Ed Walker: Ed Walker has served as ArmadaGlobal’s President since November 2015. In this role, Walker is responsible for driving business development and sustained, profitable growth. His focus on new business models enables ArmadaGlobal to leverage emerging trends, solve customer problems in larger potential markets and rapidly assemble internal and external capabilities required to reach the company’s growth goals.
You were at Transamerica for a big portion of your career. Tell us about your background and how you transitioned to ArmadaGlobal.
I had been with Transamerica for 27 years and that started out originally here in Baltimore as Monumental and then Aegon and I rose through the executive ranks. From a skills perspective, I was primarily involved in our sales and marketing and business development, very involved in some of our M&A activity, divestiture of business; so, I really was fortunate to have a very robust experience there to be able to be with a large company that was experiencing rapid growth. I thought, well, wouldn’t it be great if I had the opportunity to go somewhere else, to kind of take all the experiences that I’ve had throughout the years, and just do that on a different scale. Keith [Sullivan, managing partner and co-founder of ArmadaGlobal] and I would occasionally meet, and then he asked, “Hey, would you ever think about coming, joining Armada? Our company has gotten to a size where Brian [Rogers, managing partner and co-founder of ArmadaGlobal] and I feel we need to bring in new talent, and we need people who have had experience running larger organizations, and we’re looking at executives who have that experience and can take us to the next level.” So, I got to meet the partner group, I got to ask questions about the business, and we just kind of kept progressing. Now I’ve been with Armada for three weeks. I’m still involved with Transamerica in transitioning some things, and I will remain in an advisory capacity for a period of time, but at the end of the day, that helps Transamerica, that helps Armada, and also the other partners within the group.
ArmadaGlobal was founded in 2005, but seems to have expanded quickly. How has ArmadaGlobal grown in this time?
Our core business is rapidly growing. When you look at the last several years, we’ve become a leader with our ultimate health program. Part of an outcropping of that was our TopDoc Connect program, which was a key core aspect of ultimate health, and now looking at expanding access to give consumers much broader access. We want to go from roughly the 30,000 executives and families that we cover today to millions, giving access to millions of consumers through our TopDoc program.
What are your five-year goals for ArmadaGlobal?
We handle a variety of clients from small employers to larger groups, and, in terms of different client-type segments, they could be professional organizations, manufacturing, so it kind of runs the spectrum. We’ve found that our solutions aren’t specific to any one client profile, but they’re solutions that are attractive to a wide variety of clients, as well as consumers. When we look out at the next five years, we want to be the top company in terms of medical advisory, as well as supplemental lines that help customers.
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