Looking for Friends in all the Right Places
It’s amazing what you can find when you start opening your eyes to more than what you THINK you should see. It’s true in business, certainly, as this journey can attest as it has transformed from a means to an end to the end itself. It’s also true in the people you meet along the way.
That’s why it was so fitting that outside the offices of Rod Cameron, upon an unremarkable window ledge, sat this strange pairing of a small stuffed dog nuzzling with a ceramic cat. No explination. Just a random sighting that served no other purpose than to stop me for a moment and make me smile.
But it also put me in the right frame of mind to see beyond what I had thought was in front of me as I knocked on the doors of Cameron Financial. I came to the Golden, CO finance company on a referral from a friend who thought I would enjoy meeting with the company’s owner, Rod Cameron. After all, part of this whole “business building” thing (and a big part, at that) is stretching yourself to meet as many people as possible. Tell them your story, who you are, what you are trying to accomplish, and how they can help. Most people actually want to help.
It is an added bonus when you have the opportunity to meet someone who is referred by a friend and also happens to be a local leader in an industry that you happen to have a good deal of experience. Rod Cameron is just such an opportunity, and it was in seeing him as more than a friend’s referral that that became clear. A well-seasoned financial pro, with years of experience on the corporate side as an in-house controller, for the past eight years he’s run his own mortgage company.
And he knows his stuff.
Current president of the Colorado Association of Mortgage Brokers (CAMB) and active member of various small business and entrepreneurial groups, Cameron has particular interest in utilizing new technology to further consumer education in the mortgage space. He recognizes that a lot of folks got burned in the past few years, but feels the mortgage broker has been blamed for too much of that.
“The mortgage backed securities continued to be over valued,” Cameron explained, “which lead to a lot of people getting into loans that they probably shouldn’t have because the belief was the economy would somehow grow forever.”
Education, not regulation, he believes, is central to avoiding a future crisis. Instead of just talking about it, however, Cameron is actively doing something about it.
In Colorado, he’s worked to build an educational outreach component where the CAMB holds consumer events that aim to teach everything from understanding credit, to learning how to navigate the different loan options out there. Even things as simple as clarifying very well-known programs.
The “first time home buyer” program, for example.
“It’s a misnomer,” Cameron explained. “It’s available to anyone who hasn’t owned a home in the past three years.”
I was particularly interested in speaking with Cameron because I have a good deal of experience in the mortgage space. Having lead PR for MILA, at the time one of the largest online wholesale mortgage lenders in the country, I understand the unique challenges of translating “mortgage speak” into “people speak.” I also am keenly aware of how to utilize new tools to get out educational messages.
At MILA, we launched an early podcast program dedicated to uncovering topics that were of-interest to the company’s broker audience. This was way back when you could just post whatever you wanted on iTunes. And we did. We had a full MILA page, with comments and subscription information, all available on iTunes. It was successful because it launched a dialogue with MILA’s target audience, which is really what social media is uniquely able to do. Beyond just pushing out a message, the new tools can launch conversations that engage audiences and allow a company or organization to better meet their needs. We won a national award for that podcast program and I’m confident that had the industry not gone the way it did, we could have built it even bigger.
But nothing is ever done in vain. In talking with Cameron, there might be some ways for us to introduce some of these proven tools as well as some new ones into the framework of teaching consumers more about the mortgage process. Empowering people to make smart choices is just good business sense. For the mortgage pros who are looking for ways to regain credibility, and for the PR pros who are looking for ways to show how to grab onto some of the latest tools to achieve those goals.
Who knows what will come of our meeting. But the potential is there for us both to build our business while at the same time doing a service to the community in reaching out to consumers with usable, informative and entertaining information about the housing market.
Honestly, I’m OK with any and all of the above.
