Anson Thompson (left) and Jenny Dils Durr of The Thompson Group joined forces, cultures and employees in 2012.
The Thompson Group’s mission is about finding pain, healing pain and showing love. About three years ago, the insurance agency began to feel its own pain. The Parker City, Ind., business had seven employees with owner Anson Thompson at the helm. He had purchased the agency from his father in 1996. While Anson was focused on growing sales and serving clients, he started to realize a significant gap.
“I’m not a good manager of people by any means. I’m a salesperson. A lot of my interactions with people weren’t going well. I hired Servant HR to act as a kind of buffer,” he says. Anson knew what he was good at and what he needed to focus on to be an effective leader, and HR didn’t apply.
Since that time, Anson has helped his agency grow in several ways. Its culture has matured, its staff has grown and it has added a second location. But The Thompson Group’s path to where it is now was not a simple one. After merging with a larger, more traditional agency, he experienced fundamental differences of culture and business direction that weren’t going to be worked out with time and effort.
“Our office has always been a little creative. We look at the insurance business in a different light than most people in our industry. We’re kind of quirky,” he says.
While the relationship between The Thompson Group and the larger agency floundered, one of the owners of the larger agency found she had a lot of common ground with Anson. As a result, Jenny Dils Durr and Anson joined forces and merged in 2012.
Servant HR handled the hiring of Jenny’s employees in Indianapolis under The Thompson Group’s HR umbrella. Servant HR had developed administrative processes, an employee handbook and other strategies that made it easy for Jenny and Anson to follow necessary regulations and be sure their employees understood the changes.
Anson says that having Servant HR handle the human resources for The Thompson Group’s 16 employees allows him to get out and sell. “If we have an issue at all, we call Servant HR . It’s the ‘good to great’ theory. Good is the enemy of great,” he says.
“We aren’t good at managing people, and Servant HR has become our HR position, which positions us to go sell and make money. By partnering with Servant HR, we are far more profitable than if we didn’t work with Servant HR. Servant HR makes us money.”
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