I’m Shawn Williams

Engage with Shawn

Shawn’s Long Bio

Shawn Williams can’t share the story without choking up.

Sitting silently, 50 web meeting attendees wait eagerly for Williams – owner of Fortis Mortgage – to finish a story he simply calls “The Client.”

He fights off the emotions trying to overtake him in the moment and continues.

The attendees soon discover: The story is well worth the wait.

It begins with Williams’s client - “The Client” - desiring to change his life after being caught up in the revolving door of the prison system.

It ends years later with this same client checking himself out of the hospital – against doctor’s orders and with stitches still in his stomach - determinedly signing a contract on his first-ever home.

For the first time ever, Thanksgiving and Christmas will be at “The Client’s” home.

By this point in the story, the Fortis Mortgage founder isn’t the only person tearing up.

“This,” Williams says, “is why Fortis Mortgage exists.”

Williams played college basketball for two years, one at Shenandoah University and one at George Mason University.

After two years of college basketball, Williams focused on completing his communications degree, finishing up his course work by doing a summer abroad in Spain.

“I was one of 25,000 students from all over the world doing this summer study abroad,” Williams said of his summer at University of Madrid. “I met some really good friends, and I ended my college with a bang.”

BEFORE FORTIS

Even before founding Fortis in 2018, Williams found immediate success in the business world.

While still a student at George Mason University, Williams began his professional career as an employee at National Public Radio (NPR). During this time, he also began his relationship with the woman who would become his wife.

From NPR, Williams took a sales job with a telecommunications start-up called PaeTec Communications.

“That was my first sales job,” Williams revealed. “We didn’t have an office. Our office furniture was being delivered. We were in an empty room with a cordless phone. We passed the cordless phone around and made cold calls. That was our training.

“We went from zero dollars in sales to one million dollars a month in revenue (over a period of time). In my region where I worked, I was always in the top 10. In my branch, I was always in the top three.”

Having proven himself in sales, Williams then went to work for Verizon corporate. After Verizon, he sold insurance. And while he had found success, Williams still hadn’t found his life’s calling.

After his grandmother passed in 2005 – an emotionally difficult and pivotal point in his life – his closest childhood friend convinced him to transition into the mortgage industry.

“He and I would talk a lot as I was grieving over my grandmother,” Williams said. “He said, ‘You know I would love it if you came and worked with me.’

“He was like, ‘Man, this is perfect for you. Remember growing up how you used to preach how Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about saving the community? This is your opportunity to do that. We help people build wealth through homeownership, and they pay us to do it.’ I was like, ‘Let’s do it! When do I start?’”

Almost instantly, Williams knew this was the industry for him.

“Before this, no one ever sent me a thank-you card or told me how I changed their lives,” Williams said. “While I honestly feel like insurance was the most important product I've ever sold, you don’t know you need insurance or care about it until someone dies. You don’t think about it while you’re living. It seemed thankless.

“Even while I was falling in love with the mortgage field, I was starting to get phone calls from people saying I changed the trajectory of their lives and thank-you cards from people.

“Helping people who felt like something was out of reach and making it very attainable to achieve that goal: That’s what made me fall in love with it. It’s the people.”

BUILDING FORTIS

As Williams continued to reach new heights in the mortgage industry, starting his own company just started to make more sense.

“What led me to the entrepreneurial thing and Fortis Mortgage was just climbing the ladder,” Williams recalled, “going from being a loan officer to a team leader to a branch manager to a district manager to an executive vice-president and head of production.”

In those spaces, Williams also had some challenging experiences. Those experiences fueled the desire to eventually be his own boss.

After a host of family meetings, he went with the name Fortis.

“My kids would write all these far-fetched names on the wall,” Williams said, laughing. “My mother-in-law came up with the name Fortress. Fortis, the Latin derivative, means strong. Fortis was the insurance company I worked for, and I just don’t believe in coincidences. I said, ‘You know what, this company is going to be named Fortis Mortgage.’”

That was three years ago.

Williams knows it was the right decision.

“I’ve never been more free in my life,” he said. “I’ve always been entrepreneurial and been in leadership and called the shots. But this right here, it’s like watching one of my kids grow up. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s not easy, but it’s so challenging that it’s worth fighting for. I get to set the standard of the company.”

LEAVING A LEGACY

His three life goals have always been clear.

The first, and most important, is to make his mother proud.

“She birthed me in her early 20s as a single parent, and I never heard her complain,” Williams said. “I don’t even know if she knows, but watching her taught me the art of problem-solving, having great manners, and having respect for others. She sacrificed a great bit of her life to raise me. I watched her compete in the workplace and crush it. She was relentless about education, and performance was non-negotiable. She allowed me to try any and all extracurricular activities and made sure I was always on time. She never missed a game or event.

“I always felt like she believed in me, and I never felt like a burden. For that, I am eternally grateful… Why wouldn’t I want to make my hero proud?”

Making his community proud is also important to Williams.

And the Fortis Mortgage founder wants to use his platform to reimagine the conversation around race.

“The third thing was to break down stereotypes,” Williams said. “I wanted to knock down every single stereotype and show people that Black people were supposed to be there (in business), and that we were good people. That became part of my passion for the industry: to show people I belong.”

Not only is Williams impacting the trajectory of other families like in his story “The Client,” part of the legacy of Fortis Mortgage will be changing the trajectory of his own family.

“I decided I could go ‘all in’ on Fortis when my daughter said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy. When you get older, I’m just going to take over the company anyway,’” Williams recalled. “That just did it for me. That’s when I said, ‘There’s no way that I’m not doing this.’”