That Would Worry Me

The thing costing you most is probably the thing you still call a strength.

I was 35, at a mortgage conference at the Fontainebleau in Miami, sitting across from a guy who had owned and run a mortgage company for thirty years.

He was twenty years older than me. My company was doing more loans than his.

I was feeling like a big man.

We got to talking shop and I told him how many people we’d hired. A good chunk of my ego was wrapped up in that headcount, though I couldn’t have told you so at the time. The number of seats felt like the scoreboard.

He looked at me sideways and said, “That would worry me.”

I dismissed him. It wasn’t the reaction I’d lined up for.

Here’s the context for why I was so sure of myself.

I got involved with Princeton in late 2017, trying to find someone to run it. The company had two state licenses, a six million dollar warehouse line, and no loans. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted the job. So I took it myself.

By mid 2021 we’d gone from fewer than ten people to more than 225. Revenue went from $500k to almost $50M. We were printing cash and collecting awards.

I was building ten-year proformas to $100M in EBITDA. I had jet prices open in another tab. I took my family to Breckenridge for a month. I was 35 years old, four years into running a company, pricing aircraft off a future that hadn’t happened, and I felt like the most reasonable man alive.

A few months later, March of 2022, I’m in Sarasota visiting a friend who got rich buying distressed real estate in 2008 and never stopped. We’d played polo together the summer before. After a day on the field we went out to dinner and started talking rates.

He put his drink down and said, “You’re going to have to fire half your team to make it through this.”

Guess what I did.

I dismissed him too.

But something had started to itch. Two people I respected, a few months apart, telling me the same thing in different words.

I filed the itch away and went back to being right.

The Excuse

We muscled through 2022 and lost a lot of money.

The entire time, my brain was busy finding the evidence it already wanted.

Rates will be back to 3% by the end of the year. We’ve seen this movie before. Ride it out for twelve months and you’ll catch the next boom. If you cut now, you’ll be understaffed when it comes back, and you’ll miss the run.

I wasn’t analyzing the market. I was building the case for a verdict I’d already reached. A good enough story about yourself feels exactly like analysis from the inside. It has charts. It has comps. It’s a confession dressed up as a forecast.

So I waited. I called it discipline. I told my team we were going to be the company that didn’t panic.

March 2023. I get on the phone with a mentor of mine. A billionaire. I was lost. I’d spent a year waiting for the market to come save me, and it wasn’t coming.

I asked him how he was doing.

“Great. The market gave me an excuse to fire 11,000 people, and we’re on track to make $800M this year. How are you doing?”

My stomach flipped. I wanted to throw up.

He didn’t tell me a single thing I didn’t already know. Same market. Same rates. The same brutal year every one of us was living through.

The Fontainebleau operator and my friend in Sarasota had handed me the truth with the numbers attached, and it slid right off me. This guy used one word, and it went straight through.

Excuse.

I’d been treating the market as the thing being done to me. He treated the exact same market as permission to do the thing he should have done anyway.

Same facts. Opposite relationship to them.

What I Was Protecting

In that one call, I finally saw it.

My ego had never shown up as arrogance. It showed up wearing the face of a virtue.

I’m the guy who protects his people. The one who doesn’t do layoffs. The one who’s smarter and stronger than the market.

That sounds like loyalty. It was the most dangerous thing in the building.

Because it wasn’t my people I was protecting. It was the version of me my people believed in. To make the cuts I’d been told twice to make, I’d have had to stand in front of 225 people and admit I’d built something I now had to take apart. I’d have had to be seen exactly where I was, instead of where I’d spent two years telling everyone I was headed.

I couldn’t stomach that. So for a year I called it conviction and let the market make the call for me. Which is the coward’s version of a decision. You get the outcome without ever having to be the person who chose it.

I was running a real company, and the whole time I was protecting a story about myself.

Ceiling and Floor

Here’s the distinction I wish someone had hit me with in 2021.

Your ceiling is what you say you want. Your floor is what your behavior proves you’ll tolerate.

Almost nobody fails to grow because their ceiling is too low. They fail because their floor is too low.

The floor is the bad file you keep accepting. The hours you then burn rescuing it instead of originating the next one. The employee you keep carrying. The referral partner who makes every deal miserable and still gets your weekends. The support cost you keep justifying. The borrower profile that got you started and now keeps your pull-through low and your margins high. The business model you emotionally outgrew two years ago and still defend at dinner.

None of that shows up on your goals list. All of it shows up in your P&L. It shows up in your pull-through, your margins, and the rate you have to quote to carry them. It shows up as the deal you lost by an eighth last month, the one you told yourself you lost on price. You didn’t lose it on price. You lost it on everything you’ve been tolerating, quietly priced into the loan.

And here’s why the floor stays low. We lie to ourselves about how we’re really performing, where we’re actually headed, and what our choices are costing us. Then we give the lie a name we can be proud of. Loyalty. Patience. Conviction. Service. Care. Work ethic.

Mine was “protecting my people.” The real one was “protecting myself.”

Raising your floor means letting yourself be seen exactly where you are, before you’re ready, while you’re still not what the next level requires. It feels like the riskiest thing you could do. It’s the safest thing you’ll ever do. You just won’t believe that until after.

The Mirror

So if the warnings don’t do it, what does?

I watched the answer with one of our top producers.

For years the guy shot himself in the foot and couldn’t see it. Worked nonstop, wore it like a medal. He’d fire a message into the sales group chat at midnight on a Friday. “I’m working. Who else is?”

It was supposed to read as dedication. I read it as a distress signal. Nobody whose front end is clean is up at midnight keeping his files from blowing up.

He worked that much because he took sloppy applications and believed that if he ever stopped hovering over every file, the whole thing would fall apart. The midnight grind wasn’t the virtue. It was the tax he paid for sloppy front-end standards.

We coached him. We advised him. We made fun of him. He nodded and kept going, certain he was right. Eight years of this.

Then he hired an originator of his own.

Within three months the new hire was doing the exact same thing. Taking sloppy apps. Shoving them into underwriting half-structured. Then complaining and blaming everyone when they blew up.

And for the first time in eight years, he watched the behavior from the outside. Once it had someone else’s face on it, he couldn’t defend it anymore.

He changed how he took apps. He scheduled his borrower calls instead of letting them ambush his day. He set expectations up front. He fired two Realtors who’d been making his life hell for years.

Every one of those was a no. Fewer files, fewer Realtors, fewer exceptions. The kind of subtraction that’s supposed to shrink a business.

He’s got 27 loans in his pipeline as I write this. And a fraction of the stress. Raising his floor didn’t make him smaller. It handed him back the hours he’d been losing to cleanup, and he spent them originating.

Eight years of advice changed nothing. One mirror changed everything.

You’re Already Running This

You’re almost certainly running a version of this right now, and you’d defend it as a strength if I named it.

The branch manager whose identity is built on protecting his support staff. His processing creeps to $2,500 a loan when it could be $700. That raises his margin requirements, which makes his rates worse, which forces him to sell “service” to cover a cost problem he created. Then he wonders why his volume won’t grow no matter how many lunches he buys.

The originator who built his book on the hard files. First-time buyers, credit repair, the deals nobody else wanted. Noble. Also low pull-through, climbing costs, climbing margins, and now he can’t win the clean loans because his model is too expensive to compete for them. The thing he’s proudest of is the thing pricing him out of the layups.

The originator who says yes to every Realtor, every borrower, every exception, every fire drill, and calls it work ethic. It isn’t work ethic. It’s the absence of a standard.

None of these people think they have an ego problem. They think they have a loyalty problem, or a work ethic problem, or a helping-people problem. That’s exactly why they can’t see it.

Whatever is actually running you tends to show up dressed as a virtue.

The Seed

So I’m not going to ask what your goals are. You know your goals. The goals were never the problem.

Here’s the question.

What are you still saying yes to that you already know is below your floor?

Not what you want. What you’re tolerating. Because that’s probably the thing costing you the most, and if you keep protecting it, you don’t get to pretend you’re serious about the next level.

You’ll read this and find the part of you that wants to argue. The cut you won’t make. The hire you keep carrying. The model you’ve outgrown. The flattering word you’ve been using for the thing that’s been costing you for years. And you’ll come up with a reason it doesn’t apply to you, because your reason is good.

Mine were great.

Scars don’t transfer. I can’t hand you mine. The Fontainebleau operator couldn’t hand me his, and my friend in Sarasota couldn’t either, and both of them tried, to my face, with the numbers sitting right there on the table.

I dismissed it twice, from two people who’d built more than I had.

The seed got planted anyway.

Rich Weidel III

CEO, Princeton Mortgage