Total Quality Lending Wins the Great Place To Work Certification

Total Quality Lending is Great Place To Work Certified, based on an anonymous survey of its employees. Two statements drew agreement from every employee who answered: that they can ask management any reasonable question and get a straight answer, and that they are given the resources and equipment to do their job.

How Great Place To Work certification works

Great Place To Work Certification is based on what employees report, not on what a company says about itself. Employees answer the Trust Index Survey anonymously. It has 60 statements rated on a five-point scale, plus two open-ended questions. The company also completes a questionnaire about its culture, called the Culture Brief.

To earn certification, roughly 7 out of 10 employees have to report a consistently positive experience at work. Great Place To Work sets strict rules for how the survey is distributed and how many employees must respond, so a company can't survey only the people it expects to be happy. Certification lasts 12 months. After that, the team takes the survey again.

That last rule is why we value it. Nobody at Total Quality Lending can buy this result or write it. The people doing the work have to give it to us again every year.

What the Total Quality Lending team said

The results on Total Quality Lending's Great Place To Work profile, updated September 2026, include two statements at 100%.

Every Total Quality Lending employee who answered said they can ask management any reasonable question and get a straight answer. Every one said they are given the resources and equipment to do their job.

Those are the two we'd point you to first. A straight answer and the right tools are what decide whether a new person learns the job or struggles through it. With 45 U.S. employees, that's also a statement about the people you'd work beside every day.

Why the survey matters if you're new to the industry

Most finance careers are closed to people without finance experience. The job asks for experience, and the experience only comes from the job.

If you're coming in from somewhere else, your first months are mostly questions. What does this guideline mean? Why did this file stall? What should I say to this client? In a place where the answers come back straight and the expectations are clear, you learn the work. In a place where they don't, you spend those months guessing.

The work itself is real. Total Quality Lending is a lender for real estate investors, and many of its files involve properties and income that other lenders won't take on. The culture doesn't make that work easier. It makes it possible to learn it without being left on your own.

The four F's behind the culture

Total Quality Lending builds its culture around four priorities: faith, family, fitness and finance. In the company's own description, faith keeps people grounded, family keeps them connected, fitness keeps them strong, and finance gives them the means to build a better future. You can read more on the mission and values page.

In practice, that shows up outside the office as much as in it. The team at the Carmel, Indiana headquarters holds an annual volleyball tournament, shows up dressed for Indy 500 weekend, and closes each year with a Christmas party. Top performers have been recognized with a private chef dinner.

Great Place To Work recognition before 2026

This isn't the first time the Total Quality Lending team has put the company on the list. Total Quality Lending was Great Place To Work Certified from April 2020 to April 2021. In 2023, Total Quality Lending ranked #13 on Fortune Best Workplaces in Real Estate and #45 on Fortune Best Small Workplaces.

What the survey keeps measuring is whether the people inside a company still trust the people running it. That's the same question every new hire is quietly asking.