Tom Kaiser
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Tom Kaiser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're out there talking about the actual business and how it works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Showing 1–20 of 34 · page 1 of 2
Next →