Jackie Kille did not plan to start a company. She was laid off. She had no outside capital, no marketing budget, and no office. What she had was nearly 20 years in the title industry, a business partner willing to say yes from her kitchen table, and a conviction that the companies around her did not reflect the values she had spent her career developing. That was enough to start. What happened next is worth paying attention to, not because the story is dramatic, though it is, but because of what it demonstrates about what it actually costs to build something on faith rather than just talk about it.

What Forced the Decision

When Jackie and her business partner were laid off, the obvious move was to find another job in title. Jackie had the experience and the reputation to land somewhere quickly. But she had also spent 20 years paying attention to how companies in her industry operated, and she kept running into the same problem: the culture did not match her values. Not just in one place. In most of them.

That is a harder problem than it sounds. It is easy to tell yourself you will find a better environment, that the next company will be different, that you just have not found the right fit yet. Jackie had already spent five years in Austin as a certified escrow officer, working in a larger market, applying everything she had learned. That experience did not change her assessment of the industry. It confirmed it.

So she stopped looking for a better version of what already existed and decided to build something different. She and her partner applied for their Texas license, handled the paperwork, secured funding, and received their license within months. Rosewood Title officially opened in late 2024.

That part of the timeline sounds clean. The rest was not. Jackie sold property she had inherited from her grandparents to fund the company. The first buyer’s loan fell through. She reduced the asking price. She sat through a month of silence with her savings nearly gone and no capital to fall back on. Then on January 2nd, a cash offer came in to close in five days. The money arrived exactly when she needed it.

She describes that moment plainly: “If that wasn’t God, I don’t know what is.”

For any business leader who has watched a deal collapse at the worst possible moment, or held on through a month that felt like it might end everything, that sentence lands differently than it would in a testimony from a safe distance. Jackie was not describing faith as a concept. She was describing the specific experience of running out of options and watching God come through on his timeline, not hers.

The Real Cost of Trust-Based Leadership

Ask Jackie what sets Rosewood Title apart from other title companies and she starts with the golden rule. Her team does not clock in. Everyone operates on the honor system. If someone needs to leave, they leave. She builds flexibility around church commitments, evening family obligations, and the reality that her people have full lives outside the office.

This is not a perks strategy. It is a philosophy that came directly out of how she had been managed and what she refused to replicate. She spent years studying her supervisors and mentors, deciding what she would keep and what she would discard. The thing she discarded most deliberately was the assumption that an employee’s presence on the clock was a proxy for their value to the organization.

Her framing is precise: her employees do not work for her. She works for them. Her job is to train them, equip them, and be available to them, not the other way around. Philippians 2 describes exactly this posture: considering others more significant than yourself, looking not only to your own interests but to the interests of others. Jackie did not use that language in our conversation, but the structure of how she runs Rosewood Title reflects it directly.

The actual cost of leading this way is higher than most leaders want to acknowledge. Trust-based management requires a leader to absorb uncertainty rather than push it downward. When you cannot see what your team is doing at every hour of the day, you carry that exposure yourself. When something goes wrong, you cannot point to a clock-in record as evidence that the structure was sound. The accountability sits with you. Jackie accepts that. She is explicit that her team’s livelihood is her responsibility, that their trust in her with their careers is something she holds carefully. That weight does not cause her to tighten her grip. It causes her to make better decisions. That is servant leadership working as it was designed to work.

The results are not incidental. Rosewood grew from two people to six in just over a year, entirely through word of mouth, without a marketing budget or formal business development effort. People refer business to companies they trust. Clients trust Rosewood because they feel seen. The team performs because they know Jackie has their back. Patrick Lencioni’s work in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team argues that vulnerability-based trust is the foundation everything else is built on, and that leaders have to go first. When a leader protects herself from exposure by tightening control, she prevents the trust from forming. Jackie’s approach, whether she would frame it in those terms or not, creates exactly the conditions Lencioni describes.

Knowing a Market No One Else Is Serving

El Paso’s real estate market has specific cultural dynamics that most title companies do not fully understand, and that gap is one of Rosewood’s most significant competitive advantages.

In El Paso’s Hispanic community, there is a deeply rooted superstition around estate planning. Many people believe that writing a will or taking out life insurance is an invitation for death. Jackie hears this from clients regularly. She has navigated it with her own mother. It is not a fringe belief. It is widespread, culturally embedded, and has real consequences for how property is passed between generations.

The practical result is a market full of handshake deals, undocumented property transfers, and title chains that stretch back decades without proper paperwork. Jackie’s team regularly searches for death certificates, tracks down dates families have forgotten, and works to clear titles on properties where the ownership history is murky, informal, and complicated in ways that a title company operating from a generic playbook would struggle to navigate. This is painstaking, emotionally loaded work. And it is exactly the work most companies in her space are not equipped to do.

This is not a niche service. It is an underserved need at significant scale in a city where the Hispanic community is not a minority demographic but the majority one. Most companies operating here know the legal mechanics of title. They do not know why a particular client is reluctant to discuss her late father’s estate, or what it takes to earn enough trust to have that conversation at all. Jackie does. She was formed for it.

Mike Michalowicz’s Fix This Next offers a useful framework here. The central argument is that the most valuable thing a company can do is solve the problem its specific customers cannot solve anywhere else. For Rosewood, that problem is generational title complexity rooted in cultural patterns that most outside firms do not recognize. That is not a gap Jackie stumbled into. It is the gap her two decades of experience and her own family background positioned her to fill.

For real estate professionals, attorneys, and financial advisors working in El Paso and the surrounding region, this is the practical takeaway: if you have clients whose property history is informal or incomplete, Rosewood Title is equipped to work through that complexity in ways most companies are not. That specificity is rare and it is worth knowing about.

What Humility Actually Does to a Leader

Jackie is direct about something most business leaders keep private: the past year and a half has been a sustained lesson in humility. She came into this season with legitimate pride in her expertise. She had earned it. Twenty years in a demanding industry, trained by people with 30 and 45 years of experience, trusted with significant transactions. That pride was not unfounded. God humbled her anyway. She describes it as a hard pill to swallow. It changed how she operates.

The shift she describes is specific. She stopped making herself the center of her decisions and started making space for God to direct. That does not mean she became passive. She still moves decisively. She still has strong convictions. But she holds them differently. She has learned to distinguish between the decisions that are hers to make and the ones she was trying to force.

That distinction matters practically. A leader who confuses her own judgment with God’s direction will force outcomes that are not hers to control and exhaust herself in the process. Jackie learned that through the funding process for Rosewood, through closed doors that did not open until she stopped pushing them. The cash offer that arrived on January 2nd did not come because she pressed harder. It came because she finally let go.

For leaders who are in that kind of season right now, holding a decision that will not resolve, watching a door that will not open, wondering whether to force the issue or wait, Jackie’s experience is a useful reference point. Not because her path will look like yours, but because the posture she describes, learning to trust rather than force, is both a spiritual discipline and a leadership competency. The two are not separate things.

Building Something That Outlasts You

When Jackie talks about what she wants Rosewood Title to become, the first thing she mentions is not revenue or market share. It is job creation for people who do not have a traditional path into a career: people who did not finish college, who were not handed opportunities, who have capability and drive and no obvious way to put them to work. She wants to be the door that opens for them.

Her industry is facing what it calls the silver tsunami: a generation of experienced title professionals who are retiring and taking decades of institutional knowledge with them. Jackie was trained by some of the best of that generation, people with 20, 30, and 45 years in title. She considers it a stewardship obligation to pass that knowledge on rather than treat it as a personal competitive advantage. Knowledge hoarded dies with the person holding it. Knowledge transferred builds an institution.

The way she handled her own daughter’s entry into the business illustrates this clearly. When her daughter asked to join the team, Jackie did not bring her in under her own wing. She placed her under escrow officer Vanessa’s authority and stepped back entirely. She told Vanessa: this is yours to lead. Her daughter had to earn her place on the team’s terms, not her mother’s. She earned it. She is now talking about how many branches she wants to run someday.

That decision took more discipline than simply mentoring her daughter directly. It required Jackie to subordinate her own instinct to be involved to what was actually better for her daughter’s development and for the team’s culture. Those are the kinds of decisions that build institutions rather than personalities, and they are being made in year one, which is exactly when they matter most.

Jim Collins’ Built to Last draws a clear distinction between companies built around a single leader’s vision and companies built around a culture and mission that outlast any individual. The companies that endure are almost never organized around a charismatic founder. They are the ones where the founder built something that could operate without them. Jackie is making those decisions now.

What are you building that would continue even if you stepped away tomorrow?

Additional Resources

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni: The definitive framework for understanding why teams fail and what trust-based leadership actually requires structurally. Essential reading for any leader building a culture from scratch.

Fix This Next by Mike Michalowicz: A practical tool for identifying the highest-leverage problem to solve at any stage of growth, especially useful for founders who are doing everything and need clarity on what matters most right now.

Built to Last by Jim Collins: Collins’ research on what separates visionary companies from those that peak and fade. The central argument, that enduring companies are built around culture and mission rather than individual leaders, is directly relevant to the legacy-building decisions Jackie is making right now.

Learn More About Jackie Kille

Jackie Kille is the founder and president of Rosewood Title LLC in El Paso, Texas. With nearly 20 years in the title industry and a team built on trust, faith, and the golden rule, she is creating a company and a career path that El Paso’s real estate community can count on.

Instagram: Rosewood Title on Instagram

Facebook: Rosewood Title on Facebook

Office: 2531 Montana, El Paso, TX | Phone: (915) 503-1920

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