Growing their own in Madison, Wisconsin

Rough Notes, Nov 2003 by Pillsbury, Dennis

* Consistency in approach regardless of level. "We are professional and thorough. We put candidates through multiple interviews."

* Enthusiasm that is brought to the interviews. "We readily share our enthusiasm for our jobs and our goals for the future. That way people know they are coming in to a growing, energetic team."

Risk management

As important as it is to focus on finding and nurturing the right people, equally critical to the success and growth of M3 has been a relentless focus on solving clients' problems. "We made a decision in 1989 to bring risk management personnel on staff in order to provide a higher level of consulting service to our clients and to allow us to advise on more complicated risks," Mike Victorson notes. "The decision to invest in our services by having on-staff risk management talent has allowed us to focus on the middle market more aggressively." Today, the agency has five full-time risk management personnel. "We work with insurance companies to develop safety and loss control programs for our clients. We also provide health insurance data analysis, reporting and budget forecasting to clients that have self-funded or heavily experienced rated health or workers compensation plans."

Rick Kekula points out M3's strategic relationships with companies and RiskProNet in saying, "Our clients expect us to have the best relationships with the insurance markets in order to serve their needs. We take this commitment seriously by actively participating on the agency councils or advisor groups for many of our P&C and EB companies. In addition, our participation in RiskProNet provides our clients with national and international risk management and insurance placement expertise."

Mike Moore adds, "We also pride ourselves on the professionalism of all our people. We have a number of people with CIC, CISR and CPCU designations. And those people who don't have a designation have a plan focused on getting one. We believe it is very important that our professionals be well educated in insurance not only so they can help our clients, but also because it helps them feel better about themselves. They are confident in what they are doing and that is reflected in the manner in which they interact with clients."

Employee benefits

Mike Moore continues by pointing out that the professionalism of the M3 people "has allowed us to develop a teamwork approach to solving all our clients' problems. We have equal bench strength in property/casualty and employee benefits. That gives us the resources and ability to meet the property, casualty and employee benefits needs of our clients effectively. There are not many agencies that can offer a commercial client the level of expertise, resources and relationships that come with a P&C and a Benefits practice as established as ours."

Mike Victorson adds, "Our emphasis on education allows us to have people from such different backgrounds. We spend the money to send people to producer schools. We have an outsourced trainer who coaches our people on the skills necessary to deliver for our clients. We've invested a great deal of time and effort to find good people so it just as important to spend money at the other end to retain and grow those people."