Roscoe Douglas jumped out of the cab of his truck — actually he was pushed — and landed in the middle of a booming business.
Bet you can’t break into the benefits business. It seemed like a safe bet at the time.
See, Roscoe Douglas grew up in a “small shotgun house without a toilet” in Dothan, Ala. Running water was a luxury the family couldn’t afford. His father worked as a mechanic for railroad while his mother earned money at a sewing factory.
Douglas broke new ground by being the first in his family to attend college when a student loan got him in the doors at Auburn University, where he studied electrical engineering. But he had to find work so he could keep attending classes.
“The year was 1967,” Douglas recalls. “I worked as a scuba diver for Pan American World Airways inspecting underwater communication cables at NASA radar sites in the Bahamas, Brazil and Ascension Island in the Atlantic.”
The work interested Douglas much more than his engineering textbooks. And his grades showed it. He tried to make it work for three years. But his grades dove as quickly as he did. He flunked out of Auburn as a senior in 1971.
Then he did what anyone else would have done in his position: He stepped back to re-evaluate his life. Then he did something not anyone else would have done in his position in 1971. He enlisted.
“I joined the Marine Corps and spent a tour of duty in Morocco,” Douglas explains. “After my enlistment was up, I returned to Auburn and received a degree in industrial management”
Not that things came easy then, either. During his last year of school, he and his brother owned and operated an Amoco service station. Between classes and fill-ups, Douglas and his brother found time to marry sisters, who promptly came on board to help run the gas station. All four of them trudged through their classes at Auburn.
“After graduation, [my wife] Gwen and I moved to Albany [Ga.] and I took a job as a safety engineer with a trucking company,” Douglas adds.
That lasted all of six weeks. Then they fired him.
“So, I was living in Albany in a rented house. My wife didn’t work, I was out of a job and my next-door neighbor worked for New York Life in Macon, Ga.,” Douglas says.
Douglas followed his neighbor on a few appointments and figured he could do this insurance thing. That was until he failed the aptitude test. For some reason, they hired him, anyway.
“I found out later that [my neighbor] had bet the regional vice president that I’d succeed; the regional vice president bet I wouldn’t,” Douglas recalls with a laugh. “Anyway, I ended up staying. I really enjoyed it. I got in on a bet, I guess.”
Douglas made good on that bet, toiling away as an agent for four years before jumping up to assistant manager, where he spent another three years with the company. Not that things were any easier there, either.
“I was so shy when I first started that I took my wife with me on appointments. I had a dismal start,” Douglas explains. “After I had been in the business about eight months, I came home and found Gwen crying. She was rolling coins to cover a check she had written at the grocery store. I had a heart-to-heart talk with myself that day. I had married Gwen, and promised to support her. Seeing my wife crying after I had spent most of the day playing basketball at the YMCA was a life-changing experience for me.”
Over the next three-and-a-half years, Douglas [earned sales awards] twice before earning consistent top-selling status. And he was just getting started.
“When I left Albany to take an assistant manager’s job in Macon, I was making more money than the general manager of the trucking company that I had worked for right out of Auburn. I actually went to his office and thanked him for firing me,” Douglas recalls.
But, again, things didn’t get any easier. Despite the promotion — or maybe because of it — the work seemed to just pile up even more.
“Being an assistant manager was fun, but I went from working four days a week as an agent to six days a week as a manager. After three years as a manager, Gwen and I decided we would be better off staying in Macon and opening an agency,” Douglas recalls.
So in 1979, Douglas did just that. He hung up his own sign and started an agency specializing in group and employee benefits.
“As an agent with NYLIC, I was number 10 out of 10,000 agents in group sales when I left Albany to become a manager. So in 1979 when I opened my agency, I was doing what I liked, and did best,” Douglas says.
Benefits Selling: How did that go early on?
Roscoe Douglas: It went fine. I’ve never had a problem selling. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. It was kind of difficult starting out with no clients. After seven years, you’re used to them paying all the bills. You’re used to getting an expense account and then suddenly you pay all the bills and you have nothing coming in. But, you know, at the end of the year, we did OK. I guess the Lord provided for us and it worked out real well. We’re still here today, so I guess that worked out.
BS: What did you do to succeed early on? How did you go about going out and getting clients?
RD: I made cold calls. When I was at New York Life, time as an agent was spent mostly in the group market. I learned early on that I could pick who I worked with if I was willing to go out and call on them face to face. My market was in hospitals. So when I went back in the field as an independent person, I had a contract with John Hancock but also a number of other companies. I just went to small hospitals throughout south Georgia and was able to write group insurance and voluntary benefits for those hospitals.
I kept some of those clients for over 20 years. Virtually all of them came from sending them a letter and making a call face to face. I didn’t wait for a response. I just sent a letter, showed up on the administrator’s front door step and said, “Hey, I’m Roscoe Douglas and I’d like to talk to you about your insurance programs.” That’s the way it went. I still do that today, by the way. If I find a company I’d like to work with, I have no qualms about just stopping by and introducing myself. I kind of like that.
BS: So you do group and voluntary.
RD: Yes. We do dental, vision, LTD, STD, voluntary term, voluntary permanent. We’ve dabbled in the pre-paid legal. If it’s voluntary and it’s an insurance program and it’s legal and ethical, we offer it.
BS: What do you have the most success with right now on the voluntary side of things?
RD: Voluntary permanent life insurance has really had a comeback. We’ve also used voluntary term insurance. LTD and STD have been very good programs for us. We have tried voluntary long term care, and I don’t know if it’s my sales approach or what it is, but that is a very difficult program for us to sell.
BS: Do you see the compliance issues being something of an obstacle for your average broker trying to get into this sort of thing?
RD: Yes, you have to do it correctly. Absolutely. A lot of what we do today is automated. We’re doing Internet enrollment, laptop enrollment and also call centers. We’re doing multiple benefits: one platform, multiple companies.
BS: Are you still seeing cancer sell pretty well?
RD: Oh, yeah. We’ve sold with a bunch of different companies over the years. So, we’re doing cancer with whoever has the best product for the particular update we would be enrolling at the time.
BS: I see that you also sell mini-meds. How are those working out for you?
RD: I don’t particularly like them, but there are some markets that do, particularly in the fast food restaurants. We have one chain that’s in seven states, has 200 locations. They offer major medical to the management employees and then offer a mini-med to the hourly employee. I guess a way of describing that is a mini-med card is like a dignity card. It gets you in to see a doctor if you need to; it does not offer good hospital coverage. This is not part of what it is. It does offer hospital coverage, but it’s not good coverage.
Anyway, today when I’m talking to these employees, giving a group presentation, I do present [mini-meds] as a way to see the doctor. It gets you in the door.
BS: Have you had pretty good enrollment rates on these mini-meds?
RD: About 10 percent of the people take it if it’s a voluntary plan. It depends on how it’s enrolled. If the employer participates in it, those percentages go way up.
BS: Are you seeing more employers helping out, footing the bill on that?
RD: Yeah, actually. Unfortunately, you’re also seeing the employers getting rid of major medical and going [exclusively] to mini-meds, and I really hate to see that. It’s taking away a tremendous amount of coverage. If you offer it when they don’t have anything, that’s fine, but to do away with [major medical] and go to a mini-med, I just don’t think that’s fair to the people. It’s a good supplement but not good as a replacement.
BS: Do you have any thoughts on the rise of consumer-driven products?
RD: I am in favor of everybody having health insurance. I still think there’ll be a place for us in selling maybe a dual system like they have in Great Britain. I really believe that everybody should have medical insurance, and I think it should either be mandatory or the employers purchase it or some sort of federal program; and we know the federal government just screws up most everything they get involved in. So I would like to see something.
BS: There’s been some action recently, too.
RD: I know Massachusetts started a program recently, but I really would like to see that nationwide, and that would probably hurt me commission-wise, but people having access to medical care, I just think that’s critical. Today you have the older people with medical care, you have the people who don’t work or the real poor on Medicaid. But then you’ve got that large number of people who are working, and because they’re working they don’t qualify for Medicaid. They can’t afford the tremendous premiums today. You’ll see premiums of $300, $400 a month for an individual, $800, $1,200 for a family, and the working poor simply cannot afford that.
BS: I want to switch gears here a little bit and talk about your communication process. What do you find employees like the most when it comes to the communication process? What works best?
RD: What has worked best for me is the employee booklet we produce in our office that is specific to the employer. We include all products in one book, whether it’s offered as a core benefit or a voluntary benefit, and we send those booklets out for all new hires. We send a booklet out to everyone once a year and we include in that a plain summary description of the cafeteria plan. It’s really an employee benefit booklet that also includes insurance. For some of our larger clients we actually produce orientation material. We give them booklets that will have their I-9s, W-4s; all of their sign-off materials for policies and procedures. That material is ordered through our office. When a store or a location runs out, they’ll call us and we’ll produce and send it out. We send out thousands of books every month to different locations. Now, we also have that material on the Web site, but not everyone has a computer. The present program we’re doing for the employers, employees can go online and enroll, they can go online and look at their coverage, but if they want to they can pick up the phone and call us. Every store has our books. They can pick it up, look at it there when a new employee is hired. They call us to enroll or they go on the Web site to enroll, but they have the book, the printed material right there in front of them to take home and show their family what they have. So to answer your question, we do both. We do printed material and then we also put it on the Web.
BS: Are you getting a pretty good response with those who do have computers on the Web site?
RD: Yes. Employees can go on and look at it, but we’re finding most folks would really rather talk to either my agent going around to see them or call us on the phone. I’m a very good person in the phone and I’m good with folks. You can help them enroll online; it’s there. We have other folks who work the phones for us. It seems to work well. If they have a problem, they call us.
BS: Do you have an example of a problem you’ve had to solve?
RD: I have had occasions where someone will get to the doctor and say, “Listen, my Blue Cross Blue Shield card doesn’t work.” There have been times I have given folks my credit card number on the phone or doctors my credit card number and said, “Listen, I know for a fact this person has coverage. I want them seen and I want them seen now.”
I get them seen then. Sometimes you do things like that.
BS: What important issues do you see the industry facing? What is it that we’ve got to do going forward?
RD: I guess long term care is going to become a huge issue as people like me get older. I mean, I’m 59 now. I never dreamed I’d get that old, but I am. As our population gets older, long term care is going to become much more important than it is now. It attacks our system. This thing with health care and the cost — something has to be done with that. I think a lot of it has to do with litigation. I understand that if you sue somebody and you lose, you pay their legal bills. I know we’ve talked about that in our country, but there has to be some way to rein in these lawsuits. I just think that it’s really one of the problems — that and the uninsured.
BS: What is your guiding philosophy when it comes to doing your job and your career?
RD: Being honest with people. Admitting what you know and what you don’t know when somebody asks you a question. Getting back with them as quickly as you can. Not putting yourself above anybody else. Doing for others what you would want them to do to you in the same circumstances. It’s always been like that.
At the end of the day, Douglas will be the first to admit that — among other things — he has chosen his partners well. He loves his job. He still enjoys working with other agents. He likes to say that, “Life is a lot more fun when you share the good times, and a lot easier when you share the tough times.”
Shortly after he landed in the business on a closed-door bet, he hit the books and the tapes. He’ll be the first to admit he listened to Zig Ziglar constantly. And his conclusion?
“I am not sure that I have ever had an original idea about selling insurance. At company conventions, and industry meetings, I have learned from the experiences of others,” he admits readily. “I told one of my partners recently that I was thinking of retiring. He looked at me and said ‘Roscoe, I don’t know anyone who is as retired as you are. Retired means you can do what you want, when you want.’ I guess Gene is right, by that definition, I have been retired for many years.”