Don Goettling Goes All In With Momentum Builder

Don Goettling, a nearly 40-year veteran of the mortgage and real estate industry, announced last week that he’s committing full time to his role as CEO of Momentum Builder, the company he co-founded in 2018.

The organization, which provides resources for housing professionals — including coaching, workshops, events and technology tools — also oversees the Sales Mastery event, founded by Todd Duncan. Momentum Builder bought Sales Mastery late last year and plans to continue its annual sales summit while updating it for future participants.

In an interview with HousingWire, Goettling highlighted the challenges faced by the mortgage industry that he’s witnessed firsthand, including the impact of COVID-19 and rising interest rates, as well as the importance of community and upcoming initiatives by Momentum Builder.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Wolak: What inspired you to dedicate yourself full time to Momentum Builder after four decades in the industry?

Don Goettling: Basically, it started as a passion project to help more people. I’ve been in the industry for 39 years now and I’ve always had a business coach.

My coach at one point said, “Don, you run a division of 163 people with nine offices doing $1.5 billion in business. I can’t really teach you more about the mortgage business. After so many years in the business, what do you want for your legacy?” And I basically said, “I’d love to provide all the resources that changed my career.” I almost quit the business because I didn’t have those resources, and therefore I was trading hours for dollars and running out of hours.

And fortunately, ironically, somebody introduced me to Todd Duncan and Sales Mastery, and it changed my entire life and career, because now I was aligned with the right coaches, the right tech, the right people, the right inspiration and the right business planning. Todd’s been a mentor of mine for decades now, and I just wanted to give back to the community and provide resources.

I created Momentum Builder to provide that and now I decided that this is my real passion. And to really take it to the next level, I have to dedicate my time, full time, to growing it out and creating more partnerships and more value.

SW: It’s been a year since Momentum Builder bought Sales Mastery. Can you share how you’ve been working to maintain the legacy of Sales Mastery while modernizing the experience of Momentum Builder for industry professionals who might be feeling challenged like you once were?

DG: We’ve just gone through three of the toughest years I’ve seen in the industry in my 40 years. It’s been more challenging than ever, and people are more confused and lost and in need of inspiration, direction and community.

We lost a lot of that community during COVID, of course. Now we’re trying to bring back community for not just for mortgage — we’re leaning into real estate as well. Now, more than ever, the mortgage and real estate communities need to work together to get their market share, because we’re all competing with the big marketing budgets of Rocket, Zillow, Redfin and so forth.

We’re providing those resources and inspiration and community through more events and workshops. We have a new podcast coming out, and we’re creating a new website that’s going to be a one-stop shop for everybody who wants to be successful in not just business but in life.

SW: Can you talk about some of the pain points that people in the industry are dealing with, and how is your role helping to alleviate them?

DG: Being in the industry as long as I have and managing so many loan officers, I’ve been in the grind. I know what the challenges, concerns, and needs are of mortgage professionals and real estate professionals, because we align with them.

The challenge has been the length of this slowdown. Usually we have an 18-month to 24-month slowdown, and then it cycles. Last year, we thought that was going to happen in the spring. And then, unfortunately, when the tariffs hit and rates went back up, it slowed down the economy to the slowest summer buying season in decades.

And what I’m seeing is that as good as COVID was for our industry income-wise and volume-wise, it really hurt our industry because it actually made a lot of the sales professionals a little lazy. They had it easy for a couple years, and now trying to get them to do what made them successful in the past, it’s very hard to get them to do it again.

What I hear a lot of people in the industry keep saying is, ‘I’m waiting for the market to get back to normal,’ when there is no normal. It’s all changed and we have to help our industry understand that it has changed. There are people who are very successful, so we’re bringing to light all these great professionals that are successful … and how they’re getting their mindset in the right place.

SW: What types of resources, tools and experiences is Momentum Builder planning to offer or hone to help people thrive and feel part of a community again?

DG: The nice thing about Momentum Builder is that we’re the only agnostic platform out there that is not selling a product. We’re brand ambassadors for the best in the industry.

What we do is, we vet the best of the best that we can find, and then bring them to our community and give them the options. They may not even know about some of these tech platforms and how they work. They may not know about some of these coaches, so we’ll just say, “Here are the best six to 10 coaches. Choose who speaks to you.”

We’re going to be doing monthly workshops with all these professionals and we’re going to team up with other professionals for more events throughout the year. We’ll create experiences — meaning intimate, small-person mastermind groups that will go to a resort location and really walk away with something tangible to implement in their business. But we’ll also create an experience and a mastermind group that’s going to hold each other accountable.

SW: One theme that resonates in our industry is choice. How do you provide your audience information about, say, mortgage coaches to choose from without letting your personal bias come through?

DG: That’s a really good question, because there’s always a bias. And that’s why, after seven years of doing the events, we are very unbiased, because we do not have a product.

All we do is basically allow them to represent their value proposition — whether it’s tech or whether it’s coaching. And a lot of it will be done either through our podcast interviews so people can learn more, or workshops, if they would like like to learn more about a product that’s going to help them align with more real estate agents as a value add to create more customers together. It’s allowing them to make the decision.