The concept of actively seeking out trusted partners within the title industry might be foreign to some, especially regarding title production. We’re not talking about attorneys and underwriters, albeit really important – but partners that can help improve internal workflows. Help make you more efficient, improve your services, and even help you become more profitable.
Where does one even start? What questions should be considered when exploring partnerships? How can one take steps today to help fortify current relationships and branch out into new ones?
In this post, we will outline three insights to help you frame and discover the possibilities.
1. Ask! Be introspective
Wow, simple, right? Be inquisitive, right? This would be the end of the article if it were that simple. However, the types of questions one asks can help strengthen one’s current relationships and open new possibilities. Questions such as, what should I stop doing that isn’t adding genuine value for my clients? What could I possibly outsource to others who specialize in those tasks? How can I stay focused on what I’m good at? Not to mention, passionate about? And do I know of other agencies that have made a move to outsourcing with great success? What can I learn from them? Considering today’s economy, ask yourself and others on your leadership team what your goals for the coming year are. Can the right partnerships get you there while reducing your risks? When we approach potential partnerships with fresh insight, clear goals, and a focus on preserving what we do best, great things can happen.
Five Essential Questions To Power Partnerships In 2022
JFK famously said that “The Rising Tide lifts all boats” This sentiment rings true today. One must not look over the reality that trusted partners bring benefit to our success. While some tides rise slowly, there are others that move swiftly. “Big wave” trends and technologies can change industries, often in a heartbeat. The current state of the real estate industry is invoking accelerated digital transformation to improve and differentiate services and decrease costs. Being open to partnerships that can accelerate digital transformation while preserving what you’re best at is probably worth investigating.
2. Seek out the advantages of the right partner
One significant advantage to partnerships is playing to each other’s strengths. With the right partners come new outlooks, expertise, and possibilities. The outcome of a great partnership is bridging the gaps that one may have in their operation and leveraging your partner’s know-how and skills to accelerate positive change.
The world of title research has been a largely fragmented, often manual, set of processes. As a result, agents, underwriters, and searchers often live in their silos trying to meet the age-old quest for the perfect close. The perfect close to you may mean fewer errors found during the title abstracting process. Or it might mean the ability to be highly efficient and close multiple files in a day. It could be a significant and unfair burden to assume the aspiration of achieving the perfect close on your shoulders alone. The good news is, you can focus on the area you are great at through the right partnerships while leaning on others to help with other parts of the complicated title process.
ATR is committed to title production, technology, and continuous innovation. What that means to our clients is that we stand in our strength and continuously seek ways to improve our process. We strive to help make the lives of our clients better. Within traditional title research, a title research company would only provide the property records search, leaving most of the work to the title agent to abstract the search, and type legal descriptions and names into various platforms, all before generating a title policy.
ATR discovered that more could be done to aid our clients. As a partner, we seek ways to reach further into the process to help cut back on manual processes such as typing. We are also committed to integrating into all major title software platforms. This positioning, as a partner, who is actively seeking out solutions to make the title production process less cumbersome has been our focus for over two decades. By developing an ethos of “always improving,” we found that we can best help our partners.
7 Partnership Advantages In 2022
3. Choose Skills over Creds
LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky claims that “skills, not degrees,” matter most in the new hiring process for 2022. This by no means suggests that degrees aren’t important. But it does suggest that at the end of the day, skills matter most. This principle, of course, applies to the partners we pick. If one were to focus on the skills they could pull from within a partnership while preserving what they do best and what their brand stands for, the probability for success goes way up.
You’re leveraging the skills of others to grow. Leverage other’s strengths when possible. In a world of limited time, resources, and staffing, it is more important than ever to know what you are good, what your staff is good at and amplify that.
The reality of today is that partnerships are essential to growth. There is just too much complexity to be good at everything, nor could you afford to be. Pick partners that make you better.
LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky: Skills, Not Degrees, Matter Most in Hiring
Additional Resources
https://hbr.org/1994/07/collaborative-advantage-the-art-of-alliances
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/find-a-business-partner
https://www.business.com/articles/connor-blakley-strategic-partnerships/
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/why-brands-should-invest-partnerships-2022/629206/