For a guy who didn't have a career plan, Doug Hogeboom has done pretty well.

The humble president and CEO of Kingston, Ont.-based Empire Life Insurance Co. is the quirk to a Workopolis survey in August that found 82 per cent of Canadian adults are not in the dream jobs of their youth.

Hogeboom is proof that if you stick to what you're good at - even if you don't know what you want to do in life - you can still thrive.

So can your company.

Michael Lea, Business Edge
Doug Hogeboom is planning to spend more time with his family and in the community after his retirement.

Empire Life ranks among Canada's top 10 insurance companies, holds more than $7 billion in assets and generates almost $1 billion in revenues annually. A.M. Best Co., a highly respected U.S. firm that evaluates corporate competence, has stamped Empire with an "excellent" financial-strength rating.

Now in his third decade with Empire, Hogeboom is also a poster boy for retiring Baby Boomers in general and CEOs in particular. Earlier this year, he announced his intention to retire, after three decades with Empire, sometime in 2008.

But before he goes, he's making some plans ...

1. What was it like growing up in Kingston in the post-war era?

"It was an interesting time. Because I grew up outside of the city (in Kingston Township, which is now part of Kingston proper), it was a very rural environment. In fact, the first elementary school that I went to was a two-room school. We had all eight grades in those two rooms and that amounted to about 20 kids in each room. Pretty much all the way through elementary school, I had probably about three or four other kids in my class. We had a few friends that we went back and forth with a lot. These days, that particular building is now a kindergarten class filled with kindergarten kids, so it's changed a lot. As I got a little bit older and we got into things like baseball and hockey, that's when I first got exposed to coming into the 'big city' of Kingston."

2. What did your parents do?

"My dad worked at DuPont, which had a fibre plant here and still does. It's now Invista (a new name for DuPont's textile subsidiary). But he worked at DuPont for about 30 years. He was an instrument mechanic, which means that he went around and fixed the equipment and the infrastructure and that type of thing. He had quite a mechanical aptitude - which he did not pass along to me. My mother was a homemaker for most of the time that I was at home. Later on, after the kids were grown, she worked as an assistant at Queen's University for a few years. There's four of us, I have a brother and two sisters, and I'm the oldest of the group."

3. What did you dream of becoming when you were younger?

"I don't particularly recall any dreams I had to be this thing or that thing, or (have) any particular career. I was enjoying life as it was and wasn't thinking too far ahead at that time. Even as I went into university, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. I had stuck with my strengths, which were the maths and sciences, so I had a math degree and a chemistry background. I just felt at that time that it would take me in some direction that would be suited for me."

4. You worked at Kodak for about a year. How did you end up joining Empire Life?

Doug Hogeboom

"When I left Queen's, coming from the math program, there was a position open here at Empire in the actuarial training program. A few of us from that math class applied for that program and another of my classmates got that job. Then Kodak offered me the opportunity in Toronto. A year later, another opening came up. Actually, the chap who had taken the first job gave me a call and said, 'There's another position opening up. Do you think you'd be interested?' So I made an application at that point - and that's how I ended up at Empire."

5. What did you do in that first job at Empire?

"I was in the actuarial training program, but my first job was as a customer service representative in our customer service area. So I was dealing with client queries and questions that come from our field offices and doing a lot of the transactions associated with customer service work, like changing addresses and changing beneficiaries and doing policy changes."

6. Where did you go from there?

"I was in that role for about a year or so and then I moved into our underwriting, or basically, risk-assessment area, for about another year - which was another different experience for me. After that, we were installing our first automated computer system for processing our business and I was a co-manager on that particular computer installation on the business side. So, the first four or five years, I really didn't do too much actuarial work. I was getting exposed to the business. In hindsight, that was very valuable training."

7. How did your promotion to president come about?

"I was put into this position back in (around) 2000. It came from a lot of years of being exposed to the business and learning the company and building relationships. When one has one of these types of opportunities, obviously, there's a lot of fortuitous things that come into play. I guess people liked the work that I had done over the years. I was kind of in the right spot at the right time when our previous CEO retired."

8. How would you describe your management style?

"The management style just comes naturally to me. I tend to (use) an interactive approach. I rely very much on the people that work with me.

I focus a lot on ensuring that the people we have in our key roles around the organization are good, skilled people who know their job and who are entirely trustworthy. You need to be able to rely - totally - on the people around you. One of the key strengths that I seem to have been able to bring to the table over the years has been the ability to recognize people that are skilled in what they do, but are also trustworthy to work as a team - to pull it all together."

9. Can you elaborate on the award that your company received for employee training earlier this year?

"It was an award we received (in the spring) from LOMA - the Life Office Management Association - one of the industry associations that we've belonged to for many years. They're focused a lot on training aspects within the industry over time. We're very pleased with that, because in the last few years we've put quite an emphasis on ensuring that our people within the organization are as knowledgeable as they can be about the business, the products we have and the things we do. Any time anybody joins a new company, they're a little nervous and don't quite know what's going on.

"We try to address those types of issues as quickly as we can and we try to give them support as far as where to go if they have questions and who they should be talking to. It's been pretty well received. We also try to encourage - as much as we can - interaction across the company with peers. We try to ensure that people don't feel like they're on their own out there."

10. What benefits does Empire Life offer its own employees?

"What I would call the normal sorts of benefits. We have an extended health program that covers the costs of drugs and dental and vision care and that type of thing. We have a short-term disability program for people who are sick or injured or something like that (and) are off for a period of time. We have a pension program in place that we've had for many years. We have an employee assistance program, which is a confidential approach where employees can access counsellors if they have personal issues, whether it's with an illness or a family situation or various things like that. We try to do a lot of things around the company to participate and get to know other staff members in the company. We have a staff club - it's sort of an old terminology - which organizes get-togethers and golf days and potluck-type of things so that we can encourage employees from across the company to get to know people they wouldn't normally see."

11. Are those Empire products, or do you get them from another source?

"We have a group division which, in essence, provides these types of products in the marketplace for other companies. So we actually self-insure for those types of benefits. That way, it keeps us consistent with what's going on in the marketplace. If we have our own benefit plan within the organization that mirrors the benefit plans that we're selling commercially, we can be pretty sure that we're staying in touch with the marketplace. The employee assistance program is different. That's one in which we do have a supplier who provides us with those services to maintain confidentiality."

12. What's it like managing $7 billon worth of assets?

"From our perspective, it's a significant amount of assets. We like to characterize ourselves as a mid-sized company. But in the insurance business, we're a small company relative to the larger players. We have an investment division in Toronto who actually are the investment professionals, and they manage all the assets within the organization - both for our clients and our corporate assets as well. So from our perspective as an operating unit here in Kingston, most of our people are operating the business. Our investment division in Toronto is managing the actual assets themselves."

13. How do you like that arrangement, considering the amount of money involved?

"It's pretty exciting to be working in an organization that has been able to build its overall asset base to over $7 billion. For us, that's been a pretty significant accomplishment. Whether it's management of the assets or the accounting side of things or the actuarial side, it's back to that other issue that we spoke about before. You need good, strong, skilled people who you can trust to be the leaders in those divisions. For a person in my role, as long as I can be confident and comfortable with the people in those very critical divisions, then I can be comfortable that things are going well and that we're doing what we should be doing. Clearly, the business is so technical now - and probably always has been - that when you're in a more general management type of role, you just get so far away from the details. You really do have to rely on those people."

14. How have your products changed over the years?

"The life insurance products in particular have probably changed relatively dramatically since the early '80s, when I first personally started getting involved on the product development side. At that time, products tended to be whole life insurance and they had cash values and that type of thing. Over the years, the products evolved much more toward term insurance coverage - just the straight insurance coverage - and then people were doing their own investing rather than building up cash value in the plans.

Or they were into more of a universal life-type of product, where there's insurance coverage but also the ability to save money within the plan - but doing it by using various investment funds that are offered.

"In today's environment, the two key product lines tend to be universal life and term insurance coverages, and that's what most companies are offering. That's a bit of a shift from years ago when they used to be more of a 'whole life with cash values' type of thing. Empire has always had its segregated funds. They go well back into the '60s. But over the course of time, various new funds are being added, funds that are focusing on different aspects or segments of the marketplace. That's probably been the biggest change in the wealth-management side of things - the proliferation of all the various specialty funds that are in the marketplace these days."

15. What type of insurance do you have as you approach retirement?

"I have universal life coverage. I like the universal life product. It's a good product for both providing the insurance coverage and also for building up value in the plan and being available down the road to take out the funds myself or it's passed to the next generation (of the family). They would get that without having inheritance tax or estate tax applied to it."

16. Other insurance companies have run into problems protecting client assets and privacy. How does Empire Life manage this?

"We take (a potential client privacy leak) extremely seriously. In my mind, it's probably a worst-case scenario. I get asked from time to time, 'What's the one thing that would keep you awake at night?' Well, the one thing that would worry me the most is to have clients' private information get stolen or have a mistake that's out in the public domain. We turn down the screws on all those types of things that can protect client information. We have a privacy officer within our organization who deals with any issues that come forward, where a person might have a concern that the privacy around their client information has been compromised in some way. We report regularly to our board of directors on any issue that might have arisen around privacy of information. It's something we're very diligent about."

17. Are you, for lack of a better term, a poster boy for retiring Baby Boomers?

"I don't know. But I'm getting close to 60 and I will have been with this company for about 33 years by that point in time. I just think that, after all those years and time with the company, it's time to step aside and do some things that my wife and I would like to do personally and move aside for some younger new leadership to come in as well and take the company to the next level."

18. How would you assess large corporations when it comes to dealing with this large exodus of Baby Boomers and making sure that their companies are adequately prepared?

"I think, actually, companies are more prepared than people might think. We've all been aware of how this is playing out. We've had programs in place for a number of years - whether it's training programs or development programs or succession-planning programs - to identify those types of roles that are going to need replacement over the next few years and to do as much as we can to ensure that people within the organization are going to be ready to take on the new accountabilities as they come open. Now, that doesn't imply that every role in a company is going to be filled internally. But, ideally, you'd like to see a good portion of the opportunities that open up in the next few years be taken up by people who have been in the organization and who have been mentored or trained over the last few years for that."

19. Do you think some early-retirement programs have come back to haunt companies?

"The things that have come back to haunt companies have been downsizing arrangements where, for whatever reason, an organization decides they need to take 10 per cent of the workforce out.

"Whether that's laying people off or whether that's early-retirement programs or whether that's hiring freezes, to me, those are the damaging ones, because you're just arbitrarily going through the company and taking out people who have experience and knowledge. Over the years, we've not had to do any of that type of thing, which I've been thankful for. But what you find is that a lot of these people end up coming back and working for the company in a different capacity. They come back as a contract person or some other means, maybe working with a contractor that the company's hired to do the job. It's a bit of shuffling things around - a shell game."

20. What are your plans for your retirement years?

"I've been involved in a number of volunteer non-profit organizations in the Kingston area and I would expect that I'll keep that going. My wife and I like to travel. We don't do particularly exotic travelling, but we do like to travel. Her family is on the East Coast (in Halifax) and we have a property down there, so we'll probably be doing some shuttling back and forth. Probably, somewhere along the way - and I'm kind of hopeful that it will (happen) - there'll be some opportunities to sit on some boards of some nature. I think I would enjoy that."

Doug Hogeboom

* Title: President/CEO

* Born/raised/age: Kingston, Ont./Kingston/58.

* Education: Bachelor of science (honours mathematics) from Queen's University, Kingston; FSA (Fellow, Society of Actuaries) and FCIA (Fellow, Canadian Institute of Actuaries).

* Family: Married to Penny Hogeboom. Father of Sarah, 24, and Lauren, 19.

* Career: After graduating from Queen's, Hogeboom spent a year with Kodak Canada in its Toronto office. He joined Empire Life in 1974. Over the next 12 years, he held a number of technical, management and director roles and was appointed vice-president, investment products in 1986. He then went on to provide leadership in virtually all major divisions of the company over the next 15 years. Early in 2001, he was appointed executive vice-president and chief operating officer, and in spring of the same year was appointed president and chief executive officer. Hogeboom also serves as executive vice-president on the board of directors of E-L Financial Corp. Ltd., the parent company of both Empire and The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Co., as well as on the board of directors of E-L Financial Services Ltd.

* Moonlighting: Actively involved with Kingston's local United Way campaign since 1997, most recently leading the community to a record-breaking result as chairman in 2006. Current chairman of the Providence Care Foundation Board. Has also served on boards of Ongwanada, a Kingston-based facility that provides housing and care for mentally challenged adults, Junior Achievement, the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association, and Assuris, the insurance industry's equivalent of the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corp. Received the 2007 Davies Award for Philanthropy from University Hospitals Kingston Foundation for his outstanding personal philanthropic leadership benefiting the provision of health care for the people of Kingston and southeastern Ontario. Honoured as Business Person of the Year by the Greater Kingston Chamber of Commerce in November 2006.

* Passions: Family, Kingston, Empire Life, golf, hiking, jogging.

Empire Life

* Brass: Doug Hogeboom, president and CEO; Duncan Jackman, chairman; Mike Schneider, senior VP, corporate; Les Herr, senior VP, individual products; Anne Butler, VP and corporate secretary; Deborah Frame, VP and chief investment officer; Edward Gibson, VP and actuary; Timo Hytonen, VP, human resources and community relations; Gary McCabe, VP and controller; Wendy Merkley, VP, information systems and technology; Steve Pong, VP, group products.

* Profile: Founded almost 85 years ago by a group of five businessmen, Empire Life has been headquartered in Kingston since 1936. The company operates sales and marketing centres across Canada and is ranked ninth among Canada's Top 25 Life Insurers based on revenue. Through a network of independent financial advisers and managing general agencies, Empire provides insurance and investment products. In June, Empire garnered a national corporate award for best practices in learning and development from LOMA (Life Office Management Association) Canada, which represents a majority of the country's insurance firms.

* Stats: Empire has approximately 670 employees - 500 in Kingston and the rest at offices in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. Last year, the company reported assets of $7.1 billion, revenue of $923 million and policy dividends of $15 million. It has approximately 370,000 individual clients, 6,300 group employer clients and 675 group retirement plans, which include pension and RSP funds.

* Corporate Structure: Privately owned subsidiary of E-L Financial Corp. Ltd. (TSX:ELF).

* Website: www.empire.ca

* HQ: 259 King Street East, Kingston, K7L 3A8

* Phone: 613-548-1881 or 1-877-548-1881

(Monte Stewart can be reached at monte@businessedge.ca)