Q&A with Julie Webb

Julie Webb, CIC, CPCU, is vice president for MPB Insurance & Risk Management in Harrisburg, PA. She is also an avid proponent of mentoring and developing young talent. To this end, Julie supports numerous projects, including Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Pennsylvania Future Business Leaders of America, University of Pittsburgh Women in Business, and IA&B’s Intern Day.

Q. How did you get your start in the insurance industry? And how has your career progressed?

A. I’ve always enjoyed helping people, leading teams, and volunteering. After college, I thought I would take these skills and my business degree and work for a non-profit. However, during the spring semester of my senior year, I met a recruiter from GEICO Insurance who was hiring for a leadership development program, and she sold it! At GEICO, I obtained my license and started my CPCU, developed my business and sales acumen, built teams, earned promotions, and gave back to my community. What young professional wouldn’t want that?

After seven years at GEICO and five different addresses, I returned to Pennsylvania with my husband and son to be closer to family and put down some roots. That’s when I found Keystone Insurers Group and was properly introduced to the independent agency model. My time at Keystone was a master class in agency leadership and carrier relationship management. I was fortunate to learn from some of the best agency principals in the business. They were helping business owners take care of their employees with group health insurance, protecting schools and non-profits from mission-ending claims, and creating opportunities for their own employees and their families. Who wouldn’t want to do that, too?

Q. MPB Insurance is a relatively new division of a larger financial institution. Tell us about starting and growing your team. What lessons have you learned along the way?

A. In March of 2020 (yes, that March), I started MPB Insurance & Risk Management, a sister company to Mid Penn Bank. Believe it or not, starting an insurance agency in the middle of a pandemic was the easy part. The hard work, the important work, the lifelong work is team building. Part of our mission at MPB Insurance is to “foster a winning culture – a culture that puts our team members first and empowers them to advocate for our clients.”

To bring this mission to life, I’ve learned to incorporate three values into my daily routine: intentionality, “highest and best use,” and future focus.

At the beginning of the year, our team almost doubled in size through an acquisition. We now have a great group of people working together, but that’s not good enough. We are intentionally building a team based on trust through a value-defining exercise. Once defined, these values will be our north star in how we interact with each other, our clients, and our partners. It will also be built into our hiring process and performance evaluations. It can be messy and painful, but doesn’t that make it worth it? That’s intentionality.

Ask anyone on my team what “highest and best use” means, and they will tell you it’s spending most of their day on tasks where they add the most value. As a leader, I love to uncover my teammates’ strengths and build on them. Everyone on the team has unique interests and skills, and leveraging them improves the overall success of the team.

Our agency is only three years old, but we have an organizational chart for what it will look like in 2030 and beyond. This keeps us focused on the future in a couple of ways. It shows our team members where we are going and how their career path will help us get there. As the leader of the agency, it keeps me focused on developing talent internally and externally for today and tomorrow.

Team building never ends. As a leader of a growing team, I take that very seriously. I’m always looking for opportunities for my team to continue their education, learn something new, or find a mentor. After all, I can’t do this all by myself. Time spent investing in your people is always time well spent.

Q. You generously donate your time to many projects (including IA&B’s Intern Day) that focus on mentorship and talent development. What drives your commitment?

A. I have a vision that when asked “How did you get into insurance?” the answer from the next generation of insurance professionals will never be “Oh, I fell into it.” Instead, it will be, “An insurance agent came into my fifthgrade class and taught me about insurance careers,” or “I had a mentor in high school who practiced insurance,” or “I had a college internship at a local firm … and I decided to pursue a career in insurance.” This all takes time, but if we don’t invest in it, who will?

Q. What’s your favorite part of working in the insurance industry?

A. The challenge of it. This magazine’s audience knows we are usually selling an extremely complex and intangible product to someone who doesn’t want to buy it. On some days, it’s frustrating and even defeating. But there are days when you or your team helps a client understand the importance of insurance and how it protects their business or family – those are my favorite. And they’re my favorite because you don’t get to that day alone. It takes years of continuing education, coaching, mentoring, and practice. That’s the fun part.

Q. It’s no secret that independent agencies struggle with recruitment and retention, particularly of young talent. What do you think that our industry, as a whole, can do to address this?

A. Everyone has to do a little bit, and we have to be open to taking a risk on someone who doesn’t check all of our experience boxes.

At the beginning of 2021, I was looking for an experienced Client Relationship Specialist. To me that meant someone who had been working in an agency quoting multiple companies and servicing commercial lines customers in our agency management system for three to five years. Sound familiar? My recruiter sent me a resume for a college student finishing his senior year from home due to Covid. At first I said, “No.” He didn’t check my experience boxes. Then she said, “He’s interested in a career in insurance.” Now my answer was, “Yes.” I interviewed him, and he sold me on hiring him. He’s a key player on our team because, as the CEO of our bank says, he has the attitude, aptitude, and work ethic to be successful. It takes time, but he’s learning the insurance piece. He was the first person we hired without all of the experience, but he won’t be the last.

Of course there’s work to be done beyond hiring. Insurance agents are some of the most communityminded business owners I know. So I know I’m preaching to the choir when I say, show up for the middle school career day, invite a high school student to your agency, or host an intern for the summer. Where I think we can be better is sharing the resources we use when we volunteer so we all aren’t recreating the wheel.

Our agency is three years old, and we will host our second intern this summer. When we first created our program, I reached out to IA&B who pointed me to Invest (InvestProgram.org). We adapted what they had to work for our agency. I’d love to see what other agencies do, and I will happily share the intern program we created with anyone who asks.

Q. What’s your favorite community or volunteer project you’re involved in? Tell us about it!

A. Mid Penn Bank partners with Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Capital Region on a worksite-based mentoring program, Beyond School Walls. Once every two weeks, a group of students from a local high school come to our office for mentoring sessions. Through this program, I have the honor of mentoring a young woman who is now a high school senior. Building a relationship with her and watching her grow over the past two years has been one of my most rewarding experiences.

Q. What keeps you busy outside of work?

A. I am invested in developing young girls and supporting women in business. This stems from my own experiences and my desire to create a more diverse independent agency system. I want to work with other women and to help develop the next generation of women. This is what fills me up, and it’s important work that we, as women, need to do. That’s why I am involved with the Girl Scouts and the Central Pennsylvania Chapter of the Women’s Business League, which I started last year with a friend. Girl Scouts is all about building leadership skills to help girls grow up to be confident businesswomen, while the Women’s Business League is a place for women to connect and talk about shared experiences.

Of course, like most women, I have many roles, and two of my favorite are being a wife and a mom. I recognize the importance of having a strong support system, so my husband and I work together to build our kids’ confidence and independence. We share the experiences that we have in the business world with them, and we expose them to different careers – like insurance.

On her last day of kindergarten, Julie’s daughter’s career aspiration was to be an insurance agent.