A Conversation with Mike Hamilton – Episode #2

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Beyond the Challenge is a podcast where executives in the insurance and financial services industry share their insights and experiences. Hosts Kevin and Sandy Dougherty talk with today’s top business leaders about what keeps them up at night and the biggest opportunity organizations can capitalize on today. We encourage you to listen, share, and subscribe to our program.

Kevin and Sandy Dougherty each have over 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services, corporate leadership, and executive search. They’re the owners of Global Corporate Solutions and Global Corporate Leaders. Global Corporate Solutions partners with organizations to gain efficiencies and contain costs. Global Corporate Leaders partners with organizations to enhance and evaluate talent.

Beyond the Challenge podcast is sponsored by Exactuals, perfecting payments and the data driving them.

Welcome to Beyond the Challenge. Here are your hosts, Kevin and Sandy.

(interview)

Kevin: Welcome to Beyond the Challenge. Today, we are talking with Mike Hamilton, Senior Vice President, Chief Distribution and Marketing Officer for RBC Insurance, about the challenges faced by carriers to grow their bottom line, stay relevant in the COVID-19 world. As the head of sales and distribution, Mike Hamilton is responsible for leading RBC Insurance sales and distribution teams across Canada and across multiple channels. Welcome to Beyond the Challenge.

Mike: Sure, Kevin. Thanks.

Kevin: Mike, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career?

Mike: It’s — yeah, it started quite a while back, I would say, 25 years ago. I started with Merrill Lynch, went through their professional development program and became Merrillized down in Princeton, if you will, and built a block of business over the course of seven years and had a relatively successful timeframe. From there, I went to Jackson National Life during all the insurance regulation era with the gentlemen of Bob Saltzman and Dr. Greg Salsbury and, basically, revamped they, as an insurance company at the time, which was roughly an $8 billion company, and over the next three years, we took it to a $65 billion company and got into acquisition mode and had quite a bit of success and I learned a ton from that opportunity. From there, I joined a venture capital firm, got involved in mergers and acquisitions of insurance companies and ended up running American Pioneer, Constitution Life, Heritage Health as well as Pennsylvania Life back up in Toronto, Ontario. So I became their global president, if you will, of acquisition of companies that they purchased and the idea was to turn them around, build them to a point that they’d wanna be acquired by a third party and did that very successfully. And roughly three to four years later, we sold Pennsylvania Life to La Capitale out of Quebec and then I was recruited by Nationwide out of Columbus, Ohio, as President of their NFN, or Nationwide Financial Network, and all the agents selling property and casualty, life, health, wealth, retirement funds, working alongside people such as Peter Golato and working for Mark Thresher. Great, just a great opportunity and I really enjoyed my time. I spent roughly four years at Nationwide and then RBC recruited me, Royal Bank of Canada, to come up to Toronto to run their insurance network across Canada to revamp it as a multi-line distribution opportunity, both as a manufacturer as well as proprietary brokerage distribution, and that was basically nine years ago and I’ve enjoyed my time since and have had some great successes, challenges, opportunities, and I’ve really enjoyed my time so I continue to hang my hat with RBC today.

Kevin: Mike, so far, insurance carriers have weathered the COVID crisis exceptionally well, largely due to investments they made in networks, applications, laptops, and more. The crisis did expose a number of gaps and vulnerabilities. The big question now facing leading carriers is this: How do we anticipate business strategies to accommodate a new way of working and still grow revenue? What has been your strategy on partnering and building client relationships in the new digital world?

Mike: It’s a great question, Kevin. I think in building the network and, again, within the factions across the industry, I know some individuals and some companies have been challenged with expanding their network, expanding those relationships, and I will say I’m proud of both my team as well as myself and RBC as we’ve been able to really deepen our relationships, gain a lot of focus, but do that from really keeping our promises to the clients, making sure that we’re there. We pick up the phone. You know, oftentimes, a lot of organizations struggle and, within a very short period of time, we became a virtual insurance company but we managed that and really led from the front by engaging both brokers and our career agents as well as our teams across Canada to ensure that they could deliver what they needed to deliver to each and every client and we never left or really never missed a beat. While doing that, we became known from leading from the front and other organizations really asked to tap into our expertise and being able to do that and expand our network, and as opposed to putting up a shield and just doing what we do, we invited them into the team to help expand their own networks and it’s worked out very well.

Kevin: How have you sold your sales force on changing from an in-person sales to a new relationship strategy?

Mike: Yeah, that’s — it was a challenge in the beginning. I think it’s something that we have to take a hard look. Again, you have to lead from the front with very candid discussion. I mean, we say the words but very often, we try to placate the field, if you will, by saying, you know, “This is just gonna last.” I remember back in February, March timeframes, many organizations were telling their field force, you know, “Just hang on for a few months, we’ll be back at this in July and August and September.” The reality is, if you will, I made a bit of a bet and I said, “Folks, we made a decision, we’re gonna be innovative and we’re going virtual and we’re gonna be in this at a minimum for another year and if not longer,” because the muscle memory of our clients is going to adjust to the new norm and sitting there and thinking that we’re gonna go back and sit across the table and invite those individuals into our house, just look at our own actions, whether that’s as a country or that’s on policy and everything that’s going on. We see all the vaccinations taking place or the vaccination coming and the reality is people are still very nervous. After that, what will take place? The fact is that you have to lead your people to say, you know, “It’s okay, we’ve gotta change, we’ve gotta develop.” Give them the tools that they need to be successful and lead them down that path. We adjusted our sales process, we adjusted how we interconnected, we gave everyone the capability to do web access with their clients, and what ended up happening where, normally, a field agent would be doing, say, three to five appointments a day, they started realizing they could do 10, 15, sometimes even 20 appointments a day because they were more disciplined in their meetings, they were able to share the knowledge quite quickly with their clients on an ongoing basis but they could do it through Webex so they felt they were on the table as their clients as opposed to, if you will, selling them or pitching them a product. And in essence, they became a generalist to fill the needs of those clients over the long term.

Kevin: Mike, how do you help your producers evaluate and grow their book of business?

Mike: We help our producers when we look at the block of business, again, really connecting with clients, doing demographic breakdowns, and understanding what the needs of the clients. Again, in the past, we’ve looked at everything from lifestyle planning, setting up blocks of business, your A clients, your B clients, your C clients. That doesn’t necessarily go away but what we are really doing is expanding the education, whether you’re a life and living benefits specialist to an investment specialist to, say, a home and auto specialist because I handle all lines of business, we are the largest multi-liner in Canada, so we have a number of avenues that we have to go down. And in the process of doing that, we have to ensure client’s needs are completely met but also understanding what we refer to as the NBO, the next best offer, and coordination with their own demographic and their lifestyle change over time. So, in educating them to do that, review that, to help them identify mining the block but on top of that, where to go hunt, so, really, as a hunter relationship model, it just is being done in a different way so that they can collect to really find their key COIs, the centers of influence, that can maximize their benefit as an individual and be very community based and solution based for each and every one of their clients.

Kevin: How are you dealing with the aging sales force?

Mike: Now, the aging sales force is really — I took a stance a number of years ago to build, number one, to build from within, meaning we provide a lot of onboarding training to get people. Our goal is to create a successful career track for individuals coming into this business versus the old style where I think we both got into this business, which is, “Okay, you need to develop over the next 18 months, you know, a thousand clients and a $100,000 in recurring commissions and you’ll be successful.” And the thing is, there’s a 90 percent dropout rate. That was always a failing model. So what we did is we converted it to bring people in with the mindset to make them successful, to give them all the tools that we could through the onboarding and training. Additionally, I think, and we’ve been talking about networking, is also networking with the key colleges and universities that provide financial education, insurance degrees, and insurance licenses to make sure that we become a feeder system for them so that one of their alumni or one of their folks can redistribute those resources back into their university, they’re able to promise those individuals opportunities outside and being the largest financial institution Canada, it’s a great proposition to not only brand with those organizations but also to be provided, you know, young people that wanna get into our business. And in fact, our age, within our agencies, is actually quite a bit lower than the industry average. I’m very proud about that.

Kevin: Wow.

Mike: But we are building from within.

Kevin: How did you recruit and train the best talent?

Mike: Yeah, I think recruiting and retaining, recruiting, as I said, we go to these universities, we’ve really established a career path and, again, I think more so now than ever, especially with young people coming into the industry, they wanna understand what that career path is and what’s great about our industry is you don’t necessarily need to be doing the same thing every year or every two years. You get to develop over time. You get to develop your skill sets, different types of clientele, possibly becoming an underwriter to a claims person to getting involved in product, or do you maintain being a broker and an agent and continue to build that network more broadly and taking care of clients and building something that’s gonna — that you’re entrepreneurial and gonna be bigger than even what you anticipated? But when we truly look at it, making sure those individuals are successful was always key.

Kevin: Mike, thank you for your time today. It’s been great to learn more about how RBC has adapted their business strategy to accommodate a new way of working and finding new ways to grow revenue.

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