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From the mailroom to the boardroomInterviewed by Nathan Leaf
Age: 35 Position: President and chief executive officer for M3 (Mortenson, Matzelle & Meldrum), 3113 W. Beltline Company at a glance: M3 is a commercial insurance agency founded in 1968 by Loren Mortenson. The company has 165 employees, mostly insurance agents, at five state offices in Madison, Milwaukee, Wausau, Green Bay and Eau Claire. M3 has grown from 11 employees with $11 million in premiums and $1 million in operating revenue in 1985 to $325 million in premiums and $23.5 million in operating revenue last year. The company projects 20 percent growth in operating revenue for 2006. Background: Grew up in Escanaba, Mich., about 100 miles northeast of Green Bay. Self-proclaimed "yooper" (a person from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) Professional history: "100 percent M3. I essentially started in the 'mailroom.' I did a couple mail routes, typing and filing. It was humbling. Then (I) went into telemarketing, customer service work and on to sales. Joined the sales-management track, became a vice president in 1999, chief operating officer in 2001, president in 2003, chief executive officer in 2005." Education: Bachelor of arts in communications and political science from Augustana College (Rock Island, Ill.) in 1992 Personal: Wife Karin, daughter Annika, 7, sons Ethan, 5, and Erik, 2 Hobbies: Golf and church activities at Community of Life Lutheran Church, Oregon Q. Coming out of Augustana with a degree, did you expect to start in the mailroom? A. Absolutely not. I was forever law school bound. The reason I got here was because I was wait-listed at the (UW-Madison) law school here and I didn't get in right away. (While waiting to get in) I met (company founder) Loren Mortenson just by chance. And he started talking about this business and what it had meant to him. Q. How did you meet Mortenson? A. I met him through my father-in-law. It's kind of a weird story. The way I'm put together, it's kind of a God thing. He had arranged some interviews for me because I didn't want to go to law school in Chicago. And they all flamed out. All crashed and burned. So I was getting ready to head back to Augustana and he says, "Why don't you stick around and come to dinner with my friends?" So what do I have to lose, it's a free dinner, right? So I go to dinner and one of the guys at dinner is Loren Mortenson. They hear my story and use it as conversation fodder. After dinner he comes up behind me, puts his arm around me and says, "You need to call me." I called him and two interviews later I took the job. Q. What kind of effect has your fairly quick rise had on you? A. One of the things that it does is it keeps you pretty humble. One of the things you have to recognize is the collective wisdom in an organization. Because if you think you can bring that to the table at that age, you'll find out pretty quickly that you can't. Also the fact that I got the chance to do this job speaks a lot about the kind of company that Loren Mortenson and Charlie Meldrum tried to run. The fact that they would take a chance on a young guy to fill that role, it makes an indelible impact when you're then in my seat in how I want to provide opportunities for people in their career, and trust their ability. Q. Why do you think they took that chance? A. I think they saw enough in me that I could handle some pretty key aspects of the job. An ability to communicate. An ability to connect with people. To cast a vision. To bring energy to the position. I think the other big thing they had to see was that I would be humble enough to rely on a bunch of other people who are here and had lots of experience and were involved in running the company. I think if they would have seen me taking a pass, maybe starting in that 1999 time frame, or (that I was a) maverick ... I don't think I would have gotten the job. Frankly, that would have been foolish of me and I wouldn't have been successful. Q. Coming in without a business background, did you have to learn everything on the job? A. Yeah, absolutely. It was difficult but there were some advantages. The difficult part was that this is a fairly technical business and you can't rush a lot of technical knowledge until you get a chance to experience it. That took years. But you don't bring in any preconceived head trash about what you can or cannot do. From that perspective it was relatively natural. ... For me any type of sales that is contrived or programmed, frankly, is either cheesy or easily flushed out by the buyer. I learned the sales business from my father, who is a barber. He didn't take any appointments. So he had to convince people that they needed to stick around and get their hair cut even if there were three or four people sitting in (line). And you only do that through building relationships with people and connecting with them and that's probably the best sales training I ever got. Q. Growing up as the son of a barber, are you particular about which barber you go to in Madison? A. You know, I don't have much hair left ... but I can't bring myself not to go to a barber. I found a guy who I like over at Westgate. (But) I try to time my haircuts to when I'm going to be seeing my dad. So sometimes it gets a little shaggy. I still love getting haircuts from my dad. Q. What do you do when you're not working? A. We're pretty involved in our kids' activities right now, whether it's band or soccer. We are very active with our church. A lot of things in the community during the week. We get together in a lot of small groups. We do a lot of traveling right now to see family -- my folks up in the Upper Peninsula, a brother in Chicago, another brother in lower Michigan. We tend to be on the road for weekends seeing family, so that takes up a lot of our time. When you're raising kids at that age, that's pretty much it. They take up your time. Q. What's your typical work day like? A. That's actually pretty easy for me to answer right now. I spend my time on three primary things: people, production and strategy. What that translates to is there are four executives in our company that I talk to every day. And there is a smaller group of managers that I talk to a couple times a week. And salespeople that I rotate through and spend time with every week. On the production side, that's time I'm spending with our insurance companies, our clients. The strategy component is more making sure I'm spending enough time looking out over the horizon at what's facing us, where this industry is going, what our customers need, what we need to stay competitive. The nice thing is that we restructured the company for the first time in 20 years last year. After that restructuring it really allowed me to focus my time at a high level. Q. What was the reason for the restructuring? A. We made the decision that we wanted to remain a privately held company and we didn't want to sell out. And in order to do that we needed to do a couple things. One of those is we've expanded our footprint. We now have five offices around the state. We invested tremendously in people and resources. We've grown our staff more than 50 people in the last few years. What that required us to do, quite frankly, was get flatter. To spread out responsibility to more people. So then that restructuring called on me to operate at a higher level, which I enjoy. Q. Why stay private? A. When people come to work at M3, they come to work for M3. They didn't join the company hoping that they could work for a company out of state that is going to manage us via spreadsheet. That's the first thing. The second one is we think remaining a privately held company is going to best serve our clients and attract the best talent. We've had good success as of late attracting real good talent because they know they're going to be involved in running the company, pushing us to new heights, shaping our future. This doesn't happen every time, but in our industry people who get purchased lose a lot of that decision-making and direction. Q. What are M3's goals? A. Our goals are to grow and double the size of our company by 2009. We think that's an integral part of the strategy to remaining privately held. In our business people who do what we do are called on every day to continue to bring more and more resources to the table. Specialized knowledge. Insurance companies are asking us to do more for businesses. The only way you can do that is to continue to grow and invest more in the company. Q. Is there a limit to M3's growth? A. We think that we will continue to grow to become one of the largest insurance brokers in the country. We think that will be a natural byproduct of doing the right thing every day. Q. What are some of the challenges that you face in that growth? A. We have a couple that are pretty acute. When you grow a company you have big communication challenges. Keeping people on the same page. Not just the "what" but the "why." Another huge piece is attracting talent and finding talent, then on-boarding it and training it. Because we're a people business, 80 percent of our expenses are related to people. The last one is continuing to sharpen our message so we can maintain a competitive advantage. That challenge never goes away. If you start relaxing, it's over. You will get beaten. It's the nature of the business; we have a lot of high-quality competitors. Q. How do you keep that competitive edge? A. One of the things is you have to bring energy to the job and then apply that energy to the customer. Another one is doing research and homework on your competitors. Even getting outside your normal business environment, let's say Wisconsin, and learning what's going on in other parts of the country and potentially learning some progressive ideas. You don't need to read a business book on it. I think you just have to show up to work every day and pay attention and work hard. Q. What are some of the biggest triumphs that you have had at M3? A. I was involved in the transition from Loren Mortenson and Rich Matzelle to Charlie Meldrum and now to me. And I don't think that's ever easy when you do that. And the fact that we've been able to do that and continue to grow as a company is a triumph. The other one is how we handled a really company-busting exercise in restructuring our company. When you move that much cheese with that many people, I think there's a huge opportunity to screw that up. I'm really proud of how everyone rallied around the business' need to do that. Q. What's been your biggest failure? A. Growing in my ability to make the tough decisions as it relates to people and handle them when it needs to be handled. When you're in the people business like this, often times what can happen is it's hard to make tough decisions about people because you've built a relationship with them. Q. What do you like about doing business in the Madison area? A. I find people to be straightforward. I find them to be hard working. They value relationships. And there is a sense of loyalty here that I enjoy. Q. What do you dislike about doing business in Madison? A. The only thing that can be hard when you're doing business in this town is that it isn't that big of a town. So sometimes when you are searching for a certain type of skill set there aren't maybe 500 people doing that job that could be part of a potential labor pool that you might find in Chicago or Minneapolis or someplace like that. We've run into some of those staffing challenges as we've tried to grow. nleaf@madison.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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