My North Star Was Always to Get Acquired. Here Is How It Actually Happened.

Ever since I founded PMI Rate Pro, I knew my north star was to get acquired someday. I used to ask every founder I met who had sold their company the same question. How? How did you find your acquirer? How did that conversation even start?

The answer I kept getting was always some version of the same thing: it is almost always someone you are already working with. Someone already in your orbit. A partner, a customer, someone you have been in the same room with before.

I filed that away. And then we kept building. Building PMI Rate Pro was not something I was in a hurry to hand off. This was a problem I had experienced firsthand as a loan officer, watching borrowers get quoted MI without a full picture of what was actually available to them. Our team built something to fix that. We were not going to let go of it until we felt like the timing was genuinely right.

That moment came. And when it did, I did what I always do when I need real guidance. I went to someone I trusted.

The Conversation That Started Everything

I reached out to Jodi H. ll and asked her who I should be talking to.

She introduced me many prospects. LoanPASS - PPE was one of them.

The conversation with their leadership took off almost immediately. And I think the reason it moved so fast was not the pitch or the terms. It was because some of us already knew each other.

I still remember the earlier days of meeting Michael Lewis , Derek Long & Bill Mitchell at industry conferences. They were always so welcoming to me as a founder in a space that can be hard to break into. We had talked for years about integrating at some point in the future. There was already a level of trust and familiarity that made the more serious conversation feel natural rather than transactional.

But what really made me feel certain was not the familiarity. It was the values. I knew they were genuinely good people. People who were in this industry because they actually wanted to change it for the better. That was exactly what I wanted to do when I built PMI Rate Pro. Not just build a product. Change the way MI works inside the origination process so that lenders could do right by their borrowers every single time.

And then I met the founder, Bill Roy & the rest of the executive team . Hearing their future vision for LoanPASS was the moment everything clicked for me. It was not just that our businesses fit together. It was that I genuinely wanted to be part of what this team was building. The direction he was taking LoanPASS, the problems he was trying to solve, the scale he was going after, I wanted in.

When the people you are about to say yes to have the same reason for being in the room that you do, and when the founder's vision makes you lean forward instead of sit back, the decision stops feeling like a risk.

What I Was Afraid Of

I still want to be honest about this part.

Even with the right people and the right alignment, there is always a moment where you ask yourself: what happens to what we built?

I was not afraid the deal would fall apart. I was afraid PMI Rate Pro™ -Acquired by LoanPASS would lose its identity inside something larger. That it would stop being a platform built around a specific problem and become a feature buried in a product suite.

But the more we talked, the more I understood that was not the direction LoanPASS had in mind at all. They wanted to accelerate PMI Rate Pro. They saw a platform with the right foundation and the right carrier relationships, and they wanted to put the resources behind it that I could not access building independently. That is a completely different thing from absorbing something. And once I understood that, the fear went away.

The Decision

When the time came, I kept waiting for the doubt to show up.I expected to feel torn. Expected some version of grief about letting go of something we had spent years building.

It never came. What I felt was clarity. When the vision is aligned, when you already trust the people, when the resources they bring unlock things you have been working toward, the decision is less complicated than the stories make it sound.

I said yes.

What Surprised Me Most

I expected the shift from founder to SVP to feel like a smaller version of something. Like I had handed something over and stepped back from it.

It did not feel that way at all. The title changed. The mission did not. I was still talking to the same lenders, still working on the same problem, still showing up with the same conviction about what MI transparency should look like inside a lender's workflow.

What changed was the room I was sitting in. And the room got a lot bigger.

What the Year Since Has Looked Like

In the first year after the acquisition, we rebuilt the PMI Rate Pro platform from the ground up. Built for enterprise scale. Built to handle the volume and complexity of the largest lenders in the country.

We deepened our relationships with every major PMI carrier. We brought on large lenders who were already operating at a significant scale and needed a solution built to match them.

Things I would have spent years working toward happened in months. Not because the idea changed. The idea was the same one I had sitting at my desk as a loan officer. That never changed.

What changed was the infrastructure and the reach behind it.

And it was never just a few people at the top. Dave, our CTO, and his team gave the platform the engineering foundation to rebuild for enterprise scale. Bill, our CRO, helped close deals I have been close for years. And leaders like Tess Anson , Derek Staley, CSPO , and Kyle McCord and so many more than I could ever fit here brought the depth in guidelines, account management, and capital markets that turns a good idea into something lenders can actually run on. What I thought I was joining was a few people I trusted. What I actually joined was a team of operators who knew this industry well. That is the part I underestimated, and the part that made the year move as fast as it did.

And Then Came Wilqo

We recently announced that PMI Rate Pro is now embedded directly inside Wilqo's Charlie platform, the industry's first Production Optimization Platform.

Lenders using Charlie can now quote MI, compare options across every major carrier, handle risk allocation, and order coverage without ever leaving their origination workflow. No switching between systems. No separate logins mid deal. The full capability of PMI Rate Pro, right inside the platform where the loan is being worked.

Here is something I want to be honest about: the relationship with Wilqo had already started before the LoanPASS acquisition. That conversation was already in motion. The vision was already there.

What I did not have was what it took to get it across the finish line.

Rewriting our system for enterprise scale, building out the infrastructure to support the largest lenders in the country, having a full team behind the work rather than a small one pushing against every constraint, that is what LoanPASS brought. The integration had the right foundation. LoanPASS gave it the resources to actually get done.

That is what the acquisition meant in practice. Not a new direction. The same direction, finally with enough behind it to move at the speed it deserved.

When I was a loan officer, I used to think about how much better the process would be if MI just lived where everything else lived. If you did not have to step outside your flow to get a complete answer for a borrower.

The Wilqo integration is that. And I am proud of how we got here.

Before Any of This, There Was a Team

Before there was an acquisition, there was a team.

I have not forgotten the early days, and I never will. The early PMI Rate Pro crew who built something out of almost nothing with me. The people who believed in a tool that did not exist yet, and took a chance on a problem most of the industry had quietly learned to live with. Donald Hawkins David Biga Megan Darnell-Valencia Tanya Trana Camilla Sisemore Anthony Bolognese and many more!

I remember it clearly. The late nights. The version of the product that barely worked. The calls where we celebrated a single lender saying yes, because a single yes felt enormous back then. We did not have resources or a safety net. We had conviction, and we had each other.

Those days shaped everything that came after. To the team that got us here: none of what followed would have been possible without what you built first. Thank you. I still carry those days with me, even now that the room is bigger.

What I Want Other Founders to Take Away

When I was in the early days of building PMI Rate Pro, I kept asking founders who had sold how it happened. They all said some version of the same thing: it is probably someone you already know.

I heard it. I did not quite believe it. I did not know how to manufacture that kind of connection on purpose.

What I learned is that you do not manufacture it. You build real relationships over years, you stay clear on what you are trying to do and why, and when the timing finally feels right, you ask the right people who you should be talking to. The best acquisition conversations do not feel like negotiations. They feel like the obvious next step in a relationship that was already real.

I am SVP of Business Development at LoanPASS and the founder of PMI Rate Pro, a LoanPASS Company. The title changed. The mission is the same.

And now I am learning every single day. Not just from leadership, but from everyone at LoanPASS. Every person in every role has something to teach me. That is not something I expected. That is one of the best parts.

Can't wait to see what more the future holds!

To learn more about PMI Rate Pro and what it looks like inside a modern origination workflow, visit LoanPASS.io