Wednesday Wisdom with Kimberly Torres

🎙️ This Week on Wednesday Wisdom: Kimberley Torres

This week, we are joined by the incredible Kimberley Torres, and she shares a simple piece of advice that can completely change the way we approach business and life:

“See a need, fill a need.”

The greatest opportunities often come from paying attention listening more closely, noticing what others may overlook, and then stepping in to provide a solution.

Whether it’s for a client, a colleague, your team, or your community, when you become the person who recognizes a need and takes action, you create value, build trust, and make an impact.

🎧 Listen in to this week’s Wednesday Wisdom and hear Kimberley’s powerful perspective.

#WednesdayWisdom #SeeANeedFillANeed #Leadership #MortgageIndustry #MakingLivesBetter #womeninbusiness 


🗓️ **Mark your calendars!**
- New episodes drop every Wednesday.
- Available on all your favorite podcast platforms. 🎧

🎉 **Join us for an enlightening journey** as we explore the minds of those who shape our world. Whether you're a mortgage veteran, a creative thinker, or just someone who loves a good dose of wisdom, this season is for you!

Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe for more inspiring content! 🌐👍🔔

Subscribe to my Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOyeiwxez-y4ss2sPx7LqZQ

Transcript

Copy

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Open up your eyes. Let your spirit die. Say yes to the truth. Let your soul be the guy.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Thank you for joining us today for another episode of Wednesday Wisdom. Today, we are joined by the incredible Kimberly Torres. She is the chief lending officer at Open Mortgage Wholesale. Kimberly, thank you so much for saying yes to being with all of us. And the way that we kick off Wednesday Wisdom, we go through life, we pick up these little lessons, we listen to people's advice, we read, we we gather things, but certain things stick with us. They kind of become part of our life and and maybe even affect how we live our life. So to kick us off, we'd love to hear what one piece of advice would you like to share with all of us?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

All right. Thank you so much, Laura, for having me. And in terms of uh a piece of advice that I live by, this is gonna sound a little out there, but it really comes from a cartoon. Um, when my kids were little, they're 24 and 28 now, uh, there was a movie called Robots, and they watched it on a loop in the back of the car. And there was this inventor whose whole line was CNE Philine. And that really struck a chord back then because I was functioning as a utility player wearing a lot of hats. And now, 20 years later, we're in this industry where everybody's probably quoting sales books and I'm running on a robot voiced by Mel Brooks. But, you know, I I think that what that really in terms of applies to today is around, you know, a lot of like the guidelines that shape our industry can be kind of interpreted as binary, right? Uh black or white, it works or it doesn't. And I think that people's lives really exist in the gradient, right? But not in the black or the white. And so um maybe it's that I've drawn my own docs, I've audited deals as like QC risk, and those two seats are going to look at a deal from a completely different lens, right? And so when we kind of shifted back in the day away from alt A and all the deals had to move behind automated findings, I was in a different kind of opportunity where I could manually underwrite conventional. And then from there, it was like low FICO manual government paper when nobody had an appetite for it, right? And so it's really about seeing a need and filling a need, right? And I think that that that's really how I've operated with my career is where can I add good? What can I do differently? How can I be of service?

SPEAKER_02 3:31

I absolutely love that, and that makes total sense from what I know and have seen with you over the years, and you know, you're tying into. I was just listening to a podcast from a brilliant, brilliant woman that's a she's a Stanford, she's okay, she's a neuroscientist to start, and now she's a Stanford professor, and she recently wrote a book about luck. How people say, Oh, that person's so lucky. Look at how they've got that position or how they did that, and the book is about what you just said. C and E, Billy, raise your hand, serve others. That's how you improve your luck. There's no such thing as luck. You create your own luck, but your philosophy of what you just said about from C and E Villane, that's how you create your own luck. So you got it. Yay! I love that, and I totally agree with that, you know, so many times, and so many people kind of sit back and they wait for other people to go first, and that prevents them from some major opportunities that may be available to them. And Kimberly, I mean, of course, I know fear might be one of those reasons, but what have you seen are some other reasons that kind of prevents people from fulfilling that need when they see it?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Well, I I used to think that seeing the need was the hard part. Um, but I think that maybe many people will think around manual underwriting as like loosening standards, but it's not. It's actually the harder path. You are going with more documentation, more defending your work to people who probably rather wish you didn't. And what it buys you in that process is the ability to see a person that the automated system kind of flattened into a decline. And I don't know that the system's wrong about the data, it just can't see the gradient, right? And so back in the day, it was a lot of extenuating circumstance deals versus financial mismanagement, and that just kept happening. And so I think that that has attuned more around like looking at living by the second half of the line, not the first, right? Like seeing is free. Anybody can look at a decline and feel bad about it, but filling the need actually means doing the harder work, taking the defensible risk, and maybe waiting for that to turn into the payback when nobody else is clapping around you for the hard work that you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Right. You know, you're you're making me think about, you know, some the part I listen, I love this industry, and I will tell anyone I wear my heart on my sleeve when it comes to how lucky we are, all of us, to be in this industry. And, you know, just this week we had a family with a gentleman that had no FICO score. Okay, he just didn't have any credit, right? He just paid cash for most of his life. He was a 56-year-old man that never owned a home, never owned a home, was living in an apartment his whole life, and they sold the house that he was living in for like 20 years. He lived in the same place, and one day they just sold it. And this man was like, What do I do now? And a loan officer said to him, You know what? I think you can own a home. And he said, How can I own a home? I don't have a credit score. I, you know, like I'm not, and that man closed two days ago, and I have a picture of him sitting at the table signing that feeling, right? Like to your point, that was not an automated underwriting loan. Like that was not a, you know, like to your point, that was not a black or white. That was really in the middle there. Um, but how fulfilling. Like that's the joy we get to do and serve, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Absolutely, absolutely. I never would have thought when I was younger, oh, when I grow up, I want to be a mortgage banker. But the um absolute joy in having such powerful transformative purpose is is really, really amazing.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

Agree. Agree. All right, so Kimberly and and you know, uh I don't know when this is airing, but Kimberly also just was on our NAM Inspire session. So thank you for saying yes to that and gracing us with your brilliance there. And you know, I know your mindset is very driven, and I know you, you know, you and I are very alike when it comes to that type of thing, right? And one of the things that you say is the will to win anyway. Can you tell us about that? Can you, you know, what does that mean to you? And how do we, because listen, we all know this industry, yes, how much we love it, but boy, is it up and down and cyclical in every direction, right? So sometimes you don't feel like you're gonna win, sometimes it's harder than others. So please share with us.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Okay, yeah. Um, in terms of the will to any win anyway, I think that it's gonna be uniquely framed the way that I see that, right? Um everybody quotes Vince like Lombardi and credits him with saying winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, right? And he didn't actually say that first. It was uh this guy, Red Sanders, at UCLA. And Lombardi spent years afterwards saying that he'd been misquoted and that what he actually meant was the will to win. And I love that because the will is the part that you control, right? And I would say that the person who probably taught me the most about winning wasn't a coach. It uh came from the story of a sculptor whose name is Ruth Isawa, and she was a Japanese teenager um whose family was interned during the war. And at first they were um her whole family was living in a horse stall at the at the Santa Anita racetrack. And then they got moved to a camp in Arkansas, and in that horse stall, she learned how to draw from several artists who were interned with her, right? And then she wanted to be an art teacher, but back then no school in the country would accept the Japanese American to be a student teacher. So she went to Mexico and in a little town called Toluca, she volunteered to uh teach art to kids for free. And exchange there was a local school teacher who taught her how to loop a single strand of wire into a basket. And that technique became her entire life's work. Her sculptures hang in museums now. She raised six children while she made them. And that classroom that she was denied, that she, you know, she basically spent the back half of her life building arts education for children. And now there's a public high school in San Francisco with her name on it. And she never chased out the classroom. Instead, she built something so real that the classroom came to her. Right. And so three things that I like take from her and I put straight into how I build is that first she made her pieces out of wire, right? Bailing wire, which is a material that's cheap, but her vision wasn't cheap, right? And that resourcefulness isn't what you do until the funding shows up. It's a competitive advantage that then compounds, right? And then the second thing would be that she gave first, right? When she was in Toluca with nothing in it for her. And that's not like a nice story, that's the whole mechanism because attraction is just generosity with a longer time horizon, right? Chasing is what you do when you haven't built anything worth walking toward yet. But I really enjoy pouring into others and nurturing careers and growth. And I think that that kind of is the precipitation before like the will to win anyway. And the thing I think about maybe most is that her sculptures are actually hollow. So the form comes from the space inside, and what holds a company together, right? And I know that you know this, is basically a shared vision. And everything else loops around that, right? Yeah. So when people ask, like what I look for in a salesperson, I'm looking for those who have built anyway, who have won anyway, who finds a hard market interesting rather than unfair. Right. And I'll be honest about the other side of that too. If somebody needs the market to be easy or it needs to be handed a pipeline, then we're not going to be a fit. And I'd rather say that now than in 90 days, because we work hard and we have an absurd amount of fun. But you know, I've stopped kind of treating that as a trade-off. And that's what building with like an artist's eye means to me, is that you're basically making something that kind of can stand up long after you're gone, right? And it's all anchored in that like will to win anyway.

SPEAKER_03 14:06

I love that. And what was what was the name again of the artist? Her name is Ruth Asawa. Wow, I love it.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

I've never heard of her, and I'm now going to. Now I'm going to read up. So thank you for you. Just shared that wisdom with me and everyone listening. That's that's the beauty of hearing so many different voices that come on here and share. That's how we all get to grow, and we all get to, you had said it. I know you and I are very aligned when we speak about legacy, and that's very important to us, right? If we can leave things a little bit better than before someone met us, worked with us, had a moment with us, then we're happy, right? That gives us joy. Oh, I love that, Kimberly. Thank you. All right, so Kimberly, the way that we wrap up Wednesday Wisdom, and we are so aligned in this too. I know that you're one for having big dreams and big goals, and there's no no limits, right? But I have found that that's not the case in most situations. A lot of times, people hold themselves back from those really, we'll call them the Bhags, those big, hairy, audacious goals. And so the way that I always like to end is I like to allow people to really expand their minds and think to themselves if I had my little magic wand in my hand and I said to you, I'm going to grant you one wish with unlimited resources and unlimited knowledge, you for sure are going to accomplish it. What would that one thing that you would bring to life?

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Okay, I'm imagining the magic wand. Right. And I think that I would like to build a financial readiness institution. So that's for people who are one conversation away from ready and they don't know it yet. Not a pamphlet, not a webinar, but a real curriculum that maybe starts two or three years before anybody's ready to buy. Because I think that that's where the actual gap is. Um, home ownership is the largest purchase most Americans ever make, and somehow we've decided that it's acceptable for people to arrive at it with almost no preparation and a marketplace full of misinformation. And that's what kind of makes it a little crazy for me, right? Is that American adults get about 47% of the questions right on the National Financial Literacy Index, and that number hasn't moved in 10 years. And for Gen Z, it was 38%.

SPEAKER_03 17:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

So we're not failing to teach this, we are just not teaching it. And when I think about the room and who's in that, right? Maybe this is like again, touching back on lived experience. Maybe it's a kid who's aging out of foster care. There's 20,000 of those a year. Maybe it's a single mother who is a part, you know, of a group that's, you know, they're right now buying more homes than single men. They are, yeah. Right. Um, a first generation daughter who's been translating loan documents for her parents. Um, the 24-year-old, I have one, who's been told that the medium first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old and has quietly concluded, hey, that's not for me, right? And I think that these are people with enormous economic power, but nobody's actually invested a dollar in preparing them to use it. They don't fit in the traditional box. And I'd argue that the box is the problem, not them. And so the outcome that I want with a magical wand isn't necessarily the closing. Uh, it's more around what I'd build because it's not gonna make somebody a homeowner, you know, tomorrow, but it's something that creates a foundation, right? And it goes back to what you and I were talking about before, which is legacy. I'm yeah you know, 28 years into my career. I don't know how much longer I'll be doing it, but maybe I've got 10, 15 years in me. So I'm really thinking about what I can build that's going to outlive me in terms of a magic wand.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

Yes, and and I love it. And Kimberly, it's not even a question that I know you will accomplish it. So the second part of why I make people do that is I believe that when you put something out into the world, now it's there, now it's alive, now it's going to grow and it's planted. So that's the reason why I do that. And I know you're going to make that happen. And you already know that's, you know, sometimes people don't start because they're like, wow, it's this big, big thing, and and it could be this. But Kimberly, you and I both know if you affect one family, if you affect two families, three families, like you know what I mean? That number, that is a monumental difference for future, existing and future generations to come. So even though, even let's just say it's five families, five families to multiply by generations that then their lives are different because that one person received education and bought a home. Like we know the impact that happens from the work that we do. So we wish you all the best with that. And I know we'll we'll have you on in the future when you tell us the update about that. Because I can't wait to hear about it. All right. Well, Kimberly, thank you so much for your time. Before we wrap up, how can people connect with you? Learn more about you and what you're working on, how can they they find you?

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Sure. Um, well, if you're in the industry, a lot of local events. Uh, I love to meet people face to face because that's the best way to make connections, right? So in the coming weeks, I'll be at FAM. I'll be at um the Arizona Um Association of Mortgage Professionals, I'll be at NAM. Outside of in-person impromptu connections, uh, you can reach me uh simply by sending me a message on LinkedIn, Kimberly Torres, uh, or you can send me an email, and that's just kt at openwholesale.com.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

Awesome. Thank you so much, my friend, and keep shining bright.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Well, thank you, Laura. I really appreciate you having me on, and I really appreciate the work that you're doing in the world. That's really great.