After teaching elementary school right out of college I joined the insurance industry in 1977. I spent the last 46 years in both independent wholesale and retail agencies in Iowa, Idaho and Minnesota. My roles have focused on sales and sales leadership, growth through mergers and acquisitions as well as organic strategies.

I have held the role of President of the Boise and Minneapolis office for a London broker, Sedgwick, which was acquired by the world’s largest broker Marsh McClennan. There I was part of the leadership team to develop a new division within Marsh called Marsh Advantage America that focused on the insurance needs of small businesses. We had 64 offices across the US.

I joined a startup insurance agency, Bearence Management Group in 2007 and we grew this from $1M to $16M in 11 years. Our target market was small business, surrounding them with expertise in personal, commercial insurance and employee benefits. We had 3 offices in IA, NE and MN.

While at Bearence, I focused on sales leadership and talent recruitment and M&A opportunities. I also became familiar working with private equity as a partner. In 2014 our PE firm sold Bearence to Broadstreet Partners. It was an amazing journey through that process working with an investment banker.

In 2018 we merged our agency with North Risk Partners who was also owned by Broadstreet. My last 5 years in this business was my best as the team we had was second to none! We thrived and grew from 150 employees to over 450 employees in 5 states. In these 5 years I was the president of the Twin Cities, Employee Practice Leader for all North Risk Partners and a partner/owner.

INDUSTRY
Insurance and Risk Management

SKILL EXPERTISE:
Leader of teams and mentoring new talent in the industry
Talent recruitment
Mergers and Acquisitions/growth strategies
Sales leadership and planning