“I can do it better”

At the time, the main motivation for the father of four was to make more money. It took him two years to get licensed – mainly due to his feet dragging, he acknowledged – before he could enter the field in earnest by 2018. “I did it part time really to pay for vacations we couldn’t afford before,” Sloan said of his early days. “I was in the hospitality industry, which was great, but the money was not good. But it was all I knew.”

Once licensed, he gave his notice at the hotel where he worked and went to work with his friend who recruited him to his company. By February 2020, Sloan was fully ensconced in a new career under something of a trial by fire: “He gave me a lot of really, really tough loans he didn’t want to deal with,” he recalled of his early work assignments. “I dealt with them.”

MPA caught up with Sloan at the fifth annual Fuse conference that took place in Las Vegas from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1. The theme of the gathering was “Brokers are Better,” a clarion call the event’s organizer, the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts (AIME), hopes to spread wide – beyond the realms of nomenclature within membership ranks.

The convention went off without a hitch. Sloan didn’t have it as easy when he first started out, he told MPA. “COVID hits, and June, half of July, we worked from home. With dad home, the kids competed for attention: “They need five minutes all the time,” Sloan described. “Both of us said ‘this is impossible; we can’t do this anymore.’ So we went back into the office. I put my head down and started working.”