| An evening with friends leads to title career
Amy Grasso has spent much of her career solving problems.
After spending 18 years working in leadership and project management jobs in health care, insurance and global technology organizations, Amy pivoted to the title insurance industry in 2017.
 Today she is senior vice president of Acrisure Title, where she works with a management team that oversees operations in offices in Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. She has a home office and travels to the other office sites in Michigan on a regular basis.
“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it,” Amy tells The Title Report. “(I) don’t expect to leave it. I’m hoping to retire from it, hopefully in the next five-ish years or so, but we’ll see.”
Since she’s still relatively new to the title insurance business, Amy says she believes she provides a fresh perspective on how to improve her company’s efficiency.
“I like going in with a fresh view and looking at this and (asking) ‘why are we doing it like this?’” Amy says. “I’m not always right. Sometimes there’s a really good reason why we’re doing things a certain way, and I get that, but I believe not growing up in the title industry (has) offered me a different perspective than many people have because I'm able to ask, ‘Why do we do this? Why don’t we do this? Why can’t we do this?’”
Amy spoke with The Title Report about why she switched to title insurance eight years ago, how she uses her project management skills to help her firm operate more efficiently and what challenges face the profession during the next several years.
From IT to title insurance
From 1998 to 2014, Amy worked in information technology (IT) management positions for Electronic Data Systems (which was eventually purchased by Hewlett Packard) and handled IT support for General Motors.
“We had seven global locations that we ran for General Motors for all their IT support,” she says. “They would need a password reset. … (The) server was down, you call the service desk, and then we would get you to the right spot. … We ran that … for all of GM’s locations around the world.”
From August 2014 through early 2017, Amy worked as senior project manager for Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services.
Amy and her husband have been friends with her current boss, Brent Warner, and his wife for many years. The couples met one another because they each had a child participating in competitive cheerleading. The chance to work in title insurance materialized through a conversation they had when the four were spending an evening together. At the time, Amy was looking for a new professional opportunity and Brent was working as owner of Diversified National Title Agency and Diversified Insurance Group.
“We got to talking,” Amy says. “(Diversified) was starting to grow and (Brent) needed some more help. I went in as a commercial escrow officer (at Diversified in 2017), and had to Google, ‘What's title insurance?’ that night when he started talking, and I learned from the ground up.”
She was trained in commercial escrow officer work and then operated in that role at Diversified National Title Agency from January 2017 through January 2020.
“I was the front person for all of our commercial transactions,” Amy says. “I would deal with the attorneys and the clients on purchases and refis that were all commercial properties. … I would handle those transactions from beginning to end.”
While she was working at Diversified National Title Agency, the firm was purchased by Acrisure, a financial technology and insurance company based in Grand Rapids, Mich. Diversified is one of more than 20 title companies that are owned by Acrisure, but the Diversified management team is the first one to start operating as Acrisure Title across multiple states.
Putting project management skills to work
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“What gets me going is how can we make technology not to necessarily get rid of people, but to make people more efficient.”
Amy Grasso
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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, “commercial title just died,” Amy says. “Nothing happening.”
Activity picked up on the residential side of the business, however, and Amy applied her prior experience as a project manager to improve Diversified’s efficiency on both financial and operational fronts. The firm had operated on a spreadsheet system to keep track of the orders they were handling. When a new order was opened, the information was entered into the spreadsheet and title examiners would mark the files they were going to handle.
“Orders were getting lost because people would forget to put it in the spreadsheet,” she says. “I think we had 200 or 300 backlogged orders at that time. It was because COVID was crazy on residential. We got so busy.”
Amy implemented procedures where employees collaborated with one another more. Previously, each examiner was handling transactions within a specific geographic area and did not venture outside of those boundaries.
“If they didn’t have files in their county, they didn’t have anything to do where somebody else might have 50 files,” she says.
Amy revised the procedure so that examiners handled files in multiple geographic locations. She explained she established a “first-in, first-out methodology and got all the examiners examining all the areas … just built the efficiencies within our title production department, and then it just evolved after that.”
Amy says Acrisure Title has a title production team that supports Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Team members have been cross trained on how to handle transactions in all four states so they support fellow co-workers when business picks up in one state.
“We have people that were examiners in Kansas, we have people that were examiners in Texas, we had people that were examiners in Michigan that are all part of our team now,” she says. “They all report to the same person now, and they’re all cross trained in different areas. So if Michigan gets caught up and Texas has a lot to do, they can step into Texas and help, or Kansas or Oklahoma.”
Her previous work running GM’s global service desk was helpful when she turned her attention to Diversified’s operations.
“I was very process-driven in what I came from at GM. … We had to have things fine-tuned to operate on different continents and different time zones,” Amy says. “You really had to have things zeroed in on your operations right in order to be able to function. I just took those same philosophies and started applying them to the title operations that Brent had, and the position pretty much evolved.”
Amy says she also helped improve the company’s communication processes.
“We had offices throughout Michigan, and everyone operated in their own bubble … in some ways and we started having team meetings, started bringing people together to collaborate on better ways, ideas of doing things,” she says.
Amy’s project management strategies paid off in a significant way.
“In about three years, we grew by about 300 percent as a result of all the team’s effort … We hired a couple other people to really start growing our joint venture (JV) business, and it evolved into where we are at now,” she says.
The company launched a lot more JVs, too, and created a procedural checklist that defined the steps needed to initiate a JV.
“Every time you start a new JV, it’s really starting a new company,” Amy says. “So I use that project management brain to start building efficiencies and how we do things with repeatable processes so that we would not have to reinvent the wheel every time.”
Amy believes she and her co-workers thrive at running the business in part because the staffers come from a variety of career backgrounds.
“Service is always number one with us,” she says. “That’s something we’ve learned, that if you don’t have service for your client, you don’t have anything.”
Acrisure Title’s primary clients are Realtors and Amy notes her firm has “a lot of really smart people from a marketing and social media perspective … help(ing) our Realtors take their business to the next level.”
What’s on the horizon
Looking ahead, Amy says fraud prevention is a major issue and she expects that to continue during the next several years.
“I know there’s lots of people looking at that,” she says. “Wire fraud and every type of fraud. The fraudsters are getting really sneaky, and you got to be on your guard at all times.”
She believes the title industry is still trying to figure out how to utilize the newest technology while still offering strong customer service.
“People are people and they don’t want to pick up the phone and talk to a robot,” Amy says. “… We need people talking to people and if there’s a problem, they need to be able to text their person on the weekend or the evenings to help get stuff resolved, but … on the processing and operational side, (we should) make it so that the escrow officer has the time for taking those calls.”
The question is, Amy says, “How do we get some of that busy work off their plate, and let them focus on taking care of their client?”
While noting people could be removed from refinancing transactions, she believes human beings will always need to be part of a home purchase. For most people, Amy says, buying a home is the “biggest purchase they’re ever going to make in their life, and they’re not going to deal with a computer for that, right? They’re going to deal with people for that. That’s why service is always number one.”
During her eight years working in the title insurance industry, Amy says advances in technology have significantly impacted the profession. The various forms of title production software and integrations are making escrow officers’ jobs easier.
“There’s been tons of advancement and that’s what we’re most interested in,” she says. “What gets me going is how can we make technology not to necessarily get rid of people, but to make people more efficient, maybe be able to handle those ebbs and flows better than just hiring people and maybe having to let people go because you can’t handle the influx. … I think we’re getting there. … One of our main focuses right now is what can we do from a technology perspective to help our people be more efficient, have less errors … do more with less?”
Amy says the company is currently looking at ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into its operations.
Family events, animal rescue work
Amy and her husband of 26 years, Jay, live in Holt, Mich. They have a 24-year-old daughter, Lauren, and a 22-year-old daughter, Olivia, both of whom graduated from Michigan State University.
 Lauren is getting married next spring and will graduate from medical school and start her residency in summer of 2026. Olivia has started attending physician’s assistant school at Central Michigan University, and is expected to enter the profession in about 18 months.
Amy volunteers with an animal rescue organization called Happy Feet Pet Rescue that was started by two of her good friends several years ago. She noted the organization has 100-plus volunteers and has helped more than 2,500 animals since its inception in 2020.
“A lot of our focus is working with owner surrenders and local shelters that have animals that are in need for whatever reason …,” Amy says. “We have a building that has a few kennels that will keep animals temporarily, but it’s mostly home-based because animals do better at home.”
During the past decade, Amy and her family have cared for hundreds of dogs, cats, puppies and kittens. They have three dogs and four cats at home now.
“It’s a big passion of mine,” she says. “There’s a lot of animals in the world that really need help and we try to make a difference. … When that day comes that I do retire, I’m hoping to put more time into that part of my life.”
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