Photos by Lori Sparkman
There are a few tells that define businessman, author and philanthropist Greg Hatcher upon first meeting. One, the competitive spirit of the former three-sport athlete and baseball coach simmers tangibly, the secret ingredient to his career as a salesman and founder of The Hatcher Agency in Little Rock.
Two, he hates sitting still, as many driven individuals do. Even after a long day, an extended conversation sets his leg to bouncing with excess energy like a fast-twitch baserunner looking to steal second.
Three, about the only thing that supersedes his professional ambition and hyper drive is an abiding love of family that is palpable in word and action. Emotion creeps into his voice while he talks about his children’s accomplishments — there are many — and few business scenarios take precedence over answering their phone calls.
All of these traits, taken in over the span of an hour’s conversation, provide a speed portrait of the man and a condensed arc of a remarkable life.
“When I was younger, I used to say all I wanted on my tombstone was, ‘Here lies a great competitor.’ I’ve grown way past that,” said Hatcher, 62. “I want my kids to think I was a good father, my wife to think I was a good husband, my grandkids to think I was a good grandfather.”
For this, Hatcher was given an apt template in his own parents, Joe B. Hatcher, a college English professor, and Irma Gail Hatcher, an educator. His father moved into post-secondary administration, and a transient period in the family’s history followed, eventually leading to Joe Hatcher’s presidency at Hendrix College in Conway and bringing the native Texans to Arkansas.
“I was kind of a college brat. I had to move around a little bit,” Greg Hatcher said. “At first, I absolutely hated it because once when we moved, I had to leave all my friends, kindergarten through eighth grade, only to be at the next place for a year, and then we were moving again.
“It served me well, though, because when everybody else went off to go to college and it was the first time for them to be away from home, I was an old pro at meeting new people and making friends because I just had to. I kept the old friends and made new ones.”
The eldest of three, Hatcher was a solid student but an absolutely fanatical athlete who stood out out in soccer, wrestling and baseball at the prep and collegiate levels. Joe Hatcher indulged his son’s ravenous participation during school, but when Greg graduated from Alma College in Michigan, Joe put his foot down.
“My father was concerned I would never want to work. He thought all I wanted to do was play sports,” Greg Hatcher said. “When I got out of college and moved down here, I made a traveling baseball team that had a bunch of minor league players, and I played three or four games with them. We were getting ready to go to Kansas, and my dad said, ‘No more. I’m not paying another nickel. You have to get a job and go to work.’
“What happened was I knew how to work hard from being on all those teams. When I was in college, I’d go to double practices most days. Plus, I was always the hardest working guy on my sports teams. Because of that competitiveness, once I actually got into business, it was, like, really easy because I was not competing against people who were college athletes and had had a coach yelling at them. I was competing against the average Joe who was nowhere near as motivated.”
Hatcher said he sold himself as much as anything in the early days.
The elder Hatcher connected his son with the head of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Little Rock to begin his career. During the job interview, Hatcher was asked what he ultimately wanted to do.
“I told them I wanted to own my own business, but they went ahead and hired me anyway, thinking, ‘Well everybody wants that, but he’ll like working for us’, which I did,” he said.
Hatcher was an immediate success. By the end of his first calendar year, of which he was on board for nine months, the rookie set an all-time record for group sales. Arguably, no one was more surprised than Hatcher himself, who had unwittingly discovered he had been exposed to the best sales training anyone could have had all along.
“I didn’t know I was a salesman when they hired me,” he said. “It was very natural because I was the captain of all my sports teams, where you’re leading people, convincing people. If you’re the president of your student body or your fraternity or whatever, you are leading people. You’re communicating.
“Most importantly, I was at my father’s dinner table from the time I was born, and if you’re a college president, you can communicate. My father was a great businessman because when you’re a college president, your No. 1 job is to go visit people and ask them for money.”
Hatcher’s success belied how many obstacles there were for an unrefined kid right out of college to overcome, especially in the dusty hinterland where most rookies start out.
“I was 23 years old, and I looked like I was 18,” he said. “I had a Yankee accent from the North, and my territory was Hope, Prescott, Malvern, Texarkana. I’d never listened to country music in my life, yet that’s all that was on the radio when I’d go see these guys.
“What I learned from all that came from the first two questions every customer would give me: ‘Hi. Where are you from?’ because of the accent, and, ‘How long have you worked at Blue Cross Blue Shield?’ I knew what they were really asking: ‘Hey, where the hell are you from?’ and ‘You don’t know anything. You look like you’re 18.’ so I developed a sales pitch called, ‘Why me?’”
Hatcher’s approach took each of the twin elephants in the room — his youth and perceived inexperience — and wrestled them immediately to the floor. Possessed with an innate understanding that clients buy into the person first and the policy second, he hammered home the point that what the client was really purchasing was an ironclad relationship with someone unequivocally dedicated to their satisfaction.
“Instead of selling Blue Cross, I was selling me,” he said. “I would tell them my father lived in Conway so they would know I was a Southerner. I’d say, ‘I know I look like I just started. I did,’ and I’d say, ‘I know I haven’t been here very long, but there is no human being in this state that’s going to work harder for you than me. If you will trust me with your insurance, you can call me 24/7.’
“They used to make fun of me at Blue Cross among the sales managers because I don’t know if a demanding salesperson is the right term, but I wasn’t sophisticated. They described it as walk in like a tornado, tell them all the stuff, make sure they understand it, dust them off, and walk out.”
True to his word, Hatcher stepped out on his own after an extremely successful seven-year run with the company. However, the banking world to which he would appeal for the required financial reserves was not impressed with what the still-young hotshot, family man and would-be entrepreneur had thus far accomplished.
“When I wanted to go out on my own, I needed a $100,000 credit line because when I walked out [of the corporate world], I didn’t have any income, and I had to pay my house payment,” he said.
“My dad had since retired from being the president of Hendrix College and was the vice chairmen of Regions Bank; it was called First Commercial Bank back then. He knew all about banking, and he made me go to eight banks and get turned down by all eight of them. He said, ‘You just learned a lesson: A bank won’t loan you money unless you have the assets to back it up.’ Well, I’m a young guy. I’ve got a car — actually, I had a company car from Blue Cross, so I didn’t even have that.”
Hatcher has told what happened next on many occasions, including in his acceptance speech upon being inducted into the Arkansas Insurance Hall of Fame in 2022, but the retelling still catches in his throat.
“After [my father] made me go through those exercises, he co-signed a loan for $100,000. It took me years to understand the significance of that,” he said. “The most money he ever made as a college president was $105,000. To risk $100,000 was about 50 percent of his net worth at the time. I took it for granted then, but later, when I really understood money and I was really doing well, I understood exactly what he did.
“There’s no way the Hatcher Agency would have stood without him. He was willing to bet on me because he saw the work ethic.”
The elder Hatcher was not alone, and over time, insurances companies have clamored to be featured among the agency’s suite of products. After satisfying the noncompete clause with Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the company made the largely unheard-of gesture to return three of Hatcher’s largest accounts to him, figuring correctly it was more profitable to have him as an ally than a competitor. A squabble with United Healthcare years later, over which the Hatcher Agency was barred from selling UH products for a period, ended similarly, with executive leadership approaching Hatcher to let bygones be bygones.
Such clout and achievement have not come on their own. Over the decades, Hatcher has created a culture that prioritizes daily improvement and unrelenting attention to customer satisfaction. Throughout the headquarters, one sees placards displaying various slogans one might find in a championship locker room pounding home the company ethos. The founder himself models such behavior, attacking what he perceives as weak points in his own leadership repertoire, such as delegation skills.
“Probably my greatest weakness,” he said. “In the beginning, it was me and one lady, and we did everything. I did every sale. I did every renewal. Within a year, I had grown to seven employees. I was 28 when I started the company, and I was hiring 22-year-olds out of college. I had 7 a.m. staff meeting five days a week. If you were working for me, you were a lunatic, or it was your first job and you didn’t know any better. We did that for years.”
As far as he has come, there are still some things Hatcher insists on handling that most CEOs leave to others. Foremost among these is hiring, all of which he does personally. Hatcher favors candidates with athletics in their background because he knows they can take coaching, and he also values tenacity. When it comes down to the gritty will to overcome versus a show dog with insurance pedigree, he will take the mutt almost every time.
“When you’re interviewing with the Hatcher Agency, you’ve got to make a decent first impression, you’ve got to be semi-intelligent, friendly, likable, someone I’d invite to a party,” he said. “I don’t give a rat’s rear if you have insurance experience because I’m hiring good people that are trainable our way. I’ve hired a couple with insurance experience, but I absolutely don’t care because [insurance experience] often only means I’m going to have to convince them that our way of doing things is better.”
Hatcher has been as influential in the community as he has in growing The Hatcher Agency into a premier nationwide business. As much as anyone can be single-handedly responsible for bringing a sport to a state, Hatcher has been that to wrestling from the club level through college. He founded the Arkansas Wrestling Association and has purchased mats for more than 75 high schools and 14 colleges to launch new programs. In 2018, he pledged to secure funding to bring Division 1 wrestling to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, building the school a dedicated facility, along with wrestling and/or soccer facilities he had built at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Lyon College in Batesville, Harding University in Searcy and his alma mater, Alma College in Michigan.
He also founded the Mighty Bluebirds, a nonprofit Little Rock sports program and facility for youth that provides multiple athletic opportunities for children..
“It started with one soccer field, then two, then a baseball field, then a basketball gym, then a wrestling gym,” he said. “Today we have an indoor soccer facility, basketball facility, wrestling facility, equestrian facility, tennis facility/pickleball, baseball, indoor batting cages. They’re used every day. For all those kids that played there, we’ve won 98 percent of our games. About seven or eight of them work here today.”
These efforts and more have stuffed every crevice of The Hatcher Agency’s downtown headquarters to bursting with plaques, trophies and awards of every description in recognition of the firm’s generosity and that of its founder. As for the man himself, there are still professional and personal mountains to climb.
“I told my kids, ‘I’m not going to be the best granddad right off the bat because I’m not through raising you fools’,” he said with a grin. “I need a little time to become the best. I need to get the energy. I’ve already got [grandkids], and they’re just now getting old enough to be involved playing in ball games and stuff.
“I guess what I would most want for my life is to know that I raised great kids that could do things on their own. That would be success. I would just want to be remembered as someone that tried to help others, the community and just be a good friend.”
GREG HATCHER ON SALES MENTALITY
I didn’t know I was a salesman. Nobody goes to college and says, “I’m going to be a salesman.” “Salesman,” sometimes, has a bad connotation, like somebody’s trying to convince somebody to do something against their will. If you look at the sign in our conference room right here, it says, “If you help enough other people get what they want, you’ll have all you ever wanted.” That’s Zig Ziglar’s definition of sales, and that’s my definition of sales: Just get people what they need.
GREG HATCHER ON COMMITMENT
When I went out on my own, I started with a $100,000 credit line. I went $94,000 into my credit line before I made my profit. The way group insurance works, you don’t make a lot of money when you sell them; you make a little bit of money every month forever. It took me a while to stack them to where my income was more than my expenses, and by the time I made a profit, I was $6,000 from bankruptcy. I worked every day that first year from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Then I went home, had dinner with my wife and went back to work at 9 until midnight every night. That was a 15-hour day every day for 13 months
until I made a profit.
GREG HATCHER ON DESIRE TO SUCCEED
Let’s say we have two salesmen: One guy is way better than the other, and he makes two calls. The other guy is half the salesman, but he makes 10 calls. The first guy goes two for two, and the average guy goes four for 10 and makes twice as much money. In sales, we call it frustration tolerance, which is the ability to get back up when it doesn’t go your way. You only count your victories, not your losses, and you get a pay raise every day you sell something. What made me good in sales was if I didn’t get it, I could always go make the next call.
GREG HATCHER ON CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS
I had a job where I ran summer camps at college, and we were on call 24/7. My boss taught us there’s no job too big or too small for anybody to do and that you do anything to take care of that customer as long as you don’t break the law. When I got into sales, I would tell all my clients, ‘I will do anything to take care of you as long as it doesn’t break the law. You can call me 24/7, and I guaran-darn-tee you, if you give me the chance, you won’t regret it.’ That was enough to make them want to help an 18-year-old-looking kid.
GREG HATCHER ON CUSTOMER SERVICE
When we started the agency, our first slogan was “Our attitude is the difference.” We added one: “The home of outrageous service.” On the second floor in our training room, we have a bronze sign that says, ‘Hatcher Agency job description: Every employee has the authority to do anything to take care of the customer with no approval from anyone.’ If a customer is upset about something and we owe them money, employees can go get a check right now without asking me — any amount. You are much better off spending that money and having a happy customer than have that customer go around telling everybody what a poor job you did.
READ ALSO: Arkansas Visionary: B.J. Sams, The Voice
