The Jim Janson Story

A  fter graduating from a high school in rural Ashtabula County, Ohio, in the early 1990s, Jim Janson decided to take a year off before deciding his next move in life. During that year, one of his high school teachers recruited him to paint her barn.

“[It] took me most of the spring and summer, because I fitted it in between my day shift working at the local golf course, and my night shift watering the greens at the same course,” recalls Jim, 46. “The teacher’s husband, Pete Pasqualone, was the general manager for Buckeye Title in Jefferson Ohio, and about the time I finished the barn one of his title examiners left his company.”

Jim’s attention to detail and good work ethic caught the attention of the Pasqualone, who offered him $1,000 a month to learn to be a title examiner.

“I had no idea what an examiner did but compared to the golf course it was living large, so I accepted on the spot,” Jim recounts.

During that first industry job, and a series of jobs after, Jim learned the details of the title process from the ground up, and would work alongside veterans who would teach him the essentials of running a title agency.

These days, nearly three decades after getting his feet wet in the industry, Jim is the senior managing partner of Title Professionals Group, a full-service title insurance and escrow agency which provides services for real estate professionals and landowners throughout northeast Ohio.

Learning from the ground up

Learning the ins and outs of the title industry was a bit more complicated than painting a barn, but Jim would learn valuable lessons at each career stop.

“There was nothing electronic at the Ashtabula County courthouse at that time other than the tax records, so I got to learn everything the old-fashioned way, seeing the sequential order in which things occurred, getting a visceral understanding of how events associated with past ownership of real estate affected the rights of the current owners,” Jim says of his first job in the industry. “That learning was helped and expanded by a group of much more experienced local examiners, some from our competitors, that generously taught me what I was doing and how I should do it and gave me a solid foundation that, sadly, most title examiners and abstractors nowadays lack.”

His next stop was working for a local exam provider, through which he spent a year working in counties throughout the area.

“I learned what other companies’ expectations were in terms of turnaround time (faster than I was used to) and quality of product (lower than I was used to),” Jim says. “Nonetheless, while I worked there the owner taught me the value of metrics and reinvesting in one’s company.”

Eventually, he left the examining company and returned to a title agency, where the focus was not solely on producing fast exams but on insuring title, which he says requires more analysis and problem resolution. Again, Jim would learn from industry veterans.

“I worked for Chicago Title Agency of Northeast Ohio for a great employer in Bill Brainard, who taught me that in an industry in which we perform the same service at nearly the same cost as our competitors, the only thing that differentiates us is the experience we provide for our customers,” Jim explains. “I spent the next eight years examining, then learning the escrow and closing process and basic accounting principles, then learning how to take over some management tasks.”

In addition to the career moves, Jim would fit in a marriage, a degree from Tiffin University and classes at Cleveland Marshall Law School. Eventually, Chicago Title Insurance Co. recruited him to manage a couple suburban Cleveland-area branches.

“It was a huge culture shock going from a six-person agency in the boondocks to managing two offices of 20 people for a company with thousands of employees,” he says. “My first day on the job I had lunch with my new boss, Mary Moran, and her then-boss, Mike Nolan, who told me that he hoped I did a great job and if I didn’t he’d fire me, because Fidelity National Financial expected and only kept the best people.

“My time at CTIC/Fidelity was great, once I got over the culture shock. My learning increased exponentially,” Jim points out. “I realized what it meant to be answerable to a system, to have to report to managers who in turn have to report to their owner managers, at the same time as I learned how to work with and for the people I was nominally in charge of, who did not yet know or respect me.”

In 2005, Jim took a leap of faith.

“My former employer Bill decided to sell his agency when his son and daughter-in-law decided to move to Arizona to be closer to him and work in what was then a booming real estate market,” Jim recalls. “The office was half a mile from my home, I knew the owners, the employees, and the market, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up, so I took it.

“I unenrolled from law school, left on good terms with my bosses at Fidelity, and went into what was a frightening amount of debt for me. But I was pretty confident I could make it work, and envisioned that I would at least be able to keep the office what it was when I bought it; a handful of people working on deals in rural Ashtabula County.”

Since then the company has grown, acquired, partnered with and finally merged together, from one office with six employees to four offices with 51 employees completing several hundred transactions monthly. The company also has a joint venture title agency which employs an additional 16 people and processes well over a thousand transactions monthly.

He often relies upon the various lessons learned throughout his many years in the industry.

“What I have learned is that there is not a substitute for mastering your subject material. Whatever it is that you are tasked with doing, you should try to learn everything you can about it,” Jim stresses. “Learn not just what to do, but why. How your actions or omissions might affect the future, not just the present. I was provided a very complete education in title not many people get now.”

He also strives to be the resource for his employees that so many of the people he worked for in the past were to him.

“Everyone that I have learned from was experienced to the point where they either had the right answer or the knowledge to figure it out,” Jim says. “They always helped me. And hopefully our employees view me and my partners in that position now.”

He and his wife Laura, along with their children – Colin, Ben and Faith – enjoy traveling, preferably where it’s warmer. “I always like getting away from crowds and civilization,” says Jim, noting that he grew up in a small home with eight brothers and sisters. “That’s my favorite thing to do.”

Also good for unwinding are landscaping, gardening, and trying to keep his bonsai trees alive. Considerably less experienced at that than at title, he says it’s a work in progress.