When I took over as president of Camargo Insurance in 2018, I knew the agency was due for an overhaul.

At that point, Camargo was made up of a few partners running the business and serving their clients. It was a great business, but that model was capped out, and the agency was only achieving single-digit growth.

I was over a decade into my career, and I was seeing the industry change very rapidly. As a third-generation agency leader, I wanted to take the agency to the next level, bring it into the digital age and create a foundation for decades of growth. I wanted Camargo not just to be relevant, but to lead the pack in the insurance agency space.

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To do that, it didn’t seem like the agency’s leadership could make incremental change. We needed a wholesale restructuring of the operation. This included making big changes in Camargo’s processes, technology and staffing.

Tearing down and rebuilding the agency took a lot of work, but in the years since then, it has paid off in consistent growth, a thriving workplace culture, and industry recognition, including a 2023 Agent for the Future Award.

Ultimately the key to breaking out of stagnation was our focus on building a sales team. All the other changes we made flowed through the lens of figuring out the best way to create an environment where producers could rapidly grow profitable books of business.

If you build it, they will come

When it came to recruiting, I started with the idea that “if you build it, they will come.” I wanted to build an office where salespeople would want to work. I had a vision of a square office with lots of natural light, glass walls for the producers’ offices so they could communicate easily with the rest of the team, and walls covered in dashboards to track sales data.

To make that vision a reality, we needed a location that would attract the kind of talent we wanted, so we moved Camargo’s office out of the suburbs and into a downtown location that has nice views and is near local universities.

We also needed the right tech to power a sales team. We implemented an integrated AMS-CRM to manage workflows, create custom experiences for clients, and gather the data needed to manage a rapidly growing business.

Building the team

At first, our strategy was to recruit young B2B salespeople who didn’t have insurance experience and train them on the technical side of insurance.

As the agency grew, it became harder for me to manage recruiting and training myself. Bringing someone from A to Z – from no insurance experience to being a qualified commercial lines producer – is a long journey and takes a lot of resources. We realized that to move the needle on validation time, we needed to recruit more experienced producers and bring in sales leadership that went beyond my own experience.

Of course, C-suite-level leadership is expensive. The solution for Camargo has been fractional leadership. We hired fractional CFO, CMO, COO and sales leaders to help meet the organization’s growing needs and set KPIs for every business function.

We also built an advisory board and implemented The Entrepreneurs Operating System (EOS). EOS created the structure and accountability necessary to take things to the next level. We pair rising leaders within our organization with our fractional leaders and board members to mentor and prepare them to lead Camargo into the future.

Investing in diversity

When we started expanding the team at Camargo, it quickly became apparent that we had an opportunity to build a diverse team.

Diversity and inclusion is a big part of who I am and what I believe in. I come from a family of immigrants – three of my four grandparents were born outside of the United States. Their stories of survival and taking huge risks to come to this country to build a better life were a big part of my upbringing.

When I think about DEI in business, I think about it as an opportunity. There are all kinds of advantages to diverse teams. Diversity brings in different perspectives that help teams clarify ideas and find new ways of doing things. It expands a team’s reach, because the individuals may be connected to different groups and communities. Plus, a lot of high-performing insurance professionals prefer to work in a diverse group versus a group that is more homogenous.

When recruiting for Camargo, I’m intentional about looking at the whole field and bringing in candidates from different backgrounds. Camargo’s team now includes people from a variety of backgrounds, and native speakers of  multiple languages. Our leadership team, advisory board, and sales team are equally represented by men and women.

Staying true to the vision

Even as we made big changes at Camargo, we never lost sight of the agency’s purpose, which is empowering people to live their best lives.

We’re empowering people to live their best lives through the products we offer, and the way we deliver them. A family can’t buy that home without knowing that it’s covered. An entrepreneur can’t make that big investment to take their business to the next level without the right protection.

The Camargo team  lives, works and grows with our community, and people know we have their back when things happen. That’s why they choose to do business with us.

That bigger purpose and “why” behind our work drives our office culture as well. We want to empower employees to live their best lives and achieve their goals. That’s what powers everything we do.

Seeing the results

While restructuring the agency brought plenty of challenges, I’m excited about where we are today. The investments we made in building a sales team resulted in four consecutive years of more than 20% organic growth. We’ve built a thriving workplace culture – in 2023, the Cincinnati Business Journal named us as one of Cincinnati’s Best Places to Work.

Looking to the future, we plan to double the size of our sales team in the next three years. We’re working on creating a capital structure that will allow us to execute our strategy while remaining independent. In the meantime, we’re working on filling our pipeline with candidates and streamlining our processes so we can get people onboarded and validated quickly when we’re ready to hit go. We’re still laying the groundwork for long-term growth, and I’m excited to see what’s ahead.