Dennis Halsey Insurance Executive Uses Peace Corps Experience To Make Company Thrive
Dennis Halsey, profesor de agricultura.
Translation: Organizer of truck farm in Venezuela with $8,000 in sales per week.
Dennis Halsey, regional vice president, Trinity Universal Insurance Companies.
Translation: Organizer of Northwest branch office doing $50 million in business annually in less than four years.
In Spanish or English, Halsey clearly knows how to get things done.
Since he was hired away from Safeco Insurance Co. in 1992, the Asotin County native has built a Spokane operation with 80 employees serving a seven-state area stretching from Colorado to Washington.
An office not expected to turn a profit until 1997 finished 1993 and 1995 in the black, he said.
The startup was so successful, Halsey said, officials at Trinity’s Dallas headquarters set aside plans to buy up the smaller insurance operations they thought they would need to establish a viable regional office.
He said his own assessment was always more optimistic.
Earlier attempts by insurers to establish regional offices in Spokane had failed because they were hemmed in by territorial limits established back at headquarters, he said.
With seven states instead of the usual five - Colorado and Utah are the additions - Halsey said he can avoid creating an operation with overhead that cannot be sustained with customer premiums.
Also, Trinity’s surplus was twice its annual premiums, another indication the company could support a substantial effort in the Northwest, he said.
“I knew we’d never reach any kind of market saturation,” he said.
Trinity is a 70-year-old with operations in 21 states. Chicago-based Unitrin Inc. is the publicly traded corporate parent.
Trinity, Halsey said, wanted a presence in the Northwest because 80 percent of the company’s business was done in Texas. “It was very vulnerable to storm activity,” he said.
His former boss at Safeco was hired to handle the expansion, and he brought Halsey aboard.
“This was just an opportunity to create something from scratch,” he said.
Halsey said an abundance of quality employees with insurance backgrounds added to his optimism at the outset. With motivated employees, supervision does not take much of his time, he said.
“I don’t want to be around negative people,” he said.
Halsey said he debriefs each new employee after one month to find out what they think the company could do better. Once they become used to an operation, they lose counterpoint, he said.
Halsey attributed the idea to his Peace Corps stint in the late 1960s.
“It was a great experience in my life,” he said.
In two years, Halsey said, he pulled together 91 suspicious farmers 7,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains into a cooperative that delivered vegetables to supermarkets in Maracaibo.
Halsey signed up after graduating from Washington State University with a degree in political science. He had been brought up near Anatone, where his high school class of six was one of the last to graduate from the school there.
He returned from the Peace Corps to take graduate courses at the University of Washington, but left when offered an underwriter’s job with Safeco, where he worked for 20 years.
Besides his professional achievements, Halsey has been active with several community organizations, including United Way and the Spokane Symphony. He is about to co-chair a $6 million drive for a YMCA in the Spokane Valley at the former Walk in the Wild zoo site.
He also chairs the Idaho Insurance Guaranty Association, a pool of insurers that steps in to back policies issued by companies that fail. “It burns me to have to assess the survivors,” he said.
Halsey expects Trinity to not just survive, but flourish.
He said the Spokane office may employ 100 by year-end, with 45,000 life and property policies in force. Employee numbers could grow to about 165 by the end of the decade, by which time Trinity may be in its own building.
“The opportunity is ours to screw up,” he said.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo