Business Innovators Radio - The Inspired Impact Podcast with Judy Carlson-Interview with Carrie Gusmas, President and CEO, Aslan Home Lending Corporation

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

The lead lioness of our pride, Carrie is absolutely relentless in the protection of her people. That starts with her wonderful family: her husband, Britt, and her children Izzy and Colton. But her tribe extends to include everyone she works with – and every client she works for.A senior management professional with nearly 30 years of experience, Carrie is committed to the honest goal of positively affecting every life she touches, every day. She’s held to that focus while demonstrating success in aggressive company growth, P&L management, program management and team leadership. And she’s instilled that ambition as the defining ingredient of the Aslan corporate culture.Carrie is more than an innovative and resourceful critical thinker with a proven history of forging strong relationships. Think of her more as a persistent force of nature, a powerhouse of energy absolutely committed to advancing and protecting the lives of those under her reign. Just like any proud lioness would.https://www.aslanhomelending.com/https://www.facebook.com/AslanHLC**********************************************************Judy Carlson is the CEO and Founder of the Judy Carlson Financial Group, where she helps couples create personalized, coordinated financial plans that support the life they want to live – now and in the future. As an Independent Fiduciary and Comprehensive Financial Planner, Judy specializes in retirement income and wealth decumulation strategies. She is a CPA, Investment Advisor Representative, licensed in life and health insurance, and certified in long-term care planning.Judy’s mission is to help guide clients with clarity and care, building financial plans that focus on real planning built around real lives.Learn More: https://judycarlson.com/Investment Adviser Representative of and advisory services offered through Royal Fund Management, LLC, a SEC Registered Adviser.The Inspired Impact Podcasthttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/the-inspired-impact-podcast/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/the-inspired-impact-podcast-with-judy-carlson-interview-with-carrie-gusmas-president-and-ceo-aslan-home-lending-corporation

Welcome to the Inspired Impact Podcast, where dedicated female professionals share how they inspire impact every day. Authentic stories, passionate commitment, lives transformed. I'm your host, Judy Carlson. Welcome to today's episode of the Inspired Impact Podcast. My guest today is a persistent force of nature, a powerhouse of energy, and absolutely committed to advancing and protecting the lives of those under her reign. I'm excited today to introduce you to the president and CEO of Oslin Home Lending Corporation, Carrie Gussmus. Welcome. Hello.

Yeah, hello. Great to be with you. Yeah, I was just thinking as I introduced you at some point in our conversation, you'll have to tell me about the name of your organization and how that came about. But first, let's start with you and what got you started in your life and career. Absolutely. So I actually started in financial service in 1990 originally. And I was actually a financial advisor.

I spent about nine years in that career and I worked for a number of companies that don't exist anymore who were large companies. One of them ended in Hutton and for those of us that are old enough, we all just listen, right? You still remember the commercial.

You cut your hand to your ear because when people, when you have Hutton talks, people listen. I love that. And so at the time, it was Sherson Lehman Hutton. And I started out in that. I had this opportunity in the, mortgage business. So the company that I own and operator that I'm the majority owner of and the

CEO of is a mortgage company. And I had the opportunity in 2001 to enter the mortgage business. I had a friend who was in the mortgage business. She was a close friend, a great business partner. And she was talking about an opportunity that she had. And I don't know if you remember 2001 very well, but 2001, the Janus Fund existed. And it was getting 70%. So if you were getting 18%, people were upset with you. And then we came to 9-11, sadly, horrifically. We came to 9-11, and that just came to a, the whole world came to a crashing halt. But that was not the case at the time.

And so my friend had this wonderful experience of being in the mortgage business and being this purveyor of the American dream. And I, like you, had this position of talking to people about delaying immediate gratification and investing in their future for the education of their children and the financial security of their families and the ultimate objective of retirement or even saving for longer term objectives like amazing vacations. So she talked about an opportunity that she decided she did not want to pursue. And it just sounded so perfect.

It was a leadership opportunity. It was in the mortgage space and financial services, obviously, very closely aligned. And the mortgage industry is a financial service industry. It is a finance industry. So I said, give me the phone number of the organization that you were talking to. I'm going to get that job. And at the time, I was running my own small practice. So that was a big, that was a really significant big change.

but I made that change 24 years ago, almost 25 years ago next spring. And it's just been a tremendous, tremendous career and way to be a service to people and see the opportunity to help others grow professionally and then to help clients grow personally. It's truly just an outstanding, outstanding industry to be a part of. So is the company that you're heading up now, the phone number that you receive from your friend? No, no, that was a very large national company. The company that I'm heading up now, actually, Aslin Home Lending is my baby. I started this company six years ago and a couple of months.

We have a number of, there's a woman, our chief credit and compliance officer, she and I have actually been together since 2006. So about 19 years, we've worked together through a number of companies. And then we have another person who is also an owner who is, who's another primary owner, who is one of our sales leaders and one of our loan officers. and she had been with me for a number of years and I said, you know, I'm going to go start my own company because we've worked with these large national companies and I want to serve in a different way. I really want this to be a different experience and I'm sort of tired of running into the same things in the financial sector. One, obviously being a woman, I am huge on

empowerment of women and our abilities and our talents. and bringing those into corporate America because they are different. You can try to pretend that they're not different, but women in general tend to be less linear thinkers. We tend to have been raised to be more nurturing. It might be genetically more nurturing. We were gatherers. I hear people talk about there's this historical sort of tribal DNA that we bring

forward where women were caregivers and gatherers and you had to have so much awareness of all the things that were going, on and men as hunters had to have this more of a pinpoint laser focus, go from A to Z with every step being the next one that you step on. And so I just really felt passionate about creating an organization where one, our employees could say, I don't think I've ever been cared about as much as I am here. Both as my performance matters because it does, because cared about cared about does not mean like with your children, you let them lay on the couch and eat potato chips and stay up all night long watching TV, right? That's not caring about them. And so caring

about people as a leader in an organization does not mean we just let them do whatever they want and there's no performance standards and no expectations. We have very high performance standards. It's one of excellence and producing fruit are two of our key attributes. We wanted to have a place so that that that is also met with this love and this nurturing nature and that people are truly invested. And as you and I talked about earlier, how you build these amazing relationships with your clients, we have those amazing relationships with the people in our organization. We are super invested in them.

We feel like we know them and we make every effort to know them. And then we expand that. We ripple that out to where our pride not only includes because Aslan is a lion, our pride not only includes the people that work within our organization, that includes our clients, that includes our partners, that includes our communities. And I wanted to create an organization that could embody all of these different spirits and really remain true to those objectives and to those key attributes. And I was just so blessed because those couple of ladies said, we want to do that too. That sounds amazing. So our majority ownership is

the three of us, women, and then we also are an employee-owned organization. And so with tenure, we are an equity-sharing organization. And so all of our ownership is employee-based. So I went from working for these large, national, some of the largest lenders in the country, the largest lender in the country at one point in their existence and one of the largest non-bank retail lenders in the country to having my own. own relatively small business here in Colorado, and it's been amazing. How did you, the three of you, I guess, maybe together, choose the name, Oslin? That is a terrific question.

We were brainstorming on names that would be meaningful internally, that would speak to the path that we intended to stay on. And it was actually my husband who said, what about the name Aslan? And Aslan, for those who are not familiar, one, it is the Turkish word for lion. So if you're a secular person, you do not, you're not a faithful person, that's fine. Aslan's the Turkish word for lion. And there are so many wonderful things about thinking about the courage and the support and the nurturing that happens in a pride of lions. But really, the name was attached to C.S. Lewis. And in the Chronicles of Narnia, Asland is a representation of Jesus. And that was a reminder to our ownership and to anyone on our team that is a Christ follower, a faith-oriented

person in that way, that we have an employer beyond me or this company or even our clients because we can say, I work for my client and I do. But ultimately, where I am told to behave in a, we say legal, moral, and ethical all the time, but really where you're told to be generous of spirit and you're told to have a higher level of accountability is in that following of that spiritual faith and in believing that first and foremost, we work for God. And that the requirement is that we show up with all the talents and the abilities that we're given and we apply them to the service of humanity.

So that's really, when I think of the word Aslan, that's what I think of. Any time I look at our name, I think of our name, I hear something. speak our name. And that's what the purpose was of choosing that name. And what an important facet of your business model to realize that each person comes with their own gifts, but it takes all of you together to honor and respect and work with those gifts to bring about the greater good for your employees, for your clients, for God. Absolutely, absolutely. Every person, and this is true of any organization, you want to make sure that a person

has the skill set, right? They are well-tooled to fit the job requirements. And you want to make sure that they have the passion and the joy for what they are called to do. within their life and within their organization. That's actually part of our interview process. And it is something that we talk about constantly is finding the joy and the fulfillment in what you're doing because that's then what you take out and you pour into other people.

And that everybody's abilities are different. If we look at the loan officers, for example, that work for us or with us because they work for themselves and for their families and for their clients, but really the people that work with us, that make that choice, they're so different. They're so different. Some of them naturally gregarious and just love to talk to people and they want to connect and they want to find out. But then we have other people who are very analytical and they truly just pour themselves into the math of the mortgage industry and the research of the breadth and the scope of programs that are available and how can they bring those different things to the market. And finding that person

it's underserved and how can they serve that person. So everyone brings a unique set of abilities and tools and also passions to their positions and to their roles. And we want to give people a place where they are performing the responsibility of the position because we, those of us, you and I, they're a little more old school. We know we have to actually get the job done. do no matter what right and how does the water flow down the hill for you so that you get the job done in a way that is legal that is moral that is ethical that is spiritually generous and using your

abilities that brings you fulfillment it's not always the same way there's not just a rubber stamp just like you were talking earlier about clients everyone is different your clients are all completely different their stories are different they're so amazing to get to to know and to help them as individuals and help them specifically. And that's the way our pride members are too. Everybody is different and we want to help them work in a way that is most successful as well as as as unique as they are. The word pride, did that dawn on you when you chose Aslan that lions are in a pride

because that word has so many interesting meanings. Day one. Day one. Yes. From the very beginning, we said, and so sometimes we also use the word tribe because we'll use tribal knowledge and things like that. And that is, tribe is a very popular word right now. But ultimately, from the very first day when we said Aslan and we said, that's the name. That's really what it is. Sorry, but you need is a bunch of Dog's barking. No problem. But we said, we said that's really what we are because you think about a pride of lions and other than the, the gender of the lionesses and the male lion and things.

But you think about the fact that some, some lions are caregivers, some lions are hunters, some lions are on patrol, protecting the territory. And those roles change. But every lion has a purpose. And they know their purpose. And they are fully engaged. You don't, maybe you do. I don't speak lion, but you don't really see on National Geographic

where there's a lion who's saying, I'm not going to support this pride today. No lion wants to be a loner. You do absolutely know that. So we thought about the pride aspect from the very beginning. Not from the perspective of being proud, but the perspective of being part of something greater than any individual and making sure that you're reaffforming that and that it's a part of your everyday language and who you are and what you're talking about.

did you research lions to learn about their habits and behaviors not before the fact we named it first and then i said you know we think of ourselves as a pride is that a good thing yes and yes it is a good thing now that you unpacked it for us yes i love that yes wow um so when you started this firm six years ago So was it just the three of you or how did you know what to do next? Oh, goodness. Well, anyone who's ever started a business knows that there are so many things that are logistic that go beyond passion. Okay.

And so it was not just the three of us. We did have other people who said, I want to go to. I want to be a part of that as well. And then we just, we grew from there. but there were definitely all of the, where do we register? And what state do we register in? And what do you do with the Secretary of State? And how do you get a tax ID number?

And what about office space? And what's it take to financially back the launch of your own company and get people to let you do things like sign leases and things like that? So it was not just the three of us. We did have other people, but the majority of the, of the getting the business established was handled by by three of us. Yeah. And then you've had to make hiring decisions.

I know they're not, what, they're not employees. Are they 1099? They are employees. No, our team is, our team is W2. Okay. The people that are not employees, we do have 1099. We have operations, team members, and we definitely still think of them as part of the pride, but they are on contract.

Okay. And so we have had to make hiring decisions. We have refined and continued to focus on the things that are important to us as a pride. I don't think that it's as true in financial service. Obviously, I was doing some hiring in financial service and doing recruiting in financial service. The mortgage business tends to be a business that companies say, we want, we'll take everybody will write checks to get people to come on board, signing bonuses and things are a regular part of the mortgage industry. There's less care in general about if someone's a cultural fit

for an organization. There's a lot of pursuit in mortgage of get volume. And there's a lot of arrogance in any sales profession with high producers, let's say. Yeah. So when my experience, when I was in the larger organizations, both bank and non-bank, was just get as many people as you can. Oh. Just get as many people as you can. And we do not have that philosophy with Aslan.

We hire by committee. We have a very structured hiring process. And we do call it hiring, even with loan officers. We don't call it recruiting, really. We might say the word recruiting, but we are hiring. We actually interview people, and for the most part, we interview them culturally. That is to say, somebody can probably learn the skills to be a tremendous loan officer. And in fact, many of our top producers were brand new, not in the mortgage business.

when they started with me, either prior to Aslan or at Aslan. But they had great character and they had the qualities that we look for and that we interview for. And like I mentioned, some of those are just excellent and being able to produce fruit and having that generosity of spirit because we expect people to be extremely collaborative. All of our team members are pouring into other team members. Even if you're the top producer. So our number one producer probably answers more questions on our team question channel than anybody else.

He is constantly pouring into other people. But we can also have people in the middle or even from a production standpoint on the lower end. And they will absolutely pour into other members of our pride. So when we are hiring, we just have developed a process that we have a multi, step, multiple interview process. And we interview by panel. So that is helpful for people coming into our organization because the panels are not preset. I typically send an email and ask for who's available. And you can raise your hand if you are an assistant or if you're an operations person that works contract with us or you are a loan officer or you are a leader. You can just raise your

hand and say you're available on the day that that interview has been scheduled. And it's a great process for the people that are coming into interview because they get to ask questions of a panel of people who aren't really actually invested in them coming on board. Right. They are just there to query and say, I feel like this person has all the characteristics that they would thrive within our organization. and they would be interested in helping other people thrive as well within our organization.

And then the people that are going through our hiring process can ask any questions they want. No holds barred. What is it actually like? What is the leadership like? What's training and development like? What are the programs? What is the technology like? I think you just ask all of those questions openly without feeling like, well, I'm asking the decision maker.

And so I need to be really guarded about my questions need to sound intelligent. and well phrased, as opposed to what I really want to know. Yeah. So we've, it's, we've, we've, we've messed up so many times, Judy, it's ridiculous. We have adopted the higher, slow, fire fast mentality. Yep, I was going to ask about that. Yep. And we, there's a, there's a book by a woman named Beth Smith, who wrote a book called,

Why Can't I Hire Good People? I don't love the name of it because it's sort of negative. But I do love the. premise of the book and I've actually seen her speak and she's the one who says you consistently ask all the same questions of every candidate for every role. You follow the same process for every person so that you can measure so that you can get the right measurements. I am curious. Because you're such a great leader and you have such a wonderful team, how did you personally come into the leadership skills?

I have been in love with people my entire life. And I have naturally from the, first memories that I have even as a child had a drive to help other people achieve whatever their greatest potential is wonderful and that I just lucked out in that in my life I'm 53 and in my life that type of servant leadership I listen to Darren Hardy. I'm name-dropping all these tools and people and books and things, but I listen to Darren Hardy, Darren Daly, every day.

And the other day, he was knocking servant leadership a little bit. But as I said earlier, servant leadership doesn't mean let people get away with anything or run all over you. It means look at the person and have their best interest in mind. And sometimes their best interest is not to work for you anymore. Yeah. I have always, though, looked at people and thought about it in terms of how is what's best for them in alignment with what's best for the organization that I'm in. So very early on, I just naturally gravitated to leadership without authority.

And so I may not have had a title, but I would organize things. I would arrange things. I would jump in. If somebody said, who will volunteer? I just volunteered for everything. I had a friend of mine who passed away this past year. He used to say, if somebody asks you to be of service, unless it will physically put you in harm's way, the answer is always yes.

You just always say yes. And so servant leadership, leaders eat last, all of those ideologies were rising at the time that it aligns with my natural character. And I'm also, I'm great at math. I used to joke and say math and people. Those are the only two skills that I have. And so that leads itself to leadership because I can manage a profit and loss statement and I can organize a channel, a business channel.

I can create and grow an entire business. But that leadership is all born of the investment that I have in people and the love I have for people. And they can be giving me the worst excuse I've ever heard for why what was supposed to get done isn't done. And I can look at them with compassion and figure out, how are we going to actually move this forward in a way that is, that's meaningful and beneficial and is going to be helpful to them? And then also meet the needs of our organizations. So I pursued so much coaching as well. I have been professionally coached since prior to 2001, since prior to getting into the mortgage business, I have been

professionally coached. I cannot say enough positive things about finding a skilled and experienced coach in whatever you're trying to develop. So I have a coach named Dean Savoca, who I call on when I call him like my catalyst coach, when I'm going to make some giant life change, or when I was thinking of creating Aslan, of leaving corporate America and starting my own business, which required selling my family's home. I called Dean and I said, I need to talk. And so whenever, if I've changed companies, he's the person that I work through for months usually on that.

He actually is probably the reason that I'm married to the person that I am married to even. because he had me take a piece of paper, fold it into all these little squares, and then write attributes in those squares of what I was looking for, and then fold it up and stick it in my purse. And so I needed to find that outgoing, extroverted, intelligent, good humor, athletic, just all of these things that someone needed to be that wanted a family, because I was not, I was 36 when my husband and I got married. And we have teenagers. So we were, we had them late in, in our lives. So I'm a huge advocate of professional coaching to achieve either ongoing success, if you have sort of a maintenance coach or catalytic successes where you really

want to change something in your life. And that coaching helped me significantly focus on the right things in leadership and learn to develop the philosophy of I can be I'm I'm momager one so my credit and compliance officer is momager two so we will mother you but that also includes the discipline right and so learning to lead in a way that that was meaningful and that would accomplish what I was intending to accomplish instead of the negative sides that can sometimes happen if you're not really focused on what's important in leadership. That was a fabulous discussion. Thank you. Thank you. At the conference I attended, there was a comment about the markets are the markets, and they're talking about the home markets

and mortgage markets, not the S&P 500 necessarily. The markets are the markets, and you need to perceive the markets and pivot. Does that happen at your level, Carrie? So, yes. That happens at our level. I think about it in terms of control the controllables. Okay. In that we don't control the market.

Nope. The mortgage market or the financial markets. However, we control the fate of our organization and the fate of the families that work within it and the fate of the clients that we work with. And even our partners, given that when you have significant partnerships, for example, let's say that a real estate professional is our partner, then them having successful relationship with a lending company ensures that they actually close transactions and feed their own. family. That's right. And so what happens at our level and the way that we have shifted over these six years is that as the market has changed, for example, we did not lay anybody off. And we did not have an unprofitable year. Wow. And we have, we did, we did go down in volume one year by a small amount, but then we turned right back around and we were like the housing market. We gained it all

back. And then we've grown this year. And the way that we've done that is that we found where the market is and where can we serve people. So we have never been a refinance-minded organization. Refinances get done because they are part of regular business and people need them. But they don't need them more than they need a purchase. So it just is part of our overall business and it means that we're less impacted. We also have embraced and added tools. So we work with very complex self-employed clients frequently, for example, because they do need bank statement programs. They do need 1099 programs. They do need asset depletion programs. We work with small commercials. We work with investors. The common person, just an everyday person, building wealth

through real estate investment has skyrocketed. And so giving people good counsel, because so has occupancy fraud. So giving people good counsel, because a lot of people are being told, oh, say you're going to live in it and then don't. We tell people, you can't do that. You have to move into it. And when I was 22, I bought my first house. When we moved into this house, my daughter was 12 and she was in her 10th house because we would buy a house every year and we would move into it and we would live in it for a year

because that's what the deed stipulates. And then we would keep it as a rental and we would move out and we would buy the next one. So we're super passionate about helping people do that. When I was 22, I didn't have any money. and I did not make a lot of money. And so I utilized an FHA loan and I got a gift from my grandma and I bought that first house. And then I leveraged it, leveraged it, leveraged it, leveraged it. So we've just retooled ourselves to say, how do we educate people on home buying?

How do we add markets? So we're not just in Colorado. We're in 36 states that we're licensed in. We are working on all 50, maybe not all 50. A couple we may not want to be in from a regular. regulatory burden or a fine burden. There's a couple states that they manage by fine. And lenders tell us it doesn't matter what you do in this state. They will ask you for a check every year. You could be perfect on an audit, but they will ask you for a check because that's what they do.

So we want to have a good partnership with the states that we're in and understand their rules and perform according to them and be treated fairly. So we're in 36 states. There are other states where the markets are better. There are other states where it's more fruitful for people to invest right now than Colorado. We pour into our communities as well and we continue to maintain connection and grow connections. So while I can't control what the mortgage market is doing, I can't control what the real estate market is doing. I cannot control what the stock market is doing. I can control that we have our head up and that we are looking around and we are pivoting pivoting, pivoting, pivoting, pivoting,

saying, what can we embrace? If it's legal, moral, ethical, and available in the United States, that's our criteria for our clients. Our clients deserve to have knowledge of it. They deserve to have access to it. Legal, moral, ethical available, then we go find it. That's what we do, and that's what's

helped us to pivot with the market. Wow. Wow. I could keep asking you wonderful questions because you have such great answers. wonderful questions. I love them. They're so thought-provoking. Oh, well, I formulate them as you're talking. I'm like, man, we've got to learn about that. How does she do that? We can sit down and I am a coffee drinker. Coffee is so cliche, but I actually

love, I love Cortados. I'm also kind of frugal. I shared this with my team last year at our business planning day. A Cortado is $4.85 at Starbucks, but a triple shot tall latte is $7 for the same number of shots and just a little bit more milk. So just drink a Cortado and it's only $4.85. But I would love to sit down and just have coffee and I'll share anything that seems useful to you. If I have it and it is useful to you, it is yours. Wonderful. Well, is there anything you want to share with our listeners before we wrap up, Carrie?

How to reach you. what you're certainly definitely you can reach me at carrie g at aslan home lending dot com you are also welcome to call me my cell phone number is 720 231 2775 and what i would say is certainly if you if you would like mortgage advice or a great mortgage partnership wonderful we're wonderful to call but even if you are thinking of pursuing a dream that you have and you want to open a company or you just heard something that you want to know more about, I'm happy to talk about it. As I said, it's my call to be of service to other people in whatever way I can be useful. So I'm happy to be here and happy to help. Thank you. You've been a blessing to us today, Carrie. So thank you

for your time and for sharing. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for joining us for the Inspired Impact Podcast. To listen to past episodes, please visit theinspiredimpactpodcast.com.