The Five Embraces:
What I Would Do Differently If I Started as a Notary Entrepreneur in Today’s Market Environment
Written by Bill Soroka, founder of NotaryCoach.com
Hindsight is a gift, but like all gifts and strengths, when overused, they become a weakness. I don’t spend a whole lot of time absorbed in the past, yet that’s where the universe keeps its lessons tucked away under lock and key, revealing them only to those brave souls willing to seek them out through retrospection and reflection. Courage found me today after Jen Cooper asked the question: What would I do differently as a notary entrepreneur if I were to start this business today, and not ten years ago (or so)?
Incidentally, surrounding myself with people, like Jennifer Cooper, a mobile notary and notary trainer near Fresno, California, who asks deeper, better questions like this and then shares the answers to help others, is one of the best decisions I ever made. So, kudos to you for orbiting a kind, thoughtful, heart-driven notary leader in this beautiful community. Jen will serve you well!
If I Started My Notary Business Today
When you’re in the hustle, especially as scrappy start-up solopreneurs with bootstrapped budgets, you make-do with what you’ve got. You either fix it with the figurative duct tape, or you toss it depending on your bandwidth and experience. “If you can’t duct it…” well, you know the rest of the quote.
This business-owner thing isn’t easy. You’re out there doing the best you can with what you’ve got….right now. Give yourself some credit, and some grace. I’m right there with you on this, and here are five things I’d embrace and do differently if I started as a mobile notary in today’s market. I hope they help you navigate the entrepreneurial gauntlet.
The Five Embraces
Embrace #1: General Notary Work
Loan signings have an inherent risk: They are tied closely with the housing market and mortgage interest rates, thus the business is cyclical in nature. So, in retrospect, I would have embraced General Notary Work (GNW) from day one. In particular, I’d embrace Specialty Notary Work. To be even more exact, I’d embrace estate planning appointments like living trust presentations (what we call trust delivery today).
I started my notary career more by accident than intention. I was desperate for cash after more of my businesses were failing. My friend threw me a lifeline by sharing the loan signing opportunity, and it truly did save my life. In fact, loan signing changed everything for me, and I loved it. Still do! There’s no greater feeling than gathering signatures and participating in the final steps of a first-time homebuyers experience.
Or so I thought.
As much as I loved that feeling, my work as a trust delivery agent surpasses it. There’s a special magic that brews at the signing table when a family finally gets their affairs in order and protects all that they love, including their legacy. As a trust delivery agent, you deliver more than documents and notarization. You’re actually delivering peace of mind. Plus, there is very little printing involved (if any) and there is typically no middleman or signing service, so that means direct fees that equal or surpass loan signing fees (the range for bundled trust delivery fees are $100-$250 in all fifty states).
Embrace #2: Technology
Regardless of whether your state requires a journal, you should be keeping a journal of notarial acts. It’s just smart, as your journal acts as your memory, required or not. I happen to have lived in two states that both require journaling, so I’m used to it.
In retrospect, if I had to start all over again (and lived in one of the 46 states that allow it), I’d use an electronic journal, like the one offered by Jurat, Inc, from the very beginning. Since we all have to learn how to journal anyway, we might as well learn on a platform that helps assure compliance, saves time, and improves efficiency. Not to mention, as the technology improves, there is an epic “cool” factor that happens at the signing table. Jurat’s bluetooth thumbprint capture device is next level and always sparks conversation at California signing tables.
A solid electronic journal can shift your customer’s perspective of the notary stereotype from archaic to avant-garde, and dare I say even, hip. Or, as fans of Mean Girls can relate to, “So Fetch.” Yes, we’re making fetch happen.
It’s not just about being cool and fetch. It’s about efficiency. Time is money, so if you can make the same revenue in a fraction of the time, you’re winning.
But it doesn’t stop with the electronic journal. Technology could have saved me so much time, worry, and money, had I embraced it sooner. Two other examples would be:
Use Notary-Specific Bookkeeping Software
They make it for a reason. NotaryAssist and Notary Gadget would have changed my life if I knew they existed back when I started, and if I wasn't so stubborn about spending money on “boring stuff” like bookkeeping software. In retrospect, having all my ducks in a row with bookkeeping would have relieved so many sleepless nights, tax-stress, and even client turnover. I lost clients because I would forget to invoice them with my manual Word template system. It was a nightmare! Now with software, tax time and reporting is a breeze, and invoicing is on-time and easy.
Keep Track of Signer & Client Contact Information
Although I caught on to the immense value of my database relatively early in my notary career (thanks to my experience in business earlier), I still lost critical years of customer/signer contact information because I didn’t embrace it at first. By having a permission-based database of my signers, I am able to stay in touch, communicate, share value, and follow-up on a regular basis. This has led to deeper relationships (even friendships), and more repeat customers than most service-based businesses I’ve engaged with. All this translates to more revenue and more joy.
Embrace #3: Better Financial Advice…Sooner
The side effect of failing in business as many times as I have is financial woes. I spent most of my life broke. Everything was a shuffle. I had to pay that bill one week, so I could be sure to pay another bill the week after. I was also completely irresponsible on top of all that, with the motto, “you only live once.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, I don’t know how many lives we’ll lead, but it sure helped justify impromptu road trips, nights of partying, and even more shiny-object endeavors. If I hadn’t pulled my head out of my you-know-what, that one life to live would have been spent as, “broke-ass Bill.”
As my world crumbled, I could still fain happiness to the outside world, maybe even to myself every now and again. But on the inside, at my core, I knew what all that financial instability, lack of integrity, and failure, did to my self-confidence and joy.
“Shredded” best describes it.
All these bad habits followed me on my journey, even after I had found some success. My thirty-five thousand-dollar-a-year mindset didn’t just automatically shift when I started making $350,000 a year. It doesn’t work like that.
Let’s be sure you heard that.
On a consistent basis, I had never made more than $35,000 a year. That was my cap. Not from the outside world. Not from “the man” keeping me down. It had nothing to do with the fact I never graduated college.
This was all me.
I never believed I was worthy of more than 35K, and I was programmed to spend to make sure that if I did, by some miracle, make more than that, I spent every penny. I operated from zero in my bank.
When I finally had a small amount of savings, guess what? I spent it. Didn’t matter if it was fifty dollars or fifty thousand dollars. I created ways to spend every dime I had.
I always felt broke. Most of the time, I really was broke. But one day, several years into my notary venture, I was doing my taxes and realized I had made $364,000 that year. I literally couldn’t believe it and had to pull my bank statements to check the deposits again.
Why couldn’t I believe it? I know what you’re thinking. “Geez, Bill, if I suddenly started making one third of a million dollars a year, I’d sure as hell notice!” Money & success can be sneaky, especially if you drag your poverty mindset with you.
Here’s what’s crazy about this. My goal, as written on my wall and on my fancy vision board, was to make $1,000 a day, or $365,000 that year. I damn near hit that goal! And I had never felt so broke in my life.
Why? Because I spent what I made. My bad habits followed me. My subconscious financial thermostat was still set to zero.
I had avoided financial advice (other than books) because I never saw a need for it. I always felt desperate and living paycheck to paycheck, almost daily in this business. What good was the best advice if I couldn’t even survive? Plus, I was still “scrappy”, trying to make things work, so I kept all my cash in one business account “just in case.” And guess what, “Justin” always showed up with a case.
In retrospect, I would have hired a wealth advisor the moment I received my first check. Despite squandering a few years of revenue, I was, luckily, referred to a wealth advisor that understood the needs of an entrepreneur. He is a fellow heart-driven leader that “gets me”, and within a few months, my entire life was different. With a few tweaks in where I put money and when, after a few years, my legacy was preserved. Now, we have some fun, experiment a little, and still have a chance to build generational wealth.
And it all started with a stamp and a pen!
Embrace #4: Membership & Peer Connections
When I first started my notary career, I was in a desperate situation and I wasn’t looking for a long term solution. I needed money to pay my bills and fund the other five or six ventures I was scrambling to get rolling. I treated my notary business like an ATM machine, so I wasn’t even seeking connection, resources, or groups to help me. I was a lone ranger (or should I say, “loan” ranger), in my own little world as a “silo-preneuer.” I had no idea that organizations like the National Notary Association & the American Association of Notaries existed. Honestly, I thought I was some trailblazing notary who discovered this awesome “secret” role as a loan signing agent until my work with clients started introducing me to other notaries and signing services that showed me the light and the way.
Here’s the funny thing: As I met more notaries doing this work, I began to enjoy it even more. I still worked alone but didn’t feel alone. I moved from silo-preneuer to solopreneur.
And then the support from the NNA, namely the Hotline, was a game changer for me.
So if I had it to do all over again, I would pay the membership fee to the NNA for access to the hotline and resources from day-one. I would invest heavily in notary skill training, because it was only after a few years experience that I fully started to appreciate the impact and importance the notary plays as the last line of defense against mortgage fraud and identity theft.
Then, I would actively seek LIVE notary events to attend throughout the year to start building relationships with well-trained, fun, and committed notaries. Not only does it make a difference to have a support network when you need it, but notaries are powerful allies for each other, not to mention ideal referral partners.
Embrace #5: Growth & Scaling With a Signing Company
As I got some legs in this business, and began gaining traction, and started cultivating stronger relationships, many of my escrow clients started asking if I could help them facilitate loan signings in other states. I resisted this for years because I thought starting a nationwide signing service was too complicated and too hard. I thought I would have to have a business entity in every state, and that I would have to travel and find notaries to use in every state too. I turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars in loan signings (maybe millions of dollars-but I don’t want to think about that!) because I was scared of growth.
Here are some reasons why I wish I would have started a signing service earlier:
It was easier to start a signing service than I thought. But, also more difficult and expensive to manage as signing volume increases.
This endeavor can be rewarding in many ways! My signing service created the most revenue of any stream in my enterprise, so this can be lucrative. It also brings tremendous joy to be able to pay notaries a fair fee and help their businesses grow too.
That said, it also created the most amount of stress in my life. Notary errors, economic downturns, client conflicts, and other issues can take its toll.
Here are five tips I’ll pass to you if you’re considering a signing company in today’s market:
Cash: You’ll need a cash reserve or a line of credit to make sure everyone gets paid on time. This is important because depending on your client’s terms, you might not receive a check for 14-90 days, but your notaries need to be paid faster.
Nail it, then scale it: Start small and grow organically through referrals and networking. I like to call my signing service a “boutique agency.” I’m not trying to build a behemoth company, just a respected and profitable one. Once you have systems in place and you’ve nailed it, you can scale it.
Quality Over Quantity: Focus on quality service and integrity over quantity. If you’re already a notary signing agent, you’ve likely seen examples of what can happen when signing companies focus on the latter or compete for clients on pricing alone. It’s a race to the bottom and you don’t want to be there.
Take care of your notaries: Fight for them when they need it. Pay them fairly, even when it hurts your bottom line. Coach them through errors. You may take it in the shorts every now and again, but you’ll build loyalty and you’ll sleep better at night.
Diversify: Finally, and this is a big one, find a way to blend Specialty Notary Work(SNW) appointments into your business model (trust deliveries are the easiest transition because of similarities with loan packages). If you focus purely on loan signings in today’s market, you’ll likely be out of business before you even start. There are more and more companies trying to do this now, but I haven’t yet seen a successful AND scalable business model. I’m tinkering with ideas in this arena, and I want you to work on it too. I dare you to beat me to it! I want you to win! Finding a signing service business model that works with SNW is a multi-million dollar idea. Go and get it!
There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be a Mobile Notary
I hope that by sharing my experiences, you may embrace something you’ve been resisting as well. Resistance, the destroyer of dreams, wears many masks and it holds us back from reaching our full potential. How do you know you’re in resistance? For me, it starts with “should.” I know what I should be doing to move myself forward on a goal or a dream, but I’m not doing it. And I’m really good at being stubborn about it too. To move me out of resistance, it takes action. Nothing massive. Just a little step. I’ll usually choose one tiny task out of the thousands on my list, and just do it. Suddenly task two beckons and flows. Before you know it, I’m on a roll with momentum and enthusiasm again. Try it.
But it only works if you believe the work you do each day is moving forward on a dream or making a difference in your life or in others’. You have to believe it. You have to believe that right now, there’s never been a better time to be a notary entrepreneur.
Because it’s true.
You’re not too late. You didn’t miss the boat. There is life beyond loan signings. Even without all the mortgage signings, there are still an estimated 750,000,000-1,000,000,000 documents notarized every year (yes, that’s a billion!). There’s plenty of work available and that doesn’t even count all the other opportunities under the notary umbrella of services. Imagine what happens when you take advantage of all the specialties you enjoy working with, plus all the non-notary opportunities we have like, apostille agent, fingerprint technician, wedding officiant, field inspector, and more.
This is your chance to embrace the full potential of your business as a mobile notary and credentialed professional. I can’t wait to see where you go.
