#36: Shane Bigelow (CHAMPtitles)

(AI Generated)

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:00:00]: It's amazing how if you look at the top priorities of most governors in the country, almost all of them have fixing the DMV in their top Stern. And it's not because the people at DMV did like anything wrong or bad or didn't do their The. It's just hard to process all that paper, right? There's so many things that come through the DMV. Your driver's license, your titling records, your Stern registrations on states like so many pieces of paper plow through The, and there's only so much time in the Lay. People can only process so much Land paper leads to errors because people fill it out incorrectly. They they get lazy and forget to check a box, and then they have to circle back or it gets denied Land they gotta wait in line again. And it's not always the government's fault, but now there are tools that are available to make it better, and we're making one of those tools, right, to fix title and registration across the country.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:54]: Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land Northeast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I'm your host, Jeffrey Stern. And Today, we are covering a problem I personally care quite a lot about. I have a general affinity for those working to close the gap between the ubiquity of technology in people's everyday lives and the relative lack of it in the government supporting those people, which is why it was awesome to have Shane Diglo on the podcast today. Shane has worked for 20 plus years now on all sides of investment and entrepreneurial worlds, from working for a family office, to starting his own company, being part of the sale of a public company, structuring and selling financial instruments For another public company, building up a client base of entrepreneurs to whom he provided investment management advice, running part of Lay Bernstein's business in the US, to being CEO and helping to found Champ Titles, which is a startup based here in Cleveland, which has raised over 10,000,000 in capital And is focused on digitizing the process of vehicle titling between the state government, insurance carriers, financial institutions, auto dealers and consumers by creating a legal digital title that is easily transferable and verified. I really enjoyed this conversation very much, and I hope you all do as well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:32]: So I was thinking about where to start this, and I I remember connecting with Beau Shim Land Ian Lewis maybe back at the 1st Blockland conference a few years back, And they've really kind of painted this very ambitious vision to me of how Cham titles was gonna kind of jettison this Lay car title process and pull it into the modern world. Land, and I've been left with the vision since then. And so I've been excited to have you on to kind of paint the full picture, if you will, from inception of that idea to the work you're doing today, to that vision, and maybe how It has evolved since then. So I think it's very cool the space that you guys are in, and excited to Stern how it's all transpired.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:03:14]: Well, thanks, and thanks for not stealing our idea. So, appreciate another tech entrepreneur just being intrigued by what we were trying to build. And Bo and Ian are crucial to that. They're fantastic engineers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:27]: Yeah. Yeah. So, let's let's dive in a little bit here. I'd love to understand, you know, your your path to to Champ Titles and and the work you're doing Land and really to the the broader world of of entrepreneurship. I'd love if you could just kinda paint a picture of of how it is that that you came into to this role and the path that that you took to to get there.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:03:48]: Sure, yeah. Well, it actually goes back to my 1st software company. I had started a software company a little over 20 years ago out in California. I had written an algorithm to help banks more efficiently process their loan and lease portfolios. And as a result, that was primarily around car Land, became familiar with the problem of automotive titling. We sold that company Land as I say, there's no Ferrari in the driveway because that one, but, but things went well enough Land wound up at another software company, and we sold that one to Cisco Systems. And I wound up of the financial arms. Cisco Systems is one of the investment arms called Cisco Capital.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:04:26]: And that got me recruited away to Wall Stern, and, I wound up being on Wall Street for a lot longer I thought, about 13 years, but as part of the role there, there were 2 things that I picked up that are germane to this company or directly germane The is. 1 was looking at The securitization of auto loans. Land, you know, this was 15 years after that first software company. I'm looking at the way that auto loans get securitized, similar to the way homes get securitized, a lot of paper documentation need to be looked at, reviewed, understood what those loans might look like if you bought them in a bucket, and with car loans, that got me exposed to titling again, and lo and behold, 15 years later, nothing had changed about titling. Not a not a singular thing. Literally, it was all exactly the same. So, sort of like store that away and say, well, something wrong there, but, you know, I'm busy doing this Wall Street thing. I can't really fix that, but that's interesting.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:05:18]: Then I got exposed to blockchain, and I looked blockchain. We were looking at the way to keep asset registries all around the world for different assets that we might lend against. And I started digging into it Land I was really intrigued by the way that blockchain is, I think, just the most superior ledger that exists anywhere in the world today. I think it's most secure, immutable place you can go to store data and have, a system of record that is more highly useful than a traditional database. And that got me intrigued. And and then I I wound up moving from New York out to Cleveland Land and met a guy that many people know out here, a fellow named Bernie Moreno. And Bernie was an automotive retailer Land, you know, he had a large chain of dealerships, in the Midwest and up and down parts of the East Cleveland he and I became friends, had always talking about different things we might do together, and when he was getting ready to leave the automotive world and I was ready to depart from Wall Street, we kept talking about, what can we do together? And we set a few parameters on it. We said, well, first, we wanna be able to have a company that has really high barriers to entry, but the barriers didn't necessarily need to be money, they needed to be knowledge.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:06:31]: It had to be something that you really had to know and understand deeply. And the second1 was that it had to be something The, you know, you could apply software rules to, that, you know, it hadn't been touched by software in a material way, and that was really due to the margins that are available in software. And 3rd, it had to be something that would bring a process back to people that would benefit The, that would actually drive maybe paper inefficiency out of something they were doing and make their lives better. And that was important to us because we we both had a pretty good run professionally, and we felt like this was a way to not only give back, but if we gave back appropriately, you know, the company would do well Land our employees would do well and our investors would do well. And so we kept circling around on different ideas and eventually came to car titling. And circle back all of that stuff from 15 years prior, and then I guess at that point, almost 20 years prior, and we realized that car titling hadn't been touched in that Lay. And we decided that we should reimagine the way titling gets done. And that's really the background of me and how I got involved Land ultimately what we decided to found together.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:07:38]: And and he's been chairman of the board Land, and not really operating in the business, but I'm Cleveland operating the business.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:45]: So when, when you were thinking through the barriers to entry Land it, you know, not necessarily on the capital side like you were mentioning, but this kind of expertise, it raised this idea. I remember Peter Thiel Land of talking about the idea of, like, the earned secret as kind of the source for a lot of startup ideas and inspiration. Land it sounds like with your background and with Bernie's background, the expertise there really is in that space in a way that I think most of us as just people who go in cars are not gonna have the depth of experience there. So What would you describe as kind of that earned secret that that that you unearthed? And I'd love, in addition to that, if you could Land of paint a picture of the whole title industry, and we can cover that one after.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:08:33]: Yeah, sure. So, I'm not as familiar with what Peter Thiel was sang with The Ernst Seager, but I can guess most of what it is. So, for any Peter Thiel loyalists, if I get this wrong, don't beat me up too much on social media. But What was stunning to us as we started talking about the idea was that most people just presumed that titling was already digitized. That there was already a way to fill out a form online and have your title move around. And if you want to sell your car, you could fill out a form of some state portal and do that. Or if you were a state, you must have systems that had a really a system of record to keep track of The, and there's no possible way people would possibly deploy paper for this. But in Ohio alone, there are 18,000,000 pieces of paper that are used every year to process titles.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:09:18]: 18,000,000. That's like hundreds or thousands of trees. I did the math once, I can't remember off the top of my head, 100 trees. And so, The are these like odd little quirks about this environment of titling, this ecosystem around titling, where everyone's sort of just taken for granted that this is the way it had to be done, that it had to be done in paper. And they were sort of always just accepting of whatever state process was in front of of, never really thinking through The. Well, could we apply a layer of technology on top of the state process Land could we make it better for consumers Land and also states to their credit, they actually were updating a lot of their technology Land it hasn't been getting used in the right way. The ecosystem around it hadn't had a reason to necessarily shift The somewhat antiquated paper based processes. So, we started to analyze and show to CFOs and others that are buyers of our services.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:10:15]: Oh, here's what this is costing you. What if we could do it better, faster, cheaper? And that's kind of the value proposition. If you think about titling in general, you know, so accepting real estate for a minute, so park real estate to the side. We're talking about movable assets, you know, boats, planes, cars, primarily pontoon boats, ATVs, what have you, anything that has to be titled. In the movable asset world, the title becomes important because that's how people indicate ownership, right? That Land you have the keys to whatever the asset is, disprove ownership if you're holding the keys and the title. If you have 1 or the other, it's also pretty hard to disprove it. But the problem with titling is that it's not a national system. There is no national system in the United States for titling.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:11:04]: It's a 51 jurisdiction issue, 50 states plus Washington, DC. So you really don't have to be an expert in any one place. Like if you're a car Land and you're in, say, Cleveland, you probably sell cars to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and maybe Florida for your for people that go back and forth in the wintertime. So you have to know those 5 or 6 states. But if you're, Lay, Carvana, you buy a car in California, you want to know how to sell it in New Jersey the next day. That national knowledge set is not something that companies really own or hold. And so we sought out to reimagine the way that we could use the rules. We had enough knowledge because of our presence across finance and automotive retail to be able to pull that together.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:11:51]: And we were able to hire some great technologists that are a lot smarter than me to be able to build out the technology.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:57]: So it already sounds complicated enough, but to add fuel to the fire, There are a lot of disparate parties at play in this whole ecosystem. It's not just the governments that are are part of this whole ecosystem. You have The consumers themselves, the insurance companies, retailers, the the financing of it. Who are all the the players? And, Before we kinda get into Champ titles and your approach, just to kinda set the stage for everyone that's really involved with this process.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:12:29]: Yeah. So, if you think about the title ecosystem, it's not only the consumer or the company that buys the said take a car, right? It's not just the consumer, it's not just Hertz that might own a fleet of cars. It's the lender that gave them the money to go buy that fleet of cars because the lender actually owns your car until you pay off your loan. Most people like to say, oh, it's my car. It's not, it's your bank's car. They're just letting you use it until you pay off your loan. So the title actually sits with the bank. Then there's the insurance carrier who wants to make sure that they're insuring a vehicle that's owned by the right asset, the right entity.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:13:03]: Then there are the retailers themselves who sell the car and need to interact with the title paperwork because in order to transfer ownership of a titled asset, the retailer needs to be engaged in properly retitling the car. And then there's the Stern. The state is the system of record. Has been, always will be, you know, until we are no longer a republic where the states have rights and the 10th Amendment goes away, which you know, I hope it never does. I love this country, and I love the fact that we have a 10th amendment. That means states have rights Land states get to be that system of record for assets like that. So that's pretty much the whole ecosystem in

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:40]: a nutshell. Yeah. Before we dive into The the work you're doing, I just wanna take a quick detour. I'm just kinda curious your perspective on it. Going back to that idea of the innovation and technology within the government space. I'm curious why you think there is this chasm between the ubiquity of technology in people's everyday lives, and the kind of dearth of it you see in in the government institutions that are are kinda working to support them. And not to your point, you know, there there was an effort to deploy technology, but but why is it not quite there in the way that that you see it in in every other industry?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:14:18]: You know, thankfully, I think our government in general does a pretty good job of supplying a path to work with it. It may not always be the most efficient path that we as businesses would want. I'm gonna quote a leader here in Ohio that I think has the right vision for these things, is our Lieutenant Governor John Houston. He says, I wanna make sure I get government out of the way of business, right? It doesn't want to take government away from regulating business or make sure businesses doing fair and just things for consumers, but get government out of the way of business. And so, Houston, for example, launched Innovate Ohio, which is a great platform to try to allow innovation inside of the government to reach the private sector. So it's an answer to your question, but sort of in the inverse, you know, you say why is technology ubiquitous with consumers, but not necessarily within of? In many cases, it is actually available within government. They spend a lot of time and a lot of our tax dollars deploying certain technologies. The problem is They're not experts in figuring out how to let us as consumers use their technology.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:15:23]: But the government doesn't really wanna stand in the way of business, at least good governments don't. I'm sure there are some states that maybe their government is more geared to do that than others, but at least in Ohio, they're not. They want to make sure that all this money that they've Stern, all the tax dollars they Stern on their systems that is available to the private sector to leverage so that the private sector can be successful, so that Ohio can become a thoroughfarer for the country. And, you know, that's the what what doesn't exist. There aren't a ton of players that actually sit between the consumers in the government Land and take the time to really work and understand what the government has and what's available and make that inversely available back to the consumers or the companies that need to conduct these processes. Right? So titling is a government process. But The you could fill out a form and work with the government, but the government actually does have some technological capabilities, and most states have done this to enable a path to communicate with them electronically. It's a question of how you build your own technology to take advantage of and we've just reimagined the way that we've done it, relative to the industry, and that winds up making us a good bit more efficient than what else is out there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:35]: So having identified this issue of titleship and The management of that process Land having recognized that it hadn't changed in in decades at that point. What was the steps from their having identified the problem to working towards, you know, a value add solution? What what is, In your mind, at that point, did, like, the MVP for champ titles look like? And how did you think about, having understood that this industry has not changed in many, many years. What was, like, in your mind, the moment of inertia for this industry? What were you going to do at CHAMP to affect chains working with governments?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:17:11]: Well, the first thing was to figure out how to explain our technology, right? The story of what any software company or technology company does is almost as important as their 1st product release. This, right? It's explaining it to people so they get it because generally, if you're changing the way or reimagining the way that some old, stodgy process might get done, it's tough for people to consume, right? At first, they're like, well, no, you can't do it that way, right? So then we show them a few transactions, and they'd say, wait a minute, hold on. You just did The. How did that happen? And it's really about showing them. So, you know, unfortunately, and and this is where maybe we broke our own rule, in order to build the technology, you could build it in 1 of 2 ways. You could build a minimally viable product, and then go and show in a very small way how it could be deployed. And then you could go convince, you know, a bunch of investors to put in a bunch of money and say, we're going to make it big. We took a bit of a different approach.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:18:12]: We actually spent a lot of our own money upfront, and it's a Lay, it was a lot of our own money upfront, on building a true product, right, really actually saying, here's the product. So, our MVP was like release 1. It was, here we go, like, Stern it on, and that's a risk, right? That's Land entrepreneurial risk that is tough for people to stomach. We happen to have the capital in the background that we were fortunate enough to be able to do it. Now we've great investors alongside of us that are helping us grow and build the company to bigger heights. But we took a differentiated approach of not really building MVP. We really went straight to product because we believed in it so much. And we believe too that the consumers of this wouldn't believe it until they saw it, right? Government is, by their nature, risk averse, right? Land we sell into insurance companies.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:19:01]: They're even more risk averse. And so you're selling into the 2 most risk averse buyers out there. You can't show them a PowerPoint and a nifty clickable demo and think they're going to buy it, right? It's got to be real deal stuff Land that's expensive. And so we spent the money to go do it, and it's not the path that I necessarily would recommend to every entrepreneur out there, but it's the path that we chose because we took a bet that that's what the market would need to see.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:28]: Yeah. I would love to Dive a little deeper on that one, especially just in my own past, having tried to sell to secretaries of state offices and understanding that risk firsthand. I think we always encountered, this problem as a startup selling The of. So, it's really a catch 22 where in order to get the buy in of a secretary of state The or a government organization that wanted to work with you, you needed some kind of reference of having done it already. But in order to ever have a reference, you needed government institution do have bought in to what you're doing. And so for a startup, that's a really hard thing to to surmount. And and so when you Land of forego the MVP process and and just, you know, focus on on what you were building and the vision that you had. What were you doing to kind of, on the business development side, kind of plant the seeds with your future customers to get them on board with what you were doing?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:20:21]: Yeah. I mean, our our our 1st customers weren't government. Right? So our our 1st customers were in the private sector. Arguably, you know, a little bit easier to Land The folks that might take a bet on you in the private sector than in the government because of that risk averse nature that I mentioned. So we were able to sort of show in the private sector that ours worked Land our approach to government was always, it was, well, let me put it this way, it was never to go alone. If I worked in government and I had my job Land my job was to protect the citizens of our state with making sure that they get the best available services and that things don't break and that things work well and things are affordable. If I took that job seriously as a government employee, it would be difficult for me to be super comfortable just saying to a startup that came in with no partner or no entity alongside of it The, yeah, I'm going to take this risk because that's not necessarily their job. Their job is to deploy the best technology, and, you know, those huge risks aren't always rewarded in government if you take them.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:21:26]: They might be rewarded for the politician, but they may not be rewarded for the government employee. And so, you know, being sensitive to that, because it's a very difficult job that the folks in government have, you know, being sensitive to that, we realized we had to make sure that there were other advocates that were already in the space, that were already deployed in government, that were already contracted with the of, advocated for our inclusion. So, the buy in came from, well, I'm not buying a product from a startup, I'm here with others who are advocating for this, who have a material stake Land support this company. So, you know, that was, again, a bit of a different, a business development approach in that, you know, we're not really going in there asking them to take a bet on us. We're saying, hey, here's our product in the private sector, here's the way it works, here are our partners in your world, and here's what we believe we can do for you working with them. So in business, generally referred to as a channel sales approach.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:19]: Yeah. It was one of the things I wanted to ask you about. I was curious The degree to which you have Land of thought through, do you need the buy in of all those parties that you kinda laid out a few minutes ago at once, Or can you kind of incrementally working with a few of those in the private sector, with the government, with the insurance companies, just kind of work with each of those individually to Land of shift from, you know, this paper to a digital process, or does it require this collective buy in at once?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:22:48]: Well, it's like the old adage, how do you eat an elephant? 1 bite at a time, right? So, you can't eat the whole thing at once. I think it's attractive to think that there's some sort of of bang solution that you can convince the whole world that you've got a better answer. But when you look at any game changing technology, whether it's web or email or conversion of the horse and buggy to a car. It didn't happen because everybody woke up and was like, oh, yeah, we should all buy cars today. I mean, it took years, right? There's all those famous pictures of the horse and buggy eventually being not the majority on the road, but to being the minority on the road. It took time. So, you know, we go piece by piece by piece, Land, you know, it's going to continue to take time. That's The nature of any venture backed company is The, you know, your process doesn't just solve itself in a day and everyone becomes addicted to it, it's proven over and over again, you have to hope you don't fail Land you have to do all the things with your security and with your company and your personnel to make everyone very comfortable that you're the reliable source for this newfound technology that they will very quickly rely heavily on, right? And that's the shift is that people believe you know, that paper is somehow more reliable.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:24:05]: Well, I can tell you, and I'm sure you can too, countless stories of where paper fails, right? We look at voting, like, look at how many times paper voting fails. It's not more reliable than a digital secure record of what goes on, and people worry about the security of of of what's digital, but the reality is when you're deploying a thing like blockchain, one of the big benefits is the traceability of it. Right? It's an immutable ledger where every transaction is recorded. So, you know, I always think it's hilarious, for example, when criminals somehow use you know, some form of blockchain and think they won't eventually get caught. The folks in law enforcement love blockchain because eventually they can figure out exactly was you, who the user was, right? It's it's all traced. So when when you look at technology and moving away from paper, the comfort of paper was that you could somehow go back and audit it. Well, I get that you don't necessarily believe you can audit technology until blockchain came around and really had some level of of true adoption in the world, because blockchain is that immutable auditable ledger that makes this better than paper. And that's where we are.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:25:16]: In the same way that email, by the way, it's far easier for me to look back 10 years and see who emailed me about a particular topic, than it is to search through a filing cabinet and figure out who sent me a letter in 2011. Right? I can very quickly search my inbox and figure out precisely who that was in 2011, what the topic was, and what they stated, and it's very clear. We became reliant on email as a replacement for the letter. Now we're becoming reliant on technologies like blockchain as a replacement for paper.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:46]: Yeah. Northeast it makes a lot of sense. I do wanna ask you about blockchain here. So one of the things that I have found is that it's sufficiently hard to sell, to sell anything as it is. But add on top of that, the burden of educating people on something in addition to selling them on something, it It it becomes really very challenging. And I am curious as you pitch, as you sell, as you market the product that you're building at Cham titles, the role that blockchain plays there. And, you know, because one of the things at my own company that we kind of hear is pushback often. There's a combative skepticism that we almost get sometimes from even even mentioning the word blockchain Land and the whole, you know, series of connotations that people have Land associate with it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:30]: And so I'm curious how you go about communicating with regards to the underlying techno. Like, does it even matter, Or is it more just about, like, what is the experience benefit for the end users of the of the product? How how do you kinda navigate that pushback and skepticism and all that Land of stuff.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:26:48]: Well, you know, my recommendation to anyone in the blockchain world, is to not lead with blockchain, right? It's sufficiently confusing. It often gets somehow intertwined with cryptocurrency, even though 1 is just an application on top of the other. You know, cryptocurrency is an application of a way to use blockchain. But whenever you're trying to convince someone that your product should be something they use, it leading with the underlying technology is likely not a good way to sell, right? No one's leading with email by explaining how email gets from my phone all the way over to your phone. Right? If you actually spent the time to explain how an email made it from my phone to your phone, through this connection, that router, The switch through this satellite down to back down to earth, over to the Land, it gets to you, then bounces back up to a Wi Fi. Like no one's going to follow you, nor should The, it's kind of pointless, they don't care. They're like, does the email get from here to me? Yes, it does. Isn't that great, it happens instantaneously.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:27:52]: You're not talking about the underlying technology, you're talking about the effect on them. The effect on someone in our community of the title world is to say, your titles will not be processed in 50 days, but in 1 or less than 1 or minutes. And if The dig in eventually and say, well, how do you do this? Well, you explain the digitization process. Well, how do you digitize? Now you're probably in your 2nd or 3rd meeting with the tech people, and they're saying, well, okay, where do you store the data? Oh, we use Blockchain. It's amazing because by the time you get to that technical buyer in any sale, they actually know all about it. They don't need to be educated it's the same way that if you were trying to sell that email system, they would say, oh, okay, well, I know how that works, I know how it goes from my phone to this router, to a switch, to over to the landline, whatever I said before, and it's the same. Right? By the time we get to that buyer, their knowledge of blockchain is sufficient. They're comforted.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:28:50]: They're like, oh, that's a great way to store this data, title data that records who owns what. Yeah, I want to put it on the most sophisticated ledger available in the world today, the most secure ledger available in the world today. Makes perfect sense you would use that. And then I Lay, thanks, and they move on. Because The not, it's the sexy part, but it's not what you would lead with. What we're trying to solve is The titling is a paper based process that doesn't have a lot of digital conduits available to The community members, and they need that in order to process their titles and move their titles faster. It saves them money. It saves the The from printing all The paper.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:29:29]: It saves cars from sitting in salvage yards and leaking oil and bad things into the ground because they get the title faster and sell the car faster. It's good for them because they get to sell their asset, move their asset faster. It's good for the banks because it's a better customer experience. That's what you're talking about. That's what we solve. The fact that we use blockchain is nifty, and it's incredibly important to the security of what we do, but it's not what we lead with. And I always tell people in The space that are using blockchain as part of their solution, I don't see the value in leading with it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:05]: Yeah. What is the the current state of champ titles? Like, where where are you guys at? How large are you? What what are the products you have in the market? Of those players that you outlined earlier, who are you selling to? What's the lay of the land, if you will?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:30:19]: Yeah. Well, we're expanding rapidly, So we haven't announced our headcount yet, but in very short order, we probably well, we will be doing that. There's also an announcement coming out in the next couple of weeks about the growth of our company and some new big partners that we're bringing into our world. So, look for that. So, I'll keep some of those details as a teaser for people to maybe check out our website or follow us on social media and see what we release in the next few weeks. But what's exciting for us is that, we've built up a bevy of customers inside of the insurance community, inside of the government community, inside of the retail community. And we're excited to be able to give those customers a faster way to process their titles. So, you know, we've been the product's been live for a little less than a year now, just barely a little less than a year.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:31:11]: It's working exceptionally well. We have some very pleased clients. And right now we're trying to add as many people as we can because the demand for what we're doing is out stripping, the number of hours in a day that we have available to us. So I think it's a similar problem to what you're seeing at your successful company. You know, you've got to figure out how to match the demand with the talent. And thankfully, we've got some great people on the team that are helping us grow and build. So, we're really excited about what the future holds.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:38]: Yeah. No. It is it is exciting. May maybe we can talk about something, you know, that is that is public and out there as maybe a Oxy for for some of the the developments you have coming, but I I saw you have, you know, established this partnership with Copart, which, you know, for for the audience, you know, explain who they are and And the significance of that partnership, but I'd love to understand, you know, how that how that how that came to be and and how you're thinking about, you know, expansion into the market, in the context of those kinds of partnerships going forward.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:32:08]: Yeah. Absolutely. So in the, salvage worlds, so cars get salvaged when there's a bad accident. You see it on the highway, unfortunately, and the car is totaled. Total is another word for a car being salvaged, or a natural Stern, like a flood or hurricane or hail or something like that. There are only a small cadre of players to resell salvaged cars in the United States. There are a handful of companies, really only a few of them, that over the years have bought up salvage yards. So, you might see them kind of on back roads or off of highways and sort of unpopular strips of land that are used then or bought by these companies to house cars after one of these natural disasters or accidents.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:32:54]: Those are salvage yards, and those salvage yards are only owned by a handful of companies in this country, and those handful of companies sell those cars on behalf of entities that take ownership of the The. So, insurance companies take ownership over a salvage vehicle whenever they've insured a car that got in one of those bad accidents or a natural Stern. Because unlike a typical insurance claim, like where if you are an offender bender, you pay your deductible and the insurance company sends you some money and you go to a collision shop and you get your car repaired, or they pay the collision shop directly. With a with a The vehicle or salvage vehicle, they're actually buying your car from you. They're saying, here's a check for your car, and now your piece of metal that was materially damaged is ours, and they want to sell that car as quickly as possible, because that's the only way to recoup any of the money that they gave you as part of the claim. And so selling it as quickly as possible is crucial to their economic success. And Copart is the largest player in the United States in the salvage space. So it's a great partnership for us in that Copart is a fantastic publicly traded company based out of Dallas, Texas, run by some really great executives who have built that company up.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:34:13]: 1 of The, CEO Land chairman and CEO is actually related to the founder. So, it's still like, it feels like a family company. They're a really fun culture to be around. They've built this company up, over the last few decades and done a magnificent job doing so. And one of the the things they wanna solve for their insurance customers, is how to move these cars faster. Land, and our technology is something that, we believe is helpful to them and the insurance community, and we're lucky to have them as partners.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:45]: Yeah, The is really exciting. In terms of kind of outcomes to the degree that you're able to talk about that, like, what what have you seen as a consequence of of people using the product and and kind of deploying it Land getting it out there.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:34:59]: A few things. On the on the purely economic front, what's what's great is when, an insurance carrier tells us how much money we're saving them. Right? They're looking at it and saying, I used to, and by the way, insurance companies aren't taking this money and putting it in their pocket. What's neat about the insurance business is that the insurance world is highly competitive, right? You only need to turn on your television for 15 minutes. Normal television, not commercialist streaming. I mean, like old school Northeast television or YouTube TV or whatever until you'll see in 15 minutes, I don't know, 7 insurance commercials, right? Jake from State Farm, the GEICO, the Aflac Duck, the Emu, like, we all know these, like, they're part of our viewing pleasure, and they're so competitive. So what they do when they make extra money on something like this is they plow it right back into reducing The premiums for their customers. So, we're delighted that we help reduce premiums by making an inefficient process more efficient for the carriers because it drives prices down for consumers everywhere.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:36:05]: So that's the first thing on a purely economic standpoint, and they're delighted too because they've fronted all this money on a salvage transaction, now they're getting it back faster. The second thing is a benefit that I don't think we ever envisioned when we created The company, but we're delighted by, which is, there's an environmental benefit, right? So, I mentioned the reduction in the number of trees that get cut down to make paper Land the processing of paper, which is obviously not, not super environmentally friendly. But the reduction in that is obviously, something we're proud of as a company that focuses design digitizing a paper based process, but it's also The Stern those cars cycle through a salvage yard, the less They're sitting there leaking oil and other things that can damage the Earth, and, you know, Copart doesn't want The. We don't want that. No other company wants that. Everyone's always struggling to try to do better. You know, these are very thoughtful, eco friendly companies that are trying to do their best in a non eco friendly, unfortunate transaction, like your car being in a big accident or being, you know, in a natural disaster. And so, The we can solve that and The allow those cars to move faster in a reduction to the damage to the earth, it's great for us.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:37:22]: We didn't set out to do that, but it's part of our core sets of belief now that this is one of the ways we drive value back to not only our customers, but to the world. And that makes us happy and proud. And I hope the folks at Champ Titles are happy and proud of that too, because we're adding to the value proposition every day with every car that we can move faster through the titling process.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:43]: When you think back to those idea inception days and and coming up with an idea that that had this burden to to entry. I'm not sure. Like, how is competition in The space? Is there a competition? Have people, you know, followed suit with what you're doing? Were there players already thinking about the digitization of this field. How does that kind of look in your outlook?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:38:07]: Yeah. You know, there's competition everywhere. It just sometimes manifest itself in different forms. I think we're lucky to be at the bleeding edge of this. We have some proprietary intellectual property that we believe protects a lot of what we've created, if not all of what we've created. So, yeah, there are, there are traditional players that are in the paper based world that are disrupted by what we're doing. So I would regard them as competitors. But interestingly enough, a number of those companies, we also look to partner with, right.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:38:42]: We're trying to drive value back to The ecosystem. And so, for many of those companies, The have other business units that would benefit from what we do, right? And that's the uniqueness of this title landscape. There aren't a lot of players in it. And so when a new player pops up like us, you know, we catch a lot of eyeballs. And I think our view is, you know, we're, yes, everybody competes in some way, right, if we're disrupting an old process and making an adjustment that they'll have to work their change management around. But there's also an opportunity to partner. So for any competitors that are listening, give me a call. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn, and, I I promise there's probably a way we can partner.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:30]: Yeah. No. That's that's fun to hear. Has the vision changed in terms of how you're thinking about this space with the progress that you're making? Has the direction shifted at all? Or or, you know, what is the impact ultimately that you would like to have with this company looking back?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:39:44]: The only part of the vision that has, I think, materially changed is that it's turning out we can move a lot faster than we originally anticipated. A lot of that's due to having a great team. We hire the smartest, best, most capable people we can find, anywhere in the world. And we're very fortunate to be able to have, a great group of folks that we've been able to bring together. And we recognize that we can go a lot faster than we thought and that the industry is moving a lot faster than we thought. You know, The willingness to adopt digitization processes was at first thrown on its head by COVID, like any company. We were so worried as a young company when something like that stalls the entire economy, what's gonna happen Land we were damaged by it. But, you know, coming out of of, now on the other side, you're looking and saying, okay, What this has changed is that people, hopefully people are being healthy and doing the things to protect their health.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:40:41]: They're saying, you know what, I don't really wanna go to the DMV. I don't really wanna watch paper Land, you know, send it all the way around, signed things and not know where it's gonna go or who's gonna see it. You know, I'd rather have a digital track record of what I'm doing because they've gotten very accustomed to having a digital track record of what they're doing. They can see every Zoom call they've been on for the last year and a half, and they know exactly who they talk to and when Land for how long, and sometimes they recorded them. You know, it's rare that you can do that in life, but now for the last year and a half, everything has essentially been, digitized. There's this opportunity now in the marketplace where the marketplace is saying, I want to adopt this faster. So, what's changed is our speed. Right? And we're excited for our investors and for our employees and for our customers that we can move even faster than what we thought.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:34]: Yeah, it definitely, I think across the board, we've felt this accelerant of technological adoption. And you feel there is a longevity and a staying power to it. It's not a temporary shift in in people's habits and behavior.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:41:51]: Well, Lay, listen, I love my mother, but she's a great forward looking indicator of whether people will adopt technology or not. If you'd ask my mom, you know, 20 months ago, Lay, mom, you know, do you want to do a FaceTime call with your grandchildren? She's like, I never really kind of get that right. I'm not always sure how to do it. I don't know where to put the The, blah blah blah. I'll just talk to him on the phone. Now she's like, she'll FaceTime the kids. She'll get on with them on her own. She knows exactly where to put it, how to position the lights, where the microphone is going to be, you know, and you're talking about someone in, advanced age, protect my mother's age.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:42:26]: But, you know, that's become commonplace. Right? People have learned the human race is fantastically intelligent, and the idea that they won't adapt goes completely against like any thought that humans haven't adapted. Of course, we've adapted, and this is just an adaption The we had to make in rapid order. We all had to make it, and in this case, it wasn't like, you know, getting out of having webbed feet or something. It was like, oh, we're adapting to a world that is now technologically forward because It has to be. And then when you start using it for a while, besides the whole scary, you know, big tech is tracking me watching me sort of fear, which is probably real, you get the, oh my God, it's actually a lot easier to kind of like use this thing, this thing called a phone or this thing called a computer, and if I use it well, it's got a lot of power to make my life better, and I can digitize things. I don't need to sign paper, I can sign online, I can make my life a lot easier, and that's being adopted at Land incredibly rapid rate right now.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:25]: Yeah. I've realized in retrospect, kind of a silly question. I don't know anyone who is particularly excited to go to the DMV and would love for that to stay the case.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:43:36]: It's amazing how if you look at the top priorities of most governors in the country, almost all of them have fixing the DMV in their top Stern. And it's not because the people Lay DMV did like anything wrong or bad or didn't do their job. It's just hard to process all that paper. Right? There's so many things that come through the DMV. Your driver's license, your titling records, your voter registration in some states, like so many pieces of paper plow through The, and there's only so much time in the The, people can only process so much Land paper leads to errors because people fill it out incorrectly. They they get lazy and forget to check a box, and then they have to circle back or it gets denied Land they gotta wait in line again. And it's not always the government's fault, but now there are tools that are available to make it better, and we're making one of those tools, right, to fix title and registration across the country.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:30]: Yeah. Well, I am excited about the work you're doing as someone owners of vehicles, titles. It really is a disastrous consumer experience, and so be very excited about the world where the vision you have has transpired. So best of luck to you guys. I hope the growth continues.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:44:53]: Thank you very much. We're looking forward to The next phases, and I'm always delighted when someone had a better title transaction than it had to do with our tech. So, more and more people across the country can enjoy that soon.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:06]: I hope so. Well, our one of our our closing questions here that, we ask everyone coming on the show is to paint a collage, not necessarily of people's favorite things in Cleveland, but things that other people may not know about, hidden gems, if you will. And I'm also curious, you know, as a fellow New Yorker, Cleveland resident here. What are those hidden gems to you?

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:45:33]: You know, when we were in New York, my wife and I loved to experimented with different restaurants, and there's always a bevy of new ones popping up, seemingly weekly, probably a little less frequent here in Ohio. But think it's it's about finding those, those gems. You know, I I love the restaurant, Luca, on the viaduct. They happen to be in in our in our office building, believe it or not. They're the top floor, and we have a lower floor. You know, I'm really just saying that because I I could use a discount there. I Stern more time and money, but, just fantastic Italian food, great experience, wonderful run organization Land a great spot to see all the wonderful architecture of Cleveland, the bridges, the downtown Land the like. You know, similarly, we found a few small little places.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:46:23]: I love Sara's Lay in Gates Mills. A little tiny restaurant run by a wonderful group of people, makes delicious food, and it's off the beaten path. You know, you're driving through this quaint little town. You couldn't possibly imagine that there'd be a great restaurant there, but there it is. It's the only restaurant around for miles. And there's probably a few others. If if you're up in in, I think it's in Willoughby, maybe Willoughby Hills is a Mexican place called Cocos Locos. I hope not too many people go there and ruin what I think is The best Mexican in Northeast Ohio, but it's fantastic Land it's run by again, great people.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:47:00]: And maybe that's the common thread here is when you've got great people running these places, I don't know, the food just tastes better, the experience is better, and for me, so much of food is what's the experience like? What's the service Cleveland, like, are they friendly? Are they nice? Do they skimp on the chips and the saucer? Do they keep loading it up until you're full and you're wondering why you're ordering dinner? Yeah. So The are these great places, and it's so great now that, you know, so many people are vaccinated Land healthy and able to get back to restaurants, that you're able to go back and enjoy these Lay. Land and restaurants probably took it harder than anybody during The, this pandemic. And I really hope that people are getting back to not only ordering, but eating in and tipping well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:38]: Yes. Yes. Agreed there. Well, Shane, I, I really appreciate you coming on Land, sharing your story. It's been, like I mentioned, I I really was excited to learn more about the Champ Title's journey Land and how it's transpired Land and the the work that you've been able to accomplish over the last few years. So thank you very much for, for coming on.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:47:58]: No. Thanks for having me. It really is a pleasure. It's great. I love I love the focus on technology in this part of the country, and you're doing a great job to promote it. So thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:08]: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. If folks have anything, competitors, you know, future job prospects, whoever it is, if if anyone has anything they'd like to to follow-up with you about, what is the best place for them to reach you.

Shane Bigelow (CHAMP Titles) [00:48:21]: LinkedIn is certainly gonna be the easiest Lay. So just go The. Send me a direct message. I will happily join up with you. I'm super easy to find. Shane McGrath Bigelow is my full name, The Shane Bigelow will probably find you. Me and Champ Titles, you'll Land

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:35]: Lay Mail to Jeffrey at lay of the land dot f m or find us on Twitter at Lay of the land or at Stern, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make Good guests for our show. Please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of The Land. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with The Up Company LLC. At the time of this recording, Unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show.