When she was in college, Nancy Newmister was approached by an insurance agent to work as a customer service representative. “That’s where I got the first taste” of the industry, she says.
She joined Harleysville Insurance the following year and worked there for 17 years. The company supported her in earning a degree and other insurance-related education, while promoting her into different roles.
“It was a great learning experience,” she says. “I have touched every operation in an insurance company. I had exposure to everything and that really helped form my career. I knew I wanted to be responsible for a company one day but I also knew I needed to understand each position. I saw that as a young professional, that there were gaps and I wanted to increase my knowledge of all disciplines so I could run a company. That was my course of action.”
Newmister later served as vice president at Liberty Mutual Southeast Charlotte in North Carolina and at Berkley Mid Atlantic Group in Virginia. She is currently the president and CEO of Frederick Mutual Insurance, a provider of small business and homeowner insurance in five states and Washington, D.C. Frederick Mutual has been operating for 179 years. Newmister took over the position in May 2016 to take the company forward into profitability.
Newmister says while she was at Harleysville, which is now owned by Nationwide, she moved into lateral roles to gain more experience within the industry.
“I think that was beneficial for my career and I was able to build on that experience,” she says.
When she had the opportunity to join Frederick she felt it was a part of her journey and that it was the right time: “During the first year at FMIC, we declared ourselves a 174-year-old startup operation because we needed to change everything.”
Newmister believes that transparency is the key to being a good leader. She has taken a programmatic approach to making company changes and has solved them by holding people accountable to their roles.
“In the early years, it was about getting the right people on the bus. Holding each other accountable quickly became a core value. I had to make some hard decisions and it became a programmatic approach to say: ‘We need to fix this.’ A lot of people in the company didn’t know there were problems. So, we went to work together.”
Newmister leads by example and having the experience she does, she’s able to roll up her sleeves.
“If you have to change everything, it can’t happen all in one year so you have to make a plan and figure out when you can make changes,” she says.
Newmister says she was initially attracted to the role at Frederick because it was 100% paperless but what she didn’t realize was that they were paperless only on the front-end.
“The amount of paper that was necessary to complete the back-end, it was one of our biggest expenses. Covid-19 forced us to get out of the print and mail business,” she says.
Additionally, the company has worked with BriteCore, an insurance software company, to digitize and make the claims process easier for customers. Helen Yu, BriteCore senior vice president of services, nominated Newmister for the WIL award.
"I nominated Nancy not only because of her vision of transforming Frederick Mutual but also because she has been a supporter of other women leaders. Nancy is a role model for other leaders to emulate,” Yu says.
Newmister aspires to see the company double in size, profitably. She also wants to hire more people and add additional roles related to marketing.
“I’m the head coach and I believe our success is in the team’s commitment and their level of consistency and care, they hold themselves accountable,” Newmister says. “It takes all of us to make these things work.”
