August 2023 marks ten years in business for LodeStar. We’ve been humbled by the journey, and we’ve accomplished quite a bit that we’re really proud of. Every month for the next year, beginning with August, we’re publishing an article to celebrate the last decade.

For this month, we spoke with LodeStar’s CTO and Co-Founder, David Spektor.

What are some things you’re most proud of?

David: I’m really proud of our product team. I think we’re doing some really cool things. We’re making technology that is helping us internally and to better service our clients. We took so many things in-house that were previously done externally.

At the core of that, is the recording fee and transfer tax system we created. It’s very flexible and allows our data team to work without any type of developer interaction.

We’ve made a lot of cool tools for our Customer Success team to simplify the workflow for managing and onboarding clients. The time to work on a client’s setup has drastically gone down, but at the same time we have more customizability. We didn’t want to lose the customizability when we streamlined things.

And our team is really cool. We have Pat Rodmanee, Jake Yamona, and Jesse Bishop, all very accomplished. They all have their own little sphere of influence. They’re just good people that do really good work, and I’m very proud of them.

What has changed the most since you and Jim founded LodeStar?

David: If you look at what our company was like and our technological backbone from when we started to where we are, it’s so drastically different and improved. In 10 years things should improve, right? But that doesn’t always happen with companies.

In addition to the products themselves we’ve focused on developing internal processes and tools to help our teams. The goal has been to help each team streamline and, where possible, automate their core processes.

Ultimately, if you’re selling an automation service—something to automate a certain process—and you’re not automating things yourself, you have to ask yourself why not.

For example, Jim used to do all the billing himself. Now we have a process in place that is 99% automated. So it simplifies things and reduces the amount of errors. When you have a lot of clients, you make mistakes. Billable mistakes are a lot more frustrating for the clients. Pat worked on that a lot. So did Jesse.

With the new system, no one needs to manually input how many loan files a client originated, how many searches they did, what the cost per quote is, or what additional integrations they might be using. All of that is computed and billed automatically. Wherever we can, we automate the automatable.

And again, if we didn’t, how could we credibly sell an automation tool?