What’s your background, and how did you get into the world of insurance?
I grew up as an insurance brat. My father got into insurance when I was eight or nine years old, and honestly, we couldn’t afford a babysitter, so he would take me along.
He started out doing industrial life, which is lower face-value life insurance. Every Friday, we’d go to 50 or 55 houses collecting $2 or $3 from these elder ladies. They would pinch my fat cheeks and give me pound cake. I think I gained 40 pounds that first year!
But honestly, I fought getting into insurance at first. When you’re nine years old, insurance is about as exciting as being a mortician. However, as I got older, I started to realize that residual income wasn’t such a bad thing.
When I was around 18 to 20, I was still doing insurance part time with my dad. My dad’s love was always life insurance and group health insurance, but I tended to gravitate more toward businesses and business owners. I eventually fell into commercial insurance, and that was what really excited me.
There’s something about talking to someone about the business they’ve built. You can see them come alive with energy when they talk about it, and I really connected with that.
You had your own agency and worked with your father’s agency. What happened there?
My father had been pretty much retired for the last five years I was working at his agency, so I was managing and running it. I hung my own shingle for a while and had my own agency for about six or seven months before joining Smart Choice.
Then John Burnett Jr., rest his soul, started talking to me about a Territory Manager opportunity with Smart Choice. I actually turned him down at first. But John knew me, and he asked me three times. Finally, he told me, “You’re taking this blanking job.”
I think part of it was that he was tired of interviewing people, but he also knew I could do it. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself at the time. John just had a way of reading people.
Was your agency already signed up with Smart Choice when you met John?
We were already signed up with Smart Choice. I don’t know our exact number, but I want to say we were among the first 50 agencies to sign up when Smart Choice came to Georgia. John was someone my father had known for years, and he was the one who brought us into Smart Choice back in 2001.
Tell me about some of the agencies you’ve brought on board and watched succeed. What does that mean to you personally?
Honestly, I get more of a thrill out of watching someone come out of darkness into light than I do from what I would consider my own successes.
Martha Hernandez is a great example. She’s been featured in the magazine before, and her story is really interesting. In light of everything going on with State Farm now, Martha was a trendsetter. She made that jump half a generation ago because she realized that, to really help the people she wanted to help, she needed more than one answer. She gave up a very lucrative State Farm agency to go independent with no guarantees, and she hit the ground running. I think I can speak for her when I say she’s a lot happier with life than she was before.
Another example is Michael Marquis, an agent up in Blairsville. He came from working on cars—putting in aftermarket parts, stereos and window tint—so he had seen insurance from the claims side. Then, on a wild hair one day, he decided, “I want to go sell insurance.”
After about six months, he realized that the carrier he was with couldn’t offer him anything beyond what they had already given him, and he really wanted to go out on his own.
So, we started talking, and he started his agency at his kitchen table. We recently got to celebrate some big milestones. His agency brought on a couple of tremendously preferred carriers, and financially, he crossed a milestone that would have seemed like Mount Everest two years ago.
Now he’s bringing his kids into it, too, and that gives me those warm and fuzzy feelings because it reminds me of my own childhood. You see his kid sitting there with her own little desk and a coloring book, listening to these conversations. You think your kids aren’t listening, but they’re really picking up on what you’re saying. Seeing that takes me right back to growing up around my dad’s insurance business.
Tell me about your experience with NAAIA and what the organization means to you.
I went to my first NAAIA event three years ago when they were in New Orleans. I must give credit to Phyllis because I had never really heard about NAAIA until she mentioned it to me. I didn’t have a lot of preconceptions going in, but when I walked into that room for the first time and looked around, what stood out to me was the diversity. It wasn’t just a room full of Black people. There were Black people, Brown people, Caribbean people and people from all different ethnic groups and genders.
What really excited me was the range of ages. The average agency owner is around 65 years old right now, and here were college students intentionally choosing careers in insurance and risk management. That’s not something I ever would have imagined. Insurance and risk management aren’t necessarily seen as sexy professions.
I want to be an evangelist for that and help more people understand that this is a phenomenal industry. I don’t have a college degree, and you can see where I’m sitting today. There are plenty of people who do have college degrees who have also found their place in this industry. There’s something here for everyone.
If NAAIA is the way someone finds their way into this industry, so be it. But even if it’s not, we can still support what they’re doing. Whether it’s Black agents, Latino agents, women or anyone else coming into the industry, we all need to work together because my success should be their success.
What role do you think Smart Choice can play in helping bring more minorities into the insurance industry?
That’s part of what gives me energy about what I do. If someone sees a face that looks like theirs, then all of a sudden, it feels possible.
One of the things I want people to understand about insurance is that you don’t have to be flashy, sophisticated or fancy to succeed. Insurance may seem like a boring industry, but it can feed you for a lifetime. And quite honestly, if you think it’s boring, you’re just not doing it right. It’s so much broader and deeper than sitting behind a desk all day. If you like Ferraris, yachts or just about anything else, there’s an insurance side to it.
And you don’t have to be an agent. We need people on the actuarial side. We need underwriters. There are so many different opportunities within this industry.
Like I mentioned earlier, I love seeing that light come into someone’s eyes when they finally get something and have the confidence to say, “I can do this, and I will.” If that person happens to be a minority—a Black woman, a Latina woman like Martha—or even someone like Michael, who is a Caucasian man but came into this with no understanding of the industry and found success, I love being able to play some small part in that.
At the end of the day, I want more people to see that this is an industry where they can succeed. I want more good people in insurance.
What do you hope to accomplish as state director of Alabama?
I want to bring on a lot of good agents, help them write a lot of good business and bring the third and fourth generations into this industry. I want people to see faces that look like theirs and know that it’s possible. If nothing else, I’d love to bring someone into this industry who might never have considered it before.
As far as my approach in Alabama, I solicit a lot of advice because I believe you work with people, not that people work for you. I’ve been talking with Israel and Liz, who I’ve worked with really since I got to Smart Choice, and I listen to our agents and what they need.
Education is also really important to me. That’s one reason I’m interested in working more with PIA because they’re very focused on education. I’ve seen people pass their insurance exam on a Friday and start selling on Monday without really understanding what they’re selling. They don’t know the coverages well enough to explain them.
I want to get away from having an industry full of nothing but salespeople. I want agents to understand the entire situation, know the products they’re selling and be able to advise their clients correctly.