Check Out Lawrence Telles’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lawrence Telles.

Hi Lawrence, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born and raised in Santa Ana, California, and I have a lot of love and respect for the city, its culture, and the community that shaped me. I grew up in a tougher part of Santa Ana, and some of the things I experienced at a young age gave me a very clear idea of the life I eventually wanted to create for my own family. I wanted my future wife and children to feel safe, have opportunities, and start life from an even stronger position than I did.

At the same time, I was incredibly fortunate to grow up surrounded by people who taught me the value of hard work. My parents owned a drapery cleaning business in Santa Ana, and I watched them work incredibly long hours to provide for our family. My dad would work at the shop all day, come home for dinner, and then leave again for a second job at night. My uncle was another major influence on me. He built a successful, independent life as a heavy transmission mechanic without following a traditional college path, and he taught me a great deal about work, money, and what was possible if you were willing to put in the effort. Those examples instilled a work ethic, grit, and determination in me that have stayed with me throughout my life.

I attended Mater Dei High School, where I played football and later made the lacrosse team. During training my junior year, I fractured my lumbar spine, which effectively ended my athletic career and left me dealing with back pain for years. Ironically, that injury eventually helped point me toward my first career.

I entered Cal State Fullerton intending to study business, but as I learned how exercise and strength training could help alleviate my own back pain, I discovered kinesiology and fell in love with fitness. I changed my major and ultimately became a personal trainer.

After college, I eventually joined Equinox, where I became a personal training manager. Equinox was an important chapter for me for a lot of reasons. It is where I met my wife, and it also exposed me to successful people from all kinds of backgrounds. I remember walking past the valet and seeing Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Maseratis, and Lamborghinis, but what struck me wasn’t the cars or the celebrities who occasionally came through. It was realizing that many of the people getting out of those cars were everyday businesspeople who had built something for themselves. Combined with all the books and podcasts I was consuming at the time, being around those people expanded my idea of what was possible for my own life.

Personal training also taught me something that would become incredibly valuable later: how to build relationships. I’ve always been very social, but training people taught me how to communicate with just about anyone. One hour I might be talking about a reality show with a client, and the next I might be discussing the stock market or the economy with a business owner. I learned to listen, read people, find common ground, and build trust. Eventually, I realized those same skills could translate into sales.

One of my clients owned an escrow company, and when I saw that he was hiring for a sales role, I worked up the courage to ask him about it. I loved fitness, but I also had big goals for my future family and saw an opportunity to change the trajectory of our lives. I took the chance and joined his company as an escrow sales representative.

A little over a year later, another former training client, who was a senior underwriter at First American Title, encouraged me to explore an opportunity there. That led to meetings with the leadership team, and in August 2017 I joined First American Title as a sales representative in Tustin. I grew my business quickly, and about four and a half years later I was given the opportunity to become Sales Manager for Orange County. Later that year, I also took responsibility for Los Angeles County, and I’ve been leading the sales organizations across both counties ever since.

Looking back, my career hasn’t followed a straight line, but there is a consistent thread through all of it. I’ve been willing to work hard, build genuine relationships, and take calculated risks when I could see an opportunity to grow.

For a long time, my motivation was creating the life I dreamed about for my future family. Today, my wife and I have two children, and that motivation is stronger than ever. I want to give them every opportunity I can while still teaching them the work ethic, discipline, and value of earning things that were instilled in me.

And that purpose has expanded beyond my family. As a leader, I now have the opportunity to help the people on my team grow their careers, change their financial futures, and create lives for their families that they may not have thought were possible. In many ways, that feels like the natural continuation of everything that brought me here.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road, but I’ve learned that growth rarely is.

There were challenges early in my life, including the environment I grew up in and fracturing my lumbar spine in high school, which changed the direction I thought my life was going to take. But professionally, one of the recurring challenges has been my willingness to start over and put myself in situations where I’m uncomfortable.

When I started at Equinox, I had to build a clientele from scratch. I remember wearing the blue trainer shirt, working floor shifts and trying to establish myself while watching more experienced trainers with full books of business. You have to build trust and a reputation before the results start coming, and that takes time.

Then I essentially started over again when I left fitness for escrow. I knew very little about the industry and had to learn as much as I could, as quickly as I could. When I eventually moved to First American Title, I had more industry knowledge, but I was once again building a business from the ground up.

I remember coming home some days as a new sales rep and telling my wife, “I didn’t get an order today.” When the orders aren’t coming and the revenue isn’t there, the self-doubt can get very real. You start wondering, “Did I make the right decision? Can I actually do this?”

But I’ve always had what I jokingly call a kind of blind optimism. I may not know exactly how I’m going to accomplish something yet, but I genuinely believe I’ll figure it out.

So I kept showing up. I made the calls, reached out to people, walked into offices, knocked on doors and went to open houses on weekends. For a long time, it can feel like you’re just treading water. Then you get an order. You get a little momentum. You have a good month, then another good month, and eventually all those small efforts begin to compound.

Interestingly, success didn’t eliminate that discomfort. It just changed what it looked like.

When I moved into leadership, I gave up the book of business I had worked so hard to build. There were moments when I looked back and thought, “Wow, I gave that up, and there really isn’t any going back now.” It was a bit like burning the boats. I had chosen the next challenge, and now I had to grow into it.

The weight is different in leadership because you’re no longer thinking only about your own success. Today, I’m responsible for teams across two counties, and I feel a genuine responsibility to the people I lead. Their production affects their families, our internal teams and ultimately the larger organization. I take that responsibility seriously.

Along with that comes the challenge of figuring out how to perform at a high level while still being a present husband and father, taking care of my health and continuing to grow personally.

What I’ve realized is that if you continually push yourself toward something bigger, there will probably always be periods of uncertainty and discomfort. I don’t think that’s necessarily a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it means you’re stretching beyond what you’ve done before.

Every major step in my career has included moments when I’ve wondered whether I could actually pull it off. So far, the answer has always come from the same place: keep showing up, keep learning, keep working, and figure it out.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Today, I’m the Sales Manager for First American Title across Orange and Los Angeles Counties, where I lead a team of 30 sales professionals. At the simplest level, my responsibility is to help our people hit and surpass the revenue and order goals we set, continue growing year over year, and ultimately build successful, sustainable books of business.

But I think what I really specialize in is developing people.

One of the things I’m most proud of is seeing what happens when talented people are given the right environment, tools, coaching, accountability, and belief in what they’re capable of. We’ve had people join our organization with relatively small books of business who, over the course of several years, have grown them three or four times over. We’ve also had people come in with no previous experience in our industry who have developed into some of the top-performing sales representatives across our counties and even Southern California.

I certainly don’t take sole credit for that. First American provides tremendous resources, systems, and tools, and we have an incredibly talented group of people who contribute to that success. My job is to help bring those pieces together, create the right environment, and make sure our people know how to take advantage of everything available to them.

One of the philosophies I believe in is that a rising tide lifts all ships. We’ve recruited some exceptional top performers, but we’ve also developed a lot of our talent from within. When you surround people with others who are performing at a high level, they begin to see what’s possible for themselves.

That has helped us build a culture where people genuinely learn from one another. Our team members have their own conversations and side meetings, share ideas, talk through strategies, and help each other solve problems. Success becomes contagious. Someone sees what another person is doing and thinks, “If they can do it, why can’t I?” Then they put in the work, ask better questions, become more confident, and eventually they’re the person someone else is learning from.

That transformation is probably what I’m most proud of.

Of course, our business is extremely numbers-driven, so you can see the results in increased orders, revenue, and larger books of business. But I also get to see the human side of that growth. You watch someone who initially needs a lot of guidance begin trusting their own instincts. Their confidence changes. They start needing fewer answers from me because they’ve developed the knowledge and experience to find those answers themselves. Eventually, they’re helping other people grow.

If you asked the people around me what I’m known for, I think one of the first things they would say is consistency. I show up.

That has been a theme throughout my life. Whether it’s being at the gym at 5:00 in the morning, being present for my wife and kids, or being available to my team, I try to bring that same consistency to everything that matters to me. My team knows they can call, text, or email me when they need something. I’m constantly thinking about new ideas, strategies, and opportunities that could help them grow their businesses.

But I also genuinely care about the people behind the numbers. I want to know what they’re trying to accomplish professionally and personally because, to me, those things are connected. Growing someone’s career and helping them dramatically increase their business can change what is possible for that person and their family.

That connects directly back to why I pursued growth so aggressively in my own career. I wanted to create opportunities for my wife and children that I didn’t necessarily have growing up. Now I have the privilege of helping other people create those opportunities for themselves and their families.

I think what sets me apart is the combination of consistency, competitiveness, genuine care for people, and a constant desire to improve. I’m never going to pretend I have every answer, but I’ve always had this belief that somehow, we’ll figure it out. I bring that same mentality to leadership.

Keep showing up. Keep learning. Keep sharing ideas. Keep challenging yourself and the people around you. And create an environment where everyone gets better together.

For me, that’s what leadership is really about.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I definitely believe in taking risks, but I think there’s an important difference between taking a risk and being reckless. Most of the major risks I’ve taken in my life have been calculated risks. I try to understand the opportunity in front of me, consider what I could potentially lose, and then ask myself whether the potential growth on the other side is worth being uncomfortable for.

When I look back at my career, some of the most important decisions I’ve made involved walking away from something I had already become successful at.

Leaving personal training was a major risk for me. I loved fitness, had built a career at Equinox, had become a manager, and was in an environment where I was comfortable and knew what I was doing. Moving into escrow meant essentially starting over in an industry I knew very little about. There was no guarantee I would be successful. But I had bigger goals for the life I wanted to build for my future family, and I believed sales could create opportunities that my existing path might not.

Then I took another risk when I left escrow for First American Title. I had gained some industry experience by then, but title was still new to me, and I had to build another book of business from the ground up. There were absolutely days when I came home without getting an order and wondered whether I had made the right decision. But I kept working, learning, building relationships, and trusting that the effort would eventually compound.

One of the biggest risks came when I moved into leadership. By that point, I had built a successful book of business as a sales representative, and accepting a management position meant giving that up. That was something tangible that I had spent years building. Once I stepped into leadership and handed that business over, there really wasn’t an easy way to turn around and go back. In some ways, it felt like burning the boats.

But I also knew I wanted to grow. I wanted the opportunity to lead people, develop talent, and have an impact beyond my own individual production. Eventually, that responsibility grew from leading Orange County to leading both Orange and Los Angeles Counties Sales Teams.
I think all of those decisions reflect how I view risk today.

I don’t believe you need to have every step figured out before you move. In fact, if I had waited until I knew exactly how everything was going to work out, I probably wouldn’t have made some of the decisions that changed my life the most.

I’ve always had what I jokingly call a kind of “blind optimism.” It’s not that I believe everything will magically work out. It’s that I trust myself to do the work necessary to figure things out. I may not know the answer today, but I believe I can learn, adapt, ask the right questions, surround myself with the right people, and keep working until I find it.

I also think there’s risk in not taking risks. There can be a temptation to stay somewhere because you’re comfortable, even when you know you’re capable of more. For me, I’ve tried not to let comfort make my decisions.

That doesn’t mean every opportunity is worth pursuing. I think you have to understand why you’re taking the risk and what you’re pursuing on the other side of it. For me, there has usually been a bigger purpose behind those decisions: creating a better life for my family, continuing to grow personally and professionally, and putting myself in a position where I can create opportunities for other people as well.

So I would describe myself as a calculated risk-taker. I don’t chase risk for the sake of risk. But when I see an opportunity that aligns with where I want to go, I’m willing to step into uncertainty, accept the discomfort that comes with it, and bet on my ability to figure it out.

Looking back, some of the moments that felt the riskiest at the time ended up creating the greatest growth in my life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://local.firstam.com/ca/reps/lawrence4title
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelifeoflawrence/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawrence.telles/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawrence-telles-490a9276