Getting to Know Alliance Insurance: Christopher Cook

Hi Christopher. Hey how are you? So today we're going to be talking a little bit about Christopher Cook and where you're from and how that how that led to Alliance. Sure I'll start a little bit before Alliance started but I grew up in a rural part of North Carolina in Surry County. Pilot Mountain is home to me and that little town in the world has a very special meaning to me but when I graduated college from NC State my first job was in the Charlotte area. Really had a great job and had a great career ahead of me but my mother started recruiting me towards the insurance business. My mom is a career life insurance agent that's all she's ever done and as she watched her little boy mature she started recruiting me towards the insurance space and I knew what my mother did growing up. I understood how her work affected families and affected her customers and protected them and what she meant to them so I understood where she was coming from. So I got into the life insurance business at around 24 years of age and really was able to impact a lot of customers within the first couple of months of my career in the life insurance business. Had the I say fortunate it was a very unfortunate situation but the fortunate ability to deliver a claim check to a family and to a man who's my friend to this day but I really was impacted by what insurance does for families at that moment and I'm thankful that very early in my career I got a good understanding of how insurance can keep a family whole and keep lives moving forward. As I mentioned I was pretty young when I got in the life insurance business and most people naturally work with their peers you know that's kind of who we all like to do business with people that are like us that we get along with that speak the same language and so at that point in time in my life a lot of my friends a lot of my peers were not concerned about having a life insurance conversation they were most concerned about hey Christopher man can you not just help me with my car insurance and so that's what we figured out how to do. Eventually I walked into a car insurance agency one day and asked the guy if I could be his local life insurance representative I knew that that he didn't sell life insurance and and maybe I could help his customers. He recruited me into the auto insurance space or attempted to anyway and even more so started seeing the light with the questions I'd heard my friends ask me over time so I heard what that gentleman had to say and his plan for me wasn't exactly my vision of my future so I spent the next year talking to a lot of people in the insurance space adjusters what we call captive insurance agents other independent agents area managers agency owners sales folks everything and worked for a year trying to develop a business plan towards opening up an auto insurance agency and we were able to do that in 2004 really with a goal of taking what traditionally most people would call shoppers and turning them into clients by impacting people's lives and making sure that we did what was in their best interest and especially in the part of the world that I'm from that's the simplest rule ever just doing to others what you'd have them do to you and we live by the golden rule here and that was how we we founded this business is making sure we took care of our customers. The journey from there is an interesting one and a long one but we started out just selling car insurance and then we we added on homeowner's insurance about a year and a half into our agency time after about five years we had gotten pretty good at being able to protect people's auto and home and you know maybe their toys boats and rvs and things like that so we started working to ensure the small business owners and their needs that we had as part of our family and we really grew the the small business portion of alliance insurance over the next four or five years and then we decided that you know what a lot of our customers need help with their individual health insurance so we added that as part of our practice and became a more complete agency and then as we as we did that we saw that there was a bigger need for larger commercial you know when we started writing businesses we we really started with the main street folks and and now we we do even more than that so that's been our journey over time we've been amazingly blessed with an awesome team of agents there's there's folks in our practice that specialize in just home there's folks in our practice that specialize in just health insurance there's a few stubborn guys like me that want to do everything and be everything to everybody and thankfully we've got the support staff that allows me to do that that's been part of our journey of making sure that we could help any client some of the accolades we've received over the last several years that have been amazing back in 2012 we were recognized as a best practices agency and i say that a lot mainly because it speaks really clearly about who we are and who the people that work at alliance insurance are because they are the best of the best and i've been really proud of the team for being able to earn that honor year after year after year because it's not something that is an easy accomplishment to get so that's had a lot to do with with our success so it sounds like at every single step you have tried to be informed not by hey this is what i want my business to be but you've been informed by what do people need and how can i meet that need is that right that's that's definitely it that's been my focus all along how can i help the people that i like to help you know none of us are made to serve everybody but the people that i like to work with that people that enjoy working with me or or the other team members at alliance insurance we want to meet their needs and if we can then then that's what we're going to do and if we can't we're going to work to figure out how may can meet meet their needs and yeah we've definitely grown from you know being able to write car insurance for other 24 and 25 year olds to uh being able to be a full service agency for um our our the communities that we operate in and the communities we operate in are very very important to me because they they are the fabric of of who i am and who our people are i'd say that we're very very family focused and you know when i say family focused obviously i mean the people that live under my roof and live under the roofs of the folks that work at alliance insurance but also family focused and making sure we protect truly protect the families that we work with it sounds like we've got a pretty good idea of uh who you are and how that has led to you being who you are today and and the business that you have today is there is there any particular thing that you think you can think of that really informed alliance or that that you find is the most clear example of what alliance is today i'm not sure that there is one individual experience in my life that i would go back to and say that made me the person i am but i think it's a culmination of a lot of different things a true belief that uh no matter what nothing's more important than family um has certainly driven a lot of the decisions i make and maybe even some of the mistakes i've made a decision and a thoughtful decision behind making sure we communicate in an honest even if it's a tough communication in an honest format that is in the best interest of the people we're working for those the life experiences that i had growing up that i had through sports that i had through early portions of my career ingrained that in me those are lessons that i hope i'm able to communicate to all of our team and to my to my children and to our customers for a long time to come how important the local communities are to you and and i'm lucky enough to to know how you mean that and how much it means to you but do you mind uh telling us a little bit more about ways that you're active in the community yeah sure um you know i mentioned i'm from pilot mountain and pilot mountains part of surrey county and that's a rural county in northwestern north carolina um that has some just amazing people in it one of the fun projects that i have is i'm a member of the united fund board united fund of surrey board here locally and we do a lot with local non-profits to try to make sure that that the county and those in need in the county specifically have what they need and have the support that they need and i really really enjoy being part of the united front of surrey being a pilot mountain boy i graduated from east surrey high school and that's more than likely where my children will go to high school so that place has a definite strong portion of my heart i currently am the president of the cardinal foundation which is really just me making sure that my love for my community is communicated to those around me and so i'm a strong supporter of east surrey high school and and all that they do whether that be in the classroom on the playing field as a band member and the rotc whatever it is i'm very proud of that community and try my best to support that have some fun coaching ball and i got a chance to play ball a lot growing up and and have some success in that arena and the chance to coach children the opportunity to do that has been a a real blessing not just as a parent but just as part of the community those young people will eventually be adults running businesses and and growing businesses and raising families of their own so the opportunity to uh maybe pass down some of the wisdom that folks passed down to me through coaching has been a great experience for sure now we've talked a lot about how who you are has led to you having the kind of business that you have now and how it meets the needs of the people that you live with and live around every day how do you see those same values meeting the needs of people as you move forward and as you grow because alliance is clearly a different business than what it was 15 years ago so how do you see that changing or adapting as you continue to grow yeah you're right we are a different business we started out uh two-man operation in winston-salem at the north edge of town now we're in multiple communities and one of those ways that i see us you know moving forward as we grow and i do think we'll grow in different communities i don't think we'll always be in in the communities we are today i think we'll grow beyond that um is we certainly want to be able to be participatory in those communities as well and you know we talked to our team about generosity and about giving we've all been very very blessed and and i hope that our team members will continue to give to the communities that they're part of and as alliance grows and spreads our geographical footprint my anticipation that would be that we spread that generosity to the communities that we're in so i see that that that will continue for sure and i hope as we grow and as we do a better job of continuing to get better every day which we certainly have to do i think you know all of us have to continue to get better every day that we will also continue to enhance the communities that that we live in insurance i know what many people may think of insurance or i certainly know what a lot of people say about insurance and sometimes that rap is is well deserved but insurance keeps people protected and keeps people whole and without it in many instances communities would fail you know you got to look a little ways back in history but if you think about a town that burned down fires in an entire community without insurance how would those communities be rebuilt and so community has a lot of value the insurance agents in those communities usually are a big part of keeping those communities together and so while i'm proud of alliance insurance and i'm proud to have founded it and to have grown it and proud of the people that are within my agency i'm really proud of the industry that i'm in because we truly do keep communities together not every industry can say that but i'm really proud to say that the insurance industry does that one day far in the future when you're an old grumpy man your kids are taking care of you you finally retire from alliance insurance what are you going to do what what is your vision of the future uh after this uh this business is finally where you want it to be uh if that even exists uh where where would christopher cook go or what would he do that is a that's an amazing question and honestly i don't think about that very often at all my happy place in the world is water so sitting on a lake probably on a ski boat is the place in the world that i'm the happiest for sure i hope my kids are beside me and and i hope i'm an old man when this when we're having this conversation so maybe some grandkids as well retirement doesn't you know really interest me but of course that's where i'm at today i'm sure as i get a little longer in the tooth so to speak that that will come to play and if i'm on the water near a ski boat and i've got my family with me that'll be perfect thanks so much for uh having a conversation and telling us a little bit about a little bit about you and about alliance and uh wish you all the best thank you