BY: Kyle McDonald, Chief Executive Officer
posted March 19, 2018
About five years ago, I figured out what sets our company apart.
It was November 2013 and I was reading a blog post by TV sportscaster Samantha Ponder in which she talked about growing up, and what has changed and what has stayed the same throughout her life. As a young woman, Samantha said, she didn’t feel particularly pretty and was kind of an outcast. Today, things are just the opposite. She is a telegenic, highly successful professional.
What has stayed the same throughout her life, she said, is the way she grounds herself in good times and bad by working to maintain an attitude of humble confidence – being sure of herself, her beliefs and her skills without letting it go to her head.
That idea of “humble confidence” struck a chord with me. It gave words to how I’d been thinking about Argent Financial Group for some time. It describes how we are with each other and with our clients. In fact, I think it’s the definition of a fiduciary, which has been fundamental to our company since we began.
Being a fiduciary means you are in the service business, and to serve someone you must place your needs behind the needs of the other – i.e., be humble – but you also must have confidence in your abilities, or your service will be of little value.
I think it also means that you are not “salesy.” Our responsibility as a fiduciary is not to sell a product, but to learn what is in the client’s best interest and do all we can to see that those interests are met. Because of this, our primary focus is on building relationships built on trust and respect, because you can’t really understand what a client needs until you have formed a relationship with him or her.
Humble confidence also means that the client is at the center of Argent Financial Group, and the closer you are to the client, the more vital you are to the health of our company. This means the higher up you are in our company’s internal structure, the more people you serve here. This is illustrated in the infographic of our “Client Relationship Model” that accompanies this blog, which shows how everyone in the company serves the relationship managers who directly serve our clients. This is an example of how humble confidence pervades our entire organization.
Because we foster a culture of humble confidence here, we naturally attract people who feel the way we do about serving others. In fact, our commitment to having a strong, supportive company culture is a result of our discovery several years ago that an attitude of humble confidence is what makes Argent the kind of company it is. And “discover” is the right word. The foundation of humble confidence goes back to the beginning of our company. It is a concept we have held true to all along; we just didn’t have a name for it. It’s kind of like an onion: As we peel back the layers, we find what was there all along.
It’s the same with culture. I now know that we had been thinking about culture since the beginning. That is, we have always known that we wanted to have a company where people were treated with care and respect, and we have always acted on those beliefs. As the company continues to grow, we learn more and more about ourselves, and the more we learn, the better our company becomes for both employees and clients.
Stay Humble; Be Confident.
