I was born and raised in Houston TX. Growing up with a mother that was a Director of Human Resources for a luxury hotel, I had no choice but to become good with people and customer service. I followed her lead into the most customer service heavy position at a hotel, Bellman. I was the first and last person guests came in contact with which was a large amount pressure but also an extremely valuable learning experience. It allowed me to develop a unique skill set that very few teenagers had the opportunity to learn. These skills are still benefiting me today.

 

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College Years

While in college I discovered I had a unique talent for numbers and finance.  Reviewing and analyzing complex financial data interested me the most because the theory taught was easily relate-able to real world situations. While taking on a full course load, I was also able to leverage my customer service experience to secure a full time bartending position in a high-end steak house. Leaving school with little to no student loan debt was important to me as I have seen the struggles that large student debt can have on a person freshly out of college. I was able to graduate with a bachelors degree in finance and minimal student debt.

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Mortgage Career

Once I completed my finance degree at the University of Montana, I accepted a job as a junior Loan Originator with a mortgage company in Austin TX. The Miller Group was a small 3-person mortgage branch specializing in personalized mortgage experiences for high net worth clients. Being such a small branch, I was required to wear many hats in order for our team to succeed. I was able to help grow our branch from producing 1-1.5 million in loans per months to over 8 million a month over my 4+ year career with The Miller Group. I have been able to work in multiple positions ranging from sales to operations over my career I am currently the senior loan processor for our entire branch which includes 7 loan officers.

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Exploring Real Estate Investment

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset which is why I decided to explore real estate investing as a “side gig”.  My business partner and I developed and executed a marketing plan to locate and purchase homes in pre-foreclosure that would return a profit quickly. We were able to put 3 homes under contract and closed on one of them as our first project within the first 7 months. The following 6 months were some of the most difficult and frustrating months of my life as is usually the case with real estate investment. We weren’t able to sell the home and recoup our losses but the knowledge I gained from those losses were as valuable as the money spent on my degree.

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Tech Addiction

As my career continued to thrive, I began to notice the large gap in the technology I used at work and the technology that was available. With even a novice skill level in tech, I knew I could increase the efficiency with which loans are processed and closed. I dove into coding classes and soon developed my newest passion. Recently I have been using my new-found skills and have developed an interactive pipeline with real time status updates and access to the outstanding needs for each file being worked. The system has reduced the need for daily pipeline update calls to each loan officer and allows the sales team more time to go out and source new business. The addiction has now taken over and I am pursuing a full time career as a full stack developer. I am completing my Full Stack Developer course at Southern Methodist University and I’ve built a portfolio on Github showcasing my ever evolving skills. Soon enough I will be putting my new found talents to use in my new career as a web developer and most likely at a new business vanture.