We were lucky to catch up with Jon Bodan recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jon, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

Our motto is “home loans with the Rockstar Treatment, every time” – over the last few years everyone and everything has been called “rockstar” to some degree. In our case, we come by it honestly because I am literally the lead guitar player in a metal band called Halcyon Way – we have 5 albums out and have toured all over the world for years.

I started The Perpetual in 2002 but as I grew more comfortable and confident as a business owner, I made a decision some years back to completely break from the generic “mortgage banker guy-in-a-tie” corporate branding and to completely own who I was and embed that into how we do business and interact with our clients. When we made those changes it was a risk, because we’re in an industry that is known for being stuffy and humorless – but when we injected ‘cool kid’ imagery, sarcasm & humor, and an unapologetic ownership of who we are, people really reacted to it positively because it’s authentic. And there’s no way we could go back at this point.

If you’re going to be casual & approachable in our industry, though – you have to deliver the goods and have A+ expert-level execution, though – because otherwise you’re setting yourself up for ridicule. So we have a massive internal focus on our process & procedures to ensure all our clients have a similar bespoke experience top-to-bottom during the process.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m the President & Founder of The Perpetual Financial Group, Inc. – we are an independent mortgage banker based out of Atlanta. What that means is that we finance residential homes for clients. We’re licensed in 9 states (GA, FL, AL, TN, SC, NC, TX, AZ, and CA). We’re a direct lender and we have the ability to make a lot of deals work that other mortgage companies cannot, because of our independent nature. We specialize in the self-employed and investors in particular, but we do a ton of work with first time home buyers and people that want to move up into a bigger home as well. Before I started the company, I was a commercial banker for a large regional bank.

In addition, I am the lead guitar player in the band Halcyon Way, and we have released 5 albums to date and have toured all over the world.

I’m also a cancer survivor, and I serve as the President of the Board Of Directors for the Atlanta Cancer Care Foundation, and we donate money to Atlanta-area cancer patients to help them pay their bills while they are receiving cancer treatments. We fund things like eviction avoidance, utilities, food, transportation, and the like.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I’m honestly not huge on business motivation reading – when I want to read, I’m looking to not be thinking about work and to kind of recharge my mental batteries. However, early on in the business I read a book called the E-Myth by Michael Gerber. This was a massive watershed moment for me professionally because the idea of the book is that you need to be a “business owner” as opposed to a “self employed dude with a job”.

to get to that point, you have to really work ON the business intentionally and build written procedures, processes, implement systems to provide a consistent client experience and to allow for scaling, and the like.

So to me, if it isn’t codified in a policy/procedure and/or baked into our tech stack internally, it doesn’t exist.

Systems, procedures, and policies are paramount to running a good business because you can insert someone into a role off the street, give them cultural training and the like, but have most of their guardrails set up as an employee by the systems in place. It really helps to scale a business up or down effectively, and I would highly recommend any entrepreneur read the E-Myth.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Well, obviously we are in the residential real estate space, and I started the company in 2002. We have gone through a number of business cycles, but in particular we went through the Great Recession in 2007-2009. That was a massively difficult environment to operate a mortgage company in, between the complete lack of appetite on Wall Street for mortgage paper, the regulatory environment, the job market in general crushing housing demand, cratering home prices, and an unreliable underwriting environment.

Our revenues fell approximately 40% between 2006-2007 and stayed flatline for the next several years.

at the end of 2009, I calculated that 91% of my competitors in the State of Georgia had gone out of business.

To make matters worse, on the tail end of that in 2010 I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, which kept me from personally working for nearly 2 years.

however, we persevered – it’s arguable if I’m just stupid, determined, or stubborn haha – but we made it through that and entered into a massive growth phase for the company and increased our top-line revenue by 20x over the next decade. And in the wake of the Great Recession, the fact that we were still standing gave us a massive amount of credibility in our local marketplace.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rockstarmortgageATL.com
• Instagram: theperpetualfinancialgroup
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theperpetualfinancialgroup
• Linkedin: https://www.instagram.com/theperpetualfinancialgroup/
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-perpetual-financial-group-inc-suwanee
• Other: www.halcyonway.com www.atlantacancercarefoundation.org

Image Credits
Headshot & shot with guitar with red tint: Brett Falcon others are watermarked by photographer