Insurance firm sticking to its roots

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This article was published 06/02/2018 (3018 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wawanesa Mutual Insurance is expanding its footprint in its eponymous hometown for the first time in nearly eight decades.

The insurance company has purchased a Pro Hardware store and a 20-stall parking lot to accommodate an influx of staff at its offices in the village of Wawanesa, 180 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg.

Its existing two-storey, red-brick building, constructed in 1941, has simply run out of space.

“We’ve got staff kind of all over, including a few in the basement, which hasn’t happened in years,” Keith Hartry, senior vice-president and chief operating officer, said.

The basement has a low ceiling and was built for storage, not for office workers. The company has also been placing staff in the boardroom.

“We still have an annual general meeting in Wawanesa each year with the board of directors, so we need that boardroom space,” Hartry said.

Hartry was reluctant to say exactly how many staff have been added, but a local estimate of about 15 new employees is probably not far off, he said. The insurer currently has about 60 staff in the village, he said.

The mutual company has always remained true to its roots. It was founded in Wawanesa in 1896 by a group of farmers who saw the need for insurance coverage.

The “mutual” in the company’s name indicates that it is owned mutually by policy holders, with each policy holder having a right to vote at annual meetings. Hartry said the “mutual” character allows the company to take a long-term approach and not be dictated only by short-term profit.

It started in a room above a drugstore, but in 1901 moved into a tiny sand-bricked building no bigger than an insurance brokerage today. Now designated a heritage building, the original building houses the award-winning Sipiweske Museum.

It was initially led by Alonzo Kempton, a larger-than-life character who, local legend has it, liked to imbibe. He was regarded as a tyrant and was eventually ousted in 1922.

The company moved into its current building in Wawanesa in 1941. It continued to try to operate from Wawanesa into the 1950s until that proved too difficult, and so it moved its executive offices to Broadway in Winnipeg.

Today, the Wawanesa village building is primarily the supervisory centre for rural Manitoba and all of Saskatchewan. The company employs 1,146 people in Manitoba.

“The expansion is a testament to our commitment to Wawanesa,” Hartry said. “Wawanesa is where this company came from. We still have the annual meeting there every year. We enjoy going back there.”

Hartry has also lived in Wawanesa and worked in the insurance building. “That was an extremely enjoyable experience for me,” he said.

The hardware store, which closed about a year ago, is across the street. The building is about 20 years old.

The company is just called “the mutual” by local people otherwise it gets confused with the village name, Mayor Dave Kreklewich said.

The village of Wawanesa, population 600, is thrilled by the expansion. “It’s win, win, win for all of us,” Kreklewich said. “You look at an employer such as Wawanesa, it is major as far as a small town goes.”

Dean Boyd, a retired school teacher in Wawanesa, called the recent development the best economic news “since the road to Shilo and the growth of the military’s presence in our housing market.” That occurred in the 1990s when a bridge over the Assiniboine River replaced a ferry service, connecting the community to the Shilo military base, and military personnel moved in.

Hartry couldn’t say if the company will hire more people, but, “We were in a position where that wasn’t even an option before. This provides us with that option.”

People suggest the growth is linked to Wawanesa’s purchase last year of Western Financial Group and Western Life Assurance from Desjardins Financial Corp. for $775 million, a rare acquisition for the company in recent years.

But Hartry said the purchase and expansion in Wawanesa are unrelated. “This is just about our business growing generally in areas that Wawanesa offers,” he said.

“It just goes with the business cycle. As we grow, we get efficiencies. In the last few years we have filled our building to capacity.”

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca