This is my second — much more pointed — piece about my interactions with Donald Trump & members of his organization.
To be clear, I don’t recall specifically meeting Trump at any point in this process. In the wake of my last piece, I heard from other friends that they or their families had had horrendous interactions with Trump himself or his organization. But, I also have a cousin whose former company insured many of his properties & didn’t have a bad thing to say about him or his organization.
With the disclosures disclosed…
In March of 2006, I was hired away from my sales role at CBS Radio into the world of mortgages. For 18 months prior to this point, my largest client had been a mortgage brokerage that had expanded into the New York area from Florida. They had authorized me to do all of their media buying up & down the east coast while I was still at CBS. This presented a conflict for my colleagues at CBS, so it was simply easier for me to join the client in-house.
It was the worst business decision I’ve ever made. If there was any upside, I spent the next 6 months learning more about advertising & media buying than I ever would selling a single medium — especially one like radio in 2004.
Since the mortgage business at that time was loaded with more speculators than a wagon train bound for California in 1849, there was a lack of class & panache to many of the folks I was forced to consort with. That last sentence is the greatest understatement I’ve ever written.
Nearly everyone I met in the mortgage business in 2003–2009 was some level of scummy.
For once in my life, I did what I did strictly for the money. I was still pretty young & new to the business side of the media business.
That said, I’d no idea of the predatory lending practices nor the lying, cheating or stealing that was going on inside my then-company or around the mortgage business on the whole. Had I known, I never would’ve left CBS.
Given this backdrop, I should not have been surprised when the axe came for my job at around the 6 month mark. I was given no warning & no severance. These guys even attempted to fight my unemployment that I was entitled to.
The media buying company I was using to place all my radio, TV & billboards had felt awful for what had happened to me. I had brought them this $6–7MM account & a scant few months later, I was out in the street with no real recompense.
So, they put me on to a connection of theirs who was launching a mortgage company within a larger entity. They asked if I was interested in the gig, as they knew & trusted my work & hoped I would continue to use them as my media buyer.
I was interested.
The opportunity was as the Vice President of Marketing for the newly-minted Trump Mortgage.
Trump’s brand name was still on the rise with The Apprentice, so I was still interested, despite a bit of a wonky reputation up to then.
I interviewed twice at 40 Wall Street — effectively Trump’s downtown headquarters. Both interviews were with a guy called E.J. Ridings & his number two guy at the time — whose name entirely escapes me.
The first interview centered around the approach to marketing that my former company had used. In the 6 months I was on board, we opened two new markets — Boston & D.C. At my peak there, I was spending $110k per week on radio, billboards & television. We were also generating about 400 inbound leads per week up & down the east coast. So, it worked!
The second interview focused on some of what they had hoped I could do with them. It mostly focused on partnership marketing. They would want me to align Trump Mortgage with brands like Home Depot or Lowes & ReMax or Century 21 & effectively coat-tail with their existing brands to extend the “Trump Mortgage” name to those other brands’ existing audiences.
They didn’t want to spend money upfront to partner with these companies. So, obviously, we would have had to pay these partners a commission for any loans that had closed through these arrangements. But, this sort of system is simply not built to build a brand long-term.
They were intrigued with me, my experience & what I had to say for the 2 days — across 10 days or so.
Then…radio silence.
I did my usual follow-up. Thank you cards followed by emails after each meeting.
Nothing.
Two weeks later. Still nothing.
Four weeks later. Nothing still.
I wrote it off…much as we wrote off all that mortgage debt from that period.
Cut to about 2 years later, I’m doing some business development work for an interactive real estate startup. This put me back in the real estate world in New York. I asked a few folks who covered real estate in the media about Trump Mortgage. All the answers were the same:
“It folded!”
I did some research into what had happened. Turns out Mr. E.J. Ridings had entirely falsified his credentials.
What came out in the media was that Mr. Ridings had effectively conned Trump & one of the Trump’s sons into lunching a mortgage unit under the Trump umbrella.
He conned them by saying that he worked for several major investment houses on Wall Street & had 15 years of leadership experience in so doing.
In truth, he had worked for 3–6 months for a second-tier division of Morgan Stanley in 1998 — among a series of other impressive exaggerations.
The extent of Mr. Ridings’ leadership ability was derived from running a vitamin & nutritional supplement company.
The reason I share this story now is that this in less than 24 hours, Donald Trump will be taking the podium to accept the Republican nomination for President of the United States of America.
In the interview with Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” Mr. Trump specifically speaks to changing immigration processes such that anyone coming from suspect parts of the world would be put through “extreme vetting.”
Why should we believe him in this if he cannot do a simple vetting of those in whom he invests his own brand name? He had substantial resources to properly vet Mr. Ridings & willfully chose not to do so. Or he willfully turned a blind eye to these exaggerations.
Neither of which is satisfactory to me.