It started out as just a way to get back to Calgary with his young family. Now some 22 years later, Jim Virtue is firmly entrenched in Alberta’s largest city as president and CEO of PPI Solutions, the managing general agency (MGA) that has made a positive name for itself providing customized support to advisors, including those just starting out in the business.“I fell into it more than anything else,” says Mr. Virtue of his life insurance career. A chartered accountant by trade, Mr. Virtue moved from his hometown of North Bay, Ont. to Calgary after he graduated from Queens University. He was lured back to Toronto with a job at a national trust company that owned what-was-then Westbury Canadian Life. The job was based on the premise that if they couldn’t find him a job back in Calgary in a couple of years, they would help him move back. As it happened, when the job was over in Toronto, another opened up as regional vice president at Westbury – this time back in Calgary.

“The truth was at that time I didn’t really know much about the life insurance business,” says Mr. Virtue. ”But I had a financial background, I had worked for the company that owned Westbury Life, I had done a few projects for them and, most importantly, it was my way to get back to Calgary with my family.”

But while he learned much and enjoyed his new position, it meant yet again travelling from home. So he opted instead to team up with partner Kevin Algar to set up what was to become a successful life insurance practice. Not long afterward, he was approached by another Calgary-based MGA about acquiring his firm.

Capital value

“I thought this allows me to continue in sales, and it’s also a business that has a capital value to it,” says Mr. Virtue. “You can make a great living as an advisor, but growing my MGA meant I was also building a practice with capital value. The rest is history.”

Mr. Virtue believed he could best accomplish his business-building goals through expansion. For the next 10 years, he acquired or merged with other MGAs, gaining scale. Then in 2010, the partners sold part of their practice to PPI and renamed their firm PPI Solutions. The end result was a cross-country marketing company of some 1,500 advisors with the kind of muscle required to speed up the development and delivery of some key value-added tools for advisors.

Top among PPI’s products is its online Toolkit. “The tools are incredibly helpful for advisors who are experienced…but we’ve seen great success with less experienced sales people in providing them with sales tracks, concept selling and point of sale material,” says Mr. Virtue. He notes that once the tools have been integrated into their practice, some advisors are seeing an increase of as much as 50 per cent in their business.

Client presentations that had once taken an advisor an hour or two to prepare for clients when Mr. Virtue had his private practice are a thing of the past. “Included in our PPI Toolkit is that same presentation, but we’ve systemized it and it takes an advisor today about two or three minutes. And they can be confident it’s all correctly calculated – there’s no chance for human error in making that calculation.” Of note, the planning tools and point-of-sale presentations are customized and branded to the advisor and present products from different insurance companies. The firm is now developing new proprietary products to help advisors grow their practices even further.

Educational component

Mr. Virtue believes advisors are attracted to PPI for two reasons: its excellent local service and strong educational component. “So, for example, our Calgary office puts on about 150 educational seminars a year. We’re constantly helping people learn about products, practice management, sales tools, and cross-selling ideas. A lot of our marketing involves getting people to come to our educational events. ”

He acknowledges there was a push in the past towards increasingly complicated insurance products as each insurer tried to differentiate itself from its competitors. While these products have allowed the advisor to shape the product to the client’s circumstances, it’s also made the advisor’s job more difficult in terms of explaining slight variations to clients. “But as insurance companies are faced with the challenges of continuing low interest rates and market volatility I believe you are going to see a return to much simpler products.”

In his “off” hours, Mr. Virtue is an active member of Advocis. He was recently on the board of the Calgary chapter for a number of years, followed by a two-year stint as president and was previously on the board of the Advocis Protection Association. He also sits on the board of the Institute for Advanced Financial Education, the designation body in Canada for financial services practitioners in areas of advanced estate and wealth transfers and living benefits and next year he will move on to be chair of the Institute.

“I believe in the industry …and I believe it’s important that the industry has a strong voice in what goes on in the distribution of insurance products in Canada. I believe the best place to have that voice is Advocis.”

When not with his family or working, Mr. Virtue likes to reach for new heights: he’s planning on scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, with friends in October.