When The Mortgage Group was selected for Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies list in 2008, it was one of only two mortgage companies at the awards ceremony.
Donald Lambert, CEO of Fall River-based The Mortgage Group is feeling confident that the company can make the 2009 list as well. Now celebrating its sixth year in business, The Mortgage Group has gone from 15 employees to 111, and continues to attract new employees in a regulatory environment that’s made independent shops buckle under cost pressures.
Helping Lambert expand his business is a centralized Intranet system that tracks and logs every part of the mortgage process, including e-mails. It allows employees to act freely and make their own decisions, while holding everyone accountable – in addition to allowing the network to share expertise, Lambert said. With that confidence, the company can add staff quickly to its New England and Florida offices, with a future office in New York potentially on the horizon.
Donald Lambert
Title: CEO, The Mortgage Group
Age: 50
Experience: 26 Years
What touched off this boom in your company?
In 2007, I guess, we restructured the company a little bit. We’d started to grow in multiple states, and really it had probably been 55 people at that time. … The only possible way to manage it was to have an incredible technology platform that kept us safe, so the stuff that happens in Maine and New Hampshire and Connecticut and Florida and wherever a loan is originated in The Mortgage Group’s name, that my corporate office and my compliance people and my licensing people could monitor it.
Since this happened in 2007, was it in any way prompted by the sense that the mortgage industry was headed toward big changes, like increased regulatory and licensing requirements?
I’ve always been a proponent of the licensing, and a lot of the stuff the mortgage industry was doing in ‘06 and ’07 never really made a lot of sense to me, anyway. So it was more out of a need to be compliant and monitor and assist with what my staff was doing out in the field. [Because] as we started to grow, we had multiple people in multiple states with multiple offices, all using different systems – it became almost impossible.
We were reacting to problems after they happened, and that was a hard way to learn some lessons. And what we needed to be was proactive, so when a problem originated … we were on it right away. So if there was an issue with a loan in Vermont, now we have the capacity to monitor it, look at it, makes sure it’s compliant, and assist in solving the problems, as opposed to the guy in Vermont saying, ‘I’ll fix it the best I can,’ which is not always the right way.
And that’s allowed you to be more confident, and add staff more freely?
The company’s philosophy is committed to being overstaffed.
Kind of counter-intuitive, isn’t it, when everyone is preaching the necessity of running lean?
If one of my staff has a question, they should be able to find a body to help them. So I’d rather be overstaffed and make a little less profit, but know that people in the field who have need of the assistance and knowledge available to them [have it] … This is a hard industry to be in right now, and you can’t do it alone.
And it’s worse now, with tons more compliance work and costs for independent mortgage brokers?
Half of our new recruits are just like, ‘that’s it, I can’t handle the regulation anymore, I need someone else to do it for me.’ When you look at our company, it really is made up of individual groups who know how to be in the mortgage business … they’ve been in it a long time. The problem is with the regulatory and the licensing and the compliance stuff, it’s nearly impossible for a small company to exist.
And thanks to all that, you got the Inc. Magazine award for being a fast-growing company.
I went down to Washington to get the award, and there were probably about 2,300 companies there at the conference, and [there were] two mortgage companies there. And people from all different walks of life, all different industries, and it was fascinating. … When you meet with someone, you ask them, ‘what are you doing, where are you from?’ and I would say, ‘I’m in the mortgage business,’ and they would say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
Top Five secrets of The Mortgage Group’s success:
1.) Centralized database that tracks every aspect of every loan.
2.) Independent third-party auditor to make sure loans conform to regulations.
3.) Branch offices are allowed to operate independently within the system.
4.) New employees are plentiful: thanks to increased costs of business, most independents looking to join a larger shop .
5.) Leadership emphasizes growth over profits.
