Hyper Pony Studio

Owner

North Square Investments

Digital Marketing Consultant

FortéOne

Fractional CMO | Chief Marketing Officer

Ariel Investments

C.S. McKee

UX Collective

Contributing Writer

MAQTOOB

Digital Bootcamp

Instructor

The Simons Group

Senior Designer

👑 Web, Marketing, & Design Expert for Advisory and Consulting Firms 👑 Websites driven by marketing expertise 👉 hyperponystudio.com

👋 Hi I'm Manda!

Follow me and ring my 🔔 if you're in the financial services industry and want to learn more about:

👉 Marketing persuasion techniques 
👉 Writing copy that converts
👉 Attracting potential clients
👉 Turning those prospects into clients
👉 Professionally presenting your brand 
👉 Attracting your ideal clients
👉 Creating an EFFECTIVE website
👉 Establishing trust and building authority

🔻 🔻 🔻 Want to work together? 🔻 🔻 🔻

For advisory and investment firms:
🔹 Complete brand, website, & marketing overhauls
🔹 Ongoing marketing and fractional CMO services
🔹 Deep-dive website audits

For independent financial advisors:
🔹 Deep-dive website audits
🔹 Web and marketing flash audits
🔹 Ignite Your Site course coming soon!

Learn more, view samples of my work, or start your project at hyperponystudio.com!

👑
Hyper Pony Studio 
Digital marketing for the financial services industry

Manda Szewczyk

I'm noticing some disturbing behavior on Linkedin.

I've been away for a while, and I'm longing for the days when all there was to complain about was pitch-slapping in the DMs.

Here are some new LI tactics that I'm NOT loving...

- - - - - - 

🙄 People selling their services in the comments section of my posts

Not just chiming in or offering anything useful, but literally saying, "These are the services I offer" – like a little ad in the comments. Most of them are other marketers or web designers.

Not cool.

- - - - - - 

🤨 Adding me to their email newsletter list just because I accepted their connection request

Um, I agreed to connect. Not subscribe! As soon as someone does this, I lose all trust in them and their business tactics.

Unsubscribe. Unfollow. Goodbye.

- - - - - - 

😡 Sending me calendar invites when we've never communicated before

This one is the WORST! I'm getting meetings on my calendar and in Zoom from people I've NEVER met!! Some of them are for webinars, some are demos, some are pitches – but NONE of them are with people I've ever met or talked to.

What the actual...???

- - - - - - 

I get it. Building a business is hard. But come on!!

Have you experienced any of this? Or is it just me?

👑 Websites & Marketing Overhauls for Financial Advisors & RIAs 👉 Sharing digital marketing tips

All three of these tweaks come from real samples I found on a professionally designed advisor website.

Take a look and let me know which is your favorite, and if you're planning to make any of these changes to your own site.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

🐙 Hi I'm Manda - I share Tiny Tweaks to help financial advisors improve their marketing and level-up their websites.

Carousel

GO! Coaching

Empowering the Modern Loan Advisors to double their lead count while lowering their hours worked through modern marketing, sales, and operational systems.  

GO! is now the top Loan Officer Community in the US, all within 3 years.

Co-Founder & CEO

Lower

Driving the recruiting, retaining and production growth of our Loan Officers

Chief Growth Officer

Guaranteed Rate

Branch Manager/SVP of Residential Lending

Branch Manager/SVP of Mortgage Lending NMLS# 218863 Guaranteed Rate NMLS# 2611

Branch Manager/SVP of Mortgage Lending

Perl Mortgage

Private Mortgage Banking

Baytree National Bank & Trust Co.

Senior Vice President - Mortgage Division

American Street Mortgage Company

American Street Mortgage Company was a boutique mortgage firm in Chicago best known for it's composition of the brightest and hard working mortgage planners. Additionally, the core philosophy for consistent charity efforts quickly earned American Street a reputation of a high morale and ethical organization.

President

Illinois Mortgage Funding Corp.

A start up company that grew exponentially with the help of the 2003 refinance boom.

Managing Broker

CEO at GO! Coaching | Helping 10,000+ growth-minded loan officers win in business and life

Sales saved my life. 

In 1985, my parents and I emigrated Iran for better opportunities in the United States. 

We left everything and everyone. 

My mom could not get a job at McDonald’s and my Father was earning $3.75 an hour as a shoe salesman. 

We lived in a 600 sq foot apartment and moved multiple times and by the age of 14, I was working. 

I started off as a car porter and janitor and then learned how to market and rent apartments and then eventually sell cars (all by the age of 18).

School was not my thing. 

I barely graduated high school (1.7 GPA). 

I dropped out of college. 

I became a telemarketer for a small mortgage brokerage 

I made over 50,000+ cold calls and quickly became the top telemarketer in the country. 

English is my second language, but sales is my first language. 

I became BUY-lingual. 

At the age of 25, I purchased my first property: a 17-unit apartment building for $1M that I still own today and amassed 100 units before ever leaving my parents home. 

As a residential loan officer, I’ve also personally funded over $1B in home loan volume and $100M+ yearly from 2019 to 2022 alone. 

As a Co-Founder and CEO of GO! Coaching, we achieved 8 figure yearly revenue within four years of inception (all through impacting hundreds of careers). 

And as the Chief Growth Officer of Lower.com, a multi-channel fintech mortgage lender, we recently raised $100M in Series A funding (the largest in Ohio state history) to help catapult us in becoming a top 5 lender by 2030. 

Not bad for an immigrant kid from Iran. 

Selling is the most important skill you must seek. 

Understanding how to illustrate your value verbally, visually and textually, will open doors you won’t believe. 

And I’m walking proof.  

And if you’ve read this far, I have a promise for you: 

Every day, I will share one specific business gem to help you think better, do better, and to be better.  

I do, I learn, I share. 

Let's win together. 

🤜🤛

- Amir 


Email: amir@growthonly.com
Instagram: @amirsyed 
Twitter: @realAmirSyed
Instagram: @amirsyed and @bankofamirica

Amir Syed

Here’s the thing about growth: 

It rarely happens alone.

‍(By the way, this is copy-pasted from a recent newsletter, which you can read at my bio link)

This past month, at our Fall GrowthCon event (which sold out) and surrounded by hundreds of high-performing Loan Officers, one truth stood out…

A powerful environment is everything.

It’s infectious.

It’s inspiring.

And it’s necessary. 

You can have the best strategy, the perfect systems, and all the motivation in the world…

But if the people around you aren’t pushing you forward, you’ll eventually stall.

That’s what we saw happen in real time.

Every conversation sparked a new idea.

Every connection challenged someone’s thinking.

And every person in the room left with their standards raised… 

Not just because of a new tactic or playbook they walked away with, but because of who they were around.

Because we were all lifting each other up.

A rising tide raises all ships. 

Growth isn’t just about doing more.

It’s about choosing rooms that require more of you.

So this week, ask yourself:
‍
Who’s in your room right now?

Are they challenging your comfort zone, or keeping you stagnant in it?

If you want to grow faster, start there.

"I'll figure it out."

That's one of the most powerful statements you can think and say in your life. 

It shows that you:

- Believe in your ability to win
- Are going to persist through trials
- Are prepared to learn from your mistakes

The most successful people I know in mortgages and other industries have had that mindset their entire lives.

We even have a saying on our team: "F.I.O."

Figure. It. Out. 

And the key to having it is staying in the game.

When you persist, you give yourself a chance.

When you give up, you have no chance at all.

Something I've found over and over again throughout my career and life:

1. The best salesperson is the one who's studying and practicing the art of sales in their free time.

2. The best speaker is the one who's doing toastmasters and watching YouTube videos on speaking.

3. The fittest person has a trainer, nutritionist, and routine they stick to at least 99% of the time.

Outward success is the tip of the iceberg.

What you do in private is the rest of it.

Dial that in, and you'll get to where you want to GO!

“Mr. Maxwell: How can I become a great leader like you one day?

He paused for a moment, put his hand on my shoulder, and said:

“To lead and sharpen others, you must first lead and sharpen yourself. Great leadership is developed daily, not in a day. Design a personal growth plan and work on yourself every single day, because to lead tomorrow, you must learn today.”

Uh, wow.

This month, I’m re-reading John Maxwell’s “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.”

To say it’s incredible is an understatement.

The more I read, the more I realize how much further I have to go as a leader, but I’m committed to the daily discipline of becoming better for everyone around me.

As we head into Thanksgiving season, I want to thank all of you who’ve supported my daily posts here over the past four years.

My mission is to help my fellow Loan Officers not only become better at their craft, but better in their personal lives.

GO! Win.

My first 1,000 cold calls flopped. Hard. Instant hang-ups, hard no's, no real interest.

I sounded like Chewbacca from Star Wars. 

In my next 1,000, I closed two deals. 

Then I became one of the top cold callers in the country.

My first year of building started rough. Nothing came easy.

Years later, we were winning big every month, scaling quickly, and gaining traction. 

Everything is like this.

Take those early losses.

Those are your education and your rite of passage. 

And guess what: struggle gives success value. 

Love the losses.

Something I don't talk about enough: I am a believer in and a follower of God.

There's an idea in Christianity that you can't take credit for anything you do or anything you receive, because it's all Him who does it for you.

I couldn't agree more.

That doesn't mean you just wait around.

You have to:

- Show up daily 
- Execute relentlessly 
- Reflect to become wiser
- Seek others to go farther 
- Fail to learn lessons

But at the end of the day, you must have good intentions. 

God searches the heart and tests the mind to give rewards based on a person's deeds and conduct. 

Be righteous with your motives, grateful for anything you get, and keep faith that more is on the way.

I'm not one of those coaches who's in his 20s. No kids, no wife, tons of time to grind.

Instead, I:

- Have duties as a husband
- Have duties as a father
- Have duties as a leader

One way I juggle all of those is by getting up early.

When you're awake before anyone else, you can:

- Catch up on work that slipped through the cracks
- Go deep on work because you have no distractions
- Get some much-needed reflection and alone time

Become an early riser for a few months.

One hour in the early morning is like getting four hours during the day. 

You'll find that it levels you up in many areas of your life.

One more video from the NAMB Battle of Coaches at Caesar's Plaza in Las Vegas. 

This was too much fun not to share again.

Also, big shout-out to my content team for capturing this memory in such a cool way. 

I'm getting hyped all over again watching it.

Let's GO!

Happy Sunday ✌🏼

More GO! meetups.

More good times had.

More connections made.

More people winning in the mortgage biz.

Grateful for everyone who showed up at this one.

Be the person who brings people together. 

I hope I see you at the next one!

taplio

The Battle

Manda Szewczyk

Amir Syed

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreManda Szewczyk's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAmir Syed's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Manda Szewczyk

Amir Syed

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Manda Szewczyk's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAmir Syed's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreManda Szewczyk's LinkedIn Performance