“I got out of college, and I was working for an IT solutions provider as a national account executive,” he told Mortgage Professional America during a telephone interview. “We were doing nationwide POS [point of sale] rollouts. This was early 2000s, and this was the thing – putting point of sales in hair salons, subways and Lens Crafters and all that stuff. This dates me a little bit, but I was also doing some fascinating things with PalmPilot rollouts,” he said with a chuckle in referencing the once-ubiquitous gadgets that have long given way to today’s smartphones.
Early misgivings give rise to new career
Right from the start, something didn’t feel right as he pedaled his wares. “The company was publicly traded,” he noted. “I was 22, 23 years old and being in a sales position, you feel encouraged to push sales even when products are not ready and customers are not ready for invoices,” he said. “It created some unnecessary stress.”
He quit the job. “And my wife and I were at dinner with some friends, and he was in the mortgage business as a broker,” he recalled. “He said ‘what are you going to do?’ I said ‘I honestly don’t know.’ Ultimately, I decided to take a chance and get into the mortgage industry and found that I liked it a lot.”
It was 2003, and the company for which he worked was Randall Mortgage. Right away, he was more comfortable with the strict parameters of personal finance versus the abstraction of corporate production based on unrealized profits. “When you’re in personal finance – and mortgage specifically – you’re dealing with people’s personal budgets, and it has to fit. And there’s always a need for it. So unless the house is paid off you’re looking at how the mortgage payment fits in the monthly budget. And yes, people sometimes have individual spending freezes, but at the time we were still doing refinances where we could help people save money on a monthly basis. I loved it. I jumped right in and took off.”
Taking ownership of his fate
Still, he longed to own his own business. As fate would have it, that quest also would be realized serendipitously. Regulators at the time required those seeking ownership to have been in the industry for three years, so he was poised to hang his own shingle upon meeting the requirement in a few months’ time. A blast from the past would help accelerate the ownership quest.
