As Broker/Owner of Mindful Mortgage Kim Clancy has become a master at building communities. For Kim, everything she does for her community is not about promoting her business, but about being a supportive member of the community. She wants to be a part of her community and she wants to be a trusted mortgage advisor to her neighbors. Implementing that approach, Kim has established Mindful Mortgage not just as a mortgage brokerage, but as an integral part of her local community.

Kim joined the mortgage industry in 2000 after working as a clinical social worker in California. Her mother had recently become a retail loan officer and helped her join a retail shop as a loan officer assistant. She stayed at that shop until 2008 when she moved to Colorado and joined another retail shop before finally making the move to Wholesale in 2019, when she opened Mindful Mortgage in Erie, Colorado.

Living and originating in a small town, becoming an important part of the community was crucial to Kim’s success. For her, building community is a philosophy, not a strategy. She wanted to be that person in the community that neighbors could come to for mortgage advice and she actively worked to become that. She made Mindful Mortgage a sponsor of a local charter school and she participates in community events like Homecoming Parades and volunteering for the local Parent Teacher Organization. “It’s not about selling your business,” she said. “It’s about people getting to know you.”

Part of that community building is Kim’s dedication to supporting other women in the mortgage industry. At her first retail shop, every loan officer was a man and women were assistants or processors. That experience has motivated her to support other women in the industry. She is a mentor with AIME’s Mentorship program, where she requested to mentor another female broker as well as an active member of AIME’s Women Mortgage Network (WMN) Facebook Group. Those groups give women an opportunity to share experiences and skills with each other. Early in 2020, Kim was struggling to balance the increased business the refinance boom brought to her business while also caring for her family. She posted about her struggle in WMN and received hundreds of comments from other women in the industry who were feeling the same struggle.

Kim’s parting advice: Be genuine. People know when you are not being your genuine self. “Be true to yourself and everyone will feel it,” she said. That means following your instincts and intuition and also staying true to yourself and your ideals. If you do that, success will follow.

Notes:

Getting into the Mortgage Industry (1:06)Building Community (11:21)Supporting Women in the Mortgage Industry (21:56)Parting Advice (31:36)