Home
My resume
My references
My background
Contact me
|
|
|
|
American Dreamer
Glenn Stearns built a financial services firm that funded more than $2 billion in mortgage loans in 2002
| PUBLICATION: |
Towson, the alumni magazine for Towson University |
| DATE: |
Spring 2003 |
Reprinted with permission from Towson University Relations.
|
It's Thursday afternoon, and as the CEO of a billion-dollar mortgage banking company you've just filled one of the last remaining holes in this week's calendar. "Call me at 10 tomorrow morning," you tell your appointment.
Now it's Friday morning. You're supposed to be in your office in sunny Santa Ana, Calif., waiting for your 10 o'clock to call. Instead, you're in ... Mt. Hood, Ore., waist-deep in snow, sliding around a mountain road in your rent-a-car. And why? It just seemed like a good day to ask for an actress' hand in marriage.
Welcome to Glenn Stearns' world.
The 39-year-old Towson University grad has made a career out of building real estate companies from the ground up. He has taken the company he founded — First Pacific Financial — and turned it into a network of financial services firms that funded more than $1.5 billion in mortgage loans last year. But he's made a life out of spontaneity — sometimes for worse, often for better, but always with a lesson learned.
"The only way I grow is when I'm uncomfortable — when someone else is gunning for me or when I'm doing something I've never done before," Stearns said. "That's the only way you learn."
'I CAN DO BETTER'
Those lessons have served him well since he arrived in Santa Ana in 1988. With little more than the clothes on his back and the economics degree he'd just earned from Towson, Stearns and a buddy put the future aside for a while and dropped anchor in Orange County, where they shared an apartment with four other people while searching for life's next big thing.
He found it one day while wandering through some of Orange County's wealthier neighborhoods. Slack-jawed at the beauty of the palatial homes, he immediately knew what he wanted — and was determined to figure out how to get it. He approached a man in front of one of the homes and asked him what it took to get a home like his.
"I don't know. I'm just the gardener," the man replied. "But I think the owner works in real estate."
Real estate — with those two words, Stearns suddenly had a plan. His buddy was already mapping out his trip back to Maryland, but Stearns wanted no part of it. "I'm staying," he said, and soon after he found work as a loan officer.
"I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do," Stearns said. "But I've always been pretty lucky, so I just decided to wing it."
Ten months later, he made another stab in the dark. Stearns took a good look at the loan company for which he worked and thought, "I can do better." He asked the right questions, got the right licenses and took out a loan, and almost by willing it to happen, he found himself in 1989 as the owner of a mortgage banking company called First Pacific Financial.
"It was an insane thing to do," Stearns said. "I just didn't know it at the time."
More insanity followed. Stearns added escrow and loan companies to the First Pacific family of companies. When those businesses took off, he went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and asked what he needed to do to pick up some of the government's business. The result: In 1993 he formed Carriage Escrow, which would quickly become the largest HUD settlement company in the country. Then came a loan auditing business called United Housing Services, and that, too, took flight. Last year, that company performed more than 30,000 loan audits for the Federal Housing Administration, making it the largest FHA auditing firm in the country.
Today, 14 years after Stearns founded the company, the First Pacific network of companies employs more than 500 people in eight offices in California and Maryland.
Others want a piece of the action, too. In 1999 First American Title, a Fortune 500 company and the largest title company in the country, bought a minority interest in Carriage Escrow in "a deal that had eight zeros," Stearns said.
NEXT PAGE: Lessons in life
1 | 2 | 3
|
|
