You can tell a lot about a leader by what their office looks like. For many, your office space is your place of business, your headquarters if you will. Walking into the office of Agency Principal and Owner of Callahan & Rice Insurance Group Inc. Mark Rice, you can tell he is a man who comes to work ready to work. While his office has some of the usual staples; photos of family and friends, golf balls proudly on display, even a standing desk which he gladly turns from to welcome in a guest, his office is not only a reflection of himself as a person, but the result of a 35 year long career in insurance that he had never even thought about in his youth.

“When I was in high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a high school music teacher, and so I studied for that. And I got to have a degree, a BS degree in Music Education. And so I taught from 1981 to 1987 at Pine Forest, on the north side of town. But I realized that I needed to make a change,” recalled Rice. 

An example of when God calls you to do something; you listen, Rice began the journey that would take him from an independent insurance agent to a business owner in just a little over a decade in the industry. 

“My father in law had been in the insurance industry for a long time and had retired and so he was the one that kind of encouraged me to make that shift. And that was a long time ago, that was 1987 that I started in this industry. And [I’ve] just been plowing away ever since,” shared Rice. “I started out by myself and then just made a series of changes. I came to be connected with this agency in 1991, and then officially became Partner in 95 and then I bought the company in 98.” 

But purchasing the company came with more than a promotion. Callahan & Rice Insurance Group Inc. has been serving the Fayetteville Community since 1966, bringing with it not just a reputation to uphold but also a business to grow and improve. 

According to Rice the independent insurance agency is broken into three segments: commercial insurance, the niche “Defense Base Act” coverage, (a type of insurance specifically for those who do work for the U.S. government and for service members who travel outside of the country) and the more traditional types of insurance. 

“We have clients in over 50 countries now, and it's just really interesting to watch that whole thing progress. Probably 60 percent of what we do is helping commercial clients, the other 40 percent is helping our personal clients. We will help them with home and auto and boats and beach houses and those things that relate to them personally and then we also help all of those clients with employee benefits and individual life insurance and health insurance and disability and long term care and those types of coverages too so, we’re pretty broad based,” said Rice. “We represent a lot of different companies and we write a lot of different types of insurance for our clients.” 

According to the company’s website, the Callahan & Rice Insurance Group Inc. now employs eleven employees and has several strategic alliances in place to serve three generations of clients. The agency represents numerous insurance agencies and supports clients ranging from individuals to local and regional businesses. But Rice said getting to where they are now wasn’t always easy, and it was his faith that helped him through those dark moments. 

“When I bought the company, it was in a very, very bad condition. The person who had previously been in my role had really almost destroyed the company financially. So when I bought it, I had to sort of resurrect it, and that was hard, for a lot of reasons,” shared Rice. “It took a lot longer to bring the company back up to speed than I thought it would. There were a lot of challenges and a lot of financial challenges because we owed a lot of people a lot of money. And when you’re trying to fix all of that and still pay your employees and grow the business, it was really challenging. So I really had to depend on God. I think He was trying to teach me that ‘You’re not going to do this on your own. You're going to do this with my help.’ And so I had to depend on Him to get to that point. And it’s clear when you look back now over, gosh, 24 years. When you look back over that time period, then you can see the steps that He took and the things that He put in place to make all of that happen to where we are right now.”

Rice said that operating as a business of faith means starting with the right mindset. 

“I think that you have to start from the standpoint that everything here, everything that I have or you have doesn’t belong to us it belongs to God and what our role is and what my role is, is to steward what He’s given us to use it to honor Him and to grow it in a way that honors Him,” said Rice. 

He added that it also means letting your faith affect every aspect of your business, including the day to day interactions and operations. 

“Having a faith based business impacts how you treat your employees, it impacts how you treat your clients, it impacts how you treat vendors. We have a lot of vendors that we deal with, whether it’s [a] company’s representatives or the people that we buy from. I think it just impacts the culture and how we respond and react to other people,” said Rice. “We keep a running prayer list, it’s on the board in the back break room and we talk about that from time to time when certain things happen. We say ‘How can we help this person? They're going through a tough time,’ or occasionally when one of our staff is working with a client, they'll find out that something’s going on big in their life and they’ll ask him to pray for them and they’ll do that with the client.”

Rice, who has been an active Christian since the age of 13, said that the most important thing you can do is to live based on the faith and principles you truly believe in. 

“You cannot live a bifurcated life. So what that means is, if you have a faith and if it’s really a part of who you are, it really needs to be manifested and it needs to come out in everything that you do. You can't have your business life over here and your personal life over here. In my mind, if your faith is really a true faith, then it has to be incorporated in everything you do. Whether it's what you do here at work, whether it’s how you deal with people at home, whether it’s how you deal with people at a restaurant, I mean it just has to be a part of the fabric of your life,” said Rice. 

Today Rice attends Snyder Memorial Baptist Church, which he’s been a member of for nearly 20 years. Despite leaving his musical background behind, he currently serves as the director of the Snyder Memorial Baptist Church Men’s Ensemble. He said his goal is to continue to serve his clients and to continue to make a positive impact on the community. 

“This is a business where you can help people in a lot of different ways. Sometimes, I say this to people, they say ‘What do you do for a living?’ I say I’m a professional problem solver,” said Rice. “We all have an expiration date, but we don't know what that is, and so we’ve got to make sure that whatever time we have, we have to use it and make it fruitful. And that's kind of really what my goal has been in this business.”