Business Is Personal For Texas Tomboy Stacey Maisano

Since 2018, Maisano has been the director of business development at Polunsky Beitel Green, Texas’ oldest law firm exclusively representing residential mortgage lenders. Working at the firm has reinforced her belief that business is personal, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be.

“Every weekend I go out to Lake Livingston, and I get real tomboy” – another thing, Maisano confides, not many people know about her. 

Nestled in the southwest corner of the East Texas Piney Woods, Lake Livingston is the third-largest lake in Texas and just an 80-minute drive northeast of downtown Houston. 

“I invite people from the mortgage industry out there who are friends. I like to share that. I’m just a down-to-earth Texas tomboy.” Maisano cracks an easy smile when asked to describe what a Texas tomboy looks like. “What you see is what you get. Down-to-earth, no makeup, out in nature, just hanging out” with the people she hangs out with on a daily basis, anyway. 

Watch it on The Interest: Good Friends and Good Partnerships

No Separations

While some people hesitate to mingle business and pleasure, Maisano attributes her personal growth and professional success to her refusal to separate the two. Using your personal and professional network is paramount to success in the mortgage industry, she says. If you’re successful in doing so, personal and professional growth become parallel processes. 

“At the end of the day, we’re all human beings, and it’s all about connection. I’m not going to have two different lives, a business life, and a personal life. I’m just going to have life. I’m not going to be someone different in business than I’m going to be personally, and I think that’s where we connect as humans, just as being ourselves and being real.”

It’s a lesson Maisano wishes she’d learned earlier in her career. After her start as a residential closer, Maisano moved on to work as an underwriter, loan officer, and title company escrow officer. From there, she served in executive roles including as a regional sales manager, vice president of mortgage production, and originations managing director, before arriving at Polunsky Beitel Green. 

Having been on the lender side for many years, Maisano has an extensive understanding of the challenges lenders and originators face. In her executive roles, she focuses on helping people find the courage to connect as human beings by “being real.” Her work isn’t selling, but meeting people’s needs. Because business is personal, collaboration is key, if you believe, like Maisano, more is achieved together.  

“When I came to work for Polunsky Beitel Green, Allan Pollunsky really instilled in me to give back to the industry and be in the rooms where decisions get made. Be able to be a part of that and collaborate where those decisions are being made. So I started doing that when I came on board almost five years ago, and I wish I would’ve done that earlier in my career … I’ve really gotten to make a lot of good friends and connections.”

Banish The Myth

Presently, Maisano serves as a director of the Texas Mortgage Bankers Association, committee member of the Texas Mortgage Women Bankers, and a captain of the Mortgage Bankers Association State Mortgage Action Alliance. Previously, Maisano served as president of the San Antonio Mortgage Bankers Association, vice president of the Houston Mortgage Bankers Association, and education chair of the Texas Mortgage Bankers Association, among other roles. 

To those in the mortgage industry who are not in trade associations, because they think they don’t have time, Maisano would like to banish that myth.

“I never really involved myself in any industry associations because I always thought I didn’t have time for them.” She insists the commitment is not as time consuming as it’s made out to be, and the rewards of getting involved in a trade association far exceed the time cost, “not only from a leadership standpoint but a collaboration standpoint.”

Roxie Montoya, vice president and business development officer of warehouse lending at Merchant’s Bank of Indiana, met Stacey five years ago through the Texas Mortgage Bankers Association’s mentorship program. It was late 2021, when the housing market was starting to turn that Maisano’s preachings about making business personal really came into focus for Montoya. 

“We were having our best years ever, and then we were coming into some of the hardest years ever,” Montoya remembers. “It was challenging for me in the sense of how do I stay in touch with all of these referral partners I have? How do I stay in touch with clients I’m trying to court? Prospects, how do I stay on the forefront of their minds … You’re trying to hustle, you’re trying to get business, and not everyone has time to spend an hour on the phone with me every day. That’s when Stacey gave me the idea. She’s like, ‘Sometimes I just send a little hand-written ‘Thank You’ card with a $5 Starbucks card,’ and say, ‘Hey, I know we’re both busy, but I wanted to let you know that I’m thinking of you and hoping that we can get together soon. In the meantime, please have a cup of coffee on me.’” 

Montoya thinks it’s the best – and easiest – way to stay at the forefront of partners’ minds. 

“I’d always tried to do that, but when things are busy you don’t have so much time. But, when business is down, that’s when the time is that you need to do things like that.”

Local Opportunities

For Maisano, mentorship and giving back to the industry also mean expanding opportunities for other industry professionals to get involved – particularly women – at the local level. 

“There are people in our industry who are just starting and they’re not going to national or state conferences,” Maisano says. “We used to have a local women’s association throughout all the different cities, and that kind of went away.”

To address the lack of opportunities at the local level, Maisano and a few other women recently founded the Women’s Inclusive Mortgage Industry Network (WIMIN). The new Houston-based nonprofit aims to provide avenues for community professionals to connect through peer-to-peer mentoring and community resources, such as the WIMIN podcast, WIMIN magazine, and a member directory. Their inaugural luncheon was in May, in Houston.

The hope of Maisano and her founding members is that chapters will spring up in other cities as more industry professionals experience the value of getting involved in their trade associations. 

The mission is personal and reciprocal for Maisano because she’s been the beneficiary of amazing mentorship from both men and women. It begins, though, by “being involved in the rooms where the collaboration goes on and the decisions get made… I really, really would encourage that.”