Case study: A Transformational Year
How DBH Consulting helped a longtime agency clear a path to new growth by elevating trust, executing to plan — and committing to a new degree of accountability
The history of New York-based Rose & Kiernan spans 140 years, but it’s safe to say the agency has never had a year like it did in 2008.
It began in a soft market and ended in a sinking economy. Along the way, the country was rocked by roller-coaster oil prices, unprecedented turmoil on Wall Street and the worst unemployment in nearly three decades.
But none of these events dissuaded the agency’s leadership team from embarking on a bold new growth initiative. President John Murray and Executive Vice Presidents Joe Vitale and Charlie Daniels decided early in the year that 2008 would be a transformational point in the agency’s evolution.
They agreed it was time for Rose & Kiernan to align its people around a new, cohesive strategy.
They were committed to 100 percent execution of that strategy.
They also knew it wouldn’t be easy.
The agency’s 200 employees were scattered in 12 locations. Some producers were spread thin, with little time to devote to big-picture tasks. And Rose & Kiernan’s 2004 acquisition of The Daniels Agency, while successful, brought differences in culture and practice that had yet to be fully reconciled.
“We weren’t taking the time to reflect on what our goals were, or to measure our progress,” says Murray. “That’s why we hired DBH Consulting to be that third-party facilitator to help us do what we knew we needed to do. Working with DBH made us commit and be accountable to a process.”
Many thoughts, one vision
DBH Consulting’s first step was to collect the unfiltered views of 18 producers and managers across the agency. DBH conducted 1-1 interviews with all 18, identifying the factors that contributed to Rose & Kiernan’s success as well as potential obstacles to future growth. “No two interviews were exactly alike,” recalls Demmie Hicks, who spearheaded the effort. “People appreciate the opportunity to share their point of view. They value being part of the planning process.”
This mining of employee perspectives gave DBH the knowledge needed to build a framework for a Growth Planning Initiative. The focus of the initiative was organic growth: Rose & Kiernan instinctively knew it had the internal firepower to grow its book of business without having to acquire or merge with another agency. What it lacked was a blueprint.
So at a rustic lakeside lodge near Cooperstown, N.Y., DBH Consulting orchestrated a two-day planning summit that enabled R&K to examine strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities and, perhaps most important, surface issues that had been spoken and unspoken.
As with any planning session, a few came to the summit with some measure of resistance to change. “Demmie managed to convert them in the first two or three hours,” recalls Jim Arconti, a vice president at R&K. “The fact that she had previously talked with each person, one-on-one, equipped her to get to the heart of the issues quickly and directly. So the few resisters were soon on board.”
The summit’s turning point came when Joe Vitale, who is also R&K’s chief financial officer, spoke frankly and eloquently about his views on the agency’s culture.
Because Vitale had engineered Rose & Kiernan’s adoption of an Employee Stock Ownership Plan years earlier, he was a strong proponent of each employee feeling as if he or she had a deeper stake in the firm. “He spoke with great passion about why he views the firm’s obligation to take care of employees, retirees and shareholders,” Arconti recalls. “He said that growth is not just for lining our own pockets. People’s lives and plans depended on us. It was very moving and revealing. It got us past Joe’s green eyeshade role in the company.”
“That was a pivotal moment,” Hicks agrees. “And for Joe to be able to articulate his vision, he needed to have the context to speak. That’s a crucial part of a successful planning session – creating the space so that people can say what really needs to be said.”
‘Windshield time’ and other action items
Rose & Kiernan’s leaders, producers and managers left the session with more than consensus. They had a blueprint for growth. “Once those vision points gelled,” says Sean Hickey, senior vice president of marketing, “people were committed to developing the next steps. It really got people thinking about their role in this and what they need to do to make it cultural.”
The blueprint came in the form of three overarching strategies, each with its own leader and action items.
• Arconti headed a team working to forge new relationships to strengthen business development. All top leaders would deepen their involvement in communities, serving on boards and in other leadership positions. Proven producers, such as the three former Marsh executives, would be hired, and every sales professional would be expected to create new relationships weekly. To support the effort, Rose & Kiernan would add training resources, both inside and outside the agency.
• Hickey led a group that engineered an ambitious new cross-selling strategy, which began with taking a picture of opportunities within accounts across the agency. “It was fairly revealing,” Hickey says. “We took an enormous database and put into a format that allowed every producer to examine individual opportunities within their own book of business.” With prospective areas of growth revealed, the agency then began an intensive training regimen to help producers gain expertise in areas of coverage that were less familiar to them. The strategy uncovered another area of growth: Increasing coverage for existing clients that were under-protected.
• Daniels was charged with elevating the agency’s status as an excellent place to work. “We have 12 different offices, and when you’re in that many places, you’re bound to have some breakdowns in communication,” he says. “So we talked about the need to connect more with each other – which is what makes an organization work.” Some solutions were technological, such as updating the company intranet and implementing a better video conferencing system. Others were more personal. “We call it ‘windshield time,’ which means the agency leaders are on the road more, having productive face time with people,” Daniels says.
Accountability is on line 1
The best plans are living documents – they drive action, and that action eventually drives revision to the plan.
Rose & Kiernan was determined not to let its Growth Planning Initiative fade in the afterglow of its unveiling.
So the agency retained DBH Consulting to promote the plan’s execution and help ensure that momentum would be sustained. And in the months that followed, DBH organized, planned and facilitated regular conference calls with all members of the three strategy teams.
“I’m not a big conference call person,” Joe Vitale concedes, “but I definitely see the value in having everyone report in on progress, month after month. This follow-up communication has helped ensure that each committee is executing its components of the plan.”
Hickey agrees: “Through those calls, people talk about what’s positive and what needs to change. And new ideas spring from that. It’s incredibly, helpful, vibrant dialogue that otherwise wouldn’t happen every day.” Between the calls, he adds, each team is working to execute its own individual action items – thus assuring that members have progress to report.
The progress Rose & Kiernan experienced from its Growth Planning Initiative transcends new accounts or hard numbers. It has implications for the long term as well.
“It’s definitely working,” Arconti says. “I’m seeing sales guys do things they didn’t use to. John Murray is an example. In the old days, he didn’t have a lot of interface with others because he was the number 1 producer and the president. Now he’s more president than producer. Joe Vitale is another example. He’s now plugged in more to the basic needs of the sales force. And he’s getting more candor tossed his way.”
Daniels agrees. “We now have a much higher level of engagement from the producers,” he says. “I think many of them previously felt somewhat disconnected or disengaged from the process. Remember, it’s not just the product [of planning] that’s valuable, but the process you go through.”
Sean Hickey frames the progress in the agency’s recent history. “When I was here six or seven years ago, when this organization was in a different place, moving the battleship was challenging,” he says. “Now, there’s a renewed commitment to what we want to be. That’s good, because the market today is different. Globalization has created more competition. All of these things you could say are factors that create stress on an organization, but they also create opportunity.”
He pauses, then adds: “This is the world we live in. You just have to ask, ‘What does it take to be successful?’”