Best Agency to Work For – Southeast

Senn-Dunn Insurance, Greensboro, North Carolina

Senn-Dunn: Open, Really Open, for Business … and Producer Ownership

Too many cooks spoil the broth?

Not at Senn-Dunn Insurance. The Greensboro, N.C., agency — the 2013 winner of Insurance Journal‘s Best Agency to Work For in the Southeast — has 22 owners. That’s about 15 percent of its workforce.

T. Gray McCaskill, CEO, says the ownership structure was created as a way to attract and retain the best people.

The structure is an incentive and retention plan mostly for producers, according to Danielle Hoversten, chief financial officer.

It’s also a management challenge. “It requires a very collaborative environment. We spend a lot of time basing decisions on consensus, getting a lot of input. We have 22 owners, plus managers who are not yet owners, involved in decision-making,” Hoversten says. “It takes a little extra time, but we have found it works for us.”

The 22 owners have empowered an eight-member executive committee to make certain operational decisions as needed.

It all works for producers at Senn-Dunn. “The security of knowing we are going to remain privately owned and independent is a great way to wake up and go to work … knowing that everyone has an opportunity to be an owner if they work hard,” one producer said.

“I know that one day I may be offered a chance to become an owner, which is very exciting to me,” another employee said.

The company has a separate profit sharing plan for non-producers.

Senn-Dunn stresses open communication, transparency and teamwork.

For McCaskill, communication is key. “The more you’ve got people asking questions, the more it shows that they’ve got faith that you’re going to be upfront with them,” he says.

Employees praise owners for sharing financials, explaining goals and strategies, and maintaining an open-door policy.

“This transparency of ‘where we are and where we are going’ promotes a team environment,” said an employee.

To further the teamwork culture, all of the offices in the Greensboro building are of equal size, and staff has window offices while owners are in interior spaces.

The emphasis on communication paid off during the economic downturn and soft market. By 2008, McCaskill said the owners knew that the agency’s model at that time was not sustainable. P/C premiums were falling and too many customers were hurting or going out of business. Internal changes and a new direction to counter the effects of the P/C slide were needed.

“Rather than pointing fingers, we got together and asked for input,” McCaskill recalls. “We didn’t go behind closed doors. We put all our numbers on the board. We made some tough senior management changes.”

“Owners, managers, everybody” — participated in the cuts, Hoversten says.

The adjustments worked. The agency started growing again and, most important, it was able to invest in a new direction: employee benefits.

“This whole thing with Obamacare, we have sort of run through the fire on it,” McCaskill says. Senn-Dunn has been proactive, running benefits seminars, reaching out to clients and turning Obamacare into an opportunity. “At the end of the day, clients want that trusted advisor.”

Senn-Dunn is a different agency today. It had been a primarily P/C agency, but now total agency revenues of $25.6 million are almost evenly divided between P/C and employee benefits. Also, the agency had 38 people back in 2000; today it has 152.

“I was very proud of the way the company took a realistic approach to the changing business environment from 2008 to present day,” one employee told Insurance Journal.

“We have a team that supports each other,” McCaskill says. He thinks it is working so well that if there were no insurance services to sell, the team would sell something else together. But for now, they’re doing fine with insurance and benefits.

Topics Property Casualty