Using her noodle: Kathryn Emmerson brings the knowledge of 30 years as a broker to the dot-com realm.

Kathryn Emmerson, chief executive officer of InsuranceNoospent 29 years at Aon, then about a year at Marsh before she was recruited for the dot-com she now heads. Her brokerage experience--especially at Aon, where she rose to executive vice president of Aon Risk Services--gained her a broad knowledge of coverages.

"I was reviewing everything from large manuscript property placements to boiler and machinery policies to kidnap and ransom policies," she said. "It was a very fortunate thing for me that I started in that area of research and planning." From there, she was part of one of the first specialist groups in the brokerage field, this one focusing on the railroad industry.

In her early days at Aon, she also acted as risk manager for the company and later, in the mid-1980s, she was human resources manager for two years at the same time that she was handling accounts. After she was promoted to a senior management role in Aon's Chicago office, she learned the basics of agency management.

Emmerson was part of an Aon Midwest group that decided to move to Marsh's Chicago office in 1998. They hoped they'd have the opportunity to expand a consulting practice that worked on the distribution challenges facing major insurers. "But it became clear pretty quickly that we had ended up doing basically the same things we'd done at Aon," she said.

Enter Robert Rudy and Richard Madock, two former CNA employees who had developed an idea for distributing small commercial insurance online. In January 2000, they launched InsuranceNoodle, then soon realized that their business model required having an insurance agency. "They really had no experience with agencies," Emmerson said. So they asked her and colleague Don Urbanciz, former CEO of Aon Midwest and former president and managing director of Marsh Midwest, to join them and create the agency.

"And that's what we did," Emmerson said. "We saw it as an opportunity." She and Urbanciz knew that the small commercial market, at $60 billion in premium, still was very fragmented. Even large insurers such as Hartford Financial Services and Travelers had spent millions of dollars creating proprietary rating systems and service centers, yet they hadn't realized more than about $2 billion each in premium, she said.

Being part of a start-up was a big adjustment for Emmerson. "It was a matter of going from two corporations where you had lots of resources, to really doing everything yourself--from figuring out what the business model is to figuring out how to fix your printer that's jamming;' she said. "I was filling out all the forms for licenses, page by page, and I hadn't done work like that in lots of years. But you do it. And you learn from it."

One of her duties at InsuranceNoodie has been to develop major client and insurer relationships. With the company's business model, it was imperative that it obtain agency contracts with the largest insurance companies such as Zurich, American International Group and Hartford, Emmerson said. "The reason that those companies would work with us is because they had known us for 30 years and we had done a lot of business with them," she said. "So, those relationships were key in order for us to start the company."

Emmerson, like Urbanciz and the handful of others who joined InsuranceNoodle at the very start, took a pay cut to come on board. But she feels that was balanced out by gaining equity in the dot-com, as well as ample opportunity to change the direction of the company. Emmerson was the fourth person to join the venture. Four years later, InsuranceNoodle has 52 employees.

Emmerson finds that working at InsuranceNoodle is decidedly different from working in a traditional corporate setting. First, decisions can be implemented very quickly at the dot-com. "We make a decision and in five to 10 minutes we can change things, and we do," she said. Second, she found that at the major brokerages, it often was difficult to gather all necessary information to make a proper decision. "Here, the way we built our technology and our reporting systems, it is very easy to analyze data," Emmerson said. "I can do an analysis of certain factors over the past year in maybe 15 minutes."

Emmerson is a rare breed--a female CEO in the insurance world who also heads an unconventional company. Still, she doesn't think of herself that way. "Even when I started my insurance career--I guess I was very naive about it--I didn't recognize the fact that being female was different," she said. "I don't really think of myself as a female CEO--just a person who has had a lot of experiences that I'm trying to bring to this company to make it successful."