Last September I celebrated 23 years in the mortgage banking industry. It’s not a coincidence that the best years have been the past eight, which have been exclusively in the residential investor loan market.

Although I was fortunate to have well-capitalized ownership and partners with accomplished institutional mortgage banking track records—and a good tail wind from market forces—success was by no means guaranteed. The biggest challenge was there was no real existing template or precedent for how to operate this kind of lending business on an institutional scale.

There were local hard money operators and there were consumer residential mortgage banking models. But, neither of them would work for our cause. Traditional mortgage banking models were too rigid and weren’t agile enough to accommodate the requirements of the residential investor market, which included funding short-sale acquisitions, seven-day closing timelines, repeated rescheduling of closings and the fact that investors typically hated to provide credit documents.

The post-crisis regulatory environment forced consumer mortgage bankers into a fairly narrow operating channel. As a result, most of these platforms are overmanaged and underled, in my opinion. Much of the time is spent on planning, organizing, capacity models and budgeting. We tried that approach eight years ago and realized we had to change quickly. One of my strongest held executive beliefs is that leadership and management are two distinct systems of action.

We changed our processes so that we had very broad stages. It empowered our staff by default because they could no longer rely on the regimented process flows they had at previous jobs. Since our management all had traditional mortgage banking experience, we originally hired people with similar backgrounds. I spent a good deal of time and energy outlining a vision that gave them autonomy, empowerment and a much greater influence on outcomes. I pounded that message to salespeople, processors, underwriters and anyone else who would listen.

At the time, we had two processors who had joined us from PNC Bank’s Mortgage unit, where they had similar tenure. Prior to that, one was at Chase and the other Bank of America. Despite the very similar backgrounds, one is the most productive and efficient I have ever worked with and the other didn’t last.

I put a lot of consideration into whether potential team members will embrace the opportunity and responsibility of having more influence. I have learned that while it may seem obvious that people should want to make a bigger impact, many don’t.  I believe there is a place for everyone, but the fluency of the investor loan market requires the right profile. Past professional experience isn’t necessarily the main driver of success.

I have hired a lot of people in my career. For years, I focused solely on professional experience and maybe education (depending on what I was hiring for). I have come to realize the few lines at the top of the resume are by far the most important. You know where they tell you they are flexible, independent, hard-working, critical thinking and solution driven?

Sounds like a good private lender, right? Probably not a coincidence.