2 min read May 2022 — Invest: spoke with Jim Henderson, chairman and CEO of AssuredPartners, about the company’s emphasis on innovation and culture and how that has helped it attract top talent and enabled it to provide great services to the community. “We have to find the right fit for our values and culture, and we must tell that story to attract a wider talent pool,” Henderson said.
In your 35 years of professional experience, what transformations have most impacted the industry?
The business decisions faced by owners have gotten more complex, with risk transfer on international levels of currency and cybersecurity threats as liabilities that have become more prominent. Our business has become a lot more of a specialized service. About 20 years ago, a generalist in the community could take care of most customers; today, there are specialists who deal with exposure and who carve out a program to protect a company and mitigate their risk. The U.S. tort system has become an area where financial penalty for an alleged wrongful act has become very significant. Making sure companies are adequately covered by buying the right type of insurance has become complex.
What have been your strategies to recruit and retain talent in this current labor market?
I have a saying that 98% of this company’s assets take the elevator every day. We have to improve our game in terms of presenting the career opportunities and pathways for individuals getting involved in our business. Yes, we’re insurance, but we are truly in the people business. For us, that means delivering peerless consultative expertise to clients, and we are looking for people who are excited by delivering that expertise and helping clients’ businesses succeed. We have to find the right fit for our values and culture, and we must tell that story to the broader workforce in order to attract a wider talent pool. In a sense, this is a very basic business in terms of upward mobility because there are so many opportunities to carve out a career. We also want to create more pathways for diversity. Sixty-four percent of our employees are women but only about 15% are in senior ranks. That is something we can improve on. We need to look more like our clients. There is a lot of fulfillment in these roles and the industry just needs to convey that better.
How have technological advances impacted the insurance brokerage industry?
Technology and the digital world have added productivity to the entire industry. With the pandemic, we would have been in serious trouble providing capability to our clients if we had not gone to a more digital framework to deliver product. The pandemic accelerated that need. We now have positions where people can work from home a vast majority of the time and they are as productive as being in the office while doing it.
The other aspect of technology is increasing the availability and knowledge of data so we can understand our client better and we can get better capability in a broader fashion. With Zoom, we can bring multiple people to a meeting with a client instantaneously to solve an issue. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be face to face but we can put out fires more efficiently with that type of technology. It brings that problem-solving to the table for our clients very quickly.
What is your outlook for AssuredPartners over the next two to three years?
Many on our team have lived in Orlando for more than 30 years, so we call it home. It is a very good business environment and the sky’s the limit. As baby boomers begin to retire, it will open up our ability to acquire companies and expand. We have the capital and opportunity now to grow organically through mergers and acquisitions. Our goal is to be a Top 5 broker in the United States. We have also expanded in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the European Union. To that end, we are doing a deep dive on the business we do in Russia to evaluate any business connections there. Europe is a very compatible business environment in terms of capital and leadership, so we are bullish on our expansion there. On a more local level, we plan to move to the Downtown area this summer. We have procured space there for a buildout and plan to move in July or August 2022. Although we are a national organization, we have local presence and local execution.
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