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Senior Vice President
Willis, Portsmouth, N.H

The Whole Package

A long-time client and acquaintance said about Bo Adams, senior vice president and 22-year veteran at Willis of New Hampshire, that "he knows everything about the ski industry."

Perhaps this "amazing guy" is so knowledgeable because he helms the Mountain Guard ski insurance program, whose market share is upward of 60 percent. And perhaps it's because he's taken a leadership role over the last three decades in helping skiing to become a safer sport, and ski resort owners and operators to become better risks for insurers.

Of course, incidents will still happen. But as one client said, Adams is the "go-to" guy to help with a tough claim and to ensure that insurance rates don't get "out of control" afterward.

"He's the epitome of the professional," said another client, a resort president who's worked with Adams on and off again for nearly 30 years.

"He's a lot more than just a guy who's selling a product," he said.

Call Adams instead a forward thinker, a pioneer, someone who can identify emerging equipment needs and safety issues.

In the past year, for instance, Adams has focused his considerable expertise and reputation to educate the industry about the age of its ski lifts. Then he acted and, with the assistance of engineering consultants, created procedures that clients could use starting in 2010 to help indentify and reduce the potential issues with their lifts.

Managing Director
Thompson Heath & Bond North America, London

He's Just That Good

Mark Cody, or the "mayor of the London market," as a risk executive at one of the largest hospitality organizations calls this managing director at Thompson Heath & Bond North America, is a property specialist for clients with complex property risks and global footprints. These are large hospitality or real estate entities, for instance, that require, as Cody put it, "solutions at the best possible terms, but also that go beyond the standard carrier's ability."

We're talking stuff that some brokers might not even dare to ask for from underwriters.

For instance, for the hospitality client above, Cody placed his primary layer with rare, very low deductibles and broad terms and conditions, which all the carriers in the excess layers then follow form on. No domestic market would touch the primary layer as is, the risk manager claimed, but if he doesn't get this layer as is ... well, then he'd find himself in a very bad condition. Cody got it done.

"We get better results out of him," the client said, explaining why he turned to the Cody and the London market after Katrina and never looked back. "He's just that good."

This past year, on this primary layer renewal, Cody was able to attain decreases beyond targets and deliver on at least seven of the client's top-10 coverage enhancements wish list. Cody also wielded his relationships with the London underwriters after a large business-interruption loss.

"And the sticky stuff went away," the client said.

Senior Managing Director
Beecher Carlson, Greenwood Village, Colo.

Delivers Fresh Ideas

It's hard to argue with the folks who came to bat for Jason Flaxbeard this year. They are senior risk management executives at some of the largest hospitality and gaming companies in the world. If they have time in their schedule to share positive insights about a man, that man must be worth it, right? Besides intelligence, what these very busy and responsibility-laden people value in Flaxbeard is his ability to deliver fresh ideas upon call, and his dependability, honesty and polish.

There is another important quality--getting done what needs to get done--which can be said of any of the Beecher hospitality team, but in particular this senior managing director.

One example this year was Flaxbeard wielding his specialty in captive insurance to transfer a loss portfolio from the parent to the captive. It was "generally a nightmare," confided the gaming risk manager about the resource-intensive project that took nearly an entire year.

"We couldn't have gotten it done without Jason's help," the client said.

He manages a massive captive, greater than $100 million in premium, for another hospitality client. Flaxbeard is astute and forward-thinking in suggesting expansions to the captive, places where the alternative risk tool can play a role when "markets are breaking down."

"That is where he has been very helpful," the client said.

On the flip side of his expertise, Flaxbeard has also taken a lead role in the American Hospitality and Lodging Association risk management group, putting together loss-costs benchmarking data for the sector, for instance.

Vice President, Global Client Network
Aon, New York

Seeing Tremendous Growth

Simone Hanraads moved from Aon's Amsterdam office to New York five years ago, and the vice president has been making a name for herself since. She really started to shine for one of the world's largest hospitality clients in the past year, over which time the risk executive there has seen "tremendous growth in her."

Hanraads, along with her colleague and past Power Broker® winner Donna Pfluger-Murray, helped this client with its efforts to aggressively market its global casualty program to third-party owned hotels around the world, particularly in Asia. Hanraads was doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes work in what is a very work-intensive global program, with member hotels constantly coming in and out. The result was growth, however, with as much as a 10 percent increase in participation.

It's the global casualty business that is more Hanraads niche, not so much hospitality, so we can gain even greater insight into her talents by talking to another client in financial services. For such a client, the native of the Netherlands was able in the past year to identify a tricky gap in coverage for the client's global liability program between the primary and umbrella layers. Not only that, she got that gap filled. She convinced the primary insurer to increase limits by tenfold to meet the layer above.

"That was significant," said the risk manager. Should the client suspect any other such issues, she can just call Hanraads, like she did this past New Year's Eve about a question on coverages in Dubai and Russia. Hanraads got right back to her.

Managing Director
Marsh, Louisville, Ky.

Adding Value to the Menu

John Logan is no stranger to getting things done with insurance placements for his restaurant clientele. For the first time in five years he helped a major Southwest chain market its insurance program, saving it hundreds of thousands while also landing increased sublimits and enhancements.

But to get a better sense for what this Marsh managing director can offer, look beyond the numbers at strategic initiatives. For instance, this aforementioned client held a two-day retreat for his risk management staff and Logan's team. What they devised was what the client called a "Vision 2013" document, a breakdown of their current risk management program and how it could go "world-class" in three years.

"Is this adding value or not?" the client exclaimed.

It's this added value that explains why at least two other clients left their incumbent brokers for Logan at Marsh. Of course, it wasn't just Logan that brought them to Marsh, but consider the words of a claims director at one of the largest fast-food chains. He related that he was impressed with how Logan and team handled the RFP process this past year, coming up with specifics for how they could help. One proposals became reality: Logan helped them apply Marsh's proprietary VCORE analysis to choose a new TPA.

"I was pretty amazed at the results it yielded," the client said.

For the other restaurant client, he's helping her completely restructure her risk management department, with one of the end goals being getting more value out of Marsh.

Category: Hospitality/Gaming

A Broker who Leads With Numbers

John Logan, managing director with Marsh in Louisville, Ky., isn't above doing the grunt work and going whole-hog into the ins and outs of the restaurant business to find out how the sausage is really made. For that, he will forever earn the respect of clients, colleagues and competitors. Most of all, though, Logan lets the numbers do the talking, whether it's the 13 percent decline in third-party administrators (TPA) rates, the 9.1 percent drop in casualty rates, or the 5 percent slice off the previous year's property rates.

In short, Logan's the type of broker who loves to eat--eat costs, that is--for breakfast, lunch and dinner, much to the delight of clients.

Louisville's Marsh office is small but mighty in impact on humanitarian causes. Logan and his Marsh colleagues partnered with Texas Roadhouse on a large-scale humanitarian effort, sending care packages to members of the armed forces throughout the world.

Logan and his colleagues drove trucks and loaded, hauled and then unloaded more than 10,000 boxes of goods at a warehouse in New Jersey to pull off the project.

As a result of Marsh's efforts, Texas Roadhouse bestowed its "Corporate Humanitarian Award" on Marsh. Logan accepted the award on behalf of the firm.

Not one to dominate the limelight, Logan mentioned the names of 20 Marsh colleagues who had assisted him in this effort in his Responsibility Leader® application.

"We could not have pulled off what we wanted to pull off without Marsh," said Patrick Sterling, director of risk and people administration at Texas Roadhouse.

Managing Director, Hospitality/Gaming Practice Leader
Marsh, Portland, Ore.

Talking and Walking the Talk Time and Again

For having such a high-fallutin' title as managing director and global hospitality and gaming practice leader for Marsh, Janice L. Schnabel really can relate to any worker in the business, from the housekeeper to the corporate risk manager. After all, Schnabel used to be a risk manager for hotel chains.

"She can talk the talk," said one loss prevention manager at an international firm.

That she can relate comes through particularly when she's running safety training sessions for supervisors and managers. The goal is to change the safety culture at a hospitality or gaming company. But attendees don't even know they're in a boring, mandatory meeting, Schnabel is so good at entertaining and informing.

One gaming risk manager related how he's gotten attendee comments ranging from "incredible teaching session" to "usually people pay for that show."

But instilling a culture of safety is more than just doing standup. When Schnabel tailors a risk management program for a client's entire portfolio of properties, as she did for at least one client in 2010, Schnabel "gives a comfort level" for insurers, as the risk manager put it.

He's leaned on her in the past year in particular for a number of OSHA complaints. His larger goal is to avoid such problems in the future, and to do so, he's enlisted Schnabel as a consultant to help draft a proprietary inspection manual to help property managers and supervisors learn as many as 250 OSHA items they need to watch for.

"I think it'll have great success," he said.

Category: Hospitality/Gaming

Broker Leads from the Trenches

Janice L. Schnabel participates in the Marsh mentoring program and lectures to students at the Cornell School for Hotel Management on the subject of risk management and insurance.

She's a member of the court appointed Special Advocates, speaking for children without a voice in the court system. As a cancer survivor, she is active in the local chapter of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. She donates time and resources to the Paralyzed Veterans of America, Child Fund International and in 2006 adopted a foster child through the Children's Christian Fund that she continues to sponsor and actively correspond with.

In her work, Schnabel, based in Portland, Ore., is dedicated to a heavy travel regimen, traveling between 36 and 40 weeks a year, in order to maintain closer working relationships with her clients. And when we say close, we mean really close. For a hotel client that was struggling to control claims, she rolled up her sleeves and worked side by side with the company's housekeeping department, identifying ways to install best practices and improve morale. Schnabel has helped other clients run and critique fire drills and assisted with evacuations, all with the goal of making hotel guests and employees safer.
v "She's great," as another hotel client put it. "Nobody can even touch her."

Schnabel has really worked her way up the ladder in her career. She spent five years as a legal assistant, before moving on to become a health and safety director for a manufacturer. She spent six years as a risk manager for a hotel chain before her first insurance job with Wausau.