Entrepreneurial spirit

Bill Bradley combines discipline with his passion to make deals

How many horrible boss stories are out there? Everyone has one. A boss who talked down to everyone, or who left everyone in the office wondering how he got that job in the first place. Everyone can share at least one bad boss story, right?

Well, not everyone. Bill Bradley doesn’t have any of those kinds of stories. That’s because he’s never had a boss. He’s never worked for anyone else. He’s a self-employed career entrepreneur.

William J. Bradley, who goes by Bill, is the CEO and founder of W.J. Bradley Mortgage Capital. The retail mortgage originator is headquartered in Centennial, Colorado, and has nearly 100 branches with approximately 1,200 employees across the country.

It’s a far cry from where he started.

“My first desk was two filing cabinets with a piece of plywood that I had painted mahogany,” the 41-year-old Bradley says today.

It was 1995 and he had just graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He and a couple friends, who Bradley had convinced to start a business with him, packed a U-Haul full of all their worldly possessions and drove to San Diego to start a new life.

Why San Diego?

“There was absolutely no business reason behind that decision at all,” Bradley said. “That was a ‘let’s go where the sun is shining and the girls are.’” Having spent his entire life in Colorado up to that point, it seemed like a solid plan.

With $1500 in his pocket, Bradley headed to San Diego, but a stop in Las Vegas on the way reduced that amount by half. “That was the first time I’d ever played craps. It was an absolute disaster.”

Bradley got to San Diego and hung a shingle. The plan was to work with startups and very early-stage companies to raise capital. His first office was in his living room. “We didn’t have anyone come to the house for meetings,” he said. “But in the spirit of creating the right mindset, I did show up in a suit to work in my living room every day.”

Bill Bradley 2What drove Bradley to set out on his own? “It could have been a lot of personal stubbornness, when I was a younger. I suppose I was very ambitious. I wanted to do it myself. And when you get into the throws of entrepreneurship — if it is your thing — there’s really no going back.”

Bradley describes those early stages of his business career as challenging and filled with a lot of trial and error. But his passion and drive pushed him forward.

“When you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have anybody to ask for help or advice. And that makes that job very, very difficult. You end up making mistakes that in hindsight, you come to discover could have been easily avoided with a little more intelligence and a little more preparation.

“As long as I’ve been willing to learn from those things, I’ve been able to ascend,” he said.

In those early days of wearing a suit in his living room and sitting at his plywood desk, Bradley was able to find some success by catching the technology boom at the perfect time. After a successful run in San Diego, he moved back to Colorado in 1998 with his future wife to be closer to his family.

Because he did most of his business over the phone, he could conduct business from anywhere. But once he was back in Colorado, he found that he was fighting an uphill battle on two fronts. First, Colorado’s tech environment wasn’t quite as robust as what he was used to. “Colorado was behind the coasts in the technology space,” he said.

He was also fighting against his own age. “I was still relatively young and that was always a battle that I fought in the early years, because you’re trying to establish enough credibility to get people to do business with you but you’re still very young.”

Bradley tried establishing some local credibility by securing a book deal based on his success in California called “Angel Capital.”

“I don’t know if anyone ever read that book,” he said with a laugh. “I do know that it got published, because I have a copy. I’ve never seen it anywhere nor have I ever talked to anyone who read it.” A quick search of Amazon finds that the book is actually available for purchase for $19.80. However, the book is currently out of stock.

After his book was published, Bradley went looking for his next venture. He ended up partnering with Colorado Technology Incubator at the University of Colorado to launch CTEK Angels. The goal was to formalize the angel capital market, which Bradley said wasn’t well developed at the time.

“We put together, locally, a network of 50 different investors, each with a liquid net worth of $5 million in order to qualify,” he said. “We would host monthly forums with those investors and over the course of a month we would go through a screening process of tens, if not hundreds, of local entrepreneurs. There was a lot of demand to get in front of that group.”

Then the tech bubble burst and his investors were looking for the next big thing. This was right around 2001-2002, and many of the investors he was associated with were looking for more brick-and-mortar type investments, so he started to undertake a search for those types of deals. His search led him to a mortgage broker.

“I didn’t know anything about the space, so I got on an airplane, went and met these folks. They were looking to raise capital. In those discussions, I asked them what were they going to do with the money. They talked about diversifying their revenue streams. I asked how many other businesses like them were out there and they sort of laughed at the question and said, ‘they’re on every corner.’”

Bradley saw an opportunity. He knew an investor who had found success in consolidating businesses in the commodity-based industry. He’d made some money in that space and was looking to do it again. “I went to the investor and said ‘I think the mortgage space is ripe for consolidation.’”

Bradley said the mortgage space carried all the classic characteristics for consolidation. “It’s highly fragmented. There are significant barriers to entry and it’s very cyclical.”

He presented the opportunity to his investor and the investor wanted in.

Bradley had founded the company that bears his name in 1998 and now, four years later, he was ready to make a new leap in his work at W.J. Bradley.

Instead of being simply an agency business, he decided to bring the deal business into the mortgage business.

“Every investment banker who’s worth their weight makes a pretty good living doing it,” he said. “It can be a lucrative business. And I enjoy it. I enjoy doing deals.”

So Bradley went out and began acquiring mortgage companies. “This is where it became fun for me, because my deal background played in very well into acquiring companies.”

After a R&D window of time where W.J. Bradley acted as a broker dealer for mortgage lenders, the company acquired its first mortgage company in January 2005.

Today the company has nearly 30 mortgage companies that operate under the W.J. Bradley Mortgage Capital umbrella and the company is licensed in 38 states. In 2013, Inc. Magazine’s annual 500/5000 list ranked W.J. Bradley as the fastest-growing lender among the mortgage-lending firms that generated in excess of $200 million in revenue in 2012. The same list ranked them as the third-fastest-growing financial services firm in the U.S. 

Bradley is still doing deals and is always on the lookout for his next opportunity. “Entrepreneurship is a way of being. It’s a spirit, and it runs rampant in our organization. But we’re very disciplined about it. We run an extremely tight ship here, but that discipline also provides freedom.” 

In Bradley’s opinion, the mortgage business is still a local business, so his companies all operate under their own name and with their own set of rules — within reason, of course. 

“What you don’t want to do is castrate the entrepreneurial spirit inside that local entrepreneur. I believe I have a distinct advantage when I’m working with an entrepreneur because I am one.” 

He speaks passionately about passion and quotes Gandhi when describing his philosophy: Be the change that you want to see. “I’m a very, very passionate person. 

“But unbridled, untamed passion can sometimes be dangerous. You have to be able to temper that and act with some poise.” 

He cites honesty, authenticity and transparency as traits he values greatly. “Authenticity is very important to me and to my company. It’s critical.” 

He calls himself an “over-the-top” details person who doesn’t ever see himself being hands-off with his business. “I love being involved. And the only way to get to those details is to be close.” 

He has his months planned out into weekly segments where he meets with various people from throughout his company. There’s not much that slips by his desk unnoticed, and he said that being unplugged would stress him out. “It doesn’t stress me out to be on vacation and checking emails — it brings me peace to stay connected.” 

But that doesn’t mean that he’s all work, all the time. He said he loves spending time with his family, which often means leaving work to watch his three sons play sports. 

“They’re all sports fanatics. It’s total mayhem. I’m not going to lie — that’s the busiest part of my day.” 

Being an entrepreneur gives him the freedom to be at every game and eat dinner with his family every night, he said. “Sometimes parents can get too caught up in trying to create the monumental moment. But the intimacy exists in the non-monumental moments — it’s a father being there to read a book, to help a kid tie his shoes. When you think about those small things, they’ll remember that their dad was always there.” 

For Bradley, his entrepreneurial spirit and the success he’s had in his career has granted him the opportunity to appreciate the small moments. 

“You get to live life with your kids. And to me, that’s the ultimate gift.” 

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