| How learning a dead language can breathe new life into a traditional industry
A title insurance career is often a destination with an unpredictable journey. There is no one specific map or series of steps that most professionals follow before owning a title operation. Sure, some people are born right into a records office, manila folders in hand, but most leave the compass at home one day, venture out into their adult lives, look around and suddenly discover they've been in the title industry for half their life.
"Nobody's plan is ever title insurance," joked Chris Black, owner of Winged Foot Title. He may not have planned it, but here he is, in the title industry, at the helm of a small title insurance office in Florida, with grand designs of innovating the way both customers and consumers think of title insurance companies.
So how did he get here?
Chris' father, David Black, was a college president, a career path that required plenty of moves throughout Chris' childhood. Born in Tennessee, Chris' family relocated to Ohio, then across the country to California and eventually landed in Wisconsin where he attended high school and college.
"I always look back fondly on being able to experience different parts of the U.S. and different people," he said. "No matter where I was, the deep South or Midwest, there are always the core types of people. Hate to generalize, but people are the same in every place you go. Having grown up like that I cherished the experience and those different people and geographies."
Chris gravitated to university life at first. He liked the classics and planned on being a professor. After earning his bachelor's in English and classics, he readied to enter grad school by heading abroad for a summer to take an oral Latin course taught by the Latin secretary to the Pope in Rome.
“Lived there for a summer and I realized that as much as I loved the literature and languages, I couldn’t see myself doing it for the rest of my life,” Chris said. “I came back, and other than my plan for grad school, I had nothing else set up. At that point, I had to start over.”
He moved to Philadelphia, which is where his parents had relocated after Wisconsin, and taught high school Latin for almost two years. Unsure of his next move, he decided to trade in the dead language for legalese, attending law school in Washington, D.C.
“You get your ticket punched through the bar, but that doesn’t mean you know how to do anything,” Chris said about his post-law school reality. “I tell that to prospective attorneys or kids thinking about going to law school. Whatever you do, go try something practical. Make sure you have practical skills. Legal training is great but it only gets you so far.”
The search for that practical experience took Chris down to Naples, Fla., to join the staff of a national title agency. As most do upon entering the industry, Chris started at the ground floor, searching and examining his way through the title insurance process. “I did a lot of reading and researching. I needed to figure out what it was we were supposed to be accomplishing, for what purpose and for whom. It was just one piece at a time,” he said.
Chris went from an almost-career studying the classics in Wisconsin to churning out refinance closings in Florida. This destination was intriguing enough that after two years, Chris felt ready to venture out on his own and sell title insurance his way.
“What I liked was the blend — the opportunity title insurance offered to blend both my legal training and my entrepreneurial spirit. You can create something sound legally in practice and also something that allows you to grow and run a business. That was really appealing to me,” he said.
Keep in mind, Chris joined the title industry in 2005. The company was a high volume agency, and business was at the peak of peaks. Not exactly the best barometer of what life will be like for a startup agency in 2007.
The name and logo of Winged Foot Title may be an allusion to Hermes, messenger to the gods, who was valued for his speed, but Chris’ goal was never to value the quick churn of high volume. In fact, Chris considers opening in a drying 2007 market a blessing because they could have fallen prey to the same high-volume mentality. Chris used the early slow times to focus on developing the processes that would distinguish his company.
“I wanted to put into place something a little more high touch and experiential,” Chris said. “I wanted people to have a memorable, meaningful experience, and that’s what we were touting.”
His time in the industry was relatively short, but he learned and observed, especially during that hot time in the market. He believed there was a better way to do business that bucked some traditional title insurance norms. At a certain point though, the vision needed to translate into results. How do you do that during a downturn? It’s like that sports cliché: Take what the defense gives you. If the deep route is covered, focus on the short routes.
Or short sales, to be more specific.
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"It’s great that people think of us, and we can resolve the short sale issue, but it’s a huge problem if they think that’s all we do."
Chris Black
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“Maybe two years into our business we tapped into the default market in the way we could. The foreclosure stuff we didn’t have access to, but we had access to short sales because they were locally listed,” Chris said. “We put together a team and systems to process the short sales for Realtors to allow them to sell more real estate. That jump started us in terms of growth.”
The short sale strategy was executed so well that it inadvertently became a problem.
“People were under the impression that — and this is a problem I didn’t know about until someone said it — ‘hey, I thought you guys only did short sales,’” Chris said. “It’s great that people think of us, and we can resolve the short sale issue, but it’s a huge problem if they think that’s all we do."
“I love the experiential piece, and the short sales are not usually a great experience for anybody,” he laughs. “So, to be labeled that was upsetting. Don’t want to leave that impression. We want the opposite. We spent a considerable amount of time rebutting that presumption.”
And of course, short sale business only led the way for so long until those dried up. At one point, 70 percent of Winged Foot’s business came from short sales. Now that is about 15 to 20 percent as Chris and his team worked to balance the business and build the brand’s reputation around customer service and the seller/borrower experience.
The consumer experience is the furthest Chris has strayed from the traditional role of the title agent. We’ve covered the details of how Winged Foot has set up its operations to increase communication with the consumer in The Title Report. The basic idea is to normalize within the everyday title process several touch points of communication with the buyer and seller, and to provide updates on how the transaction is progressing.
The inspiration came two years ago, during a presentation by Ken Harney, a columnist with the Washington Post, who said 70 percent of consumers report leaving the closing table not knowing what title insurance is or why it’s of value.
“That struck a chord with me,” Chris said. “From that point on, I decided that we should be taking a leadership role in making sure that consumers know what it is we are doing and why it’s of value.”
Chris also references a concept from To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink called information symmetry. Decades ago, most consumer transactions had a great deal of information asymmetry. Joe Smith goes to the car dealership, looks around and relies on what the salesman has to say because he has the information. Today, thanks to the Internet, there is widespread information symmetry. Consumers are as armed as ever with the necessary information needed to make a decision. Title insurance is still largely in the information asymmetry stage, and Chris believes there is a benefit in trying to push for more information symmetry.
“I don’t think we’ll see a huge shift in how our business is driven, but I think there’s a huge void, which we are trying to fill, when it comes to engaging with the consumer in a way that treats them as someone with the right information. We want to talk to them like they want to be talked to and answer the questions they have.”
 This consumer focus serves Winged Foot in several ways. Title companies create a product people appreciate, even if they don’t know it. By informing — or teaching — along the way, Winged Foot brings that behind-the-scenes action to the forefront and builds an appreciation into the experience.
“By engaging the consumer over the course of the transaction, multiple times, by educating them and treating them like someone who matters, it creates a better referral source for our referral source,” Chris said. “Ultimately, yes, we want the consumer to be totally pleased and educated about what we do, but we want them to leave, thanking their Realtor for referring them to us. That creates a better opportunity for that Realtor to get more referrals from that consumer.”
When Chris talks about it, you can hear his genuine enthusiasm for what they have done and still aspire to do. After hearing the idea and seeing the results, it’s difficult to imagine how someone could naysay it, but Chris says it happens. He spoke recently at an American Land Title Association conference, and an attendee asked how real estate agents don’t complain about his company contacting their clients. Chris admits that now and then there are control issues, but questions why that should prevent the title agent from improving his processes? Chris points to what he calls the title industry’s “crab pot mentality.”
“In a pot of boiling crabs, there is always the one crab that can easily get out, but it’s always pulled back in by other crabs inside the pot. This happens a lot in our industry,” Chris said. Specifically about the real estate agent concern: “It’s about education; you have to educate them as well. If you are dealing with that real estate agent who doesn’t see an opportunity in the title process for them to create a better relationship with their consumer, you have to educate them in such a way that explains it. It makes total sense if you can get people to listen.”
Chris’ relative newness in the industry has helped him see opportunities that exist within the regular title insurance process that long-time veterans sometimes gloss over or dismiss.
But there’s more to it than his short stint in the industry.
Chris jokes about his “bachelor’s of unemployment,” but that time spent studying Latin prepared him for the title insurance industry and running his own business, whether he knew it or not (he didn’t).
Quick lesson on Latin: Latin is an enclitic language, meaning the endings of words indicate their role within the sentence. If the word is the direct object within a sentence, it has a certain ending — an ‘m’ or ‘am.’ So, in Latin, words can be put in any order, unlike English which depends on the proper order of words. Learning to read Latin then becomes an exercise in problem-solving. You are looking for the subject, which may be far removed from the verb or the modifier. Meaning can only be achieved by looking at the whole and piecing together those separate parts.
Is the actual skill of being able to read Latin valuable? Not really. But the problem solving skills and mindset are invaluable. Chris’ Latin education had a latent value. (Plus — searching through a document, looking for the pieces that matter and affect its meaning — is just like a title search.)
Chris’ consumer-focused strategy is aiming at a similar latent effect. Will educating consumers deliver direct, immediate new business to his door? Probably not. But over time, there could be an indirect impact. For example, in 2014, Chris plans on sending out direct mail to sellers after they’ve listed their homes for sale.
 “We are in a market that is listing-driven, so why couldn’t we succeed in some way going direct to the consumer?” he asks. “We can offer things of value. If they want to know what their bottom line will be, we can ballpark that, or send an e-book on how to more successfully list their house and prepare for closing. We could succeed in speaking to that consumer who is willing to follow the link on the piece of mail and learn about the title process from us. And then when the Realtor asks them if they have a title company they’d like to use, maybe they’ll say our name. Maybe it allows us to break through what otherwise might have been a tough sell to a new Realtor.”
The success of the effort may be even less direct than that. When you see an ad, you internalize that ad somewhere in your brain, whether you know it or not (you don’t). Chris is banking on that. Establish an early link with the consumer, in a faceless industry, and see what effect it has down the road.
Hermes wasn’t just a speedy messenger with winged sandals, transporting the dead to the afterlife. He also was considered the god of travel, communication, trade, language, writing and diplomacy. Sure, Hermes was quick, but there was some purpose behind his movements.
“There’s a place for disrupting that model where people don’t know you can,” Chris said. “We can enter in that space and disrupt it by getting in front of them in a way that no one else is doing. The end of the title work is certainly a commodity, the same wherever you get it, but it’s how you get there that really distinguishes you from the next title agency.”
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