MB: Sometimes it can often feel like within certain companies that your competitor is kind of cornering you. Price wars happen. For example, the whole competition between UWM and Rocket, it can get pretty vicious. Should you maintain that mentality of sticking to kindness and being a friendly competitor when your competitor is really trying to corner you?
Stearns: That wouldn’t happen with us. I’d call up [UWM CEO] Mat Ishbia and say, let’s go to lunch. I ran into Mat a while ago, and when we were talking, he said, “Glenn, I never had a better time in this industry then when we were number two and you were number one and we were fighting to try to beat you. We did that for a couple years and we sharpened each other. We made each other better. Everybody needs a very good competitor in order to get better. And I respect Mat for that. I loved that we went toe-to-toe and it was wonderful. When I got back in, I told him, hey, we’re coming after you in a joking way. Right? It was fun.
Now, I don’t want to get in a fight and say, you know, you can’t use another competitor. If you use him, I’m going to be mad at you. I don’t think that’s right. You either come from a mentality of scarcity or abundance. I think there’s enough to go around.
You know, don’t get me wrong, don’t compare kindness for weakness, right? There’s a difference. I don’t mind standing up for myself, but I also don’t have a problem communicating with somebody else, another CEO that we need to. You know the problems happen when you stop communicating. There’s no reason why we can’t coexist. And hopefully in a space where we respect each other. I wouldn’t get into the fights that they did because I’d rather jump on a plane and try to solve the problems.
MB: A really great thing about this industry is that it seems to be populated by self-starters who succeed from difficult backgrounds. So it makes for a lot of great stories. Why do you think that happens? Why do people like that gravitate towards the mortgage industry?
Stearns: It’s an industry that has an unlimited upside and a very cruel downside. Right? It’s a place where you can be very imaginative in your growth, and you can have your ideas and you can gain a lot of traction with people that believe in you and you can. Do some amazing things with a company very quickly and you can change a lot of lives.
So, there’s a lot to gain in getting into this industry. It’s a very cyclical world where if you only look a month ahead or at your present, you will fail. Drastically and fast and quickly. If you look at the cycles and you want to be in it for a career, then you realize you make a lot of money in this industry and you give at least half of it back during the down cycle. If you look far enough out, you understand that you need to always invest in the future and be prepared.
This has happened a few times where people have compared our company or myself to other owners that were living a real high life. I said that’s wonderful that they do that. I don’t feel it’s my money. It’s the company’s and I need to invest back in them. They’ll come a day and we see that today, right? They dividend out a lot of their money and now they need to have that money and it’s not there. You run into some problems. You really have to look in the future if you want to have a strong business.