Bert Hughes arrived at Boone Central Title expecting nothing more than a job. Thirty-two years later, he leads a company whose team has earned as much as 80 percent of its local market share, a result he attributes to the culture they have built together.

The yoga session had barely begun when the goats took over.

In a field outside Columbia, Missouri, employees from one of the busiest title companies in the state were trying to follow an instructor through their poses. The sun was overhead, the grass brushed against their ankles, and any hope of calm concentration disappeared the moment a goat climbed onto someone’s back.

Another tugged at a loose shirt. One wandered directly through the group, while another let out a perfectly timed yell that sent everyone into laughter. People wobbled, fell out of position and tried to regain their balance as the goats moved among them with absolutely no concern for personal space or proper yoga technique.

For Bert Hughes, CEO and Mary Jo Edmiston, COO, it was one of the best company outings Boone Central Title has ever had, not simply because it was funny, but because it accomplished something no ordinary meeting ever could. For an afternoon, job titles disappeared. People let down their guard, laughed at themselves and saw one another differently. They returned to work knowing a little more about the people sitting beside them and feeling a little more connected to the company they were building together.

The experience also reflected something deeper about the culture Boone Central’s team was creating together. Title companies operate in a business built on precision, process and practices that have often been followed the same way for generations. That discipline matters, but it can also make it easy to assume that the way something has always been done is the way it must continue to be done. Sometimes it takes standing in a field with a goat on your back to remember that there may be another way.

Bert wanted Boone Central to be a place where people were willing to look beyond the obvious, try ideas that initially sounded a little strange and discover better ways to work together. He wanted employees to know who they were working beside, why they were there and what they were trying to build. He also wanted them to have fun doing it.

Over time, that willingness to think differently turned an ordinary title company into a place employees wanted to join, clients wanted to know and people throughout Columbia could recognize before ever walking through the door. It is also a lesson for the title industry itself: when you give people permission to step outside the familiar, you may build more than a stronger team. You may begin to see new possibilities in a business that has been doing things the same way for a very long time.

Learning To Bring Out The Good

Bert grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and attended a small private school with about 40 people in his graduating class. Many remain part of his life because Bert is often the person who reaches out first and keeps the connection alive.

His mother was a music teacher who introduced him to theater in elementary and junior high. Bert loved football and basketball and thought of himself as an athlete, although he readily admits he was an average one. Theater gave him something sports did not. It taught him to stand in front of people with confidence and trust that he had something worth saying.

His father shaped him in a different way. A hardworking man from a small town in southeast Alabama, he taught Bert to assume there is good in every person and to help bring it out. He taught him to be a Southern gentleman, which meant opening doors, standing when a woman approached or left the table and treating people with respect.  In addition, his father shared his love of the outdoors and nature conservation; so you can often find Bert in the woods or on the water on the weekends.  Most of all, he showed Bert what a strong work ethic looked like.

Bert received a direct lesson in that work ethic after his sophomore year of college, when his grades fell short of expectations. His father brought him home and told him to find a job. Knowing the hot summers in Houston, TX, Bert looked for a job indoors and took a position selling men’s shoes at Dillard’s. He spent the summer working alongside two career salesmen in the men’s suit department, Giovanni Casanova and Booker Washington.

The experience became an education in reading customers, caring for people and enjoying himself while still taking the work seriously. He returned to school, improved his grades and graduated in 1994.

At the time, the plan seemed clear. Bert and his future wife, Kim, expected to live and work in Birmingham, Alabama. He had already asked her parents for permission to marry her, though Kim did not know it yet. Her family had a work emergency at their insurance agency so Kim needed to return to Columbia, Missouri to help out and Bert chose to go with her.

He needed a job quickly. He was pointed towards Boone Central Title, which had one opening available. Bert put on the suit he had purchased with his Dillard’s discount and interviewed to become the company courier.

Learning The Business One Seat At A Time

Bert spent a little over a year driving the courier route before moving into research. Like most people entering the industry, he had no idea what a title search was. He learned the details, from researching the records to assembling the information needed for a title commitment from several seasoned BCT staff members that are still part of the team today. The knowledge and work gave him a solid understanding of the process behind the business, but Bert has always been a people person. When an opportunity opened on the closing and escrow side, he moved into it.

By working his way through the company, Bert came to understand not only how each job was done, but how each person contributed to the whole. That perspective became especially important when Boone Central’s manager died unexpectedly from a heart attack. Bert, Karen Brown and Mary Jo Edmiston were suddenly pushed into leadership roles. They knew how to handle the daily work; running the business was another matter.

They learned together, making decisions, solving problems and gradually taking greater responsibility for the company’s future. Boone Central had been formed through a partnership between two companies, which meant opportunities for ownership occasionally became available as shareholders retired or chose a different direction. Bert had always been interested in owning part of the company, and he made that interest known. When an opportunity finally opened, he was ready to take it.

Becoming an owner expanded the way Bert thought about Boone Central. Rather than focusing only on keeping the business running, he could work with Karen, Mary Jo, and the entire team to shape what it might become. Together, they prioritized bringing talented people into the company, including candidates who were already working for competitors. Conversations with employees at several other title companies eventually created an opportunity to hire three people at once. Bert initially knew he wanted two of them. The third worked in business development, a role he did not fully understand because almost no one in the industry was thinking about business development at the time.

Until then, Boone Central had grown largely by doing the work well. Bert and his team focused on conducting smooth closings, handling money carefully, researching tract books and taking care of the people who walked through the door. The assumption was that if they provided a good experience, clients would return and tell others. There was no dedicated business development or marketing professional intentionally building relationships in the market, asking for business or making sure Boone Central remained part of the conversation.

So Bert asked what this “third” person actually did.

The answer changed how Boone Central’s leadership team viewed the business. Business development meant spending time with real estate agents and lenders, learning what they needed, explaining the value Boone Central could provide and giving them reasons to choose the company for their next transaction. That employee did not research titles, prepare files or conduct closings; they built the relationships that caused those files and closings to arrive in the first place. Bert introduced the concept to the company, and employees across Boone Central embraced it. Now marketing is a part of the team’s daily routine.

For Bert, it was a lightbulb moment. Boone Central was not only in the business of researching property records, conducting closings and handling money. It was also in the business of earning attention, building trust and asking people to choose them. In many ways, it brought him back to that summer selling shoes at Dillard’s. You could offer a great product and take wonderful care of a customer, but first, you had to create the opportunity to serve them.

Bert found the idea interesting, but the other two candidates made the decision simpler. If she did not come, neither would they. He hired all three. She remains with Boone Central today, and Bert still jokingly calls her the best person he never intended to hire. What began as a condition of bringing new employees aboard became one of the most important decisions he made as a new owner.

Making Room For Culture

Bert credits an early spark to David Townsend, who was then leading Agents National Title in Columbia. David mentioned that his company held employee “huddles,” a term Bert had never heard used that way before.

When Bert asked what a huddle was, David explained that it was really quite simple. Employees would get out of the office and spend time together, not to discuss files, numbers or problems, but simply to have fun and get to know one another outside of work.

Bert immediately saw the value in the idea, and Boone Central’s employees made it meaningful through their participation. If they were going to rely on one another during busy and stressful days, they needed opportunities to build relationships when no transaction demanded their attention. The company began holding quarterly huddles to create that time together.

One of the first took place at a local HyVee grocery store, which had a meeting room and grill above its restaurant. Each employee selected a steak from the meat counter, then carried it upstairs, where a HyVee employee taught the group how to prepare each cut properly.

Bert could have stopped there and called it a pleasant company dinner. Instead, he brought along a box of conversation cards his family sometimes used around the dinner table. Each card asked a question that the person drawing it had to answer. The questions were not profound, but they did something important. Coworkers who had spent years sharing an office began sharing stories about themselves. Soon the room was full of laughter, and everyone was seeing a different side of the people they worked with every day.

Participation did not come naturally at first, and for a while Bert made attendance mandatory unless someone had a doctor’s excuse. Today, people ask when the next huddle will happen.

At roughly the same time, Bert noticed another problem. The company did not hold regular meetings. In fact, it did not really meet at all. If culture requires communication, Boone Central needed both a reason and a place to gather.

Boone Central began holding monthly meetings in the basement, where employees sat among old file cabinets because there was nowhere else large enough. The cabinets were later removed, and the space became a conference room that can now seat about 35 people. The team named it Boone Central Title University, or BCTU.

That room became the physical home of the culture. Boone Central uses it for education, client events, office meetings and small group conversations. For the first time, everyone had a place to talk and build ideas together.

Giving The Work A Theme

As the meetings and huddles developed, Boone Central began creating an annual theme around its goals. The practice has continued for roughly 15 years, and the themes have ranged from thoughtful to wonderfully theatrical.

One early theme played on the company’s initials with the words Bold, Culture and Trusted. The company spent two years studying the service principles of the Ritz Carlton because there was too much useful material to squeeze into one. During a rebuilding year, the theme was Renaissance, complete with a kickoff celebration where Bert and his operations team dressed for the period. He read seven knightly virtues from a scroll. Another year focused on simply becoming better than the year before. The current theme, BCT Easy, began with employees in chains and backward hats and they transformed into a rap star and performed a rap song.

Each theme gives the company a memorable way to talk about where it is going. To keep the ideas from becoming a management exercise handed down from above, Boone Central formed an operations team that began developing the themes as a group. Bert’s role shifted toward listening, collaborating and giving team members room to turn their ideas into shared experiences.

The same thinking changed how Boone Central approached goals. The company already had an annual business target with employee bonuses attached, and the team expanded the plan to include personal growth. Employees began setting individual goals and meeting in small support groups to help one another reach them. The shared belief was straightforward: when people supported one another’s growth, the company’s business goals became easier to achieve.

At first, the program centered on a checklist designed to move employees beyond their usual roles and give them a broader view of the company. To complete it, they might spend a few hours working at the front desk, shadow someone in another department, attend real estate events or take a lender to lunch. The checklist also included personal health goals, supported by a company benefit and accountability within their small groups. Everyone’s progress was displayed during office meetings, making each person’s commitments visible to the entire team.

Fun helps tie it all together. Boone Central’s huddles have included capture the flag, themed painting events, karaoke and the now-famous goat yoga session. During one karaoke contest, employees were placed into random groups and assigned songs. A group made up mostly of men drew Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” quickly assembled their best makeshift Dolly Parton costumes and easily won the competition. The team still remembers the laughter as one of its best shared moments—a point when employees stopped merely participating and began creating the culture together.

Then there were the Protectables.

After Boone Central was nominated for best business in Columbia, the team faced an unusual challenge: How could a title company convince an entire city to vote for it? Inspired by the movie The Incredibles, they transformed themselves into the Protectables, created characters and wrote a skit explaining title insurance. Bert and other employees dressed in costume for a tour by local business leaders, and the team even partnered with a restaurant to create pizzas inspired by the different characters.

They poured themselves into the campaign, bringing more creativity and enthusiasm than most people would ever expect from a title company. In the end, they earned second place, finishing behind Logboat Brewing Company, which had recently opened in town. Bert remains convinced that no other business put more effort into the competition, but he also recognizes the difficult matchup. In a citywide popularity contest between a title company and a new local brewery, the brewery is probably going to have an edge.

But the experience was never really defined by where Boone Central finished. The employees had created something together, committed fully to the idea and made memories they still laugh about years later. That is how culture is built. It does not happen only when a team reaches its goal. Often, it takes shape through the creativity, effort and shared experiences that happen while everyone is working toward it.

What People See From The Outside

Over time, Boone Central’s culture became visible beyond its own walls. Real estate agents and lenders noticed the huddles, themes and celebrations. Social media gave clients a view of the people behind the transactions, and prospective employees began following along as well. One recent hire arrived already familiar with Boone Central’s traditions and excited to become part of them.

Bert believes that visibility creates trust. Clients are handing the company one of the largest and most important transactions of their lives. When they have already seen the personalities, values and relationships inside the company, Boone Central feels less like an unknown vendor and more like a group of people they understand.

Boone Central’s leadership approach rests on the belief that employees who feel appreciated and understood rarely need to be micromanaged. Team members know the standard, trust the people around them and take shared responsibility for doing the work well.

His own leadership style follows the same patient approach. Bert considers listening one of his greatest strengths. When he does not know an answer, he does not rush to fill the silence. He asks questions, reads, studies the issue, sometimes sleeps on it and returns when he can offer a thoughtful and fair response. He would rather hold back than react without understanding.

That is a revealing contrast. Bert is willing to dress in costume, rap in front of his employees or let a goat climb on him in the name of company culture. But when a decision affects someone else, he slows down. The playfulness may attract attention, but the listening is what gives people confidence in him.

Bert’s wife, Kim, has told him that when his title career is finished, he should become a teacher. He has taught for ALTA and the Missouri Land Title Association, including a course on office culture, and would gladly return to it someday. For now, Boone Central remains his classroom, and the culture he continues to build there may be the most important lesson he teaches.

Small Beginnings, Built With Intention

Bert and Kim have applied much the same approach to another business that began without a grand entrepreneurial plan. Wanting to build something for the long term, they started purchasing residential rentals. Before online listings made it easy to reach property owners, Bert drove through neighborhoods where they wanted to buy and placed letters in mailboxes.

His pitch was simple: If they could agree on a price, his experience in title allowed him to handle everything from there. Some owners responded quickly, while others held onto his letter and called later, including one who kept it for two years before reaching out. What began with a few properties eventually grew to 75 rental units. Bert and Kim have always managed the portfolio themselves, with Kim now overseeing what has become a full-time job.

If life had followed Bert’s original dream, he would have become a sports broadcaster. He still lights up at the thought of calling SEC football or basketball, and he would take a turn behind the microphone for any college football game without hesitation. Instead, life brought him to Boone Central, where the confidence he gained from theater and his love of teams, shared goals and the energy of a crowd shaped a career he never could have planned.

He arrived as a courier wearing a discounted Dillard’s suit and learned the company one seat at a time. When unexpected circumstances pushed him, Karen and Mary Jo into leadership, they learned to guide the business together. Over the years, Bert pursued ownership while Boone Central’s employees contributed the ideas, relationships and effort that helped transform a basement full of file cabinets into a place where culture could take shape.

The heart of it goes back to the lesson Bert’s father gave him years ago: there is good in everyone, and part of our responsibility is to help bring it out.

Bert helped anchor Boone Central around that idea, and the team brought it to life. Together, they created places to talk, reasons to grow, opportunities to contribute and plenty of reasons to laugh. The costumes, themes and goats may be the parts everyone remembers, but underneath them is something much more serious. People do their best work when they know they matter, when they can see where they are going and when they believe the people beside them are going there too.

That is not something Boone Central does in addition to its strategy. It is the strategy.

 

Long before Craig Haskins became president of the American Land Title Association, he wanted to be the person holding the microphone. At the University of Florida, he studied the business side of television and radio, imagining himself working for a network, deciding what should air after Murder, She Wrote or how to keep viewers watching after Larry King Live. He hosted a Friday sports segment on the student television station, worked as a DJ at the university’s rock station and briefly adopted the on-air name Craig Kennedy because he thought his cousin had been given the better name and didn’t want it to go to waste. He loved being in front of the camera, loved being on the radio and, after graduating, even sent audition tapes to ESPN and television stations throughout Florida, hoping someone would put him on the air.

The feedback was fairly consistent. “Hey, man, you look like you’re 14 years old,” he remembers being told. “Can you grow some facial hair or wear some glasses?” 

He could not, and according to Haskins, he still cannot, so the stations suggested that while he waited to look older, he should learn the other sides of the business. Sales seemed like a logical place to begin because, as one person told him, he had “a knack for yapping.”

Thirty years later, Haskins is regularly standing onstage and speaking to audiences across the country, so he got the microphone after all. He simply had no idea that the path to it would run through a small title company in Racine, Wisconsin.

Learning What Winning Feels Like

In January 1996, Comcast hired Haskins to sell advertising in Sarasota, Florida, a role he viewed mostly as a stepping stone into television programming or management. It did not take long, however, for him to discover something he enjoyed every bit as much as being on camera. He liked winning, especially when winning meant seeing something other people had missed.

One of his first major victories came from Bacon’s Furniture, a family-owned company that had always purchased advertising from television affiliates, radio stations and newspapers. Most salespeople approached the account by talking about reach, but Haskins wanted to know who was actually buying the furniture, where those customers lived and how he could reach them without wasting money advertising to everyone else. He studied the customer base, identified the neighborhoods where those buyers were concentrated and created a targeted cable campaign that could reach those households more efficiently. The owner gave him February, March and April to prove the strategy worked, and it performed so well that Bacon’s Furniture began pulling money from its other advertising and giving it exclusively to Haskins.

Then there was Arcadia Ford, in a small Florida rodeo town where the only vehicle that matters has a bed and a trailer hitch. Haskins told the dealership it was wasting money advertising to viewers in Fort Myers and Naples, people who were unlikely to drive inland to Arcadia to buy a truck, so instead, he bought every NASCAR spot he could find in the dealership’s actual market. The campaign took off, and it did not take long for the Chevy dealer across town to call. By then there was nothing left to buy. Arcadia Ford owned every spot, and the kid nobody would put on television had cornered the truck market in a rodeo town.

Haskins began to understand that selling was not necessarily about being the loudest person in the room. It was about understanding what the customer was trying to accomplish, finding a smarter way to help them accomplish it and being willing to bet that your idea would work.

Within six months, at 22 years old, Haskins had become Comcast’s top salesperson in the country out of more than 400 representatives. He made approximately $65,000 during that time, which was more money than he had ever seen, but that was not the part he remembers most. “I really wanted to win more than I ever cared about the money,” he says. “I did something that no one else in that region of Florida had been able to do.”

He had persuaded someone to give him a significant amount of money, but then he had taken that money and helped the customer accomplish something meaningful, which, as he puts it, “was really cool.” 

That early experience gave Haskins his first real taste of what would drive him for the rest of his career. He wanted to find the opportunity other people had overlooked, understand the problem better than everyone else, convince someone to try a different approach and then prove that it worked. He loved winning, but the best victories were the ones in which the customer won with him.

A Title Company And Half A Burger

At about the same time, Haskins’ mother Michele was dating a Wisconsin businessman named Jeff Green, who had purchased Knight Barry Title in 1979. Green met Haskins’ mother while visiting the Florida golf resort where she managed food and beverage, and the first meeting between Haskins and Green took place at Hops Restaurant Bar and Brewery in Tampa. 

Haskins arrived late, reached across the high-top table to introduce himself and asked Green if he wanted to split a burger.

“He still tells that story today,” Haskins says. “Nobody had ever split a burger with him before.”

Over the next several summers, Green flew down from Wisconsin on weekends to visit Michele, and during those trips, he often talked with Craig about the title business. Haskins listened, asked questions and occasionally wondered aloud why the company operated the way it did. What kind of technology were they using? Did they have email? What was their sales process, and why were they talking so much about title policies when every competitor seemed to offer essentially the same policy for the same price?

By then, Comcast had been immersing Haskins in sales training, and he began applying those lessons to Green’s business over dinner. “Everybody sells a six-page policy in Wisconsin,” Haskins told him. “There are the same words on every six pages, no matter where you buy it from, and it’s the same price. What’s the difference between you and everyone else?”

The answer, he believed, was relationships. If the product was largely the same everywhere, then continuing to place the product at the center of the story gave customers very little reason to choose one company over another. The company had to focus on the people buying it, understand what mattered to them and build the kind of trust that made them want to return. Green saw something in the young salesman who kept asking those questions, and he offered Haskins the chance to move to Wisconsin, learn the title business and eventually help him lead Knight Barry.

The salary was $25,000, less than half of what Haskins had been earning at Comcast, but Green would cover the U-Haul, give him a place to stay and pay to move him back to Florida if he could not survive the first winter. A Fourth of July visit during Milwaukee’s Summerfest helped close the deal, as Haskins returned to Florida raving about Wisconsin’s beautiful weather, the lake, the fireworks and the friendly people. His friends tried to warn him that July was not exactly an accurate representation of life in Wisconsin, but he moved anyway, leaving Florida for a state he jokes he could not have found on a map, to work in an industry he had never heard of.

In October 1996, Haskins arrived at Knight Barry with a 400-page Chicago Title underwriting manual Green had mailed him. Haskins initially assumed it was a book, only to discover that it was alphabetized and not intended to be read from beginning to end. “I reported to Knight Barry on day one having zero idea what the hell the company did,” he says.

What he did understand was that Knight Barry sold a commoditized product in a business built on relationships, speed, accuracy and trust. He could learn the technical side of title, but the question he had raised with Green in Florida remained the question that mattered: If everyone sells approximately the same product for approximately the same price, why should someone choose you?

Breaking Into The Network

Knight Barry had two small offices and 18 employees in Racine, Wisconsin, and Haskins spent his first couple of years learning title and closing. Once he understood the operation, though, he began thinking about what the company could become, because he did not want to look up years later and find the same 18 people working from the same two offices. Milwaukee was 45 minutes north of them, plenty of business was happening there, and Haskins wanted the chance to go figure it out.

The problem was that Milwaukee’s title market was controlled primarily by two established agents that had been there for decades. Haskins was a young outsider with no standing in the market, no history in Wisconsin and no obvious reason for anyone to trust him with an important transaction, so he did not begin by asking people for their best business. Instead, he called on banks and lenders, offering to handle the small, undesirable assignments other companies did not particularly want. A real estate agent might take years to trust someone new with a commission check, but lenders had stacks of work that needed to be completed.

“Could I sit at the bottom of the dinner table, and whatever scraps fall off, could I have a couple crumbs?” he remembers asking. “Give me one or two and let me prove I know how to do this.”

He also offered lenders something they had never seen from a title company. Instead of making them complete an order form and send it by fax, Haskins asked whether they would rather submit the order through a website. They loved the idea, but there was only one slight problem: Knight Barry did not have a website, so Haskins drove to Best Buy, purchased Microsoft FrontPage and built one himself in his basement. This was the late 1990s, when online title ordering was not just uncommon, but nearly unimaginable to many of the lenders he approached.

Once the website went live, lenders quickly embraced it. Haskins had given them something no other title company offered at the time: a faster, easier way to place orders without filling out forms and sending faxes. As more lenders began using the site and refinancing volume increased, Knight Barry’s order count took off, eventually prompting Green to ask whether the company could handle all the new business Haskins was bringing in. His answer was simple: “We’re figuring it out.”

That response captures a large part of how he operates. He looks for weaknesses, particularly the ones created when successful companies become comfortable, then pushes directly into them. Milwaukee’s established title agents had tenure, relationships and market share, but Haskins believed they had stopped focusing on innovation, which gave Knight Barry a way in. 

The company also hired people who were not tied to the industry’s favorite phrase, “That’s not the way we’ve always done it,” and at 29, Haskins was the oldest person in Knight Barry’s Milwaukee office.

Thirty years later, the company he joined with two offices and 18 employees has grown to more than 80 offices, over 450 employees and operations across four states. That growth came through new markets, new offices, joint ventures and acquisitions, but the pattern behind it has remained remarkably consistent: find a need, bring in the right people, give them better tools and earn the trust of the community.

Becoming Useful Before Becoming Known

Winning business was one challenge, but earning credibility inside the industry was another. Haskins was in his twenties, attending Wisconsin Land Title Association meetings with people who had been working in title for longer than he had been alive, and from their perspective, he was the young guy from Florida who had entered the family business because Jeff Green married his mother. He could not compete with their experience, so he found another way to become valuable.

At association meetings, Haskins would offer to lead a short session about whatever technology was new at the time, demonstrating email, mobile hotspots, cellphones, text messaging, software and online courthouse access. He volunteered to help write Wisconsin’s electronic recording rules, traveled from market to market explaining them and posted his demonstrations online for anyone to use, including his competitors. Rather than waiting for someone to decide that he had been around long enough to contribute, he raised his hand, found something the room needed and began helping.

“I couldn’t out-experience a room full of people two or three times my age back then, so I didn’t try,” he says. “I made myself useful instead.”

People noticed, and soon owners with decades more experience were calling him with questions. In 2001, the owner of Port Abstract in Port Washington asked Haskins how Knight Barry was logging into the courthouse online, so Haskins drove to the company’s office, ordered the necessary equipment and helped set everything up. About a year later, the owner called again, this time to ask whether Knight Barry might be interested in buying the company.

“It was all because of the free stuff and the credibility-building things I did,” Haskins says.

That acquisition helped begin Knight Barry’s expansion into new communities, sometimes consolidating companies under the Knight Barry name and sometimes preserving the people and local relationships that made those businesses valuable in the first place. Haskins believes one of the biggest mistakes an acquiring company can make is buying a successful local operation and immediately gutting everything that made it work. Knight Barry’s approach is to keep the people and relationships, remove much of the administrative burden from the local leaders and give them better tools and a stronger back office, allowing them to return their attention to customers and the community.

Not every acquisition worked that way, however, and Haskins readily admits that his excitement about winning a deal occasionally caused him to overlook the very thing he now considers most important. Three acquisitions failed for essentially the same reason: each depended heavily on an owner who planned to retire shortly after the sale. Haskins believed Knight Barry could find and train a replacement, but in those small markets, the owner was not simply managing the company. That person was examining title, disbursing funds, serving customers and, at times, practically sweeping the floors. Once the owner left, the business left with them, and Haskins eventually closed all three offices.

The experience changed how he evaluates an acquisition. “In a small market, you’re not buying a company, you’re buying the team of people,” he says. Today, the people and the book of business come first, in that order, while owner dependency and succession planning are among the first things he examines. A company may look profitable on paper, but if its culture is unhealthy, its quality has slipped or its relationships disappear when the owner retires, Haskins is willing to walk away.

There are three parts to a business, he says: people, process and product. Title companies sometimes neglect process because they are accustomed to winging it, even though process may be the least expensive of the three to fix. Title’s product is a commodity, and processes can be copied or rebuilt, but finding the right people is much harder. “People is where the game is won or lost,” Haskins says. “I grow by adding people smarter than me whenever I can.”

From Taking Ideas To Giving Them

Haskins initially attended ALTA meetings for much the same reason he went to state association events: he wanted to learn how other successful title companies operated, bring their best ideas home and use those ideas to compete against them. Early in his career, he says he essentially faked his way into ALTA’s large-agent conference, then spent two and a half days taking as many notes as he could.

“Selfishly, I wanted to learn what everyone else was doing,” he says. “How do I get better so I can beat the people in this room when I get home?”

Although he learned plenty from inside title, Haskins has spent much of his career looking outside the industry for inspiration, pulling ideas from technology, media, retail and hospitality, then asking why title companies were not doing something another industry had already figured out. The internet ordering system was a perfect example. He did not need another title company to show him the opportunity, because the banks he served were already using email and the internet. He simply met customers where they had already gone.

“The real edge usually comes from asking why our industry doesn’t do the obvious thing some other industry already figured out,” he says. “Uber didn’t come from inside the taxi business.”

The funny thing about becoming useful is that eventually the room begins asking you for answers. Haskins volunteered for committees, helped develop ALTA’s original Best Practices and became increasingly involved in regulatory and association work, with one responsibility leading to another until the outsider who had arrived looking for ideas became the person responsible for helping lead the industry. As Haskins puts it, “I started out wanting to steal information to make my company better, and now I’m the one giving information.”

As ALTA president, he wants to create that same opportunity for more people, particularly those who may not fit the industry’s traditional idea of whose turn it is to lead. For too long, he believes, associations have treated leadership like a line, where someone serves long enough, waits patiently and eventually becomes “next.” Haskins is less interested in who has waited the longest than in who has something valuable to contribute right now.

He points to professionals such as Jim Blair IV, Kelly Cohen, John Williams, Josh Terry, Laura Dishman and Liz Casselman, along with underwriter leaders including Tara Smith and Steve Black. He also sees value in bringing people such as Chris Hinton of Pulte Home Title into the conversation because he represents a business model that has not always had a seat at the table. “I want different walks of life,” Haskins says. “Not people who are next.”

His goal is to shorten the runway for the industry’s next generation of leaders. If someone has been in title for three years and is already making a meaningful impact, Haskins does not believe that person should have to wait another 17 years before being invited to contribute. He wants to strengthen ALTA’s agent leadership pipeline and leave behind a deeper bench of people who are ready to serve after he hands over the gavel.

That includes leaders involved in affiliated business arrangements, a model Haskins admits he once viewed with deep suspicion. He now owns 18 joint venture title companies and believes they can be operated properly when companies have strong legal guidance, follow the rules and are willing to tell their partners “no” when necessary. More importantly, he sees the market moving in that direction. Before COVID, most calls he received about expansion came from title agents looking to sell or retire, while today many come from real estate brokerages exploring how to bring title services in-house.

Rather than leaving those owners to learn only what they are prohibited from doing, Haskins wants ALTA to include more practical conversations about how to build and operate these businesses correctly. That means bringing experienced operators such as Ryan Banovac, Aaron Davis, Mike LaRosa, Mike Rubin and Tracy McMahon into the room, allowing them to share what they have learned and giving the industry access to ideas it might otherwise miss. Once again, Haskins is looking for people who have figured something out and handing them a microphone, regardless of whether tradition says it is their turn.

Seeing What Others Miss

The same curiosity is shaping how Haskins approaches artificial intelligence, which he believes may be particularly well suited for title. Title professionals gather data, compile it accurately, identify and solve problems, make decisions from that information and distribute it as title work, meaning AI can potentially improve nearly every part of the process. What Haskins does not accept, however, is the idea that adopting AI should simply allow a company to eliminate half its employees.

“If we can do 30,000 closings a year with 450 people and I put AI in, I want to do 40,000 closings with 450 people,” he says. “I don’t want to do 30,000 with 220.”

His rule is simple: AI should help the same people accomplish more, rather than accomplish the same amount of work with fewer people. While much of the industry’s attention has been directed toward search, examination, document review, closing calculations and fraud detection, Haskins believes title company owners and executives may be overlooking one of its most useful applications, which is managing the business itself.

Haskins has connected AI tools with Knight Barry’s financial and order systems so he can understand what is happening across the company without waiting for the month or quarter to end. The system might notice that rent has increased disproportionately at one office, warn him that a spike in orders is being offset by a lower average purchase price or point out that staffing has grown faster than expected revenue. It can then combine that internal information with mortgage rates, consumer sentiment, employment reports and other economic indicators to help him anticipate what may happen next.

“It’s like having two MBAs sitting next to me every moment of the day, giving me unsolicited advice on how to run Knight Barry.”

The technology may be new, but the instinct behind it is not. Haskins is up around six each morning, weekends included, usually after about six hours of sleep, and he begins his day with coffee and a close look at the numbers. Monday is his favorite day because it offers a clean slate and another chance to make something happen. CNBC plays in his office throughout the day while he follows earnings reports, mortgage rates, employment data and the 10-year Treasury yield, looking for anything that might tell him how many title orders are coming tomorrow.

His one non-negotiable is that he wants to know what is happening inside the business while it is still happening. He wants today’s order count, labor costs, transaction values and cash position today, not in a report delivered next month, when the opportunity to react may already be gone. As he puts it, “You cannot wait until the end of the period. You have to be in the period.” 

Sometimes that information challenges what the industry has believed for decades. Title professionals have traditionally watched interest rates as a predictor of volume, assuming lower rates meant more orders and higher rates meant fewer, yet rates remained relatively flat in 2026 while many title companies experienced strong years. That has led Haskins to consider whether people’s lives may now be driving the market more than the interest rate itself.

Families need another bedroom, parents want a different school district and retirees are finally ready to move to Florida. At some point, life becomes more important than preserving a 3 percent mortgage, and people decide they need to move regardless of what the rate happens to be. Haskins is quick to call it a working theory rather than a conclusion because, as he says, “Eight months does not make a law, but it’s telling a story.”

Raise Your Hand

Ask Haskins to identify his superpower and he will initially offer the intentionally unremarkable answer of problem solving, but give him another moment and the real answer begins to surface. “What I like to do is fix stuff,” he says. “Find weaknesses, then fix them. But I hate losing more than I like winning.”

He admits that instinct can occasionally work against him, especially when a major commercial transaction is on the line. A data center deal, for example, can take years to close, require an enormous amount of legal work and consume enough time and labor that the economics may barely justify winning it. Haskins knows that, but he also knows there is a competitor across the market trying to land the same deal, and the thought of watching that competitor win is often enough to keep him fighting for it. From a purely financial standpoint, he admits, that may not always be the smartest decision. For someone who hates losing more than he likes winning, however, letting the other company have it can feel even worse.

That competitiveness has driven Haskins throughout his career, but it has rarely been about winning alone. He also has a knack for convincing people to see what he sees and believe in an idea alongside him. It worked on Green in 1996, when a young cable advertising salesman persuaded an experienced title company owner to place more emphasis on customer relationships than the policy itself. It worked in Milwaukee, where Haskins convinced lenders to take a chance on an unknown company with a website built in a basement, and it worked inside the industry, where he turned technology demonstrations and free advice into trust, acquisitions and, eventually, leadership.

For young professionals hoping to make their mark in title, that may be the most important part of Craig Haskins’ story. His competitiveness pushed him to find openings, but his willingness to share what he knew earned him the opportunity to walk through them. He did not wait until someone declared that it was his turn, and he did not wait to be invited to teach, lead or contribute. He found something useful, raised his hand and gave it away, slowly becoming someone the industry knew it could trust.

“You don’t break in by asking for a seat,” he says. “You bring something the room needs.”

That is how an outsider became a voice for the industry, and how someone who entered association meetings hoping to learn enough to beat his competitors became the person sharing ideas with the entire room. Craig Haskins always wanted to be the guy holding the microphone, but what ultimately earned him the opportunity was not simply his ability to talk. It was his willingness to study the room, figure out what was missing and be the one who did something about it.

Now, as ALTA president, that is exactly what he intends to keep doing.

Chris Morton went to Washington D.C. looking for the answer. More than 30 years later, the CEO of ALTA believes it begins with trust.

On one corner of the northwest side Chicago block where Chris Morton grew up lived a county judge. On another was the city’s police superintendent. The mayor’s daughter lived farther down the street, and police officers, firefighters and white-collar professionals all sent their kids to the same neighborhood playgrounds.

“There were always fascinating people coming around and conversations that were being had,” Morton says. “And as a kid, it sparked my interest in learning about what people were talking about.”

Much of that talk involved city business and politics. Who decided what happened, how the city worked and why one neighborhood got something another did not. Morton did not yet know where that curiosity would take him, but the question behind it was already beginning to form: How are big decisions made?

The rest of his childhood looked a lot like the childhood of a normal kid in Chicago. The baseball field was down the street, a municipal golf course sat at the end of the block and a bus could take him downtown whenever he wanted to go. “It was a bit of Shangri-La for me, if I’m honest.” He became a Cubs fan, which in Chicago is determined almost as much by address as allegiance. “I grew up on the northwest side, and that’s the part of town where the Cubs fans are,” he says. “White Sox do not exist in my world.”

His parents gave him something more lasting than a baseball loyalty. His father spent his entire career with a health insurance company, starting in the mail room and working his way up to become a senior executive despite never graduating from college. His mother worked in the actuarial department at the same company, which is where they met. She stayed home after their children were born, then returned to work when Morton was in high school, in part to help cover his tuition. From them, he learned faith, hard work, citizenship and the responsibility to take seriously the role he played in the lives of others.

Those lessons would eventually become part of the answer he was looking for.

Looking For The Room Where It Happens

That early curiosity eventually led Morton to study political science at Northwestern University in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. After graduation, he decided the logical next step was to move to Washington, D.C., even though he had never visited the city. So he packed his bags, arrived without a job and began knocking on doors.

The beginning was not glamorous. He cut grass, conducted phone polls at night and interned on Capitol Hill for free. Eventually, one of those doors opened. Morton joined the staff of Cardiss Collins, a congresswoman who represented Chicago’s West Side, and by the time he was 24, he was leading her legislative staff.

For someone who had come to Washington hoping to get close to decision-making, he had gotten there remarkably quickly. He was suddenly working at the center of debates involving taxes, financial services, housing and other issues that affected millions of people. Still, he did not mistake proximity for understanding. He kept moving through different institutions, trying to see major decisions from every possible side.

When Collins retired, Morton returned to Chicago for a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Chicago. While there, he interned in city agencies for the mayor’s office and worked with community development groups on the West Side. After graduate school, he returned to Washington to work in the Clinton administration under Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, another Chicago native who had made his way to the nation’s capital. From there came housing nonprofits, a regulator overseeing the Federal Home Loan Banks, Fannie Mae and the Fannie Mae Foundation.

Chris summarizes his career path quickly as, “I went from Capitol Hill to the cabinet agency, to nonprofit sector, financial regulator, and the private sector.” Yet the resume is not really the point. Each stop gave him another view into how information moves, whose voices get heard and what allows people with competing interests to arrive at a decision. “All of those experiences gave me a prism by which to look at those things,” he says.

In 2009, a recruiter called about lobbying for the insurance industry, and Morton started representing life insurance agents on tax and financial-services issues. Then in 2019 another recruiter called with a different question: What do you know about title insurance?

“I said, well, I bought a house and I know what title insurance is,” Morton recalls. Beyond that, he admits, he did not know much about the industry. “But I also know the world of insurance lobbying and financial services and taxes. So let me go talk to these people.”

What Morton lacked in title experience, he made up for with a broad view of how policy is shaped. He understood insurance, housing, financial services and taxation, but perhaps most importantly, he understood how to bring information, relationships and communication together to influence important decisions.

That was exactly what ALTA was looking to do. The association hired Morton to lead public affairs and build a new approach that brought its communications work together with advocacy at the state and federal levels. He began in April 2020, working remotely during the early days of the pandemic and managing a team he would not fully meet in person for nearly a year. 

Five years later, the board asked him to become CEO.

The young man who came to Washington to study big decisions had become one of the people responsible for making them. Just as important, he had become responsible for helping an entire industry influence the decisions that would shape its future.

Trust Before The Ask

Spend enough time around Washington and it would be easy to arrive at a cynical answer to Morton’s original question. Power makes decisions. Money makes decisions. Perhaps it simply comes down to whoever gets the last meeting.

But the answer Chris found is less dramatic and far more intentional.

“I think big decisions are made because people trust one another,” he says. “There’s a foundation there and they believe that their goals are the same. They may have different ways to get there, but they’re willing to work collaboratively based on trust that’s built not in a moment, but over years.”

That is also why he pushes back on the popular caricature of lobbying as arm-twisting in a back room. At its best, he says, lobbying is an exercise of the constitutional right to petition government. It is educating policymakers about an issue so they can make more informed decisions for the people they represent.

Of course, good information alone is rarely enough. It has to come from someone who has shown over time that the information is sound, the relationship is genuine and the goal is larger than winning a single argument. You bring people useful insight before you need something from them. You help them make better decisions. You remain committed to the relationship even when you lose a battle. That is how trust is built, and when a major decision arrives, trust is what ultimately gets things done.

Once that trust is established, the argument has a chance to break through. For Morton, seeing that moment happen still brings the same adrenaline it always has. “The biggest thrill I still get in life in this town is when I sit across from a member of Congress or an administration official and I make an argument and I connect in their mind,” he says. “I see that connection and they get it. There’s no better adrenaline rush.”

Yet his job today is not simply to make the argument himself. It is to help others use their knowledge and experience to shape the decisions that matter. That starts with listening, recognizing what people do best and giving them the space to lead within their areas of expertise.

“I really try to listen to the team and allow the team to own the space that they’re hired for,” Morton says. “The reason we hire people is because they’re experts more so than I am.”

His role is to understand what they do well, give them the resources to do it, and offer guidance without assuming he must always have the best answer. In other words, he builds trust inside the organization much the same way he has built it throughout his career: listen carefully, look for what someone can contribute and prove through his actions that their expertise matters.

That approach becomes even more important when the team extends beyond ALTA’s Washington office to thousands of title agents, underwriters and vendors. For the industry to move forward, ALTA needs the knowledge and experience of all three groups, but gathering it is not always easy. Many of those companies compete with one another and may be understandably hesitant to share what they are doing, learning or seeing in the market.

Morton’s job is to earn the trust that allows those conversations to happen. That often means listening one-on-one, protecting sensitive details and looking across those individual perspectives for the broader lessons that can help ALTA’s board and membership make better decisions.

“The thing that I love and that’s amazing about the title industry is the willingness of everyone to put your business hat aside or your company hat aside and really focus on what’s best for the industry,” he says. “I have found that more than in other industries that I’ve either worked in or observed.”

That willingness allows ALTA to become a trusted table where competitors can share what they know and find common ground on the issues affecting them all. But gathering the industry’s knowledge is only part of the work. To influence the decisions being made beyond the industry, ALTA also needs its members to carry that knowledge into their own communities and tell the story from where they sit.

A Layer For Everyone

Advocacy once meant sending the professional lobbyists to make the case. Morton believes that model has changed. Lobbyists still play an important role, but the strongest voice often belongs to the person who works in the business, understands the practical consequences of a policy and votes in the community of the elected official hearing the story.

“The most powerful people are the constituents who are in the business, who have the information and perspective to tell the story from where they sit, back in the community they live in,” he says.

The trouble is that many title professionals hear the word advocacy and imagine a plane ticket to Washington, a large political contribution or a level of access they do not have. Morton sees it in layers, with an entry point for nearly everyone.

The first layer is the Title Action Network (TAN), which is free for anyone to join regardless of their affiliation with ALTA, and designed to make participation simple. A title professional can join, stay informed and respond when an action alert calls for many voices. The next layer might involve contributing to the Title Industry Political Action Committee (TIPAC), even if it is only ten or twenty dollars to support candidates who understand the industry. Those ready to become more directly involved can attend ALTA’s Advocacy Summit or meet with a member of Congress or staff member in their local district office. In either case, ALTA provides the talking points, preparation and resources needed to make the conversation possible.

The goal is not to make everyone participate in every layer. It is to help everyone find one.

Morton points to Minnesota title professional Richard Welshons as an example of what can happen when someone takes the next step. Welshons wanted to build a relationship with Congresswoman Angie Craig, so he invited her to visit his office at The Title Team while she was in the area. She spent more than an hour meeting employees, learning about the business and hearing about the issues affecting voters in her district.

It started with a simple invitation and a conversation, but the impact went well beyond that first meeting. Congresswoman Craig gained a better understanding of the title industry, local title professionals had an opportunity to be heard and Welshons began building a relationship that could matter when future issues came before her. It also strengthened his role as a community leader and gave him a reason to invite clients and others into the conversation.

That example captures Morton’s larger point. Advocacy is not a separate activity reserved for a few people at the top of an organization. It is how the industry makes sure the people making consequential decisions have access to the knowledge required to make good ones. If one person joins the Title Action Network, another gives twenty dollars, another meets with a state legislator and another travels to Washington, those individual layers begin to form something powerful. Trust spreads, understanding grows and better decisions become possible.

Five Words Worth Repeating

Before title professionals can advocate for the industry, however, they have to be able to explain it. That can be harder than it sounds. Title work is technical, and the people who know it best can easily get lost explaining how the work is done before anyone understands why it matters.

Morton believes the answer is to start with the what, not the how. Say the big thing first. His suggestion: “I protect homeownership in America. Period, end of sentence.”

It is the kind of statement that makes someone pause and think, “That sounds important.” Once they understand the larger purpose, there is plenty of time to explain how title professionals protect Americans from criminals and fraud, preserve the integrity of real estate transactions and help people become homeowners and build wealth.

Morton wants those conversations to happen beyond the closing room, whether at a school event, on the sidelines of a game or anywhere else title professionals encounter people who may one day influence the future of their communities.

The simplicity of the statement “I protect homeownership in America” matters because many of the greatest challenges facing the title industry begin with a lack of understanding about what title professionals actually do. Attorney opinion letters and other forms of regulatory overreach are not merely policy fights. They are also evidence of an awareness problem. Wire and deed fraud are not isolated operational headaches. They thrive, in part, because everyone involved in a real estate transaction does not understand the risks or recognize the warning signs. When fraud succeeds, it imposes enormous costs on consumers and the broader housing system, making homeownership even less affordable. Even the conversation around artificial intelligence depends on whether decision-makers understand where technology can help and where human expertise remains indispensable.

Morton sees opportunity in each of those challenges. Regulatory pressure creates an opening to explain the industry’s value. Fraud gives title professionals a chance to show that their work is part of housing affordability, because without those protections, buying a home would become even riskier and more expensive. AI can strengthen rather than diminish the role of the title professional if it is used to accelerate workflow and free people to spend more time applying their judgment and serving customers.

“AI will never replace the technical and human judgment and the expertise that professionals have,” he says. “So how do you leverage it in a way that accelerates and accentuates your expertise?”

The harder technology problem, in his view, is not the quality of the tools. It is the distance between title companies, lenders, real estate professionals and the vendors building systems for them. Each group is innovating, but they are not always sharing what they learn or solving the problem together. Competition is healthy, though it can send everyone down separate paths and leave the industry with several disconnected conversations instead of one productive one.

Morton sees associations such as ALTA, and other partners including the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) and the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), among others, as  forums for bringing those lessons together. ALTA’s job is to create a place where people trust one another enough to share what they know, then turn that knowledge into insight the wider industry can use. Once again, the quality of the eventual decision depends on the quality of the relationships and information beneath it.

Where Trust Begins

For all the time Morton has spent studying institutions, his deepest lessons about trust did not come from Congress, a regulator or a boardroom. They came from home.

He met his wife across the hall on Capitol Hill around 1995. They talked in the hallway, crossed paths at the coffee shop and eventually decided they should do something together besides keep talking in the hallway. They married in 1999.

After their oldest daughter was born, his wife stepped away from consulting and began building a business of her own, Congressional Meetings, which helps organizations in Washington connect with the right policymakers and deliver the right message. More than 20 years later, it serves dozens of clients. “She’s definitely the better half,” Morton says. “She’s a powerhouse. I’m very lucky to have her in my life.”

Their daughters are now 23 and 20, and the younger one shares his enthusiasm for live sports. The house is quieter, though his 4:45 a.m. alarm has not changed. He starts the day with coffee and an hour or more of running, walking or strength training before turning to the news and the day ahead. His remaining responsibility is walking Paddington, the mini sheepadoodle his younger daughter promised to care for before leaving for college. Fathers everywhere know how those negotiations tend to end.

Morton has lost both of his parents in the last couple of years, his father one November and his mother the following December. Their deaths have made this a period of reflection, especially as he and his wife consider what the next chapter of their own lives might look like.

“It all begins and ends with family,” he says. “I am who I am because of where I come from. Forming humans, and family, is the most important job anybody could have. If you do that right, the world’s a better place.”

There is something fitting about a man raised with that belief now leading an industry devoted to protecting the place where family life happens. 

The Answer He Found

More than 30 years ago, Chris Morton left a Chicago neighborhood full of public servants and civic conversations because he wanted to understand how big decisions were made. His career took him inside Congress, the executive branch, nonprofits, regulators, major housing institutions, trade associations and eventually the CEO’s office at ALTA.

What he found was not a secret process or a single room where everything happens. Big decisions are shaped long before the vote, the meeting or the final ask. They are shaped every time someone listens closely enough to recognize what another person knows. Every time a leader gives talented people room to do their best work. Every time competitors share enough information to solve a common problem. Every time a title professional tells an elected official, a neighbor or a parent at the ballfield, “I protect homeownership in America.”

Morton went looking for the people who make big decisions. Today, he is one of them. But perhaps the more important part of his work is helping other people recognize that they are, too.

If every person in the title industry chooses a layer, adds a voice and builds one trusted relationship, the industry will not have to hope that the right decisions are made on its behalf. It will have helped the people making those decisions understand what is at stake.

That is how trust becomes influence, and how influence, used well, protects an industry and the homeowners it serves.

If Morton could return to that Chicago block at age ten and choose an entirely different path, he says he might strive harder to become the second baseman for the Cubs, a golf pro, or perhaps even a blues guitarist. He does not play guitar yet, but learning is always possible.

For now, there are still a few big decisions left to make.

Monica Gilroy built a career by teaching people what was coming, speaking up when something needed to change, and refusing to stay on the sidelines. Her story is a reminder that every one of us has a megaphone. The question is whether we are willing to pick it up.

Monica Gilroy grew up in a family where learning something came with an expectation: you shared it.

Her father was a professor and one of the leading academic voices in the Paper Science Industry. Her mother became an Assistant Dean. Her grandmother taught elementary school for 25 years, and her aunt Monica, the woman she was named after, taught for 42. But Monica would eventually take that family tradition somewhere different. She became a lawyer, a litigator and, over time, a voice for the industries she served. She has taught real estate agents, lenders, title professionals and attorneys. She spoke up at the Georgia Capitol. She carried industry concerns to Washington. And somewhere along the way, she figured out something more businesses should understand: Advocacy is the best marketing that anyone can do.

Not because advocating for an industry is some clever way to generate leads, but because when you consistently learn the issues, explain what they mean, stand up for the people you serve and help move an industry forward, the right people notice. They begin to trust your voice. They begin to see you as someone who knows what is coming and cares enough to do something about it.

Monica’s megaphone may be bigger today, but it did not start that way. It started in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where she grew up around a university, spent summers reading in the campus library, competed in debate and forensics, and learned early that she was comfortable standing in front of a room. By college, she imagined that voice might take her to Capitol Hill as a speechwriter or policy person.

Law school took her in another direction.

Or, as it turns out, maybe not that different of one.

Learning To Be Heard

Monica spent her first several years in small law practices where almost anything could walk through the door, from divorce and criminal cases to personal injury, estate disputes, contracts and real estate. It was excellent training because she learned quickly what she did not want to do. Criminal and domestic work made her stomach hurt. Real estate did not. Neither did contracts, litigation, complicated title issues, or standing in front of a room making an argument.

In 1999, she joined one of the largest real estate law firms in the Southeast, and that experience taught her something law school never really had: being good at your profession and building a career in your profession are two different skills.

"Everyone needs to learn a little bit about how to be in a big firm," Monica said.

There was accountability for hours and performance, of course, but there was also accountability for your own future. Monica had to understand clients, profitability, relationships, selling and, perhaps most importantly, how to keep the work coming in. Her boss and mentor, Carol, taught her that people want to work with people they like, which meant building relationships mattered just as much as doing good work. Monica also learned the importance of actually asking for the business, a lesson reinforced over the years by Dr. Cindy McGovern and her philosophy that “Every Job Is a Sales Job.” It changed the way Monica thought about selling. A great meeting or lunch could build the relationship, but at some point, you still had to ask for the opportunity. Even her emails began to reflect that mindset, ending with a simple invitation: “Please let me know what else I can do for you.”

More importantly, Carol saw something in Monica that Monica had not completely recognized yet. She could teach. She could advocate. She could stand in front of people, take something complicated, and make them care about it. So when someone at the firm needed an attorney to speak at a real estate sales meeting, Monica raised her hand. When somebody needed to teach a class, she went. When there was an issue clients needed to understand, she explained it.

At the time, it probably felt like helping. It was also marketing.

The Worst Possible Time To Start A Business

In April 2007, Monica left the big firm and took a substantial part of the operation with them. Monica led the litigation side while her partner at that time handled closings. They started with roughly 150 employees and 12 locations.

Monica was 39, she had a five year daughter and newborn daughter at home, and her husband had just spent nine months in the hospital with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological condition that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Twice, Monica had been told to prepare for the possibility that he would die, but he fought through it and eventually began the long process of relearning how to use his body while Monica was helping launch a law firm.

Then came 2008.

Their brand-new business was heavily tied to real estate just as the real estate economy collapsed. People had to be let go. Offices had to shrink. The closing business slowed dramatically. Marketing budgets and in-house sales resources disappeared. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, Monica discovered something that would shape the rest of her career.

They were the marketing department.

If they wanted people to know who they were, they had to go tell them. So Monica got on airplanes. She flew to all around the Country to teach onsite to various Underwriters’ Georgia claims team, then did the same thing for banks, mortgage companies, lawyers, and real estate professionals. She became outside general counsel for major real estate organizations in Georgia and spent Tuesday mornings moving from one real estate sales meeting to another across metro Atlanta.

When real estate agents went to the Georgia Capitol, Monica went too. When somebody needed to explain to a senator why a proposed law could create problems, Monica was often the person sent into the room. There were no catchy taglines attached to any of this. No big campaign. No clever promotional item. She was simply useful, and people remembered who had been useful.

When Teaching Became Advocacy

Around the same period, Georgia was confronting an explosion of mortgage fraud. Monica joined a task force of attorneys, mortgage professionals, and title professionals trying to do something about it, and the firm she worked for became involved in helping draft mortgage fraud legislation that would ultimately become the law against mortgage fraud activities in Georgia.

That experience changed the kind of teaching Monica was doing. She was no longer simply standing in front of a room explaining how to write a better contract. Now there was something at stake. Mortgage fraud was hurting title professionals, lenders, real estate agents, businesses, and consumers. There was a real problem, and someone needed to explain it. Someone needed to get people to care about it. Someone needed to walk into the rooms where decisions were being made and say, "Here is what this is doing to the people I represent."

That is advocacy, and Monica began to see how closely it overlaps with marketing. When you spend enough time understanding an issue, talking about it, teaching people about it and working to solve it, something interesting happens: people start associating you with the answer. You become the person who knows.

For Monica, that connection became hard to miss. Advocacy, teaching and marketing, she says, are all closely related because at their core, they are about communication and helping people understand why something matters.

That has taken Monica to state associations, national trade organizations, the Georgia Capitol, and Washington, D.C. She has worked through the State Bar of Georgia, real estate agent and mortgage banking groups, the American Land Title Association, and the National Association of Residential Property Managers. Today, her advocacy work can mean talking with HUD or the EPA about fair housing or lead-based paint regulations and explaining how a well-intentioned rule is actually affecting the people trying to comply with it.

The topics change, but the model really does not. Find the problem. Learn it. Help people understand it. Then use whatever influence you have to make it better.

That is advocacy. It also happens to be pretty phenomenal marketing.

The Two-Way Street

It would be easy to hear Monica's story and turn it into a business strategy: speak at conferences, join associations, talk about important issues, get more clients. 

But that misses the whole point of what she’s doing. 

Advocacy works as marketing because real advocacy is not primarily about marketing yourself. It is about knowing what is happening, standing up for the people you serve and using your voice to help move an industry forward.

Monica talks about trade organizations as the collective voice of an industry. Individual experiences get gathered together, carried to a state capitol or Washington, and translated for the people writing the rules. The title professional dealing with fraud every day knows things a policymaker may not know. The real estate agent seeing buyers struggle knows things a regulator may not see. The lender, attorney, property manager or escrow officer operating inside the business has a perspective that matters.

But only if somebody says something.

That is where Monica's story becomes bigger than Monica, because every person reading this has some kind of megaphone. Maybe yours is a national conference stage, but maybe it is 700 LinkedIn connections. Maybe it is an email newsletter read by 200 real estate agents, the weekly sales meeting at your title company or five lenders who trust you enough to answer when you call. Maybe you sit on a state association committee. Maybe you simply know one customer who needs to hear something they do not know yet.

You do not have to fly to Washington to advocate for your industry. Start where you are. There is probably an issue in your market right now that your customers do not fully understand. There may be a regulation coming that will affect them, a new fraud trend putting them at risk or a market shift creating confusion. Learn what is happening, understand why it matters and then use whatever megaphone you have to explain it.

Monica's advice is remarkably practical here: talk about current events. Take what is happening in Washington, at the statehouse, inside your association or across your profession and translate it into something useful for the person sitting across from you. If you are talking to a real estate agent, explain what it means for their listings. If you are talking to a community bank, explain the fraud patterns they should be watching. If you are talking to a buyer, explain how to protect the money they are about to wire.

Don't just tell people you are an expert. Help them with something an expert would know.

As Monica put it, people are not necessarily going to choose you because you have the "best candy at the closing table" or the cutest office. They remember the person who knows what is happening, understands what it means and is willing to share it with them.

Too often, we look at people who have built a visible platform and assume the platform came first. Usually it did not. The voice came first. Monica kept raising her hand. She kept teaching. She kept learning the issues and showing up in the room. Over time, the rooms got bigger.

Her megaphone got bigger too.

Pick Up Your Megaphone

There is a full-circle moment in Monica's story. As a little girl in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, she was taught to learn something new and share it with somebody else. Decades later, that is essentially still the job. Only now the library stacks have become conference stages, sales meetings, trade associations, hearing rooms, state capitols, and trips to Washington.

The lesson has not really changed: learn something, understand why it matters, share it, and when something needs to change, say so.

The title industry, real estate industry, mortgage industry, legal profession, and every other business represented by the people reading this will not move forward because somebody else decides to take responsibility for it. Industries move because the people inside them care enough to push.

You do not have to become Monica Gilroy. You do not need her law degree, her speaking schedule, her years of experience, or a seat in a meeting at HUD. You just have to stop assuming somebody with a bigger platform should be the one to say something.

You already have a megaphone in your hand.

Use it to teach your customers, protect them, explain what is changing, advocate for the profession that gives you a living, and make your corner of the industry a little better than you found it. And yes, if you do that consistently, people will notice. They will remember you. They will trust you. Some of them will probably want to work with you.

That is the beauty of it. The best marketing might not begin with asking people to choose you. It might begin with showing them you care enough to stand up for them, advocate for what matters to them and use your voice to help move them forward.

Give people enough reasons to believe that, and choosing you becomes the easy part.

There is a hand towel in Sam Trimble’s house that has never touched water.

It cost fourteen dollars. It is still sealed in the bag it came in, receipt folded inside, with the Plaza Hotel’s double P stitched into it. Sam was in seventh grade when he bought it. His parents, a second-grade teacher and a university music professor, had saved enough to take Sam and his sister from El Paso to New York City, and when they walked into the Plaza Hotel, that towel was about the only thing in the building a seventh grader could afford.

He has carried it from house to house ever since. For Sam, it is a reminder of the trip where he first fell in love with real estate. He remembers standing at the bottom of the Twin Towers and looking up until they seemed to disappear into the sky. He remembers the hotels, apartments, businesses and all those people somehow finding places to live and work inside this enormous city. He had become fascinated with New York after watching Home Alone 2 as a kid, but standing there made real estate feel real to him for the first time.

Looking back, though, there may be something else hidden in that towel.

The First People Who Raised the Tide

Sam’s parents didn’t just take him to New York. They gave him the kind of childhood that made him feel safe to wonder what else might be out there. His mom taught second grade for more than forty years. His dad was a university music professor and professional trumpet player. Their house operated with a simple understanding: go try something. If it works, we’ll celebrate with you. If it doesn’t, we’ll still be here.

“You can’t fail when you have your faith and your family,” Sam says. “You’re always going to have that.”

He didn’t have a name for it then, but years later Sam would build much of his career around a similar idea: radical alignment. The phrase came to him through a mentor, Justin Tucker, but the idea had been playing out in Sam’s life long before he ever heard the words. At its simplest, radical alignment means putting yourself in a position where your success is tied to someone else’s success. Instead of walking into every relationship asking what you can get from someone, you start asking what it would look like to help them win first.

Because if they win, there is a pretty good chance you eventually will too.

That’s the rising tide mentality Sam has carried through nearly every stop of his career, and when you look closely, it may have started with the people who did exactly that for him. His parents gave him room to try. Later, mentors gave him opportunities he probably wasn’t quite ready for. Bosses gave him enough freedom to take swings. Friends, colleagues and clients challenged him, encouraged him and occasionally pulled him back when he needed it.

Sam has spent a lifetime being poured into by other people. Maybe that’s why he seems so determined to pour it back out today.

Learning What the Other Side Needs

After college, Sam considered becoming a history teacher, going to law school or selling real estate. He chose real estate and got his license just in time to watch the housing market fall apart. Three or four weeks into his real estate classes, Lehman Brothers collapsed.

It was a brutal time to begin a career built entirely on commission, although Sam now considers the timing a gift. He learned early what it felt like when every closing mattered. Some years he closed around fifty transactions and earned recognition as one of the top young Realtors in West Texas. Other years, five or six deals might determine whether the year worked financially at all.

He also learned that appearances can be deceiving. Sam built a recognizable personal brand around El Paso, complete with shirts, hats and lapel pins that said Sam Trimble is my Realtor and my homeboy. People took pictures wearing them around the world. His marketing could make it look like business was booming. Sometimes it was, but sometimes it absolutely wasn’t.

That experience never really left him. 

Eventually, after several deals fell apart in a single month through circumstances Sam felt he couldn’t control, he decided he was done with real estate. He accepted a job with Stryker selling trauma medical devices and prepared himself for emergency rooms and middle-of-the-night calls.

Three days before he was supposed to start however, he had lunch with John Martin, founder and president of Lone Star Title in El Paso. Martin knew Sam’s relationships in the real estate community and couldn’t understand why he was about to walk away from all of them to start over in trauma medical sales. Then he asked Sam a fairly important question for someone about to spend his career around emergency rooms:

Does blood make you pass out?

“Yeah, I think so,” Sam told him.

The next morning, an offer letter from Lone Star Title was sitting in his inbox. Sam took it, and just like that, someone else had helped change the direction of his life.

When Everybody Has to Win

Moving from real estate into title gave Sam another perspective he didn’t have before. He learned examination. He became a notary. He learned to close files and started seeing just how many people, problems and moving pieces had to somehow come together during the thirty or forty-five days between contract and closing.

Buyers and sellers want different things. Their Realtors are negotiating against each other. The lender needs another document. The appraisal comes in wrong. An inspection turns something up. A title issue appears from decades ago. Then everyone looks toward the title company and says, essentially, okay, make this work.

“The fact that it ever gets closed on some of these deals is unbelievable to me,” Sam says.

He came to see title professionals as the quarterbacks of the transaction and, in his words, the “unsung heroes of the American dream.” But he also began to see the larger system differently. Nobody involved in a real estate transaction can accomplish much alone. The buyer needs the real estate agent. The real estate agent needs the lender. The lender needs the title company. The title company needs the real estate agent to keep bringing business. Everyone may have different jobs and different incentives, but eventually they all need the same thing to happen.

The deal has to close.

That realization shaped the way Sam approached business development at Lone Star. Instead of starting with what the title company thought real estate agents might find interesting about the company, he started with what real estate agents actually needed.

“How can you best serve a client if you’ve never been the client?” he asks.

So Sam began looking for ways to help real estate agents grow their businesses. Not because he had suddenly become uninterested in winning their title business. Quite the opposite.

“If I can help you grow your business, when I then ask for your business, the answer is always going to be yes,” he says. “I helped you build this. We’re in this together.”

That is radical alignment. And it becomes even more interesting when you keep following the chain. For Sam to win, the title agent has to win. For the title agent to win, the real estate agent has to win. For the real estate agent to win, the buyer or seller has to get where they are trying to go.

Your win begins by helping the person in front of you get theirs.

“The only way we win is if we all win,” Sam says.

It sounds simple. In practice, it requires something that doesn’t always come naturally in business: thinking about someone else before yourself.

Rising Together Doesn’t Mean You Stop Competing

There is an important distinction here because Sam is not suggesting everyone hold hands, stop competing and split the market evenly. On the contrary, he wants to win and he wants Fidelity to win as an underwriter. When he worked for an independent title company, he wanted that company to win. When he sold real estate, he wanted his clients and his business to win.

But he just doesn’t believe someone else has to lose for that to happen. “There is enough business to go around for so many of us,” he says.

In fact, Sam believes competition is part of the rising tide. “Healthy competition creates friction. Friction creates spark. Spark creates fire.”

If there were only one title company, one underwriter, one brokerage and one lender, there would be very little reason for anybody to get better. Competition forces people to innovate, move faster and try things they might otherwise be too comfortable to try. When a competitor copies an idea, Sam doesn’t want to spend much time being angry about it. Instead, he starts working on whatever he think should come next.

“You cannot lead from the back,” he says. “You’ve got to be leading from the front.”

He compares it to the athletes we remember. Michael Jordan needed Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Kobe Bryant came next. Shaq and David Robinson were also there. Great players became greater because somebody on the other side forced them to be.

Nobody gets great in an empty gym.

For Sam, that is what makes the rising tide more than a clever business metaphor. “We get better together,” he says. “And you do not get better by yourself.”

The same should be true outside of work. Sam believes the people around you should push you to become a better leader, but also a better friend, husband, father, son or brother. You need people willing to encourage the big idea, people willing to help build it and, occasionally, somebody willing to tell you that your big idea is terrible.

The Safety Net Comes Full Circle

Sam can easily recall the names for the people who have done that for him.

Justin Tucker is one. John Martin is another. Mark Stiles, an attorney outside Boston, changed the way Sam thinks about relating to clients. At Fidelity, his boss Rich Cannan has given him something that sounds remarkably similar to what Sam received growing up: freedom backed by a safety net.

“He lets you cook,” Sam says of Cannan.

That doesn’t mean Cannan won’t rein him in when necessary. Sam freely admits that happens. But it means he has a leader who will mentor him, protect him when necessary and still give him enough room to try something that might not work.

Sam recognizes the pattern because he has felt it before. It is what his parents gave him. Someone believes in you enough to let you take the swing and cares about you enough to still be standing there if you miss.

“I have this list of so many people that without any of them I would have failed already,” he says.

Maybe that’s the other side of radical alignment we don’t talk about enough. Before you can become the person raising the tide for others, it helps to recognize all the people who helped raise it for you.

Today, Sam spends much of the year traveling the country for Fidelity, meeting with somewhere between 200 and 300 independent title companies and delivering around forty keynotes annually. His job gives him the opportunity to see what is working in one market and carry those ideas into another, allowing him to walk into a title company with something useful because he has watched another company wrestle with the same problem and come out on the other side. Once again, someone else’s experience becomes a way to help the next person win.

When the Tide Comes Back

Lately, Sam has seen that rising tide come back toward him in ways that have very little to do with business.

His mother has early onset Alzheimer’s and is undergoing treatment. His father has metastatic non-small cell lung cancer and has been receiving treatment at MD Anderson. Sam has spent a lot of time in Houston with him.

And people keep reaching out.

Some are close friends. Others are title agents Sam barely knows, people he may have met at a conference or worked with somewhere along the way. They text to ask about his dad. They check on his mom. They tell him they’re praying for his family. They show up.

“I’ve built these meaningful friendships across the United States with people that genuinely care about me and I genuinely care about them,” Sam says. “We all love someone and can relate to how this feels.”

For someone who has spent years talking about rising tides, there is something fitting about that. Sam spent his career believing that business gets better when we stop treating every relationship like a transaction. Help the real estate agents. Help the title agent. Help the client. Help your colleague. Push your competitor to get better and allow them to push you right back.

Eventually, you look around and realize you’ve built something much larger than a book of business. You’ve built people around you.

That perspective has become more important as his parents have gotten sick. Sam says that if his entire sense of worth came from his career, he would be in trouble. Careers change. Markets turn. Titles disappear. Companies get bought, sold and reorganized. So he measures something else.

Does his family believe he shows up for them? Do his friends and clients believe he does what he says he will do? Even when he gets it wrong, do the people around him believe he is trying to do the right thing?

“That’s what matters to me,” he says.

It brings the story back to where it started. A kid from El Paso grew up in a home where two parents gave him permission to try things without making their love or support dependent on whether those things worked. That freedom helped him take chances. Other people came along and did the same thing. They opened doors, challenged him, mentored him, gave him room to fail and helped him become better.

Now he spends much of his life trying to create that same kind of lift for the people around him.

That may be the simplest definition of a rising tide. You don’t rise by yourself. You remember who helped lift you, then you turn around and do the same for somebody else.

The fourteen-dollar towel is still in the bag. The receipt is still there too. Sam bought it because he was fascinated by a building, in a city that made him wonder how all those people could possibly find their place in it.

He understands the answer a little differently now.

Nobody builds much of anything alone.

Susan Green has spent a good portion of her career doing things that probably seemed like a bad idea right before they turned into a very good one.

She has a habit of seeing opportunities and acting on them, sometimes before she has enough time to talk herself out of it. She’ll take the job she knows nothing about, leave the one everyone else thinks she should want and say the thing that would be much easier, and probably safer, to keep to herself.

That last part may be the most interesting.

It takes a certain amount of guts to speak up when you’re sitting across the table from someone with a bigger title than yours. It takes even more confidence to tell them what you think their company is missing and, maybe even more boldly, that you believe you can be part of the solution. But for Susan, that confidence doesn’t come from believing she always has the right answer. It comes from knowing when her experience has given her something valuable to offer and caring enough about the person on the other side of the table to actually say it.

That instinct has followed Susan throughout her career. See the opportunity. Speak up. Take the chance. Don’t spend too much time worrying about all the reasons it might not work.

Or, as Susan puts it much more colorfully, “Run and jump off the cliff. Just do it.”

An Offer By Noon

Susan’s first cliff came courtesy of her friend Laura Fick.

At the time, Susan was an operations manager at Saks Fifth Avenue in Denver, running back of the house and putting in enough hours that Laura thought she needed a change. Laura worked in sales for Land Title and told Susan she should get into the title business.

“I don’t know how to sell cars,” Susan told her. “What’s the title business?”

The only title she knew was the one in a glove box.

So Laura brought her along on a bring-a-friend-to-work day. Susan showed up dressed to the nines in her typical Saks look, complete with a power suit, pumps and her hair done up, and sat down to watch what the escrow team did. Her reaction was basically, “Wait a minute, this is what you do?” By lunch, they had offered her a job.

On paper, it was a step backward. Susan went from managing operations at Saks to becoming an escrow processor in a business she had barely known existed that morning. But she took the chance. Within two weeks, she was a refi closer. Then came purchase closings, small commercial transactions, branch management and eventually sales. She wasn’t bouncing around without direction. She was learning the business from the inside out, picking up another piece of it with every move.

Then, during the height of the refi boom, Susan landed a huge customer and told her boss she wanted out of sales.

“He was like, ‘What? People dream of this job,’” Susan recalls.

She wanted something steadier and, more importantly, something that fit her better. Her boss mentioned that the marketing manager was leaving and asked how creative she was. “Pretty creative,” she told him.

That pivot would shape the next two decades of her career.

At the time, Susan was with Title Services, a large Colorado-based title agency with 16 to 18 branches. After the company was acquired by Lawyers Title, Susan continued to grow her career in marketing and branding, eventually working within the larger Land America organization. When Fidelity acquired the business in 2009, there was a role available for her, but it wasn’t the role she wanted. So once again, Susan left the comfortable path and spent the next couple of years helping grow a family-owned textile restoration company.

Eventually, another friend called with an opportunity to come back to title and run escrow operations for Liberty Title as it expanded in Colorado. Her daughter Madison was young, and Susan wasn’t convinced she wanted back in. But title was the business she knew, and more importantly, it was where her network was.

So she came back.

And that decision put Westcor in front of her.

Say The Thing

Liberty worked with seven underwriters, but Susan needed something specific. Colorado purchase files can come with mining claims, water rights and other issues that make access to local underwriting counsel particularly valuable. She wanted somebody she could pick up the phone and call and ask, very simply, “Can we close this deal?”

That need led her to Westcor. Shortly after signing the contract, Susan met then-CEO Mary O’Donnell at an agent dinner during ALTA One at the Broadmoor.

Susan was still relatively new to Westcor, but she wasn’t new to title, marketing or what other underwriters were doing. She had their materials sitting beside materials from six competitors. She had spent years inside a major national title organization. She knew what a polished brand looked like, and sitting at that dinner, she could see just how much opportunity Westcor was leaving on the table.

“There’s no sign of you guys anywhere,” she bluntly told Mary. “I’m sitting here at the Broadmoor and there’s not one Westcor logo anywhere. There’s nothing. You need me.”

There are probably a hundred reasons Susan could have come up with not to say that. Mary was the CEO, Susan was the agent and Westcor was already a successful company. Most importantly, nobody had asked for her marketing critique, much less invited her to pitch herself for a job.

But Susan also knew something that can be easy to forget when we’re worried about titles, hierarchy or stepping on someone’s toes: sometimes the person on the other side of the table genuinely needs what you know. Susan had an inside track because she knew what the competition was putting in front of agents and could see how Westcor compared. To her, the opportunity was obvious.

“You guys are successful,” she told Mary, “but just think of what can come with all that if people really know who you are.”

Speaking up didn’t immediately land her a job. In fact, it started a nine-month conversation.

Susan met regularly with Scott Chandler at a Starbucks between Castle Rock and Parker while Westcor figured out what exactly she was proposing. Part of the challenge was that the company didn’t really separate sales from marketing at the time. Salespeople were called marketers, so Susan found herself explaining that she didn’t want to run a sales team. She wanted to build a brand.

Mary suggested communications. Susan told her that was different too.

Then there was social media.

“I don’t want us to be on social media,” Susan remembers Mary telling her.

“What, girl? What? Westcor needs to be on social media,” Susan shot back.

She can laugh about those conversations now, but they mattered. Nobody had really shown Mary the difference between a personal social media account and how a business could use those platforms. Susan wasn’t disagreeing with her simply to be difficult. She was helping Mary see something she hadn’t been shown before.

There’s an important difference between having the guts to speak your mind and simply wanting your opinion heard. Susan believed she could help. She had the experience to back it up, and she cared enough about what Westcor could become to risk an uncomfortable conversation.

Nine months after that first dinner, Mary called Susan on her birthday. 

“I think I want to make you an offer,” Mary told her.

Susan understood the trust behind that decision. Mary had helped build Westcor from its earliest days, and Susan was asking her to hand over something incredibly personal: how the company would present itself to the world.

“I know it’s scary, because I’m taking your baby and I’m dressing it,” Susan told her. “But I will do right by you. I promise you that.”

She joined Westcor in June 2013.

Relentless

Getting the opportunity was one thing. What Susan did with it is another.

Westcor was already operating in roughly 39 states and continuing to grow when Susan arrived, but from a branding perspective, there was almost a blank canvas. Even the logo needed to be cleaned up. Susan saw the opportunity to give the company a personality that matched the people behind it.

If there is one word she uses to describe how she approached that responsibility, it’s “relentless.”

“I’m so headstrong, and I will go to the ends of the earth,” she says. “I don’t know why. It’s just how I’m wired.”

That relentlessness shows up in surprisingly small places. The morning we conducted the interview for this article, Susan had already been talking with her team about a logo in an image that looked slightly off-center. Some people would never notice it. Others would notice and decide it was close enough.

Susan notices, and close enough bothers her.

It’s not really about the logo. It’s about caring enough to believe the little things matter. Susan has carried that philosophy into her work, her events and even how she raised her daughter. The details people barely notice individually are often the things that collectively make something feel different.

For Westcor, that meant being willing to look different too.

“Title insurance is boring. We’re not.”

The tagline got some backlash, but it got something far more valuable too: attention. People took pictures with it at conferences because they understood the joke. Susan wasn’t suggesting that the work wasn’t important. She was saying that doing serious work didn’t require a company to have a boring personality.

“We could be playful and still be a great underwriter,” she says.

Westcor leaned into it. They put employees’ faces into Dancing with the Stars posts. They once made Mary O’Donnell the Statue of Liberty. Susan encouraged the company to stop worrying that having a little fun would somehow make people take it less seriously.

The same thinking changed Westcor’s events. Susan had spent years on the agent side, so she knew what it felt like to attend conference after conference and sit through yet another formal dinner. She had stood around hotel bars and heard people complain that they had another dinner they didn’t really want to attend.

So Westcor stopped doing what everyone else was doing and started creating experiences people might actually want to attend.

For a Studio 54-themed event in New York at the 2025 ALTA One, Susan researched the club until she found the detail she wanted. Bianca Jagger famously appeared at Studio 54 with a white horse, so Susan told the event company she wanted one.

“Find me a horse. I don’t care where you find it. Get me a horse.”

They found one. A fake one, thankfully. Nobody had to figure out how to get a live horse up a New York elevator. But when guests stepped off that elevator, there it was beside the photo booth.

It was weird. It was unexpected. People remembered it.

And that, Susan believes, is exactly why the details matter.

Caring All The Way

That relentless side of Susan didn’t start or end with Westcor.

In her first title marketing role around 2001, Susan’s boss told her they were going to hold a golf tournament for his college roommate, who had been diagnosed with ALS, and raise money for a Boston-based research organization called ALS TDI.

Susan knew almost nothing about the disease.

They held the tournament and raised more money than they ever had before. At the time, Susan couldn’t have known how significant that introduction to ALS would eventually become.

In July 2006, her mother was diagnosed with the disease.

Susan was pregnant with Madison at the time. Her mother’s form of ALS was particularly aggressive, attacking her throat and diaphragm rather than primarily affecting her limbs. Madison was born on August 23. Susan’s mother died on September 23.

“I had this new baby. My mom just died. My whole world was upside down.”

Susan needed somewhere to put all of that, and eventually she found it in the same cause she had first stumbled into years earlier. She made a decision that she didn’t want another new mother to lose her own mother to ALS because there wasn’t enough research being done.

So she got involved.

She connected with ALS fundraising efforts in Denver, met other families affected by the disease and worked alongside organizations including ALS TDI and Augie’s Quest. Her family sponsors a pub crawl in Boston. Her sister works with ALS TDI on patient engagement. They’ve held casino nights in their Massachusetts hometown in memory of their mother, who loved going to casinos.

More than twenty years after that first golf tournament, Susan is still pushing for awareness and research.

It’s another version of the same trait that makes an off-center logo drive her crazy or sends her looking for a white horse for a conference event. When Susan decides something matters, she has a hard time caring about it halfway.

She puts her heart into it.

The People Who Give You The Guts

For all the confidence Susan has shown throughout her career, she is quick to point out that confidence doesn’t come entirely from within. There have been people along the way who helped her find it.

Lisa Steele, Cynthia Blair, Wendy Ethan, Leslie Wyatt, Nicole Timpanaro, Shonna Cardello, Linda Aparo and others she has met through the title industry became more than professional connections. They became the kind of friends who push you, encourage you and make you a little more willing to trust yourself.

“They elevate me without even knowing,” Susan says. “They gave me confidence.”

And then there is Laura Fick, the friend who started all of this by looking at Susan’s life at Saks and suggesting she come to work with her for a day.

“If it wasn’t for Laura, I wouldn’t be here today.”

It’s easy to tell someone to be bold. It’s harder to acknowledge that most of us become bold because somebody, somewhere, gave us a reason to believe we could be. Someone invited us into the room. Someone trusted us with an opportunity. Someone told us an idea wasn’t as crazy as we thought. Someone gave us enough confidence that the next time an opportunity appeared, we were willing to say something.

Susan has had those people. She’s grateful for them. And over the course of her career, she has become one of those people too.

Don’t Be Afraid To Be Different

Ask Susan what she wants to be remembered for and she doesn’t reach for a marketing metric or a list of accomplishments. She talks about people and the kind of company Westcor became.

“We were just a bunch of great people that ended up in the title business,” she says. “We didn’t take ourselves too serious.”

They climbed the ranks. They earned their spot. They cared deeply about the work and the people they served, but they didn’t believe being good at something required stripping all the personality out of it. Susan wishes more of the title industry would give itself permission to do the same.

“Make it personal,” she says. “Make it fun. Don’t be afraid.”

Because being different doesn’t make you less credible. Having personality doesn’t make you less professional. And having the guts to tell someone what you really think doesn’t make you disrespectful when it comes from a place of genuinely wanting to help.

There will always be reasons to stay quiet. You might be wrong. Your idea might fail. The person across the table might disagree with you. Susan readily admits that some of the risks she has taken weren’t particularly calculated. Her attitude has generally been, What’s the worst that can happen?

In fact, she tells people who join her team that she wants them to fail sometimes. If you never fail, she believes, you probably aren’t trying enough things that could teach you something new.

But there is another kind of failure that is much harder to measure. It’s seeing something you know could be better, having an idea that might actually help, and never finding out what would have happened if you had said it.

Susan has spent her career finding out.

The Flower Shop

Of course, there’s an old saying in this industry that once you get into title, you never really get out. So whether Susan actually escapes someday is still up for debate.

But if she does, she has an idea.

When the bright lights of title and escrow eventually fade and something resembling retirement comes calling, Susan thinks she might do something completely different.

Open a flower shop.

It sounds like another unexpected turn until she explains that floral design was actually one of her first loves. Susan went to floral design school in Boston and studied under a Japanese design master. She has done more weddings for people in the title industry than she can count, along with her daughter’s prom flowers and arrangements for friends over the years.

“Creating beautiful things in people’s very happy times and very sad times just always brought me comfort,” she says.

She already sees the storefront. Walking inside should feel a little like walking into a forest, surrounded by flowers and greenery, with an espresso machine off to the side and couches where people can sit, talk and connect while Susan works.

She might just call it Greens.

There’s something fitting about it. After all these years of marketing, branding, conferences, underwriting, ALS fundraising, relationships and obsessing over details most people would never notice, Susan still wants to create something people can feel.

Maybe that has been the common thread all along.

Care enough to notice what others miss. Have enough confidence to say something when you know you can help. Put your heart into whatever you decide to do. And when an opportunity comes along that scares you just enough to make you wonder whether you should take it, Susan Green has some advice.

Run.

And jump off the cliff.

Beyond the stories of leaders growing and scaling their businesses, the Growth & Scale Report also creates space for the people working through the issues shaping our industry right now. They are testing new technology, managing teams, improving processes, advocating for the industry and making decisions that affect their companies, customers and employees every day.

Our feature stories are written by us, based on conversations with the leaders we profile. The Industry Editorial section is different. These articles are written entirely by the contributors themselves. The words, opinions and ideas are 100 percent their own, giving readers the opportunity to hear directly from title agents, underwriters, consultants and service providers who each see the industry from a different angle.

We do not assign topics or ask contributors to fit their thinking into a predetermined theme. Instead, we give them the floor to write about what they believe the industry should know, question or spend more time discussing. In this issue, that leads to conversations about artificial intelligence, technology, workflow, trust, advocacy, professional development and the value title professionals continue to bring to every transaction.

These editorials matter because they come directly from people doing the work, not simply observing it. Their experiences help us see where challenges are emerging, where opportunities may be developing and which conversations deserve more attention. You may not agree with every perspective, but hearing these voices may help you think more carefully about the decisions you are making and the role you can play in shaping the future of our industry.