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Keith Murray stands fast

A traumatic experience only fueled his desire to succeed and work for what's really important

Not many people could call being robbed at gunpoint a “crystalizing moment” or a “blessing,” but Keith Murray can. Murray, the president and CEO of PCV Murcor and VRM Mortgage Services, can look back on that fateful Friday afternoon when two men came into the bank he was working at, walked to the far end of the bank’s counter and stuck a gun into his face.

Murray began working at Home Savings of America in Los Angeles when he was 14. He spent his winter and summer breaks working in the bank, starting in the mailroom. He worked his way up from the mailroom to become a bank teller and eventually a new accounts counselor.

“That was my introduction into finance,” Murray, 56, says now. “I got a good ground level exposure to customer service in a financial setting at a time when my peers were out on paper routes. To be around folks and talking about money and retirement programs and all that, it really got my mind clicking. It was inspiring.”

The finance bug had caught Murray and it wasn’t going to let go. He studied business finance at Cal State Northridge and earned a degree in finance. After graduation, he returned to the bank. 

Upon his return, Murray paid close attention to how Home Savings treated its customers and has applied it throughout his career. “When I look at my career now, one of the things that Home Savings was known for was customer service, the tenets of taking care of your customers and being maniacal about it,” he said. “I absorbed that during the seven- to eight-year period of time that I was there.”

Murray said that one of the other things that Home Savings was known for was an internal training program. “They had a training program for something that I didn’t know a lot about,” he says. “It was called ‘appraiser.’ You know, I don’t think anyone grows up and says ‘I want to be a real estate appraiser.’ Certainly my kids aren’t saying that. But I loved the freedom of it.”

Murray became an appraiser in the early ‘80s, when licensing in the industry hadn’t become standard. “It was a financial job working with numbers, but also having a little bit of freedom,” he said. “You had a company car. You could set your own schedule, as long as you met your deadlines.”

Murray was enjoying his time as an appraiser, but as interest rates climbed “as high as 25%, there wasn’t much need for appraisers,” Murray said. All of the bank’s appraisers were moved back into the bank’s branches and to other divisions throughout the company. 

Murray found himself working as bank teller again. “My career had already gone 360 degrees in a short time and I was back to where I started,” he says.

He was 22, working as a bank teller again, and his life was about to change forever.

“In a word, it was terrifying,” Murray said of the day that changed his life. “Two gentlemen walked in and for some reason, decided to walk all the way down to the end to where I was and put a gun in my face. They said, ‘Relax. Don’t worry. Just hand me all your money.’”

In that moment, he says that he had two thoughts. “One is that I know this guy doesn’t want to shoot me,” he said. “He just wants the money. But the second thought is that he could make a mistake. It was surreal. It was shocking and it was frightening.”

But Murray wasn’t traumatized by the event. If anything, he was galvanized.

“When your mortality is put in your face at a young age like that, I just decided that if I’m going to do something with my life, I better start now,” he said. “So that next Monday, I quit my job.”

He says that he made the decision to quit “pretty much as soon as those guys walked out the back door and I knew I was still alive.”

For Murray, the weekend between the robbery and when he actually quit was very tough. “I have a distinct recollection of how painful that weekend was,” he said. “I had security of knowing where my money was coming from and when it was coming. And I was embarking on something that was completely foreign to me. It was really about going with my senses and my gut.”

Murray says that before the robbery he had often talked with his friends and family about starting his own business. “I’m gonna start an appraisal company. It’s going to be a national company,” he’d tell his friends. “And that was about where it stopped. I’m a man of faith and I prayed on it that weekend. And come Monday, I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t help but resign, despite the discomfort and the fear.”

Murray says that prior to the events at the bank, he didn’t have a timeline or a real plan for his life. But he thinks of the robbery as a positive. “My sense of it was this is me getting kicked into the deep end of my dreams,” he said. “I had thoughts about what I wanted to do in my life, but up until that point it was just words.” 

Murray calls the event a “crystalizing moment” for him. “In life, we’re fortunate if we get those and even more fortunate if we recognize the event. That’s how I see the world. I tried to find something positive and find something to propel me forward.”

After he quit the only job he’d ever known, he started Pacific Coast Valuations out of his bedroom. “I didn’t have an office,” he said. “I had a P.O. box. And to date myself, I had an answering service.”

He set up multiple phone numbers that were all routed to the answering service. He set up a desk in his bedroom. He had a “little filing system” and a Selectric typewriter.

“It didn’t take a whole lot of money to get it started,” he said. “I printed business cards, took the phone book, found local lenders and went around with my cards. I didn’t really need any VC money to get me going. My overhead was pretty low.”

He was operating out of the apartment he shared with his roommate, who told Murray that he’d “support him as long as he could, which was not very long. But it was enough to give me confidence to step out and pursue something that I wanted to do.”

Murray would contact the local lenders he found in the phone book and offer seminars on how to read and understand an appraisal. “At that time, there was no licensing required,” he said. “So it was really a matter of if you could sell and provide really good customer service and provide a fairly decent quality product, then you had an opportunity.”

Murray built on the customer service principles he learned at Home Savings and was able to grow his business quickly. “Oddly enough, even though interest rates were astronomically high, there will still some folks that needed mortgages,” he said. “So I found a couple small clients and then began to add some staff, hired a few appraisers. That took us up to the Reagan administration, and interest rates fell from 25% to what seemed astronomical at around 12%. Then the refinance boom just went bananas.”

The company that he had started in his bedroom went from one to 35 people in 18 months. But growing that quickly proved to be too much for the company. “Lo and behold, we made a mistake and lost a client,” he says. “And the business went from 30 or 35 people down to two. So I was at a crossroads in my career.”

Murray knew he needed to get licensed to truly build a strong company. “I was taking stringent courses and expanding my skill set,” he said. “That really helped propel us to the next stage. That gave me a level of confidence that I lacked before. I started rebuilding the business, focusing on quality and execution.”

As he regrew the business, he expanded beyond Southern California. “One client said to me, ‘We really like dealing with you, but we don’t really have any more business in Southern California. Do you do business in other states?’” he said. “My entrepreneurial spirit said yes before I could really think about it, and I said, ‘Yes, we do.’ And that was the beginning of what became PCV Murcor.”

He decided to honor the Pacific Coast Valuations name and shorten it to PCV, because, “You can imagine calling someone in Las Vegas and telling them you’re from Pacific Coast Valuations didn’t give them a lot of confidence to deliver a reliable and accurate valuation.” Murcor is short for the Murray Corp.

In the last 33 years, he’s grown PCV Murcor to a company that now employs 180 people and offers appraisals for all forms of residential and commercial properties. 

Murray started VRM in 2005 to provide mortgage servicing for REO properties before expanding to provide mortgage servicing for all segments. VRM now employs 350 people.

Murray says he didn’t really think that he would have ended up leading two companies and employing more than 500 people. “The harder I work, the luckier I’ve been,” he said.

For Murray, who still considers himself “self-employed,” the demands of running two companies makes the time with his family even more important. Murray is 56, has been married for 12 years and has four children, ages ranging from 10 to 2.

“I can’t imagine just working without having a family,” he said. “I did that for many years. It’s hard to remember what that was like. I can sometimes get lost in my work. But it doesn’t take too long once I walk through the door at home and my wife says, ‘I need you to change a diaper.’”

But even those “change the diaper” moments are valuable to Murray. “Before I left the office this morning, my 2-year old came to me and said, ‘Daddy, will you read me a book,’” he said. “And of course, I stopped and read her the book. And I made a mental note of that. That I’m going to take that time and invest in the relationship with my daughter. It was only seven pages in 10 minutes but it was important and she knew that she was loved in that moment.”

He calls his family “critically important” in his life. “Maybe it was a blessing that I got married later in life, because it gives me more perspective,” he said. “There’s a lot more to life than work. That work-life balance is important. It’s a very brief moment that we get with our children before they’re gone and off to live their lives. It is a balancing act, but it’s the absolute best one.”

Asked what’s driven him in his career, he also speaks of his family. He has vivid memories of hearing his father get up at 4 a.m. to leave for work in the morning. He now tells his father that his work ethic came from him. 

He says how inspired he was by his paternal grandmother. Margaret Murray was so important to Keith that he named his company’s entrepreneurial spirit award after her. “She was responsible for me getting my first job,” he said. 

“She worked as a domestic worker, but she was very well respected in her community, in her church community, and by her employer. She was very wise. She taught me a lot. There were lots of lessons about how to treat people and how to conduct yourself.

“Somehow she inspired me to pursue my dream. Was it to have these businesses and be in the real estate industry? Not necessarily. But it really was to have something more.

“To dream for something more. To have confidence in myself to do that. To have faith that if I put myself out there and I worked hard, that it wouldn’t be in vain.” 

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