With revenue estimated at $90 million, Family Heritage Life Insurance Company of America is just a duckling compared to the Aflac duck’s $13.3 billion in 2004 sales, but that’s not stopping Howard Lewis, president, CEO and founder, from swimming in the same pond.
Originally offering its supplemental insurance products in Ohio, Family Heritage now has 75 employees and a sales force in 47 states and U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico. The company moved from No. 69 on the 2002 Weatherhead 100 list to No. 36 in 2004.
“We have a revenue goal to be at $250 million in revenues by 2010, which is a good five years away. We’re pretty excited about that,” Lewis says.
Smart Business recently spoke with Lewis about the growth process and his company’s new home.
How have you grown the company?
Bottom line, it’s people. No matter what the business or what you’re trying to do, what market or industry you’re in, you must have quality people that you focus on in terms of training and development. When you build people, they build the company.
We have excellent programs at all levels for our home office staff, as well as for our field sales operation. We are committed to building our people. You can have any kind of growth goal you want to have but if you don’t have the people who have the vision of that goal and who are committed to that goal, you can’t pull that off.
That’s what’s worked for 16 years, and that’s what will work for the next 16 years. People, organizations, the economy and industries change, but the principles about building people and businesses really don’t — they’re timeless.
You’ve said your company has grown “by sitting down with one family at a time and by expanding into one new town, one new city and one new state at a time.” How are you accomplishing this?
We are not in a business where we can make quantity advancement. It has to be done from a building process. In a building process, you must have a foundation. Once we have a sales leader in any given area, we can help that person develop, and then we can build a sales force around that person that markets our products.
All of our people in our home office staff have a profit-sharing as well as an equity position in the company <m> they own stock in the company. (Our field sales force doesn’t) have the profit-sharing opportunity but they have the equity position, which lets every person affiliated with Family Heritage participate and grow in the development and success of the company.
Our stock — which is privately held — has grown at a compound growth rate exceeding 25 percent since 1990. They earn bonuses on that stock, called an equity bonus, and that has grown at 19 percent since 1993. The company they’re building is theirs.
How do you manage your company’s growth while remaining true to its roots and core principles?
If every person in a company understands the philosophy and the core principles of that company, then every decision that you’re faced with, the measuring stick is already in place. So it becomes a very simple issue of saying, ‘Does this measure up to who we are and what we’re trying to do?’ If it does, then you do it, and if it doesn’t, you dismiss it.
What has been the biggest challenge in quick growth, and how have you managed it?
You must communicate frequently and completely with your people at every level about what you’re trying to do and why what you’re trying to do is important to them and to the customers that we serve.
I’m in close contact with the senior leadership team, either face-to-face or by phone throughout the week, and we bring together the department heads and the leadership team every Monday to touch base and see where we are, what we accomplished last week, what we feel good about and what our focus is for the next week.
The second thing we do is have employee meetings every six weeks to two months, where we bring people together to discuss how we’re doing. Then we have off-site planning sessions where we really get into the extended vision of what we’re trying to do and how we’re going to do it. Communication leads to the training and development of who they are and what they can do to build the company.
How did you plan for future growth in your new Broadview Heights headquarters?
(The first building is) 65,000 square feet, and then we will be building a second 65,000-square-foot building adjacent to it. It’s just another commitment to our home office staff, as well as our field sales force.
It’s just another visible image of who we believe we are and where we are headed. We’re going to do nothing but grow and add people. Northern Ohio has a very talent-rich pool of people at every level. We started with three of us, and today, (we’re) at 75, and in the not-very-distant future, we’ll be at 300. We’ve consistently added, and we will just continue to do that as the company grows and grows.
HOW TO REACH: Family Heritage Life Insurance Company of America, (440) 922-5222 or http://www.familyheritagelife.com
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