VIP Corporate

Born and raised in Colorado, I joined the Marines after high school, served in Desert Storm, and after my honorable discharge, moved to Arizona to begin the biggest adventure of my life: mortgages.

With more than two decades of mortgage experience under my belt, I always envisioned a place where people are the priority.

At VIP, our culture emphasizes unity and family. Here, everyone believes in making this company better because it’s OUR company. Our crew embraces the entrepreneurial freedom to be creative and successful, without having the liability of running a company. By providing an innovative organization that delivers the best origination platform and mortgage tools, we attract employees committed to learning, growing and always improving. We promote an attitude that encourages employee’s optimism and problem solving.

It is my personal goal to make the borrowing experience something customers want to tell their friends and family about. They do this because of the personal service VIP provides in making them feel like they mattered, because they do.

Mortgages are in my blood. Born into the business as the son of 35-year mortgage veteran Jack Teegardin, I am a passionate leader who thrives in management and identifying top contenders that are both compliant and ethical to add to our VIP family. I take great pride in ensuring our sales force can’t be beat. To me, product training, QC training and fraud training are basic foundational fundamentals of building a career-minded sales force.

Born and raised in beautiful Colorado, I earned my finance degree from Colorado State University in 1993, and moved to Arizona where I joined Waterfield Financial and grew my origination business into President Club status and closed the most units in Arizona as an originator thanks to our incredible builder process. Later, I took part in combining our resale and construction/builder platform and co-managed the Arizona region leading our company with the most closed units, volume and revenue as a branch for seven years. Our Arizona office become the largest and most profitable branch in the company. In 2007, I joined my lifelong friend Jay Barbour in starting VIP Mortgage.

I am originally from Michigan and received my bachelor’s degree in business administration from Oakland University and master’s in finance from Walsh College. I began my career with Comerica, holding various positions before rising to Vice President. After 15 years, I joined Ford Credit Industrial Bank for four years and in that time, formed the company’s Bank Credit Policy Manual and other bank policies; improved proprietary scorecards; and published reports covering the full credit life cycle. In 2010, I found myself diving back into the mortgage industry, this time, as Chief Risk Officer for one of the nation’s largest and most respected lenders. My responsibilities included identifying and mitigating all risk that could harm the company’s reputation and/or financial sustainability; ensuring that the company was continuously improving its key manufacturing processes, and overseeing compliance to state and federal regulations.

Since joining VIP, my priority is overseeing the successful implementation of all company strategic initiatives. I directly manage the strategic projects in varying degrees to ensure their success. This position is also responsible for continuous improvement, documentation and measurement of all operational process flows.

I joined VIP in 2009 as controller, and oversee the accounting and human resources departments. With nearly 20 years in this business, I have built my success in serving the internal customers at companies. I believe that efficient care of the employees affords them the opportunity to perform to the best of their abilities. My goal is to quickly and accurately help our employees, so that they can get back to what they do best – helping their customers. This philosophy particularly holds true at VIP where team building is a huge part of our customer service approach. We recognize that a team-oriented environment optimizes the overall success of our organization. While each employee serves a specific function, those functions serve our bigger picture – to be a leader in the mortgage industry with a commitment to excellence. We build a team and then the team builds the business.