I spent 2019 through 2025 as Chief Executive Officer of a national mortgage banking company. Those years contained the full cycle: a refinance boom that strained every operations team in the industry, then a rate increase sharp enough to cut volume dramatically in a matter of months. If you want to learn what a business is really made of, run it through both halves of that cycle.
Compliance is a culture, not a department
The lenders that came through the period intact were not the ones with the biggest compliance departments. They were the ones where every branch manager and loan officer understood that disclosure timing, fair lending, and licensing were their job too. You cannot inspect quality into a loan file after the fact. You build it in at origination, and that starts with who you hire and what you tolerate.
Capacity you add in a boom is capacity you will have to remove
The hardest decisions in a mortgage company are made on the way down, not the way up. Every hire in 2020 and 2021 felt necessary, and most were. But the discipline to keep fixed costs variable, to lean on technology before headcount, and to maintain reserves when margins were wide is what determined who had options when margins collapsed.
Recruiting is the business
Mortgage origination is a people business wearing a financial services costume. The quality of your loan officers determines your volume, your pull-through, your compliance record, and your reputation. I spent an enormous share of my time as CEO recruiting, onboarding, and developing production talent, and I would do it again.
Governance protects the people doing the work
Board reporting, policies, controls, and audits can feel like overhead to a growth-minded founder. In a regulated business they are the opposite. Good governance is what lets a company move quickly, because the guardrails are known and everyone can act within them without waiting for permission.
I left the industry's chief executive ranks with a short list of convictions and a long list of lessons. The convictions are above. The lessons are the subject of the rest of this journal.