Michael Hartman, who has 26 years of funeral industry experience and has worked in several other management roles, has joined American Enterprise Group as regional sales manager for Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Hartman has an associate degree from Seminole Community College and is a proud veteran of Desert Storm.
Rebekah Manofsky, a new sales manager overseeing the Indiana and Ohio markets, has nearly 20 years of experience in both the funeral and cemetery industries, including preneed sales and marketing for independent, family-owned funeral homes; and serving as an SCI general manager. She also opened two funeral services and installed a crematory to serve at-need families. Licensed as a funeral director in Ohio, Manofsky has trained new directors, agents and marketing organizations in the areas of administration, policies and procedures, compliance, product, and sales processes, and has actively served on the Ohio Funeral Directors Association Young Funeral Directors Committee for five years.
Allen Whitmer will manage the Oklahoma and Texas markets. He is the third generation of his family working in the funeral industry and has 10 years of experience working with funeral home owners and agents to build successful preneed programs through marketing, product selection and agent training. Whitmer earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He also holds a limited funeral directors license in Missouri and has been a licensed life insurance agent for 14 years.
In other news, Aaron Young has joined AEG as national sales distribution director who will focus on driving sales growth of the Final Expense Whole Life product line marketed under the Great Western Insurance Company brand. He has more than 30 years of high-level marketing and sales experience and was most recently CEO, president and founding partner of a consulting firm that serviced clients in the advertising/marketing and insurance sectors. He was also owner/operator of a national insurance agency. Young has earned the distinction of Certified Senior Advisor through the Society of Certified Senior Advisors.
American Enterprise Group has also appointed two new members to the American Enterprise Mutual Holding Company Board of Directors (parent company of AEG). Kathy Redgate and Terry Lillis were named at the organization’s annual meeting. Redgate offers more than 33 years of broad-based, global business experience, including executive-level positions at Global Atlantic Financial Group Limited and Goldman Sachs. Most recently, she was executive vice president and advisor to the CEO for Global Atlantic Financial Group Limited. Redgate joined the company in 2006 and also held the positions of COO and chief administrative officer, as well as served as a member of the Executive Committee. During her tenure, she worked on several large acquisitions and helped significantly increase the company’s assets to more than $75 billion under her management.
Lillis spent the last 35 years at Principal Financial Group, joining the company in 1982 as an actuarial student and proceeding to hold a number of senior actuarial, risk management and product pricing roles before being named CFO in 2008. At the time of his retirement from Principal in 2017, he was executive vice president and CFO, a position he had held since 2014. americanenterprise.com