Elevate Ep 40: True Leadership with Patrick Gallagher, Executive Vice President & COO of Gallagher

**Jason Ulm** (0:13)
Welcome to the Elevate Podcast, Powered by Braden. This is your front row seat to the stories of local leaders, both nonprofit and for-profit, who are shaping our community.
Every episode brings you leadership insights, lessons from challenges and practical strategies you can use today. And yes, we'll keep it real and have some fun along the way. If you're ready to elevate your leadership, hit subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn for updates and behind the scenes content. Now, let's dive in.
Hey, everybody, Jason Ulm here with another episode of the Elevate Powered by Braden Podcast. And as you can see, we're not in the studio of Fishners. The view out these windows, if you could see, it is gorgeous from the 11th floor.

**Patrick Gallagher** (0:56)
We like it.

**Jason Ulm** (0:57)
It's a great place to be, but Patrick, where are we?

**Patrick Gallagher** (0:59)
We are in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, which is about 10 miles west of all here. So when you say it, we're in Chicago land area.

**Jason Ulm** (1:06)
Yeah, it's a beautiful building. Patrick, thank you for joining me on the show.

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:10)
Glad to be here.

**Jason Ulm** (1:11)
And in your role at Gallagher today is?

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:13)
I'm the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. And not to be confused with Operations Officer. It means the Five Operating Divisions Report.

**Jason Ulm** (1:23)
Gotcha, okay. All right, so that's what you're doing today, but that's not where you started. So let's go back to the beginning. Where are you from originally?

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:30)
I am from Glenview, Illinois, proud Glenbrook South student and not far from here, northern suburbs of Chicago.

**Jason Ulm** (1:39)
Got you. All right. So what did high school look like? What were you doing back in high school those days?

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:43)
High school, I was pretty into sports. Sports was life.

**Jason Ulm** (1:47)
Okay.

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:48)
High school. Also, started dating my wife in high school as we talked about.

**Jason Ulm** (1:52)
We did talk about that, right?

**Patrick Gallagher** (1:54)
But yeah, high school was mainly baseball, soccer, school, and my wife. All right.

**Jason Ulm** (2:02)
So at the time, girlfriend, lots of sports. So thinking about where you're going to come out high school, thinking about college, where did you think about going? And what were you thinking about during those days?

**Patrick Gallagher** (2:12)
Well, I could have played sports at some smaller Division III or Division II schools.
I opted to go to one of our family schools. All the men in my family had gone to Cornell University. Okay. A lot of the women in our family had gone to Boston College. My sister went to Cornell and I went to Boston College. So, you guys flipped the, you had to screw it over. So, I was, I was trying, I tried a baseball and soccer, but didn't make either team. But I really wanted to go to a city school, a bigger school, someplace that had roots. I'll call it a college. It was kind of my stretch school and all worked out.

**Jason Ulm** (2:46)
All right. So, gotcha. So, at school, what were you studying?

**Patrick Gallagher** (2:49)
I did general management. I've known that I wanted to be in the family business for my fixed my whole life. And so, I knew kind of what I want to do. And I start studying that as soon as possible.

**Jason Ulm** (3:00)
You know, that's interesting. I've talked to a lot of second, third, fourth generation family business folks.
Some are from the beginning know this is what they want to do. So, I'm curious, you've known this from the beginning. Where did that come from? Was it just the conversations around the dinner table? And where did that spark for you to know that you wanted to come to Gallagher?

**Patrick Gallagher** (3:20)
Yeah, so, I mean, the company is called Arthur J. Gallagher Company, and that's my great grandfather. But we didn't do a million dollars in revenue until 1968 So we started in 27, took us 41 years to do a million dollars in top line revenue. So it was really down to two brothers, my grandfather and his brother, my great uncle. And my grandfather was the sales guy.
My great uncle was kind of the business guy. He set the Gallagher Way, set our mergers and acquisitions strategy, made sure we paid profit to this public. My grandfather, on the other hand, was salesman extraordinaire, most fun guy.

**Jason Ulm** (4:01)
Yeah.

**Patrick Gallagher** (4:01)
And he loved insurance, just loved it.
So every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every Easter, there was an insurance side of the table. It's a big Irish Catholic family. And there's a non-insurance side of the table. And from the kindergarten onward, I wanted to be at the insurance side of the table, hearing about all the fun stories that people were doing selling the campus. Yes. And my grandfather was probably a very good innovator in this business, but he had more fun and he knew I loved sports. So he would always bring it back to kind of sports. He'd be saying, you know, you love getting a hit in baseball. That's like winning an account. You love scoring a goal in soccer. That's like winning an account. So if you love sports, you're going to love insurance. So it just stuck with me from a very early age. I want to be like my grandpa, and I want to be at the insurance end of the table, and I want to compete and have fun. What a great mentor.