DeWalt promotes visibility

Every vice president applied for the top job when Associated Industries was looking for a new president in 2004. So did Jim DeWalt, then president of Associated Builders & Contractors Inc. He got the job.

Normally, says AI Chairman Bill Robinson, passed-over veeps would be expected to move on. None has, which may be all you need to know about the leadership DeWalt has brought to the organization.

DeWalt has so opened up AI, which offers a smorgasbord of business services, that members – even the directors – now have a better understanding of how they fit together. When you sell health insurance, process worker compensation claims, teach industrial hygiene and safety, and help with legal and human resource issues, that’s no small achievement.

Assisting employers with labor negotiations, the reason for its founding nearly a century ago, has become a minor matter for AI’s 500 member employers, who have 40,000 Spokane-area workers on their payrolls. DeWalt gushes about his own staff of 22.

“He’s made the organization 100 times more visible than it was before,” says Robinson, president of Robinson Research, who adds that he no longer has to explain what AI is to the uninitiated.

DeWalt says raising the profile of AI is his No. 1 priority, and not just in Spokane. He hopes a new alliance with UnitedHealthcare, coupled with an expanded broker network, will give the organization a potent presence in the Puget Sound area. He plans to build on the health insurance business by offering electronic payroll services, then other programs. Western Washington employer associations are already pushing back.

DeWalt is unconcerned.

“I believe in competition,” he says. “I want to broaden and deepen who we are.”

DeWalt, 62, has a background that is both broad and deep.

His undergraduate education at the University of Washington was interrupted by a tour with the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He finished up his undergraduate work at Eastern Washington University, then returned to UW for graduate work in business and public administration. An internship landed him in the office of then-Seattle Mayor Wes Ullman, where he worked with Sens. Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson on projects like the Seattle Aquarium and downtown freeway park.

The experience made him a believer in internships. AI hosts one from Gonzaga University and is working with EWU on another.

He’s also a believer in public service, and asks all AI senior managers to work with at least one community organization. DeWalt worked and volunteered for several, including the Red Cross, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, and KSPS-TV. He is now on the dean’s advisory council for the EWU School of Business.

DeWalt was also an art consultant, welder – a strike at Todd Shipyards ended that career in less than three weeks – and a partner in the International Food Storage Corp. He spent parts of three years in Belgrade, the capital of the former Yugoslavia.

He was also there at the “beginning of the end” for Metropolitan Mortgage & Securities, an experience he calls “unfortunate at many different levels.”

Robinson credits DeWalt with taking AI through one mini-crisis: the decision by the state Department of Labor to return over-collected work premiums to employers, which denied AI the commission it gets for administering the program for members. Last year, AI returned $2.4 million to members.

Robinson notes, too, that DeWalt keeps long hours, praise that DeWalt good-naturedly deflects.

“I’m down to half days,” he says. “I work six to six.”

His own measure of a chief executive’s performance is the difference on the balance sheet between the day he or she came in, and the day he or she leaves.

DeWalt wants AI to be an organization that adapts to future growth in the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene corridor, which he likens to the development that engulfed the area between Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texas, in the 1980s and 1990s.

“This is a dynamic area,” he says. “We can change if we have to. We can be creative if we have to.”

As a former welder, soldier, art dealer and international businessman, he certainly has been.