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NACUSO Spotlight on Brad Crandall, CEO of The Servion Group

Last month a CU Times article featured the rebrand of CU Mortgage Services to The Servion Group. Their story is the kind we cherish and love to celebrate. Beginning with 3 credit unions working together to help their members. That’s cooperation among cooperatives at its best. Here’s the rest of the story. Enjoy!

PART ONE: Life Story and Experiences

What’s your current position and can you give me a brief overview of what it is you do in your work?

I’m the President and CEO of The Servion Group. Honestly, though, I always tell my employees that I’d drop all titles if I could. I’m a basketball coach outside of the office; I look at myself as a coach when I am at the office.

We focus on relationships rather than on transactions at Servion. In line with that, we’ve developed a language that supports our culture. We talk about “hitting the bullseye,” which is our way of visualizing of the different ways we want to add value for our partners.

We also talk about service in layers of the bullseye. Availability, accuracy, and partnership are the outer rings. You need to be able to hit them if you want to hit the bullseye. We hit our bullseye when we have earned our partners’ trust through availability and accuracy, and thereby become their advisor on the road to success.

As the coach of the Servion team, my day to day is about leading us to hit the bullseye for every credit union we serve.

What would you say most motivates you to do what you do? What are you most excited or passionate about?

I’m fortunate, when you asked me what I do day to day, you might as well have asked what I am passionate about. When I get done leading our staff townhalls or with an ideation meeting, I could run laps around the building.

One thing in particular that energizes me is innovation. The Servion Group came from an idea first drawn-up on the back of a napkin. That origin story is very much in line with my leadership style. If someone on our staff has an idea for a great solution – one that can profitably deliver the benefits of scale to our partners – I get excited about empowering them to go make it a reality. In fact, many of our services today came from staff pitching ways we could solve a pain point for our partners. Recent examples are our correspondent and wholesale mortgage channels, or our mortgage quality control service.

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