Acting as something of his emissary, his wife went to the event solo while networking on his behalf. Betz said she conveyed her husband’s career desire during the requisite small talk which led to a series of introductions, ultimately resulting in a meeting with a headhunter who as it happens had just refinanced his home the week before. The loan officer who assisted in the refinancing asked the headhunter to keep an eye out for good, green talent with malleability in being trained.

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“I got an interview, got the job and that man who hired me was my boss and mentor for the first fourteen years of my career,” Betz said, referring to his time at Guardian Mortgage Inc. (which later merged with a bank to become Guardian Mortgage, a division of Sunflower Bank).

“He’s still my mentor, even though we no longer work at the same company. I think that having a strong mentor when you’re first starting out is everything,” he said, putting an emphasis on the word. “It’s why I structure my branch, why I give back; it’s driven a lot of the why of what I do at this point in my career.”

After 14 years, he longed to venture out on his own: “My ultimate career goal was to own my own mortgage company and you just can’t do that in the retail space. If you’re going to be an owner, you’re going to have to be a broker. And I didn’t have any brokerage experience at all,” he said. “The broker world is like the bogeyman in retail. It was too big of a leap, in my opinion, to just start off on my own. I needed to plug into an organization that had the lenders already signed up and had the benefits and the compliance. I needed to go to a place where I could produce.”