If Nobody Loves You, Your Company Will

His teacher told him that he was an idiot. His first employer told him that he was stupid. His mother-in-law told him that her daughter should have married a doctor. He lost his previous job. Nobody loves him. He doesn't know where he's going in life and wouldn't give you two cents for his future.

A born loser? Not if he becomes a salesman for Pennsylvania Life Insurance Co., whose president cites this as the resume of an ideal prospective employee. Penn Life offers such men an income that fairly often exceeds $20,000 and a smothering of somewhat unusual fringe benefits. According to President Stanley Beyer, 36: "We become the teacher who loved him, the mother-in-law who thinks he is great, the coach who gave him nine letters, the boss who wants to make him president."

Beyer's pop psych is apparently remarkably effective. Pennsylvania Life Insurance has been spectacularly successful. Since 1960, it has increased its assets by 800%, to $48 million in 1968, and its life insurance in force by 11,600%. In 1968, its "gains from operations," the insurance industry's rough equivalent of profits, were $4,000,000. An investment of $13.50 in the company's stock five years ago is worth $242 today.

Despite its name, Pennsylvania Life Insurance is based in Los Angeles. It concentrates on selling disability income insurance, which its 1,850 salesmen peddle with missionary fervor to self-employed merchants, farmers and smalltown businessmen. The salesmen are not required to be creative, but merely to read a 25-minute presentation prepared by the company. Management's philosophy is that anybody who can read can sell. Success is founded on making plenty of presentations; salesmen make as many as a dozen brief calls for each prospect who is willing to listen to a presentation. But Penn Life has calculated that one out of three who listen will buy.

Other companies have used the single-policy idea and door-to-door peddling. They have even copied Penn Life's presentation--and have done less well. The company's personnel policy is more difficult to duplicate. As Beyer says: "From the minute we hire a man, he is in our house for the rest of his life--he, his wife, his children, his dreams become our responsibility. There is no firing in this company. A man has to be a thief to be fired."

Cub Scout Pack. Once in, the salesman--typically an ex-farm boy, gas-station attendant or school dropout--receives Beyer's brand of inspirational leadership. "You think of what a psychiatrist does or how a good father brings up a child," he says. "If a salesman does something terrible, we convince him that under normal circumstances he would never have done that, that he's a much finer person than that."

The company's salesmen stay together and play together. A team of them often converges on a town and spends the whole week blanketing it. On weekends, salesmen and their families are expected to invest their leisure time in the company of local managers.

The men whom Penn Life selects to be the local managers are crucial to the system. Each is expected to be a father image to a five-man group of salesmen. The manager is trained more in lay psychology than in selling, and acts as a moral-rearmer when the salesman's spirit flags. "The manager's whole life, his home, his wife, his family, become the center of social activity for that sales force," says Beyer. "An army is disciplined out of fear; our men are disciplined out of loyalty to a leader, like a Cub Scout pack would be. A man cannot have the choice of whether he comes to the Saturday meeting or not. He wants to come." Vacations? "We think working for us is having a vacation."

Ego Extension. The inspiration for Penn Life came originally from the late Roy Markus, a pharmacist, who in 1939 decided that disability income insurance could be sold profitably door-to-door to small businessmen. He built up a chain of agencies in the Midwest and on the Eastern Seaboard. Beyer joined Markus at 18, and by 23 was earning $340,000 a year as manager of the Minneapolis office.

Markus in 1955 bought the nearly defunct Pennsylvania Life Insurance and moved its headquarters to Los Angeles. Using that firm as the major building block, he then formed a parent holding company, Pennsylvania Life Co., which could make acquisitions more easily than an ordinary life insurance company. Pennsylvania Life has expanded to include a mutual fund, Pennsylvania Securities Co., National Central Life Insurance Co. and other insurance firms. Last month Pennsylvania Life joined with H & R Block, Inc., tax consultants, to form a new, jointly owned subsidiary. It will sell mutual funds and insurance to H & R Block clients.

Markus died in 1965, and the parent holding company is now run by a triumvirate of Beyer, Chairman Joe D. Bain and Vice-Chairman Burton Borman. "We are beyond working for a living," says Beyer. "We would like to build a billion-dollar company. It has become an extension of our egos, because pur egos soar, and we want to keep building and getting accolades. We also enjoy money." Apparently these father images also enjoy the responsibility of looking after an ever-larger family of salesmen.

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