| Determination, technology, and harnessing resources a recipe for success
I f it wasn’t for a new neighbor, Homeland Title Owner and CEO Laura Perry may never have discovered the title industry and founded her Tennessee title company, which is celebrating its 18th year in business.
 Laura, an attorney, was working as an insurance defense lawyer in Chattanooga when her mother sold her small-town legal practice in eastern Tennessee. Laura took over the practice with her husband, Jon, and though they were successful, she realized she was not built for small-town life.
“We had a thriving practice, but all we did was spend our money leaving town,” Laura recalls. “We had a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, and it was becoming increasingly clear that being a strong, smart female in a small, rural, Appalachian town had its limits.”
When the World Trade Center fell in 2001, and then her grandfather passed away, Laura realized life was too short to be unhappy. The family moved to Nashville, where Jon continued practicing law and Laura decided to stay home with the children.
“I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea,” she laughs. “About 18 months later, I’m pretty miserable unloading the dryer and the dishwasher.”
Her new neighbor was an appraiser, and during a conversation with him, he told Laura she should start a title company.
“I look into it, and I think, ‘That looks really boring, but I could be a good mom,’” she recalls.
One of the difficulties Laura had with being a lawyer and a mother is if she had a case due in court on the same day one of her children got sick, then someone who had been waiting 18 months for a court date might miss their day in court.
“I was either going to be a bad mom or a bad lawyer,” she says.
So, she started Homeland Title in June 2003, with Old Republic and SoftPro Classic. The company’s name was inspired by the creation of Homeland Security.
“What we’re doing is all about security,” she says.
Laura’s beginnings were … challenging.
“It was a disaster,” she laughs. “I had never worked in a title company before. I thought we just made a lot of copies and did a lot of paperwork. I didn’t really understand the whole insurance part or the money management part.”
The company just managed to survive its first few months.
“I hired a bunch of people who all quit, because no one wants to work for someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, and I did not know what I was doing,” Laura says.
She called her agency representative and asked for help. The rep stopped by and fell head over heels for Laura’s only employee, her husband’s second cousin once removed. (“That’s really a thing,” she jokes.) The two were married six weeks later.
At the wedding, Laura met title attorney Mary Frances Rudy. She asked her how it was going, and Laura said terribly and that she was thinking about quitting.
“Mary Frances said ‘Don’t quit. Let’s be partners,’” she remembers.
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“I went looking for ownership skills. I wondered, ‘what am I missing?’ I knew I couldn’t work any harder. I couldn’t grow the business any more without getting smarter.”
Laura Perry
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The two worked together for eight years. “In 2011, Mary Frances said, ‘You know what? You needed me for a long time, but now it’s time for the baby bird to fly out of the nest,’” Laura says.
She went solo in October 2011. As the business began to boom after the Great Recession, Laura focused on creating a more mature company and becoming a more mature business owner.
“We realized that we had been open for nine years, but we were stuck. Each year, we set a goal to grow to $1 million in revenue and each year, no matter how hard we worked, we couldn’t seem to get over that mark. Often, annual revenue would land between $850,000 and $975,000,” she says. “It took several years to learn that hope is not a strategy.”
Again, she was not afraid to ask for help and turned to her trusted vendors, Fidelity and SoftPro, asking them to explain all the resources that they were offering. She became active in the American Land Title Association. She joined the Alternative Board of Nashville, owned by Rick Lundgren, which brings together business coaches and board facilitators to help business leaders achieve their business and personal visions.
“I went looking for ownership skills,” Laura recalls. “I wondered, ‘what am I missing?’ I knew I couldn’t work any harder. I couldn’t grow the business any more without getting smarter.”
For a while, she absorbed all the information she could. Then, it came time to make the tough decisions necessary to grow the business. She began by paying herself and her staff a market-based salary.
“This step was hard, but it was a vital first step to facilitate growth,” she says. “I realized that I was overpaid as the owner, and some of my staff were underpaid. Making this adjustment was really tough. I cut my own pay. I gave some star employees raises. I leaned in and lived on less.”
She left the profits in the company, building up cash reserves. Next, they spent time on company culture, identifying what it really was and deciding what they wanted it to be.
“This step is not expensive in money, but it requires a lot of time,” she says. “We were forced to think about who we are, what kind of place we want to work in, and then boil it down to core values, mission and vision. We wrote it down.”
Then they put it into practice.
“When training a new hire, we incorporate the core values into the hiring and the training. We learned to live it. We actively promote, protect, and defend our culture. We evaluate our current employees, current clients, and vendors against our values,” she says.
It took about two years to get the culture right, Laura says. Once they had a healthy culture and a healthy savings account, it was time to invest in technology like the TitleWave portal, which integrates Fidelity searches into SoftPro to generate a commitment.
“We no longer required employees to type commitments,” she says. “We still get all of the source documents, but the integration allows us to create the commitment in just a few minutes. This efficiency has been extremely important to our growth.”
In 2017, SoftPro helped Homeland Title transition from the Classic version to Select. That was a big investment, Laura said, both of time and money. It paid off, as clients, Realtors and lenders noticed the speed at which Homeland Title could work.
The true rewards came during the COVID-19 shutdowns. Thanks to SoftPro Select, escrow officers, title lawyers and the entire title department could easily work from home.
“When the pandemic happened, we had been preparing for years,” Laura says. “We were more resilient. We had software and hardware in place that allowed 70 percent of our team to work remotely every day. We had a culture that was educated, comfortable with technological solutions, and ready to adapt and meet the challenges of working remotely. We had a reputation for being a high-tech, innovative company. As a result, we experienced a 42 percent increase in volume during the pandemic.
“Then we experienced an ice storm that stopped all travel. During the pandemic, 70 percent of our staff worked remotely, allowing the other 30 percent to handle the documents in the office and safely keep socially distanced. During the 2021 ice storm, we were able to work 100 percent remotely for five days.”
Laura also invests in education. She sends team members to Fidelity workshops, ALTA conferences and the annual SoftPro User Conference.
“We have a training program for new employees,” she says. “We hire people that don’t have any experience and we train them, and we’re getting better and better and better at it.”
Today, Homeland Title has 24 employees and three locations.
“We reached $3.2 million in revenue in 2020 and are on track this year to hit $4 million,” Laura says.
Looking forward, she plans to invest in more technology, working to integrate Salesforce and SoftPro Select.
“We don’t think any title company in Tennessee has done that yet,” she says. “We imagine a Realtor sending us a contract at 9:30 a.m. and the sales rep meeting that Realtor for lunch at noon and being able to pull up the new order in Salesforce in real time.”
Homeland Title is also growing its sales department.
“For 15 years, I was the salesperson. Three years ago, I hired a salesperson. And now we’re adding three more,” she says.
Homeland Title’s team currently has five generations working side-by-side: Gen Zers, Millenials, Xennials, Gen Xers and Boomers.
“I’m in my 50s. I really want the company to outlive me,” Laura says. “I want it to be a company that stands on its own and with a leadership team that is able to continue to grow the company without me. I think there’s a lot of title companies that bottleneck with the institutional knowledge of the individual owner. I’m really trying to train and grow a whole bunch of title professionals: a title department, an escrow department, a sales department, an admin department.
“The Great Recession happened in 2008. The Rudy partnership dissolved in 2011. In 2020, the pandemic happened. Something else will happen. What I have come to realize is that if you build a team of individuals that knows what the mission, vision and cores values of the company are, and you work with vendors that also fit into your core values, the alignment of that strong team working together can drive growth even in a disaster.”
When she’s not in the office, Laura and her husband Jon spend time with their adult children Tanner and Ryan. They are also in the process of building their dream house. In their free time, they enjoy riding bikes and playing pickleball.
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