Gerald Ladner ’81 is a Regional President with State Auto Insurance Companies. His company insures personal and commercial assets in all 50 states. His role is to evaluate insurance requests and to either reject or accept them based on the level of risk.
Transcript
>> My name is Gerald Ladner. I'm the Regional President with the publicly traded Property and Casualty Insurance Company. We're in the personal lines commercial and specialty market. Well the company's a $1.8 billion company. We insure personal assets, commercial assets in all 50 states. Personally I'm responsible for profits in our management and ultimately when we insure our customers we're looking to insure them at a profit. So, our job is to make sure that we have pretty strong underwriting policy guidelines and procedures. We select risk on a daily basis. Some of those risks actually involve my decision-making as well. We have to contend with things like weather, so we look at how we disperse our risk that we select around the country so that we don't have any concentration, for instance, such as Florida. It's a business where we are clearly at a disadvantage with weather and we have to come up with new techniques, approaches, risk management methods to ensure that, again, we make a profit. We make decisions to reject risk that don't meet our risk profiles. Other decisions -- we're in a growth mode, so we've been having to hire people. So we're having to make sure that we're bringing the right talent on for the next generation. What's interesting is probably on a weekly basis I have to put in anywhere from 50 to 60 hours a week. I do travel an awful lot, but also we have the flexibility of working from home when I need to, and also we're in a workplace now where it's not unusual to have part of your workforce at home. So you have to make sure that everybody that is operating from home are actually meeting their objectives, et cetera.
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