Company History - What We're All About

Jon Shibley, Partner & Main Shareholder, Lenox Financial

The Path to Success

I started Lenox Financial in 1994 with a very basic growth strategy. There were a couple of things that I had to accomplish. Number one, I had to learn the business better than anybody before I could hire my first employee. Once I hired my first employee, then I had to teach him everything that I knew and hopefully he could do it as well.

We Have Over 200 Employees

Once you have a group of guys that are doing it well, then you have to decide who is going to elevate to the top, and that is the kind of management team we have. We have over 200 employees and a lot of them were customers of Lenox Financial and some of the management team also began as customers. They are even better than employees because they started as customers; they saw the power of the no closing cost concept and asked to come aboard.

Superstar Management Team

In order for a company to have the most value in the way it operates and in the open market (should it go public or be sold), it has to have a superstar management team. Ours was not one that was accumulated by going out and recruiting other people from other industries, it is all people that were trained my way and who understood my basic philosophies and had what it took to be a superstar on their own. Mixed with their unique personalities, it made them who they are and created a phenomenal team.

My philosophy is to build an elite team of mortgage managers and keep bringing more and more calls to them. The good thing about my philosophy is that no client goes to a voicemail. When a call comes in, it goes through a bell system in the ceiling, and the first one to grab his phone gets the call.

As the company began to progress and develop, I realized that what hurts me is not when someone is not as his desk taking calls because the calls that the person doesn’t take will be taken by another mortgage manager. What hurts me is when the calls are taken by a newer, more inexperienced mortgage manager. My goal is to take a smaller, more elite team and continue to make it phenomenal to the degree where it doesn’t matter who takes the call.

Finding The Way

In the beginning it was tough. I was just trying to sell mortgages the way everybody else did them, and I wasn’t very good at building relationships with real estate agents or builders and convince them to send us business. I had a couple of things that were working against me right out of the gate and, even beyond that, the worst thing was the status of the industry. The fact that a normal guy buying a $200,000 home shows up and gets a nice little bonus thrown at him, ‘Oh, by the way, I know you been saving for four years for a house and you managed to get a five percent down payment. I bet you didn’t know you had to pay an extra $6,000 or $7,000 in closing cost.” I just kept running into that again and again so I knew I had to find a new way.

Once I learned to use the financial calculator, I could not understand why if you had a $300,000 loan, and you are going to pay over $400,000 in interest over the life of the loan, why you had to spend a nickel in closing cost.

My biggest problem has been to convince people that it’s not too good to be true. In the ads I always say we are making plenty of money on this, we don’t have to stick it to you for the closing cost—I try to hammer that home. I think that once people finally started to buy in and call us, and they began to understand the no closing cost concept, then that was when the company began to grow organically.

Management Team

Jon Shibley : Partner & Main Shareholder

Stefen Shibley : Partner & Shareholder

Jack Stevens : Chief Administrator

Bob Griffin : Market Sales Director

Jim Dean : Market Sales Director

Ramses Frangie : Market Sales Director

The Company

The company is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and we have over 200 mortgage managers. We run advertisements all over the United States and continue to bring the same calls to the key group of players and let them become better and better—we let them master the mortgage management philosophy.

Lenox Financial has been in business since 1994. We conduct billions of dollars worth of mortgages every year and have saved borrowers over $200,000,000 in closing costs. “It’s the biggest ‘no brainer’ in the history of earth!”™