Retired U.S. postal exec takes over Sarasota firm

SARASOTA — Professional Lien Search, a firm that's grown from startup in 2012 to 60 employees, named onetime U.S. Postal Service executive Timothy Healy CEO.

PLS is a research company that looks for unrecorded liens against residential and commercial properties. The firm searches city or county finance departments, permit offices and utility departments to find the liens or assessments on properties. Clients are mostly real estate attorneys and title firms.

The company has tripled in size in the past year, according to a release. PLS operating partner Jesse Biter, a Sarasota entrepreneur, has been looking for a chief executive to run the business for a few months due to the rapid growth.

“Once PLS surpassed 60 employees, we knew it was time to bring in the big guns,” Biter says in a release. “Healy's impressive resume made him an obvious choice to take the reins.”

Healy spent more than 30 years with the U.S. Postal Service. His last position there was as a Washington, D.C.-based vice president in charge of retail and services, where he ran a unit with more than $18 billion in sales and 37,000 locations. Healy held other management roles for the postal service in Tampa and Albany and Long Island, N.Y. Healy also held several executive positions with work process and logistics firm Novitex Enterprise Solutions after he retired from the postal service in 2011.

Berlin Patten Ebling, a Sarasota-based law firm, founded PLS in 2012. PLS did around a 1,000 lien searches a month under the law firm. Biter bought PLS from the law firm in October 2014, and it grew to 3,500 lien searches a month and 35 employees by April. Biter says his goal is to expand in both Florida and nationwide.