Before he was training thousands of professionals in the mortgage industry, Ali “Ace” Charafeddine was just a kid chasing opportunity wherever it showed up. He didn’t cut his teeth on Wall Street or in business school. In fact, he never even studied finance. But he’s built a career out of seeing the opportunities others miss — and helping others succeed alongside him.

Today, he's one of the most well-known trainers in the mortgage industry — the founder of the new Takers Brokerage, the architect behind Acez Academy, and the author of Mastering the Mortgage World— that’s reshaping how brokers and originators approach sales and leadership.

If you ask Charafeddine how he got into training would-be superstar LOs, though, he won’t point to a pipeline or a promotion.

He’ll point to an ice cream truck.

At 17 years old, Charafeddine was driving an ice cream truck around Michigan suburbs, selling Bomb Pops and Choco Tacos to whiny kids and their mothers.

“The moms loved me,” he remembers. “People would come back for me. I was giving out business cards and running neighborhoods. They would call me and pack people up for me.”

It was the mid-2000s. Rocket was still Quicken Loans and the “Push Button, Get Mortgage” slogan was still ten years down the line. The housing bubble hadn’t yet burst. And in Dearborn, Mich., a teenage Charafeddine was learning how to build loyalty, move product, and create a devoted following by hanging out a window selling Popsicles.

The ice cream truck wasn’t his first hustle, but it was a vehicle (no pun intended) that helped him better develop his natural rhythm for customer service. He knew the orders, the regulars, the cute little quirks of the neighborhood kids, the tricks to make them linger. He knew when the buses came through for school drop-off and the time parents would be rushing home from work, desperate for a distraction to buy a few quiet moments.

Long before scripts or lead generation strategies, Charafeddine was mastering the art of making people feel seen — and turning that connection into repeat business.

Ice Cream Insights

Born in Dubai, Charafeddine immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was a baby. His father owned a gas station, and often, Charafeddine would help out. He says that’s where he began developing his people skills.

“That's kind of where it all started, where I started making relationships with customers inside the gas station,” he reflects. “I realized, you know, there was a special talent there of just talking to people, working hard, and making people like you.”

Following in their father’s footsteps, Charafeddine’s two older brothers became entrepreneurs. They owned and operated local cell phone accessory stores, where they sold chargers and headphones. When the stores went under in 2005, though, the family was left with thousands of dollars in inventory and no clear way forward. Gathering at the family’s kitchen table, they brainstormed what to do with the unsold product, and came up with a plan: they’d sell to local businesses. Gas stations. Liquor stores. Pharmacies.

“In 2005 you didn’t go to a gas station to buy a cellphone charger, right? You went to a cell phone store,” he says. “So, I was a Guinea pig.”

Armed with his father’s Ford Explorer and a MapQuest, Charafeddine was sent on the road with a trunk full of product. Only no one was buying. Worse, nobody thought it was a good idea. Everyone told him he was nuts.

“I went to 10, 15 stores in a row,” Charafeddine reflects. “And I was coming back home on my way, you know, to cuss out my brothers, frankly, for sending me on this mission.”

Tail between his legs, he stopped at a Phillip’s Gas station for a slice of pizza, and struck up a conversation with the owner, who — thanks to Charafeddine’s charisma — ended up buying $1,000 of products on the spot.

That first thousand was the beginning of FIFO Wireless, a cell phone accessory distribution company with a global footprint. Privately owned, today FIFO generates $14.9 million in revenue in the U.S. alone, and their products can be found everywhere from your local convenience store to “every single hotel in Las Vegas.”

“Whenever you see a charger or a cell phone accessory in a gas station, I could say I started that,” he asserts, proudly. “You know, nobody else but me.”

Moving Into Mortgage

So how does a person go from cell phones to mortgages? For Charafeddine, if he wanted to take his earning potential to the next level, it was an obvious next step. But he didn’t know that right away.

After a decade of scaling FIFO Wireless into a global enterprise with outlets in Europe, India, and beyond, Charafeddine had built a solid business in wireless sales. Alongside that, he launched a business selling LED signs and light-up apparel, for which he secured a Marvel licensing deal and retail kiosks in malls across the country. But as the businesses grew, so did the weight of maintaining them.

“The more I grew in that business, the more expenses there were,” he says. “I wasn’t making as much as I should’ve been.” Every new expansion brought new overhead, new challenges, and a growing threat of diminishing returns.

At the same time, Charafeddine began supplying LED signage to acquaintances working at Quicken Loans. The connection was purely business at first, but he soon recognized the potential in their culture, infrastructure, and scalable model. What really caught his attention, though, was what his contacts were earning.

“People I didn’t even think were strong in sales were pulling in serious numbers,” he says. “I was like, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ I either thought that it was a Ponzi scheme and there was something wrong — or it was real.”

Skeptical but interested, Charafeddine made a bet: “I told one of my friends, you know, show me three checks in a row. He was making over, you know, 25, $30,000 a month. I thought he was lying. I said, ‘You show me three checks in a row, I’ll sell my business and join myself.’ ”

The friend came through. Charafeddine sold FIFO — though he still consults for the company to this day — and stepped into a world he knew little about: mortgages. He wasn’t a finance guy, he admits. He had actually dropped out of law school to become an entrepreneur. But what he lacked in technical background and formal training, he made up for in his unshakable need to succeed.

At Quicken Loans, new hires went through a training program called Blueprint (now Foundation). Before getting licensed, trainees worked the phones as telemarketers, transferring leads to mortgage bankers. Most treated it as a stepping stone — it is, in fact, how many would-be mortgage successes start out. Charafeddine insists he took it more seriously than his peers.

“My first month I made $9,000 as a telemarketer. People were like, who the hell is this guy?”

He was doubling — sometimes tripling — the daily transfer volume of his colleagues. But more than volume, what separated Charafeddine was intention. Listening to the licensed bankers work the leads he’d brought in, he identified gaps in their approach.

“These mortgage bankers were not excited. They were lazy. They were prejudging,” he says. “They weren’t grateful for the opportunity they had. I said, ‘You guys do not know what you have in your hands.’ And when I get to the floor, I’m going to show you what to do with this opportunity.”

His first month on the sales floor, Charafeddine proved his point. He closed 25 loans. His second, 30. By month three, he was regularly hitting 50 to 60 closings — and he kept that streak up for over a year. He became Quicken’s top mortgage banker, outpacing veterans who’d been there for a decade.

He didn’t just outperform, though — he systematized. As he moved from telemarketer to loan originator to director, Charafeddine created individualized development plans for his teammates. He designed his own coaching frameworks, using metaphors and games to help struggling bankers visualize success. Objections became “Fruit Ninja” targets. Relationship building became “cracking the egg.” His approach — the systems, plans, and frameworks — all of it worked.

The Comeback Coach

By utilizing visual and relatable coaching methods, Charafeddine gained a reputation at Quicken as a comeback coach. A guy who could guide underperforming LOs to the top of the leaderboard, taking them from the scrapheap to the summit.

Radi Al-Mahayni, one of Charafeddine’s earlier turnaround cases, calls him “a natural motivator.”

“There's been a lot of people that have done mortgages. There's a lot of people that have been leaders,” he says. “He's amongst the best of both worlds.”

When Al-Mahayni first started at Quicken Loans, he was struggling. Despite a strong track record in phone sales (he rose quickly to regional manager at Cricket Wireless), Al-Mahayni floundered as a mortgage banker. Cell phones are one thing, but a serious life investment like a house, he explains, is a totally different ball game.

“Mortgage banking is probably one of the hardest sales environments, because, as everyone knows, when you want to buy a house or you want to buy something really expensive, you're probably going to shop the deal and see if somebody else can get you a better deal.” He adds that the pressure could be even more severe at a company like Quicken. Falling a bit short doesn’t just affect your income, your entire job could be on the line.

“When you're working at an office for a mortgage company, you have a high quota to meet. And if you don't meet that quota, you virtually make nothing. If you meet that quota, you make a little money, but the money is in exceeding your quota.”

With a week and a half to meet his goals before Quicken cut him loose, Al-Mahanyi stayed at work late, watching sales videos at his desk just to survive the job. That's when Charafeddine noticed him — and decided to step in.

“He put me in a corner and said, ‘Do you have what it takes to be a Taker?’ ” Charafeddine’s team, The Takers, was the top-performing unit at Quicken, with Charafeddine notorious for his immersive approach to training. Al-Mahayni’s determination impressed him. “He said, ‘Pick up your stuff. You’re on my team now.’ ”

Only days away from being let go, Al-Mahayni started training under Charafeddine directly.

“Within a week and a half, I exceeded my target. Then, within a month, I had the biggest paycheck of my life,” he recalls. He says Charafeddine’s personal touch sets him apart from other coaches.

“He lets you become vulnerable to him and he becomes vulnerable to you, too. He'll invite you over to his house. He'll take you out for a coffee. He'll ask you for help on certain things that he's going through, whether it's something ridiculous like his hairstyle or his jacket, or something a little bit more complicated like some family issue or whatever the case is,” Al-Mahanyi says.

For him, that makes all the difference. “He'll get to know you and you can get to know him, which is something really important because a lot of people in higher status are kind of hidden behind a curtain.”

Today, Al-Mahayni runs his own brokerage, Wealth Home Lending in Canton, Mich., and attributes his financial freedom to the foundation Charafeddine helped him build.

“I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my life, and nobody tells me what to do. I’m happy, comfortable, and my career is secured,” he says. “And honestly, it’s probably all because of that one moment when Ace asked me if I had what it takes.”

A Calling For Coaching

Stories like Al-Mahayni’s not only confirmed Charafeddine’s skills as a trainer, they also reinforced what he would do with the next phase of his career.  “People that are struggling are coming to me. And I was that guy to help 'em,” Charafeddine says. “So in the process of that, I knew I had a talent.”

That talent — breaking down complex sales processes and turning strugglers into stars — has blossomed into Acez Academy, Charafeddine’s independent coaching and consulting platform. He started getting calls from brokers who had gone independent and needed help scaling. One client led to another. Then another. Before long, he was training VPs, building custom sales portals, leading bootcamps, and helping broker shops like Mortgage Pros and Rapid Home Loans grow from 30 to 200 closings a month.

On the Acez Academy website, testimonials showcase the impact of his hands-on, customized approach, and loan officers credit him with transforming their confidence, clarity, and close rates in just weeks. Just like Radi Al-Mahayni, clients note that prior to signing on with Acez they were “at risk of getting fired.”

Mike Fawaz, executive vice president at Rocket, agrees with the glowing reviews, calling Charafeddine “the go-to guy when it comes to sales.”

“His industry knowledge and sales skills are very impressive,” Fawaz says. “What Ali provides, through Acez Training, is some of the best I’ve seen in my time in the industry.” (For reference, Mike Fawaz has spent the last fourteen years climbing the ranks at Rocket.)

Word started to spread. Companies weren’t just looking for a coach to boost numbers; they needed someone who could overhaul their entire approach to sales. That’s when Charafeddine found himself stepping into a bigger role: not just as a trainer, but as a full-scale business consultant.

“I was walking into these broker companies as a consultant,” he says. “I was finding the opportunities … Were they missing skill? Were they missing culture? Were they missing leadership? I was narrowing down the opportunity, and then I was building a custom training for each one.”

In 2023, West Capital Lending, which today claims the title of “Rocket Mortgage’s #1 National Broker Partner,” hired him to consult on their business. Just two years ago, West Capital wasn’t doing anywhere near the amount of business they are today.

“They were closing around 200 loans a month. They were more into doing the independent model and they didn't want to send emails and numbers out because they're trying to stay away from the Rocket culture. I [let] them know that, it's okay if you guys are independent, but there also still has to be accountability. There has to be rewards. There has to be culture, there has to be contests, there has to be training.”

Danny Iskander, the co-founder of West Capital Lending, says that bringing Charafeddine in to redefine the company’s culture was, basically, a no-brainer. “I knew that I wanted someone to help but I was always questioning about who could understand our business,” he says. “Once Ali outlined his plan and implemented a 1:1 training strategy with Al Bennett and his sales team, I knew I wanted him in a bigger capacity. His experience from Rocket and the training he got from a world class organization I knew would bleed into West Capital culture and training.”

Iskander adds that Charafeddine is an “omni-present” figure, immediately “ready to get his hands dirty” in all aspects of the business: “training, re-selling loans for his loans, pushing himself on social media, writing his book, and his MLO and manager training planning.”

The impact of Charafeddine’s leadership guidance was obvious. Today, West Capital Lending, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., has taken off. Even in a tough market, they closed 8,430 loans in 2024, a far cry from 2022’s volume of 5,377, based on Modex data.

Impressed by Charafeddine’s influence, West Capital leadership asked him to activate his licenses and step back into origination, primarily to help refresh and refine their training materials. But once he was back on the sales floor, old habits kicked in.

“I wasn’t supposed to be selling,” he laughs. “But I started closing seven or eight deals a day. I get into sales, I get addicted. I can’t leave the desk.”

By the end of the year, he’d personally closed over 100 loans and generated nearly half a million dollars in revenue. The leadership at West Capital urged him to take the next step — to build something of his own under their brand. So in late 2023, Takers Brokerage was born, a place where Charafeddine could merge consulting with coaching and train a team from the ground up.

Now, just a few months in, his first ten loan officers are submitting over 100 loans a month. His sales playbook — Mastering the Mortgage World — is finished. The Acez Academy curriculum continues to grow. And Charafeddine, true to form, is still building. Still refining. Still taking the long shots others ignore, and turning them into success stories.

For Charafeddine, closing a deal wasn’t the only goal, but it was a step toward helping someone change their life — whether that meant buying a home or building a career. Although the lending business is a long way from handing out business cards from the window of an ice cream truck, in a way, nothing’s changed. He’s still earning trust, reading people, and finding ways to turn simple exchanges into lasting impact.

“You’re not selling mortgages,” he insists. “You’re selling cash. You’re selling dreams. You’re helping people change their lives. This is not a surface-level game, brother. You’re talking about people’s lives.”