Calbert Coakley
Managing General Agent & Director
Joined in 2011 as an agent and was promoted to Managing General Agent / Director. Leads Coakley Financial Group. Holds an M.S. in Telecommunication and a B.B.A.
Leadership
45 years, two generations, one town.
Ted Wilson, Sr. founded Universal Benefits in 1981 and still serves as Chief Executive Officer. The firm has never moved its administrative headquarters out of Sumter.
“We believe that “Nothing happens in life until someone sells something”. Selling is the biggest calling anyone can have.”
Ted Wilson, Jr.
President
“I vividly remember the very last time I asked my father for a $150 loan to make a $315 payment. He made a deal with me — come work with him for one month.”
Licensed at eighteen, and in no hurry to use it. He waited tables, bought a truck in the spring of 1994, and kept borrowing from his parents to make the payment. His father offered a deal: a $150 loan, in exchange for one month in the office.
They worked about fifteen leads sun-up to sun-down for two days. Two days after that, a check for over $1,500 arrived — and two women who badly needed coverage had it. He has never looked back.
He spent the early 2000s brokering multiple carriers and calls it the biggest mistake he made: confusing products, poor persistency, little lead or home-office support, two carriers pulling out of South Carolina and one going insolvent. In 2005 he committed to a single product and a single niche market, and has run the organization that way since.
Rodney R. Richburg, Sr.
Vice President of Marketing & Director
“Determination today leads to success tomorrow.”
A Sumter native and the youngest of twelve. He played varsity basketball at Sumter High averaging twenty points a game, took a scholarship to Morgan State, and studied law intending to become an FBI agent.
That path closed. He came home, started a family, and in 1998 met Ted Wilson, Sr.. He has since hired and trained more than 1,000 agents along the East Coast and founded UBI Southeast LLC and The Richburg Group, operating across seven states with three call centers.
Directors
The people who build the teams.
Marvin Hall
Director
Biography to be supplied by the firm.
Del Hawkins
Director
Biography to be supplied by the firm.
Operating across 7 states — SC, GA, MD, DC, NJ, VA, DE — with home-office support in Sumter.
Join a firm that stayed put.
Same town, same family, same product. 45 years of it.
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