Doug Wolff | Topeka Business Hall of Fame
By LISA LOEWEN | Photos by JOHN BURNS
Doug Wolff, CEO of Security Benefit, may not be a Kansas native but he is proud to call it home. Doug has spent the last 24 years working to help Security Benefit evolve into a financial powerhouse that is recognized as one of the top-performing life-health companies in the United States.
As with any company that has surpassed the century mark, Security Benefit has had its share of great leaders who have left their stamp on the company. Two years after moving into the role of CEO, Doug has rolled out a fresh set of company core values, which he hopes will leave a lasting impression on Security Benefit’s work culture: progress over perfection, learning over excuses, action over indecision, community over self and engagement over silence.“
If these core values become truly embedded into our culture, where we don’t just talk about it, but we actually hold each other accountable, that would be a fantastic legacy for me to leave behind,” Doug said.
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
A Connecticut native, Doug spent most of his childhood in a small town just outside of Hartford, Connecticut. Then, at the end of his eighth-grade year, his father changed jobs and moved the family to the Chicago area.
“My world was rocked,” Doug said. “As a teenager, having to move away from my school and my friends was the worst thing in the world. But as it turned out, it was the best thing that could ever have happened to me.”
A naturally introverted person, Doug found that moving to a new place forced him to come out of his shell, meet new people and try new experiences. He graduated with a degree in finance from the University of Illinois and set out to establish his career as an actuary helping companies manage risk.
Doug spent the next eight years as an actuarial consultant with Ernst & Young, studying the intricacies of how various companies operate and manage risk.
I wanted to get my hands dirty and be part of a corporate team with a single goal,” Doug said. “So, I switched gears.”’
He spent the next six years getting answers to his questions as an actuary at Allstate Insurance Company, where he also worked with the business development and sales teams. After a massive corporate reorganization limited Doug’s role to actuarial work, he sought a new position with more growth potential.
CLIMBING HIGHER
“One day, I got a call from a recruiter about a small company in Topeka, Kansas, called Security Benefit,” Doug said. “I didn’t know anything about Kansas, but I was intrigued.”
Doug was scheduled to fly to Topeka for a face-to-face interview on September 12, 2001. Needless to say, the interview didn’t happen.
Doug assumed that with the stock market closed and financial institutions in a state of flux, this small, midwestern financial company would probably just postpone his interview for six months to give them time to step back and re-evaluate their financial position.
“Instead of calling to cancel or postpone, the human resources director called me every single day to say, ‘Doug, we still want you to come down as soon as the airports reopen. We want you here at Security Benefit.’ That spoke volumes to me about the company, and to this day, I feel that is a great representation of what Security Benefit is all about,” Doug said.
Doug moved with his wife and three small children to Kansas with the expectation that he would stay five years. That was 24 years ago.
“Two years after I moved to Topeka, a guy by the name of Bill Self left the University of Illinois to come to the University of Kansas. The year after that, Illinois made the NCAA finals. So, as a proud Illini, I walked around the building asking everyone why Bill Self would leave a fabulous college basketball school like Illinois for a mediocre one like Kansas,” Doug said. “I have been eating those words now for almost 20 years.”
Doug joined Security Benefit to run the actuarial and product development portion of the business, but he remained fascinated by sales and business development. He yearned for the opportunity to broaden the scope of his role to include more aspects of the company.
When a member of senior management walked into Doug’s office one afternoon and asked him to help them find someone to fill the position vacated by Doug’s former supervisor, inspiration struck.
“I went home and thought about it, and then came in the next day and told them I had come up with the perfect person for the job — me,” Doug said.
They thought about it and decided to let him give it a try. Doug had finally found the opportunity he’d been looking for to sink his teeth into business development and sales management.
GROWTH THROUGH CRISIS
When Doug took over his former manager’s role, Security Benefit was a relatively small mutual midwestern annuity company focused on helping people build wealth for their retirement. With $12 billion in assets under management, comprised mostly of 403(b) supplemental retirement plans from the education sector, the company was well capitalized and looking for ways to grow.
Then the perfect storm hit.
First, the company hoped to facilitate growth by purchasing a mutual fund company, but they bought it at the worst time possible: right before the 2008 financial crisis.
Second, because variable products made up the majority of the company offerings, most of the revenues were tied to individual account balances in the stock market. When the financial crisis hit, those balances plummeted.
Finally, to be more competitive and earn a greater return, the company had invested $200 million in vehicles tied to subprime mortgages, which lost almost all their value overnight.
“Those three things all hit us at the same time, and we went from being very well capitalized to searching for a life preserver,” Doug said.
That life preserver appeared in the form of an investor group led by Guggenheim Partners, who purchased Security Benefit in 2010 and took the company private. With that purchase came an influx of capital and a mandate for growth. Security Benefit Chairman Todd Boehly brought in Mike Kiley to oversee operations.
While Kiley had an incredible background in sales and distribution, he recognized the need to bring in some partners with a more technical background — as well as reward employees who had been with the company for several years.
Kiley named Doug president of Security Benefit Life, a position Doug held for 11 years while helping the company exceed its growth goals for both the top and bottom line. When Kiley retired two years ago, Doug stepped into the CEO position and led the company to record earnings in 2023.
“With some great tailwinds and good decisions, that $12 billion in assets under management has grown to $55 billion,” Doug said.
Doug says he credits the company’s nearly 600 dedicated employees for much of that growth. Most of their employees work out of the Topeka location, but Security Benefit also has offices in Overland Park, Kansas, Des Moines, Iowa and New York City.
While Doug enjoys working with the sales and product development side of the business, his actuarial background has helped round out his management style. That logic-based skillset has helped him see both sides of the equation and enabled him to judge a situation by the facts and the data, so bias becomes less of a factor. His tendency to always evaluate risk and return, rather than jump into something too quickly, has served him well over the years.
“Actuaries will always look for more data. That is where the core value Action over Indecision becomes vital. Particularly when you are in this chair. If you’re not decisive, it can really clog things up for everyone below you,” Doug said. “Like everyone else, I am trying to learn and live our core values.”
Now that Doug sits in the CEO chair, he finds people asking for advice on leadership and career growth. At his annual lunch with the interns at Security Benefit, he shares with those young, eager future leaders what he calls “Advice from an old guy.”
“Raise your hand, get involved and in the right ways, don’t be afraid to toot your own horn because no one else is going to do it for you,” he said. “You can learn as much from bad managers, bad supervisors, bad co-workers as you can from the good ones. When you find yourself in that supervisory position, think about what you didn’t like and make a conscious choice to be better.”
AMBITION AND ADVENTURE
For Doug, career isn’t everything. He’s also active in the community, volunteering and serving on a variety of boards.
Doug served two terms as a governor-appointed trustee for the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System and was previously chair of the GO Topeka Board. He is currently a trustee on the Kansas University Center for Research Board and a director of the Greater Topeka Partnership Chairs Council.
When he isn’t working or volunteering, Doug is either on the tennis court, the golf course, running or on the ski slopes.
“If there’s one place that can always turn me around and make me feel good, it’s that first step off the chairlift at the top of the mountain,” Doug said.
Doug also enjoys reading, but he wishes he was a faster reader.
“One of the negatives of my actuarial training is that people would say I read every book like it’s a math book. It takes me a long time to get through a book.”
Oh, and he’s a huge Grateful Dead fan, too.
