| How an aspiring TV broadcaster ended up changing the processes and mindset of a small Wisconsin title agency
Craig Haskins is a self-proclaimed geek. Not in the Star Trek convention sense, but in the gadgets, gizmos and video game sense. Craig has always been driven by an interest in computers and numbers and buttons and data and so on. He still remembers getting that Commodore VIC-20 personal computer (a stretch of the definition by today's standards) when he was 13, followed not long after by the immortal Commodore 64. Those interests have influenced most decisions in his life, especially that ultimate decision, the one about settling on a career path. For Craig only one option made sense: broadcast television.
 As a native Floridian, he headed to the University of Florida in 1991 — one of the best schools in the country for learning the broadcast trade — and tried it all. He had two radio shows; he hosted a campus TV sports talk show; and he worked behind the scenes pushing the buttons, pulling the levers, operating cameras and living the life of a born techie.
“I liked being the behind the scenes guy, but I liked being the star guy, too,” Craig said about his passion for the industry.
Four years later, prepped for a hi-tech life in the sun, Craig was sitting in an office in Racine, Wis., learning how to find property deeds over an ISDN line.
...Wait, what?
“Not long after graduation, I worked a year in Sarasota, Fla., and it was real obvious to me that you pretty much have to jump around from small market to small market and climb the ladder every three years or so, make a couple dollars, and land in a city like Columbus, Ohio, or Jacksonville, Fla., and then you can either decide if it’s a big enough market and raise a family or hope that Orlando or Atlanta or a Los Angeles gig comes in,” Craig said.
The appeal of the bright lights and the digital editing equipment couldn’t trump the daunting career grind that lay ahead. This is when a sensible offer from his stepfather and owner of Knight Barry Title, Jeff Green, came in and changed the course of Craig’s life.
 “He said, ‘I’ll pay you $25,000 a year, and I’ll pay for the moving company to move you to Wisconsin. If you don’t like it, I’ll pay to move you back down,’” Craig said. “I had no idea what title was.”
For a tech geek that liked the idea of being in front a TV camera, a title insurance agency in a small city in Wisconsin in 1996 is about as low tech and low profile as a job can get. Craig, now 39 with three boys, (Beck, Jack and Tyler) a wife (D’Ann, whom he met at a mortgage bankers conference) and a master’s degree in business, is the executive vice president of Knight Barry. When he arrived at the company in 1996, Knight Barry consisted of two offices (“more like one-and-a-half,” Craig said), and is now at 24 offices and growing. Craig has a stated goal to add at least one office a year, and to this point no office he has added has gone out of business or experienced trouble.
A key driver in this consistent growth? Technology.
The transformation did not happen overnight for Knight Barry or for Craig. In fact, if not for being the boss’ son and being allowed to try his hand in every facet of the business (quickly) and find his niche, he might have been on that first plane back to Florida to work on the set of Del Boca Vista Today. The most notable example being after a few months on the job when Craig asked Jeff to get rid of the sales person (whom he thought was doing a lousy job) so that he could do it.
“If I was an employee of Chicago Title, and I was some idiot who just started in title and said ‘get rid of the sales guy, and let me learn closings, and let’s buy this and sell that,’ I wouldn’t have lasted too long,” he said with a laugh.
He might not have survived in his stepfather’s shop either, if those wild ideas of his had flopped, but fairly early on, Craig’s outsider perspective and interest in technology began to push the company into a different era of doing business.
“There are a couple different types of people who work in the title business,” Craig said. “There are the people who walk into a closing room with people they’ve never met, with a lot of money and documents on the table, who have to command attention and stay on task. Those are closers. There are the people who are the opposite of that who like research — digging into easements, seeing the historical starting point, working out some complicated process to see who owns a 4-foot strip of farmland. I loved the title part, but it wasn’t as exciting as I wanted it to be. Searching and hanging out at a desk for eight hours a day was not fun for me.”
He said the third type of is the sales person who either knows a just enough about title to be dangerous or is a closer who enjoys building personal relationships in transactional work who can then parlay that into being a successful rep. Sound familiar?
“I liked being the behind the scenes guy, but I liked being the star guy, too.”
Craig finds his favorite transactions are commercial deals. Lawyers, business developers and various other professionals come together to complete a deal. There is extra due diligence. There are plenty of eyeballs focusing on every detail. Commercial transactions are usually less mess for more money. Seems like a no-brainer to try and get more of it, but at the tail end of the ’90s, with 1.5 offices in Racine, there was only so much commercial business to get.
Enter the chip-away strategy.
 Craig’s sons are 14, 12 and 6 years old, they all play baseball and he coaches each team. If the team gets down by a few runs, he deploys the chip-away strategy. Get one run this inning. Get another run the next inning. Do that a few times and the game will be tied. The ballplayers even take out their imaginary hammers and chisels and start chipping away in the dugout to give the concept a little extra juice.
It’s unclear what came first, this chip-away baseball philosophy or Knight Barry’s chip-away business philosophy, but Craig is a proponent of both. The business version works the same way. Just replace the opposing team with the available business in a new market, replace the young Little Leaguers with the people at Knight Barry, and replace the air hammer and chiseling with a focus on process, efficiency and technology.
When Craig had about three years under his belt in the title business, he was ready to start changing things up and chipping away. Move one: Knight Barry opened a new office in a suburb of Milwaukee in 1999 to grab more commercial work. Seems like a daunting task, but the move worked. They have seven Milwaukee area offices now. The company intends to work a similar magic in Chicago going forward. How’d they do it? You guessed it: Chipped away.
“I’d love to go into a major bank and say ‘give me it all,’ but we say just give us a couple, let us earn our way,” Craig said. “When we moved into Milwaukee, no one noticed, and we chipped at the bottom. Picked up some home equity work, and then the home equity department introduced us to the construction department, and then the mortgage department and then commercial, and before you knew it we were the main title company in a couple Milwaukee banks.
“We will never beat Chicago Title; we’re not going to beat First American or any of the big guys. And we don’t intend to. We’ll just chip away and slowly build our market share there,” Craig continued. “We’ll do the same thing in Minnesota where we opened in September [2012]. We want to be in Florida sometime this year. We don’t go with grand visions of greatness. Just chip and get a little bit of work.”
Knight Barry opened up a commercial-specific office in Milwaukee, and it is now one of the top commercial companies in the state. Craig believes it’s a misnomer to think that the larger underwriters have control of the commercial world. Sure, the big guys used to funnel a lot of that business down to agents like Knight Barry years ago, where they now mostly keep that work in-house, save for some of the ancillary work, but the opportunities are there to gain a foothold without that funnel.
“That was a huge change. Once that business went away, we said we have to get our own and started competing against them,” Craig said. “Sometimes we did the opposite of what they did. If they let go of staff because it was slow, we picked them up. We made investments in going after commercial business. We have an expensive hi-rise lease in downtown Milwaukee and expensive employees. We have top of the line furnishings in the conference rooms. We don’t skimp on that stuff to attract the $50 million developer who doesn’t want to hang out in the suburbs. We try to separate that segment.”
It’s ironic to think the guy that completely switched career paths and moved from the beach to the snow because of how long the former career path was going to take is now preaching a one-run-at-a-time, slow-and-steady wins the race credo. Don’t take that to mean Craig is a different guy now, or that title insurance and its conservative ways have changed the video game, broadcast TV star that lurks inside. On the contrary, those are the traits that have given Knight Barry its edge during the last decade. (And let’s get serious: Going from 1.5 offices to 24 offices in 13 years, with plans to add at least one new office every year isn’t exactly slow and steady.)
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“When we moved into Milwaukee, no one noticed, and we chipped at the bottom. Picked up some home equity work, and then the home equity department introduced us to the construction department, and then the mortgage department and then commercial, and before you knew it we were the main title company in a couple Milwaukee banks.”
Craig Haskins
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“The tech part was critical [to the company’s growth],” Craig said. “If you go to a new market, you need something else to say other than ‘give us a shot.’”
Here again, Craig looks to chip away. Shave a minute off this process; cut out 10 seconds here; streamline this to one click instead of three.
“Title work — that’s all just data. It’s black text on white paper that you hand to someone. I said there has to be a better delivery mechanism. So we came up with one of the first online order entry systems in 2000,” Craig said. “We built it ourselves. We built the software; we hired programmers. In January, we bought an Internet technology company in Milwaukee to help us.”
Some of these efficiency ideas are in vogue within the industry now, but Craig had no blueprint when he started to tinker with the process and the delivery mechanisms. Now it’s a well-oiled machine internally — but that doesn’t stop the tinkering.
“We’ll build anything to save any turn time. It is critically important to us,” Craig said. “We won’t skimp on the process; we don’t want to get rid of great title people. There’s value in the product, but delivering the data to the customer is critical. Some banks say, ‘If you were quicker we’d give you more work,’ so we do whatever we can to be the fastest.”
The service that Craig stresses to prospective customers is the customization of the delivery on their end as well. How would they like to receive their documents? In what order? With what wording? Craig guesses that they’ve customized things for about 100 of their customers so far.
Those projects are the behind the scenes, button-pushing projects. The front-of-the-camera projects now exist in educational YouTube videos. These clips aren’t merely an attempt to hold onto that TV star dream (at least not completely), they are part of the bigger picture, chip-away mindset he’s adopted.
“We want to say something about closings or title insurance in a way that nontitle people might enjoy them,” he said. “The videos on YouTube are geared to someone at a bank or law firm with some knowledge of title and closings — it’s not geared to the person who has been a title pro for 15 years, talking about exclusion 2B of the policy. No one would watch that. Seven lawyers at Stewart Title would watch it. That’s not my interest.”
He relays an anecdote about a CLE course he was teaching at a law firm. At the end he gave a nod to his videos for anyone in the room who might be new and need a little bit more information. Not a day later he received an email from an associate at the law firm. She was a paralegal, had been there two months, went to YouTube and learned a lot about the industry. She thanked him.
“No one will make money doing that stuff, but you can increase credibility,” he said. “Now I have this brand new person loyal to Knight Barry because of some goofy video I put up.”
At home, in his game room, where there is the pick of Xbox, PlayStation or Wii on one of three TVs, Craig can still live out his Commodore 64 glory days against his pint-sized competition. But unlike in the title industry, he’s losing market share to a newer, younger, more-tech savvy competitor.
“I cannot beat my 6-year-old in Madden football,” Craig admits — by far the most dejected he’s been during our talk. “I played that game most in my life, throughout college and… after… he’s just ridiculous! He doesn’t even know or understand most of the rules of football.”
Like father, like son.
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