It’s All in the Family at Higginbotham

There’s a certain “something” about Rusty Reid that makes it clear why folks might like to work for him as chief executive and chairman of Higginbotham.

He feels like a buddy, a big brother, maybe an uncle. It takes a while to get over the small talk with Reid, but that’s not a problem at all. In fact, it’s downright comfortable. And it may be, at least in part, why so many of Higginbotham’s employees feel as if they belong to a family.

Fort Worth, Texas-based Higginbotham is the overall Gold winner in Insurance Journal’s annual recognition of Best Agencies to Work For, and if a word cloud was derived from employee responses to IJ’s Best Agencies survey, “family” would most certainly be prominent.

“Higginbotham treats their employees like family,” one employee wrote. “Details like performance reviews and your salary become a formality when you are simply fulfilled at work, however, they handle them great too.”

Another employee typed, “Higginbotham is a family, and their entire business structure is built on family values. They truly care about their employees, communities, business partners and clients.”

“It’s a people business. You hear it a lot about our industry, but we think it needs to start from within,” said Reid, who joined Higginbotham in late 1986 and became CEO in 1989.

Reid spent some time in the industry before he landed at Higginbotham and found a mentor in Bill Stroud, the nephew of Paul C. Higginbotham, who opened the insurance agency in 1948. Stroud purchased the agency in 1962 and ran it for the next 27 years.

“During that short stint in the insurance-carrier community (prior to Higginbotham), I saw that when people didn’t get equity, they left,” Reid recalled. “They packed up their bags and become a competitor. Good people — executives to support staff — walking out the door.”

Higginbotham became an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) when Stroud sold the company and Reid was named CEO. But he doesn’t hoard the credit. Reid name drops constantly when remembering how Higginbotham constructed its values — from Jim Hubbard, who co-founded Higginbotham’s financial services division in 1989 (“He’d say, ‘If you can’t have Thanksgiving dinner with someone, why would you want them as a partner?'”), to friend Mike Williams, who led the University of North Texas Health Science Center with the same values, to COO Mikey Shepard, who as chief people officer encouraged the agency to “put pen to paper on this.”

“Let’s not talk about it in the abstract anymore. Let’s really bring it down to tangible things,” Reid said. “A lot of people got interviewed and we really collectively built our values and the first one was, ‘Family to our employees.'”

It’s no more elegant, Reid explained, than, “Treat people with respect. Lift them up.”

Employee turnover is very low even though the agency has been acquisitive. “But we are very much a high-growth firm in and around organic growth, and that’s a function of new business and great retention,” Reid added. “One of the elements to our secret sauce for retention is we keep people. We reward them above and beyond a paycheck (as an ESOP).”

Higginbotham extends the same family feel to its communities with service and monetary donations. It’s another company value employees pointed out. “We have a Higginbotham Community Fund that is funded by employee donations, payroll deductions, etc. to grant donations to nonprofit organizations,” one wrote. “The grant recipients do not even have to be a client of Higg. So many nonprofits have received grants from us who are not even a prospect of ours. I don’t know any other agencies willing to put others first like Higginbotham.”