The Anti AIG: Beneficial Financial Group Combines Doing Well With Doing Good

While AIG is handing out millions of dollars to execs who lost millions of dollars, a smaller insurance company in Salt Lake City has quietly gone about its business of awarding top performers in an entirely different way.

Next month, Beneficial Financial Group, a 100-year-old company, will take its best agents on the incentive trip of a lifetime. But instead of sipping margaritas at a seaside resort, their reward will be quite different: building a permanent latrine system in the remote Mayan outpost of Chimaxyat, Guatemala. (Note: Beneficial is a Cercone Brown client.)

Three years ago, Beneficial decided to break away from the traditional posh incentive trips as a way to attract agents that embodied the family values of the company.  If you can remember that far back, the Dow was surging and it was commonly believed that financial advisors could be any sort of human being as long as they made you money.  As a company that has always believed prosperity is measured by quality of life, peace of mind AND financial wealth, that sort of logic just didn't work. Thus, the service trip to Chimaxyat was born.

The village of 275 or so people has no running water or electricity.  There is a small school house (which the BFG agents have worked on the past two years) and precious little else. They speak an ancient Mayan dialect, so your high school spanish is of little use here. But its beauty is beyond compare, and its simple joys are frozen in time.   

And if you're wondering if agents motivated by this sort of adventure service can make you money, too, consider that Beneficial has seen unprecedented growth in the past three years. Not bad for a company that was founded just six years after the Spanish-American War.

As business continues to wrestle with economic and environmental change (the very point of this blog), it's great to see the confluence of commitment, values and healthy bottom lines. Let's hope that this sort of unconventional but effective thinking becomes the norm, and the foolish bumbling a la AIG becomes a thing of the past.  We'll all be better for it.

I'll post news from this year's trip scheduled for April 17-25.

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