The work environment at Quicken Loans is truly one of a kind; where else can you find an office building with a playground-themed floor equipped with video games and a Ping-Pong table to relieve stress and scooters for transportation? To showcase the unique experience of working at Quicken Loans, both The New York Times and USA Today have featured aspects of our exciting atmosphere within the last week.

The New York Times

Contrasting QL with companies that “fail to deliver” acceptable customer service, The New York Times piece explains how the culture and guiding principles behind Quicken Loans make all team members eager to talk the talk and enthusiastic about walking the walk.

“…What Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Emerson have done is create a set of expectations as well as a sense of community and mission. Employees at Quicken Loans have it hammered into them: care about the customer, sweat every detail, improvise when you need to, always deliver.”

There’s an undeniable connection between the amazing QL environment and the relationships cultivated with our clients. Because team members are excited about coming to work, they’re ambitious about successfully completing their tasks and pleasing customers throughout the process. The positive office setting breeds accomplishment; we take extreme pride in our award-winning customer service.

USA Today

USA Today focuses on the age demographic of the Quicken Loans population and how the presence of young workers provides for a successful and productive workplace. In addition to discussing the positive influence of Generation Y, the article even provides a three minute video for you to witness the colorful walls and the massive photo name-tags for yourself.

“Tapping Gen Y for ideas keeps them “engaged and excited about staying at a place long term,” he says. In fact, the average tenure for a Quicken Gen Y employee is six years. Most studies show the average Gen Y employee stays only two years.”

Whether it’s the slushie machine, nerf guns or basketball court, symbols of young energy are endless inside the Quicken Loans office. Jay Farner, our president and CMO, was even recognized in 2011 as one of the 40 highest achievers under 40 by Crain’s Detroit Business. With just a walk through the hallways, the youthful atmosphere embraced by all Quicken Loans team members will have you feeling energized.

Read the articles, watch the video and see how Quicken Loans continues to thrive as one of the best places to work!

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Today, June 3, brought a beautiful summer day to Campus Martius in downtown Detroit; the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the wind was blowing just the way it should. Then, at 2 p.m., water balloons went flying. It wasn’t a bunch of campers or daycare kids; it was just some of the Quicken Loans Servicing team bringing out their inner child for a unique celebration.

There are a lot of reasons why Quicken Loans has been voted the #1 place to work. Don’t feel like walking? Glide through the colorful hallways on a scooter instead. Need a question answered? Grab a marker and scribble it on the nearest writable-surface wall. Stomach growling? Enjoy a chilled slushy or a bag of unlimited popcorn. There’s a lot to celebrate about our workplace, but here at QL we also value the importance of rewarding productivity. We work hard, and then we play hard.

The Client Solutions and Account Advisor teams embodied this philosophy by unconventionally motivating their members to reach higher this month; members that hit their specified goals would be allowed to hit their leaders with water balloons. “All goals were aimed at helping clients pursue foreclosure alternatives and either save their homes or exit them with dignity if they cannot retain,” explains Elizabeth Stuart of the Servicing team.

With 500 water balloons at their disposal and eight blind-folded team leaders at their mercy, deserving members pelted away. For about 20 minutes, the residents of Detroit got to watch the show before all members wiped the sand off their feet, wrung out their clothes, and returned to work. The event was very successful in motivating productivity this month, and even after getting publically drenched all leaders walked away smiling. “I thought it was a great event. The teams had a blast, the audience got some laughs, and the leaders got a well-deserved bath. It was a win for everyone,” said Matt Thompson of the Servicing team.

If you’re interested in working at this amazing place, read more about our teams here. And stay tuned to the Zing Blog for more fun events at the home of Quicken Loans in Detroit!

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Left to right: Gusty Molnar – Director of Mortgage Banking, Josh Offenberg – President’s Club Power Banker, Jason Scalese – Regional Vice President of Mortgage Banking, Rodney Sweigart – Operation Homefront Central Great Lakes

Every week it seems like the VA Unit banking team in Cleveland is up to something. If they’re not doing the Tough Mudder in support of paralyzed veterans, they’re handing out easter baskets to kids and their families at the VA hospital. They’re so involved in the veteran community that I have to be on my game 24/7 just to be able to keep up. It’s a good thing for them I welcome the challenge. Bring it on, buddies!

The team’s most recent endeavor was in support of our partnership with Operation Homefront for their Back to School Brigade. In the most basic sense, this program provides school supplies to kids with family members in the military. But it’s really much more than that. It helps the families with the financial stress and worry of having to acquire and organize supplies for their children right before school. Many times this happens right as the family is in the middle of PCSing, or a parent is being deployed. Shopping for school is a stressful time as is when you don’t have to deal with relocating, family separations and all the other worries that come with being a military family. Operation Homefront attempts to help alleviate some of this stress by providing kids a free backpack and enough school supplies to get started on their first day of school.

Last year, Operation Homefront collected nearly 5 million school supplies and filled approximately 40,000 backpacks for kids across the country. According to Operation Homefront, there are 1.2 million children who have active duty servicemembers for parents, and nearly 60% of them are school aged. This program can help these families immeasurably, not just financially but emotionally as well, and our team is so proud we could be a part of it.

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Picture courtesy Tough Mudder

Last year, some of the elite forces of our VA loan unit showed the Tough Mudder who’s boss, and this year was no different. As they walked in on that sunny morning in Mansfield, Ohio, I swear you could see the course itself recoil in fear. It was as if the whole world slowed down for a few moments. Heads turned, voices hushed, ladies swooned and men stared in awe as the thumping bass line from the song Little Green Bag announced their entrance. Wait…wasn’t that a movie?

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that this team is incredible. Not only are they ridiculously dedicated to helping veterans and servicemembers understand and use their VA loan benefits, they’re also committed to showing their support outside the office as well. This year’s Tough Mudder was conquered in support of, and in honor of, our partners at Paralyzed Veterans of America. The course was also conquered with the overall goals of Tough Mudder in mind which support and encourage participants to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project – a cause that’s also close to our hearts at Quicken Loans.

But make no mistake, Tough Mudder isn’t just running and jumping over some obstacles here and there. It’s a hardcore, 10-12 mile course developed by British Special Forces. It’s designed to test your physical stamina, your mental fortitude and was created so that you cannot finish it alone. Tough Mudders are expected to compete as a team, to work together and to make sure that no man (or woman) is left behind.

You’re going to want a team that you can count on when you’re facing obstacles like the Cliffhanger – a 40+ foot cliff of mud that’s set at a 45 degree angle. If you want to get up this hill, you’ll need a helping hand, otherwise you’ll just slide back down into the boggy mud pit over and over again. And when you make it to Everest, a quarter-pipe ramp that’s coated in mud and grease, you’re all but guaranteed to fail if you try to go at it alone. You’ll need a good team that helps lift your spirits when you feel like giving up on the waist-deep mud on “Mud Mile” or to give you words of encouragement when you’re too afraid to jump from the 15+ foot obstacle “Walk The Plank.”

Tough Mudder Team 2013

If there’s anything that showcases how well this team works and cares for each other, it’s the fact that these guys – and gals – kicked Tough Mudder’s butt together. And I all but guarantee that this type of dedication doesn’t start and stop off hours – it’s evident in everything they do for our veterans, too. So when I tell you that our VA loan unit is awesome, you know I really mean it. Because those bankers are some tough mother….mudders.

Check out the team at this year’s Tough Mudder:

(click on the thumbnail to view a larger image)

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By now you probably know that at Quicken Loans, we provide expert advice and amazing client services. And you should know how we also support organizations for veterans like Paralyzed Veterans of America because we really care about the men and women who serve in our country’s armed forces.

But, you know, it’s one thing to say you’re a supporter of causes that benefit veterans, but it’s entirely different when you actually bypass the lip service and go above and beyond the call of duty. That’s what the elite team of Home Loan Experts in our VA Unit does every single day. Not only do they help veterans and service members with their VA loan benefits, but they actually also work with veterans charities and organizations outside of the office on their own time.

We have partnered with Paralyzed Veterans of America in support of their Mission:  ABLE project. Recently, Bill Lawson, national president of Paralyzed Veterans of America, stopped by our Cleveland office to take a tour and learn about what we do on a day-to-day basis. Bill got to see our awesome “Wall of Honor” that features all of the veterans our bankers have worked with, and are displayed – in honor –  as a way to celebrate their service and commitment to our country.

Check out the video of Bill at our office, featuring some of the coolest and nicest fellows on the planet – Regional Vice President Jason Scalese, Power Banker Josh Offenberg and Senior Director of Mortgage Banking Scott Holden. These guys represent just a small cross section of this dedicated and hard-working team. I honestly couldn’t be more proud to be a part of this team – even if it is by proxy.

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The city of Detroit, and the momentum building behind its revival, is starting to get international attention. The Guardian, founded in 1821, is the second most popular newspaper in England and recently featured Dan Gilbert in an interview regarding the current status and progress of Detroit. “Dan Gilbert has a vision for this city’s future – and the money to fund it” writes Dominic Rushe of The Guardian in his fair and well-written article. Rushe uses an interview with Gilbert as the focus of his article, while interviewing associates of Gilbert and other Detroit natives.

Rushe focuses on much of Gilbert’s progress with downtown Detroit in a very positive light, which is a refreshing turn from the common cynicism usually heard concerning the city. Startups in the M@dison building, employee incentives for city living, national interest from franchise businesses and Gilbert’s new vision of downtown are all mentioned with enthusiasm in the article which overshadows the “precarious” nature of the city’s recovery stated in the article’s title. Mention is made at the top of the article of a generational shift in viewpoint that has recently happened in Detroit: Gilbert is quoted as saying “You’d hear from your parents and grandparents how incredible Detroit was.” Rushe then emphasizes that Gilbert is attempting to reclaim the Detroit that belonged to his parents and grandparents; a place that was once referred to as “the Paris of the Midwest.”

He can’t do it alone, though.  As Gilbert states towards the end of the article, “I don’t care who you are, how big you are or how much money you have, you could never do this alone. Someone could give you all the money in the world and you still couldn’t get it done. You need people, in business, education, in government.” This is a vital statement considering that The Guardian is a prominent British publication. This international exposure is great for the city and the movement going towards revitalizing it. I encourage you to read the whole article here.

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Very cool article this past weekend in the NY Times that I wanted to share with our readers who share my love/concern/interest for all things Detroit.

If you’ve read the Zing blog, you probably know that one of the things we write about is Detroit and the revival currently underway downtown. We do that for a simple reason. Quicken Loans is dedicated to rebuilding Detroit. It’s that simple.

So when I see an article like this, that does such a good job of pointing out the many positives that are taking shape down here in Detroit, I share it.

A few highlights about the article:

• Gilbert discussing how, as a young man, he discovered just how much Detroit had been neglected
• How focusing on downtown Detroit will eventually pay off for outer neighborhoods
• Gilbert’s story (it all began selling candy and pizza as a kid)
• Background on how Quicken Loans became the incredible place where I now work and consider myself part of a close family
• Background on Opportunity Detroit
• Lots more good reading

And here, to wet your beak, is a little bit from the article:

THE best way to experience all that is strange and a little otherworldly about downtown Detroit is to walk the streets around 5 p.m. on a weekday. At that hour, you’ll notice not just the peculiarity of what is around you — notably, the gorgeous, Art Deco skyscrapers alongside empty, decrepit buildings — but also what is missing. There is no traffic here. As the workday ends, cars trickle out of underground parking lots and speed off to nearby highways, but in a volume that doesn’t cause delays.

It is just one small sign of how far Detroit’s fortunes have fallen: the birthplace of the mass-produced automobile, the city that gave us the infuriating, bumper-to-bumper commute, is now so sparsely populated that it doesn’t have a rush hour.

So there you have it. Please read the full article and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

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There’s a lot of work that goes into filming a commercial, or anything for that matter. There’s all the planning that goes into pre-production: script writing, scouting for shooting locations, casting, etc., and then you have to actually shoot the whole thing. Depending on the complexity of the shooting script, this could be a few hours or few weeks, and that’s just for a commercial. Then in post-production the meticulous editing of the footage and sound must be fine-tuned and polished into a final product.  It can be an exhaustive process, and the viewer is rarely conscious of what happened behind the scenes that tied everything together.

This is the case with Fathead’s newest national commercial (it’s at the bottom of the page if you want to see it now), which features a local performing doing some impressive beat boxing to score the commercial. It wasn’t written to be in it, but how it happened to get in there is an amazing and hilarious story that shows the benefits of being part of a collection of diverse companies.

Before I get ahead of myself, I need to mention the multi-talented man behind the beat boxing, Stevie Soul. He’s been working with entrepreneurial startup company Bizdom for a while, consulting and doing graphic design. He and Eric Torenberg eventually got involved with Rapt.fm, a company that promotes freestyle rapping and teaching literacy along the way, and it was profiled last year in the Zing Blog. Stevie has also done voiceover work for radio and TV, teaches, and can be seen performing around the metro Detroit area.

Backtracking a little bit more; Stevie Soul had a terrible stuttering problem when he was a kid to the point of making it difficult to communicate. Stevie used his beat boxing as a way to cope with this, and has been beat boxing since around the 5^th grade. Listening to his part in the Fathead commercial, or any of the videos he has on YouTube or StevieSoul.com, it’s clear he’s been doing this for a long time.  Speaking with him, as I did in the Compuware building early last week, you would never be able to notice his former speech impediment. The quick speaking and enthusiastic guy in front of me had no hint of it, except for the occasional mix up of words as if he was trying to say all three of the things on his mind at once.

So how did this Mr. Soul’s beat boxing make it into a national commercial that he wasn’t written into?
“The first big introduction to the family of companies was at the family reunion that happened in October in the Ren Cen…it brought about 3-4 top team players from every company to this one sort of space…everyone gets to mingle and mix from every company and Bizdom had a presentation in that.”
They brought Stevie in to beat box during people’s pitch session, and later him and Eric of Rapt.fm we’re going to “perform” what the company was about with him rapping and Stevie beat boxing.

“I didn’t know Dan Gilbert personally before that day, and about five minutes before we’re supposed to go on set…I go in the bathroom, I assume no one’s in there and it’s one of those luxury bathrooms that like the granite goes all the way down to the floor so you don’t know who’s there…I go in there and I start beat boxing, preparing the set we’re going to do…Eric’s in the other stall performing as well and we’re like rehearsing…He’s like ‘Steve, is that you in there?’ I was like ‘Yeah!’ Now we’re like talking and communicating, I didn’t think anyone was in the bathroom but us, turns out Dan Gilbert was in the stall next to us.”

Stevie says Gilbert was floored by their impromptu bathroom rehearsal, asking them to keep going (after they all left their stalls) and telling them they should perform today not knowing that they already were. They explained this, washed, then shook hands, and went about their day, no business cards exchanged but a great story gained.

About two days later, Stevie is sitting on his couch at home and, out of the blue, gets an email from Dan Gilbert about a new Fathead commercial that’s about to go national.

“He sends me this email saying ‘Hey Stevie, great meeting you, there’s this Fathead commercial that’s in production and it’s needs like an edgy rhythm kinda beat to it…kind of score the beat to this commercial…I have a studio where I live so it worked out. I just kind of demoed out 3 different concepts for him and the next morning I sent it to him…He picked one, and it all kind of worked out really quick.”

After some extended polish in his studio, Stevie Soul had ended up scoring a national commercial after a chance encounter in a bathroom. He said he knew it was the legit thing when it all happened so quickly, adding that any national project he’s worked on in the past (and he has with Hulu, Hotels.com and more) tends to get done real quick. Haste, like in how quickly he jumped on board with the commercial, seems to be a good summary of Stevie’s personality; quick to react but not without intelligence and consideration, and ready to pull the trigger when something needs to get done. When you get people with these characteristics, like the odd combination of Dan Gilbert and Stevie Soul, you end up with a great product. Stevie proved this again at the end of the interview when I asked him if he’d be willing to improvise a quick beat for the Zing Blog, which you can listen to here: Stevie Soul Zing Beat Box. It’s featuring me as the hypeman who laughs and yells “Dude!” at the end. Also, the commercial itself is right here:

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The American Heart Association (AHA) kicked off their 10^th Annual National Wear Red Day on February 1, raising awareness of cardiovascular disease and encouraging millions of men and women across the country to wear red to show their commitment to living a healthier life.

At Quicken Loans and our Family of Companies, we’re keeping the heart-healthy party going all month long.

The QL Wellness Program is helping spread awareness of the disease with presentations for team members from cardiologists and nutritionists. Eating healthy is an important part of maintaining a healthy heart; so red apples are also available in the kitchens of our buildings.

In downtown Detroit, the One Woodward, Chase and Compuware buildings are aglow with red lights and red dress wall graphics created by Fathead and BodyPartChart.

Quicken Loans, Bedrock Real Estate Services and Just Baked are supporting the ‘Go Red for Women’ campaign with a Red Dress fundraiser Feb. 4-28 at any of the 14 Just Baked locations. Each cookie costs $3.50 and a portion of the proceeds of all red dress cookie sales will go to the AHA.

On Feb. 15, Quicken Loans is proud to be a sponsor of the Go Red for Women luncheon, taking place at the MGM Grand Casino in Detroit. Paula Silver, Vice President of Communications and Stephanie Stevenson, AVP of Compensation and Benefits at Quicken Loans, serve on the AHA’s metro Detroit Go Red for Women Executive Leadership Team.

Since 2003, cardiovascular disease has been the No. 1 killer of American women, claiming nearly 500,000 lives each year.  To raise awareness, and counter the belief of it being an “older man’s disease,” the AHA and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute created National Wear Red Day, in conjunction with the Go Red for Women initiative.

Funds raised through these initiatives allow the AHA to help women by offering educational programs, increase understanding about the risk for heart disease, and support research to discover scientific knowledge about heart health.

Since the first National Wear Red Day 10 years ago, 21% fewer women have died from heart disease and 23% more women are aware that it’s their No. 1 health threat.

Let’s keep the good stats going! What are you doing to stay heart-healthy in 2013?

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Cleveland talk radio host Tony Rizzo had some nice things to say about Quicken Loans and his mortgage banker, Colleen Kutz. I know Colleen and I’m not surprised Rizzo had such a great experience working with her for his mortgage. She’s one of the really good ones. For sure.

In fact, it was Colleen who worked with the clients who closed our one millionth loan. Here’s the video to prove it.

She recently help Rizzo buy a new home and he couldn’t have been happier.

Listen to his great testimonial of Colleen Kutz and Quicken Loans. Rizzo talks about how easy it was to get a loan. How he got a great mortgage rate. How Colleen helped him through the process and was professional. He rates his experience very well.

“Service was great,” said Rizzo.

That’s good. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Again, you can listen to Tony Rizzo’s testimonial of Quicken Loans here.

Good night and have a great weekend and MLK day.

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