| Going against the grain
T he years prior to and during the Great Recession saw many title companies close their doors, and many fee attorneys across the country seek greener pastures, as home sales plummeted and foreclosures skyrocketed.
 Before those turbulent years arrived, Dan Foster had built a profitable fee-attorney business in Texas, with five offices formerly under the LandAmerica Commonwealth brand. In 2008, he decided to go against the grain in the midst of ominous signs and plow even further into the industry, changing his 10-year relationship with LandAmerica from fee attorney to independent agent.
"When the market crashed and it started affecting the underwriters, they started making decisions based on what was happening in Florida, what was happening in Las Vegas, where the markets were worse [than in Texas]," said Dan, CEO and one of the owners of Providence Title, headquartered in Arlington, Texas.
"Those decisions didn't always make sense in Texas because we didn't have a lot of those issues that they were having elsewhere," he added. "We had issues, but not to the same degree or to the same extent."
One of his employees in his fee-attorney business suggested he start his own title agency. "I figured if I became an agent, if I was making bad business decisions, they would be mine. I wouldn't be making bad business decisions based on what somebody in Richmond or Florida or Houston told me," Dan, 59, recalled. "The crash of the market actually gave me the incentive to go out on my own."
Launched in May 2008, Providence now has approximately 220 employees at 34 offices in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio.
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"The crash of the market actually gave me the incentive to go out on my own."
Dan Foster
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Following his 1983 graduation from the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Dan went to work at a middle-sized law firm in Fort Worth, where he eventually became a partner. He handled a variety of areas, including real estate, but gravitated toward consumer law.
"Working on consumer law led to real estate disputes. I represented buyers, sellers, Realtors — Realtors on both sides," Dan stressed. "Once you do a case, someone says 'oh, you know how to do real estate.' [Then], a friend has a problem, so they would call. Then a friend of a friend would call. So I began focusing and growing in the area of real estate — residential real estate disputes because I was a litigator."
He'd been doing legal work for a friend, who was a builder. That friend eventually decided to join with a Realtor and start a construction company. They asked Dan to handle the legal work. Eventually, they convinced him to launch his own fee-attorney business.
"It was another law school education to a large degree. Figuring out what to do and how to handle it properly," Dan remembered. "When I started it, I never anticipated going much beyond my one fee office. A couple years later, I had another closer approach me and say, 'hey I'd rather work for you than who I'm working for.' "
The first few months after the launch of Providence went well. Then, the recession-related problems other areas of the country already were experiencing arrived in Texas like a hurricane.
"By August [of 2008], I looked around and said, 'hey where are all the orders? What happened to the business? That's when the hammer fell on Texas and things dropped off," Dan recalled. "I had to tighten the belt, from July until probably the end of the year, and then things picked up, turned around. And it kind of just kept going up from there."
Dan said one of the reasons he left the law firm and started his own business was because he didn't think law firms fairly shared their profits with their top producers. He vowed to change that with employees.
"From the beginning, one of my approaches was to try to pay the producers a fair share of what they produce," Dan explained. "Give them a fair return, which is done primarily through heavy commissions. Your better people are going to get paid better; they don't have to ask for a raise. When you're working harder and producing more, you automatically get the raise, it's built in. We still lose people, but we rarely lose people because of money."
Providence's success, he said, also is attributable to his team, which includes Executive Vice Presidents Denise Smith, Steven Ramsey, Tracie Fleming and Brianne Woltmann. It also includes his wife, EVP Paige Foster.
 "She's been an integral part of building this – more from the human relations aspect as opposed to the escrow technical side. She's a big part of why the company was able to grow. She's a much more humanistic person than I am," Dan admitted.
Dan and Paige have a blended family that includes three daughters and a son, two of whom work in the business. He said Paige has helped the company create a positive work culture that emphasizes a work/life balance.
For him, work/life balance translates into traveling and hunting when he can. "Traveling allows me to see things I haven't seen. I was a history major," Dan pointed out. "I haven't made it to Europe yet, but that'll be on the bucket list."
Hunting — which he's been able to do in various places, including Canada, and Africa — allows him to enjoy the outdoors. "A lot of times it's just watching the animals and seeing what they're doing. In Texas, probably my highlight was seeing a hawk scoop down on a rabbit and make a kill."
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