From Mark's Desk

In the middle of catastrophe work, when the pressure is relentless and the environment around you looks like a war zone, you learn a lot about who you are and what leadership really means. During the hail, tornado, and hurricane deployments that followed my early adjuster work, I eventually found myself overseeing large teams in areas where communications were down, families were displaced, and every day felt like a race against the clock.

That responsibility didn’t show up after years of slow preparation. It came fast. And I learned quickly that no single person, including me, is capable of carrying an operation like that on their own. It requires knowing your people. Not as placeholders or as names on payroll. Instead as individuals with skills, instincts, and strengths that need to be aligned with the job in front of them.

I’ve always admitted that I can be a perfectionist. And if catastrophe work had allowed me to micromanage, I probably would have tried. But the truth is simple: in crisis environments, micromanagement will destroy you. It slows decisions, suffocates talent, and turns you into a bottleneck when people need a leader who sets direction and trusts others to execute.

So I started doing one thing very deliberately: Put the right people in the right places. Find the ones who see the mission clearly, handle pressure well, communicate honestly, and share the values you’re building toward. Give them responsibilities that align with what they’re great at. And then trust them to do the job.

That became my leadership philosophy early on not because a book taught me, but because catastrophe demanded it. If I tried to hold all the reins myself, nothing would get done. But when I built teams of capable people, delegated well, and allowed them to operate, we turned chaos into structure. We helped people faster. We restored homes, assessed damage, and put families back on their feet.

Leadership isn’t being everywhere. It’s knowing where you shouldn’t be. It’s letting other people lead when they’re the best equipped to handle that part of the mission. Those years taught me humility because you see firsthand that success doesn’t belong to the person with the title. It belongs to a network of people who understand their work and care about doing it right.

I carried that lesson into every chapter that followed including business management, fraud investigation, medical environments, family operations, and now with your support and vote public service. Because whether the workload is 100 catastrophic claims or the responsibilities of an elected office, the principle remains exactly the same: The best leaders don’t stand on pedestals. They build platforms others can stand on.

And when you’ve seen entire communities devastated and rebuilt, you learn that the greatest results always come from people working together not from one person trying to be everywhere at once.