Profiled: Gord Dahlen of Invis and Mortgage Intelligence
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15/12/2009 8:00:00 AM
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Booking a time to interview Gord Dahlen, the recently appointed president for Invis and Mortgage Intelligence, is a practice in patience and timing. Not only does his new role have him endlessly travelling across Canada meeting brokers and lenders, making the act of getting him on the phone difficult, but then it is the matter of getting him to sit down long enough to think back on his life in the mortgage industry.
Luckily, CMP was able to catch up with Dahlen on one of the rare mornings where he was truly in his element - at his home just outside of Vancouver.
"My schedule is such...," he says before trailing off, looking for the right words. "I've made five trips to Toronto in three weeks, I arrived home last night at midnight and I'll be back in Montreal on Monday, then Kingston and Ottawa next week, then I return to Toronto in three weeks time. Plus I'll be criss-crossing the country and could be anywhere between Victoria to St John's Newfoundland and Halifax in the next month."
Just trying to calculate the frequent flyer miles that Dahlen will be accumulating is enough mental math to fry any brain, but it doesn't take a calculus professor to figure out that if you multiplied the amount of times Dahlen has unpacked his bags in a new hotel by the amount of airport taxis he's taken in the last month, divided by the square root of brokers he's met face to face since becoming president (that number was 300 at the time of writing), the answer would be that Gord Dahlen travels a lot.
While Dahlen is "literally just coming home, dumping clothes and then heading back out," it comes as a bit of shock that he is, well, in a better mood than most people before their third cup of morning coffee.
"The one thing I would say is that there is a lot more information coming at me and decisions have to be made very quickly, but I relish every minute of it," he says.
A B.C. boy
Dahlen was born and raised in Dawson Creek, B.C. and grew up in a family of "planners."
"Going back there were a lot of aldermen and mayors in our family," he says. "Our last name is synonymous with that little community up there. We just tend to gravitate towards that I guess."
And it seems to be something Dahlen picked up at a young age.
"If there were six people standing around I would kind of make a plan. As a kid it would even be, 'alright, let's go down to the Dairy Queen then to the movie', and I'll plan it and that's sort of how it was growing up."
In 1984 he entered the industry with a role at Household Finance (HFC), going into the broker realm three years later with Household Trust. After that, he says, his involvement with brokers became "serious" as he moved to Mutual Life, which later became MCAP.
"In the last 20 years I've only had two jobs - 11 years with Mutual Life and MCAP, then over to Invis in 2000."
Ron Swift, a friend of Dahlen's from school and current president at MCAP, was responsible for introducing him to the broker realm.
"I was in Victoria when Ron [Swift] called me up and offered me a chance to go back to Vancouver with Mutual Life. I was happy it was a chance to go back to Vancouver but I didn't know what I was getting into at all. I didn't seek it out to be honest, but I've enjoyed every minute ever since and wouldn't think of leaving it."
Dahlen's willingness to trust Swift in this new endeavour could be dated back to their college years.
"Gord and I met at BCIT (the British Columbia Institute of Technology) in 1981," says Swift, adding that their friendship grew as a result of playing hockey together. "He was my goalie and I cleared the front of the net for him. We had each other's back."
In 1994 Dahlen was what Swift refers to as his "right-hand man," leading the Western Canada operations.
"Then Gord left MCAP to help start up a new brokerage company, Invis, and I knew he would do very well. His commitment and passion to providing exceptional service, building strong relationships through trust and integrity and genuinely caring about people are his strongest attributes," he says.
While licensed since 1997, Dahlen has never actually been a broker himself, but he has always been a broker advocate, whether it was helping to build the broker channel at MCAP, being a part of MBABC and CAAMP, including serving on the B.C. board three times, and generally promoting broker awareness.
"That's been my life for the last 20 years," he says. "I haven't quite caught up on the broker side though. I'm a little over on my lender side, but in the next year and a half or so that should be equal."
Just a hobby farm
In the summer of 2000 on a hobby farm in the quiet town of Langley, B.C., a hand-painted sign for what would eventually become Invis mortgages leaned against the back door of a chicken coop. Inside the chicken coop seven owners were not only waiting for a proper office space, but for what would be their first mortgage as a new company. Out of those seven, only one, Dahlen, is still with the company.
"I guess you could say the first mortgage rolled out of a chicken coop," he laughs. "We've come a long way. I remember that first mortgage in 2000 and today we're billions of dollars."
Since then Invis (and eventually, MI) has grown into a brokerage known for its inner culture, and a big part of that is its annual galas.
"It's a big part of what we do," says Dahlen. "We love to recognize our folks. We're big on culture."
It's also something not lost on those within the mortgage community.
"The one thing Invis has done uniquely is truly to build an internal culture," says Boris Bozic, president, Merix, and long-time peer of Dahlen's. "I believe that Gord was the one to coin the phrase invis-ion (sic), and he's a strong believer in that and has certainly been able to impart it on his employees."
Bozic, who says he has always worked with Dahlen based on a customer/supplier relationship, with the roles mutually reversing over the years, adds that Dahlen is not the type of individual to point fingers when something goes wrong. "He understands that whenever there is an issue that the accountability is shared. He has the ability to look at things from the macro perspective, as in, one specific issue will not be final judgement on our entire working relationship," he says.
Home sweet home
Just in the midst of a tour when CMP spoke with him, Dahlen has plans to work more from his home office once it's over, and considers himself a family man first and foremost, coaching his eight-year-old son's hockey team and being a "soccer dad' with his youngest daughter.
"We just relax," he says about his home life. "I live in a small community of about 2,000 tucked away in the trees so it's great to come off the road and kind of retreat into the bush. I'm really looking forward to being back on home turf and finishing up telling the Invis/MI story here, and then I will stay right here in B.C. and enjoy my family and some downtime."
And he should have plenty of time to do that as he continues to grow into his new position from the comfort of his home office.
"I think the biggest change with the new position is being able to make decisions that will affect the entire company, and I'm very excited about that," he says. "It's taking my old job and multiplying it by two, but I love it."