Ed Shackelford kept the night shift

Edward L. Shackelford began his working life keeping sock-knitting machines running. Years later, when he decided to sell insurance, he made a choice that rather spoils the usual entrepreneurial fairy tale: he kept a job at the mill. The new venture could have his ambition. It would have to wait for his complete financial dependence.

There is something appealing about that arrangement. Business origin stories tend to polish away the backup plan. Shackelford’s includes one. In 1988, he started Piedmont Brokerage in his garage, carrying a newly earned insurance license into a profession he had yet to prove he could master. A garage offered an office. The remaining textile shift offered a cushion.

That small beginning eventually became The Assurance Group, or TAG, the North Carolina insurance distribution business acquired by Integrity in 2020. Along the way, his wife, Beverly, founded an affiliated lead-generation company, and their twin daughters took leadership roles there. The garage story grew into a family business with a decidedly practical preoccupation: giving agents the support to make a living.

The mill had a family resemblance

Shackelford grew up in central North Carolina, in a family already acquainted with textile work. His grandfather, Ray Stafford, was a head fixer. Ed joined a textile plant while still a junior in high school, working the second shift from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. His grandfather could teach him the trade. The machines made socks; Ed helped keep them making socks.

The detail matters because this was an available, familiar route into adulthood. He had work, a skill to learn and someone close to him who knew the machinery. Leaving such a route requires more than disliking a job. It means setting aside a path whose next steps are relatively easy to picture.

His early schedule also puts the later company into perspective. After high school, he added work at another plant. The move into insurance came after years in textiles, rather than straight from a classroom into a founder’s title. Before he had agents to recruit, he had shifts to work.

Passing North Carolina’s insurance examination supplied a new possibility. It did not supply a sales record. He gave up his second-shift position to begin selling and retained the third-shift job. The distinction gives his career change its human scale. He wanted a different future for his young family, and he left himself a way to pay for the present.

“work-a-hobbyist”

Ed Shackelford’s description of himself

Eleven years between the garage and TAG

Piedmont Brokerage was the original name. The Assurance Group arrived in 1999, eleven years after the garage opening. Those dates are a useful correction to the impression that a company springs into existence with its familiar name, its offices and its settled description of what it does.

The early business worked in employee benefits before expanding into life insurance and final expense policies. Its portfolio changed as the company developed. So did its accommodation: successive office moves eventually led to an Archdale home office in June 2001. The garage had served its purpose. Insurance paperwork, unlike a founder’s fond recollection of a garage, requires somewhere to go.

By 2012, Shackelford and his team were building a career-agent division. That step put a different question at the center of expansion. Recruiting people into an industry also means deciding what kind of working life the organization can offer them once they arrive. A company can ask agents to be ambitious; it must also decide what help ambition receives.

The dates trace a career built in stages. A first sale and a national distribution organization belong to the same biography, but they demand different arrangements. As the business grew, training, prospecting and administration became part of the proposition offered to agents. Selling insurance was the occupation. Supporting people who sell it became an enterprise of its own.

Beverly’s answer arrived in the mail

In 2004, Beverly founded Leads2Success to support the agency’s sales professionals. It supplied direct-mail services and lead lists, addressing the question that sits uncomfortably close to the start of any sales career: whom, precisely, will you speak to?

By the October 2020 acquisition announcement, Leads2Success was mailing more than 50 million pieces a year. Brooke Mitchell and Brittany Bowles, the Shackelfords’ twin daughters, were leading it. The family connection had become an operating arrangement, with Beverly’s business supplying an essential part of the wider agency’s work.

Fifty million pieces of mail make a rather substantial reply to the idea that entrepreneurship is chiefly a matter of having an idea. Someone must organize the next introduction. Then the next. In this family’s business, that work developed into a company with its own leadership and a scale measured in mailboxes.

It is also a reason to look beyond Ed’s founder title when telling his story. Beverly established the affiliated business; their daughters led its operations. A family photograph gives you the relationships. The division of responsibilities gives you a better understanding of what they built together.

The work has an unromantic advantage as a subject for a business biography. It is specific. An agent needs a prospect. A prospect needs an introduction. Direct mail is one way the company creates that opening. The founder’s ambition becomes easier to understand when translated into something another person can use on a working day.

Thirty-two years in, a different kind of partner

On October 7, 2020, Integrity announced its acquisition of TAG and Leads2Success. Ed and Beverly became managing partners in Integrity. Thirty-two years separated that announcement from the garage opening. The transaction brought a family-built operation into a broader network, while extending employee ownership opportunities through Integrity’s ownership plan.

Shackelford’s explanation centered on the resources required for further expansion. He had spent decades building the company. The next stage involved access to additional technology, industry talent and shared business functions. His account of the decision was about making more possible for the organization and its agents.

“we needed a partner who could help us scale”

Ed Shackelford · October 2020

The practical additions included quoting and customer-management capabilities, alongside support in functions such as accounting, marketing and human resources. These are useful details in a founder’s story because they show what growth asks for after the founding moment has passed. Eventually, even an energetic owner needs an organization around the organization.

The announcement put TAG’s footprint at 30 regional sales offices. That number belongs to the transaction’s moment in time. It gives a sense of the distance traveled from a garage without turning a historical figure into a running scoreboard. By then, Shackelford was deciding how an established business would enter its next chapter.

The next recruit needs a working day

TAG’s offer to agents makes that chapter tangible. Its recruiting materials describe mentorship, appointment setting, lead programs and retirement seminars. Each occupies a different point between joining a company and sitting down with a prospective client. The workday needs more than a license and an encouraging speech.

There is a neat connection here to Shackelford’s own beginning, although the circumstances differ. He entered a new profession with a job retained elsewhere. Today, his company’s recruitment message emphasizes the support around a person entering or developing an insurance career. The recurring question is how to make the next step workable.

The company also provides electronic contracting, consolidated commission statements, reporting and lead-management tools. These may be modest attractions beside the grand language of entrepreneurship. For someone trying to keep track of an actual business, modest attractions can be persuasive. A commission statement that is easy to find has virtues a motivational poster cannot hope to match.

Those services help explain the shape of Shackelford’s career. He began as an individual changing occupations. The business he founded now organizes resources for other people doing the work. The unit of attention has widened from one seller’s prospects to the arrangements that support a network of sellers.

A hobby with an organizational chart

Shackelford calls himself a “work-a-hobbyist,” a compact description with a little room for self-mockery. His biography pairs that description with time spent with Beverly, their daughters and grandsons Jackson and Wesley. Work and family appear repeatedly in his life story because the two have repeatedly occupied the same ground.

His public LinkedIn activity offers a suitably plain piece of encouragement: “Stick with the process, your discipline will pay off!” It is an apt line beside a career measured in decades. It also sounds rather more at home next to an appointment calendar than on a monument.

The most revealing choice remains the one near the beginning. A young textile worker passed an exam, opened a garage office and kept another shift while testing his new trade. The later company would have offices, affiliated operations and a place within a larger group. The first arrangement had to accommodate an uncertain salesman and a family’s immediate needs.

That is where Shackelford’s story keeps its footing. Before the founder title came the practical decision about tomorrow’s work. Years later, with Beverly and their daughters helping run the business, tomorrow’s work had become something the family organized for thousands of agents. The garage was a beginning. Keeping people working became the longer undertaking.