Declaration of Independents

David Lyons

President & CEO
Lyons Companies
Wilmington & Rehoboth, Delaware
Bethesda, Maryland

He’s created a healthy market in captives for business owners fleeing workers comp price shocks. He’s started a “human capital management” arm of his firm for businesses overwhelmed with regulations. And now he’s won the mayor’s race in Henlopen Acres, Delaware—even as he runs his Wilmington-based 50-plus-person brokerage firm. David F. Lyons Sr. loves to dig into business and civic endeavors in and around the First State.

Lyons dreamed up the annual “Lyons Economic Forecast” event in 2006 to educate staff and clients on big-picture economic issues. Run in conjunction with the Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship which he chairs at the University of Delaware—which he chairs—the event draws hundreds of clients, staff and students to hear Federal Reserve Bank presidents, investment experts and economic reporters from The Wall Street Journal. The center offers bank-at-school, economics competition and “Entreprep” camp—and its personal finance course reached 4,436 high school students in 2014-15, fulfilling Lyons’s “hope that more and more children can be exposed to economics.”

CAPTIVE BENEFITS?

It takes a lot of mystery out of the budgeting for businesses. You’re really in partnership with that client. They appreciate what you’re doing for them in getting them out of the standard marketplace and bringing an option to the table they might not have ever seen or heard of before.

We’re up to more than 125 [group captives] now. It’s not just workers comp, although they’re workers comp-driven. The group captive has been a niche and a real differentiator for us. We’ve made a big space within the firm for that—there’s a lot of back room we had to build out with our own loss control, claims and accounting people. You need all that in order to run this kind of book.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT BEING A BROKER?

Being an independent agent allows you to get into dealing with so many different types of people and businesses. It broadens your horizons so much on so many different issues.

ON RESILIENCE

If there’s ever a time to become a partner with your clients, now is that time. You need to help them get through the next wave of regulation that’s going to come to them as it relates to their employees. We’ve done that with building up a practice in human capital management by hiring people with background not just in HR and employee benefits, but the whole range of employee services. Everything today as a business owner revolves around the employee.

WHAT’S HAPPENED SINCE HEALTH CARE REFORM?

Our whole employee benefits division has really changed its focus because of so much regulation out there. Using this human capital management platform has been a real benefit to clients who ‘get it’ and have spent time in coming to our educational seminars and using the [risk management] services we provide.