the Fıeld
A Visit With Agents of Change
ON A MISSION
How Rod Furniss went from a farmer to missionary to insurance agent to a legislator to serve a greater good. • BY JOH N H I LTON •
M
ormon missionaries spend two years in a daily struggle against tremendous odds to win converts to the faith. Those who complete their missions learn to communicate better, be persistent, accept rejection and live a disciplined life. Luckily for Rod Furniss, those lessons learned during his Argentina mission could not have prepared him better for a career in insurance. “Everyone I talked to said I was crazy to 14
go into the insurance business,” Furniss recalled. “To prove them wrong, the first year I worked four nights a week and I promised my wife I would wean myself down, and each year I worked less.” Furniss, 60, spends little time on insurance agency matters these days. He has moved into politics and is serving his first term in the Idaho House of Representatives, where he helped push tough rules on annuity sales through a heavily conservative legislature. Most significantly, the bill requires all indexed annuity advertising to be pre-ap-
InsuranceNewsNet Magazine » November 2020
proved by the Department of Insurance. That measure caused some heartburn for companies, Insurance Commissioner Dean Cameron told colleagues this summer. The rules took effect July 1. “We were seeing some abuses in the sales industry,” Furniss said. Although he is a stalwart conservative proud of Idaho’s lack of regulation, Furniss biggest accomplishments during his first term helped expand government oversight. In addition to the annuity bill, he sponsored a bill requiring self-funded health insurance plans to register with the state, and another bill to require vehicle owners to prove they have a registration before they can get insurance. “While those bills appear to expand government, the monetary savings from each bill actually made business sense for both the state of Idaho and the constituents,” Furniss said. “I call those bills good commonsense business bills. A win-win for Idaho.” Being a lifelong insurance agent brings a great perspective to the legislature, said Hyatt Erstad, president of Erstad and Co., a Boise-based insurance and employee benefits firm. “He’s done a really good job,” Erstad said. “I think his background in the insurance industry has helped him be very proactive in the legislature.”
Working The Farm
Furniss was born and raised in Menan, a small town of about 750 residents, tucked into the southeast corner of lower Idaho. It was and remains pure country living. “I lived five miles from any town,” he said. Growing up on a remote farm meant a lot of things for teenage Rod Furniss: long workdays carrying buckets of grain for the pigs, tending to up to 2,000 cows and riding horses over hundreds of acres. It also turned out to be great training for a future insurance agent. Furniss learned how to work hard and how to work largely by himself. He received lessons in self-sufficiency and perseverance that would later translate to a young agent working tirelessly to build a book of business. The farming life is about putting in a lot of work toward a reward that comes much later in the form of taking crops to market. A star quarterback on his high school football team, Furniss went on to play