CEO SERIES Family recipe for success MJ Insurance’s home-grown talent helps them celebrate 50 years in business By MICHAEL GOSSIE
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hen Michael M. Bill started MJ Insurance, gasoline was 30 cents a gallon and bread cost 21 cents a loaf. Now, 50 years later, Bill’s son Michael H. Bill is CEO of one of the top 100 independently-owned insurance agencies in the U.S. The company has posted a profit in each of its 50 years, including record revenues in excess of $25 million in 2013. Az Business caught up with MJ’s secondgeneration CEO in hopes of finding out his family’s secrets. How has MJ been able to be so successful for so long? We have done a really good job of developing and growing our own talent and developing people into leaders. We are not a top-down leadership-driven organization. We are a very collaborative, team-oriented organization. We have the ability to execute quickly because we are closely held and don’t have a lot of bureaucratic challenges. What does 50 years in business mean to your family? It’s something that makes my father — whom I started working for in 1991 — and I very proud. If I look at our retention, we have very little turnover. I am working with people that I knew before I came to work at MJ. Of MJ’s 125 employees, 43 have more than a decade of tenure. How are you able to maintain that high retention rate? We do a good job finding and sourcing the right talent. We hire slow, we really get to know the individual and what their
core capabilities are find out what their goals and values are inside and outside of the office and how those goals and values align with our organization. We are spending a lot of time with all our associates and putting together individual development plans for each of them where they out together their own mission statement and we have resources to help them achieve their professional or educational goals. If we have engaged associated, it leads to better business for MJ. What personal qualities do you have that make you an effective leader? No. 1: I’m a good listener. No. 2: I make sure our purpose is aligned with our vision and understanding where we are, where we’ve been and where we are going so I keep everybody aligned. It’s like football, each player has different roles and responsibilities and each player may be paid differently, but you cannot operate effectively or efficiently unless everyone is aligned and communicating effectively. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in your industry? With the tremendous amount of consolidation that is taking place, we are seeing more and more opportunities to deliver more consultative services and more value-added resources for our clients instead of just transactional. We are doing a lot more analytics and a lot more consulting.
LILLIAN REID/AZ BIG MEDIA
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced? It goes back to that recruitment and development of talent. Our industry doesn’t generate a lot of excitement from college students when it comes to getting into the business of insurance, risk management or employee benefits. Our industry does not do a good job of promoting it as a career. But if you bring someone new into the industry, they get to learn a lot of things about a lot of different businesses. They are working with C-level executives, financial officers, HR executives and getting to learn about other businesses and how they operate. A lot of careers don’t offer that. Why has your family business been able to succeed in this economic climate? My father, since Day 1, has always believed that business was business and family was family. The only family members involved in this business are involved on a daily basis, so we don’t have non-participating family members. We also have 14 other principals who are not family members, so we are very disciplined. We may be closely held, but we are professionally managed.
12 AB | March-April 2014
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