Tom Kaiser
Appearances
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
That's how I got in the insurance business. They had served during World War II. I came into the Vietnam, so they were already well established in business, but their background was in aviation. Were you growing up, what were your aspirations? It was wide open. I went to university.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
When I came out of university, I happened to be one of the first people who got a low lottery number in the crazy draft. And so six months after graduating from college, I was in the Air Force. I decided that if I could fly, that was what I was going to do. So I passed the flight physicals, and that led me to the five years that I spent in the Air Force.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
From that perspective, I knew I wanted to go into business, but I really didn't know exactly what. What led me to insurance was, again, the feeling that I had that five years of being an aviator... somehow put me behind my peers who had been in business for five years and I had to find a way to catch up. And that was not true, but I just believed that.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
And so I looked for jobs that really were based on merit, 100% on merit, and ended up in a sales position where I was selling large property insurance packages for Factory Mutual.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
I was a know-nothing on insurance at that point. I was fascinated by the fact that Arkwright at the time or Factory Mutual tailored insurance products to specific solutions or problems that companies had. And so it was very good for anybody who was selling those products.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
After 9-11, the insurance industry backed out of including terrorism insurance or anything associated with terrorism insurance. And the government came out with definitions of what terrorism is. And so an event like 9-11 is defined as terrorism. It's not insured. So the insurance industry responded with the government to come up with solutions to fill that void.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
And a new product was developed because the other one was gone. And it supported basically and complemented what the government was offering in the realm of terrorism insurance. But it was basically a property insurance that would pay if your property was destroyed by a declared terrorist event.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
In certain industries, yes. I mean, in the aviation business, big demand. Depends on what the industry was, because most people were not buying the product. But those that really felt that they were in a situation where they could have a terrorist attack and lose large assets, they were attracted to it.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
Well, it was a new company. Arch was born out of 9-11. And several people raised the capital. And I was fortunate enough that I was working with a man named Dino Serrano at Zurich. And he went over to become the CEO and he brought me over in the number two role. It went from a very small company into a very large company rapidly. Very clear success story.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
Today, Arch is about a $35 billion company. Really relied on individuals that had skin in the game and were very entrepreneurial to build individual businesses that, when you added them all up, became quite a significant business under the name or the brand that was promoting it. Recruiting was the key to building Arch or building any of the companies that I worked with.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
You find the right people that are focused in the right way, they have the right attitude, and they want to make it happen, and you can move the world. Those who have a lot of self-confidence want to win, and they want others to win. And they're very keen on relationship and relationship management. You had to build relationships with brokers, You had to build relationships with customers.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
And all this had to come together in a positive way. As a manager, you become a coach when you want your employee or your report to win instead of just managing them. You pick up on it, I think, very quickly if they have the same desire because you're working closely with them. You're not some guy in the back room looking at how many calls somebody made, whether they made their calls or not.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
You're out there talking about the actual business and how it works.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
Well, I think people need the touch. It's not something that can be done in a vacuum. It's something where you're there. You're part of the whole process. I can't emphasize enough that you're driven because you want them to win, to be successful. And that's where you're coming from. People pick up on that.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
And when you do that enough and you have enough people involved in it, it becomes a cultural thing. People just get it and they want to be part of it and they help you ferret out those that don't belong. It's a remarkable thing because once you have that alignment.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
And that alignment working for you, it's a self-correcting environment that they don't want to let anybody in that doesn't buy into what we're doing here and why we're doing it.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
Well, I think if you've established your relationship with that employee as a coach, you're going to have that opportunity to coach them. And in that process, the walls are going to be a lot easier to climb. The obstacles are going to be things you can talk about. And there's other people within your team that you can bring in If you're a good coach to say, well, here's how Joe dealt with that.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
You need to talk to him, right? Recognizing we're all going to have challenges, but by talking about them and working with them, we can make ourselves better and more successful.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
I always look for high-energy people, and I think I like people who took care of themselves, that were physically fit, that had other things going in their life, and had a very broad background of how things worked and what they believed in. Because I think it's the whole person. That always served me well, too. I like people who tried to close me, who wanted the job and asked for it.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
I got to tell you a story. It's funny. When we first started Arch, I spent 90% of my time recruiting people. People were very reluctant to leave a big company, a safe position, and come with a startup. A year later, we had to fight these people off. Because once it showed it was successful and it was a moving thing that was really doing well, they all wanted to join.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
Your success is also what drives bringing in good people. If you've got a great company and they see you as a great leader, they're going to want to work for you. So you have to use that to your advantage also.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
The fact about insurance is it's a thing that everybody needs, but they don't necessarily want it.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
So the need is created by the fact that you have a home or a car or you have a business. No matter what you have, there's going to be certain requirements of things that you have to buy to protect that business or to protect the home or the auto or what have you. Life insurance is another question.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
It's more complicated because there's more reasons why people buy or don't buy than the simple thing that the government says you have to have auto insurance. But I think the struggle is that people really don't know who they want to buy from. And there's lots of places you can go to buy your insurance. And there's lots of different products that are offered in the general marketplace.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
I always found that the best thing to work for me was to open up and help someone with the entire package from A to Z. What are you trying to do with your financial planning? What are you trying to do with all of the insurance products? How do you look at it? I used to start a conversation with people saying that you do not build an insurance program from the bottom up.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
You build it from the top down. And what people make, the biggest mistake they make is they start from the bottom up and they self-insure the biggest exposures they have, which is the top end of it, where if the worst thing happened, you're in bad shape. That was a good way to start a conversation with people who didn't know a lot about insurance. Right.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
Well, I think my legacy is out there. There's probably 30 guys that work for me that are running significant portions of insurance companies that have big jobs in those companies. And they're all part of the team that I assembled at these various companies. I'm really proud of these guys and they really have been successful and have been the new leaders as I've drifted out of the business.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
But my legacy is really those people who are out there that are still working, that I influenced, that I brought into the business and now have significant roles within various companies.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
Well, I think it's something lasting that is beyond you and the contribution you were making at the time. So the way I define it is I left the business physically in 08 and haven't worked for an insurance company since 08. But I've got a whole cadre of people who are in senior positions that I hired and I trained. that continue to support a lot of the things that we've been talking about.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
You'll hear them talk about alignment and the importance of making sure everybody's pulling in the same direction. I used to say that if you've got four powerful horses and you hook them to a wagon and you decide to pull the wagon in different directions, you pull the wagon apart. But if you get them going in a straight line, you can go anywhere.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
A lot of this is rocket science, just stuff that you've got to repeat over and over and over again and tell stories about and celebrate successes around because that alignment is so important. Absolutely. Why should someone buy insurance? For protection and risk management.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
In other words, you're transferring risk at a price and that's to be part of your risk management orientation that you don't have to bear that risk if the worst case scenario happened. Your house burns down, there's an explosion, you die, you name it. So everybody should have an orientation towards risk management. Insurance is one of the tools that goes with risk management.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
They should go on to masterfulcoaching.com and I'll make an offer to them. We have a book called The Revenue Engine, an e-book, and they can go in there and download that for free. Masterfulcoaching.com.
Let's Talk Legacy
People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
It did. In fact, I spent five years as a KC-135 navigator in the U.S. Air Force. And I thought that, gee, I must have missed out on business for those five years. So I probably should find a job. And that took me to our great mutual insurance, where the guy who was running it was a B-29 pilot. And the number two guy was an F-106 pilot. We talked to airplanes and they hired me.