Coffeez with Joe Shalaby - The Most Powerful Woman in Mortgage Melinda Wilner | Coffeez for Closers with Joe Shalaby Ep. 9

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

We're kicking off International Women's Day with Melinda Wilner—a quintessential girl boss! Welcome to a landmark episode of the "Coffeez for Closers" podcast, where we celebrate our 10th episode and kick off the exciting "Coffeez on Tour" Series! 🎉Today, we're honored to feature the distinguished Melinda Wilner, Chief Operating Officer of United Wholesale Mortgage, Who stands at the forefront of the mortgage industry. As the driving force behind UWM, Melinda has led the company to its esteemed position as the nation's top wholesale lender, managing a dedicated team of over 7,500 members.🌟 Highlighted Achievements🌟:- Recognized by Forbes as "The Most Powerful Woman in Mortgage" - Recipient of the HousingWire Vanguard awardIn this episode, we sit down with Melinda to explore her extraordinary journey through the mortgage industry, the challenges she's overcome, and her innovative approach to leadership that sets her apart as a true industry trailblazer.🎙️ Whether you're an industry professional, aspiring leader, or simply a fan of engaging and inspirational stories, this episode is a must-listen!✅ Don't forget to subscribe for more episodes of "Coffeez for Closers," where we bring you closer to the individuals shaping today's industries.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

What's up everybody? Welcome to Coffees for Closers, a show about visionaries, entrepreneurs, and of course, closers. Here we talk about their wins, their failures, and ultimately the story of their success. What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Coffees for Closers. Today we are sitting with Melinda Wilner, the chief operating officer of UWM, recognized as Forbes, powerful woman in mortgage and honestly she is the most powerful woman in mortgage currently Melinda is a superstar in the space she's been recognized by Housing Wires woman of the year for six years consecutively we welcome Melinda Wilma thank you so much what an amazing introduction I'm humbled by it and thank you so much for having me today thank you so much well and really I'm I'm I'm really humbled to really have you here sitting with me it's like

Starstruck. Oh, you're sweet. Thank you so much. Great to be here with you too. Thank you, Melinda. So I like to start the show with, you know, an icebreaker. And my icebreaker is like, how do you start your morning? What's your morning routine?

I thought it was a scarier question on that. So that's good. Ooh, my morning routine, I get up early. I love, love the morning. I would not call myself a night out because I'm in bed by 9.30. But I get up in somewhere in like four or five o'clock hour when the world is quiet and dark. and nobody's around. And it's actually kind of my thinking starts right then.

I'd say my best thoughts are in the morning before like the crazy workday start. So I get up, I make my 16-year-old teenage boy a smoothie every morning. I make his peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. I make myself a functional shot of espresso to kick off the day. And I kind of just take my time a little bit more in the morning than I used to now. And I just find like good thought time and good piece. And then I am getting ready and out the door for work. and love to be in early and start my day.

Nice, and how long do you work? Because you're, you're a really hard worker. Yes. And what's that workday look like? Like, what's the full day? It's busy. We have a lot of team members at UWM. I'm over 7,000, and a lot of them are on my teams.

And it's a day of chaos. I'm telling you earlier, I was the youngest of six children. So I grew up in a very chaotic household. So I think I love the chaos of operations and having so many team members all day. So it's kind of like, in fact, I start my day so early because I feel like, okay, after 9 o'clock, I'm at the mercy of my team. Like, I am there for anything that they need. So, you know, Melinda's get emails caught up and, you know, the bigger thought things happen from,

you know, we'll call it six to nine. And then sometimes from like five, we'll call it about 7 o'clock at night. But my brain's kind of tired by then. So the good stuff's in the morning. That's amazing. Actually, I forgot to mention to the audience. Melinda's the C-O of United Wholesale Mortgage, the number one. mortgage lender in the country. So I just really can't fathom the amount of

responsibility that's on your plate and how you just take it with ease. You know, I know you basically are, you know, the true backbone behind UWM. It's, you know, my partner, my CEO, Sam is always in the dark as well. You know, Matt's the face of UWM and you're the one making it all happen and I don't even want to begin to understand how you do all that because you're the largest company in the in the mortgage space and you guys are like the true Google of the industry. But I want to dive kind of into your story. What year did you start in mortgage? 1999. You're the baby. I wish, but yeah. I was young. I was just out of, not just out of college, a couple years out of college. And I had a friend where I worked,

It was kind of doing like accounting for a home improvement company and came to me and my now husband was not back then and said, hey, do you guys want to go start a mortgage company? I used to do mortgage older than we are. I used to do mortgages back in the 80s and it's an amazing business. It's getting hotter and hotter. And I'm like, okay. Like I hadn't bought my first home by then. Like didn't even know what really a mortgage was or I knew what it was, but not like the inner workings

of it. And I'm like, okay, sure. Sounds good. So we started a mortgage company and I remember that. after saying yes. I went to Barnes & Noble because I think this was maybe just when Amazon wasn't so big yet, but went to Barnes and Noble looked for the only book that I could find on mortgages, like, what the heck is a mortgage? And it was about this thick, just a tiny little book, you know, good size, and that was my kickoff. So we, like he, we were a branch of a company

on the west side of Michigan, and he originated, and I was processing the loans, doing internal operations and we kind of grew from there and took off. So I was kind of in the broker originator space for about 12 years in my career and then my last 12th had been here at UWM. Amazing. So you started at UWM at what position? I came in as an underwriting and we still called the manager. So technically an underwriting manager back then. Like we have changed our verbiage quite a bit. So I'd say CEO maybe for the last six or seven years. So I was a coming into the company and underwriting and then taking on a couple other teams as well operations and technology and that's where i'm today how many people are at uwm when you started oh i think you know we were just

talking about this the other day i think somewhere between 250 and 300 i want to say back in 2011 and that year we closed you know 1.1 billion like we were just teeny tiny and i remember my first interview with matt and i didn't know him before came in like okay i actually followed somebody here So, you know, somebody else that I worked with, he came to UWM. He's like, you've got to come here. Like, we're going to have so much fun. You're going to love it here. So I had my, you know, kind of formal interview with Matt.

And I remember him saying like, high energy. Both had very high energy. And he was talking about how he wanted to be a top lender one day. I'm like, well, what's top? You know, he's like, oh, and I don't remember if he said top 10 or top 20. I can't even remember what he was after. But I remember kind of like internally rolling my eyes and be like, okay sure you're really going to take off because we were just you know we were tiny we were

closing anything. Was that when you guys were in the grocery store? Yeah I love people know our very very very humble beginnings yeah and it was very close to where I lived and like okay this will be perfect I can you know he and I joke all the time because it was maybe maybe two or three blocks from my house so like that was a win and I'm like oh my gosh I can like you know be home to get my kids off the pot, whatever. And it's funny, like from, you know, day one just probably came in working 12, maybe 14 hours a day, right off the bat and kind of stuck with it. So he laughed sometimes. He's like, it's a little bit different than where we started. But it's been amazing. It's been an amazing ride. So it started very small, very humble, which I loved. You know, being a broker for

years, never got the opportunity to work at a big corporation or anything. I sold freight right out of college or whatever. But so always very comfortable in that family-owned. small company feel that we started out with and here we are today. And it still kind of feels like a family. It does, very much. Because you start with that. And also like your second in command, you're like his sister. Yes, exactly.

We're brother and sister. We fight like brother and sister. We talk to each other like brother and sister. It is exactly that. And it's been, I mean, that's probably, I don't know, one of my favorite parts and certainly like why things work so well. He'll kind of start here with the wild idea. And I'm, you know,

is the more conservative little risk aversy. and we, you know, slowly meet in the middle. And it's like, okay, yes, we can do this, but, hey, let's change these couple of things and come out with something great. So it's been an amazing relationship of trust and friendship and truly, like, family between the two of us. And I think that's why it's always worked so well and we've been able to do, you know, obviously we have a great team, amazing team members of lots of people,

but our relationship has always been very, you know, good, intact, and we've set the eye on the prize and grown together. And it's been amazing and breathtaking, really. Wow. Now, what's that, like, I just want to understand the journey of starting from the grassroots, like, of a company that was small, and then really building the largest company on the planet. You know, you were there for all of that. Yes. Yep. And what kind of mindset did you have to start a massive organization and to be, you know, to build such a massive infrastructure? Yeah, I know. It was, it was pretty amazing. And, you know, kind of. of back to the interview, why I kind of laughed was I think a lot of people have, I want to be the best whatever. I want to be number one at whatever. I want to be top five at

whatever. But very few people can really do it and put into practice and work hard enough to make whatever that goal has happened. Right. Like it's easy to say, hey, I want to be X. But to actually put your thoughts and your energy and actually meet that goal is what the really difficult part is. So it's, you know, the beginning when you walk into the humble grocery store with the mauve carpet and it was not that nice of a place. And obviously, it didn't still have the grocery racks in the freezers anymore because everybody likes a joke, like, were you sitting in the freezer section or the, but when you actually have somebody like Matt who really puts the thoughts and words to action and really devoted the time to build out the infrastructure,

to hire the right people. When I came in, there was like, there was nothing in writing. Like, it was all just people all kind of hearsay. And I remember kind of arguing, you know, early on with, you know, some of the underwriting leaders that were already there. It's like, well, you know, they're like, this is a problem. I'm like, no, it's not a guideline anymore. And, well, it used to be a guideline. I'm like, show me. Show me where in writing that it says it's a guideline, right? So it was a lot of really kind of tipping the apple cart over of what did exist. And we invested a lot in, and I think these are keys for any business, a lot into technology, a lot into compliance, and then a lot into just, you know, being more aware that you've really got to lay the foundation to be able to grow. So in our business, your business as well, we're in the service industry, and we're in the industry of providing a great experience.

And if you don't have the foundation to, hey, I want to be number one, I'm bringing a bunch of business. You don't have that foundation there. you are not going to get a good service, you're going to implode yourself and blow up. And there were times. There were times when I first came in. I would say in the first like a year or two, like, you know, UWM, turn times are really tight. Like, I mean, we went to five, six, seven turn time, business days for turn time, which is unheard of. But. No, that's the norm still. I know. Not for us, though. We are one day, same day, next day, two day, for sure.

But it's, but, you know, it's so important if you're going to grow and you're serious about growing, you're actually going to execute to it that all of that stuff is laid out ahead of time, giving you the ability to scale and grow. And it's been interesting, too, like, you know, what got us to this level had to change to get us to this level and, you know, so on and so on. Like we've, you know, kind of recreated scale and how we do things over and over because certain things only work for so long and then you could have a certain size. It's like, okay, wait, it's time to, you know, go back to blocking and tackling and then let's do this on top of it. So it's been, I mean, the growth has been unbelievable to go through. And, you know, again, it's, I wouldn't change it for the world. It's been

amazing. What an incredible journey. And I'm going to talk about, I want to talk about, like, what are some of like the early obstacles do you think that you guys faced? Yeah, I think it was just lack of, a lack of structure, truly. There was, you know, there, it's really hard to get people to do what you want them to do when you haven't done a great job of laying out expectations. So, like, you know, one of my rules today of, like, you know, short of, like, ethical, or moral concerns. It's like if it's not in writing for a team member to do X or Y, like it's very hard for me to hold them accountable to it. Right. Like I can say it's like, now, hey, you know, Joe, make sure you go do X and Y, but to give you something to refer back to if you

missed that day, hey, if you didn't understand it. So it's really important. Setting expectations was really important. And to do that, you know, any business, my goodness, spend time like right down your processes, write down and be thoughtful with it so you know exactly how you want your team to execute to it. You know, you as the business owner, the COO, whatever your role is of, you know, getting people to fulfill your products, really important that they do it exactly the way that you want it done. I mean, that's your reputation as the product that you're selling. We sell an intangible product. So it's, you know, really important to really put in writing and to hold people accountable to do exactly acts so that you can provide your customers with that great experience.

So that was definitely an obstacle. So we spent a lot of time putting a lot of stuff in writing, which is super boring and takes a long time and seems kind of pointless until it's not, right? And then you realize like, okay, the next person that's starting, hey, here, start with reading this. You know, you'll get 80% of what you need to know. Then let's put you in class. So it's been, I would say that was an early hurdle of just nothing, nothing was in writing, nothing was structured enough. And it's so important to take the time to do that and to think about it ahead of time before you just like, you know, buy a bunch of leads,

bring in a bunch of business, whatever it is. So I would say that was a definite early hurdle. You were there when they started doing retail business. I was there when we were still doing retail. Yeah. So it really started as retail years before I got there. And then I think Matt had started UWM several years before I got there as well. So we still had a little bit of overlap, I would say, for the last year or two.

And then we're like, you know, Matt's always, and God bless them for this. Like very focused individual, right? And it's like what we realized. I mean, one, like, you know, retail. So we knew broker was the way to go from the beginning. I've always known it. It was a broker for years. Like I could compete with any retail lender.

It was simple, easy. And yeah, so we made that decision. And a lot of it is just, and a lot of it is just focused. You know, when there were two arms, it was, okay, when you build this project with your technology team, you have to build it this way and you have to build it this way, right? Like singular focus is so important. I think a lot of business owners want to, you know, make any. dollar from anywhere, but you got to realize like your mental capacity to make something really great

is really hard to spread across two things, three things, four things, right? So it was absolutely the best move that we've ever made. And again, we're true believers in the wholesale world anyway is the best way. So happy to get weird of retail within the first year or two that I was there. You must have been a big part of that decision making process. Like what was that like where you're like, we're just going to dump all the revenue that we're making from retail and focus on wholesale, which the margins are basically a fraction of. Yep, yeah. Like for people to make a decision like that, that's a full decision.

It is. And I think it aligns a lot with how we generally make decisions, which is focus on what's right. Just do the right thing. Care about people, care about your customer, care about your team members, and everything else kind of falls in place from there. So I'll be it, you know, giving up revenue streams or, you know, higher margins is always difficult, but when you, you know, in your heart of hearts, you know that that product

that you sell is better than that one. Great. Go after that product. The rest will fall into place, and clearly it has. So, you know, call it a leap of faith or call it, you know, whatever. But I think, you know, so many business owners, again, exactly what you said, it's hard to give up different revenue streams. Like, you know, even back as a loan officer, the old, like, you know, trying to get people's credit to be better. Like, it took a lot of time and energy to do it. And so rarely did it, you know, pay off. So it's just, so important to focus on what you can focus on to get you to the next level. And I remember UWM when they started, you guys were doing all the really low FICO stuff.

Oh, yeah. That was before me too. That was before, yeah. Yeah, that was before my day as well. So you guys stopped doing it when you started? I think it was, I don't think it was right before a right ad. I think it was for a while. I mean, they never got into the non-conforming business so much. I mean, I do think they did lower FICO scores and manual under rights for government stuff. But no, by the time that I got there, we were on the higher FICO side for sure and very middle of the fairway. It was very just, you know,

Freddie Fannie and FHA and gosh, I think even back then we were correspondent. We weren't even direct with Fannie and Freddie when I first came back when I first came in. So it's been a, you know, product growth to where we are today with bringing on so many new products for our brokers to be able to sell those out in the market. So I'm always bugging Matt to add by the pot. Which one? What's left? There's nothing left. Right. I mean, there's a little left.

There's always something that's right. 580 to 550. I mean, 579. 500. What else is left? Maybe some land stuff. Yeah. There's really not much left.

No, there's not. There's not. And we want, we love, obviously, and most brokers love doing business with you, WM. So if there's a way, if we're always, if we're missing something, I'm bugging mad. I don't know how much more appetite you guys have left for the lower stuff after that. I don't think there's... Yeah, there's just, honestly, we look at it all the time. Like, nothing is ever off at the table.

And when we look at kind of in numbers, it's like, okay, is it, you know, how much more is it worth, you know, a separate teaching a team to do underwriting differently? Like, there is some numbers in there. And again, you know, I'll kind of put it back in the focus bucket a little bit too. It's like, hey, do you really want this little thing that's not going to bring in so much that you're going to have to train completely differently on? I allocate different people to go do it just for this little amount. Like, it's, it's tougher.

It's, you know, much easier to focus on the, you know, kind of the larger product groups in there. But, yeah, nothing's the rough. You know, the transition to bank statements and the CR. That was very helpful for the whole broker. Well, thank you. You saved so many relationships. Exactly. And that's why we did it.

Like, I, you know, that's what I love about. I love our brokers. I love, you're great. Your company is fantastic. Just the feedback and, you know, boots on the ground. like, hey, here's what the market needs. And we had, you know, I have Matt, too. I mean, just great sentiment for a great consumer experience.

And, you know, exactly that ask was like, please don't make me send my borrower somewhere to be handled. And I'm going to lose a relationship. Exactly, not so well. And truly, that was, that's, that was the why behind the expansion. That literally that. It wasn't like, oh, you know, the margins are high or we're going to get. And we don't get in a ton.

It's a small drop in the. bucket compared to the conventional government that we do. And that was exactly it. And that, you know, oh my goodness, I hear that all the time. I love it. It makes me so happy that great. Like, hopefully the next loan is, you know, the more normal one. And that relationship stays there because you didn't have to send it somewhere that takes 60 or 75 days to close and you're going back to your consumer 19 times, ask for more docs like that. It's just not a good experience at all. And that's what we strive for every day to make the experience great for you, our direct customer, and then make it great for your borrowers as well. So it was a good move. One thing I'm personally curious about

because Matt has a real similar personality to me. He's like, I just want to win. I don't care about money. Like, I will lose money. And me and my partner, we personally clash over that because obviously like you need profit to operate, buddy. Yeah, I know. What's that dynamic like by just he's an absolute winner and clearly. Yes. Like that model works. Yeah. because as long as you dominate money follows. But, you know, accepting that as reality for you. Like, how was it? Because I'm asking for myself.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I would say, like, early on, I probably, you know, had more resistance to it than I do later. And what you realize is, you know, eventually you realize anybody, I don't know, maybe it's blind faith at some point, things that you're like, this sounds ridiculous. But you watch it over and over again and you watch the success rate still continue. And like the, you know, hey, money follow success.

You watch it happen in real life. And then you're like, okay, whatever. Let's, you know, let's do it. Because you've seen it work before just fine. So, yeah, even now, I mean, he'll do stuff and be like, okay, let's lose money on extra why. He's like, but it's funny. You still give him a hard time about it.

But, you know, no resistance to it. Because it always works. It always works. It always comes out just fine. It's just, again, so many people have such a hard time, like, thinking through all the, you know, what if this happens or, you know, we're in business to make money. How do you do it? But, and especially, like, I'm, if there's, like, one thing, like, even, you know, our business, yours as well, residual, too. It's like, hey, you know, if you've got to do something for free, do it for free because to, you know,

keep that, that relationship intact. Like, it doesn't really matter. So, yeah, it's right. Like, again, just go back to the basics of, you know, life, really. Treat people. well. Yeah. And happiness follows and success follows and gratification follows and life follows. That's, that's my mind. I'm going to replay that. I'm going to create a short out of that. I'm just going to send it to my partner over and over. I'm going to call them too. But it's a, I don't know. It's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Because I, I, most people are pretty risk adverse. I'm a risk taker. You know, and, you know, when you have a partner like that, like me,

crazy too. Yeah. Matt's a contrarian with his thought process and it works. Yep. And men of vision are typically, you know, contrarian thinkers. Yep, for sure. It's not, I mean, you know, it's important that you do have a partner like you do, though, right? Like, it's a balance.

Otherwise, I'd go bankrupt, too. I really, I really would. Yes, exactly, exactly. So it's good. I mean, that's what it's all about having great people on your team that can help get you to wherever it is. And, you know, we all bring different perspectives and we all bring different things. thought. So Matt's great about this. Always has been great about it. You know, what do you think about

X, right? Like anything, any crazy thought in his head, it's like, hey, what do you think if we did X or Y? And he'll ask multiple people that to get their perspectives because we all have different day to day. We all have different thoughts in our head about what will work, what won't work, risk, all of that. And I think that's one of the, one of his greatest success points is, and a lot of the time it's, you know, reaching out to you guys. Like, hey, you know, our brokers are do business. Hey, what do you guys think about X or Y? And just getting people's perspective on things. And then, you know, you take all that feedback in and you put together the best way to move forward and there it is. I love that. Let me ask you because you inspire thousands of women every

single day. That's just what you inspire at the physical level because that's what you guys have 7,500 team members. Not only do you inspire thousands of women's at the physical level, then you have all the women who would like just follow you. Who inspires you? Good question. Matt, definitely an inspiration. I think I'm so thankful every day to have been on this ride with him, and he's a wonderful person, and it's been so much fun, so much fun, so gratifying, so clearly, he definitely. But I would say, you know, my dad, my dad was the other big influence, he's not with us anymore, but he was one of the hardest workers I knew, and he came from a pretty nasty background. And, you know, what I loved about him, you know, all of us kids told us, so much you loved us every single day, how much we could do anything that we wanted in the world. And I get so much from him. Like he was so humble. My goodness, I remember the first time my sister took me for school shopping and she bought me a pair

of guest jean. My dad went crazy. Like, oh, you can buy Levi's for X-N. So it was much of so much humility from him. But that guy, I mean, he'd get up at 3 in the morning and he would get home at 70 o'clock and work half a day on Saturday. too. And it was, you know, he just did it. And he was all about hard work. So without, and I do think that's like the success to everything. Just like, work hard at whatever you do, find gratification in it.

And I don't know, the world's your oyster, really. So, you know, back to the simple messages in life that turn out working pretty well out in the end. You know, you work so hard. And, and for me personally, like, I want to instill that same work ethic that you have in my kids, right? Like, how are you that for you how are you instilling that for your kids like tell me some tips and yeah no I think I do think that there's a ton of them just watching for sure and I'm certainly don't keep it all passive just like I watched my dad I don't actually remember him telling me very often like work hard work hard it just wasn't maybe that purposeful of a parent in that like he you know he had different things that he would say more verbally

but it was just the aspect of watching and I think our kids benefit from I don't know I remember reading somewhere it's like the children of self-employed parents are the hardest workers ever because they watched it. They didn't just read it from a book. They truly had that father figure, mother figure, whoever it was in front of them, showing them how to work hard. And I think everything is, you know, whether it's grades, whether it's studying, hey, if there's a test and they don't do well, the question is always like,

hey, did you give it your all? Did you study as hard as you could have? Like, hey, next, so you know for next time maybe study a little bit more, but it's all, everything is about, did you give it your all? Like, I know, that's my belief if you're going to do anything in life, give it everything you've got, right? If not, then go find something else to do. And it's, you know, I'm fortunate that I love what I do. And it doesn't even feel like work. It's just part of a wonderful life that is so impactful and I get so much from.

And I don't, I love it. Love it. And we love that actually, you know, look to you for guidance and wisdom and counsel. And we're thankful for that. What I want to, what I'm curious about is, you know, you went to Vanderbilt. You're an econ major. You had this really fancy degree. college but then you're like I'm gonna walk away from that and I'm gonna go commission only and work for free until maybe ever well so like what was the catalyst or what were you thinking when you entered the the mortgage space and you went straight into pure entrepreneurship yeah it's an interesting question

and you know the whole fancy whatever like I mean I guess technically I am first generation college. My parents neither one went to college. And my dad, I remember him saying, is like, hey, doing well in high school, you can go wherever it is that you want. I grew up extraordinarily blue collar. My dad was a truck driver home every night, so it wasn't like over the road and that very, very blue collar. And he was just a fan of, hey, get into the best college that you possibly can get in. So it wasn't like, you know, fancy. But I do, I think a learning lesson from that, though, I think there's a lot of people who go to school and they, focus on something like economics like I don't love the economy I never thought like I'd be an economist

or anything like that it was just I liked how the the thought pattern worked and I think a lot of people will take whatever their major is and feel like they're compelled to go find a career that you know is directly aligned with whatever their major is right and I think it's a I think it's like a kind of a detriment to people it's like there's so many different ways to apply your skills and the things that you love it may not be you know economy proper or economist proper but you know, mortgages is related to the economy, right? Housing economy, how rates fluctuate all of that. So I think, I don't know, it's, I've actually been very happy that that was my path.

And it wasn't, you know, just, I don't know, formal, let's go work for this big corporation that does act. So I don't know, it's a good question. But it's a, I call it leap of faith, call it, you know, just surrounding yourself with people that you care about and trust in business, I think is really important too. and the sky is the limit from there. I love it. I love it. You know, you're so strong, you're so passion, you're so resilient. Where did you develop, like, such strong work ethic?

It had to be my dad, for sure, without question. And it's, yeah, again, kind of back to the, if you're going to do anything, just do it right, give it your everything, or go find something else to do, or it shouldn't give your everything. Your dad was a huge inspiration. Yeah. I hope to be like that for my daughters. Yeah.

Because there's, you know, truly there's just not a lot of women like you that they're just not. And you're the most powerful woman in mortgage, they say, right? Per Forbes and, you know, New York Stockton, et cetera. Yeah. No, I think it's, again, I think just showing them every single day that your working hard is really the biggest thing. You can't just tell your kids. You can't just, you know, talk the talk and not walk the walk with children. I mean, I'm sure you know that from your own childhood.

somebody tried to tell you, don't do this or do do this. And you're like, well, you don't do that. You're not going to listen to them at all. So I'm sure anybody, any kids who have super hardworking parents that, you know, that example, I think is more important than anything, regardless of what you say to them on a daily basis. But both my kids, like, same way. Like, they are super hard workers and they work hard, very hard in school. They're both great students and they give it their everything and they try hard in sports.

Like, they put an effort, which is all that anybody could ask for. So I think your kids will be just fine. Thank you. And a lot of people, we're all seeking answers of just better parenting strategies. Yeah. How do we make our, you know, our little mini means just the best people they can be. Yeah. You know, one of the benefits of this podcast is I get to ask the greats, right, of what their parental styles are.

How are they making their kids better and, you know. So you get up at five in the morning every single day. You grind till God knows how long. What do you think motivates you every single day? your source. Where do you get that? Why? It's just fun, too. I mean, I love what I do. I love, I love the gratification of working for a company that cares so much. Like, I laugh in my head all the time. It's like, can you imagine working for a company that you weren't proud of, won their values to their product? Like, we do, we care so much about doing things as perfectly and as well as we

can. Are we perfect? Of course not. But always striving for like the next best thing. And I'm so proud of that and it's so like, I don't know, it's just like, it's, I don't know, it's like this internal easy motivation because you just want to do more of it. And I love hearing the impact that we have across our broker community. And oh my gosh, UWM has changed my life. And oh, my goodness, like even like one of my favorite things is just how much are how great our team members are and how much our brokers enjoy working with them and the happiness that they bring. I hear it all the time. It's like, I love talking to your underwaters because they just make me feel better. They're always friendly. They're always happy. Like, if I'm having a bad day, I just call somebody at UWM and they

pick me up. And it's like that power of positivity. And I love that too. Like we're such a positive company. I like to think that we make a giant impact across everybody. And it's not just, oh, I, you know, I just send my loans here. It's like, there's so much more than that. There's just a beautiful family, cultural feel that. And I just love. I'm like, if you're going to work, just, you know, be happy. If you're going to sell a product, be positive and wonderful about it. It's just a better way to be in the world. So I always love hearing things like that as well. And that's very compelling just to hear the impact that we continue to make. You're there a huge impact. Yeah. Oh, thank you. And not just at a national level, I feel like at a global level.

You know, you guys are, you've totally changed the entire broker industry. You know, completely changed the landscape of mortgage banking and lending at, you know, at a macro level. And And it's your impact is you're impacting millions of people every day. Yeah. So with that said, like, what specific, like, what kind of mindset would you recommend to another female entrepreneur to have who's going to enter the mortgage industry? Get ready. It's a heck of a ride.

It's one of those love hates, right? Yeah. It's almost like, I don't know how you feel about like your kids. Like, do you want them in this business one day? Or not. Yeah. No, it's questionable. I mean, and then I had questioned.

Do I want them to be entrepreneurs or I just want them to go to Mascar. Oh, good. All right. That works too. That works too. I think the advice is the same regardless. I think it's just, you know, I, my mantra has always been work hard and everything else follows. I've never chased a title.

I've never chased money. I've never chased a position. I've never chased headcount. Like, oh, this many people, it's just, I just want to work hard. And then I know that good things will come. when you go into anything in life, it's, you know, work hard at it, give it your everything, people will notice you'll be the obvious choice for whatever that opportunity is that comes next. And I think it, and just, you know, be a good person.

Do the right thing. Live a clean life and do things for the right reason just because, hey, you're going into your job every day. You should work hard at it. You should give it your all while you're there. You don't want to be, you know, let me walk around for half the day and, you know, just be a half worker or whatever. It's just I think it's with anything. Mortgages are not. Work hard and everything else files from there.

I love that. So you've had so much success over the years and you've been the CEO for six, seven years. Like what do you think the future is like for you? Like you're going to continue to be the CEO for however many years you're going to. You could exit now if you wanted to. Like what's the plan for you? I don't know. I don't know.

If there's ever a day, I guess, where I don't love, love, love it. And again, it's not really work. It's just part of my life. If there's ever a day that comes, I don't love it. I don't expect that day to come. Like, I don't, again, I don't. I know, you know, without Matt, this company would be much less fun for me as well. So I don't know.

I'm not sure what the future will hold. But as long as I love it and I thrive on it and hopefully I continue to give value to our brokers, our clients, and UWM, I will keep riding it because it's been amazing. can't imagine life without it actually. That's awesome. What else is there? What am I going to do? Yeah, I love it. Like, why change something that you love and that you get great gratification from and

you feel like you're helping people? Like, I don't know. Who would gift that up? No. So you're like, you can do this to your 78 years ago. We'll see. I love to hear that. A couple more questions than we'll wrap up.

What UWM is really like known for is they make bold decisions. Like, how important do you think? taking big risks are for your company? Very, very important. I think, I mean, that I feel like it kind of all comes down to execution as well. I think it's very easy for people to come up with a lot of reasons why not to do something. It's real easy. It's real easy to let the little voices in your head like, okay, well, if you do this,

what happens if these ten things go wrong? And in real life, those 10 things rarely ever come to fruition, but we get in our own heads, like, oh, you know, if I make this bolt change, but if these, well, no, shouldn't make that bold change. But again, it's like, you know, kind of years of learning, like, okay, what I was worried about when we make crazy decisions, it never really comes to fruition. So I think sometimes we get in our own ways, like we keep ourselves from doing great things by thinking through the negative parts of what we're going to do. And if everybody does that all the time, there's just, there's no progress. Like, progress comes with discomfort and it comes with, you know, taking risks. And that's where the great stuff happens is from the risk-taking. So, and hey, you know what?

It doesn't work. You change it a little bit. Big deal. Like not being afraid to, and it's not even fail. It's just like, hey, try this thing. If it doesn't work as well as you want it, you either pull it back or you tweak it a little bit and make it work better. Like, that's what we do all the time with everything.

And I think that's, it's a great lesson for any business. Like, go try things. Don't be worried about all the things that could happen if you, you know, try this one thing. So you can always change it. What I've learned is people hate change, generally speaking, right? So I think any, excuse me, any entrepreneur, any business owner needs to well get over the desire to just not want to change because it's, you know, again, I think it's like innate

people like, we're habitual, right? We like doing the same thing over and over and over. And I think any great leader has the ability to step out of that and love change. And sometimes they'll be in a room of 100 people and it'll be like, who loves change? And you get like two hands to raise. So I think that's one of the biggest detriments I think to any business is fear of change. And again, I wouldn't even call it fear of failure. It's just fear of changing and doing something different than before.

Because oh my gosh, what if this bad thing happens? It's like, so what if it happens? Then change it up and move forward. Yeah. And I noticed that we talked about yesterday. our mastermind's like, UWM brought in, you can make your payment with Bitcoin. And then it's like, we pulled out of Bitcoin. And then Matt was like, well, we studied blockchain for a long time and it didn't work out.

Yeah. And now, like, that leads me to my next question is like, you guys rolled out Bolt, totally AI-driven, automated AI underwriting. How much more AI is UWM going to implement? How much better is that going to be for the broken community? Yeah. That's a humongous focus. It's been for a long time.

And like you said, Bolt was kind of the early version of it. not quite the chat GPT version that got real popular recently, but that's so exciting. I mean, what an exciting time to have a business and something that you use a lot of technology with knowing these giant waves of what's coming. Like, it's going to be incredible. We always have a lot of things that we want our technology team to do.

Everybody always talks about the backlog, right? We have so many great ideas, but everything's prioritization, and you only have so many resources to do X and Y and AI. oh my goodness, like if you could see that like mental strategy backlog across UWM, it's pretty amazing. So as we, you know, get the, get more expertise under us and we've got so many great ideas of how to apply it. So I think we'll see like incremental technology change the rest of this year for sure and then years to come. So it's a it's pretty amazing what, what can be done out there. Yeah, and you guys are already, I know you got 600 developers on staff.

About 1600 on the IT team. So I can't imagine that the forward progress you're making daily on that. Yeah. So the brokers can expect now that a lot of big changes are coming in the automation world. Yeah, definitely. The artificial intelligence. Definitely. Yeah, and Bolt's a big part of that.

And, you know, a lot of components to bolt. Funny, it's name, right? Bolt it on. But, yeah, a lot of great things, even inside the Bolt platform with AI and a lot of, just there's so many applications of it. It's so amazing. So we're excited for that. Awesome. I like to end this question, and I know UWM is really good at this one question.

It's a three-prong question. Okay. What is a personal goal that you have this year? What is a business goal that you have this year? What's a family goal? Oh, my personal are usually my family goal. Let me think about the ones I have written down, because we do write down. We all write down our two professional and our two personal, starting with the family one first. So I have a, excuse me, 20-year-old boy who's already off at college. So now I have my 16-year-old teenage boy who still is home with us. So it is with him.

It's like one memorable thing a month that we do. It's not just like, you know, sitting home and watching a TV show or whatever. It's like, hey, let's go do something. So like February was we went skiing for a week somewhere, right? So next month might be, oh, let's, you know, when it gets warm, let's go to Cedar Point together. So something, you know, a good memory build once a month with him. I'm not saying it's like, you know, go to travel the world for the month or anything, but something that he and I will both remember that's out of the norm.

So that's my plan and that's my family goal with him. I would say one of my personal goals, I guess not related to family. This one is, it always drives me crazy. I know you had a similar goal last year. But, you know, when you see people that you know they're just not in your daily circle of life and you're always like, we should do dinner sometime, right? and it rarely comes to fruition because you end up hanging out with your same group of people that you do every weekend. And so one of my other ones, this one, I did it every other month and hopefully I'll do it even more.

It's like at least six dinners with those people that you say, like, we should do dinner sometime, right? Like actually doing dinner, right? That's a great goal. Because I think I say that every week. Exactly. Exactly. And there is, I mean, there's so much value from just having dinner with some. And you might get a great business idea and you might get something that just you know comes up and you're happy like what a fun dinner that was so cool and not that your normal group of friends isn't fun and comfortable and you love them but it's really nice to bring somebody you know fresh into the world.

It really ends that let's get dinner like okay let's get a number. And it never happens. I mean if you're every day, or every week or every day you're saying that which one? You got a long backlog. No, I know. I'm like I just got to start implementing that nap because I got a huge, huge back off. And I forgot. I think I, someone said that to me yesterday. Yeah. Okay, well, good. All right. And start small. You know, every other month isn't going to kill you, right? Just start,

start little. Don't be like once a week. It's just not realistic. So starting small. So that's, yeah, it's not even every other month. It's six times in the year of 2024. That's such a cool goal. Yeah. And it's small. But, and hopefully I can do more and blow that one away. So that would be one of my personal goals. And then let's see, my two business goals, one's a around efficiency and that's you know numbers too many numbers to talk about but the other one well no no talk about some of the efficient I want to yeah this most brilliant mind in the space it's it's to it's to increase efficiency on different teams by different amounts we'll say it that way so you know the way that we can

look at things are you know how many team members is it take on a certain team to close a thousand loans right and then hey if you want to close 4,000 how many team members do I need to be able to do that so that's kind of that's how we're looking at it this year which is I really like that way of looking at it. Because you add tasks, you remove tasks, like you change how much people can do in a day. So it's really like how many people do we need,

really like a close alone, right? How do we get more efficiencies, whether it's through technology, whether it's through process changes, to be able to do more with less, if you think about it that way? So can technology take a lot of tasks off our plate? For sure.

And everybody can do more than I need less number of people do X tasks. I can redeploy them to do these other tests instead. So that's a, That's one business goal. My other one, though, that I'm actually, you know, that one's so important, obviously, leading aberrations, efficiency is everything. But the other one that I love, love is we as leaders at UWM, every month we have to shadow a team member. Shadow, meaning sitting with them, watching them do the job, asking questions, sitting one-on-one side-by-side.

And instead of once a month, because I, I mean, I come away with every one of those with two to three pages of notes. It is never like you don't get something from it. Like I get so much from it. It's like, hey, why do you do this? Why is the screen this way? Hey, when you say this on the phone call, why do you say it this way? Hey, what's something that can make your job easier? Like just that together time with that team member and like focused solely on, you know,

for that 60 minutes on whatever the task is that they're doing is so humongous. Like we at UWM talk a lot about being in the weeds, knowing what everybody does across your company and how they do it really in person. of the best way to do it, right? Like, just if you don't know what your people are doing, it's hard to get them to think about the best way to do whatever you're trying to get them to accomplish. So mine is, you know, kind of two shadows a month, if not more. So I've kind of already laid out my year. I'm like, okay, hey, in February, I'm going to shadow this team and this team, March. I'm going to do these two teams because it's one of those things. Every time I walk away from it, I say to myself, I wish I did this more often. And it's, you know, it's hard

because the days get crazy and there's a lot of competing priorities on our plates. But that one is one of the most valuable ones all the time to me, to UWM, to our processes, to our eventual product. It's second to none. So I love that one. That is such an important one. And Matt talked about that yesterday in the master's. And he says that, he said almost the same exact thing you said. He said, I come away from every time I shadow someone with two to three pages of notes.

It's insane. And I didn't really, you know, and I'm going to be can with you. I don't do that. And after hearing him say it, now hearing you say it, guys, if you're watching this podcast, I went to a mastermind's traveled thousands of miles to do this to get, you know, one of those takeaways and you guys are getting it right now on a podcast. Like, that's how valuable these podcasts are. Like the amount of information that's disseminated is, you know, incredible.

And that is such an important goal. and I hope that other people who are especially listening to that, implement that because we're all here just to help the broker community. We're all here to serve the broker community. There are no trade secrets. There are no like, hey, this is my secret sauce. You know, like this is, we just want to get better. It's so true. And help people, you know, eat our humble pie every day. Exactly, exactly. Linda, you've been such a blessing to have. I'm honored and blessed. And thank you so much for, you know, coming here and, you know, pouring your heart out and giving so many listeners the opportunity. just to dive into your brilliance.

So thank you. Thank you so much. God bless your family. Thank you. You know, I hope you hit every single goal time. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me and this was a lot of fun.

I appreciate it. It's always great to hear just different perspectives and to think about things and to get asked questions like this that you actually have to, oh, well, that's because I'm this and this. this amazing opportunity. I got so much out of it. Awesome. Awesome.

Coffees for closes, guys. Melinda Wilner, C-O-WM, amazing interview. Thank you so much, Melinda. Thank you.