Quality is EVERYTHING!
February 23, 2017
Good Morning everyone, I was asked to take a break from the history of land descriptions to talk to you today about the importance of what we do. I made several observations on my visit last week the first is that we have become divided status vs abstractors, abstractors vs typists, current owner abstractors vs Louisiana abstractors, and this makes me very sad. We spend the vast majority of our day together and we are all working toward one purpose and that is to provide quality abstracts in a timely manner. Our newbie abstractors need to slow down and ask questions. Everyone is asking for an abstracting class but I can tell you that a class will only get you started, hands-on training and knowledge-sharing is the only way to learn this craft, veterans this is on you. I learned so many little tips and time saving shortcuts from spending time with everyone and hopefully I had some skills to share as well.
Guys there are consequences of messing up on an abstract, we are in business to make money and we make money by providing quality abstracts. If our quality slides they our customers go elsewhere, simple as that, there are a hundred other companies out there trying to do what we do and are more than happy to take our customers from us. When an error is discovered we need to figure out why it happened and then put a plan in place to keep it from happening, our run sheet was designed with this in mind. One of the things that I discovered while visiting is that there is attitude that our largest client is treated differently from the core clients. Because this client sort of knows what is going on with the file some feel that there are less consequences if we have an accuracy issue arise on our end. I could not disagree more with this, each client should be treated like it is our only client, and each file demands perfection. Your name is going on that file and you should abstract each file the same way whether you have 1 or 30 in your queue. Perfection is hard to attain I was actually written up in my early days as a abstractor because on my hand written title reports and I would switch back and forth from upper case to lower case letters with the same word. I learned right away that I needed to step up my game, at the time I was like really???, but later realized this boss was training me for perfection.
This is not only an abstracting issue, I talk about that a lot because that is what I know, but our business has grown and it takes more than one person to oversee its operation.
We all have a stake in the success of the business, and we need it to be successful.
Donna Hunter