| Lawyer turned entrepreneur loves challenges of title business.
T itle Partners CEO Dave Davis has only been in the title insurance industry for 12 years. In that time he grew his agency from a backroom operation to one of the biggest title companies in St. Louis. Like many in the industry, Dave didn’t enter the industry by design. He had related experience, an interest in real estate and a passion to open his own business.
 After attending the University of Missouri for his bachelor’s degree and law school, Dave worked for several law firms before serving as assistant general counsel for Bank of America. There he was responsible for the Midwest region for commercial and private banking. He briefly joined his brother’s title agency before opening his own in 2006.
“I always had a passion for business and knew I wanted to be my own boss,” Dave said. “I had some friends in the mortgage business who encouraged me to make the leap. So, at 39, with a wife, mortgage and three kids, I left Bank of America and started the business. It started very small and grew and developed.”
Dave said a key part of the growth was his employees. He takes a lot of pride in attracting the best talent in the market who are also respected by their peer groups in the industry. Each of the company’s seven offices were built around a team of employees first.
“Our philosophy is we don’t want to be the biggest; we want to be the best at what we do. That starts and ends with the employees,” he said. “I still interview each employee we have and strive to get the best people we can in every position. Obviously this starts on the escrow side, and goes all the way through to those typing policies. We have good people who understand and are committed to customer service. It’s a relationship business and that permeates everything we do.”
Title Partners is a full-service title agency. Approximately 80 percent of its business is residential and 20 percent is commercial. Dave said because the agency does a lot of bank and lender business and avoided the subprime market, it was able to grow through the Great Recession.
“Thriving and succeeding during that time was invigorating,” he said. “Knowing we could survive the ups and downs of the markets. That caused me to focus on strategic planning, where we wanted to be in the market and how we needed to get there.”
This strategic approach also helped him when it came time to implement the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule. He and his staff did internal and external training with customers prior to Oct. 3, 2015. The agency hosted webinars and researched software.
To comply with lender requirements and be a proactive player in the industry, Dave now has brought in third-party auditors to determine whether the agency is compliant with the American Land Title Association’s Title Insurance and Settlement Company Best Practices as well as the SSAE-16, SOC 1, Type 1 standards. Next year he intends on bringing them back in for a Type II audit.
However, Dave didn’t do it all on this own. Aside from his Title Partners team, Dave also had Jack Barnes and Barnes’ late wife Barbara as mentors.
 “Both have been very important to me since I came into the business,” he said. “Barb was instrumental in teaching the ins and outs of the escrow side and Jack has served as general counsel with well-respected companies here for years and has also mentored our general counsel through the nuances of the title insurance business. Jack has not only been a mentor on the nuts and bolts of the legal aspects of the business but is a well-respected sounding board for me to bounce things off of, and I always know that I will get advice from someone who has seen and done just about everything there is in this business.”
He also joined the Entrepreneurs Organization, a national group made up of business owners with more than $1 million in sales. It is broken into small groups who meet on a monthly basis and talk about business.
“They’re kind of your outside board of directors,” Dave said. “You can get input from people who have been there, done that. That was a big help for me transitioning from law to business.”
Fortunately through that transition and the growth of Title Partners, Dave had his wife Kelley’s support. They met in high school, went to college together and have been married for 23 years.
They have three children – Emily, a high school senior looking at colleges; Caroline, an athletic sophomore competing across the country and Alex, whose baseball team Dave coaches. Together they attend Mizzou games, travel and play tennis and golf.
Dave’s hope is that one day Title Partners will become a multi-generational company.
“I like the industry,” he said. “It’s never boring. There’s always a new challenge. There’s always a new adventure. It’s a people business. It’s a relationship business. I like that. You get to know your lender clients. You get to know your Realtor clients. Same with the employees; it’s a small, niche industry. Everyone knows each other.”
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