Consultants usually like to hear a client call them by their last name: The informality suggests familiarity, camaraderie, and a certain degree of trust. Buck Consultants' Paul Sailor appreciates that his clients call out his surname frequently. "I'll pick up the phone several times a day and hear, 'Sailor get over here,'" he reports. When that happens, Sailor zips from his Houston office to Shell Oil Company, one of several big-name clients for whom he has designed pension plans, integrated disparate plans following a merger or acquisition, and provided other consulting and actuarial services.
Sailor's skills and service — most recently applied to a complex post-acquisition plan-integration project — earned him and his team a "Relationship of the Year" award, and Sailor emphasizes that it was a team effort. "I have a great team, including three project managers dedicated to Shell," he says. "My team makes my life so much easier."
Sailor realized his calling at an early age. "I'm probably one of the few people in the world who knew I was going to be an actuary when I was 14," he says with a laugh, noting that a high school math teacher in Syracuse, NE, inspired him and more than one-fourth of his graduating class of 45 students to join the ranks of actuaries. "The discipline offers such a wonderful blend of math and business," he says.
As he near his 20th year as an actuary and retirement-plan consultant, Sailor finds himself spending more time with clients and less time immersed in complex calculations.
"Working on client relationships is so much more fun than focusing exclusively on the numbers," he notes. "I like simplifying complex concepts and then arranging them into manageable concepts that clients can work with and communicate to their employees in a straightforward manner."
Those opportunities in the pension-plan arena have been drying up for many consulting firms: A growing number of high-profile companies have frozen or phased out their defined-benefit pension plans in the past six years. Despite that trend, the retirement practice that Sailor directs has flourished: The practice's revenue soared more than 50 percent in the past year and added 25 percent more staff during that same period.
Each of these new consultants is exposed to Sailor's passion for client service and the actuarial arts, a calling that he only wavered from once. A varsity bowler at the University of Nebraska, where he also earned Academic All-American honors, Sailor asked his coach if he should give the professional tour a shot after graduating. "He said, 'You know, a lot of bowlers have natural ability — you should get a job.'"
His customers and his team owe Sailor's bowling coach — and his math teacher — a thank you.
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