The distance between Syria and Lee’s Summit, Missouri is just over 6,500 miles. No one understands this better, perhaps, than Sam Kaddah, the founder and CEO of Liquid Logics. Kaddah, who was raised in Syria, said the values he learned growing up have transferred themselves to heightened business acumen.
Founded in 2004, Liquid Logics provides a next-generation cloud-based loan origination software – or LOS – that is primarily geared towards hard money lenders. The system was built around the borrower experience; this emphasizes its simplicity and speed for loan officers. At the end of the day, Sam said there are a number of simple factors that separate Liquid Logics from ‘the rest of the pack.’
“For us, [our most important differentiators are] service, trust, and knowledge. We understand [our clients’] needs, we have the knowledge to solve their problem, and we are always, always going beyond,” he said. “If you want me tomorrow…we’re there for you. What sets us apart is our knowledge and our service. And we’re not just techies, we’re industry experts. And we are friendly and we’re there for you any time you need us.”
This friendliness is partially due to Liquid Logics’ Midwestern roots – Sam said that many people may think of his company as ‘Silicon Valley’ because of the products it offers, but this isn’t the case. Kaddah also said his own friendliness comes from growing up in a self-described modest family composed of teachers and a school principal.
“Personally, I think [many people] would be surprised to learn how humble and down-to-earth we are,” he said. “People think of us completely differently but at the end of the day, we are just heads-down, Midwest people.”
This mindset, often referred to colloquially as ‘Midwest nice,’ is something Kaddah tries to inject into every aspect of his business. This ‘niceness,’ however, should not be confused with naivety in the nonconventional lending space; far from it in fact. After beginning his secondary education in Syria, Sam earned a degree in electrical engineering from MIT. After graduating, he worked with mammoth household names like Ernst & Young and General Electric.
“So I started as this little kid with humble beginnings, coming halfway around the world for electrical engineering,” he said. “And I quickly learned how to work hard and understand the markets and understand the dynamics. I put in a hundred hours a week worth of work for years until I got to a level where I was comfortable and had mastered what I do. I started from zero with just my knowledge and didn’t really have any other help.”
Armed only with a background in engineering and an unstoppable, can-do attitude, Kaddah ran a global operation for General Electric across four continents for a $408 million division. This role expanded his experience with technology and productivity, skills that would prove invaluable once Liquid Logics opened its doors. Kaddah also ran Ernst & Young’s upper Midwest practice for e-commerce and security, which amplified his web-related acuity.
On the heels of this varied experience, Kaddah took a leap of faith and decided to make the shift to hard money lending and its related technology.
From day one, he said, Liquid Logics focused on hard-to-underwrite services such as Alt-A, HELOCs, and subprime products. By straying from the ‘easy sell,’ Kaddah said his team was able to attract prospective clients with a different type of product. As for the end-to-end technology platform, Sam said this came from a lack of competent systems in the space.
One company in the Northeast Kaddah talked to said its existing system had ‘many deficiencies.’ In addition to these pitfalls, he said the company also wished to have one system to manage investment-related processes, as opposed to numerous programs to manage one-off functionality. This seemed like a golden opportunity for Kaddah, who altered his existing system to accommodate the private lending space.
“We were able to evolve an existing, complete system and specialize it and trim it down,” he said. “We trimmed it down to the private lending products and offered it out to the market. Lo and behold, we found out that there’s actually a big market for it and a big gap – the minute people knew we existed, we started getting flooded with people wanting to move to our system.”
This specialization, in the eyes of Kaddah and his team, allows Liquid Logics to better serve its clients.
“This allows us to focus on a highly specialized vertical and lets our workflow and management and servicing and loan origination expertise be concentrated on one area – that puts us at the top of the chart as the system of choice,” he said.
Kaddah added that starting his own business has been a difficult, yet ‘highly rewarding’ process. Part of Liquid Logics’ success, he said, stems from a ‘large company mindset’ despite its situation as a smaller unit.
“The number one challenge, I would say, is being able to adjust to thinking big and working small,” he said. “I’m used to global organizations and larger budgets and a larger staff, so the biggest challenge was how to apply the big enterprise capabilities and implement it in a small organization and adapt to that.”
Despite the challenges associated with thinking big while being small, Kaddah said this dichotomy has not stood in the way of Liquid Logics growing to its current size. With a development, quality control, and production environment successfully established, Kaddah said this infrastructure allows his team to provide 24/7 support.
It goes without saying that technology plays a substantial role in the day-to-day operations of Liquid Logics – everything from the complicated underwriting process to regulatory concerns are managed by a complex network of cables; looking forward, however, Kaddah said the ever-changing technological landscape will be the source of countless hours of navigation and thought.
Technology as a whole, he said, will give companies – not to mention individual agents in the field – insight as to where efforts need to be concentrated, where the most profitable markets are, and the ability to leverage those data points into a more robust business model. As technology’s role in real estate evolves, he added, Liquid Logics – not to mention his competitors – will all strive to stay on top of trends.
“I think the analytics and the intelligence that you can collect from transactions to fine-tune products and target specific markets is going to be paramount [moving forward,]” he said. “Today, everybody is making a lot of money and they look at it from that perspective, as a take-all. However, when the market turns, or the market not necessarily turns, but saturates, it’ll be necessary for everybody to understand different pockets. After all, there’s no such thing as a national market.”
Understanding the different facets of not only real estate, but technology, will be an important attribute of Liquid Logics moving forward, Sam said. One area specifically where massive changes are occurring, he added, is the way in which lenders are interacting with technology ‘in the field.’
Sam said Liquid Logics is planning on ‘going 100 percent mobile in our application.’ When origination-related software began populating the offices of mortgage professionals in the 1980s, the thought of taking that software ‘to go’ seemed ludicrous. As agents transfer different elements to mobile devices, however, office-bound PCs begin collecting dust.
“We are going into a kind of comprehensive collaboration approach,” he said. “This means that all parties and their [handheld devices] can participate in the same loan, the same record, and have everything transparent to everyone involved.”
Paired with the mobile phone revolution is a substantial industry interest in automation. Some professionals view automated elements as a boon to their bottom line – heavily incorporating them into software – while others take a more Luddite approach, cautioning against the potential loss of jobs associated with automated processes. To Kaddah, automation is a ‘double-edged sword.’
“There’s nothing new under the sun,” he said. “That has been the issue with automations forever. People have their own misconceptions of what an [automation] is. Those who think automation is a bad thing, think you’ll produce bad widgets. Those who think automation is a good thing, think your productivity, your capacity, and your top and bottom line will be directly affected; you’ll get higher profits at lower costs and increase your capacity.”
Although he added that automation can positively impact a business, he said that companies large and small should be cautious about over-reliance on this facet of technology. These concerns take a back seat, however, when the economy takes a turn for the worst. Kaddah said Liquid Logics has the tools necessary to thrive during less-than-handsome monetary conditions, but added that the economy – like automation – can be fraught with misconception.
“Do I believe that we are coming into a downturn? The economy is cyclical. That’s the nature of the economy and natural things, so things will happen regardless,” Sam said. “And it’s also affected greatly by politics, not everything under our control… so when the economic downturn comes, if it comes, we are positioned to manage both ends of that equation where nobody else does. I think we will be positioned neatly to be able to transition these assets and manage them separately in our system.”
With all of these concepts – automation, technology, and the market – swimming around in Sam’s head, one could reasonably assume that any work-life balance is nonexistent. This is not the case, however, as Sam said this phrase is a bit of a misnomer.
“I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as work-life balance. It implies that work is a burden,” he said. “It implies work is something that I have to do so I can live. If you enjoy what you do and you value every part of your life, whether it’s work or whether it’s your son calling you, it doesn’t matter. I will stop any meeting at any moment when I get a call from my son and talk to him.”
On the off chance Sam has free time, he said that he is no stranger to a racquetball court. Just as important to him is mental acuity; a simple daily act helps him clear his mind.
“Every day I take a minute, open my garage door, walk outside, and take a deep breath of that fresh morning air first thing in the morning,” he said. “Those are the most precious moments, where you can enjoy everything by just closing your eyes. And I do that religiously, every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s snowing or if it’s one hundred degrees out. It’s worth it just to enjoy that early morning feeling before heading out for my day.”
For more information about Liquid Logics, visit https://liquidlogics.com/
