Dan Snyder, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Homeside Financial, built Homeside after the Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2008 with the mission to disrupt the industry and change the customer experience while maintaining authenticity. That authenticity flows through the entire 450 person organization and put Homeside Financial on Glassdoor’s Top 50 Best Places to Work list. In this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, Dan shares how his company makes authenticity real for their employees every day.

 

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Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
	My name is Adam Robinson and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today, on the program, Dan Snyder is the co-founder and managing partner of Homeside Financial, a mortgage company founded in 2013 and based in Columbus, Ohio and Columbia, Maryland. Homeside is privately funded, has 442 employees and is named a Glassdoor Best Place to Work in 2017.
	We are so excited, Dan, to have you on the program and to learn from your experiences today. Welcome to the show.
Dan Snyder:	Thanks, Adam. Thanks for having us.
Adam Robinson:	We’re here today to focus on the people side of your business, but before we dive in, I’d like to set the stage for our listeners. Give us 30 seconds on Homeside Financial and what you do.
Dan Snyder:	Homeside is a mortgage bank, so we’re not a broker and we’re not a depository, so we lend our own money and our sole product is your home mortgage, so people … consumers specifically buying a home or refinancing their home.
	We started off 2013, like you said, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of the how we grew, but our main thing is the beautiful mortgage business, which has been torn to shreds in the media over the last … basically I started in it, so it’s been fun trying to repair and change the perception of what customers … how customers should really be treated.
Adam Robinson:	If listeners want to learn more, what’s the best why for them to do that?
Dan Snyder:	You can check us out at www.gohomeside.com.
Adam Robinson:	All right, very good. Let’s jump in and I see here from your profile that you spent your early career, really up to Homeside in the mortgage business, so tell us about your experience briefly that led to you saying, “This is a good idea. I’m going after this.”
Dan Snyder:	I can first share with you that I would say 100% of our nearly 500 employees now never dreamed of being in the mortgage business. Period. I don’t think that’s one of the career paths that as a seventh grader you write down on a piece of paper.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	Like many, I was out of college. I had everything engineered to become a lawyer. That’s really where I had my eyes set. After graduating a little bit early from undergrad, I ended up going to … I needed to make some money, so I worked at Wells Fargo. The big Wells Fargo beast and ended up getting promoted at a fairly age and liking it and it was … I realized that maybe mortgage … I could do it. It just … from there at Wells, I worked there for four years. Worked my way up and got a bit bureaucratic. Took over an opportunity to start a lending division for a small bank and started that. That was my true … my first foray into true mortgage lending and that was in January-February of 2007 right before the crash happened. I got the … it was both a blessing and a curse to try to build something when everything around you is going … literally falling and crumbling down and many of the people that I had started with then, are still with me today at Homeside.
Adam Robinson:	Wow. You launched in the middle of the meltdown and so … blessing in disguise. The listener’s know I have a similarly story in how I ended up in the recruiting business and Hireology.
	You started the business and the mortgage business is a people business. You are in the trust-building business. It’s a transactional business, but it’s not. Take us through … you mentioned early on your approach to treating people differently and the process, so tell me what did you see that you think better people practices could impact from a differentiation standpoint?
Dan Snyder:	My pervious experience prior to 2013 and co-founding Homeside was working at a bank and a bank you’ve got multiple … You’re serving multiple customers. You’re serving from a bank deposits, auto loans, credit cards, mortgage transactions, commercial, et cetera. Launching Homeside in 2013, late 2013, it was all about just serving the mortgage costumer. We feel like that’s a big enough trillion dollar industry that was in desperate need of some disruptions, so started in 2013 with the melody line of the … I guess, so to speak, our theme was going to be blending technology with a handshake, so not complete automation, not removing the human touch, but making the experience through technology better for the customer, easier for the customer, more just intuitive, combined with experts that will help guide you in arguably the largest transaction of your life.
Adam Robinson:	Translate that into how you staffed the early team there. You start with the idea … I guess a couple of questions. Were you always lending your own money, so to speak, as a bank? Did you transition to a bank and then how did that equation factor in for the people model that you built?
Dan Snyder:	Yeah, so we operate … where we’ve got our own funds and warehouse lines, funding mechanisms, in order to really control the whole process from origination to underwriting to funding and closing the loans that we are in control of the customer experience. Our team was folks that my … were interested in not just doing the same thing in the mortgage space or the banking space, but people that really, for lack of a better term, gave a shit.
	Today we have a huge, huge … very high give a shit factor. From my chair all the way down to the brand new people that come in and that’s helped. We started with a temporary space that had stained carpet and we’re recruiting in really talented people that have worked at higher-end places and saying, “Hey, hey. Come on, join us. I know that we don’t have the coolest space on earth and yeah, we’re not venture backed or we don’t have any sort of cool things to offer you. However, we feel confident that the customer … the mortgage customer has been neglected and we feel like we can assemble a great team and help change that reception,” and that’s really what we did.
	It was just people that … We built the team around that people that bought into that mission. Authentically bought in. It’s one thing to grandstand and have a big elevator pitch and another thing to have a terrible place to work or not listen to your people and we tried to avoid that and just … We’ve done it ever since.
Adam Robinson:	The vision then for the business is to focus on the customer experience and your recruiting strategy is to bring people with industry experience in who are willing to abandon the accoutrements of a big bank and focus on the customer. How do you make that focus on the customer real in the business in a way that delivers on that value propitiation to the folks you’re bringing in the door?
Dan Snyder:	It starts with listening to the customer and listening to your people. It sounds so easy, but as you’ve probably heard from a million people, it’s easier said than done just because folks like me would get maybe defensive or my partners or executives would get very defensive in how it’s been done in the past and it takes a lot of extra work to keep tearing things down that once were staples of the industry or staples of the process.
	What we did tactically was we said … First off it would have been easier for us to buy a bank, frankly, but then you’d be regulated by the OCC and large … it’s just a harder animal to be yourself in, so we’re a non-bank, strategically. That’s all we do is mortgages. I get the question all the time, “Why don’t you do commercial loans? Why don’t you do this?” What we do is hard enough and we have to do a good job at it.
	Then we build a team of experienced people that were looking for a different story to tell their customers or their realtor partners or builders and in addition we have a very robust training program for people without industry experience, so we do a lot of recruiting on campuses. We do a lot of recruiting at two to three year out of college or people with other experiences and then bring them in, train them from scratch and deploy them. We’ve had tremendous success doing that.
Adam Robinson:	Talk about the early days, then as you started to staff this team. What was your hiring process when you were getting off to a start in 2013?
Dan Snyder:	A lot of it hasn’t changed til today. We look at who do we know, first. A majority of our hiring has been done by referrals. Whether referred by current employees or referred by … maybe it’s coaches or professors that are referring in specifically the top students that are graduating or it’s realtor partners or builders or someone that says, “Hey, I vouch for this person.” That’s how we did it in the beginning and that’s how we’ve continued to do it. We’re just doing it at a very, I think, fairly quick pace. In September alone, we hired 34 people.
Adam Robinson:	Wow. What kind of infrastructure then are you carrying to be able to process the number of applicants and interviews to make that happen? 34 hires implies thousands of applications, but it sounds like you may be doing it a little bit differently.
Dan Snyder:	We use the traditional sources that many people would use like posting jobs on a LinkedIn or what have you, but we try to be more selective, so it’s more work on … We don’t … We might attend a career fair or attend an industry event, but rarely are we sifting through thousands of resumes to … We get thousands of resumes, we just don’t … We’re again, taking the approach first of share, hire, referral, who do we know, who do you know, we’re getting our organization to recruit good culture fits for us, which has been incredibly important as we grow.
	That’s one of my biggest fears is bringing on … We’re going to bring on bad apples once in a while, it’s inevitable with a growth company, but it’s how can you limit that as much as humanly possible, so we’re using our employees to help us spread the word and get people on board and then we have a very, very … I would say a best in class human resource training and integration team. It’s just … I don’t know. It’s good.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about that then. It sounds like … it’s core to the model being able to onboard this number of people effectively, get them trained and productive and in the field. Talk about that organization. When did you start building that? What was the catalyst and how do you manage it?
Dan Snyder:	I think, first, it’s overcoming what you don’t know. When we … for the company, one of the many things that I’m involved in is HR. I don’t have a … outside of running organizations, I don’t have an HR background, but I had an HR … human resource coordinator named Lauren who had worked for me for five years, but she didn’t really have deep HR experience, so I hire in a 25 year veteran and long story short, that veteran just didn’t operate at the same speed or the same authenticity as I was comfortable with or Lauren was.
	A year later, Lauren now runs … and she still today, four years in runs our human resources and she’s 28 years old, she does not have your traditional human resources background, but gosh, I would put her up against anybody, at any size company at her ability to onboard, the compliance, the legal aspect of it all and it’s done with a work ethic of a high speed, technology driven, hungry employee, not to say that that 25 year to 35 year veterans aren’t, but they aren’t from my experiences.
	From a human resource’s perspective … and one of the big game changers for us was realizing that most employees, I don’t care what industry it is, they fail within their first six months, so we created a, we call it an integration success team and their entire focus area is an employees first six months with Homeside across multi-functional areas and they are doing 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, 120 day touch bases.
	They don’t have a dog in the fight, so to speak, so they’re not the person’s direct boss. They’re not a manager of any kind. They’re not just a mentor either, they’ve got power behind them and they take it from after training, HR, onboarding, a couple day orientation and then bam, you are out in the field or you’re at corporate and you are doing your day-to-day, but you’ve got a success team helping you for the first six months.
Adam Robinson:	That sounds absolutely intentional structured and managed. That’s the secret to the success there, am I right?
Dan Snyder:	Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Robinson:	I guess said differently, it sounds like Lauren treats recruiting as a sales process, not as an administrative function and yes, that’s a theme I’ve heard and seen and experienced with the best run talent operations are run like sales organizations, not like paper processing teams.
Dan Snyder:	100%. We don’t rely on our HR department to do the recruiting and hiring. It’s not like a paper pushing, let’s sift through resumes. We rely on them to help us vet out candidates and help us make sure that we’re hiring the right way and we rely on our managers and we rely on our recruiters and we rely on our whole company to help spread Homeside and bring on good people. No jerks.
	We are constantly talking about it. We don’t want to just hire anybody. We have lots of people that are referred in that don’t get hired, but it’s much better if someone can vouch that you trust for a new hire coming on because as you know, there’s so many landmines out there and bad hires can just crush morale and crush the business.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s transition here to talk more philosophically about your approach. You’re a top 50 nationally recognized best place to work this year through Glassdoor. What do you think you’re doing that’s making Homeside Financial a top employer in the US?
Dan Snyder:	I’ve thought about this a lot. A couple thoughts. Number one, we go above and beyond to explain the why. It’s hard … we have sales contests and we have operations appreciation things and we’ve got a lot of cool stuff we give away, but we’re probably not the best at that. There’s a lot of other companies that spend more money in those areas than we do, but we do a lot of employee appreciation stuff, but we keep it real and explain the why and that takes a lot of work and confidence and I think that goes a long way because the way I look at it is, 50% of our employees are going to not agree with a decision that comes down. It’s just … maybe it’s 60/40, if we’re lucky, but 100% of people do not like just running blind without understanding why.
	It doesn’t have to be big philosophical, we’re going to … about disruption or the consumers, it can just simply be, this is why we don’t offer this product because it will … we lose money on it.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	Or, we can’t do … why didn’t we hire this person? Because we hired a better person, but at least the why, so you get … or why did this person leave the company? We just had one of our … he was only 25, but he was just being groomed for sales management and he recently left and it was kind of, whoa, everyone took a step back. We thought he was a lifer and so before he leaves, the senior vice president in charge of … he runs the sales for this division was really smart and he, with that why in mind, he brought this guy, grabbed every single employee at the time on Friday, instead of trying to hide it, he just brought everyone together and was like, “Hey, Mike’s leaving. I don’t want to be the one that you hear it from.” Mike was going to be … he’s in the mortgage business and his dream had always been to be a pilot and he’s going to go to pilot school, so it’s not like it’s something that we could control, but it’s explaining why things are happening.
	It’s tough. We don’t do it every single time just because of … there’s not enough time in the day, but we do as much as humanly possible to explain the why and I think it translates to our employee satisfaction and ratings.
Adam Robinson:	I couldn’t agree more. My experience here at Hireology and other places where I’ve been a leader manager is that if you do not give the details, your team will certainly fill in the details with whatever wild and fantastical stories they can come up with why your top producer just left and it’s not ’cause he wanted to go be a pilot. It’s typically because the business did something wrong or everybody should be scared. I don’t know if that’s been your take on it, but we’re full transparency because we know how creative our team can be if we’re not.
Dan Snyder:	Absolutely. That’s the … you can go too far on … More often than not, I’m having to encourage our department heads or our leadership to just explain the failure. Just do it. People will love you for it. You’re not … we’re all human, so if you mess up, just own the mess up. That’s fine. If you get a … we have in house developers, even I was naive to how hard it is to develop proprietary software.
	It’s just tough and they missed deadlines and we have … We were like, just own it, explain why you failed or why you didn’t hit the deadline and people will respect that. Don’t keep it all in a vacuum and people will have a conspiracy theory or they’ll think that we’ve ran out of money and we’re going out of business.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	It’s so true, but it’s all about the culture. The culture of trust and being comfortable just explaining the facts and not feeling like you’re going to get ridiculed. We work on that a lot.
Adam Robinson:	With the final few minutes that we have here, I want to ask you something very specific. There’s a word you’ve used in this program a couple of times and in my research on you and your company you’ve used in interviews with publications and that’s authenticity. It seems to be the centerpiece of everything you’re doing there as it relates to building the culture and the company. Talk about the role of authenticity and how that has helped you build the business and the culture.
Dan Snyder:	It goes back down to the why. Explaining the why and it goes back to fundamentally you want to be … One of my biggest fears is being … winning one of those awards, Best Place to Work and not really being the best place to work, where everyone rolls their eyes and says, “Oh gosh, how much did they pay for that one?”
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	It all comes down to just being yourself. I look at authenticity as the core foundation for integration, which I look at as integration of work and life is what we’re all seeking and that’s what we try to get our employees. We want them to have a good work-life balance. We want them to bring their kids by their place of work. We want them to feel comfortable at home responding to an email and not getting yelled at by their wife or husband and having the flexibility to truly lead an authentic life. We don’t want people to be … We want people to be themselves.
	If you would compare work and life, you look at your house and you look at the different rooms, if you were to tear down all the rooms, are you being the same person in different rooms of your home or are you being different? We want you to be the same at home, at work, to your customer, to your realtor partner, during an employee review and that’s not just from my chair, that’s down to our brand new hires.
	You’re just … We don’t want to do every single loan for every single customer, so if we somebody that’s maybe scraped with debt and this is a bad idea, maybe they should go rent a house for another year of so before they embark on the challenge to own a home. We don’t want just every sale. We don’t want just every employee and it’s hard to get that type of true motivation if you are fake, so that’s why the more authentic and integrated our company can act, regardless of the rate environment or the housing supply or what’s going on in the politics, I think Homeside will be fine.
Adam Robinson:	Final couple of questions here, what book are you reading right now or have you most recently read? Would you recommend it to our audience?
Dan Snyder:	Oh man, I’ve got three and a half year old twins and it has … my golf game has gone, I don’t have time for that. I feel like I have no time for reading anymore. Let’s see, the most recent books that are good. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, I thought was fantastic. His story.
Adam Robinson:	I agree. That may be one of the best CEO autobiographies I’ve ever read.
Dan Snyder:	I completely agree. It was actually interesting. I love the … one of the books I encourage all my employees to read is The 4-Hour Workweek, which seems ironic because it’s emphasizing not working very much, but it’s actually the counter because he, Tim Ferriss, explains so many good examples of how to work smarter and not harder that can be applied to everyday work life.
Adam Robinson:	Final question, taking us home here, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and report to us on whether or not you were successful in tackling the single biggest, people related opportunity that you have in front of you and your business today what would you be telling us?
Dan Snyder:	On a tactical level, we’re still … we’re trying to find the right balance for employee reviews and truly … we’ve got a professional advancement through Homeside, which is called Path and we’re really trying to make that from ground up to the top down to work to help develop our people so that they can step into future leadership positions, so I think that’s the number one thing.
	If I was to come back in a year and say, “What are you really proud of?” It would be and I’ll keep using this phrase, but making … truly creating an authentically, amazing review process for our people that gets them from where they are today to the next level and it’s so challenging because you’re … especially as we grow, especially because of the different levels of engagement from our management and engagement from our employees, so tackling that would be a great accomplishment.
Adam Robinson:	And that’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Dan Snyder, co-founder and managing partner of Homeside Financial. Dan, thanks for being with us on the show today.
Dan Snyder:	Thank you, Adam. Appreciate it.
Adam Robinson:	And that’s a wrap for this episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneur whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
	My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for listening, as always and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
	My name is Adam Robinson and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today, on the program, Dan Snyder is the co-founder and managing partner of Homeside Financial, a mortgage company founded in 2013 and based in Columbus, Ohio and Columbia, Maryland. Homeside is privately funded, has 442 employees and is named a Glassdoor Best Place to Work in 2017.
	We are so excited, Dan, to have you on the program and to learn from your experiences today. Welcome to the show.
Dan Snyder:	Thanks, Adam. Thanks for having us.
Adam Robinson:	We’re here today to focus on the people side of your business, but before we dive in, I’d like to set the stage for our listeners. Give us 30 seconds on Homeside Financial and what you do.
Dan Snyder:	Homeside is a mortgage bank, so we’re not a broker and we’re not a depository, so we lend our own money and our sole product is your home mortgage, so people … consumers specifically buying a home or refinancing their home.
	We started off 2013, like you said, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of the how we grew, but our main thing is the beautiful mortgage business, which has been torn to shreds in the media over the last … basically I started in it, so it’s been fun trying to repair and change the perception of what customers … how customers should really be treated.
Adam Robinson:	If listeners want to learn more, what’s the best why for them to do that?
Dan Snyder:	You can check us out at www.gohomeside.com.
Adam Robinson:	All right, very good. Let’s jump in and I see here from your profile that you spent your early career, really up to Homeside in the mortgage business, so tell us about your experience briefly that led to you saying, “This is a good idea. I’m going after this.”
Dan Snyder:	I can first share with you that I would say 100% of our nearly 500 employees now never dreamed of being in the mortgage business. Period. I don’t think that’s one of the career paths that as a seventh grader you write down on a piece of paper.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	Like many, I was out of college. I had everything engineered to become a lawyer. That’s really where I had my eyes set. After graduating a little bit early from undergrad, I ended up going to … I needed to make some money, so I worked at Wells Fargo. The big Wells Fargo beast and ended up getting promoted at a fairly age and liking it and it was … I realized that maybe mortgage … I could do it. It just … from there at Wells, I worked there for four years. Worked my way up and got a bit bureaucratic. Took over an opportunity to start a lending division for a small bank and started that. That was my true … my first foray into true mortgage lending and that was in January-February of 2007 right before the crash happened. I got the … it was both a blessing and a curse to try to build something when everything around you is going … literally falling and crumbling down and many of the people that I had started with then, are still with me today at Homeside.
Adam Robinson:	Wow. You launched in the middle of the meltdown and so … blessing in disguise. The listener’s know I have a similarly story in how I ended up in the recruiting business and Hireology.
	You started the business and the mortgage business is a people business. You are in the trust-building business. It’s a transactional business, but it’s not. Take us through … you mentioned early on your approach to treating people differently and the process, so tell me what did you see that you think better people practices could impact from a differentiation standpoint?
Dan Snyder:	My pervious experience prior to 2013 and co-founding Homeside was working at a bank and a bank you’ve got multiple … You’re serving multiple customers. You’re serving from a bank deposits, auto loans, credit cards, mortgage transactions, commercial, et cetera. Launching Homeside in 2013, late 2013, it was all about just serving the mortgage costumer. We feel like that’s a big enough trillion dollar industry that was in desperate need of some disruptions, so started in 2013 with the melody line of the … I guess, so to speak, our theme was going to be blending technology with a handshake, so not complete automation, not removing the human touch, but making the experience through technology better for the customer, easier for the customer, more just intuitive, combined with experts that will help guide you in arguably the largest transaction of your life.
Adam Robinson:	Translate that into how you staffed the early team there. You start with the idea … I guess a couple of questions. Were you always lending your own money, so to speak, as a bank? Did you transition to a bank and then how did that equation factor in for the people model that you built?
Dan Snyder:	Yeah, so we operate … where we’ve got our own funds and warehouse lines, funding mechanisms, in order to really control the whole process from origination to underwriting to funding and closing the loans that we are in control of the customer experience. Our team was folks that my … were interested in not just doing the same thing in the mortgage space or the banking space, but people that really, for lack of a better term, gave a shit.
	Today we have a huge, huge … very high give a shit factor. From my chair all the way down to the brand new people that come in and that’s helped. We started with a temporary space that had stained carpet and we’re recruiting in really talented people that have worked at higher-end places and saying, “Hey, hey. Come on, join us. I know that we don’t have the coolest space on earth and yeah, we’re not venture backed or we don’t have any sort of cool things to offer you. However, we feel confident that the customer … the mortgage customer has been neglected and we feel like we can assemble a great team and help change that reception,” and that’s really what we did.
	It was just people that … We built the team around that people that bought into that mission. Authentically bought in. It’s one thing to grandstand and have a big elevator pitch and another thing to have a terrible place to work or not listen to your people and we tried to avoid that and just … We’ve done it ever since.
Adam Robinson:	The vision then for the business is to focus on the customer experience and your recruiting strategy is to bring people with industry experience in who are willing to abandon the accoutrements of a big bank and focus on the customer. How do you make that focus on the customer real in the business in a way that delivers on that value propitiation to the folks you’re bringing in the door?
Dan Snyder:	It starts with listening to the customer and listening to your people. It sounds so easy, but as you’ve probably heard from a million people, it’s easier said than done just because folks like me would get maybe defensive or my partners or executives would get very defensive in how it’s been done in the past and it takes a lot of extra work to keep tearing things down that once were staples of the industry or staples of the process.
	What we did tactically was we said … First off it would have been easier for us to buy a bank, frankly, but then you’d be regulated by the OCC and large … it’s just a harder animal to be yourself in, so we’re a non-bank, strategically. That’s all we do is mortgages. I get the question all the time, “Why don’t you do commercial loans? Why don’t you do this?” What we do is hard enough and we have to do a good job at it.
	Then we build a team of experienced people that were looking for a different story to tell their customers or their realtor partners or builders and in addition we have a very robust training program for people without industry experience, so we do a lot of recruiting on campuses. We do a lot of recruiting at two to three year out of college or people with other experiences and then bring them in, train them from scratch and deploy them. We’ve had tremendous success doing that.
Adam Robinson:	Talk about the early days, then as you started to staff this team. What was your hiring process when you were getting off to a start in 2013?
Dan Snyder:	A lot of it hasn’t changed til today. We look at who do we know, first. A majority of our hiring has been done by referrals. Whether referred by current employees or referred by … maybe it’s coaches or professors that are referring in specifically the top students that are graduating or it’s realtor partners or builders or someone that says, “Hey, I vouch for this person.” That’s how we did it in the beginning and that’s how we’ve continued to do it. We’re just doing it at a very, I think, fairly quick pace. In September alone, we hired 34 people.
Adam Robinson:	Wow. What kind of infrastructure then are you carrying to be able to process the number of applicants and interviews to make that happen? 34 hires implies thousands of applications, but it sounds like you may be doing it a little bit differently.
Dan Snyder:	We use the traditional sources that many people would use like posting jobs on a LinkedIn or what have you, but we try to be more selective, so it’s more work on … We don’t … We might attend a career fair or attend an industry event, but rarely are we sifting through thousands of resumes to … We get thousands of resumes, we just don’t … We’re again, taking the approach first of share, hire, referral, who do we know, who do you know, we’re getting our organization to recruit good culture fits for us, which has been incredibly important as we grow.
	That’s one of my biggest fears is bringing on … We’re going to bring on bad apples once in a while, it’s inevitable with a growth company, but it’s how can you limit that as much as humanly possible, so we’re using our employees to help us spread the word and get people on board and then we have a very, very … I would say a best in class human resource training and integration team. It’s just … I don’t know. It’s good.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about that then. It sounds like … it’s core to the model being able to onboard this number of people effectively, get them trained and productive and in the field. Talk about that organization. When did you start building that? What was the catalyst and how do you manage it?
Dan Snyder:	I think, first, it’s overcoming what you don’t know. When we … for the company, one of the many things that I’m involved in is HR. I don’t have a … outside of running organizations, I don’t have an HR background, but I had an HR … human resource coordinator named Lauren who had worked for me for five years, but she didn’t really have deep HR experience, so I hire in a 25 year veteran and long story short, that veteran just didn’t operate at the same speed or the same authenticity as I was comfortable with or Lauren was.
	A year later, Lauren now runs … and she still today, four years in runs our human resources and she’s 28 years old, she does not have your traditional human resources background, but gosh, I would put her up against anybody, at any size company at her ability to onboard, the compliance, the legal aspect of it all and it’s done with a work ethic of a high speed, technology driven, hungry employee, not to say that that 25 year to 35 year veterans aren’t, but they aren’t from my experiences.
	From a human resource’s perspective … and one of the big game changers for us was realizing that most employees, I don’t care what industry it is, they fail within their first six months, so we created a, we call it an integration success team and their entire focus area is an employees first six months with Homeside across multi-functional areas and they are doing 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, 120 day touch bases.
	They don’t have a dog in the fight, so to speak, so they’re not the person’s direct boss. They’re not a manager of any kind. They’re not just a mentor either, they’ve got power behind them and they take it from after training, HR, onboarding, a couple day orientation and then bam, you are out in the field or you’re at corporate and you are doing your day-to-day, but you’ve got a success team helping you for the first six months.
Adam Robinson:	That sounds absolutely intentional structured and managed. That’s the secret to the success there, am I right?
Dan Snyder:	Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Robinson:	I guess said differently, it sounds like Lauren treats recruiting as a sales process, not as an administrative function and yes, that’s a theme I’ve heard and seen and experienced with the best run talent operations are run like sales organizations, not like paper processing teams.
Dan Snyder:	100%. We don’t rely on our HR department to do the recruiting and hiring. It’s not like a paper pushing, let’s sift through resumes. We rely on them to help us vet out candidates and help us make sure that we’re hiring the right way and we rely on our managers and we rely on our recruiters and we rely on our whole company to help spread Homeside and bring on good people. No jerks.
	We are constantly talking about it. We don’t want to just hire anybody. We have lots of people that are referred in that don’t get hired, but it’s much better if someone can vouch that you trust for a new hire coming on because as you know, there’s so many landmines out there and bad hires can just crush morale and crush the business.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s transition here to talk more philosophically about your approach. You’re a top 50 nationally recognized best place to work this year through Glassdoor. What do you think you’re doing that’s making Homeside Financial a top employer in the US?
Dan Snyder:	I’ve thought about this a lot. A couple thoughts. Number one, we go above and beyond to explain the why. It’s hard … we have sales contests and we have operations appreciation things and we’ve got a lot of cool stuff we give away, but we’re probably not the best at that. There’s a lot of other companies that spend more money in those areas than we do, but we do a lot of employee appreciation stuff, but we keep it real and explain the why and that takes a lot of work and confidence and I think that goes a long way because the way I look at it is, 50% of our employees are going to not agree with a decision that comes down. It’s just … maybe it’s 60/40, if we’re lucky, but 100% of people do not like just running blind without understanding why.
	It doesn’t have to be big philosophical, we’re going to … about disruption or the consumers, it can just simply be, this is why we don’t offer this product because it will … we lose money on it.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	Or, we can’t do … why didn’t we hire this person? Because we hired a better person, but at least the why, so you get … or why did this person leave the company? We just had one of our … he was only 25, but he was just being groomed for sales management and he recently left and it was kind of, whoa, everyone took a step back. We thought he was a lifer and so before he leaves, the senior vice president in charge of … he runs the sales for this division was really smart and he, with that why in mind, he brought this guy, grabbed every single employee at the time on Friday, instead of trying to hide it, he just brought everyone together and was like, “Hey, Mike’s leaving. I don’t want to be the one that you hear it from.” Mike was going to be … he’s in the mortgage business and his dream had always been to be a pilot and he’s going to go to pilot school, so it’s not like it’s something that we could control, but it’s explaining why things are happening.
	It’s tough. We don’t do it every single time just because of … there’s not enough time in the day, but we do as much as humanly possible to explain the why and I think it translates to our employee satisfaction and ratings.
Adam Robinson:	I couldn’t agree more. My experience here at Hireology and other places where I’ve been a leader manager is that if you do not give the details, your team will certainly fill in the details with whatever wild and fantastical stories they can come up with why your top producer just left and it’s not ’cause he wanted to go be a pilot. It’s typically because the business did something wrong or everybody should be scared. I don’t know if that’s been your take on it, but we’re full transparency because we know how creative our team can be if we’re not.
Dan Snyder:	Absolutely. That’s the … you can go too far on … More often than not, I’m having to encourage our department heads or our leadership to just explain the failure. Just do it. People will love you for it. You’re not … we’re all human, so if you mess up, just own the mess up. That’s fine. If you get a … we have in house developers, even I was naive to how hard it is to develop proprietary software.
	It’s just tough and they missed deadlines and we have … We were like, just own it, explain why you failed or why you didn’t hit the deadline and people will respect that. Don’t keep it all in a vacuum and people will have a conspiracy theory or they’ll think that we’ve ran out of money and we’re going out of business.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	It’s so true, but it’s all about the culture. The culture of trust and being comfortable just explaining the facts and not feeling like you’re going to get ridiculed. We work on that a lot.
Adam Robinson:	With the final few minutes that we have here, I want to ask you something very specific. There’s a word you’ve used in this program a couple of times and in my research on you and your company you’ve used in interviews with publications and that’s authenticity. It seems to be the centerpiece of everything you’re doing there as it relates to building the culture and the company. Talk about the role of authenticity and how that has helped you build the business and the culture.
Dan Snyder:	It goes back down to the why. Explaining the why and it goes back to fundamentally you want to be … One of my biggest fears is being … winning one of those awards, Best Place to Work and not really being the best place to work, where everyone rolls their eyes and says, “Oh gosh, how much did they pay for that one?”
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	It all comes down to just being yourself. I look at authenticity as the core foundation for integration, which I look at as integration of work and life is what we’re all seeking and that’s what we try to get our employees. We want them to have a good work-life balance. We want them to bring their kids by their place of work. We want them to feel comfortable at home responding to an email and not getting yelled at by their wife or husband and having the flexibility to truly lead an authentic life. We don’t want people to be … We want people to be themselves.
	If you would compare work and life, you look at your house and you look at the different rooms, if you were to tear down all the rooms, are you being the same person in different rooms of your home or are you being different? We want you to be the same at home, at work, to your customer, to your realtor partner, during an employee review and that’s not just from my chair, that’s down to our brand new hires.
	You’re just … We don’t want to do every single loan for every single customer, so if we somebody that’s maybe scraped with debt and this is a bad idea, maybe they should go rent a house for another year of so before they embark on the challenge to own a home. We don’t want just every sale. We don’t want just every employee and it’s hard to get that type of true motivation if you are fake, so that’s why the more authentic and integrated our company can act, regardless of the rate environment or the housing supply or what’s going on in the politics, I think Homeside will be fine.
Adam Robinson:	Final couple of questions here, what book are you reading right now or have you most recently read? Would you recommend it to our audience?
Dan Snyder:	Oh man, I’ve got three and a half year old twins and it has … my golf game has gone, I don’t have time for that. I feel like I have no time for reading anymore. Let’s see, the most recent books that are good. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, I thought was fantastic. His story.
Adam Robinson:	I agree. That may be one of the best CEO autobiographies I’ve ever read.
Dan Snyder:	I completely agree. It was actually interesting. I love the … one of the books I encourage all my employees to read is The 4-Hour Workweek, which seems ironic because it’s emphasizing not working very much, but it’s actually the counter because he, Tim Ferriss, explains so many good examples of how to work smarter and not harder that can be applied to everyday work life.
Adam Robinson:	Final question, taking us home here, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and report to us on whether or not you were successful in tackling the single biggest, people related opportunity that you have in front of you and your business today what would you be telling us?
Dan Snyder:	On a tactical level, we’re still … we’re trying to find the right balance for employee reviews and truly … we’ve got a professional advancement through Homeside, which is called Path and we’re really trying to make that from ground up to the top down to work to help develop our people so that they can step into future leadership positions, so I think that’s the number one thing.
	If I was to come back in a year and say, “What are you really proud of?” It would be and I’ll keep using this phrase, but making … truly creating an authentically, amazing review process for our people that gets them from where they are today to the next level and it’s so challenging because you’re … especially as we grow, especially because of the different levels of engagement from our management and engagement from our employees, so tackling that would be a great accomplishment.
Adam Robinson:	And that’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Dan Snyder, co-founder and managing partner of Homeside Financial. Dan, thanks for being with us on the show today.
Dan Snyder:	Thank you, Adam. Appreciate it.
Adam Robinson:	And that’s a wrap for this episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneur whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
	My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for listening, as always and we will see you next week.

Adam Robinson:	Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
	My name is Adam Robinson and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today, on the program, Dan Snyder is the co-founder and managing partner of Homeside Financial, a mortgage company founded in 2013 and based in Columbus, Ohio and Columbia, Maryland. Homeside is privately funded, has 442 employees and is named a Glassdoor Best Place to Work in 2017.
	We are so excited, Dan, to have you on the program and to learn from your experiences today. Welcome to the show.
Dan Snyder:	Thanks, Adam. Thanks for having us.
Adam Robinson:	We’re here today to focus on the people side of your business, but before we dive in, I’d like to set the stage for our listeners. Give us 30 seconds on Homeside Financial and what you do.
Dan Snyder:	Homeside is a mortgage bank, so we’re not a broker and we’re not a depository, so we lend our own money and our sole product is your home mortgage, so people … consumers specifically buying a home or refinancing their home.
	We started off 2013, like you said, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of the how we grew, but our main thing is the beautiful mortgage business, which has been torn to shreds in the media over the last … basically I started in it, so it’s been fun trying to repair and change the perception of what customers … how customers should really be treated.
Adam Robinson:	If listeners want to learn more, what’s the best why for them to do that?
Dan Snyder:	You can check us out at www.gohomeside.com.
Adam Robinson:	All right, very good. Let’s jump in and I see here from your profile that you spent your early career, really up to Homeside in the mortgage business, so tell us about your experience briefly that led to you saying, “This is a good idea. I’m going after this.”
Dan Snyder:	I can first share with you that I would say 100% of our nearly 500 employees now never dreamed of being in the mortgage business. Period. I don’t think that’s one of the career paths that as a seventh grader you write down on a piece of paper.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	Like many, I was out of college. I had everything engineered to become a lawyer. That’s really where I had my eyes set. After graduating a little bit early from undergrad, I ended up going to … I needed to make some money, so I worked at Wells Fargo. The big Wells Fargo beast and ended up getting promoted at a fairly age and liking it and it was … I realized that maybe mortgage … I could do it. It just … from there at Wells, I worked there for four years. Worked my way up and got a bit bureaucratic. Took over an opportunity to start a lending division for a small bank and started that. That was my true … my first foray into true mortgage lending and that was in January-February of 2007 right before the crash happened. I got the … it was both a blessing and a curse to try to build something when everything around you is going … literally falling and crumbling down and many of the people that I had started with then, are still with me today at Homeside.
Adam Robinson:	Wow. You launched in the middle of the meltdown and so … blessing in disguise. The listener’s know I have a similarly story in how I ended up in the recruiting business and Hireology.
	You started the business and the mortgage business is a people business. You are in the trust-building business. It’s a transactional business, but it’s not. Take us through … you mentioned early on your approach to treating people differently and the process, so tell me what did you see that you think better people practices could impact from a differentiation standpoint?
Dan Snyder:	My pervious experience prior to 2013 and co-founding Homeside was working at a bank and a bank you’ve got multiple … You’re serving multiple customers. You’re serving from a bank deposits, auto loans, credit cards, mortgage transactions, commercial, et cetera. Launching Homeside in 2013, late 2013, it was all about just serving the mortgage costumer. We feel like that’s a big enough trillion dollar industry that was in desperate need of some disruptions, so started in 2013 with the melody line of the … I guess, so to speak, our theme was going to be blending technology with a handshake, so not complete automation, not removing the human touch, but making the experience through technology better for the customer, easier for the customer, more just intuitive, combined with experts that will help guide you in arguably the largest transaction of your life.
Adam Robinson:	Translate that into how you staffed the early team there. You start with the idea … I guess a couple of questions. Were you always lending your own money, so to speak, as a bank? Did you transition to a bank and then how did that equation factor in for the people model that you built?
Dan Snyder:	Yeah, so we operate … where we’ve got our own funds and warehouse lines, funding mechanisms, in order to really control the whole process from origination to underwriting to funding and closing the loans that we are in control of the customer experience. Our team was folks that my … were interested in not just doing the same thing in the mortgage space or the banking space, but people that really, for lack of a better term, gave a shit.
	Today we have a huge, huge … very high give a shit factor. From my chair all the way down to the brand new people that come in and that’s helped. We started with a temporary space that had stained carpet and we’re recruiting in really talented people that have worked at higher-end places and saying, “Hey, hey. Come on, join us. I know that we don’t have the coolest space on earth and yeah, we’re not venture backed or we don’t have any sort of cool things to offer you. However, we feel confident that the customer … the mortgage customer has been neglected and we feel like we can assemble a great team and help change that reception,” and that’s really what we did.
	It was just people that … We built the team around that people that bought into that mission. Authentically bought in. It’s one thing to grandstand and have a big elevator pitch and another thing to have a terrible place to work or not listen to your people and we tried to avoid that and just … We’ve done it ever since.
Adam Robinson:	The vision then for the business is to focus on the customer experience and your recruiting strategy is to bring people with industry experience in who are willing to abandon the accoutrements of a big bank and focus on the customer. How do you make that focus on the customer real in the business in a way that delivers on that value propitiation to the folks you’re bringing in the door?
Dan Snyder:	It starts with listening to the customer and listening to your people. It sounds so easy, but as you’ve probably heard from a million people, it’s easier said than done just because folks like me would get maybe defensive or my partners or executives would get very defensive in how it’s been done in the past and it takes a lot of extra work to keep tearing things down that once were staples of the industry or staples of the process.
	What we did tactically was we said … First off it would have been easier for us to buy a bank, frankly, but then you’d be regulated by the OCC and large … it’s just a harder animal to be yourself in, so we’re a non-bank, strategically. That’s all we do is mortgages. I get the question all the time, “Why don’t you do commercial loans? Why don’t you do this?” What we do is hard enough and we have to do a good job at it.
	Then we build a team of experienced people that were looking for a different story to tell their customers or their realtor partners or builders and in addition we have a very robust training program for people without industry experience, so we do a lot of recruiting on campuses. We do a lot of recruiting at two to three year out of college or people with other experiences and then bring them in, train them from scratch and deploy them. We’ve had tremendous success doing that.
Adam Robinson:	Talk about the early days, then as you started to staff this team. What was your hiring process when you were getting off to a start in 2013?
Dan Snyder:	A lot of it hasn’t changed til today. We look at who do we know, first. A majority of our hiring has been done by referrals. Whether referred by current employees or referred by … maybe it’s coaches or professors that are referring in specifically the top students that are graduating or it’s realtor partners or builders or someone that says, “Hey, I vouch for this person.” That’s how we did it in the beginning and that’s how we’ve continued to do it. We’re just doing it at a very, I think, fairly quick pace. In September alone, we hired 34 people.
Adam Robinson:	Wow. What kind of infrastructure then are you carrying to be able to process the number of applicants and interviews to make that happen? 34 hires implies thousands of applications, but it sounds like you may be doing it a little bit differently.
Dan Snyder:	We use the traditional sources that many people would use like posting jobs on a LinkedIn or what have you, but we try to be more selective, so it’s more work on … We don’t … We might attend a career fair or attend an industry event, but rarely are we sifting through thousands of resumes to … We get thousands of resumes, we just don’t … We’re again, taking the approach first of share, hire, referral, who do we know, who do you know, we’re getting our organization to recruit good culture fits for us, which has been incredibly important as we grow.
	That’s one of my biggest fears is bringing on … We’re going to bring on bad apples once in a while, it’s inevitable with a growth company, but it’s how can you limit that as much as humanly possible, so we’re using our employees to help us spread the word and get people on board and then we have a very, very … I would say a best in class human resource training and integration team. It’s just … I don’t know. It’s good.
Adam Robinson:	Let’s talk about that then. It sounds like … it’s core to the model being able to onboard this number of people effectively, get them trained and productive and in the field. Talk about that organization. When did you start building that? What was the catalyst and how do you manage it?
Dan Snyder:	I think, first, it’s overcoming what you don’t know. When we … for the company, one of the many things that I’m involved in is HR. I don’t have a … outside of running organizations, I don’t have an HR background, but I had an HR … human resource coordinator named Lauren who had worked for me for five years, but she didn’t really have deep HR experience, so I hire in a 25 year veteran and long story short, that veteran just didn’t operate at the same speed or the same authenticity as I was comfortable with or Lauren was.
	A year later, Lauren now runs … and she still today, four years in runs our human resources and she’s 28 years old, she does not have your traditional human resources background, but gosh, I would put her up against anybody, at any size company at her ability to onboard, the compliance, the legal aspect of it all and it’s done with a work ethic of a high speed, technology driven, hungry employee, not to say that that 25 year to 35 year veterans aren’t, but they aren’t from my experiences.
	From a human resource’s perspective … and one of the big game changers for us was realizing that most employees, I don’t care what industry it is, they fail within their first six months, so we created a, we call it an integration success team and their entire focus area is an employees first six months with Homeside across multi-functional areas and they are doing 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, 120 day touch bases.
	They don’t have a dog in the fight, so to speak, so they’re not the person’s direct boss. They’re not a manager of any kind. They’re not just a mentor either, they’ve got power behind them and they take it from after training, HR, onboarding, a couple day orientation and then bam, you are out in the field or you’re at corporate and you are doing your day-to-day, but you’ve got a success team helping you for the first six months.
Adam Robinson:	That sounds absolutely intentional structured and managed. That’s the secret to the success there, am I right?
Dan Snyder:	Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Robinson:	I guess said differently, it sounds like Lauren treats recruiting as a sales process, not as an administrative function and yes, that’s a theme I’ve heard and seen and experienced with the best run talent operations are run like sales organizations, not like paper processing teams.
Dan Snyder:	100%. We don’t rely on our HR department to do the recruiting and hiring. It’s not like a paper pushing, let’s sift through resumes. We rely on them to help us vet out candidates and help us make sure that we’re hiring the right way and we rely on our managers and we rely on our recruiters and we rely on our whole company to help spread Homeside and bring on good people. No jerks.
	We are constantly talking about it. We don’t want to just hire anybody. We have lots of people that are referred in that don’t get hired, but it’s much better if someone can vouch that you trust for a new hire coming on because as you know, there’s so many landmines out there and bad hires can just crush morale and crush the business.
Adam Robinson:	Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s transition here to talk more philosophically about your approach. You’re a top 50 nationally recognized best place to work this year through Glassdoor. What do you think you’re doing that’s making Homeside Financial a top employer in the US?
Dan Snyder:	I’ve thought about this a lot. A couple thoughts. Number one, we go above and beyond to explain the why. It’s hard … we have sales contests and we have operations appreciation things and we’ve got a lot of cool stuff we give away, but we’re probably not the best at that. There’s a lot of other companies that spend more money in those areas than we do, but we do a lot of employee appreciation stuff, but we keep it real and explain the why and that takes a lot of work and confidence and I think that goes a long way because the way I look at it is, 50% of our employees are going to not agree with a decision that comes down. It’s just … maybe it’s 60/40, if we’re lucky, but 100% of people do not like just running blind without understanding why.
	It doesn’t have to be big philosophical, we’re going to … about disruption or the consumers, it can just simply be, this is why we don’t offer this product because it will … we lose money on it.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	Or, we can’t do … why didn’t we hire this person? Because we hired a better person, but at least the why, so you get … or why did this person leave the company? We just had one of our … he was only 25, but he was just being groomed for sales management and he recently left and it was kind of, whoa, everyone took a step back. We thought he was a lifer and so before he leaves, the senior vice president in charge of … he runs the sales for this division was really smart and he, with that why in mind, he brought this guy, grabbed every single employee at the time on Friday, instead of trying to hide it, he just brought everyone together and was like, “Hey, Mike’s leaving. I don’t want to be the one that you hear it from.” Mike was going to be … he’s in the mortgage business and his dream had always been to be a pilot and he’s going to go to pilot school, so it’s not like it’s something that we could control, but it’s explaining why things are happening.
	It’s tough. We don’t do it every single time just because of … there’s not enough time in the day, but we do as much as humanly possible to explain the why and I think it translates to our employee satisfaction and ratings.
Adam Robinson:	I couldn’t agree more. My experience here at Hireology and other places where I’ve been a leader manager is that if you do not give the details, your team will certainly fill in the details with whatever wild and fantastical stories they can come up with why your top producer just left and it’s not ’cause he wanted to go be a pilot. It’s typically because the business did something wrong or everybody should be scared. I don’t know if that’s been your take on it, but we’re full transparency because we know how creative our team can be if we’re not.
Dan Snyder:	Absolutely. That’s the … you can go too far on … More often than not, I’m having to encourage our department heads or our leadership to just explain the failure. Just do it. People will love you for it. You’re not … we’re all human, so if you mess up, just own the mess up. That’s fine. If you get a … we have in house developers, even I was naive to how hard it is to develop proprietary software.
	It’s just tough and they missed deadlines and we have … We were like, just own it, explain why you failed or why you didn’t hit the deadline and people will respect that. Don’t keep it all in a vacuum and people will have a conspiracy theory or they’ll think that we’ve ran out of money and we’re going out of business.
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	It’s so true, but it’s all about the culture. The culture of trust and being comfortable just explaining the facts and not feeling like you’re going to get ridiculed. We work on that a lot.
Adam Robinson:	With the final few minutes that we have here, I want to ask you something very specific. There’s a word you’ve used in this program a couple of times and in my research on you and your company you’ve used in interviews with publications and that’s authenticity. It seems to be the centerpiece of everything you’re doing there as it relates to building the culture and the company. Talk about the role of authenticity and how that has helped you build the business and the culture.
Dan Snyder:	It goes back down to the why. Explaining the why and it goes back to fundamentally you want to be … One of my biggest fears is being … winning one of those awards, Best Place to Work and not really being the best place to work, where everyone rolls their eyes and says, “Oh gosh, how much did they pay for that one?”
Adam Robinson:	Right.
Dan Snyder:	It all comes down to just being yourself. I look at authenticity as the core foundation for integration, which I look at as integration of work and life is what we’re all seeking and that’s what we try to get our employees. We want them to have a good work-life balance. We want them to bring their kids by their place of work. We want them to feel comfortable at home responding to an email and not getting yelled at by their wife or husband and having the flexibility to truly lead an authentic life. We don’t want people to be … We want people to be themselves.
	If you would compare work and life, you look at your house and you look at the different rooms, if you were to tear down all the rooms, are you being the same person in different rooms of your home or are you being different? We want you to be the same at home, at work, to your customer, to your realtor partner, during an employee review and that’s not just from my chair, that’s down to our brand new hires.
	You’re just … We don’t want to do every single loan for every single customer, so if we somebody that’s maybe scraped with debt and this is a bad idea, maybe they should go rent a house for another year of so before they embark on the challenge to own a home. We don’t want just every sale. We don’t want just every employee and it’s hard to get that type of true motivation if you are fake, so that’s why the more authentic and integrated our company can act, regardless of the rate environment or the housing supply or what’s going on in the politics, I think Homeside will be fine.
Adam Robinson:	Final couple of questions here, what book are you reading right now or have you most recently read? Would you recommend it to our audience?
Dan Snyder:	Oh man, I’ve got three and a half year old twins and it has … my golf game has gone, I don’t have time for that. I feel like I have no time for reading anymore. Let’s see, the most recent books that are good. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, I thought was fantastic. His story.
Adam Robinson:	I agree. That may be one of the best CEO autobiographies I’ve ever read.
Dan Snyder:	I completely agree. It was actually interesting. I love the … one of the books I encourage all my employees to read is The 4-Hour Workweek, which seems ironic because it’s emphasizing not working very much, but it’s actually the counter because he, Tim Ferriss, explains so many good examples of how to work smarter and not harder that can be applied to everyday work life.
Adam Robinson:	Final question, taking us home here, if you were to come back on this show a year from now and report to us on whether or not you were successful in tackling the single biggest, people related opportunity that you have in front of you and your business today what would you be telling us?
Dan Snyder:	On a tactical level, we’re still … we’re trying to find the right balance for employee reviews and truly … we’ve got a professional advancement through Homeside, which is called Path and we’re really trying to make that from ground up to the top down to work to help develop our people so that they can step into future leadership positions, so I think that’s the number one thing.
	If I was to come back in a year and say, “What are you really proud of?” It would be and I’ll keep using this phrase, but making … truly creating an authentically, amazing review process for our people that gets them from where they are today to the next level and it’s so challenging because you’re … especially as we grow, especially because of the different levels of engagement from our management and engagement from our employees, so tackling that would be a great accomplishment.
Adam Robinson:	And that’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Dan Snyder, co-founder and managing partner of Homeside Financial. Dan, thanks for being with us on the show today.
Dan Snyder:	Thank you, Adam. Appreciate it.
Adam Robinson:	And that’s a wrap for this episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneur whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
	My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for listening, as always and we will see you next week.