The Immigrant's Playbook for Market Dominance | Joseph Shalaby

27:57Ryan Hanley:Or do you think the administration truly believes this is a game-changing piece of – No, no. They just think it's one – the administration thinks it's just one of many ways to attack the issue. You are not going to make a dent in the current environment without massive changes. so i mean we are really upside down with affordability for housing right now it's like a joke yeah think about here in new york or in california where the housing average price is over a million and a half or something i don't know in california it's like a million plus in new york i'm sure it's the same million plus million plus for a mortgage okay at the current rate environment that's seven thousand dollar seven thousand dollar payment plus your two thousand dollar tax bill you're at nine thousand dollars you need to be making 20 grand a month to buy a freaking mediocre house you're talking about a three-bedroom two-bath bungalow in upstate new york nothing super fancy who makes 20 30 grand a month your local you know anesthesiologist is buying a little rink-a-dink ranch you know that's who's buying that doesn't make any sense when our parents' generation, you know, like a coal worker was buying a house, you know, or whatever, right?

29:20So now you got, it's just weird how it's done. Jobs don't pay enough to buy houses. Everybody's looking for that side hustle to double their income.

29:31Ryan Hanley:It's crazy. I mean, I know, I know, I have a friend who's a very successful, was very successful landscaping business. He's got multiple, multiple units, does, does very well for himself. And he called me yesterday, not yesterday, a week ago, sorry, and asked me about YouTube faceless videos as a side hustle. And it was like, like, I had like this moment of like, what the, like, it was just so out of left field. But he's like, he's like, dude, you know, I was like, dude, I thought you're doing great. He's like, oh, no, we're doing great. He's like, but But he's like, you know, with all the increased, you know, increased expense here and, you know, he wants this and he's got kids that are getting close to college age.

30:11Ryan Hanley:And he's like, you know, I'm looking at my bills, man. And like he's like, I can't scale my landscaping business fast enough and, you know, to to make enough more because that means I, you know, paying another crew of guys. I got to buy more trucks and I got to buy another sales guy or bring another sales guy in. He's like, I need a side hustle. He's like, and I was watching some whatever YouTube faceless. And it's like the fact that that thought was even in his head, you know, it wasn't the faceless YouTube video thing. But like the fact that he's would go to something like that to say, I need this side, this easy passive side hustle thing to make an extra five or 10 grand a month.

30:47I'm like, that's crazy.

30:50Ryan Hanley:Like something is wrong when that guy who's been very successful, hardworking, 20 years building his business is thinking about starting a faceless YouTube video channel or YouTube channel in order to make an extra couple grand to like get ahead. Like that's crazy to me. You know, that's the world we're in right now. People need several hustles to survive. I mean that's just the reality. They need several hustles. There is no one size fits all for your income anymore. I'm a serial entrepreneur, so I understand the concept of kind of several income streams. But now that's just becoming a requirement to survival.

31:28Ryan Hanley:Yeah. Everything's so expensive now. You know, everything is so expensive. The thing that hit me in the face was about a year and a half ago, I got divorced from my wife three years ago. Kind of single dad, two kids, kind of doing my thing. You know, I got two boys that are with me 50 % of the time, sometimes a little more. And I'm looking at my grocery bill and I'm going, how does a single guy who has two boys half time, like, how is my grocery bill like$200 a week? Like, how is this even possible? We don't even buy that much stuff. That's it? $200 a week? I mean, man, that's nothing. Yeah. You're obviously not going to Whole Foods.

32:11Ryan Hanley:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's true. But, you know, it's like I was just looking at it going like I'm not a big, you know, I don't make myself a bunch of fancy meals. You know, I'm pretty easy as far as that goes, although I love food or whatever. But, like, you know, just in general, and it just blew me away that I was like this. Even a few years before that, it was like$100,$120 for the same amount of food. and I'm going, how do these families, like how do we expect these families who are in a 6 % mortgage because they went a year ago or something and got their home or two years ago and they got two kids and two cars and both parents are working and they're trying to get their kids on the travel soccer team and they want them to go to get some extra help in math and pay for a tutor and whatever.

32:56Ryan Hanley:And now, like how does that family ever actually get ahead beyond the trickle that they may put away in their 401k or something that they hope, you know, pays for their bills. Like, I just, I don't understand. I mean, they can't get ahead. They're robbing Peter to pay Paul every week. You know, I, my dad would have been so successful if he started his own practice. Like he's still 76 years old, retired, took his retirement, went back to work, you know, because he can't figure out how to just get ahead. And unfortunately for wage earners, especially now, they're not going to be able to get ahead.

33:37Wage earners cannot get ahead. They have to figure out some other way to get ahead, whether it's dropshipping, whether it's, I don't know, YouTube faceless reels, whether it's closing mortgage deals on the side or getting real estate license or whatever it is. They have an additional revenue stream to get ahead. That's just how life is. Um, I'm still, and you are, but we're both still trying to figure out how to get ahead. You know, we're podcasting, we're opening up new doors. We're talking to people that are moving and shaking in society and, um, trying to figure out the next move because it's survival of the fittest right now.

34:17It really is. And, uh, that's what we're preparing our boys for, right? So preparing our kids for.

34:25Ryan Hanley:As a leader, how do you recommend handling side hustle culture? I've always been of the opinion that the companies that I've led or run myself or even my own company, I have outcomes that you've committed to as being an employee of my company. As long as those outcomes are hit, right, I'm happy with you. What you do outside of those outcomes, you know, the outcomes that I need you to get, it's never bothered me, right? As long as you stay focused and you're getting your outcomes done for my business, God bless you. You wanna go have a side hustle? You wanna go build another business? Awesome. But so many of my peers in my home industry is the property casualty insurance industry.

35:05Ryan Hanley:So, so many of my peers in that space, they are, like, I see the message boards, I hear the comments when I'm doing keynotes or I'm talking to somebody, like, are about this idea of, like, I can't keep my people focused. I know he's working on this other thing during his lunch or this or, and it's like a major point of friction for a lot of leaders that their employees have these side hustles. So how do you, do you have that happening in your business? How do you address it? And you know, whether you do or you don't, how do you, how do leaders kind of wrap their head around this idea? Because you don't want your people to be under constant anxiety from capital.

35:42Ryan Hanley:If you can't provide enough to them in your business or the job that they're doing. Well, here's the deal. My business, because I'm a leader of a sales organization where people, I'm in the business of making businesses. So eMortgage Capital is an organization that makes other mortgage companies. So when I'm talking to my leaders, I'm telling them go all in on building this business because the opportunity under the eMortgage Capital ecosystem is endless. You have the ability to make tens of millions of dollars. You have the ability to have hundreds of employees under the e-mortgage capital ecosystem.

36:19We're like a farmer's insurance, right? You run a farmer. Some farmer's branches are much more successful than other farmer's branches. So if you run your mortgage company under e-mortgage capital with all the resources that we provide to you, whether it's licensing, technology, marketing, lead gen, data solutions, infrastructure support, or training, or coaching, or onboarding, whatever it is that we're doing for you. You have a billion dollar ecosystem that you pay zero dollars for to scale your company. So just leverage and learn and educate yourself and ask questions as much as humanly possible to grow your mortgage company, to grow your brand so you can dominate within the EMC ecosystem.

36:58We have mortgage. We have real estate. We have so many opportunities for you to scale and grow with our platform that I really just push people towards our side hustle culture because our side hustle culture if you build within the emc ecosystem is infinite your side hustle culture allows you you have your own production i still produce deals you have recruits you could still recruit everybody could do what i do which is bring in other people and have like revenue streams under us or you have the opportunity to bring in other new guys or other guys and buy leads from and split commissions so if you want to grow under one of the verticals grow under one of those segments underneath our ecosystem and always build your personal brand podcast do your social media content.

37:40Like there's so much to do that you could stay laser focused on just mortgages.

37:46Ryan Hanley:Because of the infinite upside. And when you're referencing wage earners, you're talking about, I work for the state and I make$64 ,000 and I really have no, regardless of how much effort I put in this quarter, I'm still making$64 ,000 and there's nothing I can do about it. Pretty much. You're basically capped. Yeah. So I have a friend, you know, works for the, I think he's a probation officer now and he has no upside. So I introduced him to an investment opportunity where he can basically earn a full-on other income. But if he sits in the opportunity, it will compound. If he extracts it every month, it will just add a full-on side job for him.

38:29And he just opts to take the monthly income because he has no other monthly income. But I'm like, dude, if you just sat on that opportunity for a year, it would be like 10x that a monthly income. But he can't. He needs the revenue.

38:47Ryan Hanley:Do you think that – and maybe not necessarily his specific case, but I think what you just described is a very – is thinking maybe scarcity mindset or thinking very short-term versus long-term. Yeah. How do you get someone out of – because I know a lot of – I have a lot of friends who are very smart, talented at the things they do. but they tend to operate from this place of scarcity or, or very short term thinking. Like I just, I got to get through this month or I got to get through this week, whatever. Um, but I think we both know, like while we always have to be kind of focused on what's happening today, part of our brain, or at least we have to cordon off time to consider, think about and plan much longer term.

39:26Ryan Hanley:Cause as you said, that's where compound results come from. And you know, was Warren Buffett said, uh, the greatest force in nature is compound interest. Um, You know, how do you crack someone out of that mentality or how do you open them up to a world of abundance if they are operating or maybe they were taught by their parents or wherever they were raised to kind of think more small and scarce? You know, a scarcity mentality is something a lot of people suffer with, right? And how do you make people have an abundance mindset? By letting them know that the gifts of God are much greater than what you and I can comprehend.

40:08So it really comes through faith. Like, if you want an abundance mindset, be faithful. Because God gives you more than you've ever wanted. So if you hold on to this little thing, you know, you start to covet, right? And like, if you covet, you're just not going to be blessed. So it's a really simple concept. Don't covet. Give everything freely. And God will give you freely. Don't worry about it. You know, and a lot of people, like, they get their first deal. That's what you hear about a lot of people in my business. They get their first deal. And guess what? They're gone for, like, two months.

40:44Blowing the commission because they're like, I just made$10 ,000 on one deal. And then they're gone. Like, take that$10 ,000, pretend you didn't make it, and hit the ground running twice as hard next month, and it'll compound. Just like that. But I mean, that is something that comes with wisdom. That's something that comes like we all, if you're young and you're 21 and you're making a ton of money, sadly, you will fall to that mindset. It's just a sad reality that people live in right now because they're not living a life that's based on faith. They're living a life that's based on human desire, selfishness, et cetera.

41:29Ryan Hanley:Why did you start investing so heavily in your personal brand, like what we see on your Instagram channel, your podcast? What was the motivation to put all this effort into building that brand? I was presented with an opportunity to distinguish myself from my competitors. A couple of years back, I started the podcast. I started marketing. I started the social media. I started really hitting social media so hard in January of 2024. I launched my podcast and I launched my social media strategy. And really at the time, it was kind of like a selfish reason. It was because of basketball. The number one social media influencer at the time, I made him an offer to work with eMortgage Capital.

42:23He turned me down. He went to my competitor. And I was just really sad about him going, not because of anything other than he was our number one basketball player on our team. And that just immensely wrecked me. So I said, you know what? I can't beat them in basketball, but I'm going to beat them on social media. So I just went after it as my own personal goal. And then I beat them on social media. But then I'm like, the world of AI started to materialize. And I'm like, man, in this world of AI, social media influencers are more important than others because now they have the attention of the chat GPT and the AI algorithm.

43:04And every word we're saying right now, believe it or not, every word, and understand this is very important for your audience to know, every word that you say online is now indexed on AI. So ChatGPT will be able to reference this specific podcast on this specific day, you know, that I said this and this about this political subject that we, you know, one of the subjects we talked about earlier, how I feel about Trump or whatever it is. Like, it's all indexed there. So this started to materialize while I was in the midst, like 2025. I'm like, man, personal branding is becoming more important than ever.

43:37You know, I need to go really heavy into it. So I really started to fight with how I'm going to position my brand because I was gaining a massive audience through Mr. Beast style content like giveaway comedy, you know, this other stuff just kind of being eccentric. And I'm like, that's, you know, I'm the CEO of a financial institution. Like, then my board is like, you can't do that. You need to like position yourself like Jamie Dimon. But I'm like, I'm not that boring, you know. Like, I need to just be a little bit more out there, a little more relatable. I'm not going to be like, I'm not a Fortune 500 CEO or if that's a Fortune 10 CEO.

44:14I'm not doing super boring content. I'm going to stay real because at the end of the day, my goal is simple. I want to recruit talent. So.

44:25Ryan Hanley:Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. One of the things that I've been preaching for years inside the insurance industry in particular has been the importance of agency owners or leaders in the space to step out and start to start to own that narrative. Because one of the things that you will hear in every association conference meeting that happens is it's so hard to find good talent. and I know you don't know too much about my backstory, but I started my own national digital commercial insurance agency, grew it, scaled it, sold it, exited it in just under five years and at no point did we ever have problems hiring and we actually had a waiting list for people to come in and be producers for that business and it was simply because all I did every day, I shouldn't say all I did, but every day I was out front on LinkedIn or Instagram or in a newsletter or a podcast talking about what I believed about the business and what I believed in general and what my value structure was, et cetera.

45:26Ryan Hanley:So people were attracted to us. Partnerships were attracted to us. Clients were attracted to us. And to me, this seems so incredibly obvious, yet I see, I continue to see a tremendous amount of hesitation, particularly from leaders in actually going out and presenting themselves. Now, they'll do it in a very corporate, vanilla, like the lawyers dotted I's and cross T's way. But that like what their personality is, what they actually like to do, who they really are. If you were to go golfing with them or whatever hobby you like to do, you rarely see that. Yet that has shown over and over again, yourself being case in point, when you allow your personality to come through, that is when people actually form that true bond with you.

46:10Ryan Hanley:Yes. What is the message or how would you convey to anyone listening who is struggling with this decision to go out the importance of what you just said? Like how do you crack that code? For every entrepreneur listening right now, if you do not build your personal brand in the next 12 to 24 months, you face complete extinction in your space. And the reason for that isn't because anything we discussed on the show. It's because of something very simple. Everybody now goes to AI to make their decisions for them. If you go to ChatGPT and you ask, should I go with Joe or should I go with Chris? And ChatGPT can't pull up anything on Joe, guess what?

46:50They're going with Chris. AI is now deciding for people. You now have to feed the algorithm, the AI algorithm, what the narrative is. So that people can logically decide or reasonably decide or whatever the reasoning model is. AI is going to go through thousands of variables and deduct with what it can aggregate on all the web why to work with you. So make your voice loud. Make it louder than your competitors so you can beat your competitor, period, because they're going to do it if you don't.

47:23Ryan Hanley:Yeah, the other thing about AI too that I think people miss is where with Google's 10 blue links, even though most people would – the prominent number of people would choose from the first three. you still people would still scan them all right today with ai it's returning the answer that it thinks is it's getting giving one solution so it's not even like you have a chance if you're three four five on a list on on a google listing on a google seo listing but you know when you search for hey what what's the best commercial insurance agent or where should i get my mortgage from right it's giving you the answer that it thinks is the best for you and it's giving you And if you're the business and you don't show up, you just simply aren't there.

48:06Ryan Hanley:Like you said, it's not the days of options seem to be going away. It seems to be just give me the answer so I don't have to think about it and I can move on. Yeah. I mean, people want that instant gratification. That's what AI is delivering. And it's going to be able to make a reasonable decision based on thousands of sources. You know, now it's going to scour the entire web. and that's why I'm on every platform. I'm on Reddit, I'm on Facebook, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Snapchat, I'm on TikTok, I'm on Medium, I'm on Substack, I'm on, I mean, you name it. I got stuff everywhere on every platform that exists.

48:46So when you're thinking about Joseph Shelby, the reasoning model, it has thousands of hours of data. It's always going to pick me because I'm just the most well-known in my space.

49:00Ryan Hanley:where do you see the biggest opportunity in those social platforms or or in the in distribution in general online distribution where you know you could just check online what has the biggest reach i i mean but here's the thing every one of these platforms is gaining market share so i can't tell you what's going to be the next hottest thing i can't one thing i definitely see that's going to be very very hot uh very soon because it was you know that's getting a lot of market share is Snapchat, you know, people are like not even considering Snapchat, but in so many verticals like insurance or mortgage, like nobody's dominating Snapchat for mortgage right now.

49:33Nobody's dominating Snapchat for insurance. So there's like opportunities in these emerging social platforms. But I don't know what's coming out that's going to be better soon. But it seems like the powerhouses like, you know, obviously Meta are going to dominate under them for a while. And the ones that are like the outliers, like Snapchat, will start to gain more market share, are continuing to gain tons of market share.

49:59Ryan Hanley:Yeah. I mean, just look at the people who built entire careers on TikTok. That's one of the most recent that has gone very, very big. And entire careers have been generated just off of being an early adopter and building a community and growing on that platform. I give a ton of credence to taking these platforms and seeing if your message can resonate early. And the earlier, the better. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, go ahead. So, yeah, I mean, we right now are in a really critical phase right now where all these platforms are fighting for market share. We got X, we got Threads, all these other, you know, we had, you know, new ones coming out.

50:38What was it called? The Blue Sky came out, tried to compete with X to be just in case the Democrats won. So I set up a profile there even just, you know, during the campaign. I'm like, well, if this went, if they went somehow, I don't know if it's impossible, but thank God things worked out the way they did. But, you know, just in case I was ready to start posting on this other platform. Even Trump's true social, I mean, there's so many, you know, fighting for our attention. So if they're all fighting for our attention, I just try to pour it into all of them. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

51:16Ryan Hanley:My last question for you kind of takes in, you know, you obviously are very knowledgeable, not just about your business. You obviously spend time thinking about what's going on from a political standpoint, economic marketplace, societally, et cetera. And you can see it in your commentary on your Instagram. I get pushback because I'm very similar, very similar, ferocious consumer. I have wide ranges of interests. Obviously, I have the things that I do for work. And I talk about an interview for the show, people from a lot of different walks of life and a lot of different places in either business or in what they do.

51:54Ryan Hanley:And one of the pieces of pushback that I get is I waste brain cycles thinking about things that I can't control, right? Like the economy or what's going on politically or international, whatever. But my viewpoint has always been understanding the macro of our world is just as important as understanding the micro of our world. And I think it allows me to make better decisions in my day-to-day, smaller life when I understand what's going on in the broader world in general. But I think a lot of people get lost in that. One, do you agree that it is important to have a broader understanding and to spend that time?

52:36Ryan Hanley:Or do you see, I don't want to call it being distracted because obviously I find value in it, But for those who see spending time thinking about these things as a distraction, do you think that that might be a more valid point? I mean, the macro is imperative, especially when you're because it allows you to make micro decisions, you know, because you could see what's happening at a macro level. I'm always looking at the macro, especially in our industry, the mortgage industry, where it's very much dictated by the macro impacts. Right. When the Fed cuts rates or when there's an issue with something geopolitically or when there's a war, whatever it is.

53:10All those macros affect the micro. It literally affects these people's mortgage interest rates and closing dates, etc. So a lot of people wait on Fed Day. So, you know, I always, in our industry, the macro, everybody's watching. Everybody's watching who the next Fed president's going to be. Everybody's watching, you know, Trump's moves. Everybody was excited. But also one of the things, because we're in the finance business, everybody wants someone who helps you with your taxes and self-employment laws, etc. So that everybody wants someone like that in office because it just helps our business and our bank accounts personally.

53:50So those macro decisions as well politically impact our business. So I'm very much an advocate of people paying attention to the macros because that's what impacts them at the micro level. But also always sharpen your micro knowledge as well. And then also it's important for at the micro level in our business to be very knowledgeable, like to know what's going on with your state council, your city council, your, you know, charities that you donate to locally or local communities, et cetera. So all of that's very, very relative in our space.

54:29Ryan Hanley:Joseph, I could talk to you for hours, man. I think what you've done is phenomenal. I'm a big fan of how you approach it, of your mindset. I think that you are completely dialed on how to get after this and be successful. If people want to go deeper into your world, where's the best place to do that? Just find me on social media, Joseph Shalabi on all social platforms or follow my show Coffees for Closers, Coffees with a Z. Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate your time. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having me.

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