Making New Rules to Scale
Rocket Companies blossomed from a small team to a colossus of 26,000 by simplifying complexity for customers and betting on remote processes before that was even a thing.
Relatively successful businesses know the regulations in their industries and develop processes to work within them. So, they play a status quo style of the game to some success. But game-changing businesses know the rules so well they actually play the game differently. They play boldly to win big and to scale.
Rocket Companies is now a number of business entities, including Rocket Mortgage. At the beginning, however, two brothers, Dan and Gary Gilbert co-founded Rock Financial to be a mortgage brokerage business. Early on there was only a small number of employees and now there’s 26,000 across a variety of companies. Bob Walters, CEO of Rocket Mortgage and President and Chief Operating Officer of Rocket Companies, rose through the ranks and learned a lot from Dan.
“Dan had this unbelievable ability to take the most complex things and deconstruct them into their simplest components and make it approachable and understandable,” Walters said. “For example, if you look at our Isms book, which largely he authored, it doesn’t look like heavy paragraphs and detailed charts. It almost looks like a children’s book. There’s illustrations that are fun and they look like it might have been to an audience of 10 year olds.”
Simplifying complex things became a guiding principle for Rocket Companies, for employees, and for customers, too.
“So many people seem to gain value by explaining things that seem complex,” Walters said. “And people are like, ‘Uh, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And you’re like, ‘I know you don’t know, aren’t I so smart?’ Dan is like, ‘No. it’s the opposite. It is the ability to explain things easily and make things approachable. That’s genius. That’s the thing that’s challenging to do.’ And really, I think the company has embodied that both certainly in our messaging externally, but also how we approach processes. Make them easy. Solve the client’s problem.”
Early on in the Rock Financial story, in 1996, a product was launched called “Mortgage In A Box.” In basic terms, it allowed the mortgage lending process to all happen through the mail.
“That was internet before internet,” Walters said.
“Mortgage In A Box” helped the company scale because customers could be served from distances much farther away from a brick and mortar bank. It’s an example of simplifying processes for customers while increasing understanding — even the title of it is easy to understand.
Then, the internet became more readily adopted, and Dan made a very bold move.
“Dan came in one day and said, ‘We’re gonna shut all of our branches down. We’re going internet. This is the future,’” Walters said. “And I distinctly remember this thinking, ‘Wait, you said we’re going to do what?’ A lot of founders, they bring a vision that is a unique way of thinking. It all seems very obvious today. But [I] promise you, in 1997, it didn’t seem obvious.”
Of course, this decision allowed the company to scale and operate on an entirely different level across the country. Dan described just how far Rocket Companies have come, in terms of lending, from the first year that Rock Financial was founded until today.
“I think they did three to six million of loans in the first year,” Walters said. “To put that in perspective, we do about 3 million a minute.”
It’s fair to say that the “Mortgage In A Box” product and then going all in on the internet were two well-timed bets. The game changing decisions and subsequent success is evident. But the lesson underneath all the substantial growth is about the power of perspective.
“If you say the world is a static pie, if things are as they are and you operate within those constructs, you have one lens on the world,” Walters said. “If your world is, ‘I can actually open that box wider, I can create rules. I can alter the course of things,’ that’s a very different lens.”
Beneath that lesson is the real motivating fire that was, in great part, established by Dan Gilbert, among other leaders at the companies. It is about leaning in to change the world for the better by giving people and communities the boost that they need to succeed.
To find out more about how Rocket Companies are making new rules to provide rocket fuel to those ready to launch, tune into Business X factors.
—
Business X factors is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by Hyland.
For over a decade, Hyland has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, leading the way to help people get the information they need when and where they need it. More than half of 2019 Fortune 100 companies rely on Hyland to help them create more meaningful connections with the people they serve. When your focus is on the people you serve, Hyland stands behind you. Hyland is your X factor for better performance. Go to Hyland.com/insights to learn more.
