Below is an excerpt adapted from our Inspired By podcast conversation with 40 Under 40 Honoree Derek McGowan, Branch Manager at McGowan Mortgages. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

From Low-Score Leads to Industry Leader

Derek McGowan still thinks of his career in baseball metaphors. The Kansas-City-raised pitcher learned that “it’s a game of failure,” and that the best players “are the same person every day — whether they’re four-for-four or oh-for-four.” Today, as branch manager of McGowan Mortgages and a two-time top loan officer at NEXA Mortgage, he uses that clubhouse calm to steer a fast-growing team through one of the toughest origination climates in a generation.

Early Hustle, Hard Lessons

“Like anybody joining any industry, you start off, you don’t know what you don’t know,” McGowan tells host Andy Baker. Fresh out of school, he signed on with a lender that handed out 580-credit-score leads “and kind of had to scratch and claw to get things approved.” The upside? When creditworthy borrowers eventually appeared, every file felt lighter.

From the jump, McGowan ran on a simple motto: “Try to make it better every day.” That meant owning his mistakes — “never make the same mistake twice” — and remembering the borrowers who needed the most coaching. “Those people have been super grateful and amazing clients,” he says. “I don’t want to forget that.”

When Doing It All Stops Working

The next lesson was bandwidth. “I knew that I needed help. I needed some good hands around me that could also assist and make sure we’re always giving that same level of care,” McGowan recalls. His first stab at delegation — accepting company-trained processors “who operate in answer to the company, which makes total sense” — fixed one bottleneck but created another.

Why? Because McGowan’s brand of service was anything but generic. “They don’t just say, ‘Go get that transaction history.’ Tell them what that is. Tell them how to get it. Put that extra effort in,” he says. Scaling would require hiring to culture, not just competence.

‘Don’t Give Them Any Freebies’

Out of those growing pains came a client-care philosophy that every new hire must memorize. “Don’t give them any freebies — don’t give them any small little things to be frustrated about that then pile up,” McGowan warns. Instead, his team pre-answers likely questions: “Here are the common questions people have when they’re at this exact stage in the process.”

The result is what the founder calls glide-path lending. Yes, unexpected issues still arise, “but at least if something pops up, I want it to be worthwhile or legitimate.” Nothing erodes trust faster than avoidable confusion.

Building A Dugout, Not A Bullpen

Delegation also forced McGowan to evolve from top producer to head coach. “Now I have to focus on not just what’s my day looking like, but what’s the team’s day looking like? Are they all set up in the best position to succeed?”

His training progression is pure baseball: “Let me show you. You try it, I’ll watch you. You try it, I trust you.” But talent alone won’t cut it. “We’ve brought on some really great mortgage minds — and they just weren’t the right team fit,” he admits. Culture is oxygen; without it, expertise suffocates.

Lessons From The Mound

McGowan’s sports analogies aren’t window dressing — they shape process. Pitchers learn to surrender outcomes they can’t control. “You could throw your best fastball and they could still crank it,” he laughs. The takeaway for mortgage lending: focus on mechanics and mindset, not market whims.

Another transfer from the locker room is emotional steadiness. Big-league veterans, he notes, make it impossible to tell “whether he was four-for-four with four home runs or 0-for-four with four strikeouts — he’s the same person every day.” In a rate environment where volume can plummet 70 percent year-over-year, that steadiness keeps McGowan Mortgages from overreacting. “We don’t have the leisure to mess something up. We have to be dialed in.”

Surviving — And Thriving — In A Slump

Asked about 2024’s origination drought, McGowan shrugs like a man who’s been down an 0-2 count before. “You can’t ignore it — it is what it is,” he concedes. The fix isn’t gimmicks but fundamentals: do it better, do it more, be more consistent.

Working under NEXA Mortgage, the nation’s largest broker platform, helps. “NEXA is the biggest — most loan options, most loan officers, most volume,” McGowan says, praising owner Mike Kortas for raising, not cutting, LO comp last year. “Some people would say, ‘Hey, I made it.’ … He’s just not done.” That relentlessness rubs off.

The Newsletter And The Megaphone

Scaling reach without diluting authenticity is McGowan’s next frontier. Every week or two he crafts a video-rich newsletter “because I don’t want the same newsletter as the next person. I want it to be my video or my thing or my podcast on it — my voice on it.” Speaking gigs and community events fill the calendar his staff now guards.

Those appearances reinforce a service mission: “We all want to feel good about what we do,” he says. Hearing clients spend their first holidays in a new home “is the cool part,” the payoff for paperwork that often feels like “just a document or a number.”

Climbing The Next Mountain

Two years running, McGowan Mortgages has finished as NEXA’s top producing branch among 3,000 loan officers. The achievement barely makes him pause. “All right, what’s next?” he grins. The new target is national: appearing on the first page of Scotsman Guide’s top originator rankings alongside friends like Tammy Saul, last year’s No. 1 female LO.

To get there, he doubles down on support staff so he can stay in front of Realtors, past borrowers, and would-be buyers. The logic echoes Kobe Bryant, another hero: “It’s tough to be satisfied.” As McGowan puts it, “We’ve got a long runway left.”

Final Thoughts

Derek McGowan’s story is a case study in servant leadership, culture-first hiring, and crisis-proof process. You’ll hear how a one-man shop became a branch whose clients no longer ask for the boss by name — and why that’s the ultimate compliment. You’ll also hear a young leader wrestle with scale in real time, balancing ambition against empathy.

To hear McGowan’s full story and how he uses clubhouse calm to steer a fast-growing team, listen to the full episode of Inspired By from National Mortgage Professional.