First Community Mortgage

A branch manager at our company sent me a text last week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. He's going through something hard. The kind of personal situation I'm not going to put on LinkedIn because it's not mine to share. But he wrote to tell me that despite all of it, April was on track to be his best production month of his career. What he wanted me to know was that the team around him was the reason he could still show up to work at all. The ops people picking up files he couldn't get to. The branch coordinators handling the small things. The leadership making space for him without making it weird. He said FCM was carrying him in a way he didn't know a company was capable of. We talk a lot in this industry about culture. A lot of it is marketing. Real culture is what shows up when somebody is having the worst week of their life and the team closes in instead of pulling back. A record month in the middle of his hardest weeks. That's what culture is actually for.

At a lot of mortgage companies, the underwriting department is where deals go to die. Salespeople see it that way. Leadership tolerates it. And loan officers learn to work around underwriting instead of with it. Our head of underwriting has a different philosophy. He'll tell you straight up... our job is to say yes. Our job is to find every possible way we can get this deal done. That means when an LO brings a file that doesn't fit neatly inside the box, we don't just decline it and move on. We look at compensating factors. We restructure. We adjust. We find the path. You don't find a lot of underwriting departments who are that focused on serving the people in the field. When you do, everything speeds up. Files move. LOs have confidence to bring complex scenarios forward instead of avoiding them. And borrowers get into homes that a rigid process would have blocked. We tell our underwriting team to be fast, friendly, and consistent. And they deliver.

There's an assumption in our industry that if you work in mortgage, you understand mortgages. I don't think that's true for mortgage marketers, at least not for me. Sure, I have picked up TONS in my 15 years, but budgets get tight and official training for marketers is not at the top of the list. Marketers who deeply understand loan origination, servicing, and the mechanics of mortgage banking don't just write better copy. They build better strategies. They ask sharper questions. They become real partners to their LOs and leadership instead of order-takers. When David Upbin at MBA reached out and asked what I thought about this initiative, I was thinking, "Finally, someone gets it!". I can't wait to dive in.

I've had mentors my entire life - and I never connected the dots until a few weeks ago. When I was young, my mom put me in the Buddies of Nashville program. A guy named Ancil Loggins would come on Saturdays and take me to play golf or throw a football or just hang out. I was maybe eight or nine. My parents were divorced. My dad was in Washington State. Ancil was that guy for a few years. Then a soccer coach and businessman in Smyrna named H.G Cole became a father figure from the time I was 14 through my mid-twenties. Then Andy Rambo, an attorney in Shelbyville, became my biggest cheerleader from the day I rented an office in his law firm until he died at 68. Every critical season of my life, somebody showed up. Not as a formal mentors. But as people who were present, who listened, and who cared. I never connected those dots until a conversation I had a few weeks ago. And I realized something. I now mentor six to eight guys regularly. I light up when I get to pour into someone. I wrote recently about how I've become the Andy Rambo to the next generation. But it goes further back than Andy. It goes back to Ancil showing up on a Saturday. It goes back to H.G. sitting with me at his drugstore in Smyrna. These men shaped something in me that I didn't fully understand until now. If you've had someone like that in your life, you know exactly what I mean. And if you haven't, maybe the takeaway is simpler than we think. Just show up. Be consistent. Be there. That might be enough.

Most founders build companies and then reward their teams. Last week, one of my branch managers rewarded me. He takes his team to an all-inclusive in Mexico every year if they hit their goals. A processor on his team left, so there was an extra spot. He called and asked if my wife Shannon and I wanted to come. My daughter was already going. (She's married to Jacob, one of our LOs, who's on that same team.) So Shannon and I said yes, packed a bag, and flew out. Four days later, sitting poolside, it hit me. Twenty-four years ago, I started this company with 12 employees, a PC, and a fax machine. And now a branch manager inside the company I built is paying for me to go on vacation with my daughter and son-in-law. Funny how life works! But that's what happens when you build something that works for people. He built a real business inside FCM. Hit his goals. Rewarded his team. And somehow the founder ends up on the guest list. That's the generational build in action.

Inside FCM AI School: 12 weeks of hands-on AI training for every employee in the company. Here's what we built. It's called FCM AI School. Every session is built around real scenarios from our actual business. You practice prompting. You draft real documents. You learn what's safe to share and what isn't. You walk out with something you can use that day... a prompt library, a reference card, a workflow. The baseline tool is Microsoft Copilot. Classes are optional but recorded so nobody falls behind. No prior AI experience required. The schedule runs every Tuesday for 12 weeks. We start with the basics... what AI actually is, how to talk to it, how to draft and summarize. Then we get into using it inside Outlook, Teams, and Word. There's a prompt challenge week. A session on compliance and privacy, because knowing what not to share matters as much as knowing what to ask. We cover how AI is changing the mortgage industry specifically. We tour other tools so people can see the full landscape. We end with an employee showcase. I've said before that I think the mortgage company of the future has two types of people... salespeople and technology people. This is us putting real resources behind that belief. If you're thinking about where the industry is headed, pay attention to which companies are investing in their people's ability to use these tools... and which ones are pretending this isn't happening.

We have 7 retail underwriters doing $1.7 billion. The next person we hire won't be a 8th. What if we hire an IT person instead? (Not to replace the underwriter - to pair with them.) Take our existing underwriting team and make them dramatically more efficient by embedding technology alongside human judgment. What if those same seven underwriters could handle three billion? Still making judgment calls. Still managing exceptions. Still doing the work that requires reasoning and experience. But with AI and automation handling everything that doesn't require a human brain. Over time, what you'd see is the ops team staying flat while the sales and technology infrastructure grows around them. Not a bloated operation that expands and contracts with every rate cycle. More stability, more predictability. And that's the real goal. Every time rates spike and volume drops, mortgage companies start laying people off. Families feel that stress at the dinner table. We’ve watched this cycle repeat for decades. What if we used technology to level out the ups and downs so that employees didn't have to wonder whether they'd have a job next quarter because rates moved 50 basis points? That's the vision. Not replacing people. Protecting them.

AI will handle the systematic work. Humans will handle the emotional work. (And the emotional side is where the real value has always been.) An appraisal comes in low. A title issue surfaces 3 days before closing. The borrower calls in a panic because something they don't understand showed up on their disclosure. These moments happen on nearly every file. Something goes sideways, and a family making the biggest financial decision of their life needs to hear a human voice say: “everything is going to be okay.” “here are our options.” “we're going to figure this out together.” An algorithm can reprice the loan. A chatbot can give you scenarios. But the assurance that comes from one person picking up the phone and walking a borrower through it with genuine care... that's not something you can replicate with software. We’re investing heavily in AI at FCM. Our SmartPath system delivers underwriting decisions in minutes with no human in the loop. We believe in where this technology is going and we’re pushing our team to keep building it. But I also believe the loan officers who will win long-term are the ones who lean into the parts of this job that technology will never touch. The relationship. The trust. The calm voice in the middle of the chaos. AI will handle the systematic work. Humans will handle the emotional work. And the best LOs will understand that the emotional side is where the real value has always lived.