You Can't Have It Both Ways
# You Can't Have It Both Ways
Before I begin, let me be clear about something. This isn't aimed at every signing service or every title company with an in-house notary network. There are some excellent companies out there that treat notaries fairly, communicate well, and don't take anywhere near half the fee. They're good business partners, and this article isn't about them.
This is about the companies that *do* keep a large percentage of the fee while also expecting the notary to absorb the financial pain every time the market slows down. If that isn't your business model, then this probably isn't about you.
There's a deal in this industry that I've always understood and mostly respected. Signing services and the title companies that manage their own notary networks exist because national lenders and title operations don't want to vet, hire, train, and 1099 a notary in every zip code in the country. So they outsource that job. The signing service goes out, builds the relationships, does the marketing, lands the contracts—and in exchange, they keep a healthy cut of the fee. Sometimes half. Sometimes more.
I don't have a problem with that split, as long as it's fair and the notary is still getting paid enough to make the job worth doing. That's a legitimate business arrangement. Somebody has to do the selling, and selling isn't free.
But here's where the deal falls apart.
## The excuse only works one direction
Every time notaries push back on rates that don't leave any real profit—and every time we point out that other notaries keep undercutting each other to take those rates anyway—we get the same answer: *the signing services and managed networks are the ones doing the marketing. That's why they earn their cut. Let them do their job.*
Fine. I'll take that deal when times are good.
But the second interest rates tick up and refinance volume drops even a little, something changes. The lender is still paying title the same fee. Title is still paying the signing service or their in-house network the same fee. Nothing upstream has changed. Yet suddenly the signing service—or the title company running its own stable of notaries—decides the person at the bottom of the chain needs to eat the difference. They start lopping ten or twenty dollars off signings that were already too thin to begin with. Not because the fee coming in shrank. Because the volume did, and they want to protect their margin on every file that's left.
## You can't claim the job and then hand back the risk
This is the part that doesn't add up. If the pitch is, "We deserve our cut because we go out and market, build relationships, and bring you the work," then that has to hold true in a slow market too.
A slowdown isn't a reason to squeeze the notary. It's exactly the moment the marketing you claim to be doing should be earning its keep. If business dries up, the answer isn't to cut what the notary makes on the file that's left. It's to go find more files. More lenders. More title companies. More volume.
That's what I have to do. If my schedule gets thin, I don't get to call up a title company and say, "I'm going to make less on the signings I've already accepted because my calendar isn't as full as I'd like." I go find more companies to work for. I market harder. That's part of being self-employed.
If a signing service or a managed network wants to claim credit for doing that same job—and take a substantial portion of the fee for it—then when business slows, the answer should be to market harder, not simply pass the problem down to the notary.
## The fee didn't shrink. Somebody just decided who absorbs the pain
The lender didn't pay title less. Title didn't get paid less by the underwriter. The money coming into the transaction is the same as it's always been. The only thing that changed is who decided to keep their piece whole and pass the shortfall down.
And somehow, it almost always rolls downhill to the person with the smallest piece of the pie and the least leverage to say no.
If you're going to justify keeping the larger share of the fee because you're the one out there building the business, then keep building the business when times get tough. That's the job you said you were doing.
You can't have it both ways.
