Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 27, 2009
Teems brothers win two Walker County Chamber awards
David Laprad
The largest crowd to ever gather for a Walker County Chamber of Commerce membership luncheon watched Teems & Teems collect two awards in the “Best of Walker County 2009” contest earlier this month. The Chamber had partnered with the Walker County Messenger to assess which local businesses, based on votes, were the finest in their category. Teems & Teems won as best insurance agency for the second time; most of the more than 1,000 voters also selected them as the best real estate company in the county.
Brothers Bobby and Billy Teems, owners, say winning the awards was an honor and attribute their victories to their policy of offering the best possible customer service.
“We’re fanatics about customer service,” says Bobby. “That’s what drives our business. People know how they’re going to be treated when they walk through our door.”
“One thing we always tried to do is treat everybody the same,” says Billy. “If someone walks through our door and they don’t know where their next meal is coming from, and then someone walks through our door and they have a million bucks, I’m helping the first customer before the second one.”
Billy is especially keen on calling potential insurance clients back as soon as possible. “I’m a fanatic about getting back to people right away on a home quote,” he says. “If I’m the first agent to return their call, the chances of me getting to write their policy goes up three-fold.
“If you’re the agent, and you call me back in 30 minutes, and the other guys don’t return my call until a couple days later, I’m going to think the same thing will happen when I have a claim.”
The brothers also stay active in their community. While this is more of an extension of their character than their business efforts, it benefits their insurance and real estate endeavors.
“We’re involved in a lot of youth sports,” says Billy. “We coach football, basketball and baseball. A lot of people helped us when we were growing up, and we want to return that blessing. If someone wants us to sponsor a tee ball team and someone else wants us to sponsor an adult softball team, if we can only do one, we’ll do the tee ball team.”
Billy says since people see him “at the rec all the time,” they feel comfortable coming into his place of business and talking with him about car insurance or listing a house.
Regardless of why people voted for Teems & Teems, the brothers say the awards humbled and encouraged them. “It means a lot to us that people think that much about us and our business,” says Billy. “In instills confidence in us, which is important when times are tough.”
“It blows our mind when we think of the amount of support this community gives us, even though we didn’t grow up here,” Bobby says. “That’s what makes this area different.”
“We live in one of the best communities around,” says Billy. “We have a great group of family and friends.”
To be sure, Bobby and Billy have come a long way from when they were boys and would lie awake at night talking about going into business together when they grew up.
In 1977, Bobby was working at the recreation center in Summerville, Ga., when a man came to sell him life insurance. (The brothers were raised by their grandparents, who were poor, so they purchased life insurance at an early age so their grandpa and grandma would be able to bury them in case something unfortunate happened.) As the man was walking away after their meeting, he turned around, looked at Bobby and told him he’d make a good insurance salesman.
Today, the brothers believe it was divine intervention. At the time, Bobby thought the man was buttering him up, so he shrugged off the idea and went back to work. “I had hair down to my shoulders and I hadn’t shaved, so I thought the guy was just doing his job,” Bobby says. “That was a Thursday night. On Monday morning, he called and told me if I’d spend the same number of hours selling insurance as I was working at the rec, I’d make five times as much money.
“What did I have lose?”
Ten years later, Bobby moved to LaFayette, Ga.; in 1988, his brother followed suit, ready to hop on the insurance bandwagon. “The biggest compliment I’ve ever received was when my brother told me he was thinking about going into the insurance business, and when I asked why, he said it was because he’d seen me do it the right way. People didn’t run away from me,” says Bobby.
In 1997, after establishing themselves in the insurance business, the brothers decided to go into real estate as a way of earning money for retirement. They envisioned themselves buying, remodeling and selling the occasional house as a supplement to their insurance business, but when they joined forces with a developer, hiring his wife as an agent, and sent out letters to their insurance customers announcing their new venture, they found themselves in the midst of an explosion.
The swell of that blast continues today. And with a second office in Rock Springs, Ga., Teems and Teems are showing no signs of slowing down. But for all of their achievements, Bobby and Billy say they’re brothers first, best friends second and business partners third. “I’m sure we’ve wanted to deviate from that at some point during our 23 years of being in business together,” says Bobby, “but the bottom line is, if we’d had nothing else, we would’ve had each other.
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