Billie Joe Galli, SVP of Marketing and Insurance Operations at Tricor Insurance, spent seven years managing marketing, technology, data, and training through rapid growth via mergers and acquisitions. She explains how to balance automation systems with human development when scaling fast, and how private equity backing and a hard market forced the company to adapt.
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So how does a hyper growth insurance agency, in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as traditional organic growth, balance the operations based in technology and the growth of their people? On today's Agent Leader podcast, I have a fantastic interview with Billie Joe Galli of Tricor Insurance. She's the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Operations and has a very unique perspective on how things can and should run to make sure that people are utilizing technology and the data that they have at the highest level. Fantastic episode. Enjoy. Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. This is the podcast for insurance agency leaders to learn to grow, to develop and ultimately become best version possible leaders who lead best version possible agencies. My name is Brent Kelly. I'm your host. It is my pleasure to be with you today and also my pleasure to to have an incredible guest, someone who has been a partner with the Sitkins Group for a number of years, their agency. I got a chance to know her through coaching calls and some other experiences we've had. I've got Billie Joe Gally with me. She is the Senior Vice President, Marketing and Insurance Operations. And I'll add this, she seems to be the chief everything Officer in so many ways for Tricor Insurance. Does a great job. So, Billy Joe, welcome first and foremost to the Agent Leader podcast.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, well, we're going to have some great conversation and I know that you know, your experience, Billy Joe, is you've got a unique perspective from an agency side of things. So many things that you do and so many amazing things that Tricor Insurance does. And Tricor is located in Wisconsin. I've had a few other guests from Tricor and now I've got Billy Joe. And again, there's so many things that you guys have done to learn and to grow. And before I get into some specific questions on successes and challenges that the audience can learn from, if you would just share a little bit about your background, how you got to where you are today, what specifically you do, and certainly some information about Tricor Insurance as well.
Yeah, sounds great. So, Billie Jogale, I have been working at Tricor for about seven years. So I have both our marketing as in brand and advertising. I've learned in this industry you need to let people know that side of it. And then I have the insurance operations team. So that includes our service team, our data team, so the people that run our AMS system from a data and technology side training team, we have quality assurance and training and it's just a really amazing team that we have here. And then previous to Tricor, I worked at Cuna Mutual Group. So I was a part of the team that helped them develop the Trustage brand which is a direct to consumer insurance company. So selling life insurance, AD&D auto and home direct to consumer. So we did a lot of really fun projects but it built on my background of a data marketing so using a lot of data and technology to target market. I was there for 12 years in building that role and previous to that I was actually in the retail industry. I worked for Lands End for period of time going through college and different things like that. So it's been a really fun ride.
Yeah, it's awesome. I. I wrote down on my notes you're saying there, I mean this is a positive thing but you got your fingers in lots of stuff, so to speak, right? There's a lot of different areas and certainly in the fact that you think of operations, I mean that's, that's a lot of stuff. And as you said, you've been to Tricore for seven years. You, you all have changed just a little bit in seven years. Is that, is that fair to say? There's been some evolution and growing and growth over the last seven years?
Yeah, it's been really fun. So not only M and A is a big portion of our growth, but so is organic growth. So really the portion that we spent a lot of time building the foundation of is our intersection of data and technology in order to leverage for multiple things, whether it's marketing, it's sales pipelining, it's reporting and business analytics. So you know, going from a owned by two brothers agency as well into full growth mode in backed by private equity now we have great partners in that helping us with capital as we're purchasing agencies as well. So. And really the industry is going through a shift of trying to modernize itself into the technology and data and just using that to make decisions and be more effective and efficient. So. And then put on top of that a really interesting hard market. So it's been, it's been a fun few years.
So yeah, I just you know, think about this and obviously your impact personally but you know, got a lot of great people, I mean so many good people on your team but this idea of data marketing. But then you think about this, the changes that you've all had just as far as sheer volume and numbers plus just how you do things and people and technology and what's all involved in that and I'm so excited to get, you know, your viewpoint I mentioned just from an operation side and the part that you've got that data background, because I think there's so many agency leaders and insurance agencies that are interested in that. Want to learn more about that. How do we take the next step? What did you do? What does it look like? So what may go all kinds of places on. On some of the questions and conversations. And I want to start by just leaving it super simple and wide open from your experience. And we'll just, you know, you can go anywhere with this, but you're back seven years. Maybe it's something you're working on now. Maybe it's something you accomplished three years ago. What's been, in your opinion, a great success that you've been a part of at Tricor, Right. And your team have done, and what did you learn from that? I just love to start with successes because the success leaves clues.
Oh, gosh, I could go a couple ways in this one. One avenue that we've had is we built a very talented, robust M and A team. So as we're able to bring multiple in about a week, we're bringing two more onto the system in one day. So. And that team is constantly thinking of the data and making it accurate and clean. And so we get a very good picture of what's coming in. It's really valuable to us because it could also bog you down if you did not build a team that is very efficient at what they're doing and you would never get a view of your true business analytics as those data points come into the system.
