No, Mat Ishbia, Work From Home Doesn't Mean You're Average.

Mat Ishbia, CEO of United Shore Mortgage deserves a lot of credit for investing in Pontiac, a city in the wealthy county of Oakland, that was once home to the Pontiac Silverdome, home of the Detroit Lions. As a kid, my mom would take my brothers and me to McCourts Music on Saginaw Street for lessons amidst the boarded-up buildings. Once or twice I'd stop in Griffs Grill across the street and grab a burger and a coke.

And that was really all Pontiac had to offer at the time, outside of the occasional concert or weekend converted church nightclub that pulsed techno and hormonal 20-somethings into the late evening hours.

Ishbia had the vision to transform Pontiac and was committed to it. Years later United Shore Mortgage became a legitimate brokerage powerhouse, rivaling the other home lender in town, Dan Gilbert's Quicken Loans empire. The two Spartan alum titans of the 5-year arm industry were as acidic towards each other as when Michigan State would travel to their in-state Wolverine rival's Big House on a Saturday to declare who was the true "Little Brother".

The roof blew off the building for United Shore when in the Summer of 2021, during the pandemic, they went public, instantly catapulting Ishbia onto the Bloomberg billionaire index. Unlike others on the list, Mat was younger, with energetic vigor to juxtapose the stodgy perception of the lending business. His LinkedIn profile was sung with the praise of new associates excited to meet him and amazed at his down-to-earth accessibility.

Mat, for all intents and purposes, is a cool as fuck CEO.

That is until this morning.

The Wall Street Journal profiled Ishbia and his proclamation a year ago that WFH was indeed over and RTO was a mandate. As of this time last year, COVID numbers were considerably low, and pushback to pre-pandemic normalcy was on the agenda across every employer with empty office space. The warning that Omicron was coming fell on deaf ears, masks disappeared, and wouldn't you know it? By December of 2021, we were back to record levels of infections, breakthrough cases, and the disruption that came with a global pandemic that still threatens the health and the economy - from small businesses to enterprises.

The RTO mandate was Ishbia's prerogative. If he truly felt that his business could no longer survive on Zoom, Slack, Hangouts, Teams, or the myriad of other virtual productivity tools that enabled millions of Americans and publicly traded companies such as 3M, Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, SAP, and others to function without interruption, then he has the right as CEO to do it.

He also has the right to proclaim in the WSJ profile that, “If you want to work from home and just kind of exist...and just want to be average—there’s nothing wrong with that,” because according to Ishbia “That’s what a lot of people are.”

Approximately 500 "average" United Shore employees parted ways when the WFH mandate was made. To be honest, I don't know if they were average. I don't know if they were high achievers or low achievers, but I do think labeling employees who for a multitude of reasons decided that work from home was a better option than coming into an office every day, despite having the benefits of volleyball courts, hair salons and other enticing inspired by Meta "never leave the campus accompaniments", is a bit of a farce, don't you think? Had they just passed out United Shore branded N95s, maybe a few would have elected to stay.

Oh, and for as ass-backward as Facebook can be, Meta also allows their 60,000 employees to work from anywhere.

So if you made it this far, you know I take this personally. I started Telemetry in the middle of the pandemic two years ago. I have four full-time employees who live in Michigan, Alabama, and Colorado which I know is nothing but a blip to big employers. We provide communications strategy and brand journalism to Fortune 500s and startups alike in the United States, Japan, and Australia. We have over sixty freelance contributors to manage at any given time, working on deadlines to deliver volumes of articles. Our revenue has increased year over year by 2400% and growing.

We have never been in an office. We've never been together in one room, ever. We don't have a foosball table or a volleyball court. Our dogs come to work with us, we are hyper-organized and take advantage of every productivity tool that we can get our hands on.

We are anything but average, Mat. Let us know if you ever want to chat about it and I'll send you a Zoom link.