A brief history of your Blown Mortgage Scribe, Part 2

A lot of people ask me about my background and how and why I am in mortgages. Most people want to know why someone in the mortgage industry has a web site like Blown Mortgage. I guess its a little weird having a site that is primarily focused on the negative aspects of the industry in which I work. So with out further ado, for those of you that care about who is writing this blog please enjoy this autobiographical article that should shed some light on who I am and why I write Blown Mortgage.

Part 1

Here’s part 2:

After College

After college I took a year off and enjoyed the last of my halcyon Santa Barbara days. Enjoying the life of a nominally employed; I slept, swam, imbibed and for a gainful wage worked as a front door sentinel for a popular nightclub and waiter at the mildly famous (and tasty) California Pizza Kitchen. I still fought with myself about career direction and ended up making a poorly reasoned foray in to the dreary world of clinical research. It must be the worst career choice possible for someone who tires quickly of details, menial office work and loathes superiors who refuse to nurture and cultivate ambitious employees. I quickly realized that my time in Santa Barbara was coming to a much-needed close and began to look in earnest for a position that actually matched my passion of marketing with some of my relative skills (computers) outside of a field I now thoroughly rejected as a possibility for my livelihood (biotechnology, any science really).

I landed in Los Angeles after taking a job in 1999 with a dot-com company called SalesMountain.com. I was hired on as an operations manager managing a team of 30 part-time data entry personnel who didnt care what I knew or what I was doing there as long as they got paid suddenly immersed in the fading light of dot-com greatness. While it wasnt a marketing job it certainly was an interesting change of pace, and the idea of working for a start-up was inspiring. It invoked the kind of feeling I had as a kid when Id wake up to a crisp New England winters day with virgin snow glistening in my front yard, nary a footprint to spoil it. I had again the feeling of endless possibility that I captured on the bluffs of Santa Barbara, this time in a company with no blue print, with rules and ideas only to be written by us the self-proclaimed pioneers of a new economy. We all know how this story ends with a bust. But before we get to the ending of another failed dot-com company I must acknowledge another defining event in my life.

After a few months of over-achieving at the dot-com startup I was asked to go to Frankfurt, Germany to relieve a counterpart who had been attempting (with little success) to get the German and London-based operations of the company up and running. I readily agreed, willing to take the prospects of a year abroad and an apartment over another baking summer on my buddys couch in a non-air conditioned, somewhat-converted Sherman Oaks garage. So off I went to Frankfurt to experience the world (at last!) and to learn what it truly means to start a business from the ground up. Between weekend getaways to Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich and Hamburg I logged obscenely long hours doing everything from network administration, data entry, venture capital status meetings and schmooze fests, cleaning toilets, building web pages and web-based advertisements, hiring employees, learning German and managing two London-based remote employees. It was the immersive experience in every sense of the word; and I loved (and still love) every minute of it.

After a year (and one Christmas) in Germany the unfortunate realities of the dot-com bust resulted in our venture capitalists shutting us down to reclaim the only remaining capital left from 16 failed ventures (ours was the only one with most of the initial $5 million given) and my prompt return to Los Angeles. While the unpleasantness of the return was somewhat upsetting I had no clearly defined in my head what I was good at and what I wanted to do. I wanted to market. I wanted to do more with the web and help promote and develop business concepts and marketing programs specifically related to the web. I had finally found it.

Housing, Finally

If you were beginning to wonder when my career would converge to the industry I am now dutifully entrenched in, wonder no longer. Here we begin Morgans immersion in to the world of housing and mortgage. After collecting a months worth of unemployment during a fruitless search of Los Angeles-based opportunities I took a random weekend sojourn to visit my friend in San Diego. After a weekend of carousing I flipped through a San Diego Union Tribune while nursing a rather stubborn hangover and found a small one inch by one inch job opening for an interactive marketing firm as an assistant account executive. With a leap of faith I secured a job interview and the job; shoveled my belongings out of my LA garage and headed to San Diego finally on a path with continuity and promise.

The company I worked for was known for its home building clients; including all the largest Southern California builders. As this was 2001-2004 the home building and mortgage industries were both going gang busters; and I was able to quickly learn about the industry and the particular quirks that are involved with marketing a home. It was here where my desire formed to combine marketing with pleasing customers. I have always been in search of the genuine article the fulfilled promise. I loathe the constant sting of over-promise, under-deliver that is so prevalent in our society today. The constant battle between sales and production. The sales person promises the world in order to win the business, and production simply delivers a product that (at best) dutifully fulfills its purpose (but, alas, does not deliver the world) and at worst is a poor hack and worthless.

I have always felt that the importance of marketing lay not in the ads on TV, nor the brochures, nor the website, but rather an orchestration of a much larger organism-the business itself. If I could I would spend 90% of my marketing budget on improving the internal operations of a business and 10% on the outside because I firmly believe that a company that can actually live up to the hype ascribed to it by their sales people, the media or overzealous fans are the ones that truly rise to dominance in their industry. And not only do they dominate; they are ascribed with a benevolence and good will from their customers. Simply look at Google to get a sense of the magic. This has always been the quest for me.

While working on marketing these homes (primarily building web sites and integrating back-end loan origination platforms in to lead-generating online platforms) I was really drawn to the experience side of home buying. As some one who hadnt yet bought my first home I was amazed at the range of emotions that run through a prospects mind: from pure euphoria to sheer terror and back more than once before taking ownership. I was fascinated by the attention to detail that these home builders put in to marketing a home; from pumping in the scent of baking cookies to playing piped in sounds of children playing in the bedrooms all in an effort to sell homes (homes that were selling themselves by the way in 2001-2004).

Going through this experience of learning about the emotional connections people have with homes made me acutely aware of the stresses that one faces when dealing with homeownership and the uncertainties that it raises in a buyers mind. I also learned what worked what calmed the soul enough to sign on the dotted line the triggers and cues that were needed in order to reassure the buyer that the purchase was a safe and smart one (though clearly those buying in 05-06 are cursing their poor luck). This understanding was in stark contrast to the story being told to me by my soon-to-be wife and future brother-in-law.

Both worked for different mortgage companies in Orange County. Their stories were of fast-talking con artists bilking home owners for tens of thousands of dollars for simple refinance transactions. Of desks made out of broken doors and saw horses; offices in garages and antics that would make the most loyal fraternity clown blush. Disbelief and shock were my most common reactions. It was in complete defiance of the goodwill being built up on the purchase side. It felt like pure evil. Not picking up phones on signing day, adding additional points and fees to loans, signing documents and creating new ones; these were all stories I heard at one time or another from the various cretins that boasted about their atrocities over beers at happy hour. I usually left feeling nauseous.

Thankfully so did my wife and brother-in-law. They got fed up with the malfeasance and fraud rampant in their previous organizations. More than that, I believe they got fed up with the depravity and lack of respect and basic decency towards fellow man flaunted by their colleagues. When they got fed up, they called me.

At first I was not sure about the mortgage industry, and certainly wasnt sure about leaving a company where I had rocketed to the top of the heap and experienced 100% salary increases in each of the first 3 years of employment. I felt like I was on a good path; yet the idea of building the ideal business (you know the one where we meet the promise) was appealing. Entrepreneurship is embedded in my genetic code. My mother and grandparents were both small business owners, and the idea of being my own boss was of course intoxicating as well. So, after assurances that we would be different; that we would be the answer to the unconscionable actions of others, I roped my best friend from college in to the enterprise with us and New Day Trust Mortgage was formed.

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[Source: Blown Mortgage]