Let me kick off 2017 by wishing everybody a Happy New Year. May this year be a huge one for your title agency. We’re going to see a lot of change in the industry. We’re seeing it already, but let’s see what post-January 20th brings.

If your title agency is not doing that great, most of the time, it’s because of the human resource. You either don’t have the right people working for you, or you, as a title agency owner, are not creating the right environment for people to perform better.

Among the thousands and thousands of title agents that use TitleCapture every day, we’ve seen truly awesome people. And we’re seeing great teams, built by truly inspiring title agency owners. We talked to some of them, and a pattern seemed to emerge. I’d like to share that pattern with you.

We believe that the best performers comply with at least 2 of the 3 key elements required for a title agent to deliver consistently in the medium-long term.

The key elements are:
1. Positive Motivation
2. Accountability
3. Comfort

Let’s take a look at what each one means.

Positive Motivation

It’s either internal or external. Someone who is internally motivated to grow and do better because they, one day, want to start their own agency, and feel they need to really learn and grind, until they are ready, that is a big get for you. This kind of person is also very rare.

External motivation is when you incentivize performance by rewarding it either financially or emotionally (as an owner you really need to know how to treat people, i.e. have a high EQ). We do not recommend going overboard with the financial incentive or you’ll open up Pandora’s box.

No matter if internal or external, positive motivation is the employee’s drive to grow, to solve problems. It’s a rare occurrence, but when you have someone like this, you can consider yourself lucky. It’s the stuff your future mangers or CxOs are made of.

Accountability

Most people try to do a good job, not necessarily because they’re motivated to do a great job, but because they don’t want to fail in front of their boss, colleagues or the client. It’s more about the fear of failure than the desire to succeed. Unfortunately.

So it’s important that every team member is accountable to at least one person and that he or she can’t hide his or her mistakes. Also they need to be aware WHAT they’re accountable for and to WHOM.

It also helps if the people they’re accountable to, have a high emotional intelligence quota and they know exactly how to reinforce that sense of accountability. Too soft and the team won’t feel accountable anymore. Too hard and they’ll all walk away.

Comfort

How easy it is for them to do their job. That’s what comfort is about. No matter how motivated or accountable a person is, if they find it frustrating to do their job, it’s not gonna last for long.

So, agency owners need to always think like entrepreneurs. Meaning, look at the processes and operations that happen inside the agency and try to simplify them.

Whether we’re talking about the settlement, secure communication or plain quoting out to Realtors and Lenders, you always need to find the easiest and best way for your agents to do their job and actually love doing it.

For example, TitleCapture is widely regarded by title agents nationwide as the easiest way to create a title quote or a seller net sheet for any of their Realtors or Lenders.

So when your Realtor or Lender calls you on the phone that they need an estimate, instead of spending time creating an unnecessary file in your settlement software, generating the quote and then saving a PDF and figuring out then how to send it over, you simply log into TitleCapture, do the estimate in 10 seconds and send it over right from within the app.

We’ve definitely made the quoting part comfortable.

Another example is our website builder that helps marketing people inside an agency to create and maintain a website without having to rely on designers or developers at all. Instead of them spending months creating a website and going nuts with 3rd party people, they log into their website builder tool and get the title agency website done in 1 hour. No kidding.

Take a look at your agency employees. How many of the 3 elements do they check off the list. If the majority of them aren’t at least a 2 out of 3, you need to make some adjustments.