Fast Focus
	Woods can work a room on the social side and find coverage gaps on the business side like nobody else.
	With a partner and 45 employees, she built a boutique wholesaler and a second family.
	Her whacky golf tournament is a must attend among carriers.

Zest Fest

From smashing fruit to smashing sales records, her zest for life creates a successful boutique wholesale operation.

By  Louise Lague

Loti Woods loves driving the streets of southern Florida, and not for the obvious reasons—the eternally sunny weather and waving palms. No, Woods likes to see her customers thriving. “We insure the business connected to that truck and that chain of restaurants,” she says. “We have a client that processes orange juice, a charcoal manufacturer, several real estate and construction accounts. It’s fascinating to see what their plans are. Student housing, maybe, military housing. We know 90% of our insureds.”

That is somewhat unusual, considering that Woods is co-CEO of McAuley Woods & Associates, a wholesaler that is officially two steps removed from the premium-paying customer. But that’s how things are done at McAuley Woods. Whenever possible, the insured, the retail broker, the wholesale rep and even underwriters form a team that bears down on the orange juice plant, learning the business, checking for gaps in the coverage, and shaking hands all around.

“This is something that every wholesaler tries to do,” says Bob McAuley, Woods’ co-CEO and partner of 11 years. “And we don’t hold a gun to anybody’s head about it, but most of the big guys just can’t [keep up with clients like this]. With a maximum of 50 clients, we can.”

The very luckiest of the carriers will be invited to the annual McAuley Woods Legendary Golf Tournament, an event that involves both golf holes and the smashing of pumpkins. “I had one client call to say it was the most fun golf tournament she’d ever been to,” says Woods. “And then a whole bunch of people started asking why they weren’t invited.”

Woods is in charge of the social greasing arena because, says McAuley, “she can work a room, a cocktail party for 500. Just zip through. I can’t do that. With small talk, she’s in her element.” On the flip side of that, he says, “she’s a very tenacious businesswoman; very structured.”

Mike Sullivan, managing director for property-casualty at Jacksonville’s Lanier Upshaw brokerage, calls Woods “a great and kind person who likes to form personal relationships with the folks she does business with. She’s also very responsive, very creative, shows great attention to detail, strives to partner with her clients. The teamwork they talk about is real,” he says. “She does live up to her professional modus operandi.”

Woods began to learn her social graces after a year of “extreme culture shock” that began when, on her 15th birthday, her family yanked her out of her native Summit, N.J., and moved to Birmingham, Ala., where her father was to be president of a bank that became AmSouth.

“I don’t think I talked to my parents for a year,” says Woods. “After getting in some minor trouble, I decided to adjust and started volunteering at the local hospital, a center for mentally challenged children.”

That led her to Peabody College, now part of Vanderbilt University, where Woods took a double major in elementary and special education with a double minor specializing in learning disabilities and mental retardation.

After a year and a half of teaching, Woods found she “loved the kids but didn’t like the system. I wasn’t able to accomplish what I wanted to. I wanted to be a good teacher, not just a child minder. I wasn’t able to grow. Also, I didn’t like having summers off. I got bored.”

While looking for a summer job, Woods got an offer from her father’s cousin to be an intern at USF&G in Nashville. “It was a year-round job and it paid $12,000 a year instead of $7,500, so I took it.” She worked her way up to property underwriter and stayed for 18 months.

She moved to Crum & Forster, where she did marketing, managed the office and managed regional underwriting in four states. She opened a branch for them in Greenville, S.C., where she grew the volume to $15.5 million in premium. Then Crum restructured. “They didn’t know how to do branches, so they closed them, including the one I headed in Greenville,” Woods says. “I had to fire 24 people, all of them good people who did really, really well. It was time for a career change.”