Today we’d like to introduce you to Atusa Hangafarin.
Atusa, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was a nanny and had been paying for my own community college to take classes for criminal justice, business law and criminal psychology, philosophy and trying to find what I wanted to do because I wasn’t sure.
I then had a circumstance that would provide a temporary absence of me having my nanny job, and I had just signed up for a new apartment. Prior to that I had been living in my car for a couple years and then luckily couch surfing on friend’s couches. Due to my new lease and my need to pay bills, I had the perfect opportunity to look for a career since the nanny job would be temporarily unavailable for me.
Since I had known ever since I was a child that I wanted to have a family. I wanted to do something that I knew would allow me to support one and that my family could be proud of. Being a child of divorce, I had seen the financial toll it took when the woman had to become the provider after the fact.
At this time in my life, my mother was a successful commercial insurance broker and jumped on the opportunity to get me involved in insurance. It started with her offering to pay for my insurance school if I went. I agreed and went to the school and loved insurance from the first day.
It wasn’t easy after that, I interviewed with several different places and basically begged for the 1st job I wanted at my mom’s firm. I had to interview with 3 separate people, read 2 books, take a personality test, another test about sales, and then when they still weren’t sure if they wanted to bet on me because I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, I bet on myself and took the job with no money except solely on the business I wrote because I truly believe in the business of insurance and I knew I could do it even though I was being doubted. I went into the personal lines side in order to compliment my mom and ended up training myself by asking a lot of questions and pretty much bothering everyone I worked with. It took a lot of long nights, 12-13 hour work shifts and crying about twice a week on how I was going to make it but I didn’t give up and kept my faith in God.
6 years later, I am now a practice leader of our personal lines division at C3 Risk & Insurance Services who has helped expand the division and grow our Personal Lines team.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not at all. I usually tell people that I am what they call living proof that you can turn bad into something good by the choices that you make.
I grew up going through a pretty harsh divorce that was really hard on all sides of the family, and abuse of the physical, emotional and verbal kind by a relative that I won’t mention. I also have had quite a few near death experiences including a knife being held to my throat due to refusing to leave a friend who a psychopath was trying to sexually assault and I angered him by refusing to let him control the situation. I also had to witness a friend try to slit his own throat in front of me and talk to the ledge, those were just some of my personal challenges and I have flashbacks and what I call trigger memories as well that affected my stress level and that I had to learn to handle because my work in itself carries its own pressure.
Besides all of the personal challenges, anyone in insurance sales will tell you there is over a 90% fail rate because of how difficult it is, insurance is an intangible product so the sale itself is hard not to mention being a broker you are working with over 15 different carriers and usually throwing yourself in the middle of carriers and clients. It’s a lot of long hours, and some really frustrating days, and you have to learn to be ok with hearing no or doing all this work for a client and then not getting the account.
It can be heartbreaking sometimes especially when you truly care about what you do and on top of all of that, very few people believed I could even do it. I had a lot of people talk down to me because I had not gone to university, or because I wasn’t there version of successful. It only pushed me hard to do it my way and prove them wrong. Thankfully I met some truly amazing mentors who believed in me and also pushed me to be better and helped me to learn in all circumstances. My mom ended up being one of those mentors as well which was a huge blessing tome because she and I had a very rocky relationship previously.
But experiencing the challenges that I did in the insurance world, and learning what she went through to do her best to raise 3 kids while going through a divorce, it gave me a newfound respect for her and I believe it did the same with her for me when she saw what I was willing to go through to be the best version of myself even if it wasn’t the status quo of our culture at the time. So going from a rocky relationship in my childhood to working together and pushing culture boundaries was at first a challenge that turned into one of the best experiences I could have had.
C3 Risk & Insurance Services – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I am the Practice Leader for C3 Risk & Insurance Services Personal Division. I specialize in analyzing personal insurance programs.
Personal relating to anything personally owned and tailoring programs to create risk solutions for my clients by marketing them to carriers.
Being a practice leader of the division also brings other responsibilities such as creating operations efficiencies, bringing in carrier appointments and maintaining relationships, providing ideas on implementing strong marketing techniques, writing business plans, creating helpful documents, continuously looking for ways to improve our client experience via our company values, and most of all supporting our personal lines team and providing both a listening ear and a voice for them to also enhance the employee experience and help all of us grow into the best versions of ourselves.
My job as a practice leader requires dedication to thinking outside of the box and commitment to taking action to help us improve collaboratively. None of us could do this job without one another and knowing that helps us not only to grow together as better employees, but also better people and that allows us to provide the best kind of client service that any human is capable of providing which is what we aim to do every day.
We are also an In House One Stop Shop for all of your insurance needs (personal, commercial, life, health, employee benefits, disability), the camaraderie between departments is impressive. We don’t just hand people off, we work together to do the best possible job for our clients co-efficiently.
C3 Risk & Insurance Services has opened up offices that bring a sense of community and transparency back into the insurance world which is rare in this industry; not to mention they keep up to date with technology which is unheard of for pretty much any other insurance brokerage firm.
I am proud of the culture that C3 Risk & Insurance Service has created that counts everyone both inside (employees) and outside (clients) as a significant part of the company. People are treated as human beings and not numbers. Everyone is truly treated as part of the C3 family. Most of all I am proud of the kind of people that I have the privilege of working with, who they are and the way they care about their clients and each other.
What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?
I have a lot of proud moments, but if I had to choose my proudest moment with C3 Risk & Insurance Services was our ability to expand my division by hiring more people to our Personal Lines team that were part of my previous team. I was most proud of this because we were able to do it within a 6-month time of from when I had started my job with C3 Risk and Insurance Services. In that short period of time, we had created enough resources to make it possible to expand a division and do something I had really wanted to do and had told myself I would. It was the first time I was able to see one of my visions being brought to life.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.c3insurance.com
- Phone: (619) 233- 8000 ext. 132
- Email: atusa@c3insurance.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/c3insurance/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/C3insurance/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/c3insurance
Image Credit:
Max Weiss Phone
C3 Risk & Insurance Services
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