Blog/News Room

Prioritizing People Over Business

07
May

Prioritizing People Over Business

It’s been just over four years since I joined the Lighthouse team. During that time, we have experienced significant growth at the enterprise. From a business perspective, we have:

  1. Launched Lighthouse products in 2 new states: North Carolina and Texas.
  2. Added Prepared Insurance Company, a Florida carrier, to the family.
  3. Purchased Excalibur National Insurance Company, a Louisiana carrier.
  4. Experienced 4 hurricanes along with several other large flood, hail, and tornado events.
  5. Grown written premium from around $70M at the end of 2014 to over $250M (enterprise wide) currently.

As I write these words, I am proud of our collective achievements and feel fortunate to be a part of our team.  Fast growth and change can be challenging to any organization. As Brian Jones, our consultant from The Table Group, reminds us, companies are more likely to die from choking than from starving. The additional volume is a lot to digest!

As organizations grow, it is more common than not for communication to break down, politics to grow, silos to be built, and for different departments to simply stop communicating with each other. Companies begin to trust their data and their systems more than their People.

At Lighthouse, we believe People still matter. We prioritize our people. We invest in their professional/personal development and care about who they are as individuals, both inside and outside of work. That also must carry forward to our agents and their teams. The ability to have sensible and honest conversations with the individuals, who are representing our products to our insureds, is critical to our mutual success.

This “People First” philosophy is not only good for Lighthouse, our employees, agents and insureds, it is also good for business. If you work diligently to build trust with one another, then you can have difficult discussions without being defensive. You can challenge ideas openly and honestly without making value judgements about each other. These actions limit the politics and speed up the decision-making process. It creates an environment that does not accept mediocrity and ultimately creates profit, protecting all stakeholders in the long term.  It is just good business.

Written by Bruce Bessire, Director of Sales