Second-Time CEO Buys a $30m Title Company

Thanks for having me. Will.

In 2021 Randy, you acquired a title insurance business, one of the nation's larger title insurance agencies, using a traditional search fund. You are now five years in and we're going to hear all about the journey to date. Please start us off with some background on you. Randy.

At that point in time the industry had kind of reached a low point and the ownership group for that company decided they'd like to make a change and so they brought in an individual who had a ton of experience from AIG and inevitably in 2011 I was given the opportunity to either become a general counsel or run a company and I figured hey, what's the worst thing that could happen here? I have to…

So I took the opportunity to step into the leadership role. I think at that time we had about 300 employees. I had never had a direct report in my life.

How old are you at this point?

So I was 29, 29, 29 and we were about 17 million in revenue and probably minus 2 in EBITDA. So we had a long journey in front of us and it required a lot of hard work. The average age of my direct report at that time was probably in the low 60s.

So in terms of credibility I had none in all fairness. And that was the first thing we really had to work to establish. I knew some executives from a peer group who encouraged me to use EOS as a management tool and system.

Inevitably that's what we ended up using and we really coalesced around. We wanted to turn the company around and so we made a lot of really tough decisions and over the course of about a six year journey, we ended up doubling the company and taking it from minus 2 and EBITDA to plus 5. As a part of that journey, I realized that I really wanted to have a stake in the business that I was running…

And I put it in an effort with private equity group or a family office to try and buy the company in 2016. And inevitably we just couldn't get the deal done. So I hung around for another 12, 16 months, something like that, because we had some projects we wanted to get done and once that was done, it was time for me to go out.

I took a little time off and my goal was to, I hadn't yet decided to do a search fund. My wife and I were committed to staying in the Twin Cities if we could. And so I worked with some family offices locally to try and find a company for, oh, probably a year or something like that after my time off.

The takeaway for the audience is at the ripe old age of 29, as a lawyer you are tapped to lead the turnaround of the business where you are council tapped, meaning become the CEO of this business that does 17 in in revenue, negative 2 in EBITDA. And sorry, the business was what force placed insurance.