How Health Insurance Chose Me

May 112012

Do you believe in Karma?

I can remember years ago when things were not going well for us in the sanitary paper business, standing up in front of the sales people who reported to me and saying “at least we don’t sell insurance,” thinking that was the bottom of the barrel.

In 1999 when I left my corporate job I thought I might retire, but I made two mistakes; I thought I didn’t want to work any longer and I believed I had enough money. WRONG!

The money is easy to understand, but it turns out I didn’t not want to work any more, I just did not want to do the type of big-company, travel-heavy sales work I had been doing for 26 years.

After two years of doing little but traveling and playing poor golf (I thought I’d get better with practice, but I never did), I needed to find a job. The first thing I did was phone all my old friends in the paper business to see if there were any opportunities there; thinking, that with my experience, I’d find the best opportunities in that business.

After speaking to a lot of contacts, it became apparent that there were few opportunities and, if I did get a chance to interview for a position, I had better do well. As I had not interviewed for a job in 18 years, I decided I needed practice. So, I picked up a copy of the Denver Post and checked out the classified ads for any company that was conducting interviews.

A health insurance company that was hiring agents caught my eye. I called to set up an interview time and met with the manager later that week. It was not a very good interview, but I was offered the job, and, having nothing else going on at the time, I accepted the position until something developed in the paper business.

Two things soon become apparent to me about this insurance business, I both liked it and I was good at it. I soon left this first organization when I found out they were not all that they had claimed to be, and started my own company, Colorado Affordable Health.

I’ve been doing this for more than 9 years now and, despite having once thought that selling insurance was a terrible thing to end up doing, I enjoy the work and the people. I hope to be able to continue with it into the foreseeable future.