Lone Wolf's New CEO Jack Blaha

WAV Group and RE Technology would like to welcome Jack Blaha to the real estate industry. This article is part of our Follow the Leader series that highlights real estate's most profoundly impactful CEOs.

Blaha (pronounced Bla-ha) has taken the helm at Lone Wolf Technologies, replacing CEO Patrick Arkeveld who has moved up to Executive Chairman of the company. (Lone Wolf founder Lorne Wallace continues in an executive advisory role with the company).

Lone Wolf Technologies is a portfolio company of Vista Equity Partners, a holding company led by Robert Smith. Vista has about 60 portfolio companies, placing them among the largest software conglomerates in the world. They manage a portfolio of about $46 billion. To put this into context, Oracle has revenue of $38 billion and equity of $49 billion.

Timeline:

• 2015 – Vista Equity Partners invested in Lone Wolf.
• 2016 – Patrick Arkeveld became the company CEO when Wallace became Executive Chairman.
• 2019 – Blaha joins firm as CEO and Arkeveld becomes Chairman.

Lone Wolf is among the largest SaaS companies serving the real estate industry, holding leading positions in brokerage accounting with the brokerWOLF product. In October of 2016, Lone Wolf acquired Instanet Solutions and added TransactionDesk, an industry-leading transaction management, forms management, and eSignature solution. Before the Instanet transaction, Lone Wolf had revenue over $25 million.

Under Wallace, Lone Wolf was among the fastest growing technology firms though a combination of organic customer growth and acquisition. Under Arkeveld, they made the largest acquisition in the company's history with the Instanet purchase, and continue the founder-inspired growth of Wallace. Arkeveld also spearheaded the development of their Data as an Asset program, developing data lakes for clients like Crye-Leike.

Blaha brings plenty of acquisition experience to the firm. At Aptean, he led 14 acquisitions (about one every two months). But Blaha's goals at Lone Wolf include a continued focus on operational excellence. Blaha splits his time between the company offices in Dallas, Texas and Cambridge, Ontario. After graduation from West Point, he was stationed at Leavenworth when he met his wife in the late 90s. They have a home in Austin, TX and a family of three, ages 9, 10, and 13.

Some of the innovative developments that Lone Wolf is focused on today include Link and Analytics. Link is an integration that connects transaction data between TransactionDesk and brokerWOLF for seamless, two-way communication. Analytics sits on top of the broker's data lake to allow live data visualization though custom reporting dashboards and push reporting.

A number of WAV Group clients sit on the Lone Wolf advisory group and report a lot of excitement around the direction of the company. We expect to see a lot of improved integration between the company products in 2019, followed very shortly thereafter with deeper integrations using APIs with leading CRM solutions.

During our discussion, I broached the need in our industry for transaction management systems to "talk" to each other. Blaha understands that brokers do not want their agent to log into another broker's transaction management system. Disparate systems require both brokerages in a transaction to manually duplicate data processing, task management, and document management in parallel. No doubt, secure APIs that connect brokerage transaction systems will be a huge benefit to the broker, agent, and the consumers who are parties to a transaction.

Welcome to the industry, Jack! You are going to love the people and fit right in.

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.