People Need The Touch, with Tom Kaiser
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Legacy means a lot of things to a lot of people. To some, it's lasting integrity. It's building and maintaining a history of greatness. It's making an impact on people and community. For others, it's dependable security and assurance in an uncertain time. To us, it's all of that and more. It's a mindset, a brother and sisterhood of hardworking people dedicated to doing the right thing for you and those you care about of growing today for a better tomorrow that's what legacy means at southwestern legacy insurance group what does it mean to you let's talk legacy Welcome to Let's Talk Legacy. I'm Gary Michaels, your host, founder of Southwestern Legacy Insurance Group. And today we have Tom Kaiser, the guest on the show. Tom Kaiser is the managing partner of Masterful Coaching, a renowned expert in the field of collaboration.
He also has a deep background in the insurance industry, both domestic and worldwide, with experience running large, complex global businesses, including serving as a top executive in Arkwright Insurance, Zurich Financial Solutions. He either built the business from the ground up, which is very interesting to me and our listeners, or transformed them into a dynamic industry leader. Thank you for joining our show. you to do it. So you started off in the Air Force, but that experience sort of unexpectedly opened up some doors for you later in the insurance field. Talk about that a little bit.
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.
So when you first approached them about insurance, were you fascinated with business more or were you fascinated more with insurance?
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.
Got it. One of the more interesting and unique items we saw on your resume is from your time serving as the executive VP and president of Marine and Energy for ARC Insurance Group, where you were responsible for global marine energy and aviation and terrorism, which really intrigued me. Terrorism insurance. Is that a thing?
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.
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