Thriving on binding ambition.

• Author: Davis, Lisa E.
• Position: David Sprinkle, president of John O. Todd Organization

THRIVING ON BINDING AMBITION

David Sprinkle used to jump on his old Sears bike between M.B.A. classes in 1967 and '68 and ride all over Chapel Hill. He'd stash the bike in the bushes, knock on doors and try to sell life insurance to graduate students.

And a lot of the time, they'd listen. "We were in the middle of Vietnam, and you didn't know whether you were going to live or not," Sprinkle says. The $15,000 policy he was selling guaranteed future insurability for $150,000 more, and that sounded good to potential draftees - who knew they might end up disabled.

Students then had to be serious about the future, and R. David Sprinkle was a serious guy. "People tended to trust me, and they would open up to me and tell me about what they were trying to accomplish," he says. Because he was in business school, Sprinkle tried to present himself as a financial planner, a counselor - not a pushy insurance agent. And it worked: He made close to $5,000 his first summer on the job.

"I found I had a knack for that," he says.

Two decades later, Sprinkle, 46, is still peddling line insurance, but not to impecunious graduate students. Now he makes his pitch to CEOs and boards of large public companies. His clients include NCNB, Carolina Power & Light, Glaxo and Old Greenwich, Conn.-based American Brands.

As president of John O. Todd Organization of Greensboro, Sprinkle designs non-qualified executive-benefits plans, the so-called "golden handcuffs" that companies use to retain top managers. The idea is to set up benefits that are so attractive an executive can hardly afford to leave.

"It gives senior staff a good feeling about our company," explains Donald B. Williford, secretary of Charlotte-based Ruddick Corp. Three years ago, Sprinkle installed retirement and deferred-compensation plans for Ruddick.

These options supplement the qualified benefit plans regulated by Congress. A company's contribution to a qualified plan is tax deductible, and the plan's assets are protected from creditors. But all employees must be treated equally. Congress over the past few years has restricted special benefits for executives.

Non-qualified plans don't carry such restrictions, but they also lack the tax advantages and protection of qualified plans. Sprinkle tries to design plans that come close to keeping those attributes. "Our job is really creative financing," he says. And that's where life insurance comes in.

Sprinkle sells corporate-owned life insurance to help companies finance the plans he designs, helping protect the plans from insolvency in case the business runs into trouble. Most of his company's efforts go to the design and administration of these plans, he says, but about 85 percent of its revenues come from commissions on the insurance products...