18 As the CEO of AmeriLife, you have taken the company on quite the acquisitive streak over the past year and a half despite the global pandemic. Can you tell us a little bit about it? We’ve been fortunate that our business, our people – and our industry at large – has been very resilient during the pandemic, and that’s been especially important to our ability to take care of the financial wellbeing of consumers who rely on us and our partners. The pandemic has really accelerated our acquisition activities – we’ve acquired over two dozen companies in the past 18 months and continue to grow. When you look across those acquisitions, you’ll see that these organisations not only fit our business structure from a product and solutions or strategy standpoint, but that their leaders also align with our values, which is incredibly important. For us, it’s about being aggressive and scaling quickly in a highly competitive market; in turn, we’re able to offer governance and operational value to our new and existing affiliates in the areas of accounting, marketing, cross-selling technology, compliance, and more (for example, we offer state-of-the-art cybersecurity monitoring capabilities that much smaller companies are often unable to procure and implement). That value has been incredibly attractive to our new partners, who are no longer keen to go it alone in a rapidly changing marketplace, but still want a sustainable path to continue growing their business. That’s presented an enormous opportunity for AmeriLife. How are you managing the company’s rapid growth? It starts with investing in our people. We’ve built out our human resources division, continue to aggressively recruit and hire, and have significantly invested in talent development programs. Since 2017, we’ve nearly doubled AmeriLife’s employee population and have modernised our workplace and its benefits to attract top industry talent. Second, we’ve built out our infrastructure, including growing our finance, integration, corporate development and marketing and technology resources to support our growing business. This has been critical to staying “ahead of the puck” to ensure we’re properly scaled with our shared services and can also address our enterprise and affiliate needs quickly and effectively. Third, we’ve deployed state-of-the-art technology abilities such as Salesforce and a proprietary enterprise data strategy for, among other things, improved reporting and customer insights. Lastly – and perhaps most crucial – we’re on a continued journey to ensuring that our core values of honesty, integrity, accountability, excellence and courage, continue to manifest themselves as part of our culture and our actions every single day. The rate at which you’ve scaled change management, business transformation and operational integration has been phenomenal! How did you manage to achieve this? A dedication to best-in-class change management and communication practices are absolutely critical when introducing so many new people, processes and tools to a rapidly growing company like ours. As part of this we’ve implemented the right balance of governance and structure to support this growth. But at the end of the day, we’ve still been able to stay true to our advantage of being an organisation with very little bureaucracy. This helps us remain nimble, encourage innovation from team members with great news ideas, and execute, iterate and show results quickly. What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned during this process? When it comes to attracting new partners or talent, it’s important to have a value proposition beyond THE CEO INTERVIEW
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