Once the storm clouds have cleared, the floodwaters have receded and the fires have been extinguished, Worley Catastrophe Response employees arrive on the scene in their uniform black jackets to service insurance claims and assist in disaster recovery necessary for devastated areas to assess and rebuild.
But Worley isn’t an insurance company. Nor is it a major self-insured corporation. The company’s employees are provided by contract to major insurance providers and large-scale corporate entities.
Worley, which is now owned and operated by the founder’s son, Mike Worley, experienced a phenomenal 2008. The company’s revenues increased 102.6%, from $68.1 million to $138 million, and it climbed from No. 48 to No. 26 on Business Report’s Top 100 Private Companies list.
“It’s been quite a year,” Worley says. “A lot of things have come together.”
But it wasn’t the result of any drastic changes. Rather, Worley says the reason his company’s revenue increased so dramatically is that it stayed ahead of employee training and focused heavily on building customer relationships.
The company’s model also has evolved from its original purpose, serving smaller insurance claims, to handling large losses.
“We’re a completely different company now than we were in 1984,” Worley says, referring to the year he started working for his father.
The company began to service a regional market in 1992 and went nationwide three years later. It also began training its own employees and developing new systems to handle catastrophe response, called Worltrac.
And in 1999, when the business was known as Worley Companies, it started an educational expo to train employees [most of whom function like temporary employees, only working when they’re needed] and prospective employees on how to handle estimates, insurance loss, policy, service skills and ethics.
“We started with 150 attendees our first year,” Worley says. “Last year we had over 900.”
Those figures now include some of Worley’s customers, who come to train employees on how to handle claims specifically for their policyholders.
“I had an idea to take the company, bring in the correct management and train the company,” Worley says. “There was not enough management in the field. So we’ve taken it to another level. There’s some good competition out there. But we feel like we’re the best in the industry.”
Secretive, too.
Business Report requested to speak to some of Worley’s clients. He says one portion of establishing strong relationships is maintaining their clients’ privacy.
Just noting the list of events with which the company has been associated speaks volumes for its presence in the industry. It has responded to natural disasters such as tornadoes, hailstorms—it was on site after tennis ball-sized hail damaged property earlier this month in Wichita, Kan.—and every landfalling hurricane since Andrew in 1992.
The company also responds to manmade and environmental disasters such as chemical and petroleum spills and plane crashes. It has worked extensively with Shell, serving to aid crisis management after a refinery explosion in 1988 and later with the oil company handled 50,000 claims to replace vehicle fuel tanks after reports of high sulfur content in its gasoline.
“We’ve been involved in every major headline incident probably in the last 15 years,” Worley says. “Maybe even going back the last 20 years.”
Clients have come to count on his employees. Worley employees are ready at a moment’s notice to deploy to a disaster area.
“We have to train every day like you’re going to have a Katrina hit,” Worley says, “like you’re going to have a 9/11.”
That’s part of the reason Worley Catastrophe Response keeps evolving. The company recently moved into an office building off Interstate 55 in Hammond, and it’s wrapping up construction of a training facility.
But Worley says he doesn’t plan to slow the company’s growth unless clients need them less—adding, however, that it has continued to break revenue records. The company had its best first quarter on record from January through March of this year.
The company will continue to grow as large as its clients require.
“We’ll do whatever our customers need,” Worley says. “That’s how big we get.”
Still, there’s no stopping Mother Nature. And someone has to be there to help clean up the mess.
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