IRVINE — Glenn Stearns didn’t have to come back.
He had already made his fortune with his first mortgage company, survived two bouts of cancer, spent a year sailing around the world on his yacht and starred in the TV show “Undercover Billionaire.” He even married a glamorous TV celebrity and was living the high life in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Yet, Stearns decided to start Kind Lending LLC in March 2020, just as the pandemic shut down much of the world. Then, the mortgage company endured 33 consecutive months of losses as interest rates rose rapidly.
“I love the game,” Stearns said during an interview with the Business Journal.
Kind Lending began turning a profit in early 2024 and now employs 1,100 people, including 120 in Orange County. Stearns considered buying the building bearing the company’s name near the 55 and 405 freeways. Instead, Kind Lending moved late last year to the neighboring Centerview complex in Irvine, where Stearns occupies a penthouse suite.
“This has such a lovely vibe here. We love the Irvine address. We love that we’re right here in kind of the middle close to the airport. People love it. The ceilings are higher; the windows are bigger.”
Kind Lending’s revenue has grown almost 200% in the past two years, reaching $184 million for the year ended June 30, 2026. It ranks No. 2 on the Business Journal’s annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the large category (see page 21).
29% Attrition Rate
Stearns’ life story, which has been featured on the “Oprah Winfrey” talk show, includes being born to alcoholic parents, fathering a child at age 14 and becoming the first in his family to attend and graduate from college.
At 25, after working as a loan officer for 10 months, Stearns formed his own mortgage company in 1989. He spotted the subprime mortgage crisis early and pulled out of that business, which helped him survive the 2008 financial crisis.
By 2013, Inside Mortgage Finance ranked Stearns Lending as the nation’s largest wholesale residential lender. By 2015, the company was originating about $26 billion mortgages annually and employing 1,500. He sold 70% of the company in 2015 for an undisclosed price to Blackstone Group Inc. (NYSE: BX) while retaining a 29% stake.
Around the time of the Blackstone deal, Stearns was diagnosed with cancer at the base of his tongue and underwent chemotherapy and radiation. After recovering, he bought a 190-foot yacht and spent a year sailing with his family.
About four years later, the cancer returned as he was preparing to film “Undercover Billionaire.” Doctors removed his epiglottis, leaving him unable to eat or drink by mouth and reliant on a feeding tube.
Meanwhile at Stearns Lending, Blackstone moved the unit to Texas and laid off many of its California employees.
Stearns, who remained a board member, was shocked to learn the annual attrition rate under Blackstone was 29%, which meant the company was losing 1,000 employees annually, he said.
“That’s a thousand people saying we suck, we’re not good,” he said. “You know how expensive is it to onboard, offboard, train, retrain? You lose the institutional knowledge.
“I told them that when I sold you the company, we had 1,500 people,” he said. “Six people left that year. I know their names.”
When asked whether it’s worthwhile to sell a company to private equity, Stearns said, “If your desire is to cash out and protect your family forever and take a break, maybe it’s a good idea. For me personally, I found that having a partner that had different objectives than I did made it harder. You have conflicting desires when they’re led by people that all they care about are financial results.”
The company eventually filed for bankruptcy, causing Stearns to lose his equity stake, which he accepted to save employee jobs. He said the loss also caused him to no longer be a billionaire. Forbes estimated his wealth in 2019 at around $500 million.
The blessing, he said, was he no longer had a non-compete clause.
The OC Talent Pool
At the time, he lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and he felt he had to move his family back to Orange County, which has a deep bench of mortgage expertise and several prominent companies like loanDepot and New American Funding.
He also knew several former employees had stayed in the area rather than relocating to Texas.
“I really felt like the original group that really understood my vibe, what I was doing, they were here. We decided let’s just start all over one more time and see if we can rebuild from zero,” Stearns said.
Besides, he and his wife Mindy love Orange County to the point of paying $50 million to buy the Newport Coast home owned by the best-selling author Dean Koontz.
The company began in March 2020, just when the pandemic took off.
“The beauty about coming back with such a good reputation that Glenn maintained for the 30 years when he had Stearns, he was very well respected, well regarded,” Mindy Stearns said. “When he came back, people were excited. They wanted to work with him. And the difference in building a brand-new business is you are kind of looking for anyone who buys into the idea of what you’re doing. People already knew what he was doing. So, we could handpick the kind of personalities we wanted to create. They had to fit the culture, and we didn’t have to compromise on that, which was nice, and we could really select the best.
“We brought a bunch of people who were Stearns employees from before and they’re all like, the band is getting back together,” she added.
Interest rates fell that first year, creating a booming demand for mortgages and refinances. Then the mortgage rates started climbing in 2022, causing a well-known revenue plunge in the industry.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to scale,” Stearns recalled. “We were just plugging in the software, which took a couple years to really get the integrations all done. So we did much better than we thought because of such great tailwinds. But then we were just getting ready to go and there was nothing.”
Every month, Stearns said he had to write a personal check to cover the losses because he didn’t have any outside investors.
In January 2024, Stearns and his team noticed a turnaround.
“It was the first month our CFO said, ‘Glenn, I got good news. We don’t need your checkbook this month. We’re in the black.’
“A lot of companies started to drop out and we started to gain market share.”
The Goal In 2020, he told the Business
The Goal
In 2020, he told the Business Journal that his goal was to reach $26 billion in annual originations. Stearns said he hasn’t yet reached that goal and is currently at $18 billion.
It’s been eight years since he recovered from cancer. He doesn’t have an exit plan and plans to continue working, noting several prominent older OC executives who remain active in business, such as Gavin Herbert.
“We didn’t have to do this. We were floating around the world on a boat. We were enjoying ourselves. But I love the game. So, I said, let’s go back and do it again. This time we’re going to do it our way. I don’t care about having to compete against everybody else. I want people to really enjoy coming here. And so, we focused on our people. If you can make happy people, they’ll work harder, stay late. This is a people business. Rates and all that stuff are way secondary.”
The Direction of Mortgage Rates?
Since Glenn Stearns owns a mortgage company, quite naturally, he closely follows interest rates.
Hence, he is often asked: Are rates going up or down and by how much?
“I’ll tell you what I tell everybody else—I have absolutely no idea where interest rates are going because I have no control over them,” Stearns told the Business Journal.
Whether rates go up or down “doesn’t matter,” he added.
“People are always going to need mortgages. So, let’s figure a way to become the best we can be. And then we’ve got a relationship, and then some days we’re going to make more and some days we aren’t.
“What we can do is focus on our customers and the relationships because they’re going to go up. They’re not going to go down.”
—Peter J. Brennan
The First Employee at Kind Lending
Glenn Stearns’s first hire at Kind Lending had no experience in the mortgage industry—his wife, Mindy.
“I didn’t know mortgage speak,” Mindy Stearns told the Business Journal. “But I know people, communications. So, I came in as kind of a chief culture officer, if you will. Chief Kindness Officer.”
Mindy’s background was in television, including stints at Entertainment Tonight, where she worked with the famous Mary Hart, and as an entertainment reporter at the Southern California TV station KTLA. She also had a role in “The Princess Diaries,” the classic film that was directed by Garry Marshall.
She met Glenn in Las Vegas.
“When I first met Glenn, he was divorced with four kids, and he was not on my list of the ideal man. I was not looking for baggage.
“On our first date, he proceeded to tell me about the last time he’d seen his mother alive was in Las Vegas and the exchange they had brought me to tears,” she recalled.
“I always wanted a man who loved his mom, who was close to his mom. But what really sealed it for me was that he had been married, and he didn’t say one unkind word about his ex.
“Character is everything.”
The couple is celebrating their 23rd anniversary in October along with their combined family of six children and two grandchildren.
Mindy says she is active in Kind Lending, such as greeting new hires and using her skill set to create videos for the company’s Kind TV program.
She conducts surveys and sends out birthday wishes.
“We call our employees Kind Ambassadors. We say it’s a mindset. We ask that when you go out in the world, you are representing a brand, and this is part of our culture, not just at work, but at home with your community, whatever you do.”
—Peter J. Brennan
