Operator. Notary. Nonprofit founder.

Getting into mortgage wasn't a plan. It was proximity.

Aaron was excelling at it. His father had been in real estate his whole life. I didn't want to just take part, I wanted to understand all of it. A neighbor running a team at LoansDirect.com taught me the business from the ground up, and by my second month I was second in the company out of more than 100 loan officers.

At DirectLender I owned everything from docs to funding: the loan products, the criteria, the bank lines, secondary market settlement, and every policy and SOP across 280 offices. The hardest thing I ever fixed was the flow. No structure, no standard, no shared playbook, and people not buying in. The fix was never motivational. It was operational.

We built systems so clear that performance became the only option, put the right people in the right seats, and removed the wrong ones. The culture came from the structure. Month end was a war, and the first week of every month the winners flew to Cabo.

Bear Stearns offered to buy us. We turned it down. Then 2008 took all of it: the company, the savings, the house, the boats and the plane. I was served with 17 summonses in a single day. I handled it the way I handle everything. I worked mobile notary jobs, kept the books on what was left, and stood between our family and the collectors.

Aaron went to Nepal and came home changed, and he made me go back with him. When I walked through the gate at Rainbow House, the children were holding a banner they had painted by hand: “Debbie ma'am, will you please be our mom?” I broke right there in the dirt, and I stayed. For 18 years we've helped raise those kids and run medical camps in the Himalayas through the Center for Global Change, the nonprofit we co-founded. I still run it today.

This October Aaron and I are trekking the MDS Trek Morocco, 70 to 120 km across the Sahara, to raise money for the Center for Global Change and our families in Nepal. Thirty-five years married, and we still do the hard things together.

The people I trained run their own companies now. They took the SOPs and the culture with them. That's the work I want to do again, with you.