Mike Dellipriscoli plans to retire at the end of the year after almost 30 years being involved in major initiatives around the company. We wanted to get a few of his thoughts before then.
Q. What brought you to National Life?
A. In ‘88 when I was 32 years old I was working for Colonial Penn Group down in Philadelphia. I’d been there for a couple of years after working for Philadelphia Life Insurance for six years. I was itchy in that job, so I was interviewing. I was actually close to getting offered a job as a consultant for Coopers and Lybrand before they merged to become PWC. But one day I got a phone call from a headhunter who is based in Los Angeles who I still talk to occasionally. And she said, ‘Would you be interested in a position in Montpelier, Vermont?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ because I was in the mindset of change.
And so we drove up. My two oldest kids were 2 years old and 9 months old. We drove up one weekend. I had a brother-in-law that lived in Glens Falls. We came over and interviewed Nov. 8. It was a job for Tom MacLeay when he was the controller. We described what we wanted to do. We were still a mutual company and the idea that Tom and I – and I bought right into it – was we can’t continue to manage as a mutual company. We would have to take the management science and financial discipline to move the company forward like stock companies. So we hit it right off. He offered me a job before I left. I had to say let me get back to you. I am still a Philadelphian. It’s hard. We’re very parochial in Philly. All my family’s down there, all my wife’s family’s down there. It was my wife that actually said, ‘It’ll be an adventure. Come up here and see how it goes.’ We did. I didn’t know anything about Montpelier. I know a lot of people move to Vermont because they love the idea of Vermont. I had to look Vermont up in the encyclopedia.
Q. We know you’re a native of Philadelphia. But you’ve been in Vermont for a long time and set deep roots here. What’s Montpelier got that Philly doesn’t?
A. I’m still a Philly boy. We still talk about the Eagles. All five of my kids are actually living in Philadelphia right now. All the rest of the family’s there. I love Montpelier. I lived in a neighborhood of Philadelphia and Montpelier’s like being in the neighborhood, it’s just not surrounded by as many other neighborhoods as Philadelphia is. That kind of small community I loved. National Life. That’s really what it comes down to. That’s what brought me here. National Life became the first community that I was involved with in Montpelier.
Q. You’ve been hugely civic minded in the community, including heading up the board of the Central Vermont Medical Center. How do you decide which causes to support?
A. I became involved with a lot of other. But I think if I was working down in Philadelphia I’d be doing a lot of the same thing. I like the community. The first thing that got me civic minded in the community was seeing how Montpelier dealt with the flood of 1992. It was then that I talked to one of the executives here who was in the Rotary. I would go down and help clean up the old Lobster Pot, which is now NECI, and the Tavern, which is now J Morgan’s. Bill Cassidy was the head of operations then and he got me in the Rotary. I got in the Rotary as a way, ok I’m in the community of National Life but I want to know about the community. And then people ask me to do things. I very rarely say no to things. I got involved with Central Vermont (Medical Center), our CFO from a while ago, Ed Bonach, he was on the finance committee of CVMC. When he left to go to Canseco, he left a hole there. They asked me to take his place on the finance committee and I guess they liked the way I was working there and they asked me to be a trustee. And then they asked me to be the chairman of the board. And then we affiliated with the University of Vermont Medical Center when it was Fletcher Allen. And I’m also on the board of that, the UVM health network board. The high school that I went to, the Jesuit high school, the motto was men for others. And the motto for Rotary was service above self. So these kinds of things seep into me. It goes naturally to what we’re doing now, servant leadership. It’s all the same thing. I had other ways of getting into it before we started servant leadership here.
Q. Now that you’ll have a little more time available, how will you spend it?
A. I’m not selling my house or anything. I’m staying very active. I’m not chairman of CVMC board anymore. That just means I don’t have to run the meetings anymore. And there’s a couple of meetings that start at 7 in morning that I don’t have to go to anymore. But I’m fully engaged with that board and I’m fully engaged with the health network board. What we’re trying to do with health care from the provider side in Vermont, it’s such important work and I’m so happy to be part of it. That’ll keep me busy. I’ve already signed up for a class through the Senior Center down in Montpelier, doing the yoga for men. My wife and I signed up for a film series down at the Savoy every Tuesday morning, comedies with social commentary. So that’ll be fun. We want to stay involved with that. We will try to travel. My youngest son is still in college. He goes to Temple in Philadelphia. We’ll probably get down to Philadelphia probably a week every month to see the kids. We’re keeping my mother aging at home. So I’ve been doing a lot of the financial work with her. We’ll go down the end of January, through Super Bowl weekend just in case the Eagles are playing in the Super Bowl.
Q. It seems that athletics have been important to your family and one of your sons is even a coach. What’s your best personal athletic achievement?
A. All five of my kids had much more outstanding athletic careers than I ever had. I might attribute that more to my wife’s side of the family than me. I taught them to play the game because you love to play the game. And they’ve gotten that. For the most part, they’ve played basketball and soccer. John who just finished coaching the Montpelier girls soccer was named capital coach of the year.
I was a baseball player in high school. I guess my personal best was I was the leading hitter in my senior year in my high school. We weren’t a very good team. But I was a pretty good baseball player. But I’ve played basketball and softball and everything for the love of the game. And that’s why sometimes you see me walking around and I limp: basketball injuries.
Q. What’s the most memorable thing you can share about your career at National Life?
A. When I was CFO of sentinel, in July 2007, we were still in merger and acquisition mode. We were acquiring and trying to do deals. We made contact with a couple of European banks. We were negotiating with them to do a joint venture where they would take some Sentinel funds and sell them in Europe and we would take some European funds and try to sell them here. We met with them in New York. Tom went, Kerry Jung went. She was the Sentinel lawyer back then. We went to Paris for three days to negotiate with them. We never consummated a deal with them. But any time you get to go to Paris on a business trip it was a memorable thing. The thing with Kerry, she and I actually traveled together on the same flights and she was pregnant with Cade at the time. So traveling with a pregnant woman she gets to the front of the line for everything and I was: ‘I’m with her!’ So we always joke. I always say to Kerry, ‘We’ll always have Paris, kid.’
Q. What would surprise your coworkers to know about you?
A. I love musicals. I love soundtracks. My grandmother loved going up to Broadway. The “Music Man” is still my all-time favorite musical. It’s kind of indicative of what I like: Small town in Iowa, kind of like Montpelier, big-city guy – who was a flim-flam guy and I’m not flim-flam – but he sells them on doing a boys’ band. It’s Americana, it’s comedy, music, romance.
Q. Who is your role model and why?
A. I don’t have any one given role model. I just think there’s been so many influences. I want to be my own person. There’s certain behaviors I model, people who’ve influenced the way they’ve lived their lives. First of all was my maternal grandmother who died when I was 12. She had a great influence on my life. My mother and father, that’s almost a trite answer. But in a lot of ways I’m like my father and I see the good things that he did. But I don’t model everything off of his life. And the teachers that I’ve had. There were two seminal events or opportunities. I was growing up in southwest Philadelphia. I was in one big parish. I’m in the neighborhood and I’m going to go to the local West Catholic high school. That’s what everybody did. And then I had the opportunity to take the entrance exam for the Jesuit high school in Philadelphia and I did well enough on that and I won a scholarship. My family could never have afforded for me to go there. But I won a scholarship and that education just changed the arc, the direction. And then a lot can be said for the opportunity. I was not necessarily looking to come to Vermont. But sometimes opportunity knocks, you open the door it turns out to be a 29-year-long great gig.
Q. If you could give one piece of advice, what would it be?
A. The one piece of advice, and I’ve given it many times, especially to a lot of the younger folks that I’m dealing with these days, and I think it’s so important, is just be curious. Always be curious. How can I do things better? What are we really trying to do?
Q. Who’s the most memorable character from your time at National Life?
A. There are many memorable characters. I’ll never forget the opportunity that Tom MacLeay afforded me. And then the people I’ve worked for up to and including Mehran, everybody’s been memorable. The most memorable character is a guy who hasn’t been here since 1997. But early on in my career we did a lot of work together. His name is Mike Hambro. He was an actuary. We worked together. We were kind of a committee of two that dealt with one of the first change projects we had. It was to try to change operations. That was the first time we brought the Boston Consulting Group here. The first time they came in the main thing they said was you got to get rid of the disability income line or it’ll bring the company down. And then he and I ran another thing to look at the efficiency of things. Before we even had the gym downstairs we would always go down at lunch time go out for a run down the River Road. And Mike was shorter than I am. I’m not real tall but he was shorter than I am but he was like the little engine that could. He’d go out, strides, just half a foot, but he would just go up the hill. I’d get to the bottom of the hill and I’d be, “I can’t,” and I’d walk up. But he was just so memorable. For me, the younger days of my career here, he was a partner and a great friend.