The Corn Campaign

Gillespie started at M&T Bank out of Buffalo, New York, with no money for marketing and no idea what a refinance was. What he did have was instinct from growing up in his father's shoe store in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where relationships were everything. His father taught him a lesson that stuck: when Gillespie bought his first pair of shoes after the Marines, the store owner recognized the Gillespie name and gave him wholesale pricing. "Tell your father, can't wait to have him at the house again," the man said. Gillespie was stunned. His father explained that when he traveled for work, that client didn't want him staying at a hotel — they had him stay at their home. "You're a sales guy. Are you kidding me?" Gillespie remembered thinking. His father's response changed everything: "Son, I get the sense you don't have a lot of respect for people in sales. Look around. Everything you see had to have passed through a salesperson one way or another. That's what we do, and we do it with quality and integrity and character."

That lesson drove Gillespie's entire approach. "I would ask realtors, I'm not trying to take over the business you already have with someone else, but what is something they're not doing that I can do?" He got sweet corn from his parents' acreage, put it in cheap bushel baskets, and printed a message: "When it comes to listening to what your borrowers need, I'm all ears." He walked it into real estate offices across Miami County, Ohio.

It worked. "I know that's corny," he said, doubling down on the pun, "but it was really different. They saw we weren't just people in suits or bankers, but were out there listening to their needs, caring for their customers." By his third month in the business, he was doing almost a million dollars a month — this when the average loan amount was only $73,000. A realtor called one day and said she loved working with him but not his company — she'd already set up an interview for him elsewhere. That's how he ended up at Starbank, where regional president Mike Puffenberger let him stand in the doorway for two hours asking questions about how to grow. Puffenberger eventually asked Gillespie to present to the board. As a young professional, that was a big deal. The topic: developing relationships.

The Countrywide Years And The Crisis

When Countrywide came calling with an opportunity to run an area across Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, Gillespie took it. The company gave him autonomy to build culture and lead teams, and he approached it with characteristic creativity. Tired of hotel rooms and wanting to maintain family balance, he bought an RV — ostensibly for weekend getaways. Then he realized he could stock it up and pull it into parking lots in new markets. "I ended up becoming known as that area guy in a mobile mortgage unit," he says. He'd have recruits meet him at the RV, talk through the vision, and build offices throughout the Midwest. "I remember driving through Pittsburgh in the RV, realizing how steep those hills are. It's not the best for RVs," he chuckled. But it allowed him to take his kids along, turn work trips into adventures, and stay present for the teams he was building.

His leadership philosophy crystallized during those years: "My job is to remove obstacles for smart people." Find smart entrepreneurs, help clear their path, and be present as often as possible to support them. He spent about 17 years between Countrywide and the Bank of America acquisition that followed.

Thrive came next — about seven years of growth, technology investment, and national expansion. Gillespie and his team took the company from obscurity to a household name in mortgage circles, partly through relentless relationship building and partly through early adoption of social media. The strategy worked. Thrive became a destination for top talent. But eventually, the team that had built the culture together began to come apart. "That team that we had together at Thrive for all those years and all the growth," he reflects, "and then just to see it kind of disassemble."

The LeaderOne Model

When Gillespie joined LeaderOne as president, he found what he'd been searching for: a mid-size IMB — about 300 loan officers doing nearly $2 billion in production — built on principles that aligned with everything he'd learned over three decades. "It's an incredible model that brings all of those pieces that have been important to me my entire career together," he says. Leadership's job is to remove obstacles, provide the platform and resources, and cultivate a culture that encourages authenticity and quality. But what sets LeaderOne apart is what it doesn't have: an insatiable appetite to dominate, a phrase one hears often in the hallways of mortgage insdustry C-suites.

"Dominate is probably one of my trigger words," Gillespie admits. "I used to say that as a young sales guy. But if dominate is the result of doing the right thing and taking care of the client in their long-term best interest, then fantastic. But too often it's not. It's about just winning the sale and getting on to the next one." About ten years ago, inspired by Todd Duncan, Gillespie made a list — not of what he wanted, but of the non-negotiables he wouldn't do anymore. No insatiable growth appetites. No compromising standards to hit quotas. "I've seen by having quotas that you end up compromising the most important part of your vision just to achieve a number." LeaderOne offers something rare in the industry: privately held with diversified ownership, well-capitalized, with a succession plan built in. No outside investors pressuring for growth. Just a humble leadership team focused on filling what Gillespie calls "the necessary niches" — serving the diversified consumer base with different needs, some tech-heavy, some not. "People who are joining us are saying, 'Randall, I'm just tired of moving,'" he says. "We like change and growth. We just don't like to have to pick up and move." In an industry known for instability, that promise of longevity matters.

Why IMBs Will Win

Gillespie believes the independent mortgage bank model will dominate the next decade. He watched Ken Lewis, when acquiring Countrywide, say he didn't like the mortgage business because of the variability — banks don't like that kind of risk. And the broker model, while surging to over 28% market share after hitting a low of 10% post-recession, has natural limitations. "The IMB is the great middle ground," Gillespie argues. It can do what banks do and what brokers do, adapting to both sides based on design. LeaderOne brokers out when needed, competes on price when necessary, and maintains flexibility that neither banks nor brokers can match.

"Growing is easier than shrinking," he observes, pointing to the challenge that hurt large lenders during the COVID boom. Top producers demanded more capacity, more people, more service. When the market turned, those same producers resisted right-sizing, threatening to leave if their team members were let go. The result: heavy cost models that affected pricing and compensation for years. Gillespie's answer is transparency. "If upfront someone says this is not a model I want, then fantastic, let's find it out before they become part of that." If the company needs to grow quickly during a boom, everyone needs to understand that variable expenses will get eliminated when the market turns.

If he were starting a mortgage company from scratch today, would this be the model? "Absolutely," he says without hesitation. His litmus test: would he want to originate there? "That is my first requirement of a lender. Would I want to originate there and why?" The second question: are they willing to look at what's not working and reevaluate, either for a specific market or as an organization? At this stage in his career, he doesn't need to build it from scratch — he found the team already doing it.

The vision extends beyond closing loans. Gillespie sees the industry at an inflection point where companies either invest in specialization — helping clients navigate complex financial decisions — or get commoditized by rate-chasing and automation. "As consumers are getting older and the baby boomers are retiring, there's going to be less conventional loans and more specialty loans," he predicts.

"Reverse, Non-QM, construction — all those things are going to continue to grow." Technology can handle the simple stuff. What technology can't do is sit face-to-face with someone, hear the tenor and tone of their voice, and understand what's emotionally right even when it's not financially optimal. He remembers a refinance client who got scared when he presented a creative buydown strategy. The wife finally said, "Mister, we just want to refinance." The lesson stuck: "Even though financially it would have been better for them, they just needed something that made them comfortable."

The Relationship Platform

Gillespie built a significant following on LinkedIn, now one of the most recognized voices in mortgage. But he's quick to point out that follower counts tell only part of the story. Early adopters benefited before LinkedIn put restrictions in place — "those who got in early and built it fast were able to get those followers" — but what matters more is engagement and quality. "You can see more impact by those who don't have as many followers," he notes. A post with 2,000 followers can sometimes generate more meaningful conversation than one with 20,000.

What's changed for Gillespie is the depth of connection. "This community of technology and relationships of genuine, authentic people has been so inspiring to me this past year," he says, referring to the network he's built and the conversations that continued even after his departure from Thrive. The platform became less about marketing and more about finding people who care about the same thing: making sure the industry has a great future.

The Technology Paradox

Ask Gillespie about AI and automation and he'll give you the practitioner's view, not the technologist's. "I don't see AI being able to do what we need it to at the pace we're going to need it," he says. "It can't sit and hear your voice, hear the tenor and the tone." He learned that in mediation: you can try to resolve conflict over the phone or through emails, but face-to-face changes everything. "When you're watching and hearing and listening and seeing those cues, you're better able to understand what is important to them."

The mortgage industry, in his view, has been chasing the wrong efficiencies. Companies that invest in technology without investing equally in human specialization will lose to commoditization. Companies that do both — fast processing times plus deep expertise in reverse, Non-QM, construction — will win the trust that leads to lifetime relationships. "We need to show ourselves using social education pieces," he says. "That's one of the cool things about technology: it allows us to have those specializations so we can help consumers make critical decisions."

The Unfinished Journey

Gillespie's biggest LinkedIn posts, he jokes, were about food — hot dogs and hamburgers. The hot dog post warned about fake stuff on social media and got 150,000 views. The McMortgage post cautioned against verticals built on automation instead of consumer service. "Wouldn't you know that'd be the biggest post," he laughs. But beneath the humor is conviction: the industry's future depends on professionals who combine technology's speed with the relationship skills no algorithm can replicate.

The Marine who wanted Congress found something better — a career built on listening, adapting, and showing up with sweet corn when everyone else showed up with business cards. More than three decades later, he's still asking the same question he asked those realtors in Ohio: what are they not doing that I can do? The answer keeps changing. The question doesn't.