Wired For Passion and Tenacity

If you ask Tye Reidie — a Mortgage Origination Director for Canada ICI Calgary — what makes ICI work as a company, he sees a balance between corporate name recognition and your own personal persistence. “Your ability to deliver for your clients is your personal brand that you inherently developed over the years, but it’s also backed by the Canada ICI brand,” Tye explains. Those two elements work in tandem to get deals done — the Canada ICI brand gets you into the meeting, and your personal tenacity carries the deal across the finish line.

It’s a dynamic that is similar to the way individuals contribute to a team in the sports world. As a former member of the Canadian national badminton team, Tye understands that better than most. “You can certainly do what we do if you’re not an athlete, but I think it correlates that a lot of us played high-level sports,” he says. “When you stop playing sports, you have this void in your life of that commitment you had — working hard, setting goals, brushing the dust off when you lose, and figuring out how to keep going. For me, my career at ICI has filled that void.”

Tye also sees this culture of tenacity arise out of necessity among his colleagues at ICI. “In this industry, it takes many years of challenges to get to a point where you can look back and say you’re enjoying the fruits of all that hard work,” he says. “That’s tenacity, right? It’s about creating. It’s about never giving up.” In other words, if you don’t have that passion to keep pushing, the commercial mortgage industry might not be for you.

One thing that continues to impress Tye about working at ICI is how the company has gotten a bit younger in recent years, but hasn’t sacrificed that culture of tenacity one bit. “Our senior people stay motivated and committed to the company, but at the same time, having our younger people grow into relevant roles and push the company is crucial,” he explains.

According to Tye, Canada ICI does a great job of attracting the right people, but there’s also a significant element of ICI’s culture that molds those individuals into members of a team. “Our culture is defined. You either fit in it or you don’t,” he says. “Everyone is ultimately driven by their own success on the origination side, but as part of a team, and for the greater good. You see other people grinding and enjoying their success, and that breeds like-minded people who want to do the same.”