Building a Better Closing Experience Through Title Tech | Ep 108

We can literally see the difference in a moment on what happens in a real estate transaction because of software, because of a great customer experience at the closing table. That's something cool. That is the title industry. We win by helping our customers win. In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Choumil stands at the forefront, guiding title professionals to not just grow their businesses, but to master the art of innovation.

With every episode, you're handed the keys to unlock unparalleled Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Title Agents Podcast, where we explore the minds and strategies of leaders driving innovation in the title industry. I am your host, Mo Choumil, Alltech National Title CEO, and today we're joined by my good friend here, Bill Svoboda, co-founder of CloseSimple, a game-changing platform that's revolutionizing the way title companies client and title companies do business. Bill, welcome to the show. Thank you, Mo. communication in the title and escrow services.

From his early entrepreneurial ventures to creating the pizza tracker for title, Bill has been at the forefront of blending technology with customer experience. Get ready for an inspiring conversation about innovation, industry evolution, and the future of title services. Welcome, Bill. Hey, great to be here. Thanks.

As we always start off this show, would love to know your life story. In a condensed version, I, Basically, I started my first business out of my dorm room in college. It was an online custom apparel company, and that was 2003. Fast forward, I made the very logical career choice to move from custom t-shirts to title software, and that's where I am today. It's probably a longer story about how we got there, but the gist of it is we had an idea while I owned that other company, and my business partner Paul and I, he had this cool idea.

for real estate. I came alongside, helped him get it going, and before we knew it, we found ourselves with this platform in the title industry. And I ended up selling my t-shirt company to do title software full-time, and I couldn't imagine a better place to be in the world, actually. Love this industry. The funniest, I remember my old roommate from years back had a t-shirt company.

Custom, I think it may still be around. It's called t-shirts.suck.com. I'm not giving him a plug, but I noticed that business a little bit in the behind the And then I printed some shirts on weekends for free pizza or free beer. There you go. I think the thing I learned in running that business though was all about customer experience and customer care, how to treat people, because it's a very— you're selling a product, but it's also how do you treat people?

Everybody we got to work with, the customers like Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and everything, and this is all remote, so I never met these people face to face. And so that was the big thing for me. How do I treat customers better than the next company? And that was really the impetus for getting into the title industry. Then how can our software help title companies give that type of amazing customer experience?

Let's stick with the t-shirt companies. Yeah, you said a custom shirt. Tell me a little more about that company. What do you guys do? How do you get started?

How? Yeah, it all started back when I was in college. I was in charge of a t-shirt order for my college dorm floor, and I put weeks into this design. I thought it was going to be the coolest shirt on campus. It was for our intramural basketball team.

And lo and behold, I get the shirts back a few weeks later and the shirts look like junk. They feel like junk. They feel like cardboard. They're stiff, everything. And I had to watch my floor of guys playing basketball in these ugly shirts.

So my roommate Ryan— I was a sophomore, he's a freshman— he goes, what college is this? At North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, smaller school, about 1,200 students. Ryan comes over to me and he goes, why don't we just start a business? Like, nobody should have to go through what you just went through. Nobody really liked the shirts, and it was a passion project for me.

I was like, this is going to be a cool shirt design, and it didn't turn out cool, all because of the printer. So he's like, why don't we start this? We could do it better. So 2 college kids, we just were like, let's do this. And I went around campus the rest of that semester telling people, all the leaders on campus because everybody orders shirts when you're in college.

So I just went to all the leaders and I go, hey, I'm going to start a t-shirt company in the fall. And one guy goes, I'll, I'm your first customer. And he ordered 300 shirts from us. And that was our first order. 300 seemed like a lot to a kid who, we didn't know what we were doing.

But before we knew it, Ryan and I are graduating college. We're printing shirts for our university, for a ton of other universities, for businesses. And I bought Ryan out and did it full-time. And I'm like, it was a pretty interesting little gig starting your own business out of a dorm room. Did you print the shirts yourself or you outsourced that?

No, I had a mentor years ago that said, don't get the ink under your fingertips. Don't print them yourself. Outsource that and you're going to thank me later. And I got to thank that guy. His name was Kurt.

I grew the business, sold it for an exit, and all because I built a business that was scalable where we had 2 or 3 printers around the country printing for us, shipping for us. All I had to worry about was the customer experience and how do we provide the best product for our customers. So that was it. So what got you interested in real estate or specifically title? So my business partner, Paul Stein, he's our CEO.

He actually had this idea. We had, he had just gone through buying a home. This is like 2010, first-time home credits and everything were coming out, '08, '09. So he bought a home and it's just, he's working with his realtor and his realtor at the time, we were, they were thinking like, how cool would it be for a realtor to be in touch with a buyer post-transaction? This is like the early days of CRMs.

This is the early days of project management too. And social media is early. So they had this idea to create like a Facebook for houses. What if we could create a Facebook? So once you buy a home, You get a profile on this platform, and then basically that's a way for your realtor to stay in touch with you.

He gives you access or she gives you access to this platform. Now your home has a profile and you can have all your energy bills, you can have all this right through that one thing. I came into it, Paul and I were having sushi and he goes, we want to get this off the ground, but Jeff and I, our third partner at the time, we don't have enough time. And I was running the t-shirt company. I was outsourcing everything, growing, and I was like, I'll help you get off the ground.

So I just literally went to realtors. I posted on Facebook, in the next 20 days, I want to meet with 20 real estate agents, buy them a cup of coffee, get their feedback on an idea, because I wanted to find a customer who would pay for this thing. And lo and behold, nobody liked it. Nobody thought it was that great of an idea, but every realtor I met with came to that meeting. stressed out about a buyer or seller who doesn't know this or that, complaining about, I can't believe this buyer, fill in the blank.

So I went back to Paul and I go, I wonder if we scrapped the idea of this social network and I wonder if we just create a tool to help the real estate transaction communication better, to help the buyer, the seller, everyone know. And at the time, Domino's had just come out with the pizza tracker and All project management software at the time felt more like a buffet where it's like, you got to do this, that, and it's like random checkboxes everywhere. Our idea was, what if we could just keep it more linear? You picked your house, this, that, that. So lo and behold, we signed a deal with the number one RE/MAX franchise in the world as our first customer.

A year into that deal, we thought we were the hottest thing ever in real estate. We went to Inman Conference and all this. Yeah, because we got the number 1 RE/MAX on our timeline tool. And basically though, a year into it, that realtor pulled us aside, that broker goes, none of my realtors are using this thing. He goes, you know what though?

Forget them. My realtors are stupid. I give them a great tool and they don't use it. I own a title company and the number 1 complaint from my realtors against my title company is the bad communication. Could we take this timeline tool and put in the title?

And we were like, I bet we could, but what's title? And that's literally how we got it. So that first title company, they did 1,200, 1,500 deals a month. We had no idea that that was a pretty large title company. We just thought it's a title company.

And we learned by listening to our customers then. And shortly after, I sold my t-shirt business, Paul got out of his job, and here we are. That's amazing how that transitioned. And it's very, as entrepreneurs, a lot of times people put their heart and soul into something before getting feedback or Finding out if the client's going to buy that product or not. Then 2 years later, your heart and soul into it and a lot of money and debt to realize that nobody wants that too.

Yeah, you gotta— our ideas are only as good as our customers think they are. You gotta hold your idea very loosely until customers give their feedback on it. It's a, as they say, like the validation is, will somebody willing to write a check for the product? Yeah, somebody's gonna write a check. It's really, it's just like, yeah.

And something I like about the title industry is we are very— our industry makes sense in terms of everything has to line up. It's very account-driven, like an accountant-driven, where it's all about the numbers. Everything has to make sense, dot every I, cross every T. Back when in the glory days of startups, 2000s, 2010s, it didn't matter about making money. It was all about users.

So when we got into this market, it was about could we find a paying customer, not just users? And we quickly realized the paying customer has to be in love with the product, not just think it's cool. Yeah, a big difference between a user and a paying customer. Yeah, the realtors thought it was cool, but they wouldn't use it. Title companies look at it and go, I can't imagine my life without it.

Yeah, that's one of the— by the way, things have got a lot better, like, from 10, 15 years ago. But what, probably what the biggest knock on title companies was the communication piece. Yeah. Like a realtor sends the order and then it just gets sucked in a black hole. Well, and that was the day of closing, the day before closing.

Hey, by the way, we're closing tomorrow, or there's a problem with title or whatever issue there is. The number one complaint from that RE/MAX franchise was their realtors just wanted to know the title company got the file. So think of this. It was literally like, could you just create a trigger in our title production software so our realtors will know that the title company got the file? And we're like, that's the problem that you need.

And that'll— Sound simple and sound like common sense. But yeah, and that's how the name CloseSimple came about. Our first customer kind of called us CloseSimple, which was, is make the closing simple. And it's pretty interesting how you have all these grandiose ideas as a business and then it gets distilled to the most simple thing. That's what customers want.

Awesome. So besides the tracker piece, what else, what problems do you solve besides that trigger communication, and how did that evolve? It was interesting when we first got into this. I remember Paul, my co-founder, and I, we walked into our first ALTA One. It was in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we thought we were the coolest thing in title.

Like, every title company should have our software because we had a huge We had an air quotes huge title company on our platform. We didn't know the industry for anything. And we walked in and quickly realized that integrations were the biggest thing. We didn't know anything about integrations with SoftPro, RamQuest, ResWare, the big players. As we figured that out, we spent the next 2 years then actually getting the integrations, building relationships, being— I would say we weren't the smartest guys in the room.

We still aren't. And we just listened a lot. And we figured out that if we could get a buyer or a seller or a realtor to open an email or a text message, we could get them maybe to log into a portal. So portals are always like this holy grail of could we get people to log in and use our portal? Title companies always would say that.

We didn't think people would until we realized if we could just figure out how to get the emails and texts opened, we can get the portal opened. And our whole thing shifted a few years ago when we came out with the customer-facing portal where it's It's all 100% custom branded to the title company, e-signing availability in there. Now we have fraud protection, everything built right in there, file upload, download. So like, our idea is people are already using their cell phones for so much. We don't want them to download another app.

It's all web-based. But how cool would it be if we got to get the driver's license, just take a picture, upload it, boom, and it saves right to the title production software? How can we make a title professional's life easier. That's our number one thing. How do we make their life easier and make them look amazing during the process?

Yeah, uh, you said something very powerful. This is the power of listening. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. You have to listen. What advice can you give title professionals about listening to the customer, listening to the client, and how to make strategy or decisions based on what you hear, the feedback you get?

I'll go way back to when we started this. I'll give an example of what I did, and then I'll give an example of what Paul did. When I I was talking to real estate agents after that Facebook post. I had so many people respond going, I'd love to hear your idea. And number one is not being in sales mode.

It's listening. If you're going to go in and ask for feedback, you got to go and ask. You're not selling. And I would actually buy them a coffee or whatever they wanted to drink, and I'd meet in person, and I would buy something to eat. And whenever I asked them a question, because I'm any— I'm a good talker, I would take a bite so that I couldn't talk, and I'd have to have them speak, and then I'd have a notebook in front of me and I'd write furious notes, and I would just be like, tell me more.

Because there's so much power whenever you say, tell me more, what do you mean? And I would just write notes. I'd be biting on my scone or whatever I'd be eating, and I would just— I was the most interested person in the world in that person across the table from me. And that's literally how we heard from realtors that our first idea wasn't the thing, but the next idea We came up with, but I remember when we got into the title industry, Paul, my co-founder, he actually with our I think it was our first and second customer; they were both local. He would literally go to their offices and sit next to the closers, the processors, and watch them what they do in a day.

Just watch. We don't know how they should be doing their jobs better. All we knew was this was a brand new industry, so he would just sit there and watch and listen. He'd listen to the phone calls they got, look at the emails. He reminisces about a story where there.

There was one closer, just— Mo, I'm blown away. The people in our industry, there are so many people that are a force of nature. Like, the amount of work that these people do, it's remarkable. This one woman though, every time she got up to go to the bathroom, she put an autoresponder on and said, I'll be back in 5 minutes, because she knew that if a realtor would email her and not hear back within a minute or 2, the call would come next. So she put her autoresponder on for bathroom breaks.

And that kind of story was like, Could we solve this? Those kind of insights were what helped us. No, it is, it's very stressful. And in my experience, a lot of our employees were afraid to take a vacation. Yep.

And just to, because they're afraid what's going to be ready for when they come back. So we just try to force people to take time off and emails and they'll never end. It's probably the biggest challenge in our industry. Like now it's that 300, 400, 500 emails a day and how do you How can you automate a lot of the workflows so that it cuts down on all those emails and phone calls to be more efficient? Yeah.

And thankfully, I think technology is— a lot of people are leaning into technology more. They're going, what could my title production software do? What other vendors are out there? And COVID really made a lot of people more open to third parties and software. We had to adjust a lot.

COVID, tough on the economy, tough in a lot of ways, but good for innovation because it made us as customers Think of it, you're a customer, I'm a customer to other businesses. Our expectations changed. So what does that mean for our customers as a result of that too? Their expectations on our business change. As the title industry continues to evolve, what strategies have you used to ensure that CloseSimple remains at the forefront of innovation?

One, one of the things that we're really trying to do, our head of product, Nate, he's brilliant at this stuff. We are constantly talking to our customers. I remember when, what's it called, vacant land fraud was first coming out. It's been around for a while. But I remember when I heard the first story of it, like somebody got impacted by it on a national level.

We're talking to that title agent. They were actually a customer of ours, and we heard it at an ALTA conference, I think. And before you knew it, like all we're doing is listening to them tell us more. And that customer looked at us and goes, could you help me solve this? So I think part of it is just listening.

We already talked about that. But the other thing that we can really be leaning into in this crazy time where it's What's next? Just yesterday, Nvidia had their earnings report and it was down, and it was National Nvidia Day. Everybody's waiting on that stock report, but there's so much uncertainty. And I think right now what we're trying to do is add more certainty to the process.

The more we can do at the front of the process in terms of is this buyer or seller who they say they are, instead of waiting 30 to 40 days to find out near the closing. With technology, with AI, I think what we're trying to do is speed up everything. Speed it up. And proactivity, like, probably when I'm looking back, probably some of our best employees, the ones that are very proactive. Yes.

And leveraging technology and being proactive kind of solves a lot of problems and avoids a lot of those pitfalls or the fraud. And that's one of the big things that we've been shifting towards. How do we move our customers to a more proactive stance than reactive? We don't want them to find out near the closing day that this seller isn't who they say they are. So how can we build into our software automation to do that?

And I think that's been one of the biggest shifts. It's, you can't just throw AI in and sprinkle it and it's done. You go, how do we use this now to make our process smarter so our people can do what they're supposed to do, not what they shouldn't be doing? Yeah, it keeps, it's what I keep saying is AI is a tool. It does not, you still gotta have humans handling the communication piece and talking to people, but it just, it makes it more efficient.

Doesn't take over your job or take over your tasks at the end of the day. Yeah, I think just leaning into what AI is and thinking about it more and more, it's got to be on your forefront. If you're not thinking about it and not just playing with the ChatGPT or Meta AI or some AI— Some of the bots. Yeah, if you're not just touching it and playing with it, it doesn't mean your business is running on it, but just Become accustomed to it. Because I go back to think about 20 years ago, Mo, 25 years ago when email was brand new.

That revolutionized our business. Did that mean we have so much more time in our day? No, it means that we're now connected to our email more. We don't get letters in the mail the same way, but we have 400 inbox in the morning. So I think it's all about how do we become more efficient now?

I know you're big on enhancing the customer experience and how does it go making your customer's butt look good or something? Yeah, yeah. I heard there's this fashion designer, his name's Tom Ford, huge designer. He was the guy that redid Gucci in the '90s. He was at Saint Laurent.

He has his own brand, Tom Ford. The guy's brilliant. And one day I was just listening to this interview. I randomly, you know how YouTube, it just random stuff pops up. There was this interview and it was like Tom Ford's view of marketing.

And I thought, Mom, Might as well check this out. And he was being asked, hey, what role does marketing play in your brand? And without flinching, without thinking about it, he goes, I don't really like that word marketing. In fact, marketing is used for hollow products that can't speak for themselves. When a customer walks into the store, tries on a pair of pants, if it doesn't make their butt look good, they're walking out no matter how much marketing you did to get them in there.

Yeah. And I was younger in my business career at that time, and that was a mic drop moment for me where I was like, he summed up everything I think about. Like, you can market something all day long, you can say this is the greatest thing ever, but if it doesn't make your customer's butt look good, if they don't feel good in it, if in the title world, if a realtor refers business and you don't make them look good for referring business and do the closing, it doesn't matter how much we talk. All that matters is that we provide an experience that they can't imagine their life without. Through your entrepreneurial journey, What are some key lessons you've learned along the way, especially in building and scaling a business in a niche market like title insurance?

Build the right product by listening to the customers. Listen to the customers, build the right product, and customers will follow. And just be upfront like that you don't know everything. I think some of the best insights that we've had are from just listening. I was actually just before this podcast, I was talking to one of our customers and he was talking about how he is always keeping his eyes open at other industries.

So for instance, his name is Anthony Neff. He's out of Pittsburgh, PA. His title company is the Pennsylvania Land Title Company. I think that's the name. Brilliant guy.

Him and his brother run it. And he was talking about how every morning he'd be running, like just running in his neighborhood, and there was a salon, and the salon had speakers outside of the salon, like in the parking lot. And he thought, this sets such a cool mood. What if I took these speaker idea and put it in our parking lot to set the mood for the closing. And he's everywhere I go.

I'm looking for insights. I'm looking for new ideas that I can just take from other industries. And I think that's one of the biggest things I've learned is keeping your eyes open. Just when you think you've solved the problem perfect, keep your eyes open, keep looking. How do you make it one step better?

So what have been some of the most memorable moments or milestones that significantly influenced your approach to business? When I sold my t-shirt company, that was a big one, getting one exit under my belt. But I would say, I remember vividly the day that Google ordered from my company, and I was just blown away that a company like Google found us. You made it. Yeah, I made it.

For us in the title industry, very similar. When I shifted all my focus over to title, it was Wow, entire companies are running off of our software. Like they are trusting us. If we go down, they go down. And just we recently celebrated our one millionth portal view, which is huge.

So a million people logging in the portal. Like that felt amazing. But what the biggest yeah, it it was cool because I remember years ago when we got into this, we're like people aren't logging into portals. I know some companies have made portals, but we always heard the knock against it. Like customers won't, realtors won't.

Well, they won't if it's just another thing that. do, but if there's a reason to go in there, they will because we love doing things that help us win in a day. But if we're just asked to do stuff that doesn't matter, we don't do it. So I would say I love hearing about customers that are winning. That's one thing I love about our industry.

We can literally see the difference in a moment on what happens in a real estate transaction because of software. Because of a great customer experience at the closing table. That's something cool. That is the title industry. We win by helping our customers win.

So how do you envision the future of the title and escrow services, particularly with the integration of new technologies, especially AI now, and maybe blockchain in the future? I'd just love to see where the customer experience can go. Like, how can we shift more and more of our focus to creating an amazing closing experience? Everybody's going, will it be more remote? It doesn't matter.

Let's brainstorm. Let's blue ocean think about if we could go anywhere, what type of closing experience could we create? What type of workforce could we create? What type of realtor relationships could we create? What are some— I think our industry, we're at this cool point where people are dreaming again and they're going like, what could we build?

Because we just had this NAR settlement a few weeks, a few months ago, and it's just come into effect. Realtors are having to rethink their businesses. I think it's time for us to rethink our business too and go, what's the real value we add? How can we make it even more sticky? How can we make it more sticky?

And software is one part of that, but how can we put our people in the right place that the realtor could never imagine going somewhere else for a closing? That's really the question I love trying to figure out. How can we do that? Yeah, focus on the core versus just the fluff or what's a shiny object. There'll always be a shiny object.

But it's taking care of the customer and the client. And years ago, blockchain, blockchain was a big shiny object. You think about how many title conferences there were sessions on blockchain, this and that. Oh, 2016, '17. Yeah.

It hasn't really ever hit where we thought it would. AI, I think, is a different story, but still people are wondering, how do we use it? So I think being a constant learner, leaning in and just going, my business is never complete. This is version whatever. I need to make version next.

What's version next? And constantly dreaming because those are the businesses that crush it. Those are the businesses that we build our businesses based on. If they can do that, we can do it too. Awesome.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs and innovators who are looking to make a significant impact in the title industry or any other traditional industry? This industry, we learned when we got into it about how relational it is. It's relationships and it's how you treat people. It's showing up consistently. I love it.

Like Paul, my co-founder, and I, we talk about it, how like we still love going to conferences. We still love going to the Land Title Association state ones. We love going to the American Land Title. We love going to the NS3s, the RESPROs. We love being in the industry because you don't lose You don't lose the heartbeat of the industry by staying in it.

You lose the heartbeat when you stay in your office. And I think too many entrepreneurs have this idea that the product is going to be so amazing that they have the perfect solve so they can sit in their office and have salespeople just go out. What we've found is relationships win because people trust people that they see consistently. So for Paul and myself, it's we do not want to give up those conferences. We love being there.

So any younger entrepreneur in this space, it's get to those conferences. It costs a lot. It's a lot of stress on your travel, on your family. But that's where you show that you're not just a flashbang. You're in the industry like these are your people.

We're family. That's what it— that's what this industry is. So I would say the faster you realize that and stop looking at it like you're trying to sell stuff, but now you're in a family, The faster you'll win. Yeah. As we're getting close to a close of this episode, I always ask a favorite quote.

I don't know if you have another favorite quote you want to stick with, making your butt look good. That's a great one. That make their butt look good one is so good because it just says everything that I think us as business people try to do every day. We can talk the talk. Everybody can talk the talk.

But do you walk the walk? Do you make pants that make your customer's butt look good? Are you opening files or closing files just out of habit? Or are you creating emotions? I always like to say, are you going through the motions or are you creating emotions?

And that's the big challenge for us. Our industry can be very motion-driven where it's just go through the motions. How are we creating emotions that our customers go, wow? That's what I'm, that's what I'm all about. That's awesome.

How about a favorite book or books that stand out? There was a book that years ago I read. It was a book called Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by a guy named— Harvey Mackay. Yeah. Yep.

Envelope Salesman. And what I love about that book is it's a commodity business. So he sold envelopes. You think about it, envelopes are the most commodity of commodity. And he grew this business from $200,000 to selling it for $100 million, all with simple things that are in another book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

That was his book that he read growing up. So this envelope salesman just learned how to treat people better, how to treat people like people, and that was his key to success. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Swim with the Sharks, those 2 books just changed the trajectory of my life. Awesome. Any last words to our audience?

Dude, thanks for having me on this. This is awesome. Like, you've had some amazing guests before. Like I told you before, like, I just heard Pat Stone. You getting a Pat Stone on and then a Bill Svoboda, I feel like I'm just walking among giants here.

It's a huge honor to share some microphone time with you on this. So thank you. Yeah, that's what makes Pat Stone such a great human being is his humility. I appreciate you having me here, and anything I can do for any audience member, let me know. It's just a pleasure to be here.

Awesome. Thank you for tuning in today's episode of Title Agents Podcast. It was a pleasure speaking with Bill Svoboda. whose insights on innovation and customer experience are sure to resonate with title professionals everywhere. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share with your network.

Stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to bring you strategies and stories that are shaping the future of the title industry. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Thank you, Bill. Thank you for having me. And that's a wrap on today's journey with Mo Choumil.

From the Title Agents Podcast, reminding you that mastering the art of innovation is key in the title industry's fast-paced world. If you're finding it tough to keep up with the changes and challenges, remember you're not alone. Our calendar is open for you. Find the link in the show notes and let's connect. Make sure to hit subscribe to not miss out on strategies that elevate and insights that empower.

Together. We'll navigate the future of the industry. I look forward to our next meeting in the upcoming episode. Keep pushing, keep innovating, and see you in the next episode. Thank you.