Years of experience: Sheldon Rankin is marking 50 years in the insurance business by leading Integro Canada's charge.

Sheldon Rankin has been working in the insurance business for half a century.

When he landed his first job in 1956 as a clerk with Western Assurance Co. in Toronto, he was only a high school graduate earning $19 a week.

Fifty years later, Rankin, who turned 70 in October, is chairman at Integro Canada. He's semiretired and keeps office hours two or three times a week. He's the guy employees go to for advice; the man industry veterans know by first name; the one in the boardroom who's seen and done it all.

Rankin spent more than 40 years of his career at Marsh & McLennan Cos. in Toronto, helping to establish the world's largest insurance broker's position as the pre-eminent broker in Canada. He joined the company in 1962, when he changed from a casualty underwriter to a casualty broker.

In 2002, he retired as chief executive officer of Marsh Canada, remaining as chairman until June 2004, when he left to help Arch Insurance launch its Canadian underwriting business.

A New Strategy

Rankin, who comes from three generations of coal miners in Nova Scotia, says in the early days, Marsh was hardly the biggest and certainly not the best. It became that by making some fundamental operational changes, including creating a unit system and eliminating what he describes as the account executive mentality, he said.

"A typical account executive was a sales-oriented guy who looked good physically, went to the right school, had contacts, played golf and joined the right clubs," said Rankin. "Then, across the room, you had a guy who was your technician. That individual dealt with the insurance company but didn't make as much money ... and wasn't regarded as valuable as the well-dressed account executive who could go to lunch and meet the CEOs and CFOs."

Rankin said this setup meant "the account executive who didn't know much about the business was taking information from the client back to the office and giving it to the guy in the corner--who didn't know or play golf with the customer--to pass on to the insurance company. The communication link between what the clients' needs were and what the insurance company was going to do to solve them wasn't what it ought to be."

Under the unit system, however, teams were formed "with the full responsibility of servicing the client with one leg in the client's office and another leg in the insurance market, so that the group handling a client's problem was the same group taking the message to the insurance company to get the deal done" he said.

Rankin said Marsh over time became the insurance broker to basically two-thirds of the Canadian risk-management business. "We had major presence in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and there wasn't a single industry where we didn't have major clients. We had the banks, the mines, marine, and aviation when we merged with Sedgwick. Aon became a distant second because we probably had 65% of the brokerage business."

Rankin left Marsh in 2004 to start Arch Insurance Canada. It was a first-time opportunity to do something different. "I'd never gone into an office with a blank piece of paper and said 'How am I going to start a new company?' I found that very exciting," he said.

Now, as chairman of Integro Canada, he's playing another key role in the formation of a new brokerage entity. Integro was founded by former Marsh colleagues. Rankin says one of the reasons he's so pleased about being able to assist Integro is that there's room for competition in the arena of large, complex risks.