Editor's note: Benefits Selling's Broker of the Year finalists will be revealed Monday-Friday this week. Meet our fourth finalist.

Colin Smoak, a principal consultant at McLaughlin Smoak & Clarke Benefits, is the second principal at his firm to be nominated for the Broker of the Year award. His partner, Trey McLaughlin, was a finalist last year.

And that says something, Smoak says, about how their agency does business.

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"Salespeople are promise-makers," Smoak explains. "But we have such a great staff behind us that we refer to them as our promise-keepers. Our staff is superlative — they are the same personality, the same tribe, the same guild of the agency, and we all work in the same direction at the same time."

Although Smoak began his career out of college in teaching — his degree is in education, and he intended to teach children with various challenges.

"I quickly learned I didn't have the emotional stability for that," he confides. So he coached college soccer for several years before a friend of his encouraged him to look into the insurance industry as a potential career.

Education to insurance might not seem like the most intuitive career switch, but when Smoak explains his path, it makes perfect sense.

"I still enjoy helping people," he notes. "I still get a thrill out of educating people. That's the thrill I get out of this: Watching the lights go on in somebody's eyes, and then having them call me up or write a letter saying thank you."

And for Smoak, his experience in the insurance industry has been a journey, one that started with a fixed destination in mind before he realized the destination was the least important aspect of the ride.

"I will admit to you that for probably longer than I care to remember, I definitely chased the dollar," he explains. "I really worked hard at it, and I never caught it. And then I had that 'aha' moment where I realized I was never going to catch it — and it wasn't catching it that made the difference. It was the journey. That's really the part that's kept me going. I focused on the journey, and I have done well financially."

That journey has resulted in some innovative methods that McLaughlin Smoak & Clarke Benefits has used to provide an extra level of service to clients.

"We go to our clients and say, 'Look, here's where we are. We want to turn left, and everybody else is turning right. So what is it that you need that we're not doing?'" he says. "Through questions and rapport with our clients, we have built an agency that is, in large part, a response of listening to our clients.

"At the end of the day, it's about people," he adds. "Any successful agency has to have the services and programs to compete. It's about how we respond to the question when the need comes up — especially if we don't have the answer. It's being people of our word and surrounding ourselves with people like ourselves."

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Photo: Former footballer Colin Smoak still loves the beautiful game. By Terry Manier.

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