Matthew VanFossen is a successful entrepreneur and the CEO of the Absolute Home Mortgage Corporation, a mid-size Independent Mortgage Banker located in Fairfield, New Jersey. He is also the CEO of Mortgage Automation Technologies, a financial technology provider specializing in consumer mortgage technology. He has been a driving force in the Mortgage industry and is a respected figure in the community. His passion for innovation and technology is evidenced by his numerous achievements. He has been named a "Top Mortgage Professionals Under 40 " by National Mortgage Press. His vision and dedication have helped propelled the mortgage industry to long term success, and he continues to innovate and grow his companies.
“When big decisions need to be made, sit on them. Don't make the first immediate reaction. Get your head in a clear space first. Sleep on it. The decision you make within a minute and the decision you make within five minutes could be two completely different things in just that small window.”-
Matthew VanFossen
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the insight interviews. This is your host, Steve scanlon. You know, every time I come into this, I got to get my host voice on. I don't normally talk like that, but here we go. I've got a great guest today, someone that I am honored to call client, to call friend, to call colleague in this crazy life that we're living, and just someone that I'm actually just really excited to expose more of the world to, although he's pretty exposed and out there, I must say. So, hey, without further ado, insight interview world, say hello to Matthew VanFossen. Matthew, say hi to the insight interview world.
Hello, world. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it. Always great to have a conversation with you. I just kind of like that.
Hello, world. Hello, world. Yes, Matthew, we have a little tradition on this show. I'm going to change up our tradition a little bit, and I'm going to ask you a question as we get going here before we even know anything about you, which I get to ask, you're going to get to tell us about you. But before I do, there's this concept that I know you know, of in neuroscience. It's certainly around in athletics and other places. Some people talk about being in the zone. There's sort of a neuroscientific saying for it. It's called flow. Just being in the zone, like, where you're calm. Peaceful, you know? And wherever you are, what is it in this world that puts you, Matthew, in the zone? When do you find yourself in the zone?
Yeah, it's a great question, you know, you find that we all have our happy places You know, sometimes you have to take a step back and really think about that. And for me, when I'm in the zone, when I feel like I'm shining as professional spaces, when I have the ability to be creative, when I have the ability to really work with my team, to slow down a little bit right, and concentrate on the task at hand. And I haven't always been like that. Steve, I think you know that it's something that I've really been working on the past couple of years, is to be less reactionary, right, to kind of when things are happening, how can I get to the place where I have the most clarity? And it’s something you've tried to help me work through as well. Because for all too many years, it was like a spontaneous reaction. I would let things just control me, right? I would hear something I didn't like, and I wanted to immediately solve that. And it wasn't until I learned to kind of realize that I need better clarity to be a better leader, to be a better professional, and actually to be kind of more happy with myself. Right? Let things kind of roll off a little bit. So, I've noticed that there's different levels of comfort space that you have in your personal life and your professional life. You know, when I'm in my office, I'm an office person. Some people like working from home. I'm an office guy. I think that when you walk into my private office at work, you see pictures of my family. You see different tech tools and toys that are around the office and stuff. That's where I can be creative at work. And then when I'm at home and I want clarity there, I have a room there where I can think. And if I'm up in the mountains, there's maybe a favorite rock I like to sit on and meditate on. There's different places based on the mindset that you're in that you can try to really get the best of yourself with it.
That's so good. Well, I hope we get to achieve some of that even here. I did see that you were in your office, and so I just figure that what we're going to do on our podcast is going to be that much better if we're in the zone. So thank you for being a part of it.
Yeah, I'd like to be in the end zone closing some loans right now.
I get it.
That's a good zone to be in.
Yeah, I get it. Well, look, Matthew, you are a business owner. In fact, a multiple business. You know, every time I hear and think about what some of the things are that you've done in life, if I tell people that, they're like, think, what is he, 70, 80 years old? And you're a fairly young guy, you've done a whole lot in your life, been a lot of places, done a lot of things, grown a lot of great companies. You're in the little bit of a battle right now in the industry that you're in. But before, I guess I don't like to read people's curriculum vitae. If there were a way for you to put a watch on it and just take a couple of minutes, tell us who you are, how'd you get here, what are you all about? I know that's a long, long story. That's why I'm asking for your synthesis of it.
We want to go down, like, mortgage origin stories.
I want to hear the Matthew VanFossen story.
So, this is my 20th year in the mortgage industry, so I'm celebrating that. Celebrated it this year, getting my certified mortgage banker designation. So that's something I did for myself this year to really kind of mark that marker. You're right, I don't think I'm that old. I'm 37 years old, about to be 38. I decided at a young age, Steve, that I was going to make this my career. I stepped into it as a fluke. My original background was tech. I think your parents helped you tell part of your story. Obviously without them I wouldn’t be here. My dad was in the tech space. My mom was self-employed in the travel industry, and I felt like I took some of the components of each of them to really build my career path. I had a computer company in high school, my best friend, we were fixing computers. That was our after-school job. And one day I walked into a mortgage company to fix their computer. It was my friend's dad, he was a REMAX agent. He said hey, one of my friends needs some work. And he introduced me to this guy, and I saw what they were doing. I was interested in it, and I started working after school, stayed with it through college and then actually wound-up leaving college to turn the mortgage industry into my profession and career. Interesting part that really my path continued on through the trailing 20 years was I always wanted to mix technology and mortgages together. I always thought that that was the best way I can leave my mark on the industry. And I was always looking at ways to improve processes, technologies at mortgage companies as really kind of my secret sauce to my executive path. I realized that the mortgage industry at that time, we're talking 2005 to 2010 was a bit antiquated when it came to technology.
So, it was easy for a young individual to kind of define their path and really make a mark at companies being a tech leader and being a process leader and you mix that with a little bit of good compliance knowledge, and you can really develop good leadership protocols and programs to build strong companies through processes and procedures. And I think that was my secret sauce coming up through the industry was I knew how process flows worked. I always liked mechanics as a trade, like working on cars as kids, stuff like that. I learned how to work on classic cars, and I talk a little bit about how those things tie together. Running businesses and processes, taking apart something old, cleaning it up, putting it back together, improving along the way and making the whole thing run better, leaving it better than how you found it, right? And if you can practice stuff like that in business you look back over time when you're in the midst of it sometimes it feels like you're not making any traction. But then you go look back on the past year or the past three years or the past decade even you say wow, look at how much we were able to accomplish. And from a leadership standpoint, what it does is it inspires. It makes people say that's not somebody that's sitting at the top and saying do this. It's somebody that's pulling the rope with people. That's inspiring, that's showing we can innovate, we can change right? Because we talk a lot about change. In fact, I think that one of the biggest obstacles professionals have with graduating to leadership is their ability to adapt and digest change. Great leaders inspire individuals to adopt change because change is scary, isn't it, Steve? Scares a lot of people.
Almost everyone, I might say.
Almost everyone, yeah. So, for me, I think that throughout my career, my willingness to not only adopt but embrace change, mix a little bit of innovation there and a little bit of my career journey or my path of technology, leadership, compliance, and you kind of put that into some mortgage stew and you get a decent executive out of it.
Well, again, you're being a little bit modest. You're more than a decent executive based on the companies that I know you run. But this is called the insight interviews. That's the name of our little podcast here, Matt. And part of it is to not necessarily listen to your insights, but rather as people listen to it, we hope that people get insights from them. And so, I'm already taking notes here and I'm just thinking, you know, your comment about you made a decision to make this space your career, and I just want to even pause right there. And I wonder how many people in mortgage haven't even made the decision? Or in real estate, or in banking. I wonder how many of us did we really make the decision to say, this is my career, this is what I'm going to do? So I don't know. I think that's a really cool insight right there.
Well, it's a powerful statement, right? That you made a decision. We all make decisions in life. And what does that mean? For me, it meant that when I made that decision, it was actually the day I decided to drop out of college, right? And that was rough because I was making good money at the time. My parents didn't support that decision. I think my boss, my manager at the time did because he's like, yeah, I want this kid to work harder for me, right? But when I did that, I said, okay, if I'm going to make this life changing decision, this means I'm all in. And when you go all in, it's hard to turn back from that. So, it's a commitment that you're making to yourself, you're making to your future. And that's when I started getting a lot into some of the regulatory compliance stuff that I do. I started reading the laws, started really mastering the industry, because I said, well, if I am going to make this my career, then I better do my best at knowing what can be done, can't be done, how the inner workings of all. And that's kind of where I got that little compliance arm of my career from.
Is that something when you're bringing people into your company, or like you said, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about the legislative work that you do. Because again, folks, when you're listening to this, here's a guy that's running a company, in fact, he's running two or three, best I can tell. But you're also dedicating some of your time to legislative processes and understanding stuff. Even if you're at a lower level in in this space, is that something you recommend to people. Do you encourage people to dive in that deeply if they can? Or is that just something that you do and you just sort of hope they stay on the periphery?
You know, this is funny because I want people to do it. I want people to be so interested in these regulations. Right? I think that we lose it after we go through our initial testing, right. Coming into the industry, taking your NMLS test, studying for your exams, going through education, we learn our regulatory letters, right? But a lot of us lose it. So, for me, I look at where can we gain competitive edges as professionals, right? And it doesn't hurt to know this stuff. Do you have to be a Master of It? No, but there's no harm in knowing the mechanics behind your trait. I compare it to a carpenter. They say a good carpenter will make the back of the cabinet finished just the same as the front, even though nobody sees it. So, what does that mean to you? Right. What's the point? Nobody's going to see it. The clients aren't going to see some of the regs. Why do you need to make it so perfect on the back of it? Because that person is a true professional in their craft. They're a craftsman. Right? And it doesn't matter that nobody's going to see it, but they know it's there. So that kind of resonates with me where like, hey, I want to know it because this is my career. These are the laws that define what I can do and can't do when running a company.
Some people say there's other sports comments like defense is the best offense. Right? Offense wins games, defense wins championships. Well, for me, industry advocacy has been a little bit about defense, right? It's good to give back to the industry, it's good to advocate for policy change. But it's also really good for my company to have in depth knowledge and active work with these regulators to know what's coming down the pipe, right? To know what can be done, what current cases are going on, what fines are out there. Because when I look at myself as an executive and a leader here, at Absolute, we have 550 employees, Steve. It's a lot of people. And by effect, those 550 employees, they have spouses, they have children. Obstinately, there could be 1000 people that livelihood are dependent on the decisions that I make as a chief executive. That's a heavy burden to bear. And again, in that role, if you want to be serious about that role, you want us to be serious about the responsibility that you take it is, one of the best things I can do to lead this company in the proper direction is to know the rules that it has to be bound by, because at any given day, a regulator can come in. And if you didn't know it and you weren't able to make those good decisions and developing your policies and procedures, you can make a very poor decision that can put your company in a very bad way and by effect, affect all of those people downline.
Wow. All right, I'm going to play out a scenario for you. That college you quit calls you up. I'm making this up as I go, Matt, so just bear with me here. That college calls you up and says, you've been a leader for 20 years. We want you to come teach a class. And obviously there are books and stuff, but mostly what we want you to teach from are your experiences. What have you learned as a leader in organizations? And I know you can't we don't have the time to say everything that you've learned, but what would two or three of the key topics that you would teach in that class be based on your experience over the last 20 years?
You know, we'll start at the number one, emotional intelligence. It's the hardest to master, Steve. It's the one that I still struggle with today, because you know, I'm a little eccentric. I get excited you know, and I always just been in go mode, right. And I just want to get stuff off my desk. Or if an issue comes up, I just want to get it away. Being so reactionary and spontaneous in decisions, being able to slow down through emotional intelligence has been probably the number one thing that I would share, is trying to teach people that when big decisions need to be made, sit on them. Don't make the first immediate reaction. Get your head in a clear space first, right? Sleep on it. Because the decision you make within a minute and the decision you make within five minutes could be two completely different things in just that small window. We’ve already talked about this, right? We're not going to go into too much detail, but five minutes saved me, like, a couple of million dollars one time, if you remember, by having just to be able to take a step back when a big decision comes across your desk, breathe a little, try to get some clarity. I think that's really important to teach to everybody, because we're all human, right. And we let our emotions control us more than anything. That's no doubt, right? And what does that mean? That means that we're just emotional beings. Okay, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with being an emotional being. I'm sure you are, too. But you know what's funny? People say, oh, I can't control how I feel. Absolutely, you can. It's the one thing you can control. There's a lot of things you can't control, but you can definitely control how you feel.
Yeah, let's control the ones we can, because you're right, there are a bunch we can't.
So that would be the number one.
All right. And again, you didn't prep for this, so you're probably thinking along the way here, but again, what's a couple of, I love that one. Okay. Go ahead. Two and three or whatever you want to do.
Okay. Discipline. You have to be disciplined if you want to be successful. Right. Nobody's going to hold you accountable better than yourself. Nobody tells me that I have to get up every day and go to work. I tell myself, right, do I slack off sometimes? Sure, I do, right? We all deserve our own time. Okay. But for the most part, in the long run, I've been disciplined to keep fighting through, to work hard, keep showing up and allow people to disappoint you, but don't let them control all your actions. You're going to have people quit on you throughout the way.
"Not everybody's going to see your vision, not everybody's going to believe it, and not everybody's going to see your path, but it's up to you to keep fighting towards what you know you want and what you know is right, and it takes your own discipline to do that."
I love it. Again, I so want to expound upon that, but I want to get to- you're building a great course here. You didn't know you are, but you are. And then I'm going to send the podcast to that college. I don't even know who it is. Get you teaching because that's what you need to do. All right, what's number three? What else would be on your list?
Okay, let's see. So, we said emotional intelligence. We said discipline.
You already said, and again, I don't want to take it out of your mouth., you've already said another one. I want you think for a second.
I got to go with Steve's favorite one on this, suffering.
All right, well, before you get to- I'm going to put in number three. Suffering will be number four, and I want you to talk about that. I'm going to say number three is know your craft.
That's a great one, right? Expertise. Yeah, we kind of went on through. That a little bit, right?
Yeah. All right, so we already talked about talk to me about suffering. I love that one. No one's going to sign up for this course, by the way. Number four, suffering. Wait, what? Talk to me about that.
We talk about it all the time. Nobody said it was going to be easy, right? It's not. If it was easy, then everybody would do it. In fact, sometimes it's going to suck a little, dude.
A little, ha.
Maybe a lot. I don't know. Things are going to happen in your life that are not going to be great. But you know what? When I look back on it, it's like 96.3% awesome. And then the rest of it these times suck. We're dealing with that right now, right? You look at the mortgage industry right now, a lot of it is doom and gloom around. And then I realized that, well, if I can control my emotions and if I want to be a great leader, what if the world's burning down around me and I can let things kind of roll off a little bit? And I can walk down the street and be in a better state of mind and understand that it's not all peaches and cream, right?
"Bad stuff's going to happen. But if I can be resilient, I can fight through it, I can become, I can be emotionally intelligent through all of it, well then, that turtle is going to win the race, right?"
Because you're slow and steady, you're in the right mindset, right? You have the right emotional intelligence. You're not letting every little thing that's happening and every little doom and gloom in the industry affect you. Then what happens is you almost start looking at the stuff as an opportunity, right? You look at a down market as an opportunity. I look at the last time we had a down market. It was like this 2008, 2010 crisis thing that happened, right? I look back, I built my initial company during that, right? Yeah, it was really rough when we ran it, but I look back, I said, well if that didn't happen, would I have been in my mid-twenties and wound up with an enterprise mortgage lender? I don't know, maybe not.
It's so funny that you say that. Just today I was looking up because I'm giving a talk shortly to an organization and I was looking up organizations that really began in the 30s, in the early 30s. Look at what was going on in the early 30s. This is the Great Depression. That's right. Ocean spray. Neutrogena. I started finding these huge companies. I'm like, whoa, what was it like to start a company in the midst of the Great Depression? But some companies, just like I loved what you said there- resilience and it comes back again to emotional intelligence. That's so good. Well dude, if you can, I know these things go quickly. We look down, it's like, okay, we're getting close to the end. There's so much that I could ask you and I've just got it's like.
Joe Rogan’s podcasts go for like 4 hours. Not doing that?
That's why you've been blowing me off. You'd be like, I don't have time for that. Like, yeah, we're going to go quick. What didn't I ask you with regard to your business, your practice? Was there something even as you were talking about it that you'd want to share with us? Like bonus item in your class, like.
Hard ones on fly today.
Well, dude, because I told you if you prep for them, then it's all like sterile and you're all practiced. You've kicked butt. This is great. What's the bonus thing? What's the one thing that maybe I didn't ask you that you hoped I would?
Well, I kind of alluded to it before. That word “change”. Be willing to change your daily practices, right? Operate at a discomfort zone. We talk a lot about training. We talk about how the different people that are learning, right? The different phases of learning, different phases of emotional intelligence. The one thing that I think I've learned through all of this and something that you've helped me with more than anything was I used to be such a ten, dude. I was so proud that I knew so much about regulation and systems and technology. And I feel like the biggest thing that has changed in the past five years with me personally has been the acceptance of that change allows me to question myself. And I'm happier now to rather not know something than absolutely know something definitively. That's been like life changing to me, dude. It really has. Right?
Well, it's the essence of growth. Because what that does and what I've seen in you is that gives mean if you know everything, where do you grow? Right? That's an old Stephen Wright. Those of you that know that comic, he said, you can’t know everything, where would you put it? You can't know everything because where would you grow? And now that you're walking around going, whoa, by the way, you said something, I wrote it down, I can't pass it by. Learn to operate in the un-comfort zone. I'm so going to steal that and call it my own and give you no credit, that’s so good.
That’s yours. You've given gifts to me. I can give them back sometimes.
Oh, Matthew, this is so good. So good in fact, I'm just going to end it. Thank you. This has been great again. I just got a couple of pages full of notes here. Love your class on emotional intelligence. I love that the whole idea, this insight of discipline. I know that's fairly basic, but I'm a coach. Sometimes people reach out to me and go, I need someone to hold me accountable. I loved what you said. They can't, but you can. And I think that's really great. Love the idea of mastering your craft and learning resilience and suffering. Dude. What a course. Much more to come. We will do it again. We'll have you back in. We'll do more. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This has been just nugget after nugget, and I'm just grateful for it. So, thank you.
Cool. Thanks, Steve.
And we end every time by saying it doesn't matter what insights Matthew has, it matters what insights you have, right? That's where the power is. So, thanks so much for being part of the insight interviews. And we'll see you again next time.
Cool. Thanks, Steve.
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