Elephant Insurance could become major employer [Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.]
Sept. 04--HENRICO, Va. -- Move over, Gecko. The Elephant has arrived -- and it's landed in the Richmond area.
And Elephant Auto Insurance could become one of the area's leading employers.
The auto insurance company employs 80 people at its U.S. headquarters in western Henrico County. It opened in October with 47 people.
Elephant has room for 250 people at its local office and plans to expand over an unspecified time period to as many as 2,000 employees, depending on how well its business does in the U.S.
At that size, it could replace Circuit City Stores Inc. as one of the largest employers in the Richmond area. The electronics retailer employed about 1,900 people in the weeks before it began liquidating its business early last year.
Elephant is a subsidiary of Cardiff, Wales-based Admiral Group PLC, one of the United Kingdom's leading insurers that also had humble beginnings.
"We started 18 years ago with 57 people. Now we have 3,300 people and we're planning on 5,000 within five years," Henry Engelhardt, Admiral's founder and CEO, said during a visit to the local office this week.
Engelhardt discussed Elephant's culture, its plans, why Admiral chose the Richmond area for its U.S. headquarters -- and how the Elephant name came to be.
The company looked at other cities to locate its U.S. headquarters including Dallas, Pittsburgh and Charlotte, N.C., Engelhardt said. "If you plan to have 1,000 or 2,000 people, you must have a reasonable population. It can't be a tiny place."
The Richmond area was big enough, he said. Plus, Andrew Rose, the president and CEO of the U.S. subsidiary, was already here.
Richmond had several corporate offices here, which meant Elephant could plug into a management pool of talent. It has hired people who worked at Circuit City as well as from Capital One Financial Corp., Genworth Financial and CarMax; all Fortune 500 companies and major employers in the Richmond area.
Elephant is starting off selling insurance only in Virginia. But it has plans to eventually expand nationwide -- thus the need for more employees.
In less than one year, Elephant has garnered awards here that speak to its employee-centric culture.
It received the Employer of Choice award for small organizations as part of the Employer All Star award program sponsored by the Society of Human Resource Management Association's Richmond chapter, the Greater Richmond Chamber and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
What's more, Admiral has been named by The Sunday Times in the U.K. as one of the Top 100 Companies for the past 10 years.
"If people like what they are doing, they will do it better," Engelhardt said. "We want people to be happy when they come and happy when they leave . . . If you like your work, your whole life is better."
When people join the company, they become part of the "herd." Yes, there is a 7-foot, inflatable elephant in the office, a permanent resident, and plenty of small, stuffed ones.
Like Geico, which uses a Gecko as a mascot to sell insurance, the Admiral Group wanted an icon -- something recognizable and memorable, Engelhardt said.
"You can hold a picture of an elephant, but what picture can you hold that says Allstate?" he said, referring to the U.S. insurance giant Allstate Auto Insurance.
Elephant didn't sound serious enough for an insurance company until names like Amazon and Yahoo starting popping up, Engelhardt said.
The first Elephant subsidiary opened in the U.K. in 2000.
A recent competition at the local Elephant office shows the remnants of a circus and a yellow brick road ... la "The Wizard of Oz." Employees are encouraged to participate in fun days, competing in games, and play ping pong or pool if they need a break.
"We believe in tribalism," Engelhardt said. "Each entity creates its own culture . . . We try to take every opportunity to make a nice place to work."
Some people think it's easy to have a good culture if the company is small.
"We say that is balderdash," Engelhardt said. "You can have as positive a culture with 3,000 employees as you can with 300."
All employees of the Admiral Group and its subsidiaries, including Elephant, received 100 shares of company stock last Friday, valued at $2,250 per person.
"It didn't matter if you are a manager or a sales person, if you've been here a day or a year, everyone got the same amount," Engelhardt said. "Everybody is important."
The company doesn't believe in hoarding cash, he said. It recently paid a $132 million dividend last week, or about 50 cents for every share of stock.
"If you give money back, it forces the organization to operate efficiently," Engelhardt said. "We keep enough to run our business but we give most of it back to shareholders."
Operating efficiently means using as little paper as possible. The local office has only one copier, for example, and people who use it must do one push-up, or a yoga position, for each piece of paper.
Contact Carol Hazard at (804) 775-8023 or [email protected].
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