They started this company, it seems, damn near overnight. Throw up a website, pay for a lot of glossy pr newswire pages (I hear they are running great discounts on their pricing now) and you're in business jack! Hey.. they "ARE" WHITE MALES. They can GET AWAY WITH THE DAMNDEST SHIT. If you're black you had better not try this shit.
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This video is of a mass layoff in the Florida Office. Wingspan is laying off in every single state they've ventured into. The company was poorly managed from the outset.
Steve Horne was the brains behind the organization but he failed by hiring cheap, unproven, untested 'executive staff' (Justin Belter, Jason Dickard, Melanie Pellegrino and others) who had NO Executive Experience. Justin Belter, to my understanding, had just left the National Guard. He came on to Wingspan Portfolio Advisors making a few bucks over minimum wage and suddenly, as Wingspan started to experience massive growth, Steven Horne started to pass out titles to everyone who happened to be a white male working at Wingspan at the time. Whether they had earned the title or not.
These guys jumped from $15 bucks an hour to overnight making $100,000 a year and with VP titles, etc. Justin Belter had several titles tossed on him in one year. He was a blonde, blue eyed white male and Steve Horne decided he was the one to meet with potential customers in an effort to try and secure business. He was quickly procuring contracts and didn't want to have a 'black face' as one of his 'executives'. He probably felt it would frighten away business. White guys prefer doing business (and awarding contracts) with other WHITE GUYS.
The crazy thing about working at Wingspan Portfolio Advisors at the time is that most of the African American employees, even those making $11 an hour, came into Wingspan from years of working in mortgage servicing at Bank of America and other mortgage companies. Yet they were reporting to white guys with NO mortgage experience who were making two to three times as much. These guys didn't know what the hell they were doing. Melanie Pellegrino didn't know what the hell she was doing either. I remember a Bank of America exec stating as much to a few of us.
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Two years after holding a ribbon-cutting at its office in Melbourne, Wingspan Portfolio Advisors has told employees it will be closing the operation.
MELBOURNE – Two years after holding a ribbon-cutting at its office on Babcock Street in Melbourne, Wingspan Portfolio Advisors has told employees it will be closing the operation on June 30, according to a letter to workers obtained by FLORIDA TODAY.
The closing will leave about 150 people without jobs. When Wingspan acquired the mortgage servicing operation from JPMorgan Chase in February 2013 it had 400 employees.
The Dallas-based Wingspan Portfolio Advisors is a diversified mortgage servicing company founded in 2008 that partners with banks, investors, mortgage insurers, attorneys and real estate agents throughout the U.S. No one from the Dallas headquarters immediately returned a call for comment.
The company's specialty is "turning non-performing loans" into "re-performing assets," that is taking distressed properties and making them profitable again by re-working the terms of the loan. Local Wingspan workers had been assigned a contract from JPMorgan Chase to work on loan modifications.
Prior to this week, there was no notice of the layoffs from the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) which typically requires most businesses with 100 or more employees to provide 60-day advance of a facility closing or mass layoff.
But in a letter to workers, Wingspan said JP Morgan Chase ended its contract for the loan modification work, necessitating the closure of the local operation.
"Wingspan's leadership reasonably believed until June 10, 2015 that a better outcome was possible, which providing notice of the impending possibility of a closure would have doomed," Terry Mitchell, vice president of human resources at Wingspan wrote in a letter that was distributed to employees on Wednesday.
Workers who spoke with FLORIDA TODAY this week said they were called together for a meeting Wednesday afternoon and told the operation would be shutting down on June 30.
Wingspan Portfolio Advisors Blogspot