“I finally got a call from Regions Bank based in Birmingham, Alabama,” Fain said. “I didn’t know anything about banking, finance, sales or anything like that. But I needed to pay my bills, right?”
Landing at a call center
The work environs weren’t ideal, but a far cry from the corrosion – both economic and environmental – he had witnessed in Pensacola. “It ended up being in a call center, which is 100% not what I was looking for,” Fain said. “But I learned how to sell and talk to people with that job. The goal there – and it was kind of an unwritten rule – was to get the client on and off the phone in five minutes and sell them something.”
He was later recruited by Wachovia, before it was bought out by Wells Fargo back in familiar Pensacola territory. “I was a banker at Wells Fargo for about a year and then the mortgage department approached me and said ‘Hey, man, you’re putting up some strong sales numbers as a banker. What would you think about doing this?’ I had watched other loan officers who serviced our branch and they almost seemed self-employed. That’s the kind of freedom I was looking for. That to me seemed like a natural fit.”
He would cut his teeth on refinances before moving on to purchase deals. While there, he took about a month printing out all the Wells Fargo mortgages he could find among public records in a tri-county region, cross-reference each one against the bank’s system to identify potential refi opportunities, and started cold-calling clients.
Aside from his work experience, he recalled gaining early insight into the mortgage industry when buying his own home barely a year out of college. “It seemed kind of chaotic, but something I could see myself teaching others how to do. I come from a family of educators, so I tend to lean in on educating clients, give them all their options, and show them how we could possibly manipulate some numbers so they can really understand what they’re doing.”
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