When you meet Cody Ritchie for the first time—even if it’s your job to interview him—he
begins the conversation by asking about you and finding connections you never knew
you had. By the end of the conversation, you feel like you just reconnected with a
high school buddy.
That’s because he loves people. He’s a selfprofessed glass-half-full kind of guy: “If I meet someone who’s glass half empty, I try to bring them over to our side.”
And it is our side. Wyoming is a small town, as they say. Cody’s friends who are not from Wyoming or haven’t attended UW feel it. “You have something we never had,” they tell Cody. “People are so friendly. People are so warm.”
Cody is the founder, CEO, and managing partner of Crest Insurance Group, a fullservice insurance brokerage licensed in all 50 states, and he’s excited to bring his business back to his home state. After expanding into Colorado from Arizona, now Crest Insurance is moving back into Wyoming.
“It’s not monetary rewards that get me fired up,” Cody says. “It’s seeing others around you doing well—because if they’re doing well, you’re doing well. Helping others is the Cowboy Way.”
Cody grew his business on Wyoming values: “Good work ethic, keeping your word, doing the right thing, treating people fairly, not thinking you’re above everybody else. The Code of the West—those are the pillars I use to run our business.”
Crest Insurance Group employs more than 250 people in Arizona, California, and Colorado—and now Wyoming—and specializes in commercial property, casualty, and workers compensation insurance, bonds, employee benefits, personal auto insurance, umbrella and homeowners insurance, and individual life and health insurance.
“That’s what we know how to do—we get involved in communities,” Cody says. “Ours is very much a relationship business.”
Cody has stayed involved with his alma mater. He and his wife Patsy recently gave the lead gift supporting the West Side Renovations to War Memorial Stadium. The project is still being finalized but will include improvements and upgrades to restrooms, concessions, seating, ADA compliance, and the press area. The project is being supported by private gifts and funding from the Wyoming State Legislature and UW. This is just the latest in a long line of gifts from the Ritchies. Cody has been supporting UW since he left for Arizona in 1987. “I’m a pay-it-forward kind of person,” Cody says. “I live for the next day.”
As a UW student, Cody was a walk-on for Cowboy football under Coach Al Kinkade, as well as playing rugby. He earned his bachelor’s in business administration and then went on to earn a master’s in exercise sport science and athletic administration at the University of Arizona.
Cody says, “I love an underdog story. I felt like in my business—we were underdogs. I feel like Wyoming, in a certain way, we’re underdogs when we go take on the mega-universities. But all of us who choose to go there—we embrace it, love it. Together, we need everybody pulling in the same direction.”
Cody is very proud of the great friends he made at UW. He’s just as proud of the ones who went on to become CEOs of major corporations as he is of the ones who are schoolteachers and coaches in Cheyenne who impact so many lives.
“That old adage—a rising tide lifts all boats,” Cody says. “All of a sudden, we have an avalanche of people out there, supporters of Wyoming, from getting students there to getting donors there to getting people to know about our school.”
Wyoming, too, is a relationship business. Cody says, “The only way our university and state is successful is if we’re all pulling together. We’re all better together.”
