Tuesday, September 29, 2026

I truly cannot imagine what the last 25 years would have looked like without Mark “Mac” McElroy in them.  There was very little ordinary about Mac. He was a wild thinker, a bold risk taker, a sometimes-maddening boss and a man with one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever known.

He could inspire you, infuriate you, exhaust you and convince you that something you had never considered doing was entirely possible.  Sometimes all before lunch.

Mac became an owner of RamQuest in 2001, when I was working for the Title Midwest family of agencies. Title Midwest became one of the first large customers of what I came to think of as the “new RamQuest,” because almost immediately, something about this little software company felt different.

Bring them a problem and the answer was likely to be some variation of: Yes, we can solve that. Not “the system wasn’t designed for that.” Not “we’ll put it on the roadmap.”  Rather, it was yes! Pull up a chair, let’s figure it out.  And then, remarkably often, they did.

An advisory council eventually became the RamQuest User Group, and a collection of customers and employees got to experience the thrill of taking something from pure idea to drawing board to testing and feedback, until one day something that hadn’t existed in the world before suddenly did.  It was exhilarating.

Of course, about the time everyone else celebrated solving the problem, Mac was already focused on three to forty-seven more problems down the road.

One of his greatest gifts, and unquestionably one of his most maddening qualities, was an imagination that didn’t recognize many boundaries. A conversation about solving Problem A) could somehow end with Mac contemplating how we might reinvent the entire market in which Problem A) existed in the first place.

Many of us became accustomed to waking up to six or seven extremely lengthy emails that had arrived overnight when the rest of the world was quiet enough for Mac to think without all the pesky limitations daylight can impose on the imagination.

Some of it could sound like outright fantabulizing. And then, somewhere in the middle, there would be a piece of strategic thinking so sharp that it stopped you cold.

You could watch it happening in real-time, too. There was always the head rub. Irritated, ideating, strategizing, flirting — it didn’t really matter. The hand would go to his head and you knew the gears were turning.

And the gears were always turning.

One day, I walked into the office and was introduced to a new employee who would be helping with errands and office tasks. As I remember the story, Mac had encountered him somewhere out in the world holding a “Will Work for Food” sign. (He was also known to meet people on airplanes and decide we should hire them.)  Mac brought him into the office and gave him a job. It showed something fundamental about Mac: He saw possibility in people, often before they saw it in themselves.

In 2008, he called me in Utah. HUD had just substantially revised RESPA. RamQuest needed to build new forms into the software, but they didn’t know exactly what needed to be built.  So, naturally, I should move to Dallas and help them figure it out, he said seriously but also somehow breezily.

As I saw it, there was a fairly significant problem with this plan. Health issues had taken me out of the workforce at the time, and I wasn’t at all certain I could do what he was asking.  Mac’s response was essentially: You should probably try. We’ll adjust as necessary.

So I did.  And we did.

A year or so later, I became convinced RamQuest needed a presence in Washington, D.C. The federal government was writing laws and regulations our customers would have to comply with and that we would eventually have to translate into the software. We should be in the room while those rules were being shaped.  We needed to position ourselves upstream.

I spent a week preparing a proposal for a dedicated government affairs role and delivered it to Mac.  He shot it down the next morning.  Unceremoniously.  We were too small. We didn’t have the budget. I was crushed.

But, he said, if I could keep doing my Director of Operations job, I could go stretch my wings in this direction, too.

No, you cannot have the job title you just proposed.  Go do the work anyway.

It became the defining work of my career.

Mac pushed. He challenged. Sometimes he shoved; sometimes he simply got out of the way. It wasn’t always comfortable. Mac could stomp. He could pitch a fit. He could drive you completely crazy.

We had an agreement that if I strongly disagreed with a decision, I could make my case twice. Once I knew he had really heard me, if he still decided we were going another direction, I would march enthusiastically in that direction.

After enough years, enough arguments, enough ridiculous ideas that somehow became real and enough shared life, there was something familial about all of it.   People use the word “family” about workplaces so often that it can become meaningless. But that group of people was different.

In the days before Mac died, as former RamQuest staff and customers shared memories and messages, one of them wrote something that stopped me: “I miss seeing the people who made me who I am.”

Those people made each other.  We made each other.

Mac wasn’t particularly good at stopping to appreciate what he had already accomplished. By the time everyone else reached a milestone, he was sprinting toward the next gate.  There was never a finish line.

Yet there was a wonderful contradiction in Mac. The man who had such trouble stopping to appreciate an accomplishment absolutely knew how to savor life.

A great meal mattered. A beautiful place mattered. Great conversation mattered. Staying up all night gambling in Vegas apparently mattered.  Fishing and hunting definitely mattered.  His four kids mattered very much, too.

And if something was wonderful, Mac and his wife, Mary, shared it.  There were trips to Tahoe, Atlantis in the Bahamas, their homes on Eleuthera and outside Sedona. And there was Thanksgiving weekend at Pebble Beach — a trip I never would have made or even imagined making. But Mac and Mary imagined it, so off we went.

Customers and prospects who came to Dallas got a version of the same treatment. They were going to eat well, often at Bob’s Chop House. Mac believed in sitting around a table over a terrific meal and having a real conversation.

In retrospect, there wasn’t much separation between the way Mac approached business, people and life.

Why couldn’t we build this?

Why couldn’t we rethink that?

Why couldn’t this person have a chance?

Why couldn’t you do that job?

Why shouldn’t we go to Pebble Beach?

The rest of us frequently had very reasonable answers to those questions.  Mac wasn’t terribly interested in them.

Not every expansion of the possible was a good idea, mind you. Those of us who worked for him would insist that sentence remain in his tribute.  But enough of them were.

Some of the most important lessons Mac taught weren’t lessons he intended to teach. Watching him forever push toward the next gate taught some of us to stop occasionally and appreciate the one we’d just crossed. Yet his willingness to put people into rooms they weren’t entirely sure they belonged in taught them something else. You don’t necessarily need the pedigree.  You just need something to contribute. Then pull up a chair.

Mac changed companies, products and an industry. There are plenty of people better equipped than I am to chronicle those accomplishments.  What I keep thinking about instead are the people.

The person holding the Will Work for Food sign. The customer sitting across from him at Bob’s. The stranger he met on an airplane who suddenly had a new career. The people opening those absurdly long emails first thing in the morning.  The sister who began as a receptionist and became one of the best product people in our industry.  The people who argued with him, traveled with him and got swept up in the next big idea.

The people who made each other who they are.

Mac frustrated me like no other boss I ever had. He also helped me flourish like no other boss ever had.  And I know I am only one of many.

For Mac, there was never a finish line. There was always another gate. Another problem worth solving. Another person worth taking a chance on. Another meal to share. Another bet to make. Another thing that didn’t exist yet but absolutely could.

Until now.

It is almost impossible to reconcile a finish line with Mac. Even writing the words feels wrong. I can picture the head rub, the gears turning, the next idea already beginning to take shape. For Mac, there was always something beyond the horizon.

But perhaps that’s what comes when you spend a lifetime pushing people toward the next gate.  They keep going. They build the next thing. They take the meeting. They challenge the conventional answer. They give somebody a chance. They pull up another chair. They take the trip they never imagined taking.

We keep going.  And every once in a while, hopefully, we stop long enough to appreciate where we are and the people who helped us get there.

There is finally a finish line for Mac.

But not for everyone he pushed toward the next gate.

We’ll keep going.  And we’ll know who pushed us there.

Rest in peace, Mark McElroy.  And Godspeed Colleen Durda.

Until Next Time,

Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC