In September of 1990, with a bank loan, an assistant and 500 square feet of office space, Greg Hatcher started The Hatcher Agency. He signed a 3 year lease on that 500 square feet of office space thinking it would be all he would ever need. At the end of the first year, he had already outgrown his office space and had grown to 7 employees, producing more insurance in his first year of business than any agent in the state of Arkansas. Three years later in 1993, The Hatcher Agency was named Arkansas' Small Business of the Year by Arkansas Business and The Hatcher Agency was the largest health insurance agency in the state of Arkansas. Greg and The Hatcher Agency has been the number one producer since, leading the state of Arkansas in health insurance sales every year since they started business in 1990.
Greg graduated in 1983 from Alma College with a degree in Public Relations. While at Alma, he was President of the Student Body, and lettered in soccer, wrestling and baseball. Greg was named the schools Outstanding Graduate and the TKE Fraternity's Top Fraternity Man for his local Chapter and Nationwide. Greg was also a nine-letter winner and one of the last athletes to play three varsity sports for four years at Alma College. He was captain of the wrestling team and was named first-team all-Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1982-83. Hatcher helped the wrestling and baseball teams each capture three MIAA titles while also lettering in soccer. Hatcher was president of his junior class and served as president of the student body as a senior. He co-founded and was president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and also served as sports information director from 1981-83. Following graduation, he coached baseball at Notre Dame University for one year before going to work for Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield. In Greg's seven years at Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, he was named the Account Executive of the Year, a record six consecutive times, before leaving to start his own agency in 1990.
In 1999, Greg wrote the book 55 Steps to Outrageous Service, which is a book outlining the service that The Hatcher Agency delivers every day to their clients. This book has sold over 15,000 copies to date and in 2011 a publisher purchased the rights to the book and is now printing over 100,000 in paperback. The Hatcher Agency has grown to a business with 50 employees, over 650 group clients, and over 180,000 insured's. Because of his Outrageous Service philosophy, Greg and The Hatcher Agency have earned numerous awards and recognitions, including lifetime status in the Million Dollar Roundtable, recognizing the top 3 % of life insurance producers in the country and a lifetime Golden Eagle Award winner by the National Association of Health Underwriters, recognizing the top 1% of health insurance producers nationwide.
Greg is very involved in the community, serving as Past Chairman of The Little Rock Marathon, Baptist Health Foundation Board, Heart Ball, Heart Walk, and The Arthritis Foundation. He has been named the Sales and Marketing Executives Manager of the Year, The March of Dimes Citizen of the Year, received The Jerry Davis Corporate Award from The American Heart Association, and named Pulaski Technical College’s Business Honoree. Recently, Greg was named the Distinguished Alumnus by Alma College and was inducted into the Alma College Sports Hall of Fame (in soccer, wrestling and baseball). He was a member of three Hall of Fame wrestling teams and two Hall of Fame baseball teams. In 2008, Greg became a member of the Alma College Board of Trustees.
His greatest joy has come from his work in getting wrestling started in Arkansas. Hatcher founded The Arkansas Wrestling Association (AWA) and has purchased the mats for 60 high schools and 4 colleges to help get new programs started at these schools. For his efforts, he has been honored with the “Dan Gable America Needs Wrestling Award,” named WIN Magazines Man of the Year and awarded The Certificate of Merit by The Arkansas Activities Association. Greg is most pleased that over 4,000 kids now wrestle in Arkansas.
Behind The Scenes
TRANSCRIPT
Episode 83
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:09] GM: Welcome to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy, a production of flagandbanner.com. Through storytelling and conversational interviews, this weekly radio show and podcast offers listeners an insider's view into starting and running a business, the ups and downs of risk-taking and the commonalities of successful people. Connect with Kerry through her candid, often funny, and always informative weekly blog. There, you’ll read, learn and make comments about her life as a 21st century wife, mother, daughter, and entrepreneur. Now, it's time for Kerry McCoy to get all up in your business.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:41] KM: Thank you, son Gray. My guest today, Mr. Greg Hatcher from The Hatcher Agency Insurance Company is no exception, because at one time early in his career, fresh out of college, before insurance was even a glint in his eye, he was an actual baseball coach for Duke's Blue Devils. What? I know, right? Greg is one of those rare breeds of humans who had their act together at a young age. He's one of those guys you knew through his work ethic and can-do attitude, he was going to succeed at whatever he tried, and if he didn't, he was just going to keep trying. Today, we're going to hear all about his life and what he's accomplished.
Greg has been a doer all of his life. He's in perpetual motion, and he's sitting over there with two phones right now. After high school, he was president of the student body at Alma College in Michigan. He was voted the nation's top fraternity man for TKE. Makes you think he's a big drinker, but no. He had no time, because he was an athlete and leathered in soccer, wrestling, and baseball, and was captain of the wrestling team.
The next part, I think, is so interesting, and I touched on it at the beginning. Though he majored in public relations in school, his first job after college was as coach for Notre Dame's baseball team. He was a Blue Devil for one year. The next seven years, Greg Hatcher would spend his time in Arkansas working for Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield, where he was named six consecutive times as the Account Executive of the Year. It was in 1990, he decided to take the entrepreneurial leap and founded The Hatcher Agency with one employee and 500-square-feet of office space.
Today, The Hatcher Agency sits on a city block in Downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, has 50 employees, and leads the state in health insurance sales every year since the 1990s, and I think specifically since 1993. In addition, Arkansas Business Publication voted The Hatcher Agency best insurance company for at least 11 years or more.
Greg is the only agent in the state of Arkansas and possibly the nation to earn all five insurance designations, and I have no idea what any of these acronyms mean, but I'm going to read them anyway. He is a COU, a CHC, a CHFC, an RHU and an REBC, whatever that means. I think it means he is overqualified and can definitely answer any questions that might come to him today.
Last, if you are a wrestler, or know someone that wrestles besides with their kids and their girlfriend, you can thank Greg for that. He founded the Arkansas Wrestling Association and helped initiate wrestling programs throughout schools in the state of Arkansas. It is an honor to welcome to the table the philanthropic, uber successful, and well-dressed man, Mr. Greg Hatcher.
[0:03:40] GH: Thanks. It's good to be here. This is fun.
[0:03:42] KM: I know it is, isn't it? Listen, thank you so much for coming on. I read all about you and I had no idea where you were born and what your parents do. Can you tell us about the young Greg Hatcher?
[0:03:56] GH: Yeah. My father was an English professor at the college level who moved up. I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, lived there a year or two. Then my father went to work as an English professor at Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas. After a few years, he became the chairman of the English department. After a couple years there, he went to Park College in Parkville, Missouri, where he was the Vice President of Development. He was there one year and then we moved to Michigan, where he became the Vice President of Development at Albion College in Albion, Michigan.
When I was a sophomore in college, he called me and he said, “Greg, I've been offered the presidency of three different colleges.” Actually, he said it this way. He said, “Greg, I want you to know that I was offered the president of this college and this college and I turned them down.” I said, “Well, why would you do that?” He said, “Well, you can't be the president of three colleges.” We’re moving to Conway, Arkansas, where he became the President of Hendrix College when I was a sophomore in college.
People always ask, how did I get here? Well, after I graduated, me and two fraternity brothers moved to Arkansas, and we stayed because the weather was nicer and the girls were prettier. Those were the two reasons we stayed.
[0:05:16] KM: Ain’t that a song? Wow. Why did he pick Conway? Is he a methodist?
[0:05:23] GH: No. That was the –
[0:05:24] KM: Ain’t Hendrix a methodist school?
[0:05:25] GH: It was just, he was methodist, but I think he just thought Hendrix was a really good college of the three that he was offered at the same time.
[0:05:33] KM: He was, you said, the president of the school that you were attending in Michigan, right?
[0:05:38] GH: No. He was the vice president of Albion College. I went to Alma College, which was in the same conference and a rival. You didn't really want to go where your father was working, and then the town I grew up. So, I went to the rival, and I could go anywhere in the conference free. That also helped as well.
[0:05:59] KM: Was that when you moved to Conway?
[0:06:02] GH: No, because it was good for him. Good for him and my mom. My mom was a school teacher. When he became president, she stopped teaching school and she became a competitive quelter. She's a world-class quelter.
[0:06:20] KM: Competitiveness just runs in your family. Excel, excel, excel is your DNA.
[0:06:26] GH: It's interesting. My father never was an athlete, because he was the only child. He was making more money than his parents at 16. He was a worker. But he was actually a pretty decent athlete, because he would run and play tennis and he was pretty good there. I was really the first one that had the opportunity. He was having to work back then. I didn't have to work as much, so I got to play all the sports.
[0:06:54] KM: Well, how old were you when you got your first job?
[0:06:58] GH: I mean, I worked in the summers in high school, and I worked in the summers in college, but I didn't work while I was in school. My father probably thought he wanted me to. I think in my four years of high school and college, there was one season that I worked. I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken and my grades went down, and that was enough. My dad figured out that sports was good for the busier I was, the better it was.
A lot of people ask me this on my kids. I tell my kids, if they're playing three sports, that's their job. I believe, you can learn more playing the sports than you can working a minimum wage job while you're in high school, or whatever. Now, people have different opinions on that. But what I tell people is if you can compete and you're going against trained assassins from the other team every day and you're working harder than anybody at practice, those skills are completely transferable to the work world.
I didn't know I was prepared for the work world, but what I tell people is when I was in college, every day I was going to a practice, sometimes two practices, because I played three sports. 50 of the 52 weekends I competed. We tracked it one year. 50 of the 52 weekends, I was either in a soccer, wrestling, or baseball game. When it's all said and done, when I got out of college and I went into the work world, it almost wasn't fair, because I was going against somebody that had a coach that trained him. When you when you get to compete against the rest of the world, which might not be quite as intense from all that competitive warfare, work has been pretty easy, much easier than college sports for sure.
I just want my kids to learn to compete. There'll be plenty of time to work. You can only compete and play for those four years of high school and college. I want them to do that now. I will support them as long as they do that. Now if they quit, they can go to work.
[0:09:06] KM: I think it's interesting you called it warfare and you called them trained assassins.
[0:09:11] GH: Well, in wrestling, especially. Think about this, of all the sports, you have to go to practice every day and you get ready to go out on a mat one-on-one with nobody to tag, no teammate to substitute in. No coach can help you. You're out there by yourself, and the guy's trying to rip your head off, okay. He's trying to pin you and embarrass you in front of all your buddies, okay. You get more trained for that than anything else. I wasn't a boxer, a mixed martial artist. But if you told me I had to go in the UFC ring, like they do that real fighting –
[0:09:48] KM: Cage boxing. Cage fighting.
[0:09:49] GH: Yeah. I can't imagine wanting to be more prepared for that. Because if you have a bad day there, you're all cut up and beat up and you might get killed. I didn't want my kids to go that far. I do have some respect for anybody that gets in that ring, because you better be trained mentally and physically. If I then took a person like that, and that was pretty smart, and put them in just a regular job where their body wasn't at risk every day, that job would be pretty easy.
[0:10:16] KM: That's a different way to think about it.
[0:10:19] GH: To me, yeah, work was much easier than – because every day, I'm going against the guy who got a wrestling scholarship, who's got a coach in his corner. Now, I compete with people who might not get up today and work out, or get motivated to do anything, which is easier. A lot easier.
[0:10:38] KM: Well, you played in college soccer, baseball, and you were the captain of your wrestling team. When you got out of college, you took a job at Notre Dame for the baseball team. Tell us about that and what type of coach you were, and who you coach, what position you coach.
[0:10:58] GH: The truth is I had one job for six months right after I got out of college, selling computers. I missed competing and sports so badly that I decided to go back to graduate school. I went to Notre Dame to go to graduate school. I could have either been the sports information director assistant, or the assistant baseball coach. I chose the baseball coaching job. I really enjoyed it. I must admit, I still wasn't through playing. I missed playing more than coaching. Then I coached a semi-pro team with a bunch of division one baseball players, where I was the player coach. Then I ended up moving back down here.
[0:11:40] KM: To Arkansas?
[0:11:40] GH: Yeah. When I did, I played competitive tennis, softball, and ran road races for the next 20 years, because I couldn't get out the competitive juices. I just liked working out and going hard. I quit when my kids got old enough to play. Because you can't be great and your kids be great. Either one of the two of you is going to be great. But if I'm going to all my games instead of going to theirs and spending time with them practicing, then I can't be great. If I'm playing all the time, they're not going to be. I quit and started coaching all their teams. I coached all five of my kids’ teams until they got to high school. I still help in many, many ways.
[0:12:21] KM: I think that's a really tweetable thing to say. You can't be great and your kids be great. There's only enough room for one of you in the limelight at the time. I think that's a very tweetable thing to say. That's lovely. I think this is a great place for us to take a break. When we come back, we'll continue our conversation with author, philanthropist and salesman extraordinaire and athlete extraordinaire, Mr. Greg Hatcher, Founder of The Hatcher Agency, one of the largest, if not the largest independent insurance agency in Arkansas. We'll attempt to unravel the mystique of insurance.
[BREAK]
[0:12:57] ANNOUNCER: You listening to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy, a production of flagandbanner.com. If you miss any part of the show, or you want to learn more about Up in Your Business, go to flagandbanner.com and click radio show. If you'd like to subscribe through any of your favorite podcast apps, just search flagandbanner.com. Lots of listening options. We’ll be right back.
[0:13:18] ANNOUNCER: Here at Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy, we love dance. We love dancing into dreamland. As a matter of fact, that wonderful event celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. We celebrated all night with loyal guests and past performers. In the interest of our dancers and guest safety during the pandemic, we chose this year to postpone our largest fundraiser, Dancing into Dreamland 2020. Please know that this love affair with dancing and the history and restoration of Dreamland Ballroom has not been dampened at all. As a matter of fact, it's revitalized our commitment to building a loving and inclusive community. We intend to be a place for people to come together in unity and talk safely and openly about personal and social issues that affect not just our community, but the entire United States of America.
This unusual reprieve, not mounting Dancing into Dreamland 2020 this year, has presented the board an opportunity to spend a year on building partnerships and strategic plans that'll help us reach the goals that we have. We hope that you'll share in this vision and find it in your heart to give, in lieu of your usual ticket and table or sponsorship of Dancing into Dreamland. Please consider it and visit our website, dreamlandballroom.org.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:14:35] KM: You're listening Up in Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. I'm speaking today with businessman, athlete, salesman and philanthropist, Mr. Greg Hatcher, Founder of The Hatcher Agency, a highly successful independent insurance company in Little Rock, Arkansas. He's got a lot of tweetable moments and comments already in the first 15 minutes of the show.
Let's talk about your company. We talked about your life growing up. I see where all your ambition and drive comes from. Your mother and your father, they were both just very responsible people. They're both community minded, sounds like, teachers.
[0:15:07] GH: Yeah, they were good parents.
[0:15:09] KM: Let's talk about your company, The Hatcher Agency. Then let's move on to educating our listeners about insurance and how to read and understand your policy, which I do not – I am not able to do. And the future of health insurance in America, probably everybody wants to know that, including me. First, tell us how you decided to leave the security. You left college, or you moved Arkansas, you got a job working for Blue Cross Blue Shield. You decided to leave that security and start your own business. Tell us how that came to be.
[0:15:39] GH: Well, I really enjoyed my years at Blue Cross Blue Shield. My co-salesman that I worked with were really fun, because back then, Bill Phillips, who played pro football for the Broncos, he hired pretty much most of the salesmen, and so most of them were athletes. They were competitive. We had a lot of fun.
[0:15:57] KM: Oh, that's awesome.
[0:16:02] GH: I think, what did it for me is I was – I was always reading this book by Tom Peters called In Search of Excellence, which –
[0:16:12] KM: In Search of Excellence.
[0:16:13] GH: Yeah, it's an older book. It was about all the great companies and different things they do. My entrepreneurial mind just thought I could do some fun things with our business that would make insurance different. The other thing is in 1989, Blue Cross averaged about a 50% increase.
[0:16:34] KM: You mean to customers?
[0:16:35] GH: Yeah. It was one of our worst years. I would have to deliver a lot of bad news. When I worked for Blue Cross, I only had one option. I had to say, “Here's your Blue Cross renewal and here's your Blue Cross renewal.” If sometimes I couldn't fix the problem, so I'd have to send it to an independent agent who –
[0:16:52] KM: You’d lose the sale.
[0:16:53] GH: Well, yeah. Who had Blue Cross, or all the other cares. I just thought being an independent where I could solve the problem all the time was the solution. But I wanted to end in really good terms with Blue Cross, so I did. I gave them plenty of notice. I honored my non-compete clause and became Blue Cross's top producer as an independent, both on the individual –
[0:17:16] KM: If you had a non-compete clause, were you competing with them when you started your business though?
[0:17:21] GH: Well, when you leave a company, a lot of times people will try to take all their accounts with them.
[0:17:26] KM: Oh, I see. You didn't go after their accounts. I got you.
[0:17:28] GH: I didn't take any accounts with me. I had to start from scratch. I had to call people I didn't even know. I did that and I sold for Blue Cross, both individual and group. I just figured out what the best solution was. When I got out, I learned that there were a lot of other solutions you didn't know about, because you're always just working.
[0:17:48] KM: For Blue Cross Blue Shield. In a bubble.
[0:17:50] GH: Yeah. I figured that out. It's been a lot of fun. My sales pitch was funny. I would just call on people and ask them if I could help them, or if I couldn't. They'd say, “Say that again.” I’d say, “I'm calling to see if I can help you, or if I can. If you let me look at your plan, I'll either help you and save you money, or I won't. Either way, you win. You can you confirm what you have is good, or I'll find something better.”
Well, after six months of those calls, everybody I looked at, I was able to help in some way. I've never made a sales call since that six months, because it got so busy. Once you took care of those customers, they'd refer you to other ones. We grew from one employee to seven employees in the first year.
[0:18:32] KM: I wondered how you grew so fast.
[0:18:33] GH: Yup. To be fair, Blue Cross people, if they couldn't figure it – if they didn't have the fit, they'd send them to me.
[0:18:40] KM: And refer them.
[0:18:41] GH: We had a great relationship and we have a great relationship today.
[0:18:45] KM: How do you handle that kind of growth? Because one of the things that kills a business is you grow too fast and you can't manage the growth. How did you manage the growth?
[0:18:52] GH: Well, the first year in business, I set these parameters. I would work every day from 6 am to 6 pm. Then I'd go home till nine. Then I went back to the office 9 to midnight. That was my first year. I had my expense –
[0:19:07] KM: What?
[0:19:08] GH: Yeah, I had my expenses below $2,000 a month. I didn't buy a new pair of socks, clothes, and anything for the first year. The commitment was to make it work. I'd have to, like you said, when you start a business, you have to go crazy at first. I was 28-years-old. I went crazy the first year doing that. Took me 13 months to make a profit. Once you make a profit in insurance, it takes that long to build up enough renewals that'll pay your expenses. Then I was good from that point forward. Really have just been taking care of customers and hiring people as I need them ever since. There was really no goal list to get a certain size to do this, or that. I just grew as needed.
[0:19:50] KM: Are you a group insurance, or individual insurance?
[0:19:53] GH: Both. We now do everything. We do health, property, and casually, individual, corporate. We can do every kind of insurance.
[0:20:02] KM: But it's mostly health insurance and life insurance, I guess. No auto.
[0:20:06] GH: No, we do all that, too.
[0:20:07] KM: Real estate?
[0:20:07] GH: Yeah. Yeah. Everything.
[0:20:09] KM: Really? Everything.
[0:20:10] GH: We do everything. But we started off as an employee benefits –
[0:20:13] KM: Which is a group insurance.
[0:20:15] GH: Group health. Yes. That's still our main thing, but we do it all now.
[0:20:18] KM: Let's talk about the business of insurance. It is complex and the vocabulary is all to its own. How does a layman learn how to read? Let's talk about health insurance. How does a layman learn how to read his policy?
[0:20:30] GH: Well, it's getting a little easier today, because so many things are legislated. In the in the early days of my career, the two worst things were that you could go to a doctor and the doctor would charge this much and the insurance would only pay a smaller amount. That was my biggest problem. Today, you have participating doctors and hospitals. If you go to those doctors or hospitals, they have to agree to accept whatever the insurance –
[0:20:54] KM: Are you talking about HMOs, that sort of thing?
[0:20:57] GH: Yeah. HMOs, PPOs, all those kinds of things.
[0:21:00] KM: You like those?
[0:21:02] GH: Well, the customer’s protected, because when you go to the doctor, you don't know what they're going to charge. You don't know if it's reasonable or not. When you go, if they're in the network, which all the hospitals are in 95% of the doctors, they've already cut a deal with the insurance company that they'll accept what they pay and that they can't balance bill you. That's important. That they'll file the claim for you, which makes that easier.
Then recently with Obamacare, there's no more pre-existing conditions. The old thing we used to worry about was, hey, are they going to deny this, because it was pre-existing? They can't deny it anymore, so that went away.
[0:21:41] KM: Does that hurt your business?
[0:21:43] GH: No, it doesn't hurt it, or help it. It just makes it have fewer problems. Because when you buy a policy and everything's covered, whether it was pre-existing or not, that makes for less problems. The only issue that that we deal with today is if I sell you a policy and it's supposed to be covered, I'm getting it covered. In 28 years, there hadn't been a claim not paid that should have been. I've gotten a few paid that maybe shouldn't have been. Today, the biggest problem is controlling the cost, because when you pay for everything and you don't want to have pre-existing condition clauses and people are aging, and they're spending somebody else's money, the insurance companies, it's hard to keep the costs under control.
We're probably less healthy as a society, because we're all eating out all the time and not working out. We don't have PE in the schools as much anymore, and kids are playing one sport instead of three. I mean, I believe in all of those things that help keep us healthy. Yeah.
[0:22:50] KM: That takes me to another question about driving up the – what is driving up the cost? I used to think that it was insurance companies like yours, or Blue Cross, not yours, but more like Blue Cross Blue Shield, they were driving up the cost of insurance and medical, but it's really not. I've been told it's the drug companies. What's your take on that?
[0:23:11] GH: Well, it's a lot of things. First of all, I try to – one of the keys to being successful as a salesman is to make something complicated simple –
[0:23:21] KM: Exactly.
[0:23:22] GH: - so that everybody can understand it.
[0:23:23] KM: Another tweetable moment.
[0:23:27] GH: All health insurance is, all Blue Cross is, is they are somebody that processes the claims that are sent in and negotiates the price with the doctors for you. For that, they take a percentage of the claims processed to pay their overhead. They're just an intermediary that connects you and the doctor and the payment through claims processing.
[0:23:53] KM: That is so well said.
[0:23:55] GH: Okay. Now, included in there are the drugs. Let's talk about the drugs, because you have hit on one of the key points. In 1984, I went to work for Blue Cross Blue Shield at age 23. There was no such thing as a prescription drug card. I didn't even know what one was, okay? If you had a prescription, you paid for it out of your pocket and you sent the little prescription in to the insurance company as a claim and it went towards your deductible and then they paid 80%. There also were no advertisements on TV. When I watch TV, I didn't know what Viagra, or Cialis, or Lamisil, or all these drugs, or HUMIRA that we see all the time. None of those were advertised on TV, okay.
Back then, drug card claims were 5% of the total health care spend. Just 5%. Today, they're 25%. They've increased 500% since the drug card and since advertising on TV. Because today, we look at and we say, “Hey, maybe I need to talk to my doctor about that,” okay. Most of the drugs that you see advertised on TV are what I would call maintenance medications. A drug you get to take the rest of your life. They're annuities, okay. I'm not saying –
[0:25:20] KM: Spoken like a real insurance man.
[0:25:21] GH: I'm not saying that we don't need them. We do. You and I are going to live longer. I looked at a chart the other day, mortality, because as I get closer to the end, I want to know how long that is. In 1900, the average person loved to be 45. Today, they loved to be about 75.
[0:25:42] KM: I thought it was higher than that.
[0:25:44] GH: Well, if you can pass a life insurance physical, it's 86. From a life insurance perspective, if you can get through a life insurance physical, it's 86. In Arkansas, the average man's about 72 and a woman about 75. That's mortality. Now that factors in their getting hit by a car wreck when you're 18, or getting shot, or whatever, not just dying of natural causes. The point is today, our medical care –
[0:26:11] KM: Got to go longer.
[0:26:11] GH: - keeps us alive longer.
[0:26:11] KM: It's got to go longer.
[0:26:13] GH: These drugs help us. The key is how to control the cost.
[0:26:17] KM: Do you think the cost of that, part of that is the advertising expense that they've tacked onto the cost of the drug, so that they can advertise it to the masses? Because advertising on the United States wide is pretty darn expensive. I don't understand what you've talked about the prescription cards. How would that make the price raise?
[0:26:34] GH: A prescription drug card is the little credit card looking thing that you get from your insurance company that says, when you go to get a prescription, it's $15, say, for a generic $30 for a name brand, or $50 and $75 for a non-preferred name brand. When people get those cards, just like a credit card, they go into the pharmacy and they fill their prescription and they don't know what that drug even costs. They just think it costs $15. It might cost $200. Since it only costs them $15, why do they care, okay? If you were having to pay your deductible and 20% of that drug card cost, you would care a little bit more.
[0:27:13] KM: You might not go get it.
[0:27:14] GH: That's right.
[0:27:15] KM: It might sit in your cabinet unused.
[0:27:17] GH: Yeah. I'll tell you a funny story to illustrate this. I had a friend call me one time. He said, “Hey, Greg. I've lost my job. I want to know if I should take COBRA or not.” I said, “Well, you're going to get another job, right?” He said, “Yeah, I should have one within 60 days.” I said, “Well, under COBRA, you can just wait 60 days to decide whether you want to exercise your option or not, as long as you don't have any claims, that you'd save that premium as long as you got on the new plan.” He said, “Okay.” I said, “You don't have any claims?” He goes, “Well, the kids take a couple medications.” I said, “Well, what do they cost? What are they?” He said, “Well, they're ADD medicines.” I said, “Well, what does that cost?” He goes, “I don't know. $15?”
I said, “No, no. They don't cost $15. They cost – that's just your copay. You need to call the pharmacy and see how much they cost.” He calls and he calls me back. He says, “Greg, you're not going to believe it. Those ADD medicines are costing $250 a month. I got two kids. That's $500 a month.” I said, “Well, what's your COBRA premium?” He said, “Well, it's $1,000 a month for the family.” I said, “There you go. Just pay the $500 out of your pocket. It's cheaper than paying the COBRA premium. If one of them gets in a car wreck, or gets sick, we can always go back and pay our COBRA premium. It'll pay for your drugs and that.” He goes, “I'm not paying $500 for the ADD medicine. They can go do a few extra pushups. They can go right around. But I'm not going to pay that.” He didn't pay it for those two months, because it was his money.
Well, when I was growing up, as you might imagine, my parents considered putting me on Ritalin, okay. Thank God, they didn't, okay. Because I would just had a little more energy than the average guy. A lot of drugs, we really, really need. A lot of drugs were taken, because somebody got on them. They're paying the $15. The pharmaceutical rep did a good job of selling them. I'm pretty anti-drug. I do just about anything I could not to have to take one. A lot of them can be controlled with diet, or exercise, or a lot of things. Now, some of them we can’t. When I need one that I need to take, boy, I'll be taking it, and I'm very appreciative of it. I'm just saying, until people have skin in the game, you can't control the small cost.
[0:29:34] KM: Those $200 prescription medicine will make your insurance go up, because your insurance has got to make money. Your insurance goes up, because you've got $200.
[0:29:48] GH: Yeah. Half that guy's premium was already gone on those two drugs every month before we even had a big claim.
[0:29:53] KM: Insurance companies are in the business of making money. They're just a company. Some people are like, “Golly, they're making money on me.” I'm like, well, that's their job.
[0:30:01] GH: Nobody's ever going to feel sorry for insurance companies. When Obamacare was passed, it limited the amount that an insurance company can take of the premium to 15%. If $100 is sent in, they can keep 15% to pay their overhead, all their employees, their buildings, etc. And here's the kicker, of the 15% that they collect, 7 and a half percent of it is taxes that they have to send to the federal government, the state government, to a thing called PCORI, which is Patient Centered Outcome Research Institute to solve drug diseases. They really are only keeping about 7 and a half percent anyway.
[0:30:43] KM: Everybody thinks it's the insurance companies. It's not. What are the lobbyists? Do they put a cap? I'm not a lobbyist. Should they put a cap on the drug companies, lobbyists?
[0:30:50] GH: One of the reasons you know that – insurance companies aren't dying.
[0:30:54] KM: No.
[0:30:55] GH: Because as the premium cost goes up, and they're getting 15% of that number, or they're 7 and a half percent –
[0:31:02] KM: Yeah, because there’s a percentage.
[0:31:02] GH: - it is going up at a faster rate than inflation, so they're still getting there. But they were capped on that.
[0:31:08] KM: Did they cap the drug companies?
[0:31:10] GH: No.
[0:31:11] KM: That's what I keep here. Why did they not have a cap? They're the one that has a $200 bill.
[0:31:16] GH: I think you're going to see more legislation coming that way. We had a little bit here in Arkansas. But it's always more complicated than it seems. A lot of it could be, like you can get the same drug in Canada, sometimes on our big, expensive drugs for half the price, just due to regulatory legislative lawsuits, all kinds of things –
[0:31:40] KM: So, it’s coming.
[0:31:41] GH: - that it'll be hard to – it's hard to take away something once you've got it. The other thing is our population's aging with the Baby Boomers. It used to be the average age of a group was 35. Now, it's 45 or 50. The blessing is we're going to live longer, and we're going to live better lives, but it's going to cost more health. Cost is 18% of the gross national product. Number one expense.
[0:32:09] KM: I had no idea.
[0:32:10] GH: But there's nothing more important either.
[0:32:12] KM: That's right. If you don't have your health, you don't have anything.
[0:32:14] GH: That’s correct.
[0:32:15] KM: I still want to talk about wrestling. That's his real passion. But let's take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about his wrestling.
[BREAK]
[0:32:23] AM: Arkansas Flag and Banner is proud to underwrite Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. Through candid conversation and interesting interviews with business and community minded Arkansans, listeners gain insight into starting and running a business, the ups and downs of risk taking and the commonalities of successful people. Kerry McCoy, Founder and President of Arkansas Flag and Banner believes in paying knowledge and experience forward and developed this radio show as a means of doing so. The biographies, life experiences and wisdom of her guests would likely go unheard if not for this venue. Rarely do people open up for an hour to an audience about their life, mistakes, triumphs and pitfalls. This unique radio show allows the listener intimate access into the stories of prominent leaders in our state.
I am Adrienne McNally, Manager of the Arkansas Flag and Banner showroom and gift shop, located on the first floor of the historic Taborian Hall, on the corner of 9th and State Streets in Downtown Little Rock, Arkansas.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:33:26] KM: You're listening Up in Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. I'm speaking today with businessman, salesman and athlete, philanthropist, Mr. Greg Hatcher, Founder of The Hatcher Agency, a highly successful independent insurance company in Little Rock, Arkansas.
We got two things I want to talk about. I want to talk about the book you wrote, which is when I really first met you, and then I want to talk about your wrestling. On your website, it says The Hatcher Agency's goal is to provide outrageous service for all its individuals in group insurance needs. In 1999, you wrote a book called 55 Steps to Outrageous Service. I would even go so far as to say that you've coined the phrase outrageous service. Would you say that?
[0:34:09] GH: That's what we have on the side of our building, “The home of outrageous service.”
[0:34:13] KM: I think that is your phrase. I don't know if you can get it copyrighted, but I think you should. What was the catalyst for writing this book?
[0:34:20] GH: Well, I had a friend at the time named Larry Waschka, who owned Waschka Capital Investments. He died a few years back on his one-year anniversary on his honeymoon. But he had written The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Rich, and he said, “You ought to write one on service.” I thought about it, and I said, “Well, I don't know if it'll sell, but it doesn't matter. I want to write one for my employees.” In other words, this would be our training manual, 55 Steps to Outrageous Service. When I interview new employees, I have them read the book and tell them to read it. If they're not going to do those 55 things, it wouldn't be a fit.
[0:34:56] KM: How many pages was it?
[0:34:57] GH: Because we're a little nutty. It's about 250 pages, probably. Anyway, we have printed it two times. It's about to go to a third printing. We printed, one's hard back, then paperback, and we're now just revising a couple chapters. What's amazing is the same 55 steps are there, except for one. We've combined two chapters to create room for a 55th step, and that is the new chapter is called Health First. What I've learned as I've gotten older is there's nothing more important than working out. Every day, it gets your endorphins going, etc. With my new employees and my two daughters that have come to work now at The Hatcher Agency, I've told them, I don't even want to see them at work till they've worked out.
[0:35:44] KM: Every day?
[0:35:45] GH: Yeah, because there's nothing more important than that. Because if you work your tail up, but you don't have your health, what good is it? I actually believe they'll be better employees. We have a gym in our office. I give all employees the flexibility to work out during the work day, before or after, I don't care. I just want them to be healthy first. That's one of the new chapters.
[0:36:08] KM: That’s great.
[0:36:09] GH: I also wrote a book called Between the Ears: How to Think Like a Champion, which was a bigger book that focused on all the years of coaching kids, and what makes people winners. Really, both books would work in business, but the second one's a little more intense. For the casual admirer of athletics, they might not understand it. For the college coach, they would really like it. We've sent it to a lot of college coaches, and they like it. The more intense you are, the more you like that book. A lot of kids read it to get ready.
[0:36:49] KM: Why is your book that you published in 19 – let’s see. When did you publish that first one?
[0:36:53] GH: ’99.
[0:36:55] KM: Why is that book still relevant?
[0:36:58] GH: There's nothing in there that is some secret. The key to life is execution. Most people know what they're supposed to do. They just don't do it. 55 steps just reminds you of what you've got to do in any business. If any business did those 55 steps, it would be impossible for them to fail.
[0:37:19] KM: Really?
[0:37:20] GH: It’s like –
[0:37:21] KM: I got to read it again. I’ll put it on my shelf.
[0:37:23] GH: Everybody knows how to lose weight. You eat better, and you work out, and you get a good night's sleep, but not everybody can do it. In business, there are certain things that if you do in business will work. Some of the steps in 55 steps are we go see our clients every month on a good will call. Every month after we've sold them, we go see them every month to see how they're doing. Well, every business should do that, but how many do? Almost none.
[0:37:48] KM: How can you have the manpower to do that?
[0:37:49] GH: We make the manpower to do it. Because if you go by and visit your clients every month, they're going to tell other people about you. You don’t have to spend money on advertising.
[0:37:57] KM: How many clients do you have?
[0:37:58] GH: We have about a 1,000 corporate clients, and we want to keep the clients we have first before we sell a new one. If you keep what you have, then you're going to grow. We try to take care of our existing clients. They tell other clients, other prospects how to buy from us, and I'd rather be an order taker than a person pushing something down their throat all the time. That's one focus. We write five thank you notes a week to people.
[0:38:24] KM: A day, a week.
[0:38:25] GH: A week. Every person in the office writes five thank you notes a week. Well, that doesn't sound like much, but if you've got 50 people and you write 250 thank you notes times 52 weeks, you've got 10,000 times you've told somebody thanks. I don't care if it's a customer, a vendor, a friend, a parent, a sister. I don't care. I want you to show gratitude to five people a week.
[0:38:47] KM: It's good for your psyche.
[0:38:48] GH: Yeah. Do you know what happens when someone reads a thank you note?
[0:38:51] KM: No.
[0:38:52] GH: If you feel good writing it, they feel good getting it. I always say, your name changes, because they didn't call you honey, or darling the next time they see you, and they tell everybody how nice it is to work with you, and it's just a good thing. We have all kinds of little steps like that in the book to take care of our customers.
[0:39:12] KM: That is so important. Skip Rutherford, he's an avid thank you note writer. George W. Bush was – I think it was George W. one that was an avid thank you writer. I just think that's a wonderful tip. It's a gratitude that speaks to us.
[0:39:26] GH: It has to be legit. It can't be fake. Most people just don't do it. When I require it, they think, “Hey, I do need to say thanks to that person.”
[0:39:36] KM: You sold that book recently, didn't you? Did you sell one of your books? Did you give the copyright? Did you sell the copyright to somebody?
[0:39:41] GH: No. No.
[0:39:43] KM: You are very active in the community. Just to name some of the things you've given time to, past chairman of the Little Rock Marathon, past president of Little Rock Rotary Club 99. You're on the board of Baptist Health Foundation, Heartball, Heart Walk, the Arthritis Foundation. You co-founded and president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. And my favorite that I've been waiting to get to through the whole thing is you founded AWA, the Arkansas Wrestling Association. At last count, you may have better numbers. You purchased mats for 60 high schools, four colleges to start their program. How many kids do you think are wrestling now?
[0:40:21] GH: Well, we're up to 65 mats for high schools, 13 different college programs founded now. We have about 4,000 wrestlers now in Arkansas that are learning self-defense, feeling better about themselves, getting more self-confidence, burning body fat, learning how to eat right, okay, and just walk with a little bit more confidence. We just announced that the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, will become the first Division I wrestling program added since 2003. Right now, in Arkansas, we have Arkansas Baptist College, Ouachita Baptist University, Lyon College. I got to think of them, Williams Baptist College, Ozarks University, UALR. There are seven college programs now in Arkansas, which is more than Oklahoma, more than Texas, more than Missouri.
[0:41:20] KM: More than Texas.
[0:41:21] GH: More than Kansas. They called me the other day to say that Arkansas, who had no wrestling 10 years ago, now is the only state in the union to have a Division three, a Division two, a Division one, an NAIA, a junior college, a women's college program of all the states. That's an interesting fact about Arkansas.
[0:41:41] KM: You ought to be so proud of yourself.
[0:41:43] GH: Wrestling. There have been a lot of people that have helped. My goal is to get to 100 programs, at least.
[0:41:51] KM: You're at how many?
[0:41:53] GH: Well, we're 65 high school and 13 college, so we're at 78 and counting.
[0:41:57] KM: Yeah. How hard was it to do this? Sounds like a huge undertaking.
[0:42:02] GH: Well, when I get to the president of a college, or the superintendent –
[0:42:06] KM: So, you are still selling. When you say you're not selling, you're still selling.
[0:42:09] GH: We're at about 98% close ratio. Because what wrestling does for colleges is it brings more students in. It is actually a profitable endeavor, because all you got to do is hire the coach, we pay for their mats, uniforms to get them started. Then they get 50 kids coming in summer on scholarship, but they're all paying some tuition.
[0:42:30] KM: We means you pay for their mats.
[0:42:32] GH: Yeah.
[0:42:33] KM: It's your own philanthropy, right.
[0:42:36] GH: That's one of the areas we try to give, I try to give back. Yeah.
[0:42:42] KM: When you come in and say, no wonder your closing ratios are high at 98%. “Hey, I'm going to come in and give you all these mats, train you how to do it.” They have no out-of-pocket expenses in the beginning.
[0:42:53] GH: Mm-mm. Nope. At my college, so where I wrestle, that's one of the 13 college programs that we restarted. In 1984, they passed Title 9, which was a good thing. I'm a father of four daughters, okay.
[0:43:07] KM: What's Title 9?
[0:43:08] GH: Title 9 says that you have to have a woman sport for every man's sport. It goes deeper than that. If a college has 60% of its students women, 60% of the scholarships, or sports opportunities have to be for women.
[0:43:22] KM: Wow.
[0:43:22] GH: Well, when they passed that law, it was good on one hand, that it was great that we had to add women's sports, but it was really bad for wrestling, because there's always men's and women's golf, men's and women's tennis, men's and women's basketball. But there was not men's and women's wrestling. The sport they dropped, because they didn't want to drop football, was they dropped wrestling overnight. Over 400 college programs were dropped in the in ’84, ’85 due to Title 9. We've now rebuilt 115 of them back.
Well, my college program, when I graduated from college, we had won three straight conference titles. We hadn't lost a match in three years. We were our school's most successful sport. Two years after I graduated, they dropped it because of Title 9. 25 years later, I went back to the college and said, I'm on the board of trustees. Now I said, I'll pay for the mats. I'll pay for –
[0:44:13] KM: At which college?
[0:44:15] GH: At my college.
[0:44:15] KM: Alma.
[0:44:15] GH: Alma College. We added it back. They hired a new coach. Within two years, he had 57 wrestlers there wrestling. They did an analysis on it and they said, it made the college 1.2 million. Because if you take 57 students at about $32,000 a year, this was division three, no scholarships, and all you had to do is pay a coach and assistant. We paid for the mats and the uniforms. The rest was profit.
[0:44:41] KM: I don't understand. Where's the 32?
[0:44:45] GH: 32,000 per student to come to school there.
[0:44:48] KM: They came because of wrestling?
[0:44:49] GH: Oh, no question.
[0:44:51] KM: Because they had a wrestling program.
[0:44:52] GH: No question. I could sell every college president at the division three level that sits down with me, because there are less students graduating from college right now, or from high school than there were 15, 20 years ago. We just don't have as many babies. The baby boomers are gone.
[0:45:09] KM: Oh, really?
[0:45:10] GH: These small colleges are being squeezed on the number of students they can get, because they cost more to go to say, Ouachita Baptist University than a University of Arkansas. Why go and pay that money, unless you're going to get something extra? Just like when we started Ouachita Baptist University, Rex Horn, who was the president at the time said yes. Took 15 minutes, okay. He was he was the first guy to say yes to college wrestling in Arkansas. Three years later, Ouachita Baptist University finished third in the NCAA tournament –
[0:45:40] KM: Wow.
[0:45:41] GH: - because we could recruit all these good wrestlers in.
[0:45:44] KM: But where are they coming from? Are they still wrestling in high school? Were there still high schools that were wrestling?
[0:45:48] GH: Oh, yes. All the high schools were not affected by Title 9 like colleges were. Take Texas, they have 480 high school wrestlers. Then we have one college that has wrestling.
[0:46:01] KM: Oh, wow.
[0:46:01] GH: Those wrestlers come to Ouachita Baptist University. They come to Lyon College. They come here because we have wrestling programs that they know.
[0:46:09] KM: That is so interesting. That's good math right there. Okay, we're out of time. What do you want your legacy to be? You've got so many. It could be, I don't even know what all it could be. You could just do Twitter feed all day long with all your words, pearls of wisdom.
[0:46:24] GH: Well, when you first get started, you think other things are important. Right before I came here, I had lunch with my son and one of his wrestling friends and I was teaching them how to do invites on calendars, how to do a goal list, a to-do list on your phone. I was teaching them about how much money they'd have if they just had $5,000 invested right now, how to set up their Ameritrade account. When I'm dead and gone, the only thing that matters really, I guess, is what your kids and your friends think about you. I work hard on trying to help them.
[0:46:55] KM: You're going to have your picture up for wrestling all over the place, even in other states, because you already – you helped Michigan. How many other states have you helped with wrestling? Michigan, Arkansas? Any other?
[0:47:05] GH: They’re sprinkled.
[0:47:08] KM: They’re sprinkled.
[0:47:08] GH: Probably three or four more other states.
[0:47:10] KM: One word to sum you up.
[0:47:12] GH: Well, it used to be competitive.
[0:47:14] KM: That's what I was going to say.
[0:47:15] GH: It used to be competitive, but I’d probably say, driven.
[0:47:19] KM: There. Here's your gift. Thank you for coming on. Look, it's a desk set.
[0:47:23] GH: I got an Arkansas flag and a US flag.
[0:47:26] KM: Already, right now?
[0:47:27] GH: No. I'm saying, I want them to know what I'm getting.
[0:47:28] KM: Oh, yes. You're getting a US and a Arkansas desk set. I was going to say, nobody ever has one of these, but everybody should. Every businessman should have one of those. Yeah, four by six-inch US, an Arkansas desk set for your shelf, or your office wherever. Thank you for coming on. I enjoyed you.
[0:47:45] GH: Glad to do it.
[0:47:47] KM: If you've got a great entrepreneurial story that you would like to share, I would love to hear from you. Send a brief bio and your contact info to –
[0:47:55] TB: Questions@upyourbusiness.org.
[0:47:58] KM: Finally, to our listeners, thank you for spending time with me. If you think this program has been about you, you're right. But it's also been for me. Thank you for letting me fulfill my destiny. My hope today is that you've heard or learned something that's been inspiring or enlightening, and that it, whatever it is will help you up your business, your life, or your independence. I'm Kerry McCoy, and I'll see you next time on Up in Your Business. Until then, be brave and keep it up.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:48:26] GM: You've been listening to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. For links to resources you heard discussed on today's show, go to flagandbander.com, select radio, and choose today's guest. All interviews are recorded and posted the following week. Subscribe to podcasts wherever you like to listen. Kerry's goal is simple, to help you live the American dream.
[END]
