Dorothy Shares The Light

COVER STORY

Dorothy Shares The Light

How Dorothy Satti made her company UWM's number one brokerage in Connecticut – by uplifting others

By Kathryn Fitzpatrick, Associate Editor, National Mortgage Professional

Dorothy Satti with her nephew and origination partner Max Satti, who credits her with inspiring his path into mortgage lending.

Gateway Mortgage Services, LLC is located in a small white building in a small shabby parking lot on the long stretch that is the Boston Post Road in Waterford, Connecticut. Situated between an irrigation business and a nondescript local pizza place, it would be easy to miss if you weren’t seeking it out. But people are seeking out Gateway, because they’ve got something special: Dorothy Satti.

Satti, like the building she works in, does not scream “business powerhouse” upon initial impression; she likely wouldn’t strike you as a monster of mortgage. She’s short, with magenta lipstick and funky gold eyeglasses and a black velvet dress that might be more expected on the set of Hocus Pocus than a corporate office. Her hair, a forest of gray curls.

Despite looking like somebody else’s fun aunt, Satti is UWM’s top producing officer in Connecticut, and Gateway, which she’s owned and operated with her husband Bill Kinsella for 28 years, the top brokerage. Composed of six loan officers along with a team of assistants, the company produced a massive 281 loans in 2024. Of those, Satti herself churned out nearly half.

“We hire really good people,” she says. “Just first of all, the greatest people. And then secondly, top performers.”

To hear Satti talk, you wouldn’t know she was running the numbers the way she is. She’s almost deceptively ditzy, flitting between ideas as if she were flipping channels on TV. While talking with a client she rattles off about thirty thoughts in a minute, jumping from income to cryptocurrency to booze in a way that seems, oddly, natural.

“Can I just tell you something? I don't drink coffee,” she says. “I have to do decaf. I'm like, too hyper. Maybe a little vodka to calm me down sometimes. A little Bailey's in my coffee.”

A Legacy of Tenacity

The inside of Satti’s office is warm and cozy and contains the things you’d expect: a coffee machine, a waiting area, a water cooler. Less expected, nestled among numerous UWM awards and seashells and anchor tchotchkes typical of coastal towns, are several portraits of her father, who was, in 1975, appointed the first State’s Attorney for New London County. He looks the way you’d expect an old school Italian lawyer to look: vaguely like someone who could feature as an extra on The Sopranos, but definitely someone who could get things done. Heck, he’d probably make a killer carbonara. She says he’s responsible for shaping her outlook, not just on the business, but everything in life.

“My father was very religious, and his line was, ‘I cried 'cause I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.’ It’s about putting everything in perspective.”

Colloquially known as “The Bulldog,” her father was tenacious, tough. Growing up the only girl with four older brothers, Satti claims she somehow managed to out-tough all of them, which in turn, earned her her own nickname.

“Somebody once called me ‘the sweetest bulldog’ [because] I’m tenacious in helping clients. And that's how my dad was. That's in my bloodline.”

We know that this is something you’ll often hear from mortgage professionals. That they do the most. That they’re going that extra mile in order to put more people in homes, encourage growth in a business, yada-yada. Generic promises. Everyone can talk, but not everyone has the skills or hard numbers to back it up. Satti does.

“It is rare that you find someone who has been in this business for decades,” says Daniel Milan, Satti’s UWM account rep, “yet continues to have the same drive, the same care, while constantly looking to improve, and stay relevant with the evolution of the industry.”

That drive has been consistent over Satti's nearly 40 years in the mortgage business. It’s clear not only in her longevity, but in her output — she personally originated 122 loans in 2024, according to Modex data — and in her hands-on service, delivering same-day pre-qualification letters and making herself available to clients on weekends.

“Not only that,” Milan continues, “but she is a leader to her team and has helped create other rockstar experts within the office. It has been an absolute pleasure working with her over the years, especially knowing that at the end of the day it all revolves around a genuine love for her people and what she does every day.”

Satti, determined like her father, began a long career in mortgage just after graduating from the University of San Diego. During her first interview, the vice president of a firm asked how she’d sell equity in a house.

“Up until that point, I'd pretty much just been a waitress,” she says. “So I just looked at him and said, ‘I don't know what equity means, and I don't even really know what you're talking about.”

But she got the job by thinking on her feet, answering the question by drawing a comparison between offering wine or dessert during a meal, and helping a homeowner select the best option for them. The commonality was giving customers all the information possible, better enabling them to make an informed decision about what’s available.

An informed decision is not always the one resulting in a house, though, no matter how hard anyone wants to close a loan. And while sales are obviously the backbone of what Satti and her team do, the human touch, the real extra mile, is what keeps client testimonials rolling in, even as larger companies turn toward a less personal approach in order to rake in more money.

A young C. Robert Satti, Dorothy Satti's father.

A portrait of C. Robert Satti who was appointed the first full time State’s Attorney for New London County in 1975.

Dorothy Satti at her desk in her Waterford office. With nearly four decades in the industry, she remains a hands-on leader known for her approachability and deep expertise.

“My mantra and everything that I do is based on helping — to love and be loved. That’s how I move through every aspect of my life. I show up authentically, and I really, really am here to help people.”

“I'm here to help people and sometimes it means helping them by not doing a loan,” she acknowledges. “But also, I don't just say, ‘sorry, you're not gonna qualify,’ or ‘okay, here's a piece of paper.’ I'm gonna put all the information behind that piece of paper.”

Additional information is where Satti gets down and dirty. Rather than simply sending a client on their way, she takes time to patiently explain the ins and outs of all things lending.

“A lot of our time goes into educating borrowers because the more we educate them and make them feel comfortable, the more we're gonna retain and not have to go to our bottom line.”

And anyway, that education is something she’s done for her direct family, so why not her customers?

Her nephew and loan partner, Max Satti, recalls the way she taught him about credit when he was freshly 18, empowering him to buy his first home years before the typical median age.

Max Satti, Dorothy Satti's nephew and loan origination partner.

Max Satti, Dorothy Satti's nephew and loan origination partner.

“I had obviously never had a credit card,” he says. Satti told him to go to Kohl’s. “So I go to Kohl's, I got my first charge card, and she's like, just buy a pair of Nike socks and a new belt once a month. Pay it in full. And next thing you know, I was like, 19 with an 800 credit score.” (Also probably 19 with a lot of socks and belts.)

A Kohl’s card. A staple of every mother’s wallet. Seems like the sort of thing someone like Satti might recommend. It speaks to the way she seems to move through the world — pragmatic, reliable, nurturing. Business like family, each an expression of her steady commitment to people, no matter who they are.

A Mantra Beyond Mortgage

Although Satti is upbeat and endlessly likable, her story is not one smooth trip to loan success. After a difficult bout with stage three cancer, during the summer of 2023 she decided she needed to get away, so Max invited her down to Maryland, where he was living, working in insurance.

“She’s like, ‘We are not dressing up, we don’t have to go out, we don’t have to do anything,” Max recalls.

For five days she pumped the breaks on life, stayed in her nephew’s bed while he slept on the couch, and she, like Max (who joined Gateway in a permanent capacity after this trip), came out of that time with a renewed sense of opportunity. “She was in a very growth type of position because she’s, you know, beating cancer. It was one of her busiest years.”

Regardless of how aggressive the cancer was, it allowed her to shift her perspective, to understand things about lending she might have overlooked previously. First, she thought about how individual both experiences are.

“People can share all their stories, but they don't have the same cancer I have. They don't have the same stage I had. And everybody and their brother then starts telling you everything about their journey. It's the same thing when somebody goes to buy a house, it is absolutely overwhelming.”

Knowing that everyone would have an anecdote allowed Satti to rethink another aspect of borrowing: trust. It’s vital that the borrower trusts the broker over everyone else in order to guide them through the homebuying process. It’s the same way you’d need to trust a doctor if you were a patient.

And like her father passed along life lessons to Satti, she too shares her knowledge with the people around her; notably her work family, chosen or otherwise. Max, for example, credits his aunt with opening up lending as a career possibility.

“[We’ve] always had a super close relationship, and we started having these conceptual chats about where we want to go. And as she explained the volumes in the millions that she did that year, I didn't totally understand it. But I understood the business growth. So that started a trickle conversation and it expanded, expanded until come September, October of that year, I took a leap.”

Satti, however, takes less credit for her achievements, instead shining a spotlight on the team around her. She notes that her husband is responsible for much of the business end; Max, for bringing her small brokerage into the online space; and she, loving people. What makes it work so well? The alchemy of family.

And yet, Satti admits it sometimes takes her a bit to adjust to technology. “I got in the industry when there weren't even computers,” she says. “So when all of a sudden I had to work on computers and cell phones and Blackberries and things like that, it was almost like a stab to the heart. Like, oh, how am I gonna do this? I remember vividly sitting in a car crying 'cause like, how am I gonna work on a laptop?”

“Somebody once called me ‘the sweetest bulldog’ [because] I’m tenacious in helping clients. And that's how my dad was. That's in my bloodline.”

But Satti’s whip-fast. A quick learn. With the rise of assistive AI, her nephew Max is helping her navigate the constantly shifting offerings associated with lending technologies. For the amount of business that Gateway does, a seamless client experience is a necessity.

“Mortgage lending is not an easy thing,” Max acknowledges. “So I’m like, we need to identify those [issues] because each little thing creates resistance to the process.”

He explains that in creating the optimal “end user experience,” he was inspired by a local dog walking service, of all things. “They made it so easy for me to sign up, fill information out, boom, boom, boom, upload my dog's rabies vaccinations and records that I was like, that's easy, right? So they spent a lot of time thinking about the end user experience. So we are spending a ton of time thinking about our end, our client's end user experience.”

Smooth operations are make or break, obviously, but plenty of companies have user-friendly websites, online applications, the like. That’s not what keeps the masses invested in Gateway. And a quick review of the company’s near-200 Google reviews shows that the masses are, in fact, invested.

“Working with Dorothy was an absolute pleasure,” reads one. “From start to finish, she made the mortgage process smooth and stress-free.”

Another calls attention to her patient and steady handed approach. “[On] our initial meeting with Dorothy she gave us a 6 month plan. She gave us tools and extremely helpful tips to really increase our credit.”

Yet another champions the team’s ability to make them feel secure. “We felt very taken care of as first time home buyers,” they note.

But for Satti that’s all just a part of the process, another means by which she can share her light and spread the joy she takes in helping others.

“I do that just to be real,” she says. “It’s to help them at any level, whether they’ve fought or not fought before, I want them to know they’re working with somebody who’s really invested and committed to the process.”

She smiles — it’s clear she means it. This isn’t just a business motto, but a reflection of who she is to her core.

“My mantra and everything that I do is based on helping — to love and be loved. That’s how I move through every aspect of my life. I show up authentically, and I really, really am here to help people.”