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September 9, 2024
MENASHA – McClone Insurance President and CEO Dustin McClone said his grandfather Ralph “Cyclone” McClone decided to start selling life insurance at his kitchen table in 1949.
“Really, he was never meant to be in insurance – he was a teacher and a coach,” Dustin said. “So, he actually went to Marquette and played football and hoops there. He was talking to his former coach (one day) who said, ‘you know, I don’t know if you know anything about big family economics, but you can’t raise 10 kids on a teacher’s salary.’”
After pivoting careers and starting McClone Insurance, Dustin said “the rest is history.”
“He really grew (the company) up until about the early ’80s when my father took it over,” he said. “There were about six to eight employees at the time, and then my dad led it until – officially – 2018, and got up to about 70 employees or so. We have 130 team members now, and growing, which is exciting.”
Seventy-five years after its inception, Dustin said McClone still stands in Menasha – and is now a third-generation insurance broker in the top 1% in the country, providing both business and personal insurance, employee benefits and HR outsourcing.
With seven-and-a-half decades under its belt, Dustin said much has changed – but much has also stayed the same.
‘Our culture sets us apart’
The growth the company has seen over the years, Dustin said, is one of the more prominent changes.
And, he said growth in the company also means McClone has grown to have a global impact with clients.
“We’re industry leaders and industry disruptors,” he said.
What’s remained the same, however, is the company’s core values.
“It’s about people, it’s about relationships, it’s about community and it’s about doing it the right way,” he said. “Those are the things that have really pulled us through… It’s in our DNA, and our culture is really what separates us (from the rest). We’ve been able to attract some of the best in and out of the industry just because of our culture and the way that we’re tackling things.”
Dustin said the insurance industry sometimes gets a bad rap.
“There are not a lot of people who wake up in the morning and are like, ‘thank you to the insurance industry,’” he said. “And that’s probably for a number of reasons, but one of the things that we’ve seen is, our industry is, in some ways, almost notorious (for) leading with a solution, as opposed to really leading with what’s really happening in an organization or family.”
What McClone has done over the years, Dustin said, is “flip the industry on its head” – which has generated different results, and “is a lot more fun.”
“We’ve invested a lot in tools, talent and technology to really be the best at figuring out where an organization or family is, and what the things that they’re facing are – from what goals they’re trying to accomplish, to what risks they might face, even (if they’re) not insurance related,” he said.
Though some of those risks and goals, Dustin said, can be solved via insurance, “frankly, a lot of it isn’t solved by insurance.”
“It’s solved by some things that we can do, some things that we can’t do,” he said. “But we can (still) connect, and that’s really allowed us to approach the market in a very different, client-first approach, that no one else in our industry can really pull off – and that’s allowed us to scale quickly.”
In the last eight to 10 years, Dustin said McClone has embraced being “a bit of the underdog,” but also recognized it has a place at the table, which he said has also led to growth.
“We are proud of what we’re doing and the impact we’re making – and we’re not hesitant to say that,” he said. “But at the same (time), we don’t want to ever get to the point where we don’t still have that underdog mentality of, how do we out hustle the competition and put the client first – things like that.”
A continuous rise in talented employees in recent years, Dustin said, has created a good problem to have.
“New, smart people enter the room and say, ‘well, what about this, and what about this, and what about that?’” he said. “It’s one thing if you have one (good person), it’s another thing when you have 20.”
Dustin said of course McClone wants to embrace the ingenuity, innovation and excitement that talented people have, “but we can’t boil an ocean, either.”
“So, how do we work through that?” he said. “And to me, that’s been a really big, exciting shift.”
To further foster the culture of the company, both internally and externally, Dustin said McClone has strategic councils – “cross sections of eight to 10 of our team” – that meet.
“We’re empowering them to say, ‘this is where we think we can go. How are we going to do it right?’” he said. “We have these good fortunes of great people wanting to come here, but how do we shift our culture all over again to say, ‘it’s still about the people, it’s still about the relationships, it’s still about the teamwork, but yet, how do we empower that growth at scale while still keeping out promises of the past?’”
Services
As mentioned before, McClone specializes in business insurance, employee benefits, HR outsourcing and personal insurance.
“We have our business insurance division, where we have some industry vertical specializations, and work comp, property liability,” he said.
According to McClone’s website (mcclone.com), the company’s business insurance also covers other needs, such as broad market access, business income needs analysis, coverage gap analysis, cyber risk check, workplace safety training and surety.
Dustin said McClone’s employee benefits division has different teams working with different-sized companies on alternate funding, benchmark reports, employee communication and engagement, Medicare and wellness programs and more.
“We have our retail division – this is your personal, home, auto liability, life, individual health, medicare – all that stuff,” he said.
McClone’s HR consulting division, Dustin said, “ties a lot of things together” to help middle-market companies really solve HR problems.
“And then we have our financial division, so that’s more like 401K plans,” he said.
Within each division, Dustin said there are teams dedicated to different specialties within them.
“As an example, one of the things that often happens in our industry is, as you grow, people tend to only think about the big accounts – that’s a very common shift,” he said. “Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re writing national and global accounts, and they’re very important to us and we get very excited about them as well. But the way we’ve looked at it is, that account needs a specific team, a specific expertise.”
Main Street businesses, Dustin said, need a specific team, too.
“What they need from us is very different from what these (larger) accounts need from us, and so how do we position a team that’s really good at their job and loves working with that account – because they’re waking up every day excited about it,” he said.
Regardless of the client McClone is working with, Dustin said the team uses RiskMAP™ – a process that starts with identifying risk and developing strategy, to implementing solutions and then monitoring results.
“(It) doesn’t seem like rocket science, but what we’ve been able to do is – with that wrapping and with that mindset – take these really good experts that are focusing on that space and build out tools and technology as well, that allows us to solve for those things so much better and at such a faster pace…,” he said.
Dustin said McClone’s HR division is just one example of the benefits of implementing RiskMAP.
“If you had asked me 10 years ago if we were going to have a division dedicated to HR, I would have said, ‘you’re crazy, why would we do that?’” he said. “But it was through RiskMAP (that) we identified what were some key problems that a lot of our clients were facing… They were trying to grow and scale, and their ability to attract and retain talent with a high-performing HR function was just really hard for them, and it was distracting them and it was keeping them away from the business.”
Making a difference, every day
From day one, Dustin said McClone has been focused on the people, the community and making an impact.
Make a Difference Every Day, or M.A.D.E., Dustin said, is McClone’s way of giving back.
“Our core purpose as a company is to make a difference in the communities we serve,” he said. “McClone M.A.D.E. has been something we’ve done in different pieces for a very long time.”
There are three pillars under McClone M.A.D.E. – time, talent and treasure.
An example of the treasure pillar in use, Dustin said, is McClone’s decision to dedicate 10% of every dollar to the communities it serves.
“That’s our way of not being a net taker, but, really, being a net giver to our community,” he said.
Additionally, Dustin said each year, the company matches up to $500 for any nonprofit of each team member’s choice.
“We recognize that they have their passions they’re excited about, and we want to be right along with them,” he said.
When it comes to the time pillar, Dustin said the team is incentivized to volunteer with nonprofits in the area.
“There’s a lot of time we can commit to making our nonprofits and our community stronger and more sustainable,” he said.
The talent pillar, he said, is probably the most interesting one of the three.
“If we just do our job really, really well, our nonprofit clients should be better and more sustainable, even if we never gave them a dime, even if we never donated any time – we just did our job really, really well,” he said. “And I think in a lot of ways, that’s maybe our least-sung of the three, because we as a team – we don’t even think about it. We just do it.”
Dustin said a children’s museum the company had worked with during the COVID-19 pandemic is a good example of this.
“COVID hit, and they had to go from about 100 employees down to 20 in three weeks,” he said. “They didn’t know how to do it, and they were concerned about their long-term sustainability and how they were going to keep the lights on in the long run. Our team – from legal to HR to benefits to claims – we all came together and were able to help them.”
Dustin said there were even things that the team had never done before – “and we may never do again” – to help the museum.
“They needed us at that moment, and we had the expertise here, and we wanted to keep them alive in any way we could,” he said. “Our team did all they could to help this organization.”
McClone, Dustin said, is one of the largest brokers for nonprofits in the state – “I don’t think that’s by accident.”
“I think it’s because of how we engage with the community differently,” he said.
75 years and counting
Reaching 75 years in business, Dustin said, couldn’t have happened without “a lot of people, over a lot of years, working really hard in the same direction.”
“It’s not like 25 years ago, and 50 years ago, that this organization was guaranteed to make it to 75, right?” he said. “We certainly recognize that.”
And, though the McClone team recognizes the past and is proud of all the things the team has accomplished up to this point, Dustin said they’ve shifted their focus – “what’s going to be the impact we’re going to make in the next 75 years?”
“Seventy-five years from now, there’s still going to be some things that should be the same…,” he said. “I’m third generation. I’m very familiar with third-generation business statistics, and the fact is that the odds are pretty stacked against us – which I love, by the way, that gets me out of bed every morning… The fact that we’re sitting here today is a testament to a lot of work of people that came before.”
As McClone looks to the next 75 years, Dustin said his hope “is not just that we’re bigger for bigger sake.”
“I anticipate we will grow fast and extensively, but not because we just want to grow,” he said. “The reason we’re growing is because the market needs what we’re doing, and it’s because we’re making an impact. I don’t want to grow just for growth’s sake, but I think we can grow because we’re creating value.”
At McClone, Dustin said, “we’re trying to build a forever company.”
“I don’t want this to sound conceited, but I think that we matter enough to the communities that we’re in that, if we didn’t exist, that would be a negative,” he said. “And so for us, if we’re building a company for the long term, it’s because we’re that net giver, or that net positive impact, to the community.”
