Episode 283 - Stories of the Movement: The 2008 Turnaround

Why would an entrepreneur start a Mortgage company in the midst of the housing crisis?

In this new segment called “Stories of the Movement,” we take a narratively compelling, high-production look at the work of Faith Driven Entrepreneurs living out their call to create.

The goal is to unite the movement through stories because every Faith Driven Entrepreneur, no matter what industry or what community, focuses their attention on solving problems in the world.

The details may differ, but the plot stays the same. We’re all part of God’s story.

He’s using each of us to bring hope, redemption, and light to a dark world for the glory of God and the good of others.

This episode highlights what God is doing through Casey Crawford and the team at Movement Mortgage.

But you’ll be able to see yourself in their story, too. It might inspire, equip, and challenge you as you pursue your call to create.

If you like this episode, be sure to follow, rate, and share the show.

For more on Casey Crawford and Movement Mortgage check out these links:

All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.

Episode Transcript

Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.

Joseph Honescko: Picture yourself on a hiking trip. You turn a corner and all of a sudden you're standing before a large, plummeting hill. It's not a cliff or even a massive drop, just a steep decline. And you know, it's your only way down. So you start to cautiously make your way through it. With every step, you can feel the dirt under you start to slip. You lose balance a little bit, but catch yourself on a branch. You keep moving, sidestepping little by little. And then it happens. You slip. Start sliding. Excepting that the only way down is through. Now imagine in the midst of that downward slide in a plummeting environment, you decide to open a mortgage business. The 2008 housing crisis was a lot like that plummeting hill. Prices dropped aggressively for an extended period of time known as the Great Recession.

Casey Crawford: And that Great Recession echoed around the world. But it centered around the US banking system and more particularly, the U.S. mortgage market.

Joseph Honescko: That's Casey Crawford, co-founder and CEO of Movement Mortgage, a company he founded in the midst of the plummet.

Casey Crawford: Yeah, at that time, incredible amounts of greed and deceit took place where mortgages were created that had very little chance of ever being paid consistently over time.

Joseph Honescko: As many of us know, this led to a time of chaos, confusion and economic instability.

Casey Crawford: It almost shattered and broke the entire world banking system.

Joseph Honescko: While the economic effects rippled throughout the whole world. The housing crisis also brought new social challenges. It didn't just break the economy, it broke people. Families lost homes. They lost jobs. And they lost a great deal of trust in an institution that was supposed to help them.

Casey Crawford: We began to mistrust the very banks that held our money.

Joseph Honescko: That's the opportunity Casey saw.

Casey Crawford: To step back into banking and tell a new and better story, where banks became known for how we love and serve communities, not for breaking trust and robbing that fundamental relationship between borrowers and their banks.

Joseph Honescko: For Casey, this was a chance for a business to empower a community and make a difference in the world. The story of Movement Mortgage is the story of the entire faith driven movement. The story of every faith driven entrepreneur who responds to their call to create. You may be meeting different needs, but all of us are united in our pursuit to make the world better for the glory of God. We all want to see heaven meet earth. You're listening to faith driven entrepreneur stories of the movement. Let's dive in.

Speaker 3: So, Casey hired me in oh seven. I really sort of figured he was going to be a once in a blue moon client. I was wrong.

Joseph Honescko: This is Aimee Dodson.

Aimee Dodson: A I M E E with [...].

Joseph Honescko: Aimee is the national director of affiliate Relationships, a title she says her husband thinks she made up. But she has been with the team since the beginning, originally taking them on as a client for what she calls her CFO to go business in Charlotte, North Carolina, where movement is based and her early impressions of Casey didn't go as you might expect.

Aimee Dodson: I really sort of thought he was crazy because at that time, the other mortgage clients that I had were in panic mode, starting to dismantle the business. The writing was on the wall for the industry. So the idea of starting a mortgage company at that moment in time felt insane.

Joseph Honescko: The thing is, Casey and his co-founder Toby understood the harsh reality of the industry. They also thought it was insane. They knew the risks going into it.

Toby Harris: What if you woke up tomorrow and there was no internet?

Joseph Honescko: That's Toby.

Toby Harris: Or what if it was a week and you could have lost it at any time? Our financial system was so stressed. That. The very core of how people operated was being questioned.

Joseph Honescko: Business owners were scrambling, wondering, where do I put my money? I'm only insured for X amount or this amount or whatever it was. And so they started putting their money in different banks, hoping that they could do something to get some of it back.

Toby Harris: There was so much fear because nobody had lived through a financial crisis like that.

Joseph Honescko: And let's not forget that this crisis affected real human beings. This wasn't something that was far removed from regular people. This was something that touched everyone.

Toby Harris: There was so many people losing their homes, they would come knock on your door and say, you know, you [....] and so long and we told you were foreclosed. If you will be out by this weekend, we'll give you $1000 or $2000. And I went in many of the homes after people had moved out and the child's toys were there. A lot of their clothes were there, their lives, what's left in there? Maybe photos and stuff. They literally got in their car and drove away. It was that bad.

Joseph Honescko: So Casey and Toby saw the effects of greed, of unchecked ambition and arrogance. They saw how people's lives were changed forever. And like all faith driven entrepreneurs, they wanted to use their giftings to do something good. All they needed was a gap in the market they could fill. So they found one.

Toby Harris: Some of the biggest players in the mortgage business were banks.

Casey Crawford: Banks at that time. We're having a really hard time giving even the most qualified Americans a home mortgage.

Toby Harris: They were the 800 pound. They had the financing. They had all the stuff. They had owned the mortgage business for so long, and they had this system of processing once that was just so low. And, the banks were taking 60 to 90 days to do the simplest. Long.

Joseph Honescko: This is where Toby and Casey saw that they could make a difference for the economy and for the people affected by the downturn.

Casey Crawford: Homeownership has always been really central to, the American dream. And so we saw an opportunity to step in and help Americans access the federal credit subsidies that are offered in the U.S. mortgage market and do it more efficiently than the big banks were doing, because they were still reeling from this incredible meltdown that had happened a couple years earlier.

Joseph Honescko: Even Aimee, despite her early skepticism, was struck by Cassie's leadership and passion to see this dream realized.

Aimee Dodson: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, he was pretty transparent that this was a new endeavor for him. But, you know, he had cast such a beautiful vision about what he wanted to create, that I was curious and excited to see what was going to happen.

Joseph Honescko: Casey's vision was clear from the very first meeting she had with him.

Aimee Dodson: I remember he said three things. He said he wanted to, create a financial services company that treated every borrower like his little sister. And then the second thing he said, as he wanted to build a company with people that he loved doing life with and that he felt a strong bond and connection with. And I think that resonates to anyone. Right. You want to do life with people you care about? And then the third thing he said was he wanted to give his profit away. And I, I might have laughed out loud at him, to be honest, because it's really easy to talk about how generous you're going to be with money you don't have yet. Right? But he was so honest about it. And man, I love what I heard. I thought he was probably crazy. I thought he probably was out over his skis, but I wanted to see what was going to happen.

Joseph Honescko: So she jumped in with Toby and Casey, and they rounded up the team with few others around. This very clear mission to love and value people. That clarity on mission and vision empowered them all to take a leap, and they were amazed at the unique ways God moved almost immediately.

Aimee Dodson: That very first year, we did a whopping $36 million worth of loans, which, you know, we were really proud of ourselves. Every single bit of that business was hard earned, right? Like nothing came easy, but it had a huge sense of satisfaction each step of the way.

Joseph Honescko: For Toby, the huge sense of satisfaction came not just in the good work they were doing, but in the way that God miraculously showed himself through the business every day.

Toby Harris: Everybody knows the story of Noah and the Ark, and he gave you 100 years. That's not what he gave us. He let us start building the ark. After it started raining, we had every day. Every day was a miracle.

Aimee Dodson: You know, I look back now considering we did 33 billion last year. To think that we were so excited about our first 36 million. Yeah, it's wild, but it was really fun. It was a challenge and we were doing exactly what he said.

Joseph Honescko: So you might be wondering what exactly did they do? What was their secret that allowed them to innovate in a time when everybody else in the industry was in this massive downturn? Well, like we said, the banks were taking a long time to process loans and then some new legislation came out that made it even more complicated for these large institutions to meet the needs of the people they were supposed to serve.

Casey Crawford: Yeah. So this is a little bit of inside baseball in the mortgage business, but a statute called Dodd-Frank came out. And what that did, it really tried to prevent a relapse of what happened during the 07-08 mortgage collapse.

Joseph Honescko: The good news is that these rules and regulations did help protect consumers from predatory lending practices. But those same rules and regulations made it really difficult for the big banks to navigate. And that's where movement saw the opportunity.

Casey Crawford: We stepped in and said, we are going to process every single loan that comes in in seven business days and give consumers many weeks and months of peace of mind, knowing that their loan is fully approved and fully processed before they have to go buy a house.

Joseph Honescko: The fact that they were new, the fact that they were a small company, actually gave them an advantage.

Casey Crawford: Banks were just having a really hard time reorganizing themselves with all these new processes and changes, and we were small and nimble enough to make those changes without too much trouble.

Joseph Honescko: Customers appreciated how quickly the team worked, and slowly but surely Movement Mortgage was creating trust. It was healing, a fractured relationship between the borrower and the bank and people were starting to notice.

Aimee Dodson: You know, we were treating every borrower and transaction as the most important transaction of the day, and it was a lot of fun.

Joseph Honescko: So they had the strong processes, the strong business. They had the big vision to care for their people and their communities and all that ultimately led to a very successful business.

Casey Crawford: That process and that commitment to excellence actually led to an exponential market share gain and growth over the next ten years, where we grew from about five employees to 5000.

Joseph Honescko: Growth brought new opportunities with it, but it also brought new challenges. As any entrepreneur of scale knows, it's one thing to build a company culture around a tight knit group of leaders. It's another thing to sustain it across tens or hundreds or thousands of employees. And as Movement Mortgage continued to grow, they weren't immune to these challenges. They had to figure them out, too.

Aimee Dodson: Our biggest organizational hurdle was going to be finding a way to maintain our culture as we made the leap. I think that struck Casey pretty hard because we were so proud of the culture we had created, you know, in the markets we were in. Everybody was bought into this notion of loving and valuing one another and doing life together and making a positive impact. But the bigger we grew, it was much more dependent on the local hires that we made in different markets. And sometimes we got it right and sometimes we didn't.

Joseph Honescko: Even in the moments that they didn't get it right, they were always evaluating. They were always thinking about the best way to continue building that culture. And a lot of that is because Toby viewed business as a pyramid. And the base of that pyramid is culture.

Toby Harris: The first thing you've got to have at top of the pyramid is vision, who you are going to be. And we had decided we're going to own the mortgage business. That was our vision. We are going to be the best. If you work for us, you're going to do the best job on the planet. And if you borrow money from us as a mortgage company, you're going to be so happy. We're going to serve you. What is all about service? The second level of that pyramid is a process. We were fortunate to understand the complete process. What you really needed to do and how long each step should really take. And then the bottom of that pyramid is culture. None of it's going to work if you have massive turnover. You need to have great culture. People need to want to come to work.

Joseph Honescko: That core conviction to make people want to come to work meant instilling some programs to help people enjoy what they were doing and who they were doing it with. That included hiring Steven Fallon, a guy who had been pastoring local churches for over ten years. But 2017, he joined movement full time to be their chief pastoral officer. And here's what he has to say about the culture of the company.

Speaker 4: People ask us to have movement all the time. Hey, what's the secret sauce? I think it's pretty simple. We've made a fundamental commitment to doing what God has asked us to do, he said. The summary of the whole Bible is love God and love people. We're just trying to do that.

Joseph Honescko: These can feel like nice ideals and good values. But what does it actually look like to love others? Can you scale that and make it a process? Well movement has. They've developed a clear plan and programs that help them care for their teammates and maintain that strong culture, even as they've grown to thousands of employees.

Speaker 4: For us, to love means to act in their long term best interest. So we want to act in their long term best interests of our teammates first, our customers second, and marginalized communities third.

Joseph Honescko: You might have noticed that this too is a bit of a pyramid. The foundation is caring for teammates first. It's that message we've heard other leaders like In and Outs Lynsi Snyder. Share on the podcast. Care for your people and they'll care for your customers and for movement. This centers around three major fundamental needs.

Speaker 4: When we're thinking about loving our teammates. That means when our teammates are in crisis, we're going to stop. We're not going to walk by on the other side of the road. We're going to get down in the ditch with our teammates when we're in crisis together, and show up in love. The second way we're going to love our teammates is to meet a fundamental human need that we all have to be mentor. The third way that we all want to be loved is we want a purpose. We want something bigger than ourselves. A vision to expand our vision for a big God, doing big work in an amazing world.

Joseph Honescko: These commitments have led them to create clear programs like one they call Love Works.

Aimee Dodson: Love works is the cornerstone of how we as an organization say that we're going to love and value one another. When an employee is going through some sort of a crisis, we want them to understand that they've got a safety net, that they've got a community of people that have set aside resources from the beginning to meet their needs when they're in crisis. They should never, ever feel alone because they've got a community of people that loves them and wants to help them navigate through that situation.

Joseph Honescko: We'll spend some time next week in an interview with Stephen, really unpacking this idea of caring for your teams. But right now we just want to highlight one particular story of what can happen when a company steps in. Like this.

Aimee Dodson: The dollar value of the grants. You'd be surprised. It's actually lower than I think most people would think. Because often the stories that we do share are the bigger ones, right? But sometimes it's not a big dollar figure, right? It's like, gosh, we could get them right with like 600 bucks and get them financial coach and help them work out a budget. That means that the 600 bucks is the last help that they're going to need, because they're going to be on a path to sustainable, you know, healthy economic picture. But then there's plenty of scenarios where it is the big the big uglies. You know, we have a loan officer who she's got five kids and her husband was injured in a workplace accident, a chemical fire, a chemical fire. He was burned over 50% of his body, and he had to be in a burn unit for something like 21 weeks. And she's a loan officer. And if you're a loan officer, you only get a paycheck if you close loans. And if you can't be there to close loans, you're going to have a cashflow crunch. And, you know, love work stepped in and made it so that she didn't have to choose between paying her bills and being with her husband as he was going through his treatment. And that's what Love Works is.

Joseph Honescko: Love works exist to serve the employees of a movement, and movement loves customers by doing excellent work. But if you go back to Steven's framework, you might remember a third leg of the stool. Loving marginalized communities. And that happens through the Movement Foundation.

Casey Crawford: So really early on, movement had pretty significant success. And the Lord really convicted me that we weren't just going to take 10% of our profit and put it in a foundation. You know, we wanted to take a substantial portion of our earnings and give it to our foundation. But more than having that capital sit in the foundation, we want that money to hit the streets where it was actually doing what the Lord intended for it to do, loving and serving the marginalized. And that took a huge leap of faith. I can tell you, we always could have used a little more capital in the business or a little more capital in the foundation, but we just kind of pressed into what we felt the Lord was leading us to do, and he was always so faithful to provide that next project to love and serve folks and the Lord seems to meet us with just the right projects. And then, you know, he does what he says he does where, man, you just can't out give him. And he seems to kind of refill the coffers to continue to pour out, you know, capital to do his work. And it's been an incredible, faith stretching, faith growing experience to give and to see God meet that commitment to giving with just these perfect projects that we feel like he's held back just for us.

Joseph Honescko: We've got a whole video that summarizes the work of the Movement Foundation, but one particular initiative that we want to hit on here is this vision they've had for schools in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Casey Crawford: We saw the schools actually as a sustainable platform we could invest in that would create a profit, and it would create generational impact in the lives of children that we serve. And not only that, it would create a model for others to go follow. One of the things I love about the free market is that we attract capital to solve problems if it creates a profit, and so what we wanted to do was create a profitable business that solved one of the most profound problems in America of our urban poor, never changing that in their lifetime. In Charlotte, North Carolina, if you're born into poverty, 97% chance you will die in poverty. So only 3% of kids that are born to poverty are able to escape that in their lifetime. That is a statistic that we knew we have to address. And the best way to address that persistent problem in our community was through the institution of education.

Joseph Honescko: So here you have a company that is profitable, that is caring radically for their team members, and it's generously pouring into their communities. On paper, it might sound too good to be true, or it might even feel like it's just one big positive journey for them. But these decisions have come with sacrifice, particularly at the top. The level of radical commitment to the vision really started with Casey. He models it by implementing what's been called a financial finish line. You might have heard others talk about this concept, like Randy Alcorn or the recent episode we published about resisting the love of money. But Casey also experienced the blessing of this model firsthand, and it shaped the way that he ran his company.

Casey Crawford: So my first year in the NFL, I was really lucky to have a mentor named John Casey. John was a kicker, multiple time All-Pro, and he's just one of the most respected guys in the locker room. So I asked John to mentor me. And, the first lesson John sat down and gave to me was about setting a financial finish line. And I thought, that's kind of an odd lesson. But, John, you asked me if I was happy with how much I was making a league minimum as a rookie. I said, yeah, John, like more than happy man. And John asked me, you know, can I give generously with that? I said, John, I can give you know, I've given more than I've given, like probably in my whole life. And so do you, Michelle. Like, you know, get to go out on dates with that amount of money, say oh gosh, John. Yeah. Like it's fantastic. How do you like your house? Oh my gosh John, we have a two bedroom condo and we we don't even use one of the bedrooms. It's amazing. And John asked you to write that down and write down just how incredibly content I was. And then he said, Casey, you know, as your career in the NFL progresses or maybe your career business progresses, you're probably going to make more and more and more. And what I want you to remember is just how content and happy you are at this level.

Joseph Honescko: Again, here's the part that maybe just feels like sacrifice feels like trading down, oh, we as Christians have to live below our means and miss out on all these big things that we would rather have. But that's not the case for Casey. He doesn't see it as a sacrifice. In fact, he sees the financial finish line as a gift.

Casey Crawford: There's been absolutely no sacrifice in setting a financial limit for myself and my family. In fact, I think the Lord has saved us from so much heartache, so much suffering, so much angst and concern over trying to manage and maybe in some ways, my own heart hoard wealth. That end zone, that in line has been an incredible place of contentment and peace. And then the indescribable joy we've gotten from getting to pour into ministries and our schools and building hope centers around the world, and the new friendships that the Lord's brought into our life through giving. it frees you up to experience so much more life that God has for you. Conversely, in my own life, in the lives of so many of my friends. And that I've talked and walked with. Man, when you don't set those limits and creep sets and creep sets and creep sets in, there's always one more thing, one more thing you can buy one more investment. You can make one more year to wait until you start giving. And I think Satan uses that to rob you of so much joy and partnership and work. The Lord's called you to right now.

Joseph Honescko: Look, you might hear this story about movement in picture. It is some perfectly operating, well-oiled machine with no challenges. Some of you might be listening and thinking, yeah, I would love to do some of those things, but God hasn't given us that special favor that Casey seems to have. But it's worth pointing out that Casey would be the first to remind you that it hasn't always been easy with movement. In fact, entrepreneurship, no matter what it looks like on the surface, never is just up and to the right. But it's still worth doing.

Casey Crawford: The mortgage industry in the United States is famous for its peaks and its troughs. I mean, if you're going to be in this business, you are signing up for bumps and not just bumps, but, you're just signing up for dramatic ascents and then dramatic descent. So, I mean, we there's almost not a year that goes by that we don't experience some of that. And, you know, it's just, I think a long term mindset that you have to have in in any business that you're in, man, there are going to be moments of success. And then there's going to be those moments where you question yourself and question your ability to even navigate. And I think was certainly has kept me walking forward in and through those low times and low moments is my relationship with Christ and a commitment to say, Father, you know, if you give me the strength, I'm going to keep stepping on the field and I'm going to trust in you that whether the business has massive success or or goes away, or that you're weaving and working all things together for good to accomplish your purposes, Lord, and you can even take my failures and setbacks to accomplish your good purposes. As long as I'm faithful to serve you and use all that you've entrusted to me for your glory.

Joseph Honescko: You don't have to have it all together to follow what God is asking you to do with your business. The team at movement laid the groundwork for these programs and initiatives, even when the business was far from a sure thing. But they just kept taking the next fateful step.

Casey Crawford: The truth is, we weren't investable early on like we were fledgling. We would have been a bad investment. I actually wouldn't have taken money, I don't think, because I would have been scared. I couldn't repay it. It was a real honest fact. And then as the company progressed and began to have some more success, we did have opportunities. We had people that came in and said, hey, I'd like to invest or whatnot, and I'd really pray about it and think about it. And ultimately, I never felt any peace about taking outside capital, because what I always felt the Lord had called us to do was to give all of our profits. And so I was kind of saying, we're going to be a really bad investment because we're called to give all of our profits. And I didn't know how that would ever align with somebody who's making an investment to get a return on their capital. And that today has been a transformational attribute that we're enjoying being totally privately held. And in fact, we've been able to gift about 49% of the company in the NCF. And what that's done is reduced our taxes to almost nothing. And because our taxes are so low, it's just increased our ability to push dollars out the door. And, you know, I know that's a really tough thing for a lot of growing businesses, a lot of entrepreneurs to do is to create that free cash flow. Because, man, our business is really capital intensive like so many. And, you know, we've gone from five employees to 5000. And that takes increasing your balance sheet in dramatic ways. But I think because of our commitment to give. And then that led us to partnering with the National Christian Foundation. And then by giving away stock, we reduced our taxes. And that's allowed us to push out almost $500 million now in cash, you know, out the door to ministries that I think are going to be generationally impactful.

Joseph Honescko: So what do we actually learn from the movement story? We see an example of steady faithfulness, consistent excellence, and a determination to love God and love people above all else. And we also see that you can do all those things and make great returns. Now, you might not start the same kind of programs that Casey and Toby did. Your situation might look different in a bunch of ways, but every entrepreneur with a team has been entrusted with people to care for. You can have an incredible influence on the people who work with you and for you. And that influence can ripple out to families, communities, cities and cultures. But it starts with listening to God's call in your life today, thinking strategically about how you can live out your faith in your context. It requires prayer and community coming around one another asking God what he would have you do with your business. Thanks for listening to stories of the movement. Tune in next week for another episode of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. And in the meantime, visit our website to learn more about the groups we offer to watch videos or read the blogs. And don't forget to follow and read the podcast. That kind of stuff really helps us out. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next week.

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