Insurance
Winning numbers
How Mike Winner steered Ohio Casualty through multiple integrations
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business | August 2009
Page 1 of 4
You could say Mike Winner crunches numbers. Give him parts of four insurance companies, for instance, and he’ll come out with one. Or start with a territory that expands across 47 states, and he’ll condense it to eight.
But he explains his math with a simple — albeit improper — “1+1=3.”
Don’t question his computing skills, though. He became chief financial officer of Ohio Casualty in May 2004, three months after joining the company as senior vice president controller. Then Liberty Mutual Agency Markets acquired the company, closing the deal in August 2007.
At that time, Ohio Casualty’s CEO retired and Winner stepped into the role of president and CEO. Then the crunching began.
Liberty already operated eight regional companies that covered most of the U.S. So rather than overlapping footprints, Winner had to condense Ohio Casualty’s coverage to a regional focus, which meant picking up business from three of Liberty’s existing companies to complement some of Ohio Casualty’s existing business.
“One of our challenges then was how did we take parts of four different companies and merge them into a new organization,” Winner says. “We didn’t want to lose anything, so we tried to … take the strengths of all four of those organizations.”
That focus on magnifying strengths translates to Winner’s 1+1=3 philosophy. That guided him as he named a new management team by looking into all four merging companies for the right talent. Together they built a plan and a vision to carry Ohio Casualty forward, keeping the rest of the 530 employees up to date with constant communication.
