Mortgage Blog

Teamwork is good, but not necessary good all the time.

I recently worked on a few purchases, with the escrow
companies are "big" compaies. Those companies are so
"big" that they assign 3-4 people to each escrow.
And each people will have their own assignment.
Some will work on the escrow fees, some on the fundings,
some on the contacts with buyer/seller, etc. And they
thought it "must" be more efficient that way.

Most of us all had bad experience with all those "teamwork".
The problem was that they don't have someone to coordinate
the process, and they were all "busy" all the time; and
also they did not give out instructions on who we should
contact at each stage. And the process was always delayed
because of that.

So everytime when I heard that "we have a team work on it",
better it's a good team and it was coordinated very well.

I have one of the best work-flow system in the whole
industry. I don't know whether it was related my early
experience from "assembley line".

In 1991, after my graduation from MBA, I joined a
shoe factory in Dongguang, Guangdong province in China
as a manager. For the shoe business, there is none
high-tech; the only thing similar to my mortgage
business is that they all have a deadline.
For shoes, we have to ship to the clients on time,
not too earlier, not too late(most seasonal,
the brand for the shoes, lotto, an european brand).

But I did lean a lot to manage the assembly line
efficiently, from the ordering the material, cutting(
tayloring the face, tongue), put together the face
and the buttoms, etc. And the important thing was
how to product "extra" shoes so that if anything went
wrong on each stage, you don't have to start the
whole process again. It's not high-tech, but it's
still indeed a line of business.

And that's why I liked to read the book from
Zappos's CEO Tony Hsieh's book: "Delivering
Happiness", though he sold shoes, but it did
connect my past experience about 20 years ago.