Streamlining Title Workflows for Clean Energy Projects with Monroe Jett | EP192

The biggest problem about having a manual workflow is that no one else can access their information. So what we do and title later is get employees out of silos and into sharing information. And what that permits, is it lets managers actually manage managers can actually see each person's workflow and know exactly what's going on got workflow views for by the team wide and by individuals. So each individual comes in the morning to do exactly what it is you need to do.

Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts, Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar batteries and clean technologies every week, want to go deeper into decarbonisation? We do two, we're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it. Together, we can speed the energy transition.

Today on the Clean Power Hour title automation for renewable energy developers, I'm Tim Montague, your host Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. And by all means, tell a friend about the show. That is the best thing you can do for the Clean Power Hour. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a listener. I do this for you twice a week. And I'm just so excited to be part of the energy transition as you are. My guest today is Monroe Jett. He is the CEO of title leader, a software as a service for Title work. And I'm so excited to bring this dynamic entrepreneur to the show. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much, Tim. Glad to be here.

Looking forward to bringing your platform, your solution, so to speak to my audience of renewable energy developers. But Monroe, before we get into title leader, give our listeners a little background on yourself. You're a serial entrepreneur. So how did you get started in business? And then how did you come to create title leader?

Thanks, I appreciate that. So 35 years in the real estate and title industry, I was first a banker and a bank president. Banker career lasted 15 years, I left the bank to start my own full service Title and Escrow Company to serve banks as my customers. And I ran my company jet title for 15 years. And it was during the operation of my title company that I encountered the pains that I solved with the automation of the title of your platform. And that was that I had a large customer ordering searches for me. A title and escrow company does, let's say 10 things. The first is a title search. There's many other steps, the last step is you would come into the Title and Escrow Company, sign the papers and walk out with keys to a new house. Right? So I had we had software that would do all 10 of those tasks, and they're mature, mature software. But this one customer just needed search work only. And it was it was very difficult, very painful. So I automated that process sold my title company and I've since been selling my software, title, title, you're very

good. And you've discovered that the clean energy industry is a fast growing sector and has pain points just like any real estate development, solar and wind development are real estate development at at the at their core, right. And so what yeah, what was your entree? How did you discover the clean energy industry? And tell us a little bit about your journey in that industry so far?

Well, it's interesting because we, I designed the product exactly, not for renewable energy developers. So I had it. We design our product, actually for foreclosure law firms that needed a tremendous amount of search work. And the process was really cumbersome. So I automated it. But what's interesting is, within the last six to 12 months, we've started onboarding without expectation without really seeking it. We've started onboarding software developers as users of our products. So what's interesting is, you know, when you develop a tool, you really don't know who all is going to use it and how it's going to be used. So we have a wide variety of users of our platform. We have foreclosure law firms, we have solar, wind and battery storage developers, renewable, sorry, non traditional lenders, real estate developers, real estate investors, civil engineering firms, you name it, but the largest group of users is in the renewable energy sector. And so about six months ago, seven months ago now I went to clean power 23 in New Orleans, to really vet out the renewable energy sector, because we're getting more and more customers and and they're excellent for us. They're actually right in our wheelhouse. And I went down there and fully verified that the sector as an absolute need for us was greeted extremely well. They're by all the developers that I met and boarded several customers, when I got home, then went out to ra plus did the same thing. But after the clean power 23 event, we decided to go all in in the renewable energy secretary, we changed all of our messaging, to focus specifically on that market. And it's been great, since I'm

so glad to hear that you've had a warm welcome. That is one of the things that I love about working in solar, wind and storage is the people are genuinely, generally very open minded, friendly, enthusiastic, and want to say technology, enthusiasts about technology, right? We are a tech forward industry, we rely on technology to transform the grid and the economy. So you've been making the rounds and doing a good job of of reaching out to folks on LinkedIn like myself. And you know, so kudos, kudos to you for being a master networker that has really served you well, we got to spend some time at InterSolar. In San Diego recently, you're going to Boston to ra plus, we're hosting a webinar together later this month. So go to cleanpowerhour.com, click on the Events tab, and you will find information about that webinar. And all of our events, and all of the industry events that are coming up, we have three main major events happening here in Illinois. You'll be at some of those as well, Midwest solar Expo in May, the solar farm summit in July, and the Midwest, sorry, sorry, plus Midwest in October, and you're going to be a speaker, hopefully, at Midwest Expo. So our listeners can look forward to meeting you in Chicago, this it's almost summer in May, little before summer, but in the spring, so kudos.

Thank you appreciate it.

Yeah. And I want to I want to explore a little bit around creating a software as a service, you know, there are a lot of software's service platforms emerging in clean energy. And while your platform is not unique to I mean, it's not exclusive to clean energy, it, you're going to find that there is a major audience there because there's so much land development going on in wind and solar and batteries. But when you embarked on that journey to create a software as a service, because I think many entrepreneurs dream about creating a platform like this, but the reality of doing it is a totally different animal. So share with our listeners, if you would, what that journey was like.

It's been long and and a great learning experience. It takes a lot of time and a lot of patience and a lot of money to develop the platform. We're bootstrapped at the moment, which means that I've provided 100% of the funding to to get us to the point where we are we're considering a fundraise this coming quarter, either like q1 or anytime in q2 to raise funds for sales and marketing and got a finished product. It's phenomenal. It's been one thing I've learned is you've got to have early adopters have got to become your partners in giving you feedback. And you involve them and give them ownership. And they give you great feedback. And you can say what the product to them. So when we made the change to focus just on renewable energy segment, we found through canvassing the segment that we had to add a couple of products. So on our platform, it's a title management platform. So you can order to track receive access, store, find communicate, and all four steps of accounts payable. Those are the 11 steps of mandatory steps of handling title searches and title commitments on our platform. But we had to add a couple of different search types that that customers wanted specifically for companies that only focus in getting leases signed upfront, or has departments within their company. And that sole department was designed to get landowners out of the market under a signed agreement, a site control agreement. So they wanted a specific informational search, which gives vesting and tax information. It's very inexpensive, about 100 Blocks can turn around in two or three days. And that gives the sort of offer all the information they need to be able to cut and paste out of that product that we give them right into their site control agreement. So as accurate D, they know who they need to be dealing with is it and see, they need to know, excuse me, and what capacity the landowners need to sign is it members of an LLC as a president of a corporation, etc. And then D is they can cut and paste right out of this product, the legal description has been human typed by us and post that into their agenda of agreement on the site control agreement. And it's not an OCR is unreliable. So you can't use that. It's why we have to use the human to type to retype that legal, and you can't cut and paste a photo off of the document because many times it's almost illegible and very faint. So that's, that's one example of a product that the second requested that we created very rapidly and deployed and, and customers love it. We have a variety of other search types, all the search types you can you can ever want, are there one owner to owner full searches and depending on the state that can be 30 to 45 years up to 60 years search. And those are turned around and an average of 10 days and cost between, let's say 400 bucks and 1200 bucks anywhere in that range. And you get that information quickly, as opposed to ordering a title commitment right off the bat, which can take sometimes up to two months. So and it's costly, because those searches go back, not just a period of years, but all the way back to when what we refer to as patent when the government either first granted for free the land to its first private owner or sold that land to its first private owner. So those searches, if you order a commitment right off the bat, you're paying for patent searches, you're waiting for those to those to be performed, and then the commitment to be typed up. So it can be weeks to months longer than ordering searches in the meantime. So some of our current customers order that very first search type that I mentioned, you can get in a day or two others order this mid level search where they get about 10 days, and others go straight to ordering title commitment, whatever your needs are, we make it really easy on our platform all in one spot. What do you want me to talk about? The biggest benefit of the platformer, do you have a question?

Well hold that thought for a second. I want to I mean, of course, there are there are there, there are layers of understanding title work. And I have a very high level understanding of title work. And your and ultimately your, your audience. Your user is real estate professionals within energy companies and other real estate development companies. And those and those experts know exactly what you're talking about. But I will also want to provide a body of of knowledge here for our energy developer colleagues, so that everyone can kind of raise their game. One of the things that I've learned is that real estate records are fairly antiquated in the United States. There is not a universal digitization going on yet, unfortunately. Yeah. Right. And so the when you when you go to a title, company and order information about titles about parcels, that process is very manual, generally speaking, a human is, is going to a office many times right and looking through physical records may mean maybe microfiche, maybe other. But there are

there are really two steps what you're getting at 10, there are two steps that you're talking about. Let me give it a general overview. So before a first of all, a sole developer needs title work, as we refer to generally on the front end before you sign a side control agreement. So this is before construction agreements before an NTP it's so that you can get a notice to proceed. So anybody who is developing lands gotta get a site control agreement, you must have title work done. And Title work does three things. One, it gives you the ownership of the land two, it tells you in what capacity it's own, and then three it tells you what liens or encumbrances and easements might be on the property. So that's what title work is. That's what it gives you gives you that information. Why would you want that information? Well, you want to make sure that you've got the property identified correctly. So there's, there's these hoops that you have to jump through to get it. So the process of doing that is manual. So back to your point. It's a manual process to order and track and receive everything that you need. It's an extremely manual process and time consuming. So that's a portion of what our platform does is it makes it really simple for you and streamline. Yes.

I mean, at the end of the day, you're about reducing the amount of friction in the process of getting to site control and knowing that, you know, you it starts with a conversation, you're talking with a landowner who has a parcel or several parcels. And then you're getting into the weeds on Well, what is it that the developer wants? They want a lease option agreement, ultimately, in the in the early stages, right. And, and then they will get a, you know, a verbal agreement from the landowner that, yeah, we're interested in doing this deal, so to speak. At that point, the developer wants to do a bunch more due diligence, generally right, to determine if if the property is unencumbered, right?

Correct. So it's all about risk, risk mitigation. So you got to find out what are the problems with the property that have to do with title? Well, what could those problems be? Well, there could be an easement on the property for either power lines or underground, or it's simply a ride away for a neighbor to go across that land to get to their property, maybe they're landlocked. And so there's an easement where they can drive across the property, it may not have been used in 50 years may not have been used in 100 years, but it could still be there. And those easements and related items and conferences, as we call them, can impact where a developer can actually build their solar array. So they need to find out where these easements are. And if it's going to significantly impact where they build their, their project where they build their array, or if they need to negotiate to get that easement moved around to a different location so that it won't impact where they've constructed.

Yep, well said. So what are the advantages? You you had a, you know, there is one outstanding advantage of the of the platform, but what are the top three or four advantages of business as usual today, what developers are doing, versus when they on board with Title leader.

So the biggest issue with performing title work in a manual basis is that everybody is separated out into silos, each employee is managing their own work through emails, inboxes, hardcopy folders, handwritten notes, spreadsheets, color codes, maybe even some dropboxes different naming conventions. But the problem is that everybody is doing it differently and has a unique process, which makes it makes it extremely difficult for anyone else in your organization to locate that, that and find it when there's problems, or specifically when employees are out of the office. So if employees are, are out of the office, they're they're sick, they're they are in the hospital, they have any variety of issues for we're not being available, no one else can continue their work. You're

you're talking about the advantages of the product, right? And how it gives access to the work load the workflow, like a manager can get access to the workflow, right?

Yeah, the biggest problem about having a manual workflow is that no one else can access their information. So what we do in Title leader is get employees out of silos and into shared information. And what that permits, is it lets managers actually manage managers can actually see each person's workflow and know exactly what's going on got workflow views for by the team wide and by individuals. So each individual comes in in the morning, you do exactly what it is you need to do. And that lets an employee that lets the manager be able to see and know exactly what's going on at anytime. At the moment managers are held hostage by information and data and processes being locked into one person's mind. We eliminated it eliminate that completely.

Yeah, so truly, is, are our developers currently using spreadsheets for tracking all of this work today? Or how are they tracking it? There's

an amalgamation. It's mostly Well, it's everything under the sun. So you've got spreadsheets, color codes, handwritten notes, in hardcopy, folders, you have E notes, there's attempts to use shared files such as Dropbox, you name it. So the problem with that is that it's still in a silo, one person can only see all that information and if it is in a shared Dropbox, for example, then you've got issues with naming conventions. Let me give you the issue. So I had seven people in my title, company ordering title searches and doing title commitments. And even though everyone was supposed to share to save all that data in our network with the same naming convention. Invariably, we had several different ways of doing it, even though I trained on a recurring basis, so we had people sharing it on the on the, on the server with different names. As soon as they make a typo in the name, it completely disappears. We can't find it. Mainly it was served if they stored these documents on local hard drives, and even sitting and their email boxes, they would use their email boxes for where things were. So when they're out of the office. And we needed to solve a problem we needed to access information it's impossible. You know, if especially if someone was fired or left the company, then you're up to having to do then you have to do a forensic examination to find out where is where are, where are the results and what's going on. And it's almost impossible to know

if the Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America. The maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over six gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS America product lineup includes three phase string inverters ranging from 25 to 275 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 252 75, is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts, the 250 to 75. pairs well, with CPS Americans exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions. Go to chintpowersystems.com To find out more. Yeah, yeah, when I took the demo, I was really pleased to see how easy it becomes for a company to track dozens and dozens of projects in a single dashboard. And and for their there'd be layers of yeah, there's individual contributors. And then there's team leaders and managers. And as you go up that layer cake, the the manager can quickly you know, take over someone else's work or or or contribute to someone else's work. And so the vacation absence really doesn't slow things down. So what else should our listeners know though Monroe about status quo. This is how they're doing things versus getting with a platform like title leader, which by the way is completely free to try. You're paying for the title work still, just like you are today when you onboard with Title leader, but to take advantage of your platform, so to speak, doesn't cost you anything. And so it's, it's it's a it's basically a free accelerant, which sounds too good to be true. But now that I've learned about the platform, I get it. Yeah,

the big issue was how do we price this. And so my goal was, I wanted it to make it to be as easy as possible to use. So instead of charging subscription fees, or license fees, or having user number limits, we decided, in our first two years, to have it free and not charge that instead, our revenue model is that we have profit sharing agreements, or revenue sharing agreements with our vendors on the back end. So that was the easiest way to our our consultants think that we're crazy, and we need to start charging subscription fees right away, but we're gonna wait and, and give that as an incentive for customers to jump on board, before we begin to charge subscription fees. Good question.

Yep. So like I said, though, Monroe, there's there's this status quo today, what are the, you know, versus trying to mix things up and try a more modern approach? I mean, that's the bottom line here is this is a more modern approach to project management within real estate. And what are the what are the barriers to entry that any organizational leader might find, though, when they try to get a company to embrace your platform?

Well, we've removed as many barriers as possible. It's free, it's extremely easy to use. It's simplistic and very robust. But what the biggest, the biggest hurdle is overcoming inertia. So, you know, I've, I've done over 8000 closings in my career and and had over 10,000 searches and done, you know, examinations of all of them. So I understand the process. And I understand that it's always been done that way. So my issue is as soon as I do a demo, I mean, we close 90% of our demos, people will start using our product, which is which is fantastic. So the biggest issue we have is getting your message out in front of potential customers, and then they recognize how easy it is. So they don't know that they have a problem. They don't know that they're wasting weeks and months of time per project. Handling title and the old way, because they've never known another way. There's never been automation before in this segment for handling title searches for the purposes that renewable energy developers are ordering title from. So that's the biggest challenge is, for us really is getting our message in front of potential users. The biggest challenge for the users is to say, hey, there's a better way here. Now when I show managers that they have visibility and accessibility to each one of their teammates, workflow by Oh, this is fantastic. A it adds accountability be it as their ability to inspect what's going on with our customers no longer do they have to rely upon anecdotal evidence as to who's been productive. They know exactly what's going on. And the great thing about getting out of silos and into shared information is workflow continuity, as I may have mentioned a moment ago. But if any employee is absent or unavailable, any other employee, with a click can instantly pick up on the workflow of the absent employee, without any level of training, and regardless of their tenure within the company, and continue that workflow for the absent employee instantly. So we automate the process, we standardize the process, and we centralize that process. So

you and I are doing a live webinar with Michael Kohler from Azmuth. In St. Louis Azmuth renewables Azmuth is a wind and solar developer. And I wonder if you could give our listeners a little preview to what they can expect on that live webinar,

we're going to be talking about what it was like, for where Mike, before he used title here, and now what it's like after using title later. So you're going to be able to have a before and after use case live there. With you as the moderator asking questions, poking holes, seeing what the advantages are, and in what's not. What's interesting about about Mike's case, is that Mike signed up without even doing a demo. But um, next thing I know, he's uploaded orders, you know, 114 parcels? Over 12 different projects, ordering commitments on them all? Which can you imagine handling that? How else? Are you going to track that? All of that information? How's he gonna track getting quotes on all the different parcels what the quotes are, when you approve the quotes, etc. So all of that is date and time stamped and attached to each search, and each order in Title leader, so it makes it extremely easy to organize and manage it. But I think that's some of what you're going to hear. And that it'll be interesting to see to see what Mike what Mike shares, you know, he's he's very frank, and they do a lot of volume. And and our platform is made to handle that and make your job extremely easy. So so we'll see, what do you want out of it? Looking forward to you?

Well, I want my listeners to understand that there are better ways of doing business. And you know, one of the main things in the energy transition that we are dealing with is that we have the technology to make the transition. It's a question of how quickly we can deploy it, as Jigar Shah likes to say deploy, deploy, deploy. And so software as a service platforms like yours, and like many others that we feature here on the Clean Power Hour, are an are an accelerant. Right, they are going to reduce friction for developers to get more projects done in less time. And that is just a wonderful thing. Exactly.

Let me if I may, I'd like to add to that. And that is that out of all of the technology that any developer is going to review this year, we're going to be the easiest and quickest Templeman with the highest and largest ROI on the investment. It doesn't cost anything. And we we are an accelerant. I love that word.

Yeah, yeah, go to cleanpowerhour.com. Check out all of our content there, go to the events tab. And you'll see our upcoming webinars including the one with Title leader and Azmuth on automating title search for renewable energy development in our last few minutes together, Monroe, I'm curious what you have to say to you know, you've been you've been working hard at getting your beachhead in the clean energy space now for the last six months. What do you have to say to renewable energy developers that they may not be aware of like we all have our blind spots, right? And we all have our ways of doing things. But you're a newcomer relatively to the space and I'm just curious, what else? What have you what have you gathered about the industry? What insights have you made that you'd like to share with our listeners?

There's one item and that is what item jumps off the page to me And that is that developers will be ordering searches and title work straight through the underwriters. So if you're not ordering a commitment, there's no reason to order it through the underwriter. The so we're this management platform and on the back end of the platform, we have the largest commercial title search vendor in the nation that serves all the underwriters on a regular basis. So instead of ordering searches through the underwriter, you can order them directly through the vendor that they order all their searches from, and they're perfectly insurable. So when it comes time, for commitment, you won't have to pay for searching that segment of the property's history again. And what you've saved yourself is multiple weeks by ordering the search upfront. And instead of ordering it through the underwriter, you can order it through us and you get immediate access to the enterprise level search vendor. The issue there is that underwrite, most people don't realize this that most underwriters do not perform their own searches, right, even those that offer them. And there are a couple that, that do offer their own searches. They go straight to people like our search vendor partner. And that's why we have the partner that we do on the back end because of the extreme search quality but you'll get back your search quotes and you'll get back to searches turnaround time, weeks sooner than you would if you go through the underwriter to order them. Now there's some education there that we need to share with with individuals because they're so used to ordering through underwriters, but the underwriters love us, right? So we actually underwriters are, we're adapting right now, some modifications. So the underwriters can use us too, because they want to offload all those searches onto our platform and have their clients use that directly. Because all it does is clog up their workflow. So that's very exciting for us. So soon enough, all the underwriters, sorry, all the renewable energy developers are going to be hearing from the underwriters, hey, you need to be using title leader to order this A, they're going to make it much easier and faster for you. And and be it's not going to clog up their they're never gonna say this, it's not going to clog up their workflow. But they know that their clients are going to be served faster by going by going straight through us. I was fascinated to learn how many people go through the underwriters to order can you go straight to a search vendor without using us? Yeah, absolutely. You can. First of all, you got to be big enough that they're willing to take you on as a customer. And see, are you going to manage the key management silos? Are you going to let every single employees send out multiple emails to multiple vendors to get searches from multiple on multiple projects? And where's all that going to be handled? Where's it all going to be stored? How are you going to be able to manage accounts payable, we didn't even talk about accounts payable, we handle that also, we got customers that that have all kinds of issues with within voicings call that the invoice mess, and then there's the check writing the check circus, we eliminate all that together and all of its in one platform. So I think that's what I think that's the biggest thing I see is ordering from the source that costs developers weeks, even months of time across an entire year's worth one.

You touch there on interoperability, what is the interoperability capabilities of your platform? Can customers integrate title leader into their, you know, back office.

So we are currently in talks with five different software vendors and products that give services and other types of products to the renewable energy sector. And these five partners are looking to integrate our software into their platforms. So that's engineering platforms, GIS mapping platforms, you name it, some of the two of the largest names in the industry are make up those five potential partners. So there are other vendors out there that provide other services to the renewable energy sector that are looking to incorporate our software. Is that what you're getting at? Or did you did you have something specific in mind? Well,

I just think of, you know, you mentioned invoicing, for example. And so, it, you know, every company has a suite of tools and technologies that they're using for their back office for accounting for accounts payable for data rooms, you know, and I'm just I'm just curious, because that is going to be one of the one of the sticking points or catch points, so to speak for onboarding a platform like yours, they want they want to be able to suck information from title leader into other other platforms.

Yeah, so we have an open API on the front end and on the back end, we can add different vendors we can add Different underwriters. So if we have all the major underwriters that are partners on the back end, if they have specific vendors they want us to use great we can we can add them on the back end, if they already have a platform, what I found is that the only developers that have platforms that I've found so far are those that are the largest in the industry.

Like NextEra girls. Yes,

exactly. So the largest will have their own platforms, most do not, they're utilizing a hodgepodge of different places and form. So we clean up this one area for him extremely nicely and a beautiful bow. But if they need us to integrate with other software, that they might be using non-problem. We're extremely eager to find ways to make the lives simpler of our users.

Well, I think we should leave it there. I want to thank Monroe Jett, the CEO and founder of title leader go to titleleader.com to get a free demo. And please check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. Check out the Events tab and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with my listeners. I want to thank you my listener for being here. I really appreciate your spending your time here. Monroe. How can our listeners find you?

You find me on LinkedIn Monroe jet. Yes, that's my real name. And I'm the guy with two last names mo N ROV last name je TT, where you can find me at titleleader.com. And we will, we'd love to hear from you.

I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Have a great day. Hey, listeners. This is Tim, I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you twice a week. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate you and what you're all about. You are part and parcel of the energy transition, whether you're an energy professional today, or an aspiring energy professional. So thank you, I want to let you know that the Clean Power Hour has launched a listener survey. And it would mean so much to me. If you would go to cleanpowerhour.com. Click on the About Us link right there on the main navigation that takes you to the about page. And you'll see a big graphic listener survey, just click on that graphic and it takes just a couple of minutes. If you fill out the survey, I will send you a lovely baseball cap with our logo on it. The other thing I want our listeners to know is that this podcast is made possible by corporate sponsors. We have chin power systems, the leading three phase string inverter manufacturer in North America. So check out CPS America. But we are very actively looking for additional support to make this show work. And you see here our media kit. With all the sponsor benefits and statistics about the show. You know we're dropping two episodes a week. We have now over 320,000 downloads on YouTube. And we're getting about 45,000 downloads per month. So this is a great way to bring your brand to our listeners and our listeners are decision makers in clean energy. This includes projects executives, engineers, finance, project management, and many other professionals who are making decisions about and developing, designing, installing and making possible clean energy projects. So check out cleanpowerhour.com both our listener survey on the about us and our media kit and become a sponsor today. Thank you so much. Let's go solar and storage