The claims guy

George W. Baldwin took his first job in insurance to get through the summer before he started graduate school in theater design. He liked the insurance business and never looked back. And 30-plus years later, after Aon Insurance had acquired the global insurance operations of Inchcape, it saw bringing Baldwin into the company as the way to transition its new Guam operation into the full-service company its new status required.

Baldwin started with the Aetna Casualty and Surety Co. during the summer of 1964 when, as a young married father with a bachelor’s in fine arts waiting to start at the University of Washington, he answered a newspaper advertisement. “I didn’t know what [an adjuster] was,” he says. “I went and I lied like a rug. I told them, ‘This was going to be my career; I’d been thinking about this.’ Well, they hired me. When September came around in just a couple of months, I had forgotten all about graduate school. I was immersed in the claims business. I was handling claims right from the first day; I had really good supervision and I liked the work.”

Nine years later, Baldwin was working at The Aetna headquarters in Hartford, Conn. and the company was planning to transfer him to Detroit as a claims manager. “I’m a small-town kid from Sunburst, Mont.,” he says. “I grew up on a farm. [Detroit] wasn’t a place I wanted to live.”

That year, he visited Guam — where his wife had grown up — for an insurance convention and was “treated like royalty” — which he says he suspects was arranged by his father-in-law at the time, George Bourland, owner of Bourland Insurance. A year later, in 1974 he moved to Guam, with his wife and two young children, to work for Bourland.

For the first two years, things did not go particularly well. “I’m a claims guy,” he says. “Claims guys are not the same as marketing guys. After the policy is written and the promises are made then [claims adjusters] have to go out and execute them. I was really good at that. I knew what the product delivered, but was woefully lacking in the marketing skills. I knew enough about underwriting to get by, but marketing — nothing. We had a little agency — a quarter of a million dollars in premiums; I immediately made it smaller.”

But in May 1976, the island was devastated by Supertyphoon Pamela. “Then I knew what we were doing,” Baldwin says. “We were such a small agency, I personally visited every client that had typhoon insurance. I helped them through the claims process and did a really good job for them. I got a reputation for being a guy who delivered. After that, the referrals just came pouring in. We doubled the size of the agency in the first year after that.”

In 1978, Baldwin bought the agency from Bourland, who retired. “My friend Todd Smith with Deloitte was my numbers mentor,” Baldwin says. “He and I put together a business plan that looked good; the numbers were good and the payout to Mr. Bourland was workable.”

As Baldwin was setting up what became Baldwin Insurance, Smith told him that he needed operating capital and explained what it was. “So I called Jesus Guerrero, the founder of the Bank of Guam,” Baldwin says. “I said, ‘Todd Smith says I need some money.’ He said, ‘How much do you need?’ I said, ‘I need $15,000.’ He said, ‘How are you going to pay for it?’ I said, ‘Maybe we’ll make a payment every six months or so, or something like that; I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Just figure out how you’re going to pay for it and come down. I’ll put the money in your account now.’” And he did. About a week later, I went down and he had some loan documents and I signed them. That’s how we did business in those days. He knew me; I’d been here for a couple of years. He knew my work ethic; my reputation was good.”

In 1979, Baldwin purchased Marianas Insurance from Bob Smith. “Then we really got a team together,” Baldwin says. “I’d hired Mike Piccini and I had Dory Catahay and Bob Smith, and we got a lot of referrals and we were doing a lot of commercial stuff. Business just kind of exploded.”

In the early 1990s, business slowed as Guam was hit by a series of typhoons and a 7.9 magnitude earthquake. “Business got really tough,” Baldwin says. “But we managed to keep our clients and we got the business placed. But, after the 1992 storm and the earthquake, my average commission went to about 7.5%, which was pretty disastrous.”

In 1996, Baldwin was beginning to become concerned about his retirement a few years down the road and Aon entered the Guam market as part of a global expansion. “I had been a representative for Aon and the Aon predecessors here,” he says. “Then they bought Inchcape Insurance, so I knew I wouldn’t be servicing the Aon accounts anymore.

“But they really were gentlemen. [Aon director] Robert Harrison came into my office and said, ‘I came to meet you and to tell you what we’ve done with Inchcape and Atkins Kroll, so there will be no need for us to have you as our correspondent here.’ I said that I understood that. Then he said, ‘But you do things that Inchcape and Atkins Kroll don’t do. You’re very good at the brokering business; you’re very good at the marketing skills — I finally developed some. You’ve got a loyal client base and you’re a size that we might find interesting to put together.’ I said, ‘so would I.’”

After more than a year of negotiation, Aon completed the acquisition and Baldwin Insurance became Aon Risk Services. “They brought me on,” Baldwin says. “I told them I didn’t want to quit working — that wasn’t my deal. I liked the business, it’s all I’ve done and it’s really been great. I wanted to keep in it and I didn’t want to retire until I was 65. That fit their bill.”

Baldwin enjoyed being part of Aon’s global family. “We really took off and did some stuff,” he says. “Now there was enough size and technical support worldwide in Aon. I was very involved in the captive insurance initiative [in Guam]. Some people from Chicago and Australia and London worked with me and we designed an insurance program for the airport.”

On May 1, 2005, as he had planned, Baldwin retired from Aon operations, though he remained on the board for four-and-a-half more years. He moved to Montana where he rides his saddle horse and hunts for deer and antelope.

“I guess you could say that work was my hobby,” Baldwin says. “It was as much fun as it was a career.”