FRACTIONAL LEADERSHIP WORKS

In January of 2019, a new, more-than-60-year-old agency opened its doors in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Camargo Insurance, which originally served clients from a house on the suburban street from which it got its name, first started in 1956. It was being rebooted as “Camargo Version 2.0” by the third generation of ownership represented by Jay Mueller as chief executive officer. 

Jay says he moved the agency “out of the suburbs and to the downtown area, where it would be near universities and where it could create the energy needed to attract and retain the great people we needed to take the agency to the next level.”

The agency was founded by Jay’s grandfather, Guenther, who sold insurance out of his house alongside his wife, Jean, who ran her real estate business there. Jay’s father, Steve, took the reins in the 1980s and Jay got involved in 2007 in the production side of the business. “We were running a great business that served our community, but like many insurance agencies, we were not keeping up with technology,” Jay explains.

“In my opinion, we were not meeting the next generation of customers where they wanted to be,” he points out. “The business model consisted of a few experienced partners managing the business and attending to clients. It was a successful operation, but the growth potential of that model had reached its limit. I really felt that we needed to move to the next level if we wanted the business to be sustainable in the long term.

“But I readily admit that, at the time, I didn’t really know what that meant,” he adds. “I was in my early 20s and didn’t have a ton of business experience that would help me identify and solve our core challenges. So, I began looking for education about how an agency could grow and reach sustainability in the modern environment.

“After we made the move downtown, I found myself with a staff of only three,” Jay continues. “I had moved us to a facility that had a big open space where teamwork could flourish, but still offered places where you could have some privacy for focused work as needed. Now we needed people to start filling that space. We needed to recruit a team, and we needed to do it quickly.

“We had some of our best luck bringing people in from other industries and teaching them insurance,” Jay recalls. “This is a very attractive industry for great salespeople who are hampered by the ceilings put in place by corporate America. In our industry, the sky’s the limit, but only if you’re a team player, because this is such a complex industry that you just can’t know everything. That’s where your teammates come in.

“Jay and I worked very well together right from the start. We complement each other. He’s the perfect entrepreneur and what I bring is the way to make his ideas happen by developing the processes and structure needed.”

—Janet Jansen

Chief Operating Officer

“As sales ramped up and creating the operational capacity to manage that growth became a core challenge, we implemented EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System),” he adds. “EOS helped us create an empowered leadership team with clear accountability and an organizational structure that could manage and fuel our growth.

“I also connected with Premier Strategy Box, a company founded by a highly successful agency owner and entrepreneur to provide coaching to agency owners who wanted to develop a revenue-focused sales process,” Jay recalls. “They helped me set up key performance indices (KPIs) and other accountability measures, as well as clarify our technology vision and strategy.”

Advice from the best

He continues, “Because I was looking for guidance from leaders both inside and outside the insurance industry, I created an advisory board made up of exactly that. Working with the University of Cincinnati, I was able to find a bench of professionals to choose from, many of whom were executives in the second stage of their career who were passionate about helping entrepreneurs grow their business.

Dave Setter and Jay Mueller meet with client College Hill Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation (CURC) team members Craig Schultz, director of real estate development, and Emmanuel Karikari, chief executive officer. Founded in 1975, The College Hill CURC focuses on the revitalization of College Hill’s business district along Hamilton Avenue through real estate development, small business support, economic development and community engagement.

“It was their way of giving back,” Jay adds. “This board turned out to be a great place to find mentors for myself and members of our team. Our board members are also a great resource when building our brand and connections in niche industries and the broader business community.

“Two of the biggest hurdles for me were learning to truly trust my leadership team and recognizing that my capacity as a sales manager was limited,” he explains. “My strengths are dealing with big picture strategies, creating energy around new strategic initiatives, and recruiting. “In order to spend the majority of my time where it needed to be focused—working on the business rather than in the business—I needed a top-notch leadership team to take over the day-to-day operations.

“Here, too, the advisory board played a key role,” Jay notes. “Not only were some board members willing to mentor members of the team who looked to be leadership candidates, but one of them, Janet Jansen, ended up rolling off of our board and joining the Camargo team, first as a consultant and ultimately as our fractional chief operating officer.”

Fractional leadership

Jay realized that the caliber of executive level leadership the agency needed to achieve its long-term goals was unaffordable at their current size. “So, I started to look for ways to bring in a chief marketing officer and a chief financial officer on a part-time basis,” Jay says. This approach proved especially propitious in the case of a CMO where Jay went through five people before finding the one who fit their needs.

The CFO proved easier to fill thanks to AgencyCFO®, which offers fractional CFO talent from highly experienced financial professionals. “We were really able to get our hands around our numbers,” Jay says, “first fine-tuning processes so that basic KPIs like retention were accurate, and then digging deeper so that we could better understand how our operation was performing compared to best practices in areas like spread per employee, service compensation as a percentage of revenue and new producer ramp time.

“Our organic growth goals are ambitious,” he adds. “Understanding these numbers is critical to aligning short term priorities with long term goals and strategy. They provide our leadership team with clear, meaningful targets that are within their control. That allows me to trust them and let go of the day to day so that I can focus my time working on the business, where I can make the biggest impact.

“The final top executive was the toughest,” Jay notes. “Finding someone with the business chops to lead leaders and execute a business plan while not just understanding but embracing and helping carry my vision for this business and its culture was tough.

“After years of searching and false starts, the answer was right in front of me, as she was already serving as a board member and consultant with the agency,” Jay concludes. “Our team members knew and liked working with Janet. When she was named chief operating officer, the team was thrilled.”

“Jay and I worked very well together right from the start,” Janet says. “We complement each other. He’s the perfect entrepreneur and what I bring is the way to make his ideas happen by developing the processes and structure needed. We’re at the stage at the agency where we have to have enough structure so we can see where we are going. I took over the COO position after we tried out a killer producer in the role, but it wasn’t a fit.

“In many ways, because of its rapid growth mode, this agency needs to be run like a big business and I have 30 years of experience in corporate America,” Janet points out. “I took on this role because Jay and I get along so well. He’s a pleasure to work with and we trust each other. I’m also no threat to anyone else at the agency because I tell them that I want to train them to take my job so I can retire.

“As we continue to grow,” she adds, “we find that the best people for us to recruit are individuals who have worked in corporate America because they understand why we operate the way that we do and also appreciate that they have a real opportunity here.