Carrie Powers never imagined her first week as a loan officer assistant would set the tone for the next 20 years of her career. But when her boss abruptly left the office for a trip, she was thrown into the deep end with no roadmap and no guidance. It was sink or swim — and Powers chose to swim.

“She went away for a week and I had no idea what I was doing. So I was just thrown into figuring it out,” Powers recalled. “Amy was too. And I think we take that approach to everything: just figure it out.”

Today, Powers and Amy Wilemon, co-branch managers and the duo behind the powerhouse Wilpower Team, are the top loan originators at Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance, Inc., dba Silverton Mortgage.

The team reported $72.77 million on Modex in 2023. By October 2024, they had accrued $95.58 million in volume. Taught to just work hard day to day without letting numbers influence their behavior, the duo’s biggest month ever came and went without them even realizing it.

“People were calling and texting us like, ‘My gosh, what a great month’,” Wilemon remembered. “We had absolutely no idea because we don't look at the numbers. We do our job every single day and it's — you take the application, follow up with your clients, follow up with your agents. Get your loans done.”

On Partnering Up

Both Wilemon and Powers were balancing motherhood and new careers when they first met. The little ones played together in their office. 

“We actually shared a nanny for my oldest and her youngest, because they were about the same age,” Powers said. “They’ve grown up together.”

Wilemon, 52, has two boys, and Powers, 44, has two girls. 

“It's hard to be a mom and do this job. You know, people say, ‘I'm going to do it part-time.’ If you're doing it right, you cannot do it that way. Every deal is different. So you step on a lot of problems that you have to figure out how to navigate around.”

Wilemon facilitates sales, while Powers handles operations on the back end. They joined Silverton in 2012, became a team in 2014, and branch managers in 2017. 

A friend who did loans initiated Wilemon: “She was like, you can still be a stay-at-home mom. Let's just do your loan first to figure it out. Then I'm like, sure. Yeah, I could do this part-time and be a mom. I had a three-and-a-half-year-old at home and I quickly learned that's not how it works. Or at least it shouldn't work that way if you want to do a good job.” 

The pair eventually broke off from their manager and went into down payment assistance, which became a strong skill area. 

“The thing about down payment assistance is that it's very heavily guideline-driven. You have to follow the rules and people don't always fit in the box. Carrie was really good at making sure we got people to fit into the box. Then once you show agents that you are really good at hard loans, right? We started to impress them and started to build our business that way.”

A Marriage

The team built their success by working hand-in-hand, especially with first-time homebuyers and in the construction-to-permanent sector. But what sets them apart is how seamlessly they work together.

“We were always one person. We would always go to corporate for stuff and they would call me Carrie and her Amy, and go back and forth. Our COO a long time ago said, ‘Y'all are just Wilpower,’ because I'm the will and she's the power. That stuck. And then we started branding it.”

Business-wise, they file as partners.

“When you do a high volume, like we do, we found it's better for us,” they said. “Silverton helped set it up for us so that each loan is split. So we have our own W2s, but it is derived from a 50/50 split.”

“It's a marriage,” Powers said. “It's a give and take and we both do our parts. If one of us has something kid-wise in the afternoon, then the other can cover. We just wanted to have some flexibility, that’s the reason why we started partnering. But then it just kind of worked out well for us to continue.”  

Real estate agents form partnerships more often than loan officers, at times with one focusing on buy-side transactions and the other on the sale-side.

“That's kind of the same with Carrie and I,” Wilemon pointed out. “It's not that Carrie doesn't do sales. She talks to agents just like I do. She talks to clients. It's just that I take more of those applications and she does more of the making sure that our files get closed.”

On Why They’re Different

“You kind of have to put what works well for you to the forefront,” said Powers, who knows loan guidelines forwards and backward and can get questions answered quickly.

From the start, picking up the phone and returning calls to customers was a no-brainer.

“You would be amazed how many clients tell us that they called other LOs and never heard back. It is not in our DNA to allow that,” Wilemon said. “Our team is 100% focused on the client’s needs from the time they complete the online app or we answer their initial phone call. We constantly reach out to clients throughout the process. That is much easier to do on a short closing time frame, 30–60 days. But with new construction, the process is usually three to nine months, and having a system in place to reach out is key.”

They never consider closing the end of their relationship with borrowers, making a point of checking in periodically. This includes situations where a client was not eligible for a loan. 

“You might not always like what I have to say, but I'm gonna tell you the truth and I'm gonna tell you what works and what doesn't and maybe how to climb out of it,” Powers says. “If I say no to you, I'm pretty certain somebody else is going to say no to you also, and at least I did it in a way that didn't risk the money you would have lost in the transaction.”

On Silverton’s Support 

Being at Silverton has put the Wilpower Team on the fast track to success. Hard-to-crack loans are no match for their ingenuity and the company’s hard-working operations people.

“It's never a black and white, ‘No, you can't do this loan. That's the end of the story.’ It’s ‘Okay, explain it to me. Here's our perspective, and this is why it meets the guideline,” Wilemon said of working with a lender to get difficult files closed.

“I'm not saying that loans don't get denied. They do when rightly they should, but a lot of times it's really about telling the story. Often, loan officers don't tell a story. It's all paper, right?”

Wilemon or Powers might have to explain to an underwriter that a client’s gap in employment was due to medical leave, for example. 

“Let's get proof of the medical leave. Then I don't have to use a two-year average because that's not really fair to the client. But if somebody wasn't paying attention and they just turned in the file, the underwriter doesn't know. Silverton’s really fostered this, ‘Hey, let’s talk it through.’ ”

She and Powers found a welcome home at Silverton. When asked if being a woman in a longtime male-dominated industry was a challenge, they each shook their heads no. 

“The reason why we stayed at Silverton is because we felt like our voices were heard,” Powers pointed out. “If we went somewhere else … we may not have felt as confident in being able to speak up or say, ‘Hey, this is what I need for my business.’ I do think we've been fortunate to be in the right spot.”

On Growing Together

Wilemon and her husband are in the process of moving down to Florida, though she plans to visit Atlanta every month or so. “My family’s here, our corporate office is here, my business partner is here.”

They have no plans to split up the business at this point. 

“No, we're stuck. We're married,” Wilemon said, adding that the team does quite a bit in the Florida market anyways, and Powers has a permanent room in her house there.

They work with two full-time loan officer assistants, Shelly Albertson and Carol Rolston, who handle the front end with customers, gathering documents. Silverton has in-house underwriting and dedicated processors. 

On a succession plan and if they’re grooming the next generation of LOs to take over the business someday, the Wilpower Team agreed that was not always the case.

“We always said we were raising children — we both have two kids each — not loan officers, but that has changed over the past year. We have grown from two additional loan officers to now four. We plan to add a fifth in 2025.”