Take me back to earlier times, what was the journey like for you to Charlotte?
"We moved to Charlotte in 2014. We were living in New York and fell in love with the city but very quickly realized we couldn't afford it. I am originally from Pinehurst, I just had a job up in New York and that’s where I met Page, and we started dating. It was an amazing two and a half years but we just realized that when we were looking at a second or third-floor walk-up, that we wanted to have kids, and that you would be bringing strollers and cribs up and down. Then we started looking around. She was in the entertainment business, and she was on the talent acquisition/identification side of the TV roles, the head of the department at NBC typically then went on to a role in TV, and that's what Page wanted to do. I think she got a few offers in Richmond, Miami and Raleigh. We both went to Chapel Hill — I'm from North Carolina, and she's from Virginia. So, we said let's do Raleigh, and you get to Raleigh and you think you're fancy, right, like oh we are from New York. But it was right around when Ashley Christensen was opening these great restaurants in Raleigh, and they were all starting to pop off; we had a ton of friends from college still there, and we just fell in love with it. All three kids were born there, and we were like man Raleigh’s it. This is where we're going to be. But if we were ever going to go anywhere, it would be Charlotte because Page’s brother, Casey Crawford, who runs Movement Mortgage, is down here and it would bring us closer to family; my folks are still in Pinehurst. They'd still be close, and then she started looking at stations, and there is a Fox affiliate, and Fox is the only local news that doesn't go to a bigger show. For example, NBC goes to the Today Show and ABC goes to Good Morning America. So I mean, truly, you talk about stars aligning — Fox reaches out and says Page, we want to start a morning show and we want you to be one of the anchors. And she's like, wow, OK, we got to take this seriously. She gets the gig and fast forward, comes down here, and we have been here ever since and it was really cool; you'll probably recognize some of these names. It was a really cool period of time because Garrett Tichey was running We Love CLT and it was like a whole group of us connecting and networking. It was crazy, and I'm a big networking nerd. I love that stuff. Now I realize and I'm a little further away from it now, I got my kids that are getting older. I'm tied up in that stuff and Movement and so maybe these types of things are still happening, but it doesn't feel like it. At the same time you had We Love CLT and then you had Corri Smith who was doing #instabeerupCLT. They would go to a brewery and everybody would show up. Uber was sponsoring rides home so people could actually have a couple drinks. And I'm like, this is the best. I’ve got to give those two so much credit because they brought together the community in a big way, and I know you just asked me about when we moved here so I'll stop. But anyway, that was the era. That was 2014. You had the Panthers winning like crazy, the city was just electric. You had really cool networking events happening and it was a really it was a cool year to move here."
I love that, I’ve met and interviewed a few folks for this and your name always came up so it’s cool to see everyone going back to that point in time and realizing how important it all was.
"For sure. And then the other thing I was gonna add is that right around that time, not long after we got here, Page and I started a podcast called Date Night, and it was a really cheap way to make friends, you know? I mean, we found some cool people in Charlotte, we would bring them on with their significant other and when you interview someone with their significant other, they open up and they say things that they probably wouldn't normally say. Especially when you get athletes who are constantly being interviewed. So the interviews or the answers can get a little rouge. We did like 90 of them or something — it was just a blast. I've always been a Panthers fan. I've always been into the sports down here and that just really cemented it all for us.”
So, how did that transition for you kind of evolve with becoming the hype man and working with the Panthers? Did you have a vision of being that social and present with these teams? Was that a goal for you?
"No, so I came to Movement in 2017, and I got to give Movement and all my leaders here credit because they love the side stuff. They see that I'm building community, and they see that I'm putting eyeballs on Movement, and they're so supportive. Page and I always hosted things and saw things, and we just did that stuff together, and it has evolved into her own gig now where she's giving keynote speeches. For me, it evolved in a really different way. I worked in sports prior to all this and in 2008, the Beijing Olympic Games I'm working for USA Baseball and the International Baseball Federation, and we had been kicked out of the Olympics. That was our last Olympics, and we were trying to make a splash to impress the International Olympic Committee and put us back in the games. So what do we do? We can't bring the players because the players did not want to stop the season. So what else could we do? We brought in the Head of Entertainment for the New York Yankees, and his name was Mike Bonner. Fast forward from 2008 to 2020, I think he got a gig before COVID and ran entertainment for the Panthers and, so Bonner gets the job. I think he went Yankees, Broncos, Notre Dame, then to the Panthers, and he calls me up, and he said, I've got a crazy idea — I see the antics with your family online and all this kind of stuff. We want to bring a hype man to the in-game experience to the fans. And what do you think? And I'm like, are you kidding me? And then COVID hits so no crowds and nobody to hype up, and I was like, man, well, I guess it could have been worse. COVID was a pretty tough period. If this is the only thing that happens, then, OK. Fast forward a year, he calls me back and says you wanna run it back? I said sure, Mike. And so they actually just called me last week, and it will be season four. It's been a ton of fun. I’m super excited."
Do you get nervous when you do these kind of things or does it just come naturally? It seems like it’s so easy for you.
“Oh, I appreciate it. Now you're getting to the personal stuff. I get nervous for sponsor hits. Because from all of my jobs here, I now get the amount of money that goes into these investments for companies. At the end of every season, we're giving away a truck, and it's like Daimler, Chrysler of Charlotte GMC 2500 Lt. — they want all that stuff. I've been fortunate enough to just do a handful of little mini social media brand deals and, again, the perspective of working for a big company but then being on that side and they're like, you need to say this and do this, I mean it's serious. That's when I get nervous. But the stuff in the crowd with the fans and that side of things, that's the best. I give the Panthers credit, too, because they let me just be me. Most of the time, it's them saying you've got a minute, and we've set you up with this guy – have fun, and there's no script. That is the best, I thrive in that. I like that when it's like here is the truck you're giving away. I'm like, OK, I need to look at this a couple of times.”
Are you a goal driven person when it comes to things that you want to?
"I'm not a big write this stuff on the board kind of guy, and I don't know what that says about me. I am detail-oriented and task-oriented. I really like to do a good job. I like to make sure I do a good job. Of course, you know you have strategy and vision and a role like I'm in here, but I’ve have never really been into writing a goal on the board."
What is your biggest struggle in life right now?
"The biggest struggle in life is something that I would say, well, there's the micro and macro. The struggle right now is that the mortgage industry is tough. I mean everybody, whether you own or rent, the price and cost of living in Charlotte is going up like crazy. So, we have to be aware of that as a mortgage company. But then we're also in a high-rate environment, so we are supporting our loan officers in an environment where many borrowers are locked into the 2’s and 3’s. It's a really weird time, and people are getting out of the industry, and we just have to continue to support those loan officers with the best possible service and with the best possible solutions to try to close more leads and that's tough. Macro, Page and I talk all the time, I think this is like a Tony Robbins thing but work-life integration. We're big believers in work-life balance. It's like, good luck with that. I mean, that's tough to pull off. We try and involve our kids in everything. We brough the kids to Movement yesterday for some of the events that we're doing. Finding that balance of they are so busy with their sports and school, Page and I are so busy with our jobs so making it work so we can both be in each other's lives versus this must stop, so I can now start this. That's just not realistic. And fortunately, neither of us put pressure on ourselves, but integrating it is equally tough.”
Is there a proud moment in your life that sticks out to you that has shaped you into the person you are today?
"When you think about parenting, we're out there on social, and we've seen other parents or people do that, and they try to integrate their kids, or they try to hide their kids from it. And some people like to block their kid's faces on social media and all that kind of stuff. I am hyper-cognizant of that and want to be sure that the kids are always comfortable with it. We think about that a lot and we think about if we are too much out there. I have volunteered for the last two years to do chaperoning on the DC trip for the kids, and I do it because I want to be around them, I want to be the whole thing and see our kids want us to be around and our kids tell us everything. Last night, we went to a Movement networking event, and my son Ford, I took him there after goalie training, and he could have been no, take me home, and he was sitting there at one point, talking to one of our loan officers from Atlanta for like 15 minutes about college recruiting. And I think those are the proud moments of where we definitely are trying to be our kids friends but we want to be parents and we want to lead them and be strict and we need to be and and give them freedom when they need it. But at the same time, you want them to want you around too and so I don't know, I've never been asked that and I've never really thought about that answer. That's the first day it came to me; we’ve got a really cool thing going with our kids, where we all genuinely like to hang out with each other. The work I do at Movement makes me proud, the work I do with the Panthers makes me proud but watching our kids grow, mature and develop and have other people like being around your kids too. That probably makes me the most proud. We definitely want to be parents first, but it’s amazing how that earns you the respect as a friend.”
"Interesting timing. If you asked me that because I was like literally saying it to Ford when we were driving home; this is going to sound like I'm overreacting, but you were awesome tonight. I mean, there were like 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds. That was a work event. And we just stopped in there for a quick second because we had just a lot of people from out of town that are not normally here and you were acting like an adult and it was awesome."
Anything that sticks out that you're really proud of, of your time here with Movement Mortgage?
"So I inherited an amazing team, an amazing brand and the culture here was already in place, which is just what I've found over the last seven years here that that's increasingly rare. We've gone through changes. You know, people have come and gone, but what's happened recently is we've had people leave, which is frustrating, but they're leaving to go to big jobs in the mortgage, and this almost sounds like the same conversation as the kids one but two years ago, one of my top directors went and took a CMO role in a small company and then he just took a CMO role at like a monster company, bigger than us and we talk all the time and it's just the coolest thing. I think that's it for me. The fun part of this thing is leadership and growing people. I'm always going to dance and have fun on social media. I just. I love that stuff. But you know, that's kind of fleeting and it's not what it's all about. It's about putting people in homes. It's about building more schools and putting kids in schools. All that is important, and I'm happy to talk about it. But I also just care about these guys. I hope they're here for forever. And if they're not, just make sure that they have an amazing gig after this."