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By CAROL HAZARD

Move over, Gecko. The Elephant has arrived – and it’s landed in the Richmond area. And Elephant Auto Insurance could become one of the area’s leading employers.

The auto insurance company employs 80 people at its U.S. headquarters in western Henrico County. It opened in October with 47 people.

Elephant has room for 250 people at its local office and plans to expand over an unspecified time period to as many as 2,000 employees, depending on how well its business does in the U.S.

At that size, it could replace Circuit City Stores Inc. as one of the largest employers in the Richmond area. The electronics retailer employed about 1,900 people in the weeks before it began liquidating its business early last year.

Elephant is a subsidiary of Cardiff, Wales-based Admiral Group PLC, one of the United Kingdom’s leading insurers that also had humble beginnings.

“We started 18 years ago with 57 people. Now we have 3,300 people and we’re planning on 5,000 within five years,” Henry Engelhardt, Admiral’s founder and CEO, said during a visit to the local office this week.

Engelhardt discussed Elephant’s culture, its plans, why Admiral chose the Richmond area for its U.S. headquarters – and how the Elephant name came to be.

The company looked at other cities to locate its U.S. headquarters including Dallas, Pittsburgh and Charlotte, N.C., Engelhardt said. “If you plan to have 1,000 or 2,000 people, you must have a reasonable population. It can’t be a tiny place.”

The Richmond area was big enough, he said. Plus, Andrew Rose, the president and CEO of the U.S. subsidiary, was already here.

Richmond had several corporate offices here, which meant Elephant could plug into a management pool of talent. It has hired people who worked at Circuit City as well as from Capital One Financial Corp., Genworth Financial and CarMax; all Fortune 500 companies and major employers in the Richmond area.

Elephant is starting off selling insurance only in Virginia. But it has plans to eventually expand nationwide – thus the need for more employees.

In less than one year, Elephant has garnered awards here that speak to its employee-centric culture.

It received the Employer of Choice award for small organizations as part of the Employer All Star award program sponsored by the Society of Human Re

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