Hands across the border

The Sitkins Group teams up with Canada's Bauman Consulting to create Sitkins International

By Elisabeth Boone, CPCU

If you’ve ever been in the same room as Roger Sitkins and Rick Bauman, the first thing that struck you most likely was their strong physical resemblance.

Appearances to the contrary, Rick and Roger aren’t brothers; in fact, they’re not even related. What binds them, however, may be something very close to blood ties: their shared commitment to helping independent agents and brokers define and present themselves as trusted advisers to a select client group, rather than as insurance salespeople to the world.

Rick heads up The Vertical Growth Network, based in Burlington, Ontario, which he established in 1997 to help brokerage owners in Canada achieve their personal vision of success, develop a great team, and attract ideal clients.

Roger is the founder and chief executive officer of The Sitkins Group, Inc., located in Fort Myers, Florida, which provides an array of consulting services to the agency owners who are members of The Sitkins 100™. The centerpiece of those services is The Vertical Growth Experience™, a series of training, coaching and networking services and programs that allow agencies and brokerages to grow their top line revenues and bottom line profits by 15% to 25% plus per year.

Roger recounts how he and Rick came to meet and begin to forge the ties that ultimately brought them together in the formation of Sitkins International.

“Ten years ago,” Roger says. “Rick called me one afternoon and said, ‘My name is Rick Bauman. I’ve been getting your newsletters and tapes for a long time; I know about your background. I’ve just sold my brokerage, and I want to be a consultant.’”

Roger continues, “After talking to Rick on the phone, I figured out very quickly that he was a sharp guy, and I told him that if he really had an interest, he should fly to Florida. Literally within 10 days, Rick was sitting in my office in Fort Myers. Within about 15 minutes, Rick and I were so connected that we were finishing each other’s sentences.”

“At that point,” Roger continues, “Rick and I basically built an agreement that he would become the sole licensee in Canada for The Vertical Growth Experience programs there.

The collaboration proved beneficial in a number of ways, Roger observes. “Once Rick got his group going, he started developing a lot of intellectual capital, and some of the best development and creation days I’ve ever had centered around our quarterly meetings in Toronto or Florida. Each of us would bring a big three-ring binder full of new ideas and strategies we were working on, and we would share ideas back and forth.”

Rick started with a small group of brokers and says, “The group now consists of 26 very high-performing brokers across Canada. I’ve learned from the model that Roger built,” he comments. “I’ve experimented with it and refined it to meet the needs of the brokerage community in Canada, and it’s worked very well here.”

Meanwhile, big changes were taking place at Sitkins headquarters in Fort Myers. In July 2005, Larry Linne left his job as vice president of sales for a leading independent agency in the southwest and joined The Sitkins Group. Today, he is president of Sitkins.

In 2006, Coach Sitkins welcomed his son, Patrick, into The Sitkins Group. Patrick, who is director of marketing, didn’t join his father’s company right out of college; instead he worked in another industry and signed on with Sitkins only after long deliberation and frank conversations with Roger. His coaching specialties include Agency Implementation, Rookie Development, Future Leader Development, and Business Development Center creation.

The next level

With changes taking place both within their respective organizations and in the insurance business worldwide, Roger says, “We realized that it was crucial for us to do even more international sharing.”

Last winter, Rick and Roger began to discuss ways of expanding their reach to address the new realities of their clients and the business environment in which they operate. In June of this year, they officially joined forces to form a new entity: Sitkins International.

Both Roger and Rick bring an impressive array of talent and experience to their new venture. As former agency and brokerage owners, they’re intimately familiar with the challenges of creating and motivating high-performance teams, identifying and attracting desirable clients, and delivering a quality of service that virtually competition-proofs those A-list customers.

“My experience and background enhance what these guys do,” Larry comments. “Each one of us has a unique skill set that we bring to this model and, as president, my role and responsibility is to build a company that will sustain itself beyond all of us.

“Our goal is to build a company that has what we call a ‘Carnegie-like’ experience, meaning that, as Dale Carnegie created a company and himself was the company for a long time, he made it possible for any of us today to attend a Dale Carnegie class although obviously we won’t see him there,” Larry explains. “Our perpetuation objective is to refine and expand the processes and programs that are now identified as Sitkins International so the organization can sustain itself through an enhanced level of coaches and intellectual capital.

“Our ultimate purpose is to continually identify what independent agencies and brokers struggle with and to develop solutions that make their job easier, and help them achieve confidence and control around those issues.

“That doesn’t have to be done by a name or a person,” Larry continues. “It can be done using unique intellectual capital, unique people, and unique processes, and those are all things that we’re developing. Now we have Rick, Roger, Larry, Bonita Argent, Gregg Goodmanson, and Patrick Sitkins, and each one of those six people has unique talents and skills, and the ability to coach within a framework that delivers the solutions our members are looking for.”

The diverse backgrounds of these coaches, Larry points out, allow Sitkins International to offer clients a wide array of value-added services in the areas of leadership development, strategic management, agency management, personal and small commercial lines, operations, account management and servicing, business development, future leader training, marketing concepts and branding, human resources, sales and sales management, finance, performance management, public speaking, and business acumen.

Gains for members

“Everything comes back to our members,” Roger asserts. “What do our clients gain by being associated with an international consulting firm versus one that a few years ago was just Roger Sitkins running around with a whistle? When we were negotiating the deal, we agreed that there were at least four parties that had to win,” he says.

“Number one, it had to be a good deal for our Canadian members. They had to see that they would be getting more value and more expertise with Sitkins International. They had bought so deeply into the concept of Vertical Growth that if something happened to Rick, they’d be worried about who was going to coach them,” Roger explains.

“The U.S. members had to see additional resources coming in; they could not see a dilution of what they were getting from us,” Roger continues. “Rick has spoken at almost all of our Extreme Networking meetings and has always been well received; our members love his ideas and strategies and use his materials when they return to their agencies.

“Bonita has also spoken at our meetings, so our U.S. members were saying, ‘Wow, we’re getting additional resources in leadership with Rick, plus now we’re finally going to have someone who can really step up to the plate and help us in personal lines and small commercial and agency operations.’

“And there’s a win for Rick, because he didn’t want to quit,” Roger says. “As a smart businessperson, he knows that there are always two elements of perpetuation: leadership perpetuation and financial perpetua-tion. So what this allowed Rick to do is to no longer have to worry about running his company on a day-to-day basis. He can truly employ and expand on his unique talents.

Finally, Roger says, “It had to be a win for Sitkins and our leadership and ownership team of Roger, Larry, and Patrick. We had to look at this deal and ask if it made sense for us. We think we’re pretty smart businesspeople, and it had to be a situation where we could say, ‘We are not diluting our talent; we are adding to it.’ Financially it had to be a good move for everyone, and it had to be a win for our employees,” Roger says. “Ultimately, we really saw the deal being a win for all four parties.”

What’s next

A key driver of the decision to form Sitkins International, Larry comments, was a thought process that began some two years ago among the Sitkins leadership team. “In alignment with our process of considering the long-term picture of the company, we asked ourselves: ‘What is it that will make the membership want to stay with us for many, many years to come?’” Larry explains. “We decided that expansion into both Canada and Latin America were elements that would bring additional value to our members.”

Looking from north to south, Larry continues, “We are looking at Latin America, and we believe it offers tremendous opportunity and global market access. Latin American brokers are involved in a lot more international coverage issues, so they have global markets available to them. In a lot of cases, brokers serve as both wholesalers and retailers. Our member agency in Lima, Peru, brings a lot of value to our membership, and now we’re talking to others in Latin America,” Larry says.

“The other side of it is that in the U.S., we’re seeing significant growth in the Hispanic population that needs to be addressed, and agencies from the Latin American culture can help U.S. agencies understand the Hispanic markets better and learn how to penetrate them,” Larry explains.

“In addition to our permanent staff of full-time coaches,” he notes, “we also have six associate coaches who are actively working in their agencies or brokerages and who conduct training in their particular areas of expertise. So now we have 12 coaches and 130 members—soon to be 150—who can share ideas and best practices, network at a very high level, be trained inside of a common language and culture, and get coaching with that necessary reinforcement to implement the strategies.

“Now we’re all aligning ourselves with what’s at the heart of every-thing we do: The Vertical Growth Experience,” Larry declares. “That’s what it’s all been built around, from Roger’s earliest days. It’s the experience that a member or client gets inside of this large network, and we believe we now have a sustainable model to create long-term opportunities to get into a family and culture that they can implement.”

As Sitkins International gears up to perpetuate into the 21st century and beyond, its growing membership base is witnessing and experiencing some transformational changes. The menu of programs and services is expanding, the roster of coaches is increasing, and the pace is quickening. And over it all, we can still hear the sharp blast of Coach Sitkins’s whistle, summoning us back to the tables for our next strategy huddle. *

For more information:
Sitkins International
Web site: www.sitkins.com