Q&A with
DAVE RIVELL & JOSH HEEBNER Element Risk Management Partners Josh Heebner and Dave Rivell opened their agency in West Chester, PA in 2011. Since then, they’ve acquired 12 agencies, expanding their footprint across Pennsylvania and into Maryland and Virginia. Q. We understand that you two met on a job interview – for the same position! How did that play out? Josh Heebner: Dave didn’t get the job, but I did. Dave Rivell: Yeah right, he wishes! Josh (laughing): We met on an interview in Chicago. The insurance company, FirstComp, had one job available, but they liked both of us, so they created two jobs…. We grew [the business] rapidly. It was a lot of fun, and it’s where we got to know a lot of the small agencies that we deal with today in Pennsylvania. Dave: They flew us into O’Hare. All of the interviews were inside the airport. After the interviews, we ended up sitting next to each other in a bar waiting for our flight. We got to talking, and the more questions we asked each other, we realized we had just interviewed for the same job! Josh: That was 16 years ago. Dave: For both of us, it was our first job in the industry. Josh was selling bricks. I was selling software to the government. Neither of us knew anything about insurance. A brick salesman and a government contractors walk into a bar…. It sounds like an old joke!
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England, and it was time to move back home. I knew I always wanted to join the agency side. So when Dave and I got together, I had done the carrier thing, gotten to know agencies, and thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ Dave: After I left FirstComp, I worked in the premium finance industry. So once again, I got to see agencies all across the map – some high-performing agencies, some that had been around forever and had that nostalgia to them. These smaller business were really attractive to me, and I saw that you could have that local feel and still grow a very professional firm, and I had a ton of respect for those agencies. The more I got to know those people and look up to them, the more confident I was that insurance was the right industry for me. Q. When you branched off to form Element Risk Management, what did you get right? And what do you wish you had done differently?
Q. Eventually you both left the carrier side to work together as producers. What prompted that change, and what was the transition like?
Josh: What did we do right? We took the risk. We kept our heads down and did what we had to do that day to stay in business. It took us a couple months to even pay ourselves a salary, which was daunting. As far as the things I wish we would have done differently, I wish we would have taken more seriously the business side of things. In insurance, accounting can get out of whack pretty quickly. Not surrounding ourselves with trusted advisors that could have helped us was a mistake.
Josh: At that point, I was working in middle management for the same insurance company. I was living in New
Dave: The thing we got right was that we committed to a vision from the beginning. Everything we took on, we
MARCH 2021
