The Wendy Ethen Story

Wendy Ethen is not a superhero, but sometimes she wears a cape.

As president and visionary of Guaranty Commercial Title Inc., Wendy wants her employees to provide excellent service to their clients, but also encourages them to have fun.

“Fun is definitely a focus,” Wendy says. “We’re working a lot of our adult lives, right? We may as well be having fun.”

As a reflection of that playful spirit, Wendy and all of her employees at Guaranty have superhero capes in their offices.

“Sometimes you just need to wear a cape to work,” she says.

Having fun is a serious goal for Wendy, so much so that if an employee says they’re not enjoying their job, she will work with them to change that.

“Fun is one of our core values,” she says. “We do really serious, hard work all day long, but we don’t take ourselves very seriously, so we’re pretty casual and human with our clients, but they know that we’re experts.”

During 20-plus years as the leader of Guaranty, Wendy has built a business specializing in closing transactions for all types of commercial projects, with a special focus on affordable housing nationwide. She spoke with The Title Report about her journey in the title insurance business, the move to buy Guaranty and the company culture she has crafted.

How it started

While working as a temp in her 20s, Wendy was sent to a title company to type policies.

“All of us end up in this business some really random way,” she says. “I went to work for what later became First American in Minneapolis and typed policies at night. I ended up becoming an assistant and then a closer, and then I opened an office for them, and just really loved it.”

Wendy says she enjoyed working in the title insurance business because she liked “putting all the puzzle pieces together.”

Wendy says she relocated to New York after her husband’s job was transferred there. While on the East Coast from 1991 to 1998, Wendy attended Syracuse University College of Law, earned her law degree and worked at a law office before returning to Minneapolis. She worked as a commercial closer at Old Republic from 1998 through 2001 and then in the same position at Commercial Partners Title LLC from 2001 through 2004.

Becoming a business owner

With the title insurance world commanding her attention, Wendy set her sights on something she had wanted to do for a long time.

“I always wanted to have my own company,” she says. “… I think I’m just an entrepreneur at heart. I’ve always had two or three jobs. I’ve always been really hard working.”

A co-worker at Commercial Partners had an opportunity to purchase Guaranty Commercial Title Inc. and asked Wendy if she wanted to join him. When her prospective business partner ended up backing out, Wendy moved forward with the purchase in 2004.

She bought 50 percent ownership in Guaranty and the previous owner continued to own the other half of the company. They co-owned Guaranty for about two years before Wendy bought the other half and became the exclusive owner.

Guaranty handled both residential and commercial transactions for several years before completing the switchover to commercial-only when the TRID (TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure) rule took effect in 2015.

Wendy finds commercial transaction work more engaging than its residential counterpart because each commercial deal has unique components.

“I wanted to do harder projects and more rewarding stuff … no offense to my residential friends. … It just wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to do,” she says.

Handling commercial transactions fit her creative spirit and her interest in overseeing deals that are more eclectic.

“I’m not a good rule follower … and residential was so checklist,” she says. “Do this and do that for no apparent reason, and it drove me crazy. It’s not the sandbox I wanted to play in.”

Wendy focuses on affordable housing transactions

While Guaranty is licensed in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, the company does closings across the country by partnering with other agencies, and since they’re independent, the firm can work with many other companies. Wendy says she’s “very active” in the large agents group with the American Land Title Association and notes “a lot of my partners around the country come from that group.”

Wendy says she may, for example, receive a call from a client who asks for assistance with a deal they’re working on. She consults her list of agents, contacts one, and asks the agent if they want to work with her. Typically, the agent would handle the title work and commitment while Guaranty would take care of the closing, and the two entities would split the fees.

Wendy says her passion is in working on affordable housing projects.

“Most of the deals that I work on are new construction of rental affordable housing,” Wendy says. “It’s usually buildings with 100 units or more and they’re almost always targeted towards some population.”

The housing could be for senior citizens or people with disabilities, veterans or persons who were formerly homeless.

“We do a ton of work in affordable housing which is a … complicated transaction,” Wendy says. “There aren’t many people in the country that do it, and so people come to us for those deals.”

Since these transactions have multiple legal components, a majority of Guaranty’s closers (five out of seven) and examiners (two of three) are attorneys. Having that legal training is “really helpful for the more sophisticated commercial transactions,” Wendy says.

She adds her business employs a lot of risk analysis methods when assessing a potential transaction. Understanding risk analysis – which is taught in law school - is important when studying potential commercial deals.

“Some of the deals I close have 10 different lenders, and they all want something different,” Wendy explains. “…. When you’re trying to put together a huge project with all those puzzle pieces, they don’t always fit together perfectly. … There are some things where you’re (thinking), what are the odds of this going wrong? What are the odds of somebody coming back and saying, ‘I own that little square in the middle of this parcel?’ Those are the things that we analyze and decide whether to go forward with it, or say, ‘no, we can’t insure that.’”

Significant Transactions

All of Guaranty’s employees are encouraged to find their own niche. One staffer helps an indigenous chef build kitchens, while another handles charter school transactions. Others are working on projects where the land and/or buildings is returned to indigenous tribes that had the property taken from them in the past.

“We call these Significant Transactions,” Wendy explains.

She asks her staffers to think about, “What are you proud to be working on? What is important to our community or really special to our client? What (would you) go home and tell your family about that you worked on that day that you thought was really cool?”

She adds Guaranty has “done a lot of” specialty charter school projects during the past couple of years.

“(The educators are) talking about their students and what they want for their students, and we’re talking about the real estate, and it’s cool to see that come together,” Wendy says.

Guaranty recently finished a building for people who were formerly homeless, and Wendy visited with the new residents.

“For them to have a home and some place to put their stuff and start to heal, and have some more opportunities in their life, it’s really amazing,” she says. “The best part about it is, you talk to them and you’re like, you’re just like me. People fall on hard times, and I don’t think a lot of people realize that. Talk to some people who are living in these buildings, and a lot of them are the nurses and the firefighters and the policemen and the teachers.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Wendy and her staffers routinely visited the projects they worked on.

“For those of us who are just pushing paper all day long, it makes it more meaningful,” Wendy says. “For my team it’s really nice for them to see what they helped to build.”

She says they want to make these trips again and notes her team is creating a schedule of the project sites that they intend to visit.

A ‘relationship-driven’ approach

Wendy says she and her staff focus on being “relationship-driven” with the projects they handle. The same team works on a transaction from start to finish, and Guaranty continues working with many of the same clients so they can fully understand their needs.

“I know where their money is going to come from,” Wendy says. “I know who their lawyer is… You start to learn about their business model, and we can just do a much better job the better we get to know them.”

In a nod to this relationship-building philosophy, Wendy assigns projects to closing teams based on the personality of her employees.

“I’m really good at the last minute,” Wendy says. “You could throw me into a closing and I haven’t looked at it, I can put it together, and I don’t feel uncomfortable about that. I have another closer who (says), ‘I’m getting hives. Don’t give me something at the last minute. I need it a month in advance.’”

Wendy says they use the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a strategic planning system that helps to run the company. It’s a system for setting goals, metrics, target markets and clients. All of that information is available to the team, each employee can use the system to access the company’s financial information and track the firm’s goals.

“Everybody knows how much money we made last week, and everybody knows what our goals are and what their part in reaching them is,” Wendy says.

Wendy’s additional title of visionary is connected with the EOS.

“The crazy entrepreneur with all the wild ideas is called the visionary in that system,” Wendy shares. “I’m the visionary … I’m the one who’s supposed to come up with all the wild ideas.”

She notes an integrator then examines the ideas and decides which ones are feasible to pursue.

When she’s not working at Guaranty, Wendy says she enjoys traveling internationally and is a long-time scuba diver.

“When I turned 50, I decided that I had to go to as many countries as my age,” she says. “… I’m now at 60-some so I’m a little ahead of schedule … I’m at the point where it’s all got to be exotic because I’ve been to all the places everybody else has been.”

She will soon travel to Turkey, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.

Wendy encourages her employees to take time off and recharge their batteries.

“I want to make sure that everybody in my company does that, so I’m showing them it can be done even if you’re the owner,” she says.

For employees who are concerned they will fall behind on their work while they’re gone, other staffers pick up the slack.

“We have a pretty robust backup plan so that nobody feels like they can’t take the time that they need,” Wendy says.

Wendy has been a scuba diver for 30 years and dives several times each year. She and her two daughters, Aegron, 28, and Sydney, 25, are planning to swim with the whale sharks near Cancun this summer.