An Interview with NADCO’s newest board member: Danny Mangum
Published on: October 22, 2025
[This interview has been edited for clarity and content.]
MWSBF: It’s the weekend after getting back from the annual NADCO (National Association of Development Companies) Fall Conference. You were officially made a member of the NADCO board of directors. First, congratulations. Talk to me a little bit about what this new position means, why you chose to run, and even what it means for Mountain West.
DANNY: NADCO is the trade association for certified development companies and other lenders. It’s a great organization and conference because you have representatives from all over the country.
You also have a vast array of lenders participating. Some have large portfolios, process significant loan volume, and cover multiple states, while others are one or two-person shops that cover specific markets. To have a trade organization that can pull together such a diverse group and collaborate on best practices where everyone has the same goal: doing what’s best for the small business owner. It’s a pretty unique thing.
I think that’s my favorite thing about the NADCO organization: it’s a bunch of salt-of-the-earth bleeding heart type people. It’s not people who are in it for the money by any means. If money were our main motivation, we’d probably be doing something else.
MWSBF: Mountain West has had a long history of having its leadership team as NADCO board members.
DANNY: Yes – virtually continuous. I don’t know the specifics of when NADCO was created, but I bet you’ve got a circumstance where a member of Mountain West Small Business Finance has been on the board for about 95 percent of its existence.
MWSBF: Why do you think that is?
DANNY: I think it stems back to how Mountain West started. Mountain West was founded by educators, and felt like if you find something good, you need to share it. So, when they stumbled upon a product as good as the 504, they felt the responsibility to educate as many people as possible, and participation in NADCO was just one of those vehicles.
As far as my involvement in NADCO, I just wanted to be part of it. I had the opportunity to see Scott Davis, Steve Suite, John Evans, and Mike Vanchiere be part of an organization that just goes around doing good. I’ve been on various panels and hosted live trainings over the years. NADCO is just full of great people to be with, exchange ideas with, and help more people understand the unique value of the SBA 504 program.
MWSBF: So, you’ve got this new board position, but we’re also approaching a transitional period for Mountain West, where shortly Spencer Davis will take over as the new CEO, and you will be President and COO. What changes should we expect with this transition?
DANNY: First, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my appreciation for John and the stabilizing presence he has been over the past few years as Mountain West’s CEO.
I’m proud of what we accomplished and weathered as a leadership team–because there were some pretty monumental times: COVID, the CARES Act, PPP Loans, and expansion into other states.
Scott and Steve built such a solid foundation, John built on that and – like I said – helped provide a stabilizing influence through a lot of what we were dealing with, but also, because of Spencer being the Senior Lending Officer and me serving as COO through all of it, this next phase is going to continue to build on the momentum and culture we already have.
MWSBF: Okay, before we get more into that, I’d like to go back a little and talk about your Mountain West journey. You joined MWSBF 15 years ago and started as a loan officer, correct?
DANNY: I actually started as a credit analyst. Before joining MWSBF, I was a retention loan officer at Zions Bank in their National Real Estate group. It was my job to make sure that we kept loans on the books.
MWSBF: How long were you at Zions?
DANNY: I started as a credit analyst in 2008, right before the great recession, just underwriting lots and lots of deals.
MWSBF: How many is “lots and lots?”
DANNY: Several deals a day while I was there. So, we would do everything from one-off transactions where we would purchase one loan from another bank, or we’d originate a loan in-house, or we’d also buy large-scale pools of loans…any given day was different. One day, it would be one or two, or by the end of another day, I could have analyzed 10 to 12 loans.
It was just a very high-paced, fast environment while we were growing–eventually becoming a $5 billion national portfolio.
So, I was a credit analyst there. I spent some time in the servicing department, and then also in problem loans, which was a great experience in hindsight, though at the time fairly heart-wrenching given people’s struggles.
You know, when the Great Recession hit, I really got a crash course in all things SBA loans and credit.
MWSBF: Is that what you wanted to do?
DANNY: No, I always thought I’d be a baseball player-fireman-lawyer. [laughs]
MWSBF: I had heard that. So you graduated in economics from the University of Utah and–
DANNY: …thought I was headed to law school. I’d taken the LSAT and was planning on going to law school. My father was an attorney, and I was working at his law firm. So before heading off to law school, my dad recommended that I take a different job at the firm to get some more experience, to see what it was like.
And just a couple of weeks into that job, I knew that the law was not for me. It was all research, all writing. I remember going into my dad’s office – he was a litigator – and I asked how long I would be doing all this boring research stuff: highlighting, editing, redacting, before I got to stand up in court.
“Oh, five to seven years after law school,” he told me, and I was out.
That’s when I went on a journey to figure out what I was going to do and ended up talking to my father-in-law, and he said, You can go to lunch with one of my friends. He’s a banker. He might have some ideas for you. I went to that lunch, and that banker was Peter Morgan, who was an executive vice president of Zions Bank. And the rest is kind of history.
This is all a long way to say that I did not originally come over as a loan officer to MWSBF. I was asked by Scott to come over and be a credit analyst and to instill a credit culture at Mountain West. Because at the time, SBA only required a three or four-page credit presentation, but they were increasing their credit standards to be more of a full-fledged 16+ page credit memo that went over balance sheet, income statement analysis, all the things.
The idea was that I would come over, read over everyone’s credit memos, and then make suggestions on what they should do to improve their underwriting going forward.
MWSBF: So, you’re 20-something years old coming in to tell people who were decades your senior in age and experience how to do their jobs?
DANNY: Yeah… I was probably 25 years old, and all these other legends of 504 had been there for decades. I would read their credit memos and get back to them promptly with my suggestions because that’s what we did at Zions.
But [at MWSBF] they were not accustomed to receiving suggestions. [Laughs] I would say something like, “Hey, you know, I think you could spend some more time talking about this debt service coverage ratio, and do you realize that these people aren’t showing the ability to make their payments right off? I think we could work on some projections, provide some more feasibility analysis, etc.”
It didn’t go over great, and I was probably way too blunt [laughs]. In fact, one of the senior loan officers took one look at a credit memo that I had sent to him, all marked up, and he never sent me another one. It didn’t take long for us to realize that the credit analyst position was not going to work.
MWSBF: Then what did they decide to do with you?
DANNY: They decided to pair me with Judd [Blakesley] to cover the northern Utah market. Judd had a lot more eligibility and SOP experience than me, but not as much credit experience. And I had all this credit experience, but not much eligibility or SOP experience. So, put us together, and you had one fine loan officer.
MWSBF: Is this around the same time period where Judd talks about you collaborating on the Fat Boy Ice Cream deal?
DANNY: Yes! Judd was driving up to Logan two-ish times a week from Salt Lake, and he would go up and do sales visits. He’d take people to lunch, he’d visit with borrowers, he’d create these awesome relationships, and he would call me a couple of times throughout the day or email me and send me these loans that he had dug up from essentially canvassing Cache Valley.
I was used to working in a high-paced credit environment, so by the time he would get back in town from driving in Logan, I’d have the loan underwritten. It was a pretty symbiotic relationship where he was the sales arm, the eligibility arm, and then I just underwrote and structured everything.
I think about the Andy Bernard quote, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” Those were absolutely the good old days. It was capitalizing on what I did best and what Judd did best. We probably provided some of the best customer service of our careers, because you essentially had a two-headed monster.
MWSBF: Do you think that relationship is what led to how you eventually decided to restructure Mountain West and have loan officers focusing on relationships and the processing and underwriting staff churning out the loans?
DANNY: It was definitely the genesis for things. I would say that one of my proudest moments in Mountain West management is putting together and collaborating to develop our pool system.
MWSBF: Yes, I know you just did a panel at NADCO that talked about your operational system. Talk a little bit about that.
DANNY: Our loan officers oversee business development, relationships, and gathering an initial package. They then send those loan requests into our pool, which is made up of loan origination specialists and underwriters. It allows people to capitalize on what they’re best at…but also assures that all loan requests are getting timely attention.
Now we’ve developed a system where loan officers can be out working on building these relationships, educating on the 504, and getting together with borrowers, all while their loans are being tended to by real horsepower in the back office.
MWSBF: Did you always work in tandem with Judd before becoming COO?
DANNY: No, after some time, it didn’t make sense anymore. Judd had learned credit, and I had learned eligibility and watched Judd and Keler [Soffe] and the fun they had – working with these lenders who were their friends. And eventually, I started working on my own deals. They split us up to accommodate the demand, and I became a loan officer. It was about this time that I saw a succession plan opportunity, and in 2012, I started an Executive Master’s program at Utah State to get some more training for what I was hoping would be a leadership role for Mountain West.
MWSBF: Before we close, I’d like to hear what you are enjoying most about your job now. Because you made the transition to Chief Operating Officer when John was made CEO.
DANNY: I really enjoy that my job is such a mix. One day, it’s a strategic planning session on how we can grow in Colorado, and then the next day it’s reading about a small donut shop that’s trying to open in Central Utah or talking to our benefits provider on how we can better take care of our own employees. It’s just such a mix every single day. There’s no monotony to my week.
But the best part of my job is hanging out with our team. And by team, I mean every single employee at Mountain West (whom I refer to as MWSBF’ers): whether that be time with our leadership team or admins in our company.
When I was a loan officer, I spent so much time engaging with people outside of the company. It was primarily just me and Michele [Cline], figuring things out together. So, my favorite part now is just getting to know the full Mountain West team better. Getting to engage directly with different departments that I had no experience with before, whether that be servicing, closing, or administration, just spending time with a team that cares for each other, and then continuing to cultivate a culture where we do care for each other has been incredible. And then devising plans with Spencer on how we can grow this thing to go and do even bigger and better things. It’s fun and it’s engaging every day.
And the other part that stands out is going through all the credit memos.
MWSBF: You must really like credit. [laughs]
DANNY: Yeah, I guess it’s full circle [chuckles]. I read essentially every credit memo that rolls through the company. And I get to see the immense impact that our little band of 40-plus employees is having on the intermountain region: helping facilitate small business owners’ hopes and dreams. It’s incredible. I get to see and hear firsthand the impact our company is having on people’s dreams and livelihoods. It’s ultimately about the people. The best thing about my job is the people.