Agency Profile: Joining Forces

Washington, North Carolina
Founded: 1963
Employees: 10

Flatlands Insurance Group’s foundation for incredible growth in crop insurance and the property-casualty market came from an unlikely place: the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

After graduating from college, Read Allen, III joined his father’s successful life insurance agency and specialized in health insurance. After his father died, his sister, Paige Harris, decided to leave her career in higher education and join the family agency. When the ACA came along and rattled life-health agencies, the siblings saw an opportunity.

“We really embraced the ACA,” Harris says. “A lot of agents were wringing their hands because they weren’t sure what it would mean for their agency. We became very knowledgeable about it, and with that success, we were able to look to the future.”

In order to leverage their agricultural market connections, the two started a p-c agency from scratch and bought a crop insurance agency, recruiting lifelong friend Michael Lee to become a partner in the expanded agency footprint.

READ ALLEN, III, PRINCIPAL

I think education is a huge part of our job, and we have people who take their job very seriously. In crop insurance and health care, there are many moving parts. When the regulations change, we learn the changes and how they will affect our clients.

My dad’s motto was always, “If you take care of the client, the money will take care of itself.” We truly feel like we’re providing a service to our clients. We care about our reputation and how we were raised. If we can provide something additional that another agency doesn’t, even if it means we don’t gain money from it, we feel like we’re servicing the community.

PAIGE ALLEN HARRIS, PRINCIPAL

Unless it is an employee we gained through an acquisition, all the employees Flatlands has hired have been from outside the insurance industry. Experience in the insurance industry is a bonus, but it’s not a necessity. You’re looking for people with integrity. You’re looking for people with leadership skills. You’re looking for people with community connections. Of the three of us, Read is the only one who had insurance experience. Michael and I jumped in not knowing what we were getting into.

We all bring such different skill sets to the partnership. It’s cliché to say we put clients first, but I think we really do. It’s a small town—you make a mistake once, you’re not in business for a long time. Both our families were in the service industry and have been in business for 50 years.

MICHAEL LEE, PRINCIPAL

My family owns the Chevrolet store in town, so I grew up in that business. Loggers, farmers—people who work outside were who we dealt with, and for some reason, they gravitated to me or I gravitated to them. We were a fairly successful car dealership, and that introduces you to a lot of folks over 30 years. The majority of them have followed me here. This whole thing is built on trust. If you have a client base that trusts you and believes in what you tell them, then I think they will follow you to do most anything.

In the crop insurance world, there seem to be a lot of 65-plus-year-old agents who have become very stagnant. Instead of holding a file that is three inches thick, I pull it all up on my iPad in the field. We have embraced those technology changes that some of the older agents have shied away from.

Photo by Beth Niser