During that hiatus, she referred all her friends to that broker who had helped her. “Because I am a talker and like people, I would refer him to everybody.” After a while, the broker urged her to try her hand at selling mortgages. “He approached me,” she recalled. “I was semi-retired. “He said ‘you should do mortgage yourself. I’m really busy. Stop referring them to me.’ “

She figured why not, but not before thoroughly educating herself on the vagaries of the business, she said. “I opened up in my house in 2001, out of my basement office, with three kids under the age of five. It was interesting.”

She named the mortgage company ASAP Mortgage Corp, the first part an acronym for her children’s names – Alexis, Stephanie and Peter. “I got extremely busy, and I loved what I did,” she recalled. “I hired my first employee about five months into it, and she’s still with me.”

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Shortly after that came the Great Recession. She was tied to Citi at the time, as the lender exited the wholesale channel. “They kept 1,000 brokers nationwide,” she said. “I was a one-person shop, and they kept me. I asked ‘why’?” The reason, she learned, was that the lender preferred quality loans over quantity, she said. “It was a great compliment to me.”