.floatimg-left-hort { float:left; } .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 12px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 12px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 12px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} In 1976, when he was a college intern at Holmes Murphy & Associates, one of Doug Reichardt’s assignments, which he considered a privilege, was to drive founding partner Ray Murphy to his medical appointments as he struggled with cancer.

Murphy “was also an incredible community leader, which set the pace for us in the future,” Reichardt said.

By the early 1990s, Reichardt, Jim Swift and Nick Henderson had assumed the top leadership roles of the corporation, which over the past decade has grown to 13 offices in 11 states and the 24th largest U.S. insurance brokerage in terms of revenue. And Reichardt has led the way in ensuring that the culture ingrained in him from early on is perpetuated by cultivating the company’s future leaders.

“One of the things I have a great deal of pride in is helping to develop what we call Holmes Murphy & Associates University,” Reichardt said. “That really is to take what we see as the next generation of leaders inside of our companies way before their time and start to mentor and nurture and educate them about everything from our history to culture to core values.”

The company has grown significantly over the past 10 years through a simple strategy, Swift said.

“I wish we could tell you we had a really elaborate strategic plan, but our plan is really to find good people, and then we really respond to what those good people ask us to provide them so they can take care of the client,” he said. “And they challenge us all the time with how can we do it better, faster and provide a better service for our clients.”

Holmes Murphy is poised for further growth within some of the larger metropolitan markets it has entered over the past five years, and it may expand further through acquisitions over the next several years, Swift said.

Telling the story

With little fanfare, Holmes Murphy will reach a significant milestone on Jan. 1 when Reichardt, who has chaired the company for the past 16 years, steps into a chairman emeritus role and Swift adds the title of chairman to his job as CEO.

“There is very little that has happened without having what we call the ‘Jim-Nick-and-Doug fingerprints’ all over it,” Reichardt said. “The three of us had the opportunity to take over the leadership while we were fairly young from basically three guys that were before us.”So the things that we thought that the management team should have been doing – and we had all the answers back then – all of a sudden became our responsibility and it wasn’t quite as easy as we saw it from the sidelines,” he said. “All three of us bring significantly different skill sets, and that diversity created an opportunity to accomplish what we have.”

When the three assumed leadership of the company, Holmes Murphy had just two offices, Swift noted. Now it has 13, which makes the leadership classes even more valuable.

“We take for granted that over that period of time the number of employees has grown from about 140 to 500,” he said. “So (the university is) really our attempt to teach them the Holmes Murphy story and what it stands for, and really to integrate them into the company. They have a chance after they graduate to buy some stock in the company, and most of them have leadership roles within the company. It’s definitely something that we use to retain top talent.”

With just one exception, each of the approximately 40 managers who have gone through Holmes Murphy University over the past seven years is still with the company, Swift said. Among them are three the company has tapped as “next-generation” leaders: Den Bishop, president of Holmes Murphy’s Dallas office; Jason Hellickson, property/casualty practice leader; and Dan Keough, president of Innovative Captive Strategies Inc.

“We have a very strong leadership group of about 15 people,” Swift said, “and a very important role in our company is the division leader, because we let those division leaders operate pretty autonomously. We want them taking care of clients and asking for forgiveness later. We’ve got a lot of talented leadership out in our other divisions that play a key role in how our company operates.”

Among the most significant developments within the firm has been a move toward an increasingly consultative role with clients, Reichardt said.

“We always are searching for value-added propositions that differentiate us from the competition,” he said. “Our customers’ expectations continue to require us to create opportunities to help them increase their retention, their throughput and decrease their operating expenses. So we’re always looking for ways that distinguish us from just selling insurance. We end up having more of a consultative role, and that’s really what has created the energy and genesis for that rapid growth we’ve seen in the past 10 years.”

A key part of the expansion was the formation of a captive reinsurance management and consulting subsidiary, Innovative Captive Strategies Inc. (ICS), in 1999. The objective of ICS is to assist companies in forming their own insurance companies, through which they can play an active risk-management role in their business and reduce their insurance costs.

“A byproduct of that was that we also created and grew a division called Creative Risk Solutions, which handles the claims work for many of our captive clients, along with many other clients as well,” Swift said. “Since ICS, we’ve tried to find good people that match with our culture and have expanded into other markets, the first being a sales office in Sioux Falls, S.D.”

Moderate growth

In 2006, the company launched a financial services arm, Holmes Murphy Financial Services Inc., to augment its retirement services division through a strategic alliance with Securian Advisors MidAmerica. Holmes Murphy now has offices in Denver, Dallas, Kansas City, Omaha, St. Louis, Madison, Peoria, Oklahoma City and Scottsdale, Ariz.

“We’ve got a really strong operation in Dallas that’s experienced nice growth over the past five years,” Swift said. “Our start-up operation in Kansas City has probably from a percentage of growth standpoint grown faster than any other division in the company over the past five years.” The strength of the benefits and property/casualty divisions, both based at the headquarters in West Des Moines, have been a key to funding expansion into other markets, he said.

Most recently, the firm has added international insurance brokerage expertise to assist clients that do business in overseas markets, a function that it previously outsourced.

“We don’t have any internationally based clients, but we have clients that have international exposure. They send people abroad, they have facilities abroad, they’re selling their product abroad and they need to have that exposure,” Swift said. “That comes up more and more in our business.”

Business has been steady over the past couple of years, despite the recession, Swift said.

“We’ve seen some moderate growth in our business, and that’s mostly because the investments we’ve made in new markets – Dallas, St. Louis and Kansas City – have allowed us even through the economic downturn to maintain some positive revenue growth,” he said.

According to industry surveys, Holmes Murphy is currently performing at the 90th percentile of its peer group, meaning that it’s outperforming 90 percent of its competitors, “so we feel good about that,” Swift said.

“We’re not excited about running a flat business, but our business is really driven by what happens to our clients,” he said. “If we weren’t aggressive in acquiring new client relationships, we’d have negative growth in the past couple of years.”

As a broker selling health-insurance products, Holmes Murphy and its clients could see a significant impact from the health-care reform legislation now taking shape in Congress.

The company supports better access to health care, but not a public option, Reichardt said.

“(A public option) will impact the private sector, because more costs will get shifted to the private sector and drive up costs, which will make it less and less competitive as we go forward,” he said.

Continued growth will come by focusing on an enterprise risk management approach that integrates the employee benefits/financial services side of the business with the property/casualty side, Swift said. In the short term, “we’re really looking for some of our more recent investments — Kansas City, St. Louis, Scottsdale – markets we’ve entered within the last five years, to really help Holmes Murphy expand,” he said. “And I think it’s a good time to look at the potential for expansion through some acquisitions.”