Defying “You Can’t”

The job proposal made sense, at least on paper.

An established industry executive approached Briana Hildt with what she describes as a “pretty rock solid offer”—an opportunity to move from brokering loans into an in-house lending role. For most professionals in the space, it would have been the natural progression: more institutional backing, fewer operational headaches, and a clear career path forward.

Hildt turned it down.

The response she got next changed everything.

“He said, what was I going to do? I was just a broker. I couldn’t go be a lender,” she recalled.

To the executive, the comment was meant as reality. Running a lending platform meant raising capital, deploying it responsibly, selling loans, hiring staff, and managing operations. Brokers, in his view, didn’t typically make that leap.

Hildt heard something different.

“I’m not really one to take people telling me what I can’t do,” she said.

The next day, she called her lawyer. “I want to drain my bank account and create a fund,” she told him.

That decision would become the “origin” story of Cardinal Capital Group. But it also revealed how Hildt thinks about opportunity and what happens when someone is told they don’t belong in the room.

The First Ring

There was a reason the executive made such a lucrative offer: In just a few years brokering, Hildt built her book of business to a staggering $20 to $25 million a month in loan originations. But while that foundation meant she wasn’t launching Cardinal as a blank slate, it also meant risk.

“The last thing I wanted was for these repeat loyal customers or clients to call me and I didn’t have the funding or financing to do their loans,” she said.

Instead of launching blindly, she quietly made her next move: assembling capital. She reached out to several high-net-worth individuals she had worked with and asked them to take a chance on the new venture.

“There was a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that had to happen,” she says, “to get it to a safe enough place to kind of dip down a little bit and then take off.”

The Boston-headquartered Cardinal Capital Group launched in the spring of 2021—into one of the most unpredictable lending environments in recent memory. The pandemic had disrupted markets, capital flows were shifting, and lenders across the country were pulling back or tightening credit.

Cardinal did the opposite.

The company leaned into speed and flexibility, focusing on deals that required creativity and quick execution.

“We’re kind of scrappy,” Hildt said. “We operate at the speed and capacity of these big companies, and we only have 41 people.”

That scrappiness sometimes means stepping into situations where traditional lenders cannot.

“We have taken loans that a bank can’t close and the client stands to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, performing on that loan in two business days.”

Deals like that tend to build loyalty.

“The biggest value that I have is the relationships that I have,” she says.

That model recently culminated in one of Cardinal’s most significant milestones: its first securitization.

“There wasn’t really a market for first-time issuers,” she says.

Cardinal moved forward anyway. The deal was oversubscribed, and pricing came in as the lowest for a non-rated, first-time issuer securitization.

“It was very black and white to see,” Hildt says. “You have to present the truth. You have to show your track record and your performance.”

Beneath the Surface

Hildt’s comfort with risk started long before brokering or launching Cardinal.

Her father ran a car business but built homes on the side, and she spent much of her childhood watching those projects take shape.

“I was always going with my dad to properties. I’d watch them go from literally raw land to this big, beautiful house.”

Her interest in real estate is also rooted in sentiment. “I know what my home means to me … Back in the day, my mom struggled and we lost our home,” she said. “To me, if I had a career path that was providing more housing—affordable housing, whatever it might be—that’s very fulfilling to me.

“So I’ve always had a passion for construction and real estate … but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.”

Years later, living in California, she stumbled into private lending while working half a dozen or so jobs—bartending, marketing, building web sites, real estate, and trustee asset management. It was the marketing role that pulled her in.

“This company in San Diego called me and said, ‘We’re in real estate, but we’re a private lender,’” Hildt said. “They wanted me to do a pitch deck on bridge loans.”

She laughed, recalling, “I quite literally thought they meant bridge loans.”

She made the deck and started connecting the dots toward opportunity.

“It was a perfect storm working at the asset management trustee,” she said. “I was naturally meeting developers who wanted to purchase distressed assets [but needed capital] and now I was doing marketing for this lender who was doing construction loans.

She recalled the exhilaration she felt the day she brokered her first deal:  “I was like, well, that was a lot more fun than being a real estate agent, than being a bartender, than working in foreclosures.

“I loved feeling like the weight was on my shoulders,” she added. “If I wanted to do more volume, it was on me and nobody else.”

What she liked less was inconsistency and lack of control—the different closing processes and shifting structures between lenders.

Hildt knew she loved the creative piece and improving procedures. When she started Cardinal, that mindset shaped the company’s DNA—taking insight from what performed well at the asset management trustee and combining it with the more novel structures that had allowed lenders she’d brokered with to finance challenging deals.

From that foundation, Cardinal expanded intentionally, entering markets where there were close connections and clear needs. She didn’t chase national scale for the sake of scaling.

“There’s not a single market that we’re in that didn’t generate from an internal connection,” Hildt said.

Yet as Cardinal stabilized, something else began to shift.

Surging Influence

Hildt didn’t fully recognize her growing influence until her first-ever podcast appearance, on Lender Lounge, hosted by Fortra Law partner Kevin Kim.

“The views on that podcast blew out every other podcast,” she recalls. What surprised her wasn’t just the numbers—it was the response.

“There were people I looked up to,” she said, “coming to me saying, ‘That moved me.’”

Then she spoke on a Yale panel for women in business. A younger woman approached her, saying, “I texted my boss and said, ‘I quit.’ You gave me the courage to go do what I wanted to do.”

The interaction reframed Hildt’s own story. Being told she was “just a broker” had pushed her to build Cardinal. But her experience was now doing something else entirely: It was giving others permission to take risks of their own.

Strengthening the Current

Rather than keep that influence abstract, she has institutionalized it. Hildt sends members of her team through the Certified Private Lender Associate (CPLA) program offered by AAPL.

“I remember how much knowledge and confidence it gave me,” she said of taking the course earlier in her career.

“I’m investing in these people and they’re going to be investing their careers into the company, “ she added. “Why wouldn’t I want them to have this additional knowledge?”

To Hildt, certification is empowerment. It gives her team language, structure, and confidence. In an industry where she once felt underestimated, she’s ensuring the people around her walk into rooms overprepared.

That same sense of responsibility shapes how she leads under pressure.

Early in her career, she admitted, her instinct was “fight or flight mode.” That changed once she had a team looking to her for cues. She began to understand that her reactions set the temperature—something she internalized during a visit to the San Diego Zoo, where she learned that the zoo’s cheetahs were often paired with canine companions.

“I guess cheetahs are really, really anxious animals,” she explained. “And so they’ll put a Labrador—a very calm, very friendly animal—in the pen with the cheetah.

“The cheetah leans on the dog to see, are the dog’s ears up?” Is the dog fine? Is there a threat? … If the dog is calm, the cheetah knows it can be calm too.”

Now, before reacting to market noise or unexpected volatility, Hildt pauses.

“Is it a real threat?” she first asks, using the moment to assess and—if it is—ensure her messaging to the team comes from a place of calm.

Built-In Shut-Off Valves

Her “no scrambling” mindset extends to culture. Every candidate who interviews at Cardinal is asked the same question: If a deadline is approaching and it’s your child’s T-ball game, what do you do?

Hildt said, “If the answer is, ‘There’s a million T-ball games, I’ve got to meet the deadline,’ culturally, you don’t fit.”

The correct answer isn’t missing the deadline or negotiating an extension. It’s better planning: “Well, I already obviously hit the deadline before the T-ball game, because I’m going to the T-ball game.”

For Hildt, that answer signals something deeper than time management. It signals priorities and foresight. The work gets done. But life doesn’t get sacrificed.

And she holds herself to that standard.

“I don’t work on the weekends anymore,” she said. “Phone goes into do not disturb.”

The most direct expression of that philosophy came in October 2024.

Hildt’s second child was born appearing healthy but with a rare blood disorder that at first went unnoticed—until her daughter had a brain bleed.

For weeks, Hildt lived in the hospital, watching doctors and nurses treat critically ill children as part of their daily routine. She also watched other parents make difficult choices—returning to work, caring for other children, navigating financial strain.

“It was very eye-opening and humbling,” she said, “You couldn’t get me to leave that hospital, but not everyone has that option.”

Her daughter left the hospital healthy, and Hildt left with new resolve: “I just said to myself, I have to find the time to do this.”

That decision meant founding a nonprofit. Cardinal Cares became a 501(c)(3) focused on children and families, with initial giving directed to Connecticut Children’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital—institutions that had directly impacted her family and colleagues.

An Enduring Tide

If everything went away tomorrow, Hildt says she would rebuild around one thing:

“My relationships.”

That answer carries through her business decisions, her hiring philosophy, her investment in certification, and her philanthropic work.

Refusing to accept the characterization that she was “just a broker,” Hildt built a lending platform that supports borrowers, invests in education for her team, and directs resources toward families facing medical crises like the one her own family experienced.

What began as one moment of defiance created a ripple.

Today, that ripple has grown into a continuing tide—through her company, her employees, her borrowers, and the next generation of entrepreneurs deciding to bet on themselves.