From the moment Deborah Sternberg rises each day, the business executive, volunteer, wife and mother of two is literally off and running.
“If I don’t do it, I feel off balance all day,” Sternberg says of her early morning treadmill routine.
Sternberg then readies her children, ages 6 and 8, for school before setting off for the office. There, alongside her father and brother, she is a driving force behind the unprecedented growth of Starmount Life Insurance and AlwaysCare Benefits.
And when the workday is over for most people, it’s about lunchtime for Sternberg. After dinner and some downtime with her family, she tucks her children into bed by 8 p.m. and she’s back on her computer by 9. She’ll often work past midnight from home.
“It’s a breeze,” Sternberg says, when asked how she balances the demands of her career and her family.
If you consider the journey Sternberg has taken to reach this point in her life, you know she’s not joking.
After graduating from Columbia University’s prestigious Barnard College in 1994, Sternberg worked in the White House’s media affairs office, served as deputy chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, and worked elections and special events coverage alongside former CBS News anchorman Dan Rather.
Sternberg had no intention of returning to Baton Rouge when her father Hans and brother Eric initially asked her seven years ago to come home and work for the family business.
At the time, she was serving as vice president of a successful international public relations firm in New York and had just given birth to her first child.
“I don’t like to be bored, and when you’re talking about insurance, well, it’s not necessarily the sexiest career,” Sternberg says. “But my brother and father said it wouldn’t be boring, and true to their word, it definitely hasn’t been.”
In each of the past six years, Starmount Life Insurance and AlwaysCare Benefits have experienced double-figure growth in employees and profit. In the past two and a half years, Sternberg has overseen the addition of about a half-dozen products.
As executive vice president, Sternberg manages public relations and the companies’ 160 employees. Despite the demands on her time, she serves on a number of boards of directors and is developing a young leadership group at her synagogue. Among her lengthy list of awards, she was chosen one of Louisiana’s Most Powerful and Influential Women by the National Diversity Council in 2010.
And though she admits to an occasional longing for the hustle and bustle of cities like New York and Washington, D.C., Sternberg says she couldn’t be happier about moving home to help grow the family’s businesses.
“It’s really important for people to have that experience of leaving the place they’re from and then returning,” she says. “It gives you a different perspective and allows you to really appreciate where you’re from.”
