The following interview is a conversation we had with Shane McRann Bigelow, CEO at CHAMPtitles, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $31 Million Raised to Build the Future of Vehicle Title Management
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right in today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and thank you for listening. Today I’m speaking with Shane Bigelow, CEO of CHAMPtitles, a digital title management platform that’s raised over 31 million in funding. Shane, thanks for chatting with me today.
Shane Bigelow
Hey, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, can we start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Shane Bigelow
Yeah, of course. So I am in my mid forties. I have awesome wife who’s way smarter and prettier than I am, three kids, and this is the second company that I founded or co founded. And first one was kind of in an adjacent space industry and 20 some odd years later got back to starting this one. In between, I did a series of things, sold a couple of companies, and ultimately wound up on Wall street doing some things that inform what we’re doing here today.
Brett
Nice. We’re going to jump into that in a second. But two quick questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Shane Bigelow
You know, as a kid, I, I didn’t really get into following, you know, athletes or other things. I was like the kid that dorked out on CEO’s and different leaders, entrepreneurs and the like. And the one that I always thought was the most interesting. And I also found it interesting because he followed his passion as Richard Branson. Just think that, I don’t know if he’d fit into Jim Collins good to great, you know, categorization of CEO’s, but it sure looks like he has a hell of a lot of fun and people love working with him and he’s built a lot of wealth for a lot of folks along the way. So I think he’s doing a lot of good for the world right now. So Richard Branson’s my guy.
Brett
Nice. That’s such a good call out. I watched a documentary on him a while back and he was so cool. I mean, he still is cool. But he was really cool back in the. When was it, like, the eighties when he was doing all of his crazy stunts to you to get in the media? He was so smart, and he was very controversial with some of the stuff he did.
Shane Bigelow
Yeah, in my head, I think I’m that cool. But in reality, when I look at the mirror, I realize I’m about 3% as cool as he was on his worst day.
Brett
I mean, I think it’s hard for anyone to compete. He just, like. He’s just cool.
Shane Bigelow
Yeah. Yeah, he is.
Brett
He is nice. I love it. Okay, and what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be a. A business book or a personal book, but it can’t be a Richard Branson book just to have something different here.
Shane Bigelow
Okay. Well, I met a guy years ago, and he wrote a book, and I always thought it was a really compelling business and personal kind of mashup, if you will, is a book called the Monk and the Riddle by Randy Kamasar, who’s fairly famous out in Silicon Valley for his role in a handful of really awesome companies. But the book is basically about, you know, finding fulfillment at the same time that you’re building something awesome. And I find that if you can find fulfillment in what you’re doing, you’ve won 95% to 99% of the battle. So that’s my book.
Brett
Nice. I love it. Now let’s talk about CHAMPtitles. So I’d love to begin with the origin story. Did this begin with you sitting at a DMV to do vehicle titling, just wondering why you’re wasting your time?
Shane Bigelow
Or what’s that origin story, you know? No, it didn’t. But I feel for all the people that do in the states where our technology is not present and helping them get out of that line. No, the origin story, it came in bits and pieces. You know, I have a Co-Founder who was a brilliant automotive retailer. So he’s got a great vision from the automotive retail side. He’s chairman of our board, but not operating in the company, so gives a, you know, a lot of vision from the car dealer perspective, as well as a myriad of other experiences he’s had. But my side of it was from my first startup was a company that was in the automotive lending space. And when you are in automotive lending, you have to understand how to put a lien on a title.
Shane Bigelow
So I witnessed 20 some odd years ago the problem that lenders have with getting that lien correctly onto titles and off of titles. So I kind of stored that away and again sold that company, went to a couple, another company that we sold and found my way onto Wall street. One of the things I was doing on Wall Street, I was actually lending, or trying to lend rather some money about some very eclectic assets. I was actually in Zambia with one of the portfolio managers who was in charge of a portfolio that was lending this money. And were looking at trying to lend money on some eclectic assets there. The assets happen to be cattle, and it was a really cool way to help the society there by getting them access to capital while at the same time making a good return.
Shane Bigelow
And were partnering with Bono’s charity, one and Land O Lakes charity as well, to try to get this done, both as an impact investment and as a really solid returning investment. And the problem ultimately became that as good as the structure could be to get the money to these people and get the cattle and get the returns and have the economic impact we wanted to have on their society, we actually couldn’t identify the ownership structure of the cattle. So if you’re giving a loan, one of the things you need to understand is you’re collateral. And as a Wall street firm, were going to give the loan and then sell it off to other people to de risk our position, which is fairly common for banks or lenders to do.
Shane Bigelow
And weren’t going to be able to do that because no buyer of that loan would ever buy it if they didn’t know what the collateral was. And it was all because no one had a good way of keeping track of who owned which cattle. And im not talking about the RFID or other ways to track cattle and know where they are and know whose land they’re on. I mean, literally the ownership structure that validates this is my cow. And I sort of realized that you needed a way to track movable assets, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to solve that problem, other than it probably had something to do with using blockchain as a ledger, because it was such a good way to keep track of the provenance of an asset.
Shane Bigelow
So fast forward a few more years and getting to know my now business partner and he and I are discussing ways that we could start a company together. And he was going to leave automotive retail and I was going to leave Wall street. And we recognized that one place where we overlapped and had a lot of similar knowledge was in the titling of assets. Him with auto, me a little bit with auto, but with other assets, too. And if we built a better way for governments to offer this service to their constituents, then the constituents would use it. So our first use case was fixing it for DMVs, giving the DMVs away to help the car dealers, the insurance carriers and the fleet operators get title and registration on their car in a much more efficient and digital fashion.
Shane Bigelow
So it was built with that early premise. And the long term mission is to become the worlds asset registry for movable assets. Find a way to allow people all over the world to register their movable assets and then do things with those assets, sell them fractionally, own them, borrow money against them, insure them. All the things we take for granted in the United States because we have reasonable systems of record, and now with some of our technology, hopefully great systems of record that make this highly flexible and malleable in the states that are using our tech.
Brett
First off, I have to say I love that origin story. I can just picture a bunch of like, Wall street dudes in suits walking around in Zambia trying to evaluate cattle. Is that a fair picture? Well, there’s no suits.
Shane Bigelow
You definitely don’t wear a suit. But there was a reasonable amount of gin and tonic and a passion for helping people do good things in parts of the world that I think often Wall street does not get associated with doing good things. But in fact, Wall street does do a lot of really good things. It’s just often hidden from the world. And this was one of those examples where it really would have helped. It really would have been a good thing for us to do, but we couldn’t pull it off, all because you couldn’t figure out who owned which asset.
Brett
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And on the website, I see that you’re serving the entire vehicle title ecosystem. Could you walk us through who those stakeholders are in the vehicle title ecosystem?
Shane Bigelow
Yeah, sure. So at the end of the day, we’re an entity that works with government, and like most government contractors, you’re trying to do something that’s helpful to the government. But unlike a lot of government contractors, who frankly sit and try to grab as much money out of the government as possible and then wait for the renewal to come up in the contract and do it all over again, we took a very different approach. Our view was, how do we help the constituents of the government? The constituents are what makes up the biggest part of the ecosystem.
Shane Bigelow
If you think of the ecosystem like a solar system, if the governments kind of in the middle and everyone has to use it like we use the sun, then all the different planets that are rotating around it are the different constituents and the title and registration space. The constituents are car dealers, other types of automotive retailers, insurance carriers, and fleet operators. Right. And they all touch consumers in some way. But our vision was if we could help car dealers move title and registration faster, so when they buy a car, they can turn around and sell the car a lot faster, which right now, there’s a huge lag in between being able to buy and then ultimately sell a car legitimately with a clean title.
Shane Bigelow
Or insurance carriers to do the same thing when there’s a total loss, because when there’s a big accident or a natural disaster, policyholders have to transfer their title to the insurance carrier so the insurance carrier can sell the car to recoup some of the expense that they’ve paid out to policyholders. Because if they can’t do that, then premiums have to go up quite a bit, not just for one policyholder, but for everybody. And so you take that transaction and shrink it from 60 days down to maybe zero days or one day or five days or something a lot smaller, generally speaking. And there’s a huge economic benefit to a car dealer or an insurance carrier.
Shane Bigelow
Similarly, the third part of the ecosystem, fleet operators, they’re just managing so many vehicles, and they’ve got so many different transactions going on with those vehicles, changing ownership, changing users, changing domiciles, that frictional cost drives up fleet management. And people don’t think about it all too often, but really, fleets are responsible for so much commerce in our country that if you can’t run them efficiently, then all of our costs go up. So our view was solve all these problems for these constituents that make up the planets in the ecosystem, not by charging the government, because we charge the government zero, but rather by giving the government technology that would enable their constituents to have a better process, a better system. And then we’ll win if the constituents win.
Shane Bigelow
In other words, the constituents use our technology, and then we get paid a transaction fee as a result. And if they don’t, we don’t get paid. But if they do use it, we do get paid. And that means that we’re on the same side of the table as government and the same side of the table as the constituents, and that’s the ecosystem and kind of how we work at it.
Brett
And then at the state level, do.
Shane Bigelow
You have to go state by state.
Brett
And try to have an impact on legislation, or what’s that look like?
Shane Bigelow
You know, it depends on the state. Some states have more favorable legislation to handle things digitally. Some have antiquated rules that need to be changed around electronic signatures or not having paper trails, but having enabling electronic trails of data to substitute for paper. So there are some places where the legislation or the rules, statutory rules need to be changed. But what’s really great is you’ve got some proactive states, namely West Virginia in our case and in now the country’s case, who just a week and a half ago passed legislation that became law where more of those dealers and insurance carriers and fleet operators can run their titling through West Virginia, then West Virginia has a zero day turnaround right now as a function of leveraging our technology. That’s down from 45 days, by the way.
Shane Bigelow
They enable swifter transactions for the ecosystem, and you can do that from all over the country, provided that you meet some criteria that West Virginia puts out as a state. So the analogy would be that of what Delaware is to see corporations. If you ever wonder why most companies are incorporated in Delaware, my company is incorporated in Delaware. And the last time I was in Delaware, I was a kid going to the shore, not because I wanted to go to the beach. It’s because Delaware made it easier for me to incorporate there. And I win. And the economic environment and where I live in Ohio wins because I have a company faster and easier, because Delaware enabled that. Well, it’s the same sort of thing with titling, where if a state enables faster, easier, swifter titling, that’s complicit with laws around the country.
Shane Bigelow
You’ve enhanced commerce, and so you don’t always have to go state by state, is my answer, because you do have some states that are being more proactive and trying to change their rules to enable better commerce as it relates to title and registration.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense.
Brett
And are there any numbers or metrics that you can share that just demonstrate the growth and traction that you’re seeing today?
Shane Bigelow
Yeah, I think, you know, using what’s publicly available, some states that we’re working with haven’t released their data yet, so I’ll hesitate from putting any information out about those states. But what has been released, going back to West Virginia, they were processing in 45 days. They’re now processing in real time. They estimate that their title clerks are five times more efficient with their work than they were previously because of what the system enables. And additionally, they look at the paper reduction. Right now we stand in our first year of doing transactions there at about a 5 million piece of paper reduction that should scale to north of 15 million pieces of paper per year that are eliminated from the process. And then that’s the first of the greening impact of this. But the second side is that take insurance transactions.
Shane Bigelow
Cars get in an accident, they wind up sitting in a salvage yard leaking fluids and all sorts of bad things into the ground for 50, 60, 70 days in most cases as a function of just waiting on title. Now, as we bring that down to zero days, those cars are turned and recycled very quickly. And the elimination of the damage to the earth is fairly dramatic. But then you take what I think is the most interesting impact, which is what I call the time tax. So consumers don’t have to wait in line, dealers don’t have to send a runner to the DMV with, here’s the packet of all the cars we sold today. Can we please have a title in three weeks? Or something silly? All of that time tax is eliminated. You can do it digitally, you could do it online.
Shane Bigelow
You’re not waiting in line, you’re not driving to the DMV and having that negative impact as well on your day or on the environment. So there’s a lot of positives around the paper reduction, the time reduction, the damage, the earth reduction, and just the general savings of 45 days, down to zero days and five times more efficient with your workflow.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. Now, when I introduced you, I described it as a digital title management platform. Is that how you describe your market category or what is your market category?
Shane Bigelow
Someone told me recently, I thought this was a really interesting way to phrase it. We’re a b to g to c company, and I agreed with that, provided that the c meant constituent. So we’re selling something to the government without a fee to the government in order to ultimately enable better transactions for the constituents that we talked about earlier, the car dealers, the insurance carriers, the fleet operators. So I think our market space, or vertical, is in the title and registration technology space. So we’re replacing the aging title and registration technology that exists in states. And as mentioned, I think this has the potential, of course, to be translated to many other movable assets in many other market environments outside of dmvs. And ultimately, our vision is to leverage the technology to do just that.
Shane Bigelow
So right now, I’d say our space is the title and registration technology space. Got it.
Brett
And if we go back to the traction side, what do you attribute to your success? How are you rising above all that noise, and what are you doing to be so successful? Jeff?
Shane Bigelow
Well, we have a long way to go. It’s nice of you to classify us as successful, but it certainly feels a lot different five years in and with some great investors and a bunch of public companies that are supporting us through their investments, strategic investments in us. So it does feel a lot different than it did the day we started the company. But I think we have a long way to go. One of our core principles at the company that probably is the biggest. If I was doing an attribution analysis of what has caused our progress so far, it’s the simple core principle that we have at our company. It’s one of a handful of core principles that we live by, but this one, I think, is the most important. Treating no as a stumbling block on the way to yes.
Shane Bigelow
I heard that once from John Chambers when I was working at Cisco. He told the Cisco team, he said, I love how this team treats no as a stumbling block on the way to yes. And I stole that liberally from him and tried to instill that in the culture here, because we’ve created something, we’ve invented something. It’s now patented. It’s new. A lot of times, people don’t think it’s possible. You know, when you tell someone at the DMV that they can take their cycle time from 45 days to zero days and do that in less than a year, they think you’re crazy because they’ve never seen that before. And then once they start playing with it’s kind of like the first time I showed my mother an iPhone and she upgraded from her flip phone.
Shane Bigelow
She didn’t think what I was telling her was possible until she saw it and started playing with it. And then she’s like, oh, my gosh, look at all the things I can do on my phone. And it’s kind of the same thing, right? The DMV space hasn’t had new technology entered into it for about 15, almost 20 years. And so we’re the first real entrant into the space, and you hear no a lot. So treating that as a stumbling block is probably what’s core to whatever success we’ve had.
Brett
So far, amazing. I love that. Now, let’s zoom out into the future. So, three years from today, what’s the company look like?
Shane Bigelow
Well, we’re headed straight towards profitability with the contracts we have in place. So we’ll be profitable next year, which is exciting for us to be self sufficient, I think exciting for our investors. So three years from now, I would hope that profit continues to improve at the pace that I’ve anticipated for our investor group. But also, I think you’ll see a good portion of the population using in the United States that is using our technology, whether they’re aware of it or not aware of it, because their states have adopted some or all of what we’ve enabled, the digital title that will become a real thing again, first through West Virginia. So kudos to that great state and to our partner there, Tyler Technologies. That will become a reality.
Shane Bigelow
And I think other states will start to, just based on their interactions with us and with the state of West Virginia, asking them about how to use that. I think that’ll become a reality to start seeing people have their titles in their apple wallets and being able to transact on it and do things with it that previously would have been in the paper based world and taken a lot of time and effort and time tax, as we talked about earlier. So I think in three years we’re much more profitable. I think the world will start to realize that the snowball is headed downhill on digital titling, and hopefully we’ll be at the forefront of that.
Shane Bigelow
I also suspect there’ll be some other competitors that will mimic what we’re doing, and that’s probably ultimately good for the ecosystem, too, because it’ll proliferate the good concepts that we’ve started to kick off. And I always like to have competitors join in just so you know, we can beat somebody.
Brett
Makes it more fun, right?
Shane Bigelow
Exactly.
Brett
Awesome. Shane, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Shane Bigelow
Oh, well, I’m probably most easy to follow on LinkedIn, so just look up Shane Bigelow CHAMPtitles on LinkedIn and you’ll find the connection to me. Go ahead and connect. I love finding and meeting new people, and that’d be the easiest place to follow me. It’s also an easy place to follow our company. It’s where we put the most data out besides our website. So champtitles.com is our website and find us on LinkedIn.
Brett
Amazing. Shane, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and talk about what you’re building. This is all super exciting and hope to have you back on in a couple of years to talk about all the progress.
Shane Bigelow
I’d love it. Thanks for having me, Brett. Thank you.
Brett
All right. Thank you. Take care.
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