Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | B | Best's Review

Team Primerica: Primerica Life Insurance Co.'s vibrant business with middle-income Americans defies the norm in today's life industry. An extra surprise is that co-CEOs head up its management.

Article Excerpt
Key Points

* Primerica's co-CEOs worked together for more than 15 years before assuming top leadership.

* The company's system that reaches middle-income families is hard to duplicate.

* Most agents work part time.

* Agents use a comprehensive financial needs analysis to sell products of other members of parent corporation Citigroup.

There is hardly anything conventional about Primerica Life Insurance Co. So it should be no surprise that when it comes to top leadership, the Duluth, Ga.-based company is one of the few to successfully divide power between two chief executive officers.

Splitting the duties since 1999 are John Addison, 47, and Rick Williams, 48. Both hold master's degrees in business administration and have been employed by the company for a long time, but that's where the similarities end. In fact, the two are polar opposites in personality and skills.

'I am clearly the marketing side of the brain," said Addison. "I'm intuitive and use my gut feel. Sometimes I'm too quick to make a decision. Rick's background was in mergers and acquisitions. He's very methodical; he goes through the facts and digs through the numbers. So I do the marketing, and Rick does the financial hall, but we collaborate. I won't make decisions in marketing without consulting him, and Rick won't make decisions on the financial side until we collaborate."

"John is the leader of the sales force and the motivational speaker," said Mark Supic, Primerica's head of corporate relations. "He is the out-front guy. Rick has a Wharton MBA and was the chief financial officer who worked with Sandy Weill before Commercial Credit bought Primerica. They're very different personality-wise, but that's one reason it works."

Power sharing rarely lasts in a corporate world influenced by egos, office politics, back-stabbing or just bad luck. Even Weill and John Reed could not long hold together a co-CEO arrangement at Primerica's parent company, Citigroup, the company that emerged from a 1998 merger of Travelers and Citicorp.

For Addison and Williams, however, sharing the CEO position comes naturally. Part of the reason is that the two forged a relationship of trust and appreciation over many years. "The way we operate now is the way we operated when I was chief marketing officer and he was the CFO," said Addison. "Ours is not a forced relationship. The other thing that makes it work is that our career goals are to run Primerica. He and I aren't jockeying for the next big promotion. This is what we want to do. There's a comfort level, a trust level and a competency level; we're both very good at what...