking, you know, I don't know, who's the best mortgage lender. They're going now to an AI bot at the click of a finger and searching it. Um, social media is critical for that stuff, right? People don't buy from the letters that you wrap on your chest, they buy from you. And you also want to hit a target audience where you're speaking to a millennial, a Gen Zier, a boomer, whatever the case may be. And if you're telling me that I could pick up this thing right here and shoot a video and have an opportunity to reach a certain professional or reach a certain clientele that I want to, why would I not do it? Right. And we're in like our podcast studio, and it doesn't have to be fancy. Like I've done videos where I look like I not even look like I look like shit, I literally look like shit. But I build that trust with that client, right? I'm transparent with them, uh responding quickly, I'm updating and being proactive.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

What does that strategy look like? Like our with social media, are you out there posting daily? Do you have a specific like X number of posts or across a certain number of days? Well, how do you how do you measure success?

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Yeah, so we do we do a Monday market update, uh, Wednesday wins, Friday fires, which is like one of my favorites, because you're talking about just some deal that blew up and you're talking about how you put it out. And then honestly, I call it our John Madden content in between. We're literally everything that we're doing, we're sharing it at the same time, right? Where you're taking ownership, right? You're taking ownership of everything that you're doing, right? Um, your outcomes control your output. So putting that stuff out there, and guys, it could be short form video content, it could be long form on YouTube, it could be articles now, which is the big key today's day and age if you want to get found on AEO and GEO, which is the new core model, right? The traditional model with SEO search engine optimizations, how you get found on Google. Now, AEO is how you answer questions, and GEO is how you get found. So that's generally how I teach this stuff. You want to be able to just take it, post blogs, talk about your day-to-day. You want to be able to shoot content because people can relate to you that way, whether it's via LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, and finding that energy management is something that is always something that we try to find, right? I've also realized there's no such thing as replacing yourself because in many instances people want to work with you. Right. Artificial intelligence is going to be something that is going to allow us the opportunity to have more time to speak to people. And I think the professionals that are using it to replace you, right? There's that saying I hate to say it, and I actually was, you know, guilty of saying it before, but you know, if you don't use AI, it's going to replace you. AI is running on my back end operations staff. I've never been more on the phone, and I know because we track the KPI down to the minutes, the text, the emails, and the time I'm spending on the phone. And we don't have confusing clients towards the end of a transaction because they know, right? You got it written, and I also was not afraid to pick up the phone and have that condo. And content is a big part. 13% of our business in 2025 came from social media.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Is that your personal brand, or do you have like a company brand that that tends to drive a lot of that awareness?

SPEAKER_00 21:40

It's personal, it's all got mortgages. Got mortgages are our personal brand. Um, for those of you who who who check us out too, I've literally got the most obnoxious vehicle out there. It's it's the Cybertruck that all of your children are turning around and looking at. It is branded with the American flag. It's got a gorilla, which everybody refers to as. As pointing at you while you're literally stopped behind me on a traffic light saying, I want you to get a mortgage, and it's a gorilla in an Uncle Sam outfit. So it's cool, right? So, like I said, the authenticity and then having that stuff. And you know, at the end of the day, I think, you know, that workflow works over anything, right? And and being authentic with that content and putting yourself out there will give you that competitive advantage over maybe a larger company that might have a larger marketing budget, but they don't have you. They don't have that visibility that you could bring to a local market.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

No, I think pers building a personal brand is a big part of how small business America competes now, right? If you don't have that massive marketing budget and you don't have the ability to drop a consistent six-figure budget per month in meta-ads to have consistent visibility, you're just forgotten about. As quick as you advertise in a small budget, I see so many people that are putting a hundred bucks a day into meta-ads thinking that's going to make a difference in their business. And the reality is take that time, energy, emotional stress, and put it into your own personal brand and to your point, drop questions and answers right specifically into these social media platforms. And a lot of times if you get involved with Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, and you're answering these questions and talking about it, discoverability is huge for relevance when people are actually asking those questions and searching for it. So I really appreciate that. And and I'll I just want to wrap it up. Maybe Abdul, with you could just share a little bit about the brands. It's got mortgage is is your brand that you built, but how can people follow along your journey and support you?

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Yeah, absolutely. So got underscore mortgages is our Instagram. Gotmortgages.com is our website. We've got just shy of hopefully by the time this gets dropped, 700 videos on YouTube, sharing market updates, sharing um, you know, just strategies, difference between FHA conventional uh mastermind sessions that we're running, which we used to keep private, but now we put public, learning how to code, right? As as things are transitioning and using that again to help that transparency and information out there, you know, you could reach me directly at ak at gotmortges.com. And again, we run that mastermind, Ryan, like we spoke off stage, and we're literally sharing these things, right? Eventually, after a certain point, you get so tired of talking about mortgages and real estate and title. And the purpose of you know conversations now is just hey guys, if you literally reciprocate and I can learn something from you too by earning your referral or building that relationship and opportunity that I can. But you know, objections are just literally just rebuttals and oxygen, right? If if I push back, I could still be in the room and have those conversations with clients, and that's our goal throughout the whole day.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

That's fantastic. Well, just in closing, I I'm always impressed when entrepreneurs grow by giving back, and it's completely obvious. It goes back to Zig Ziggler's expressions back in the day is the you know, to get what you want, you need to help other people get what they want. And you're doing a great job of that and showcasing it through education, learning, and just kind of publishing the content. So anyway, wonderful job, and we'll be sure to link to you in our show notes and thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Absolutely. Thank you for your time.