Transcription:
Randy Paez: (
Hey everybody, we'll share some others around in. We'll just get started. So, we're here today, we're on this talent track and we're gonna talk about this topic in an interesting way. We've been hearing from a lot of folks talking about the talent and talent is probably the most important part of any company. And we are lucky enough to actually have the talent here on stage. So we actually get to hear from them about what they think about everything that's going on. I often think carriers MGAs, TPAs managed care companies. They can all compete on a lot of things. They can compete on price on reputation, on service. I think the place that they have, the hardest time competing and where you can really win is with the X factor, which is talent.
Randy Paez: (
It is the differentiator that can really change your company. There's no shortage of people that we know names that we all know, household names, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk... that can actually make a difference and make a real change through technology. So, understanding how important the talent is to your company to any company is critically important. So, we have some talent here, so I'll give them an opportunity to tell us who they are with maybe a focus on how long you've been in the profession, how long you've been in the industry, and maybe how long you've been at your company. I'll just maybe start on the end with Gary.
Gary Carter: (
Sure. Good afternoon, Gary Carter. I'm with EMC Insurance. I've worked there for 17 years out of Des Moines, Iowa started as a line developer on legacy mainframe systems, writing code for premium audit, commercial umbrella various lines of business and then eventually moving to integration systems, writing more.net code and developing there. And currently I'm serving as enterprise architect, managing portfolio of applications and services to find the business capability gaps and needs and look holistically across our solutions. Make sure they're right. Sizing and architecting staple in the Des Moines community have been part of the ecosystem there in it, both at EMT, insurance and nationwide and,
Daniel Bullington: (
Yeah, good afternoon. My name is Daniel Bullington. I am a director of software engineering at Arch Insurance. I support our pricing and reserving actuary function. And I've been at Arch, actually this month will be my one year anniversary with the company, but I've been in insurance and financial services for a going over 10 years at a variety of different organizations, but I've also been in it, in general for over 22 years. I manage a small team of engineers delivering value to our actuaries. I come from a background, both practitioner and architect and leader and excited to be here to speak on this panel. So thank you.
August Dwight: (
Hey, my name is August Dwight. I'm a technical project lead and project manager for a digital integration team at Arch Insurance. I've been with arch for about two years and that's how long I've been in the insurance industry. I've been in tech for about 15 years. I worked at the railroads. I worked in biotech. I worked at in AI. So I got a lot of diverse experience, let's see. Yeah, that's about it. Really
Randy Paez: (
Great. Well, thanks guys. Thanks for being here. And again, I think the value of this pound is actually understanding what it's like from you. I'm an engineer myself came up through the ranks and I'm Randy PaaS. I'm the CIO at arch insurance. But, I like to still think I'm a geek at heart. So let's talk a little bit about, what about coming to a company so we know that money matters, right? No one can argue that, but the question is it the end all and be all we've heard about these escalating salaries and one of the last panel members had mentioned that Microsoft, when a hundred percent on our salary recently, we heard that Amazon took their, ceiling of their base salaries from 1 68 to over $350,000. So obviously there's a high competition in the marketplace, as it pertains to money. Some companies are just printing money, not all of them, unfortunately. So the question is if money's equal, what are the things that can attract somebody to a company that's not just about money?
August Dwight: (
Yeah. So there are a lot of things that would attract me to a company. Money is important, like you said, but you've got the obvious other ones benefits, for example, paid time off, medical, dental, all that stuff. Culture is another one. That's well known as what's important proper work, life balance, things like that. And then there are some that aren't as widely considered, or at least that I don't hear very much, which is interesting problems to work on. That's what I'm looking for. When I change jobs, I want to go do something that's fun. And a lot of people think insurance that's that's insurance is fun. You do insurance cuz you like to do fun things. But the job that I have, which is largely making computers talk to other computers is something that I really enjoy doing. So that's how I got here.
Daniel Bullington: (
So yeah, I think that absolutely money is important. And I think the good thing about being in the insurance space and in financial services as a whole is that we, as an industry can afford salaries for the most part. I mean, I think at the end of the day, we're very blessed to make good products and good services and obviously, make a good return on those investments and whatnot. But when I look it through the lens of, as an engineer, if I'm recruiting engineers, because again, I'm an engineer at heart as well too. I've come up through those ranks. Obviously making sure that you're not playing games with money playing games with kind of the baseline table stakes of benefits and all that as previously mentioned.
Daniel Bullington: (
But I think nowadays engineers specifically, technology folks want to be in a true engineering culture. And I think that's where insurance and financial services as a whole has a lot of opportunities to advance. And when I say an engineering culture, what I mean is really a collective understanding of how we build things, how we operate things and how we work together to deliver value for our customers. And again, it's about things like allowing engineers to be empowered, it's allowing teams to be autonomous. It's about allowing engineers to pick how they work, where they work, what tools they work, what types of systems they work on, how they interact and how they communicate all these different things to really build a culture cuz culture at the end of the day, whether it's an engineering culture or whether it's the overall company culture, it is a singular cohesive thing that keeps an organization together. And I think that also helps to invigorate and encourage folks to not only join a company, but stay with a company as well.
Gary Carter: (
Yeah. And I'll just emphasize what they're saying. They're yes. Cash is king. So having the right salary, being in the ballpark, making sure that you're investing in something that's gonna provide for that individual, whatever their needs are, because we all have our Maslow hierarchy, it needs, right? So you need to put food on the table first, give me what I'm worth. So especially when you're trying to attract top talent, not necessarily every employee that you're looking to fill is that level of top talent that you're looking for. But for the analysis that you do and you analyze who I need in my organization, what tools and assets are value add to me, ensure that you're paying them what it takes, that they're not a bargain and they should never feel like you're one up them on that. So that honesty and integrity, but then invest even more in the technology.
Gary Carter: (
So technology should be agnostic. You should be able to move from tool to tool, language to language technology should not be an impediment to their development. And then once you've tooled them properly, train them properly, give them areas where they can influence the organization, reach beyond just a single segment, reach into what drives the business, educate them, not just on the technical side of things, but on the business aspects, the things that will make them stakeholders. So that's the next step. You gotta become a stakeholder in the organization, whether it's through employee stock, purchase profit sharing with the organization or taking ownership of an activity or area of focus within the organization, leading a team, leading a initiative type focus. And so you're kind of building up that hierarchy leads, but your initial question was attracting those people. You can't communicate that in a job posting, right? And so salary and benefits are the way you lead into that. But once you get someone in the door and if you're accurate and honest and open with them about what both sides of the relationship need, then they're gonna be retained. Then they're gonna have that fulfillment because you're meeting those needs.
Randy Paez: (
Okay. Very helpful. We talked a lot about work you enjoy. I think August you had mentioned that so insurance is rarely on the bleeding edge, but it can certainly find itself on the cutting edge. But we've certainly seen in the past number of years, an entry of high technology into insurance, whether it's OCR, it's AI, many insured techs are playing there. We're starting to see again. Amazon's and Google start playing in that space because they have the talent and then they feel like they can enter the channel with those capabilities. So I'm curious from this group, people who spend their times actually developing solutions in insurance, what do you think is the greatest disruptor to insurance from where you sit? Not even necessarily that's happening now, but just one that could be
Daniel Bullington: (
So I, okay.
Gary Carter: (
Yeah. I'll start the cloud. So being able to move from having to have physical infrastructure and have large amounts of capital, drive your expansion in a new technologies, new products, new areas of expertise. You can turn everything on with a switch now, and it's low code, no code develop as you go and you can fail quickly, right? So you can enter something, not knowing what the expectations are, but it just takes one hit outta the park of getting into the right space at the right time. That entrepreneurial spirit that all of us have ingrained in us that you can kind of play along with the big boys when everything comes quick and easy,
Randy Paez: (
Right? So speed kills, as they say. And I think that insurance has always found itself to be pretty slow and the ones who are winning or starting to win are the ones who can move quickly. And as you said, get themselves into a space, identify if they're gonna be viable in that space and then move on or try and double down into that space. Yep.
Daniel Bullington: (
So I think I'll take a slightly different angle on what was just previously said. So I think cloud is definitely a huge game changer for all or all organizations across all industries, but here's the challenge, right? And especially in insurance, just given the fact that insurance and most financial services are very risk averse, very kind of, for lack of a better word, kinda old guard mentality. In a lot of ways the disrupting factor is actually doing things like cloud and AI and all these other advanced things. Right. I think that a lot of organizations right now, especially insurance companies say they're doing cloud. They say they're doing AI, but what they're doing is they're be essentially slow walking capabilities and are being still very risk averse. I mean, if you're still managing your cloud infrastructure, like you manage a data center, that's a huge red flag for me as an engineer and as a or as an engineering leader.
Daniel Bullington: (
And so I think the real disruptor is doing it well, doing it the right way and getting out of the comfort zone and not trying to shoehorn the practices and the risk aversion of the past. That's very inherent with the insurance industry and trying to wrap it around kind of these net new technologies, because ultimately all you're doing is really recreating the worldview that you had but not really, truly disrupting because again, you're managing things the same way. And so I think the true disruptor is getting outta your comfort zone, embracing these, take these technologies like cloud, like yeah, because again using the words I used before, these are table stakes for organizations and table stakes for sourcing a talent. If you're not in the cloud and talent is coming your way, they're gonna look at you with a really funny look when you tell them that how you're either doing it wrong, or you're not doing it at all. So it's, I think, again the disruption is being willing to do it right and to be a little bit more fearless and less risk averse.
Randy Paez: (
Let me follow on with a question to that for you. If we're talking about digital transformation people might say, well, fake it till you make it. And I don't think that really works because people can quickly see when you're faking it. So if you are a technologist coming to a company, you've had these conversations throughout the interview process maybe you were able to ferret out if they were faking it until they make it. Maybe you weren't and now you show up and you see that they in fact are faking it. How do you react? How do you respond? Do you feel like people are driven to try and drive that digital transformation? Or do you feel like given the marketplace technologists will just say, what, I'm gonna move on to the next,
Daniel Bullington: (
I think it really depends on the engineer. If you've done a really good job of really vetting and hiring top, a plus talent, those are gonna be the folks that are, I think will really lean in and really take opportunity to try to evangelize and to affect positive change. There are subset of those, a players that don't have the patience or the attention span to really try to affect change. And that's okay, but maybe they don't necessarily belong in an environment where change is slow. But I think if you're looking for the right folks and you're also honest on the front end, I think you'll get opportunities to bring folks in that will help change the mindset that will change hearts and minds and help profit, great ideas and solutions over time, E even knowing that they may not, the organization may not be where they should be today, but hopefully they're, they have a commitment internally to at least get to a better place.
Randy Paez: (
Okay. What do you think about disruption?
August Dwight: (
Well, I don't really have enough depth in insurance to know what the biggest disruptor is gonna be, but the one I'm most excited about is the artificial intelligence and machine learning advances, just to you there are systems now that can get a picture of a piece of property and just assess the risk associated with that or systems that can, get the picture of a car and say, oh yeah, that's $30,000 worth of damage or, and just working with these new systems, these new technologies, it's the stuff of science fiction and it's just so much fun.
Randy Paez: (
So, I'm gonna ask Gary this question, arch doubled, its it staff over the past three years and it's got arch has been around for 20 years. It had lots of great it talent there for those, for a number of those years. It's had great retention of staff for those years and then we brought in double the amount of people. These two guys happen to be some of them you've been at your company for 17 years. Right. What is it like for a person who's been on staff who wants to stay at that company and feels their ability? What does it take to retain somebody over this time when you have the kind of staff you want to retain like yourself?
Gary Carter: (
Yeah, like I said, my path throughout the organization has gone different ways, starting at a legacy system, moving into better technology, but still being a carrier with a aging staff of it development coming from that means, frame background. It was hard to see my career progression growing faster than aging that sort of thing, ways to jump around in the company. So I actually sought professional development outside the organization, joining professional organizations, like the charter property, casualty, underwriters society networking with people on the business side, whether in claims or underwriting as well as, I have a very unique perspective. I joined the Iowa national guard and gained experience in the military while serving at EMC. So I have 15 years service in the army and Iowa national guard, 17 years with my company.
Gary Carter: (
So those two paths ran parallel to gain me perspective and a different viewpoint than a lot of my peers that required time away from the company which was a detriment to the organization, not having me there to do work to be involved in training deployments, those sorts of things, but it also provided value added and new skill sets, unique perspective management experience, project management, which the company didn't have to fund, but I was gaining through my service with the military. Now that's not recommendation to let all your subordinates go and join the army, but there are all sorts of different ways you can serve in the community and insurance because you touch other businesses, you touch schools, communities, you have the opportunity to be that face and be out there with it. It's a unique technical organization that touches every other business home.
Gary Carter: (
If you do personal lines, that sort of thing. And so giving your employees the opportunity to gain fulfillment serve their altruistic intentions, serve on boards go volunteer. We've started implementing BTO and we highly encourage individuals to go out one day a year to serve whether it's habitat to humanity those sorts of things, the D E and I has really been huge, making sure that we are a community we're a community of communities. And so gaining that additional viewpoint. So I feel EMC insurance has done a tremendous job of valuing me as an individual, allowing me to take whatever steps were necessary to educate myself, make myself well rounded, let me build roots. And then they came alongside me in that growth journey.
Randy Paez: (
That's a great story. Absolutely. Dan, you've been running teams for a while. How do you retain, how do you retain great staff?
Daniel Bullington: (
Well, I mean, actually, I think the question around, how do you keep folks in an organization long term is interesting because, one of the, again, I've only been with arch for a year, but one of the things that I've noticed in the industry, especially in the insurance and financial services, is they do a pretty terrible job of, of taking care of folks that have been long term associated with companies. And a lot of that manifests itself in pay and leveling discrepancies between folks that's been on staff for a long time and new hires. And, I, my previous role in another big box insurance company, I saw this first hand I was hired into the company, exact same role as somebody else.
Daniel Bullington: (
Who'd been there 25 years doing exact same job. And I was, I knew I was hired in at a much significant higher salary at a higher level than this person who essentially taught me how to do the job because they've been there for 25 years. And so, there was really never a leveling or releveling conversation. I think that's one of the things that has to start happening at any company of size and scale, especially in this talent pool. Yes, money is not the end all be all, but if you've got staff that's been on staff for, you know, 10, 20 years and they're providing significant value and you're hiring new folks in, there has to be some level of equalization. But in general, I think, at the end of the day, it's, hiring great talent really requires building relationships in the recruiting community, building relationships with the candidates themselves and really the again, the culture, the company culture selling the engineering culture, if you're dealing with bringing in engineers or technologists.
Daniel Bullington: (
But also just making sure that those table more of those table stakes are front remote options, personal development, encouraging contribution, open source or whatever happens to be there are more than just monetary things that you can bring to the table to attract that a talent and retain that a talent. Again, it starts with money. It starts with the kind of the table stakes. And then it just goes into overall culture and added benefits that make folks feel like they have a voice, make sure that they feel like they have a path to growth. And they also understand the mission of the organization as well, too. I think that it's important that as you're looking and talking with these candidates, that didn't understand that insurance just isn't about a contract it's about, you know, real life problems, real life situations that insurance and by extension other financial services, products solve for and help alleviate that ultimately can affect the human condition.
Daniel Bullington: (
So
Randy Paez: (
That's great. Let's switch gears here for a second. So, well, actually you mentioned something I think is interesting remote work. So obviously, everyone goes home during the pandemic. We are now in the people are going back. Some are in, I think companies are all struggling with trying to figure out exactly what the right thing to do. We've seen some companies really stumble and fall with their practices. We saw Goldman Sachs try and tell everybody to come back and what happened come back, or you lose your job. And what happens, 50% of people come back and the other 50% stay home and they don't lose their jobs. Apple tries to get everybody back they're head of AI, walks off the job and says no way. So I'm curious from your guys' standpoint, advantages and challenges of the various approaches, either full time back in the office hybrid being fully remote and how that impacts the technologist and where they choose to work. Let's just start with August.
August Dwight: (
I mean, I'm never going back to an office full time. I tell you that this has been an eye opening experience for me. For me, the right level is about one or two days a month that I want to be in the office, cuz that's time to collaborate. It's time to talk about things. And you really, if you're only spending that little time, you can focus on meeting with people, talking with people and for what it's worth my situation. My team is mostly distributed around the world. I have team members in Philippines and Bangalore and HBA and you know, wherever CRESH lives at Connecticut,
Randy Paez: (
Connecticut. Yeah.
August Dwight: (
And New Jersey, North Carolina. So if I come to the office, they're not gonna be there anyway.
Daniel Bullington: (
Anyway, that's it for me? Yeah. I think again, it goes back to table stakes. I think that COVID has proven one thing and that is that remote work works. And if it's implemented correctly and you've got the it infrastructure to support it. And I think that's was been one of the biggest challenge was the it infrastructure for a lot of organizations having to pull that together really fast. But I think that it's become table stakes. I think if you're going to look to source a talent, especially from an engineering or technology perspective, you have got to absolutely lead with remote as a number one fully accepted option and leave it up to the in person, depending on their locality and their preferences to determine whether or not they want to, uh, you know, come into the office or not, and treat folks like adults as they should be and assume that they're doing their work and that they're collaborating with the technology and the tools that we have available.
Daniel Bullington: (
I mean, companies spend millions upon millions of dollars for Microsoft or RingCentral, all these other solutions that give us, we have the technology like the old TV show used to say, right. Let's trust the technology and trust the people. It is absolute table stakes. Now, I'm not looking for a job cuz I love working at arch. And one of the things that drew me to arch was because they set off a jump street that, Hey, we're fully open to full remote. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. There's no office around me. I am more than willing to travel in for quarterlys do, you know, team building exercises, virtually whatever it takes to build that relationship with my team, which is distributed as well, globally, but also with my business stakeholders as well too, which are also distributed. So, just being empowered and having the right tools and setting expectations, I think is actually important. I think any company that draws a hard line these days, whether it's financial services, insurance, or any other industry and says remote is absolutely not a possibility anymore. We're beyond COVID I think are setting themselves up for not only failure, but also a mass Exodus of resources.
Gary Carter: (
Yeah. Just to caveat on that. I go into the office three days a week. I really enjoy it. I do not prefer working from home, but the big thing about the whole work from home alternative work arrangements, it's flexibility, right? It's trusting your people to get the job done, that you will meet them where the work life balance needs to be. And so whether it's a hundred percent remote flexible the thing is you're introducing new challenges and you just have to solve those challenges. Like anything else, the business presents, we adapt and we overcome, right. So how do you keep people engaged? How do you build rapport? How do you get ownership stakeholdership and people that have never seen your building don't wear your brand, don't interact at the same timeframe. And you only see through a digital phase it's difficult, right?
Gary Carter: (
So you have to introduce new opportunities for engagement. You have to be deliberate in every encounter that you have of mentorship. One on ones. That was never a thing when everyone was managing by walking around. But now you have to have that engagement. Otherwise you get nothing out of that work relationship with your subordinates. So there have been improvements in things that have developed because of the remote nature, leaders have better documentation of their performance management through those one-on-ones because everything's kept in teams or zoom and they can build upon those conversations because it's all recorded. It's all digital. So, not that the work from home isn't great. There's things that we're physical people. We need that interaction. This conference has been outstanding because we're all here together, right? Moving past the fear, moving past the frustrations of COVID and looking back, take the tools engage them where they're appropriate, but nothing needs to be fixed. Like what you're saying, if you draw a firm line in the sand and say my way or the highway, that's where you're gonna lose people because people like being treated like adults professionals and having that flexibility because no one solution is gonna fit everyone's needs.
Randy Paez: (
I think that's exactly right. I work from home quite a bit. Myself. Obviously most of us technologists have been always working remotely in some way, shape or form. I do like going to the office because I like whiteboarding. I like doing stuff like that. I like hanging out with people. I think people are, like I've said before are the most important part of any organization, but there's something to be said about being home when your kid gets home and being able to take care of that thing around your house without spending 15 minutes to commute to an office, how long?
Daniel Bullington: (
35,
Randy Paez: (
I think 35. He's not near an office, takes me an hour and a half to get to my office when I want to go. That's three hours a day that, yes, I'm on my laptop and doing whatever, but that's not a good use of three hours a day in my opinion. So I'm gonna give you some metrics and I'm gonna ask you a question. Since the beginning of June 17,000 tech jobs have been lost in layoffs Netflix, 2% car fact, Carvana, 12%, Robin hood, 9% hyper science, 25% Peloton, 20% into it, 7%. If I remember, I think Codery who's here somewhere 20% as a retool. If you put yourself in the shoes of folks coming out of those non-insurance, companies, what is the thing that could be said to you that would attract you to come to the insurance space?
Daniel Bullington: (
I think, if I'm coming out of those, high risk, high reward type of industries, it also, it kinda depends on my mindset, nine times outta 10, it would be safe to assume that someone having to field through a layoff is obviously looking to land softly somewhere and potentially, mitigate future risk of layoff. And so I think the big thing about insurance and financial services as a whole is because of the nature of the business and the work that we do. We are very stable, I think in general, as an industry, in terms of our employment, in terms of our resilience to economic and kind of the market conditions that are being seen affecting these high tech organizations again not to say that no organization is completely immune from layoffs or from economic issues.
Daniel Bullington: (
But I think that insurance, because it is already a very risk averse industry, there's a lot of work that goes into hedging, a lot of that risk and that hedging of risk. I think trickles down into a general perception that insurance is a pretty safe place to be, especially as a technologist. Because again, if you've landed a good position in an organization that does insurance in a technology role, there's a need for your services and they're competing for talent as well. And so I think the implication is that you've got yourself a pretty solid place short of obviously poor performance or some really unforeseen negative event that just hurts the entire industry as a whole. So I think it's safety and stability in a lot of ways. Okay.
Gary Carter: (
I fear that the insurance and financial market is gonna be the next follow on to that. You guys recently doubled in size, probably due to an initiative you're moving from one system type to another and you have a need for that workforce once your initiative's met and you get to the place where you're in operational mode, will you need that exact same staffing that you have as all these digital transformations are going on. And we don't have data centers, we don't have the infrastructure needs and management using a lot more third party systems. You're still paying for personnel, but it's at a different company for them managing, and then you're just consuming their SAS offering. So, right now we're working on the year of the engineer, right? Staffing our individuals, making sure that there's an adequate skill set and the roles that we've designed within our organization figure out where the gaps in people's education and experience backgrounds are, and maybe the desires for cross-training or different areas of capacity within our own organization. But as those people come out of those flash it positions there's not a good fit. So how do you make yourself more well rounded? That is gonna be a challenge, but the tooling that they have will help them aid other development that's just behind, but as we automate more and we move more towards configuration versus development and buy, instead of build insurance is probably right behind in the financial sector.
Randy Paez: (
Okay. And, so what do you think if you're coming out of one of those companies, what is it that can be said to you that would make you want to come to insurance?
Gary Carter: (
We're a product that's not gonna ever disappear. We are driven by the other businesses, whether it's commercial lines, personal lines, everyone's going to have real estate. They're gonna have that exposure. So it's not the sexiest or most amazing type of products that, but it's a necessary product. It's kinda like real estate. You're always going to need that. So if there's that fear element you just gotta be willing to accept that culture,
Randy Paez: (
The safety. What about you?
August Dwight: (
Well, two years ago I was one of those people, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I was not looking for a job in the insurance industry or the financial sector or any one specific place. I was looking for a job. And with my skillset, that's almost any industry is looking for people who can do the sort of thing I can do. So what I was looking for was just whatever people had and the opportunity with arch said, hey, we're looking to do this digital transformation where we're going from, what in my mind is a room full of a smoke filled room, full of people with corded, telephones and fax machines, to this more modern approach of API driven computers, talking to computers and solving all our problems. And like, that's what I like to do. And also, I don't know how many people in the room are engineers or hobby, crafters, people who build things, but as someone who builds a lot of things, I'm almost never satisfied with the end result. I would love the opportunity to do it again. So the fact that the industry, the insurance industry is a few years behind the curve means I get to solve the same problems again, but better this time, which is kind of fun.
Randy Paez: (
Okay. I like that. So just to try and summarize some of what we hear taking care of people, the safety of our particular industry it's been around for hundreds of years, certainly. And in the past 20, some odd years, we've seen a weather storms and many other industries have failed to weather the opportunity to actually have fun with what you're doing and be disruptive and not just be already there, like some of these other tech companies might be. So, I think there's one other piece to this. I didn't always realize it. And I've been in insurance for a long time and I left insurance and I came back and I always just thought of it as a way to make money. And we all know insurance makes great money, right?
Randy Paez: (
Many of us wouldn't be here if it didn't. But when you stop thinking about it as a financial instrument and you start realizing that it's really an enabler of risk it enables the entrepreneur to follow their dream and start a business. It enables the injured worker to keep food on their table when they're injured. And they're trying to get back to work. It enables the business to rebuild themselves or the community to rebuild themselves after a catastrophe, really quite changes insurance. It's no longer this thing that makes money. It is this social mission, this socioeconomic mission that has a material impact. So I'm curious for someone who's been in it for a very long time, someone who's been in it for a middle amount of time and someone who's been in it for a very little amount of time, how do you guys see it?
Gary Carter: (
Yeah. I see it as a people thing. So everyone that interacts with the insurance company, it's either the worst day of your life because your house is burned down or your business, all your inventory is gone. And so you have immediate opportunity to have that impact, add something that's gonna be lasting, or you fail in that business transaction. Right. So, we're definitely an industry built around supporting people. I love that our company is very focused on risk improvement. So not only keeping the cost low, but doing the things to keep businesses safe in the long run, right? So, going into an organization after they've issued a policy with us and seeking ways to make their lives safer, whether it's through risk inventories going through and doing training for individuals on the workplace and maybe prevent injuries save lives really, whether it's AED training, those sorts of things. And so insurance, whether it's through the independent agent or the commercial carriers, like we're out in the communities and being that large financial institution, whether it's through investing in schools through donation or the activities that we do to re indemnify after a loss, that sort of thing. It's a good feeling that you're protecting lives and the leader from nationwide today. I like that viewpoint of, we're not an insurance product, we're protection we're in that type of industry.
Daniel Bullington: (
That's great. Yeah. I think just to kind of dovetail on kind of the people aspect, I would kind of frame it up as humans, helping humans. I mean, we were at dinner last night and I was sharing with my colleagues, my own personal example, just in the past few years of if there was an insurance in my life, whether it was life insurance, excess liability insurance and several other policies because of life circumstances. I probably wouldn't be sitting here today because I'd probably in a Looney bin having to deal with all these catastrophes. Right. And so again it would the things that made the most difference in those to use those same words. The worst time of my life in a lot of different aspects was that there was a human on the other end of the phone that understood insurance that understood my situation and genuinely cared about how their products and services for which I've been paying X dollars and premiums can now kick in into effect and help me solve my immediate problems and my, and also mitigate long term problems.
Daniel Bullington: (
So it's humans helping humans. And I think that's the most important part.
August Dwight: (
I don't really have a strong opinion on this one. I'm gonna pass on this one.
Randy Paez: (
Okay. Well, I do think it's critically important. I think for those who are out in the industry who are either looking for jobs or have been recently at off, or are passively hanging around again having been, so I ran the engineering teams@webmd.com for some time and it was great and a fun job, but the fact of the matter was once we solved most of the technical problems we had, I just didn't really have a need for it anymore. I was, I soughted something else. And in this, I've been able to attach myself to the mission of protection of taking care of people. So, it's, what's kept me in insurance for as long as I've been in insurance when I've had opportunities to go to the other industries, because those other industries didn't scratch that itch that I had besides making money or solving technical problems. But it allowed me to feel good about how I spent my time on a regular basis. So with that, I think maybe we'll open up to some questions or we can finish up any questions for our talent, our technologist talent.
Randy Paez: (
Okay. Well, thank you guys so much for taking the time out. I know we're all very busy, but it's great to be able to hear as we think about how we make our companies run, the people that actually make our companies run. So thank you guys very much.