Singular Purpose; For York International's Michael Bodack, being the son of a producer and agency sales manager sparked a natural progression in group benefits that led to a corner office at the Yonkers, N.Y.-based firm - at the age of 34

• Published in: Employee Benefit Adviser 2010, Vol.8 (4), p.30
• Main Authors: Ortman, John, Photographer Jordan Hollander ]
• Format: Newsletterarticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Careers; Commissions; Group insurance; Insurance industry; Life insurance; Personal profiles; Property & casualty insurance; Sales managers
• ISSN: 1545-3839

Sequoia grew from there, adding more groups of various size and building up their book of business to several hundred thousand dollars. Sequoia's best year was its last year before being acquired, which was 2008. "We did close to $1.2 million in revenue," according to Bodack - not bad for a couple of guys in their late 20s or early 30s with no formal training of any kind. "It's not like I went through an agency's training program and then went out into the benefits world," Bodack explains. "I picked it up, plain and simple." So the three met over lunch. Then he got a phone call from Krantz, Bodack recalls: "'Hey, I want you to come up and meet my partner, [Rob Kestenbaum].' I said, 'Okay, I think I know where you're going with this.' 'What do you mean?' he says. I say, '[Jim Krantz], I get it - You want me to come and work for you.' 'Well, I don't know,' he says. 'Just come and have dinner with us, what do you say?' Spirit and confidence After a year, Bodack and the team have made some good progress, but they feel they still have a lot of work to do. "Our top-line revenue is up tremendously, and we've written some tremendous accounts," says Bodack. He offers this example: "Last summer, Gil - one of our senior producers - and I went to this decent sized group, an executive search firm with a little over 100 employees. They were with a broker for years. Gil said to them, 'We now work with this guy, who knows benefits.' We had never asked before, but they give us a shot. And we won it in three meetings. In that moment, I realized that we've got accounts out there that you can identify in each producer's book. You can see them sitting there. I asked our IT guy to print out a list of the 50 accounts with the largest workers' comp claims. We had about three of them. That was abysmal. A year later we have six. That's 100% growth. And there's a lot of gold left to mine." The goal of York's owners? To go as hard as they can for as long as they can. "I think we'd be selling ourselves short to put a dollar number on it," Bodack says. "We have certain mileposts we need to hit in order to add pieces - like an underwriter, for example. We don't have a full-time underwriter, and I'd love to have one, along with a full-time wellness person. We want to walk into any client under the sun and compete with the big boys on an even basis. I don't want to see any distinction there. But we know we need to plug in these extra pieces in order to be able to do that. There are plenty