Very early in his career, Howard Lewis was shocked.
“I worked in situations where, when you would engage the people, the warehouse people or the office people or whatever, it was clear that they had no sense of mission of what they were trying to do,” he says. “You would ask someone, ‘What are you doing?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I move these papers from here to there,’ and you’d say, ‘Why are you doing that?’ and they would say, ‘I don’t know.’ When a person operates at that level, how can you be effective?”
He learned then that engaging people in the business would yield far better results than keeping them in the dark. So when he started Family Heritage Life Insurance Co. of America more than two decades ago, he made it a point to focus on people. Twenty-one years later, that still rings true.
Throughout the downturn, he hasn’t lost any employees to layoffs or downsizing. While hiring has slowed, the company has still brought people in. And Family Heritage has maintained all of its employee programs and benefits — and it even ate the increased health care costs this year instead of passing them on to employees.
You may think that doing these things would wreak havoc on the financial side, but despite the down economy and maintaining all of the employee programs, Lewis has grown the insurance company from $102.3 million in 2006 to $152.2 million last year — earning it a spot on the Inc. 5000 list this year.
“What is the base of that growth and success?” says Lewis, chairman, president and CEO. “It’s people. It’s simply people. Having the right people, having them clearly understand what the objective is, what the mission is, giving them the training and support they need to do their job, and then giving them the encouragement and the help along the way. People will achieve extraordinary results if they know where you’re trying to go and why you’re trying to go there and what’s in it for them.”
