Daniel
Cordova,#2UPDATE EX-employee responds
Tue, December 19, 2006
How come you guys are from the same region of the country as me? Wait, you guys are within a stones throw of me! Why is that?
Doug
Millington,#3UPDATE EX-employee responds
Sun, December 17, 2006
I used to work for United American. After doing average at first in sales, I had to have some surgeries done. This caused me to have to cut back on my work time as I was trying to recover from my surgeries. At the same time, the good leads that I had been getting suddenly disappeared. I was left with leads in which the person had told them that they were not interested or the leads were disconnected/wrong numbers. Even when I had fully recovered from my surgeries, I still had horrible leads. I talked to my managers about it but nothing changed. With no luck on the leads, I started calling the small business leads. I even got a phone book and started calling businesses out of the yellow pages but I did not have any luck. I got the dreaded letter from the McKinney office saying that if I didn't post significant business then I would be let go. With all of the bad leads that I was getting, I knew that I would not be able to make any sales so I started looking for work at another company. Altig ended up contacting me and set up an interview. I went to the interview but things seemed strangely similar to United American in both the interview process and their promises of great leads. So I started to do some investigating and Torchmark owns both Altig and United American along with a few other insurance companies. In my research, usually what happens to new agents at the Torchmark companies is that at first they get good leads and they make some sales. Then after awhile the agent does not get any more good leads. The company then says that the agent needs to improve or they will be let go. The agent's sales don't improve because of the bad leads and the agent is let go. Now why would the company allow this to happen? So that the managers in the company can make a lot of money without doing much work. Once an agent does not work for United American any more, the agent does not collect the continuing commission on any previous sale. Now that commission goes to the agent manager, office manager, etc. so they get rich without doing any work. I also looked at a list of agents at my office when I first started working for United American compared to when I got my letter from the McKinney office. Of the 40 agents that were there in October 2005 when I first started, there were only 8 who were still there by May 2006 when I got the McKinney letter. That means in a 7 month time span, 80% of the agents were no longer working for that office. Is there any other business where you see an 80% turnover rate in 7 months for an office? I thought this had to be a rare situation and that was not true at other United American offices. I did more research and the average turnover rate for agents at United American is between 75 and 90% over a one year period. The few agents who stay around are the top notch agents who bring in most of the company's income but every now and then they will do them wrong just so they can collect that person's commission. So I decided in June to not even try to make any more sales for United American because I knew that they were going to let me go. Sure enough they sent a letter saying that they had to let me go. Even though I had read where some agents that were let go were told that they had a debit balance, luckily I was not told that. I went and turned in all of my materials and I thought that was the end of that. However in the past months, I keep getting emails or phone calls from different insurance companies wanting me to work for them. The one thing that all of these insurance companies have in common is that they are all owned by Torchmark. The funniest thing is that I got a postcard from a place that wanted me to work for them because they needed two people to fill Sales Positions plus there was a management position available with them. It never mentions the name of the company, but it says that I can visit uabranch.com or I can call a phone number. The phone number is the number for United American and the guy's name beside it is my old office manager. So I guess by sending me this card, they want to hire me back even though I was let go for not making enough sales. How insane is that? Finally, I did research on how United American has such "great ratings". The ratings that are used have nothing to do with how great the company is or how great the insurance is that customers are paying for. The rating is for Torchmark's financial strength meaning how much money the company makes. If you want to compare it to anything, Enron had great ratings based on how much money it made before it ran into its problems and went bankrupt.
Daniel
Cordova,#4UPDATE EX-employee responds
Wed, November 22, 2006
Unbelievable isn't it? "At Will" is probably the only reason these knuckle heads are still around. I know how it is. Even as a top producer I still was getting jerked around on residual checks. I just don't know how they can get away with it.