We tried to get George Hogue to come to the IIAT convention in June so we could give him a plaque and a round of applause, but he won’t be there. He made other plans. And besides, he doesn’t like to call attention to himself.
The reason we wanted to recognize George is that he retired in April after seven years as the driving force behind our Personal Lines Connection program—a lifeline for small-town agencies needing personal lines markets. Since George won’t let us give him a pat on the back at the convention, I’ll just have to do it here.
George’s role in what was then called the Market Finder program was one of the many flashes of brilliance (one of the others was hiring me as IIAT executive director) from the inspired imagination of DeValse Cox of Wichita Falls, IIAT’s president in 1983.
As chairman of the IIAT committee assigned to develop programs to assist members, Cox had seen the need in the early 1990s to help small-town agencies being frozen out of the business by increased production requirements by insurers.
What appeared to insurance companies as an inefficient distribution system was viewed by Cox as a source of profitable business being abandoned not because it was unprofitable, but because companies couldn’t justify the expense of supporting far-flung agencies in small towns. Cox envisioned IIAT linking these agencies together into a program that would appeal to an insurance company.
His first job was to sell a company. That proved to be easy—he was friends with the Aetna vice president in charge of personal lines who had just moved to Hartford from Dallas, and he got a buy-in over breakfast during the IIAT convention.
His second job was to find a foot soldier to make it happen. At about that time, George was taking early retirement from Aetna as a commercial lines marketing manager, and had contacted his old friend Cox about prospects in the agency business. Cox immediately connected the two opportunities.
George proved to be perfect for the job. A small-town boy himself, he loves people who live in small towns. He thrived on the appreciation he received from the rural agents he visited for the Market Finder program; he also thrived on a grueling travel schedule that would have exhausted a less-hyper employee. An always-up person, he was never discouraged by the vagaries of small-town business culture that sometimes resulted in missed appointments or unfulfilled promises. A penny-pincher, George could stretch an expense account further than even our accounting staff thought possible.
George not only helped launch and develop the Market Finder program, he also gave IIAT a presence in rural areas for the first time. The good will he created among these agencies added a new dimension to IIAT’s mission and level of member service.
Still, George was surprised that the program was slow to gain acceptance among rural agencies. Some of this reluctance was due to lack of confidence that Aetna (or Travelers, which bought the Aetna P&C business in 1997) would stick with the agency in hard times. He was also surprised at the number of calls he received from small urban agencies unable, like their rural counterparts, to meet production requirements.
There were some pleasant surprises. Many of the rural agencies George contacted were owned by young men or women, a reassuring development at a time when mergers and lack of ownership interest by young producers in urban agencies had forced IIAT to abandon its annual Young Agents Conference. And, the IIAT program quickly gained such a positive reputation among other companies that George frequently found himself in competition with another carrier for an agency’s business, even those that had not previously been seen in rural areas.
Although the program was not created to be an incubator for agencies capable of graduating to a full company appointment, a half-dozen agencies have made that transition to full appointment.
The program currently has 85 agencies appointed with Travelers and 20 with The Hartford, which joined the program two years ago. It has literally saved the livelihood of dozens of agencies swept aside in companies’ relentless push for efficiency and growth.
Any objective cost-benefit analysis would show that IIAT’s income from the program barely covers the expenses, raising the question of whether it is worth the investment. But a non-financial evaluation would clearly show a valuable intangible benefit in the form of a renewed optimism among the agencies who seized this opportunity to succeed. And, it would show that George Hogue deserves most of the credit for creating each of these opportunities, one at a time, month in and month out, in seven years of crisscrossing Texas like Johnny Appleseed, planting new agencies to grow the Independent Agency System in soil others mistakenly considered sterile.
Ernest Stromberger is the executive director of the Independent Insurance Agents of Texas.
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