Michigan is home to three race tracks, and Keven Smith, president and CEO of Mortgage Builder, finds time to get out on each one.

Like many kids growing up, Smith said he dabbled in car racing as a teenager. Now, years down the road, Smith is an instructor at race clubs in the Detroit area, including the Porsche club, the Audi club and the BMW club.

Smith teaches students a variety of techniques, ranging from a basic lesson on how to better handle their cars on a racecourse to the finer points of racing, for those who aspire to race at a higher level. 

“It’s just any level of student that wants to learn how to drive a car faster and safer,” Smith said. “The best way to learn that is to be on a racetrack, where it is a safer area for making mistakes and not having to pay for them as much.”

But the racetrack is not the only place that Smith seeks adventure. 

“There are a lot of aggressive things that are ways for me to get my energy out. 

“Work helps me do that with problem solving, but I also do everything from snowmobiling and four-wheeling to shooting a service rifle competitively,” Smith said. 

So how does all that energy and love for adventure translate into being CEO of a software company? Very well, it seems.

Smith grew up mesmerized by technology. He was about 12 when computers first came out on the market, but they weren’t widely available and many people didn’t know how they worked. But to Smith, computers represented a completely new, untapped territory for him to uncover. 

“It is not like today, where people grow up with computers as a regular part of their lives and understand that world,” Smith said. “It was really on the early leading edge of that.”

Smith got the foundation of his future career in his high school computer class. 

When he began attending high school, it was just starting to teach computer classes. 

Putting his fascination with technology to work, Smith landed the title of the first freshman to ever be a student assistant, based on the sheer fact that he already knew more than the class could teach him.

Instead, he helped teach the class for four years as the school tried to find ways to keep him challenged. 

“I was the classic kid growing up, playing video games that were just starting to come out. I played the early PAC-MAN and Pong video games and wanted to develop those myself,” Smith said. “I bought one of the early computers and started developing those at a young age.” 

The backdrop for all this technology learning was an ever-changing landscape for Smith, since he was also a military kid.

“My father was in the Air Force, and wherever they went, we went. As a kid, it is really hard moving around so often and having to make new friends every six months,” Smith said. “So when it came time to settling down, I found myself in one spot, and I like where we are. I love Michigan.” 

His company is now located just north of Detroit in Southfield, Mich.

Smith joined GCC Servicing Systems in 1985 on the development side. While working there he put himself through college and went on to get two different degrees: one in computer programming and one in business administration. 

“Computers are something I have always enjoyed and that side of it, but I also really love the business side,” he explained. 

Smith eventually worked his way up to manager. While the company focused on both origination and servicing operations, there was an opportunity for Smith to rewrite the loan origination system from scratch in order to go after that space with better technology. 

“I led that division from the development side and from a business side. The time we released our first version of the system in early 1999 is actually when we split off Mortgage Builder as a separate entity from GCC Servicing Systems, and I gained some ownership within Mortgage Builder,” Smith said.

Although the two companies were separate, they would share resources, expertise and a lot of mutual clients that would service and originate on both platforms —anything they could do to help both companies succeed. 

Since Mortgage Builder was founded, Smith has worked at taking it from a regional to a national player. Eventually Smith bought out the other owners, including GCC Servicing Systems, and became the sole owner of Mortgage Builder in mid 2012, where he has expanded its portfolio of products.

“The loan origination space is always where we had focused and now we have a complete end-to-end servicing platform as well,” Smith said. 

“It was my master plan to rewrite the system from scratch that I presented to the board of GCC Servicing Systems, and they funded it with the belief that I could rewrite the system and lead this company to a leading-edge loan origination system. 

"Their faith in me was why we are here today and why we have been successful.” 

But with great success comes challenges, Smith explained. 

One of the biggest challenges that Mortgage Builder had to handle is not growing too fast. 

“You want to keep growing and adding clients and products, but you have to keep an eye on how fast you grow,” Smith said. “You bring in too many clients too quickly and it all goes downhill.”

Rapid growth can mean implementation takes longer and all the hard work can go down the drain, he explained.

“I think it has been a balancing act of bringing in clients at a steady pace and making sure we deliver a level of service where we do not forget about the client,” Smith said.

“We want to always know who they are because the personal relationship with them is what makes it special.” 

Moving into this year, Smith said that Mortgage Builder plays a bigger role than ever with clients under the new compliance regulations. In order to help clients succeed in the new environment, the company started compliance roundtables to help inform people, in addition to making sure software was where it needed to be to ensure compliance. “The lender needs the technology to deliver the pieces so they can instill the areas of compliance and the different regulations,” Smith said

Since compliance is driving costs up, technology becomes the key to bring costs down, which is where Mortgage Builder steps in, he noted. 

And in order to stay in line with everything going on in the industry, Smith explained that Mortgage Builder attends all the major conferences, in addition to being a strategic vendor. Mortgage Builder is currently the only loan origination system that is part of Lenders One Corp., which also hosts a conference twice a year.

Smith has lots of opportunities for travel with vendor meetings and customer site visits, which means he has lots of opportunities to try out new tracks.

“Some of my favorite courses are in Alabama. Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama is probably my favorite. We just drive around to these different areas, typically on an extended weekend when I can fit it in with work and family,” he explained. 

When Smith got married and had children, he started to throttle back on the competitive side of racing. 

“Lately I have dropped it down to more open track, meaning you drive around a race course and just race. Not as much for times but more for the enjoyment of driving a car at its limits on a course and chasing your friends around the track,” Smith explained. 

Whether he’s racing cars or building software, Smith is not afraid to pursue his passions at full force.