 Hi, I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about leadership, character, and creating a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is a man of great character who's the president of finance factors. He is Rob Nelson, and today we are going beyond financial services. Hey, Rob, welcome to the show. Hey, Rusty, thanks for having me on this morning. Rob, it was so great to meet you in person some months ago, and you guys are doing some amazing things, and I wanna first start if you can share a bit about your background growing up. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm actually not from Hawaii originally. I grew up in Connecticut, New Haven area, and I consider it one of the pizza capitals of the world, so we have really amazing pizza there if you've ever been through New Haven. I highly recommend you check it out. Yeah, so I grew up in Connecticut, ended up going to college at Boston College throughout my young adult life. I was active in sports, soccer and lacrosse were my main sports. I was captain in high school of both teams, and really just enjoyed having that be a part of my life and kind of a formative experience for me and to my business life now. Yes, I ended up moving to Boston, went to Boston College, and then worked in Boston and financial services at Bank of America. And that's actually how I came across Jen, Jen Lau, who's my wife. And I didn't know at the time, but eventually, fate would kind of bring us out west, then we moved to California, had our son there in San Francisco, worked in technology for about six years, and then decided we really wanted to build family and build our careers here in Hawaii and so we were fortunate enough to move back to Hawaii, well, for Jen to move back to Hawaii in March of 2020 of all times. No, that's great to hear that, Robin. And before you became president of finance factors, what positions did you hold with financial, finance factors? Yeah, so finance factors, I joined in March of 2020 and I spent about a year as a senior EVP. And basically it was, I'll call it more or less a tryout. I interviewed with our board of directors and independent shareholders and I had a graduate degree and kind of met the requirements to be a good fit for being becoming president. But I was new to Hawaii and new to the company. So I spent about a year in a leadership role working with our former president, Steve Tariah, and really helping him drive a company strategy. So it was really a great way for me to understand the operations and try to start setting a trajectory for the future in the company and really just kind of prove myself as a leader. And Rob, you mentioned a little bit earlier about your wife, Jen. Now, I wanna ask you about your families. I mean, on both sides of your families, you guys have some incredible, amazing leaders and you have your son Blake and your new daughter Sloan just five months ago. And I wanna know about, I met Jen as well. What's the biggest thing you admire about your wife, Jen? Well, she's an amazing wife and just such a spectacular mother to our two children. So let me start off by saying that. I think one of the things that I really admire about her is her ability, I'll call it team building skills and her ability just to attract different people from different backgrounds and bring them together. So the way I first met Jen, I was working at Banco America in the Boston office and there's probably about a couple of thousand employees in that office. It was a big office. Jen joined the company a couple of years after I joined and she formed a company softball team. And so she organized it. She was the captain of the team. A friend of mine suggested that I email her and try to get on the teams. I hadn't met her yet and I did that and she probably told me that the roster was already full and there was no spots for me. But I stayed at it, reached out to a few of my friends and they kind of convinced her to let me on the team. And I think the joke is I've been trying now ever since but I think just throughout our dating life and married life, she is just so good at just bringing different people around us. I'm not as extroverted as she is. And she just always seems to bring just amazing people in our lives. So we actually, throughout our 20s and early 30s we were actively playing soccer in different places where we lived. And she would always be organizing our teams, finding new players and just all that. So I really just admire that about her. Yeah, and she has such a fantastic personality and you guys make a fantastic team together, Rob. And I wanna ask you, finance factors has been in existence for over 70 years now. And why has finance factors been so successful for so long? Yeah, that's right, Rusty. This year is actually our 70th anniversary which is an amazing milestone. And I hope we can do some in-person celebrating and recognition of that milestone. If safety will allow us to do that. But I really think just clarity of purpose is one of the keys of success for us. So when finance factors was founded in 1952, 70 years ago really it was founded by six Chinese-American families including Jen's grandfather, Danny B. T. Lau was one of the founders. And they found the company with the purpose of providing personal loans for Hawaii's working families who at that time there were not credit cards weren't really a thing. And traditional lenders really weren't serving the working families of Hawaii. So finance factors was founded for that purpose and really our early products were personal loans for working families to buy pots and pans or to buy a refrigerator, just smaller kind of things to run out of effective households and kind of live the American dream. Now we've kind of over the years we've pivoted away from personal loans. It really today we're a real estate lender. So we make home loans as well as investor loans to help people acquire real estate in Hawaii and most importantly help families own their home. Yeah, Rob it's so impressive how finance factors started and what is your vision to enhance finance factors for the next 70 years? Yeah, I'll kind of tie it in with your books. So we had clarity of purpose and we still have that and I believe that still applies today as ever. It's a very challenging place to own a home. So like the purpose is very clear. We have great people. So we have that, the people and the purpose we need to continue to evolve our process. Yes, there's the lending sphere is very dynamic. There's a lot of big traditional players in the space that are local to Hawaii as well as national players. There's a lot of non-traditional players that are coming in the market. You see ads for big kind of national digital lending platforms. You saw that in the Super Bowl last year and all that. So there's just a lot of competition out there and really so from a process standpoint we need to continue to evolve, to incorporate technology from a customer facing experience, where if a first time home buyer wants to just use our mortgage app on their phone, the finance factors mortgage app and they don't really want to interact with a loan officer in person or over the phone, we can accommodate that. Or if they want more of a kind of blended experience where they want some in-person guidance but some digital, we can accommodate that. So we need to continue to kind of evolve our use of technology in our process, both on the customer facing side, as well as our ability to be as efficient as possible in processing loans, more on the backend side of things. Because if you're a borrower or if you're a realtor referring one of your clients, being able to close the loan on time and get that person into a home is so critical and we need to continue to leverage technology for us to do that as efficiently as possible. So that's a really big focus for us. Yeah, and technology is moving so quickly. So you're so right about how critical it is to really refine the process. And Rob, you mentioned that the big focus is residential home loans now. What other financial services do you guys offer? Yeah, so we also specialize in investment in real estate. So we'll do investor loans. Really, I would say our niche is for smaller real estate investors, maybe your second property or you're building a portfolio from two to 10 properties. So we have a lot of residential investor solutions that we offer and we also have a commercial real estate lending business as well, which can support larger apartment building projects and things like that. Yeah, and Rob, the CEO of Finance Factors, Russell Lau, is a tremendous leader and you work so closely with him. What leadership qualities do you admire about Russell? Yeah, he really is a great leader and he's also the father of my wife. So it's good that we set good boundaries between work and personal life. But what I really admire about his leadership is he's, he always has a coach mentality. He's always coaching in a good way. Not in an overbearing way, but when you need that coach to give you advice or tell you what it is you need to hear to kind of improve or kind of get motivated, he's just always ready and in that role. He's just so good at that. He coached Jen in youth sports growing up and I just see it, he's just a coach in everything, both business and personal life and he really pushes us to just continue to get better. Yeah, I felt so great to have met Russell and to really talk with him and I get that that I can see the coach in him. He has a passion for coaching and Rob, how would you describe your leadership style? Yeah, I think I like to lead from the front. Definitely I have a lot of awareness. I focus on being aware of self-awareness and awareness of myself, but also very in tune with my team and what's going on in their lives, personal, professional and otherwise that can impact us in achieving our goals. So I think that's really critical and it's been I think an added challenge for me, not being from Hawaii, being new to the company and having happened to have moved in March of 2020, two days before the shutdown and really kind of coming into the company in a way where I can't get in a room with all my team and read the room and understand how they're perceiving me and how they're feeling about the different conversations that we're having. So that's an added challenge that I still live with now with our latest variant, unfortunately, but it's been so critical as a leader just to be hyper aware with any kind of input you can get, whether it's through a Zoom call like this or that one time you've happened to meet someone in the hallway, could they happen to be in the office or over email even, so I think having that awareness is something that I'm very focused on. I think lastly, I'm just very data-driven, I would say. I went to grad school at MIT Sloan, which is a pretty data-driven place and I try to lead by data. It doesn't necessarily have to be quantitative data, there can be other inputs as well, but I think that's critical to have as much data as possible to make an informed decision as a leader. Yeah, and I think you're a perfect fit because you're a great leader to really move finance factors in the right direction, I mean, to continue to move them in the right direction. And Rob, tell me a bit about your charity annual golf tournament. Yeah, so the finance factor is charity golf tournament, the tournament that we've been doing every year in some form for probably over 20 years. We missed, I guess, the 2020 year, but this past fall we were able to put the tournament back on and this is a great opportunity for us to interact with customers and other referral partners and support partners in the community. And I think most importantly, we're able to raise funds towards charitable causes and we were successful in that this past year, which is great. And so we made a great donation into the Department of Education for various local schools to support hands-on learning and sustainability and conservation. Yeah, you guys have been really helping the community through all those various charitable donations. I mean, I saw that you guys have, like you said, the DOE and Laulima, and why is that so important to you? For me personally, I just enjoy giving back and I've lived a very privileged good life and I think it's so critical that we pay it forward. From a company standpoint, we kind of talked about our purpose and our focus on helping Hawaii's families. And that's a core into the culture of who we are as a company. A lot of our shareholders today are descendants of the original founding six families and the community impact side of our business is one of the most important things to them, more so over financial return and other things. Rob, I totally agree with you on that. I mean, that's really what it's all about is to really give back and help the community at where you work. And you guys, I also noticed that you guys also do some volunteer cleanups at the beach and Chinatown as well. Yeah, so we did a clean up last year at the Waimanalo beach. And that was an amazing experience. That's me and Jen masked up there. Unfortunately, in that experience, you're kind of humbled by all the plastics that you find in the sand. But it's important to experience that and see the responsibility that we have to be good stewards for the future of our planet. And then we did a big cleanup in Chinatown as well. You see some of our employees with Mayor Rick there. Yeah, and again, it's giving back to the community. And I think as a leader, I just enjoy it anyways. I like to get out of the office whenever I can. But as a leader, it's such a great opportunity to have your employees kind of rally in person and to accomplish something together. So I think it's a great thing for our employees as well. And we're doing good in the process. So that's a win-win. I'll take that any day. I'm sure your employees love to get out of the office as well. And Rob, I feel so grateful that you read my books and then you liked the books and you're mentioning about the four Ps earlier. What are some other principles that stood out to you in the books? Yeah, I was just kind of thinking about I was reading beyond the game when my daughter was born, Ashley, so when she was born, it'll be five months tomorrow. And so I think I was kind of emailing with you while I was in the hospital, where I had some extra time on my hands, just kind of hanging out in the hospital with our daughters. I just kind of read the book when I could. I'll just say, I love how the books are just straightforward, direct and super practical. I don't think I've read a business book or a personal growth book that's set in kind of the high school level, which I think is just so relatable. For me, I'm more of a high school athlete. I played club level in college, but I wasn't a D1 athlete or it wasn't a professional athlete. I didn't climb the 14 great peaks of the world. But a lot of us, we played sports in high school or we performed in band or things like that. And it just makes it more relatable, I think. So I really appreciated that about the books. Definitely the culture of excellence, I think, and just how the importance of the small things as a leader and as a teammate, the way you conduct yourself, your attitude, your mentality, it's just so critical because it has that kind of multiplier effect. If you're off your game as a leader, you're gonna not, the rest of your team off their game as well. And as I thought, I saw that carry throughout the books and made me more aware of that in my approach to my day. I've really appreciated you giving me a couple of copies. And I keep the books with me handy. No, I love that, Rob. And you know, you're so right. It's all about that culture of excellence. And you guys have a culture of excellence with your employees. And I know some of your coworkers as well. And they absolutely love working with finance factors. I mean, they absolutely love it. Now, I also wanna ask you, Rob, about what are your thoughts about taking calculated risks? Yeah, I think my wife's probably laughing at me right now because she always makes fun of me because I'm more risk-averse in some ways than her. But I think taking risk is critical. I mean, we're a lender, so we're in the business of taking risk in some way. And for me, it's really, you know, what I see a lot from a career standpoint is taking advantage of opportunity. If an opportunity, if a door opens for you, for a promotion or maybe a lateral noob, even if it's scary or you're not 100% rule-ready, if you are aspiring to be a leader, you have to take those opportunities and take a risk and grow into the role. So I think from a professional growth standpoint, taking risks in that way is critical. You know, I have my CFA and I have some background in investing. I think it's important to kind of compartmentalize risks where you can and kind of like, you know, of course you wanna have like a stable base and you don't wanna like mess with that, but, you know, in business, you do need to take, you don't wanna put all your eggs into like a risky decision or investment, but you do need to set aside some kind of compartment to take risks and to explore either new business models, new products, you name it, but you just have to kind of continually be exploring and learning from that. And so really, I think setting a culture where, you know, failure or, you know, a mistake is okay and you learn from that and you adapt and that makes you better for the next decision. So that's something kind of core to how I try to lead. Yeah, no, I like those insights, Rob. And I wanna ask you, I saw that Joy Barua is the new president and COO of Finance Insurance and can you tell me about finance insurance and how it's connected to finance factors? Sure, yeah. So finance insurance is another affiliate of the finance factors family of companies. So finance insurance is an independent insurance agency that's been serving Hawaii for over 50 years now and we offer both personal lines as well as commercial alliance insurance. And so Joy, we're very excited and kind of fortunate to have him join as the new president of the finance insurance operation. And, you know, I think a great thing about having an independent insurance agency is that we offer, you know, I think it's over 70 different carriers of insurance. So we have, you know, we're not captive to one particular carrier. So we offer the best option for our particular clients' needs. And that's something that we take a lot of pride in. Now, and I think Joy is such a great choice to be the leader of finance insurance as well. And Rob, what are some of the challenges you're faced with in your business at the moment? Yeah, I think continuing to build succession and continuity, you know, it's, you read about in the trade press here locally as well as nationally that it's, this is difficult to the staff up and have all the employees that you want on the bus at any given time. So I think that's been a tremendous challenge I think for all business organizations. And, you know, every day I kind of just going about my day encountering the impacts of having kind of labor shortages. Yes, I think that's a big challenge. And then really for us, I think it's adapting our culture to a pandemic slash post pandemic life, I guess, where, you know, we're not gonna be 100% in the office and we're not gonna be with all our clients in person when we're closing a transaction on a home. And so we have to adapt to that in a way that's, I mean, it's new, you know, as these different variants are surging throughout our community, you know, keeping people safe, keeping our employees safe and customer safe is such a high priority. And we take that so seriously. But it demands a lot of your time and attention to kind of navigate that. So I think those are no big challenges that we're seeing right now. And you're doing a great job, you know, adjusting and adapting to those challenges. And I want to ask you, Rob, what's a very valuable lesson that you learned in life so far? Yeah, so you might have saw it in the picture of like my side of the family, but my older brother is in a wheelchair. So he's both physically and mentally disabled. So I've learned from him just to, you know, life's not always fair, but you gotta make the most of what you're given and you can live a good life that way. So he's always been an inspiration to me. He's four years older than I am. So he's my big brother. And yeah, when you go around, you can etiquette with him. He's kind of like a celebrity. Like he's way more popular than I am. Like, you know, we'll go, we'll take him out to dinner somewhere and people will come up to him and he wears a variety of jobs. So like they see him through his jobs and things like that. And those come up and say, hi, Brian. And he's, you know, he just does so well despite his, you know, his disability. So that's something I've just kind of learned growing up with him is that life's not fair, but you have to make the most of the opportunities you're given and you'll live a good life. Rob, thank you for sharing those insights on the show today. I mean, you are doing such a great job for finance factors and the future is definitely bright. And I wanna thank you for taking time to be on the show today. Thank you so much, Russi. And thank you so much for all your leadership guidance through your books and through meeting with you. Thanks, Rob. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. For more information, please visit rusticamori.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Rob and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha. What's up?