Business Insurance Lifetime Achievement Award: Mark Wilhelm

In the mid-1970s, Mark Wilhelm took a calculated gamble when he gave up his promising position at a well-established multiline insurer and moved to a small company operating in an obscure corner of the market.

In an era when self-insurance was still far from the mainstream, he was intrigued by the possibilities of the line of business he was getting into — excess workers compensation — but first he had to reassure his skeptical fiancée.

“She basically said: ‘Are you crazy? You’re working for an established company and it’s pretty well paid,’” Mr. Wilhelm said.

He told her he was confident that if it didn’t work out, he could go back to a similar position at another insurer, so he had little to lose.

With the proviso that he secure time off for their honeymoon, she gave him the go-ahead.

Forty-eight years later, Mr. Wilhelm has climbed to the top of the company, Safety National, working as an underwriter, chief underwriting officer, president, CEO and now executive chairman.

Over that time he helped guide the St. Louis-based insurer through several challenges, including surviving the loss of its rating during the liability crisis and fighting off a takeover struggle with a notorious Wall Street financier. He also helped lead its demutualization and its expansion into numerous lines of business while ensuring it maintained its reputation as a customer-focused company.

Safety National, which had 15 employees, $11 million in assets and $1.5 million in surplus when he joined, today has 830 employees, $16.3 billion in assets and $4.6 billion in surplus.

For all his accomplishments, Mr. Wilhelm was presented with the Business Insurance Lifetime Achievement Award at the U.S. Insurance Awards in July in New York, where his career was celebrated by his wife and family, colleagues and industry partners.

Changing lanes

His career might easily have taken a different path. Born in St. Louis in 1953, Mr. Wilhelm was raised in the city and attended the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he majored in accounting but decided to look at other options.

“I had job offers, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” he said. He considered law school, but as he was already working his way through college, he didn’t think he could afford it yet.

“I went to the job board at the university and one of the jobs was in insurance. I thought if I stuck with accounting, some background in insurance wouldn’t be a bad thing, and if I went to law school, again, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

The position was with Aetna, which still wrote property/casualty insurance in the mid-1970s, and its training program had an excellent reputation.

After attending the program for 12 weeks at the insurer’s head office in Hartford, Connecticut, he won the Blue Ribbon for the highest score in his class. He returned to the St. Louis office, where he concentrated on casualty underwriting.

At the time, brokers and other companies were aggressively recruiting Aetna staff in St. Louis, meaning he soon found himself underwriting some of the largest accounts in the office, including Anheuser-Busch and big construction companies.

“I was 23 and had gotten experience by the fire hose,” Mr. Wilhelm said.

He was also getting calls from headhunters with job offers that he declined, until in 1977 he was contacted by what was then Safety Mutual.

The company was established in 1942 by a small St. Louis brokerage and third-party administrator concerned about the availability of the coverage it was placing at Lloyd’s of London during World War II.

Ignoring the assertion by a senior Aetna colleague that self-insurance was “just a fad,” Mr. Wilhelm saw a growth opportunity because, due to inflation and the expansion of workers comp benefits, companies were looking for alternatives to first-dollar coverage.

“I just felt this is the right product and the right time, why not take the shot?” he said.

His hunch proved correct, and the company expanded rapidly and developed new products.

A change came in 1981, when Frank B. Hall bought ISC, the brokerage that established Safety Mutual. Under the new arrangement, Safety Mutual paid Hall a management fee.

Market turmoil

By the mid-1980s, though, the insurer faced difficulty. Senior management had previously decided to write fronted umbrella liability programs, and severe problems arose when the whole industry faced soaring claims costs during the liability crisis. With its surplus falling and the reinsurance market in turmoil, Safety Mutual lost its A.M. Best Co. rating.

Despite that, it managed to hold on to much of its business because it had a good reputation among clients and brokers, and numerous other insurers also were facing problems, said Mr. Wilhelm, who became CUO in 1985.

Safety Mutual secured $50 million in arbitration from its reinsurers and began rebuilding its business, securing a B+ rating in 1987.

“Today, that still means you’re going out of business, but at the time, that wasn’t too bad,” he said. A few years later the company returned to the A range.

Also in 1987, another challenge arose when corporate raider and Reliance Insurance owner Saul Steinberg gained control of Hall.

“And then we’re in a situation where Saul Steinberg wants money out of us, and we’re saying, ‘We don’t have money, and you can’t take us over because we are a mutual,’” Mr. Wilhelm said.

Safety Mutual canceled the management contract with Hall, and a legal battle ensued. It included Reliance sending lawyers and security staff to St. Louis to take over the premises physically; however, the insurer’s management had already moved the records to another part of the building and managed to thwart a nighttime raid by the Reliance team.

Working out of the alternate space, the management resigned from ISC and were hired by Safety Mutual.

“All the employees then resigned one by one and came to the alternate space, which was basically an area under construction with studs and wires hanging from the ceiling,” Mr. Wilhelm said.

Reliance initially tried to bring in its own underwriters but eventually agreed to a settlement in which Safety Mutual would make payments to Reliance for 13 years. However, the later payments went to Reliance’s receivers after it went into liquidation in 2001.

Return to growth

By 1991, Safety Mutual had recovered and decided to demutualize to raise capital to grow faster. The company changed its name to Safety National.

The next big move came in 1996, when Delphi Financial Group bought Safety National.

Delphi took a hands-off approach to running the insurer, and Safety National’s management began expanding the company’s products, including offering large-deductible workers comp, which was developing at the time, loss portfolio transfers and reinsurance.

The reinsurance business first focused on industry loss warranties but later developed a range of casualty reinsurance lines.

“Then, in the early 2000s, we knew that we were getting leveraged on the comp because we weren’t doing large-deductible GL and auto, so we gradually built the operational side of that up and then hired the underwriting expertise to do that,” Mr. Wilhelm said.

The company also purposefully contributed to industry thought leadership via speaking engagements and other outreach and spent “an inordinate amount of time” building relationships with major brokers, he said.

“But just spending time with them doesn’t do the job; you have to have the service levels,” he said. “We always told them we would exceed expectations, and we did.”

The company also established regional offices across the country.

Mr. Wilhelm, who was named president in the mid-2000s, became CEO in 2010.

More change came two years later, when Japanese insurer Tokio Marine, which had operations in the U.S. but was looking to expand into workers comp and other lines, bought Delphi.

Being part of a much larger international group allowed Safety National to grow its business by taking advantage of the services of other companies in the group, Mr. Wilhelm said. In addition, its rating was upgraded to A+ for the first time since 1985.

After the acquisition, Safety National expanded further, setting up an excess and surplus lines insurer. It later began offering cyber liability insurance and defense-based act coverage.

In 2019 the company bought Midlands Management, an Oklahoma City-based managing general agent, diversifying its distribution. In 2020 Best upgraded Safety National to A++, its top rating.

During his nearly 50-year tenure with the company, Safety National has expanded far beyond its initial portfolio, although it still concentrates on areas where it can grow profitably.

“I guess you could call us a specialty company, but we are in the big leagues in the areas that we operate,” Mr. Wilhelm said. “We focus on large insurance buyers, national and international, that’s who we are.”

In 2022 Mr. Wilhelm was named executive chairman of Safety National and his longtime colleague Duane Hercules was named CEO. Now Mr. Wilhelm has the additional title of chief brokerage relationships officer with Tokio Marine, where he works to strengthen ties with brokers for all the group companies.

Mr. Hercules, who has worked with Mr. Wilhelm for more than 40 years, said the success of Safety National rests on its people and its culture.

“Mark has provided leadership and been instrumental in establishing the culture and institutionalizing our core values,” he said. “We want to be first with our coworkers, first with our customers and first with our community.”

Mr. Wilhelm’s leadership style has been key in achieving those goals, Mr. Hercules said.

“Obviously, he’s smart, but he’s a very good strategic thinker, he’s a very good listener and very, very patient. That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on, we play the long game,” he said.

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ABOUT THE AWARD

The Business Insurance Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual whose outstanding contributions have had a lasting impact on the insurance and risk management sector. The honorees are also inducted into the Business Insurance Hall of Fame. The award was first presented in 2017 to Patrick G. Ryan, executive chairman of Ryan Specialty. The 2018 honoree was Maurice R. Greenberg, retired chairman and CEO of C.V. Starr; the 2019 honoree was Martin P. Hughes, executive chairman of Hub; the 2020 honoree was the late Kevin Kelley, retired vice chairman of Liberty Mutual’s Global Risk Solutions business; the 2021 honoree was Brian Duperreault, who retired as executive chairman of American International Group later that year; the 2022 honoree was J. Patrick Gallagher Jr., chairman and CEO of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.; the 2023 honoree was Alan Jay Kaufman, chairman, president and CEO of H.W. Kaufman Group; and the 2024 honoree was Dave North, retired executive chairman of Sedgwick.