Plumeri’s back in the majors

After stepping down as head of Citigroup’s retail banking arm last December, Joe Plumeri expanded his investments in Minor League baseball, buying a second team in his home state of New Jersey: the Lakewood Blue Claws, a farm team for the Philadelphia Phillies.

After stepping down as head of Citigroup’s retail banking arm last December, Joe Plumeri expanded his investments in Minor League baseball, buying a second team in his home state of New Jersey: the Lakewood Blue Claws, a farm team for the Philadelphia Phillies. (He’d bought the Trenton Thunder, a Boston Red Sox feeder, in 1994.) Now Plumeri is back in the big leagues. He’s signed on as the new chairman and CEO of Willis Group, a London-based insurance brokerage that boasts 235 offices in 73 countries.

Plumeri began his career 32 years ago as a broker working for Citi CEO Sandy Weill. “We’re very good friends,” he says. “I even discussed this opportunity with him, which he was excited about.” No wonder. Plumeri’s mission is to ramp up Willis through acquisitions and good old-fashioned cheerleading -- skills that the effusive ex-salesman honed under the King of All Brokers. He will divide his time between London and Willis’s U.S. offices in Nashville and New York.

“When you’re with somebody for that long, something rubs off,” Plumeri says of Weill. “Like any teacher-student relationship, you learn, but you also inject your own style and your own way of thinking, and you put all that together through a sausage grinder, and it becomes your own.”

Related