Vaughne Assurance Ltd.-Ltée.

Work-life balance delivered straight to the office

Fresh fish delivered right to the office. What’s that got to do with selling insurance? Nothing really, but it is just one of the things that makes Vaughne Assurance Ltd.-Ltée such a great place to work.  
 
“It’s something that I think is very unique to rural Nova Scotia,” said company president Glenna Boudreau, her voice filled with pride and enthusiasm. “We have the fish man. He calls our office about once every two weeks to let us know that he has fresh haddock for sale.” Boudreau said the man calls the office to get orders at about 9 am and the fish is delivered fresh from the wharf an hour and a half later “and we have fresh haddock for supper that night.”
 
Staff also get fresh produce delivered by a local farmer in the Yarmouth area.
 
Nova Scotia has so much going for it that Boudreau, who was born and raised in the province, has never even contemplated living anywhere else. While she has visited many cities in Canada and has travelled overseas, those locales remain for her “wonderful places to visit.”
 
“In my mind, there is no better place to live than Nova Scotia,” Boudreau said.
 
She acknowledges that people have had to leave the region for work but says that many of them will return to retire. If they live in Ontario, for example, Boudreau says they’ll be able to sell their home there, and buy one in Nova Scotia without having to get a mortgage. At the same time, they’ll be free of the long commutes and frustrations that come with living in a larger centre.
 
“My commute to work is five and a half minutes,” she said. “If I have to leave for an hour to go watch my son in the track and field meet, it’s 10 minutes away. I can do that. Or if I’ve got to go to the school to do some volunteer work, I can be there and back on my lunch hour. That’s stuff I think is great.”
 
Boudreau appreciates the kind of work life-balance you achieve in Nova Scotia. It’s not because she’s company president that she can do these things. Each member of her staff is free to take time during the day as long as the time gets made up.
 
“If the employees are happy, they’ll be much more productive,” she said.
 
Boudreau has two sons, aged 15 and 11, and finds that all her after work hours are filled with their sporting events - soccer, hockey, swimming, and kayaking. There is no shortage of activities for her boys.
 
She jokes that all her friends are the moms of kids who are in the same sports as her boys.
 
She adds that Yarmouth is conveniently located as well – only three hours from Maine via the CAT ferry and about the same distance to Halifax by road.
 
During vacations, Boudreau likes to travel within Nova Scotia or to Prince Edward Island.
“We go to Halifax to see the Tall Ships or the International Buskers Festival,” she said, “or we’ll stay in cabins or go boating.” She said there’s enough to see and do in the province that she doesn’t feel the need to go anywhere else.
 
Boudreau, 44, has worked for Vaughne Assurance since she was 21. She worked up through the ranks and continued her education at the same time. Then, in 1998, then president Ed Madden asked her to be the company’s general manager. When Madden retired in October of 2008, he asked Boudreau if she wanted to take over the business.
 
She is proud of the fact that neither she, nor members of her staff, has had to leave the province for their education. Insurance is a field that requires a lot of continuing education and it is all available at the province’s community colleges and universities.
 
The company has four locations; Church Point, Yarmouth, Tusket, and Barrington. All are small coastal communities and, as such, they attract a cosmopolitan clientele. Many Europeans and Americans own vacation homes in the area.
 
Vaughne has done two things to accommodate these unique customers. One comes naturally. The company is located in an Acadian area of Nova Scotia so many of employees speak both French and English. This has come in handy with the European clientele.
 
The other is that Vaughne provides a unique service that most other insurance brokers don’t offer. The company has field underwriters on staff who can inspect vacation properties and advise the owners of any safety issues and make other recommendations that will make it easier for clients to have the property insured.
 
Boudreau said many of her foreign clients have commented on the ease of doing business in Nova Scotia. She tells the story of one American couple who came into the office to make an appointment with their customer service representative and were amazed when they got to see the person in less than five minutes.
 
“They said, ‘where we come from we’d have to wait two weeks for an appointment,’” Boudreau said. “So that’s pretty nice, I think.”
 
Still, the majority of Vaughne’s clients are local residents and Boudreau loves working in a relatively small market where everybody knows your name.
 
“Our customers are the people we sit next to in church. We’re standing beside them as we’re volunteering at the local food bank or raising money for Relay for Life. Work and community kind of just mesh together.”
 
Because the community is so close-knit, business is much more casual and friendly, Boudreau said.
 
“When I do my groceries on Saturdays it’s very common for me to meet up with probably two of my customers and we’ll do business right in the store. Just two weeks ago one of our customers had sold his boat. He said, ‘Glenna, when you get back to work on Monday will you take the boat off my insurance?’ and it’s things like that that I find is great about working in Nova Scotia. It’s not as formalized as it is in other regions.”

Feature story written by Catherine Buckie