Claims Champion
Doug Witcher, the founder of the High Point-based insurance services company Smart Choice, is an intensely focused person who chops through the noise to get to the bottom line. It’s how he overcame modest beginnings, a severe learning disability, and an entrenched industry to build one of America’s largest insurance networks.
Today, Smart Choice is a major force in the industry, with more than 10,600 independent agents in its national network. Total billings last year topped $2.4 billion and revenue topped $200 million.
Lately, Witcher’s attention has been directed toward giving away lots of his money. In the past year, he has donated nearly $50 million, by his accounting, to a variety of nonprofits.
“It’s been great,” the 71-year-old Witcher.“I wake up every morning and it’s all crystal clear, right there in front of me. Here is my purpose in life, God’s plan for me, I think. I’m supposed to give away all this money to good causes. And so that’s what I’m doing.”
Witcher’s philanthropy is funneled through the 3-year-old Witcher Family Foundation. The gifts have the idiosyncratic feel of a closely held family fund. Most recipients are connected to the High Point-Jamestown area in southwestern Guilford County where Witcher grew up, and still spends most of his time.
The foundation gave $2 million to the fundraising campaign for the Women’s Center at Atrium Wake Forest’s High Point hospital; $1 million to the High Point Police Foundation; $1 million to the United Way of Greater High Point; $600,000 to the Communities in Schools of Guilford County; $500,000 to the The Art Gallery at High Point’s Congdon Yards; and six-figure donations to a slew of smaller High Point charities.
Witcher also made the $4 million lead gift toward a new gymnasium at the Caldwell Academy, a private school in Greensboro where his teenage daughter is a student. (He has two sons from a previous marriage.) He gave $50,000 to a small private school on Bald Head Island, North Carolina, because “I’ve always liked Bald Head.” He gave $1 million to
Lees-McRae College, where President Lee King is a friend. Witcher owns a mountaintop home at the Elk River Club near the college.
The Lees-McRae gift did not go unnoticed closer to home. He`s given about $20 million to his alma mater, High Point University. “That money you gave to Lees-McRae. … that
will not get you into heaven,” HPU President Nido Qubein told Witcher.
“He (Qubein) said that at an (HPU) board of trustees meeting,” says Witcher with a smile. “I think he was kidding, but … maybe not.”
HPU’s School of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences is now named after him. Across campus, the Witcher Athletic Center houses the university’s lacrosse and soccer teams.
Qubein calls Witcher an “uncommonly joyful donor.”
“You know, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh he gave $20 million to HPU,’ or ‘He gave a million to United Way,’” says Qubein. “That does not describe Doug Witcher. I think it is slightly misunderstood, maybe more than slightly. You see, it all lies inside his heart. He’s not trying to impress anyone. He does it voluntarily, not asking anything in return. He did not ask us to name a school. He’s given a lot of money with nothing in return. He’s a willing giver who wants to do good things in his community.”
Witcher confirms that he did not ask to have a building at HPU named after him. But he’s happy about it, all the same.
“I mean, you don’t want to do that and be dead,” says Witcher. “You want to see it! That’s why I wanted to get started, why we started the buyout (of Smart Choice, which sold a minority share to an investor in 2023). The big thing here was to get some money into the foundation. I mean, that’s kind of critical. You have to have some money to give away before you can really give it away like this.”
Thanks to Smart Choice, Witcher has some money.
Smart concept
Smart Choice, which Witcher founded in 1994, is a simple concept. A bunch of insurance agents form a network to create the buying power and leverage needed to deal effectively with large insurance carriers. Witcher wasn’t the first person to come up with that idea, but he has been one of the most successful in executing it.
In 1994, Witcher launched Smart Choice with 13 agents, each based in the Carolinas. It now has 160 employees, including agents covering cars, boats, homes and many other products in 48 states. It brings in about 1,400 new agents into the network each year, says Andrew Caldwell, who succeeded Witcher as Smart Choice’s CEO in April after a decade as president. The roster of agents has nearly tripled over the pasr decade.
The network’s total billing is more than $12 billion, but Caldwell says the more relevant number is $2.4 billion. That’s the additional business written through Smart Choice’s network program, on top of existing policies. The company represents 120 carriers across nearly every possible insurance line.
Smart Choice is becoming increasingly profitable, officials say. Pretax profit increased to $30 million this year and is projected to top $60 million in 2026. “We’re just producing more with the business we have, and we continue to add agents to the network,” says Caldwell. “We’re in a pretty good place.”
Some growth is driven by the acquisition of 36 independent agencies since 2019. It also buys stakes in agencies, which can assist ownership in developing an exit strategy, a common problem for agency owners. Smart Choice also provides agencies with a buffet of support services, which can help agents, and agency owners, grow their businesses in different ways. For instance, Smart Choice helped Lee Ann Pridgeon, a Charlotte-area agency owner, grow by brokering her purchase of three other agencies in the Smart Choice network who were looking for a way out.
Smart Choice’s profitability and growing scale began attracting attention from suitors about a decade ago. Caldwell says the company kept them at bay until approached by Pelican Capital Management of West Palm Beach, Florida, several years ago. After a courtship period, the investment company acquired a minority ownership in Smart Choice in 2023. Pelican’s stake grows monthly as it purchases shares from Witcher at prices based on its earnings before taxes, interest and other factors.
If things go as planned, Pelican will eventually own the company, says Witcher. Now chairman of the company’s board, he declined to share more details on the ownership transaction.
Dyslexic disruptor
Witcher isn’t Horatio Alger, but he’s close enough.
His father owned a small High Point landscaping company, and if Witcher didn’t grow up in poverty he could “see it from where I lived,” a line Witcher employs regularly during speeches and conversations. Hard work and dogged determination helped him overcome an undiagnosed case of dyslexia. It was often missed during his youth. A college professor at High Point suggested he try copying textbooks into a spiral notebook to learn the material and improve his reading skills. She probably meant it as a temporary learning tool, but Witcher took her literally and hand-copied more than 50 books during his college career.
Armed with an education degree and some athletic skills, Witcher was set to begin a career teaching and coaching in the Guilford County public schools. That changed when family friend Jay Woods, a long-time High Point Realtor, suggested he give real estate a chance.
“But Jay, I’ve already got a (teaching) job plus a coaching supplement,” Witcher protested. “’I’ll be making $8,000 a year. Why would I want to pass that up?”
Woods told Witcher he “might do a little better than that in real estate.”
He tried it, joining Woods for a year, and he did better. Most importantly, he made some friends in the related insurance industry. The industry that Witcher entered in the late 1970s was the epitome of the “good ol’ boy” system.
Insurance carriers capped the number of agents who could sell their product. Some used the “captive” system, in which agents represented a single company. Others allowed independent agencies to write their own business, but limited competition to familiar faces by requiring agents to meet quotas for sales volumes and other metrics. Most small- and medium-sized agencies couldn’t produce the volume needed to maintain relationships with more than a few carriers.
With limited carrier relationships, small agencies struggled to grow. They couldn’t be competitive on price, and in many cases, were simply unable to write certain types of business.
It was clear to Witcher that a network of agents could fix that, but he still had to figure out a way into the club. His door turned out to be Black insurance agents and other minority groups.
“Now, everyone in the industry works with everyone, of course,” says Witcher. “It wasn’t like that then. All the carriers had problems, something akin to redlining in real estate, that were beginning to gain scrutiny. Some agencies were getting around it by selling out their back door through a minority agent, which wasn’t legal. The carriers would pretend they didn’t know about that, but they did and most were also wringing their hands, wondering how they could get into those (minority) markets.
“Gaining access to those markets … that’s what got us in, in the beginning.”
Most of the agents who joined Smart Choice at first were minority agents. This changed later, but the ability to deliver helped Witcher break down some barriers.
Still, there were years of hard work ahead as Witcher and company crisscrossed the country, persuading agents to sign up other agents for its network, and negotiating contracts with carriers, who weren’t excited about some new guy trying to bust the system.
“It’s an amazing story, but it wasn’t easy,” Caldwell says. “Anything he (Witcher) tells you about the struggle … that’s not an embellishment. What he says about it, it was worse. He was Elon Musk and DOGE of the insurance business. People were standing up at insurance conferences and ripping carriers to their faces for doing business with Doug Witcher. It took some courage to sit there like Doug did with a smile on his face. He’s good at that. He’ll smile and then cut your heart out while he’s doing it.”
Today, Caldwell says, everyone has heard of Smart Choice, and the company has little difficulty lining up agents or carriers.
“Where Doug did all this work, today, I basically field calls,” says Caldwell.
Smart Choice is one of two large networks that dominate independent insurance sales. (The other is New Hampshire-based SIAA Agent Alliance.) About half the independent agencies in the country work with one or the other.
Besides opening up access to carriers, Smart Choice also provides training opportunities and assistance with business management tasks. There’s no fee to join Smart Choice. Agencies split the commissions they receive with Smart Choice on a 70% to 30% basis, until certain goals are reached. After that, the agent keeps it all.
“We want everyone to be happy,” says Witcher. “It’s a volume business, so the more agents we have, the better off we all are. Everyone can make a lot of money.”
And, some can give a lot away. ■
