Other than co-founders Jim and Dave, Kelsey is the most senior member of the LodeStar team. She began as a sales and marketing intern, and she worked her way up to become Director of Customer Success. Now, Kelsey oversees all client onboarding, customer support, and Knowledge Base article creation, among other things. She’s a certified Encompass® admin, and her expertise helping lenders is unparalleled. These days, Kelsey’s name is all but synonymous with the impeccable quality of customer service LodeStar provides its clients.

What has changed the most in 10 years?

The LodeStar Kelsey joined was three people, including her. Now, LodeStar, though still a small business, has nearly twenty employees spread across several departments. And with that growth in personnel has come a growth in the amount of knowledge LodeStar possesses.

With new hires and new research has come the opportunity to offer a lot of new fees through LodeStar’s nationwide fee database. Property taxes, appraisal fees, pest, septic—just to name a few additions to our offerings. Also, LodeStar has been able to make its calculator adaptable to different scenarios for disclosing, bundling, and itemizing fees.

The ultimate boon with offering more fees, other than just having a more powerful disclosure tool to sell, has been the growth in trust and confidence on the part of our clients. If a lender has a question about some obscure fee scenario, chances are, someone on LodeStar’s team has seen it before and can address the question quickly, if not on the spot.

But even earlier on, when LodeStar offered fewer fees, Kelsey recalls what a joy it was to see the relief on people’s faces during demos when they heard what fees LodeStar can cover. One prospective client was very stressed about quoting Florida Intangible Tax. When Kelsey told them LodeStar could quote it accurately at the click of a button, they were ecstatic.

And that enthusiasm has empowered LodeStar to dive into increasingly more fee offerings. The latest frontier is lender fees, which is no easy task…

What are you most proud of?

Kelsey is proud that, operationally, LodeStar didn’t miss a beat when it came to either the COVID-19 pandemic or the housing market ups and downs of 2020–2023. She is proud of how LodeStar supported and clearly communicated with our staff, which was already spread out across the country and relying on remote-work technologies. There was never a question of safety or productivity. Those two were inseparable.

And regarding the market, LodeStar didn’t, for example, put all its eggs in one basket with the refinance boom. When refis dried up, no one on LodeStar’s team was surprised in the slightest, because the business was designed to accommodate spikes and dips in origination volume.

What’s Next?

The next big thing is the launch of our partner title company, SettleWise. The ability to leverage LodeStar’s exceptional customer service to produce a new offering for our clients will be a win-win for all parties involved. 

But on the LodeStar front, Kelsey is excited to offer even more fees. As mentioned earlier, lender fees are the next big target. Those are immensely complicated, and LodeStar’s standards of quality don’t allow us to put out anything that works less than impeccably.

What Differentiates LodeStar’s Quality of Service?

The first and foremost difference is that, when a lender reaches out to LodeStar, an actual person responds. And that person is a part of a small team that has been in the trenches cultivating fee expertise. LodeStar’s Customer Success team takes the trust clients place in the company very seriously.

LodeStar takes every opportunity to reinforce that trust through interactions with clients, making sure support ticket resolution times stay as low as possible, offering support articles for any problem or question a client might have, and making sure data and fees are accurate.