You might call it the second coming of Patrick S. Flood.

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Joey Ivansco/AJC (ENLARGE)

Patrick Flood inside the cubicle that serves as his office at Covenant Mortgage Corp. He has 35 employees, including his wife, Lisa.

Bloomberg News / 2005 photo (ENLARGE)

Patrick Flood (center), then-chairman and CEO of HomeBanc, rings the New York Stock Exchange's closing bell on Aug. 15, 2005.

Joey Ivansco/AJC (ENLARGE)

'I don't ever shun responsibility for anything I've ever been involved in,' says former HomeBanc CEO Patrick Flood.

PATRICK FLOOD ON . . . Why he decided to go back into the mortgage business: Lenders and brokers are retreating from the market, which leaves room for experienced hands to grow their business in lean times and be ready when the market rebounds. Why he started small: To be as close to coaching employees and working with customers as possible, something he couldn't do as CEO of HomeBanc after it reached a certain size. Whether his religious outlook and approach to business are genuine: "Being a Christian doesn't make me better. Being a Christian is an admission of a problem and that I also have a solution to that problem." THE PATRICK S. FLOOD FILE • Age: 46 • Hometown: Miami • Family: Married to Lisa for 24 years; one son • College: Graduated from Winthrop University in 1985 with a degree in communications. • Career: CEO of Covenant Mortgage Corp., the company he founded in September of last year; it has 35 employees. Spent 22 years with HomeBanc Mortgage Corp., which he worked for straight out of college. BUSINESS Latest Headlines: 401 (k) 'dippers' robbing future to pay now  Peachtree City Panasonic plant to cut 500 jobs  Down payment assistance program to end  H&M attracts three generations in suburbs  Former eBay exec joins Home Depot  • More business news • Business photo galleries

The once high-profile CEO of HomeBanc Mortgage Corp., known for his Christian faith-oriented management style, was fired last year from the company he had been a part of for 22 years, just months before it sought bankruptcy protection.

For some people, such a public end to a chapter of their professional life would have been enough to send them into semi-obscurity with their golden parachutes.

But holding on to the religious principles he said guided him through the events of last year, Flood, 46, has started a new company, Covenant Mortgage Corp.

The not-so-subtle biblical reference is intended to symbolize the compact between the borrower and the lender. In another sense, one that's not readily apparent, it's reflective of what Flood says is a recommitment to the aspects of mortgage banking he said drew him to the industry in the first place: working with and coaching people.

"I wanted to do something simple and something small," Flood said. "The last three or four years when I was at HomeBanc, I probably had the least amount of enjoyment because the company —its roots were very small — had gotten very big and then adding on to it when we had gone public."

Experts on executive leadership say making a comeback after a public fall isn't impossible, but it takes resiliency and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

They note Apple Inc.'s chief executive and co-founder Steve Jobs was ousted from the company in the 1980s after a power struggle, only to come back about a decade later. Winston Churchill, following a devastating defeat in the Battle of Gallipoli in World War I, was thought to be finished politically, but he became a legendary leader in World War II.

"Leaders tend to be resilient. It helps them cope with crisis and recover," said Ronald Humphrey, an associate professor of management at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Business. "When someone does suffer a big blow to their ego, often it causes them to go back to their core values and think about, 'Who am I? What is my real core value? How can I start my life over again in a way that's consistent with my core values?'"

Most leaders who make a successful comeback do so because they return to what it is they enjoy doing most in their professional lives, Humphrey said.

Back to basics

It's perhaps fitting then that Flood — a Miami native who aspired to be a professional baseball player (the pro scouts told him he'd make a great coach instead) — is starting small.

Gone is the 18-story, 390,000-square-foot Summit Boulevard glass office tower that had been his HomeBanc headquarters. In its stead, a 4,000-square-foot office on Northridge Road where his cubicle is situated near the reception area.

Sure, Covenant Mortgage, which opened Sept. 17 and employs 35, including his wife, Lisa, only closed about $13 million in mortgage loans in April, the fledgling company's best month to date.

By the end of this year, the goal is to be on pace for $250 million to $300 million in loans, he said.

It's a sharp difference from his days at HomeBanc, where at its zenith in 2005 it was closing $25 million in home loans a day with a head count that exceeded 1,100.

"I don't think there's any debate that these have been the worst six months in the mortgage industry, so some might say you couldn't have picked a worse time," Flood said during a wide-ranging interview in which he discussed his public rise and fall, the lessons learned from his years at HomeBanc and the role of faith in the workplace.

"Some might even say this proves you're not a good businessman. The way I think about it is all of the companies that are out there today, they're all going to be reducing or contracting their interest in the mortgage business because of the credit issues for an extended period of time, and it's not going away anytime soon."

Flood said this new start has also given him something that he hadn't felt from his professional endeavors in his last three years at HomeBanc: Fun.

Pink slips and gift cards

To drive home the point, he recounted a HomeBanc audit committee meeting that he said dragged on for six hours, prompting him to scribble on a pad to himself: "How on Earth did I wind up here?"

Though he said he recognized the importance of such meetings, his heart wasn't really there, Flood said.

"My schedule was filled with doing things that were incongruent with my first and greatest love, which was investing with people and encouraging them and enrolling them in the idea that they have something special to give to the world," he said. "I was sitting in a meeting for six hours close to accountants talking about issues that were necessary and important, but it wasn't really where my heart pounded, and I found myself estranged because of it."

But as he was becoming disengaged from some day-to-day aspects of the business, the company itself was unraveling. A mix of external forces, especially the market slowdown caused by the Federal Reserve's interest rate increases in 2004-2006, took their toll. HomeBanc was particularly sensitive to those increases because adjustable-rate mortgages were one of its most popular offerings.

At the same time, home buyers with bad credit who took subprime loans — which weren't a HomeBanc offering — began showing signs of strain. As their defaults rose, financial institutions got tight-fisted with buying and investing in the pools of mortgage loans HomeBanc and other loan originators were selling.

All the while, HomeBanc, which went public in 2004, was adding employees and boosting origination volume but posting loss after loss.

Seasoned veterans began to leave, particularly in Florida — which went through a red-hot housing craze — because they weren't able to offer some of the more creative loans available on the market. Though they were extremely risky for the lender and borrower, mortgage brokers wanted them because they brought in hefty commissions.

By January 2007, HomeBanc's board fired Flood; the company filed for bankruptcy in August of that year.

How much of the blame he deserves in HomeBanc's ultimate demise is clearly a wound that has yet to heal.

In the days immediately following the bankruptcy, public message boards were abuzz with former employees who blamed him, but just as many defended him.

A particular sore point was his $4.98 million exit package while HomeBanc employees received a $20 gift card to Publix that was funded by their own payroll contributions to an emergency fund.

He contends that he spent 22 years with the company so his severance package was hard-earned and noted HomeBanc still had $70 million in cash when he left. Had he not been fired, he would have stayed, he said.

"I don't ever shun responsibility for anything I've ever been involved in because I'm not perfect," Flood said. "For the people that experienced pain at the end, the idea that that didn't hurt me or concern me — of course it does if you care about people. But I also never claimed brilliance and did my very best.

"When I think about it, I don't ever control the outcome of things. I control how I participate and what motivates me."

True religion?

Flood said his reliance on his faith and his wife are what steered him through the months leading to and after his ouster. That orientation has been a key component of the Pat Flood public persona. Staff meetings were often started with prayers. It also was part of the discussion of several of his talks to business students at area colleges and executives.

He acknowledges detractors question his sincerity and whether the wearing of religion on his cuff-linked shirt sleeves was nothing more than a marketing gimmick.

His mantra at HomeBanc was that people came first, money second. Some employees who lost their jobs when the company filed for bankruptcy, however, felt betrayed. Flood was long gone with his millions, and the "company cares" catchphrase rang hollow at a workplace that had been ranked as one of Fortune magazine's 100 best.

But Flood, who is writing a book tentatively titled "Going Public" about publicly pronouncing faith in the workplace, said those who know him best — his wife, son and family and his closest friends — know his true motivation.

Those people "know all my imperfections but also know my heart was not negotiating," Flood said. "What I said publicly, we operated on privately."

While he said he wishes the HomeBanc story had turned out differently, he isn't haunted by the events.

"If the history books say I wasn't a very good CEO, I'm OK with that. I'm much more interested in someday, when I meet my Maker, what he thought about me," he said. "I don't think if you're a great CEO in man's eyes that in the meeting with the Maker he's going to be impressed. In fact, man's view of success and God's view of success are always diametrically opposed."