The newest player on Des Moines’ insurance brokerage landscape has three familiar faces, and a name that’s already well-known in the eastern half of the state.

Less than two months after leaving senior positions with subsidiaries of the troubled Marsh & McLennan Cos., Joe Teeling, Dave Schwartz and Dennis Johnson have hit the ground running with their own insurance brokerage, doing business as TrueNorth Companies of Des Moines.

Operating with eight employees in the Regency 1 building in West Des Moines, the one-month-old enterprise is ramping up to become a full-service, one-stop insurance brokerage that specializes in serving small to medium-sized businesses in Central Iowa.

“It was an opportunity for us to start something new,” said Teeling, president of TrueNorth Companies of Des Moines. His former position as vice chairman of Marsh Benefits was eliminated on Dec. 31 when the company transferred that function to Marsh & McLennan’s consulting arm, Mercer.

TrueNorth’s goal in Des Moines “is to become a significant player in town,” Teeling said, “and to raise the bar, really, to provide more competition and another choice for employers in Central Iowa to come to.”

Cedar Rapids-based TrueNorth, which has doubled in size since it was formed in a three-way merger four years ago, was seeking a way to continue its expansion beyond Eastern Iowa and achieve a regional Midwest presence. The 150-person company also has offices in Waterloo/Cedar Falls and Davenport, as well as locations in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona.

Established as a separate entity known as TrueNorth Enterprises, the Des Moines company has entered into a partnership with the Cedar Rapids brokerage firm, which provides it both financing and an established operating platform.Teeling said the partners plan to couple those advantages with their expertise and contacts within the Des Moines market.

TrueNorth was among about 15 financial services and insurance brokerage firms that had contacted the three professionals with various offers to use their expertise.

“We ended up choosing TrueNorth because they fit our vision for where we wanted to go,” Teeling said, “and they were very much aligned with us in how they treat and invest in people. That won out over everything else.”

Schwartz, formerly Marsh’s managing director in Des Moines, had led the firm’s financial services segment and developed its human resource outsourcing business. Johnson, who was managing director for Marsh’s Advantage America unit, had served as the company’s national sales and marketing director for benefits and property and casualty insurance.

TrueNorth initially will offer property and casualty insurance and employee benefits, adding human resource outsourcing, retirement and financial services by this summer.

“We want to be a full-service agency,” Schwartz said. “We want to offer the employer the ability to one-stop shop, from benefits packages to financial and retirement planning to outsourcing, everything that a small to medium-sized employer needs to help them run their day-to-day business.”

The company will sell both business and personal lines of insurance, using a worksite marketing approach in which voluntary individual policies will be sold to groups of employees through payroll deductions. Health savings accounts, which offer high-deductible, low-premium coverage as an option, will be a large part of its business, Johnson said.

“We think giving consumers more choice is critical in medical care and all types of insurance benefits,” said Johnson, TrueNorth’s senior vice president. “That’s why I’m with the firm today, because I think there’s tremendous opportunity for us to help employers make that ultimate move from old-style full-coverage plans to higher-deductible plans that give employees choices on how they spend their money. What we’ve seen in the past is that a lot of companies are talking about it, but very few are doing it.”

The former Marsh executives emphasized that Marsh & McLennan’s highly publicized bid-rigging schemes uncovered by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer were entirely centered in the New York City offices.

“We weren’t concerned about finding any type of fraudulent activities in our activities,” Teeling said. “We just knew we had a clean shop. It’s a really unfortunate thing that happened at Marsh, from my perspective.”

TrueNorth’s goal is to grow to between 20 and 30 employees by mid-year.

“We’re very interested in having a culture that will develop the total person,” Schwartz said. “We’ll be bringing in people who are well-rounded and who are at the top of their profession.”

“Our goal isn’t to be the biggest,” Teeling added, “but to be the best at what we do. I think we’ve got a great start.”