Today we’d like to introduce you to Gene Griffin.
Hi Gene, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Before any of this I was in the music industry running an artist services company, and I still DJ under “Regal Eagle”. From there I moved into auto refinance, a brokerage shopping lenders on a borrower’s behalf, just with car loans instead of houses. I refinanced over 7,000 loans in that space.
I was good at it, and I hit a ceiling. That job let me make a small impact on a very large number of people. Saving somebody sixty dollars a month is real, but it’s sixty dollars. Mortgage was the inverse, a huge impact on a small number of people, one family at a time. I made the trade on purpose, with the plan of scaling it back up.
I got licensed in 2022, the same year rates went from three percent to over seven. Refinances vanished and loan officers left the business in droves. I walked in the door right as everyone else was walking out.
So here’s what 2023 looked like. I woke up at 3am, put on a blue Amazon vest, and delivered packages out of my own car until 7am so there was money coming in. I listened to podcasts and audiobooks the entire route, because if I was going to be up at 3am I was going to come out of it sharper. At 7 I’d shower and put in a 10 to 12 hour day in mortgage, often for nothing. I went months without a commission check. I kept going because I knew this is where I belonged.
We were Summit Mortgage Solutions then, a name half my industry had some version of. Massif started as a placeholder so I could stop thinking about it and get back to work, but over time it grew on me. A “massif” is a compact group of connected mountains forming a distinct part of a range. Residential, investment, and commercial, different clients climbing different peaks. The placeholder stuck.
Georgetown pulled us in and we stayed. I’d rather be the lender who actually lives in the community he serves.
None of it was linear, and none of it happens without my wife Adrienne and my daughter, who starts high school this year.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No. And I’d be suspicious of anyone in this business who says otherwise.
The auto refinance background gave me a real leg up. After 7,000 loans I already knew how to read a credit file, how to talk to a borrower who’s nervous about their own numbers, and how to work a lender. Most people entering mortgage are learning all three at once. I wasn’t.
What I couldn’t out-skill was the timing. I got licensed in 2022, right as rates doubled and the refinance market evaporated. Competence doesn’t help you when there’s nothing to compete for. That’s what led to the 3am Amazon shifts and the months without a commission check. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing. There just wasn’t enough business in the market for knowing what you were doing to pay the bills yet.
The other thing I underestimated was how much of this business isn’t the business. Origination I can do. Building a company is a different skill entirely. I’ve spent real money on systems and tools that never produced a dollar, mostly because I bought the solution before I understood the problem. I’ve paid that tuition more than once.
And then there’s the part nobody warns you about, which is that when you’re building something and it isn’t working yet, you can’t say so out loud. Clients need confidence. Your team needs confidence. So you carry it. I got through that stretch because Adrienne knew exactly where we were and never once suggested I stop.
The market will hand you a reason to quit about every ninety days. The people still standing aren’t the ones who found a way around that. They’re the ones who decided in advance that the answer was no.
We’ve been impressed with Massif Mortgage Group and Massif Capital Group, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We operate two brands under one roof, because the people we serve are solving genuinely different problems.
Massif Mortgage Group is the residential side. First-time buyers, families moving up, and investors building rental portfolios. We’re a brokerage, not a bank, and that distinction is the whole business. A bank can only offer you what the bank sells. We shop hundreds of wholesale lenders, so when a borrower’s situation is unusual, and most people’s are, we have somewhere to take it.
Massif Capital Group is the commercial and business-purpose side. Investors, property operators, and business owners financing acquisitions, projects, and portfolios. That world runs on completely different underwriting, different timelines, and a lender network closer to 2,500. It’s not a bigger version of a home loan. It’s a different discipline, and treating it like an add-on service is how most shops get it wrong.
What ties both together is that I’m an advisor, not an order-taker. Anyone can send you a rate. Fewer people will sit down and tell you what this deal does to your position in five years, or tell you not to move right now and give you the three things to fix first. I’ve done that plenty of times. It costs me a commission, it’s the right call, and those clients come back.
Brand-wise, what I’m proudest of is two words we run on internally. “Heart and Hustle”. Heart is telling people the truth even when it isn’t the answer they wanted. It’s doing what’s best for our clients regardless of the outcome for us. Hustle is out-working the room when it’s time to perform. Doing something every single day to push the business forward. Most companies pick one. We’re not interested in picking. And after what 2023 looked like, I don’t have to wonder whether my team can do the hustle part.
The last thing readers should know is that we’re headquartered in Georgetown, TX but have a nationwide reach. We work with clients across the country, and every one of them gets the same thing our Texas clients get. You talk to a person, not a queue, and the person you talk to is your dedicated advisor.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Pick the thing you’re going to be stubborn about, and be honest that it’s a bet.
I got licensed in 2022 knowing the market was turning. I did it anyway because the ceiling I’d hit in auto refinance wasn’t going to move, and I’d rather be early in something hard than comfortable in something finished. That call cost me a year of income. It was still right. But I want to be clear that it was a bet, not a sure thing, and anyone telling you they knew it would work is telling you a story after the fact.
What I wish I’d known is that competence isn’t the bottleneck. I came in with 7,000 loans behind me and I still went months without a commission check. New people assume that if they get good enough, the results follow. The truth is you can be genuinely good and still lose for a while, because timing and market conditions don’t care how prepared you are. Understanding that early would have saved me a lot of nights wondering what was wrong with me.
The other thing is to protect your ability to stay in the game. That’s what the Amazon shifts actually were. Not a hustle story, just math. I needed income that wasn’t tied to closings so that I could keep working the thing that wasn’t paying yet. Whatever your version of that is, get it in place before you need it. People don’t usually quit because they lost faith. They quit because they ran out of runway.
And find one person who knows exactly how bad it is. Not a mentor, not a mastermind group. Someone who sees the real numbers and stays anyway. For me that was Adrienne. Carrying it alone is what breaks people, not the work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://massifmortgage.com/massif-mortgage
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/genegriffinmortgage/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gene.griffin.10
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/genegriffin/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@genegriffinmortgage
