TELEVISION EXPOSURE on WORLD BUSINESS REVIEW
The backstory on AIS' unique business structure has been featured in February 2004 on the award-winning television series, World Business Review with General Alexander Haig. Ed Chin and AIS’ innovations in the insurance industry was available to 90 million potential households via CNBC, BRAVO, and United Airlines in-flight news and entertainment. Available on our website is the full WBR broadcast. The clip is viewed via Windows Media Player, if it is not displaying properly please contact brad@ais-insurance.com WMV and Quicktime versions are available on CD.
The American Dreams Collection: 1997, By James Bickford, 1997
When you walk into Ed Chin’s spacious office in downtown Oakland, California, the first thing you notice is the large number of prestigious awards and plaques hanging on the walls as well as photographs of some of America’s most famous individuals. There are easily over 200, including one signed by President Clinton.
As a third generation American, Chin’s wonderful rags-to-riches story is one that he built only a few miles away from the neighborhood he grew up in.
Ed was raised just down the street on 7th and Webster in the Chinatown district. “I grew up in a house with not more than 1,200 or 1,300 square feet. We probably had fifteen people at any one time living there. We slept in a cot by the water heater. I think there was something like three or four kids in every room. We had one bathroom and no shower facilities,” Chin reflects on the early days.
“I never knew I was poor because I never new there was anything else out there. We always had food on the table. We all ate together every day at six o’clock. Rice and soup and vegetables, and maybe, chicken if we were lucky, and that was it,” recalls Ed.
As a student, Ed wasn’t the best early on. He was basically a C student. He got bored easily and was always ahead of the teacher. He was probably a gifted student at that time, since Chin scored very high on his IQ tests. Had they offered gifted or advanced classes then, he most likely would have been in them.
“When I was a kid, there were a lot of derogatory racist remarks toward me. I used to get in fights because I would never take it. Big guys, little guys, it didn’t matter. I got caught up in the martial arts because I didn’t want to get whipped at the time,” Chin stresses. “I’ve been a martial arts enthusiast for many, many years.”
Ed studied several types of martial arts. He was fortunate to train with Wally Jay of Alameda, with his uncle, Jimmy Lee and also with Bruce Lee, said to be the finest martial artist who ever lived. Today, Ed’s son Bradley is a silver medal national champion with a brown belt in karate.
“I’m just a salesman,” Chin shares softly with us. “I originally started selling Chronicle subscriptions way back when I was a kid to win trips to Disneyland and everywhere else. Then I sold brushes made by the blind. I was the biggest producer, even then.”
“As a kid there was something I learned. There were two ways you were going to get out of wherever you came from, and that was, one, to have money, and two, to have control of the English language. So I worked very hard perfecting my English language skills.”
“After high school I started college and I later dropped out before I graduated because I had to make some money. I was broke, my father was ill, I needed some money. That’s how I got started in insurance.”
“When my father was ill I remembered him talking to the insurance person. He didn’t have insurance for that particular problem. This insurance man had on a suit and a tie, and I didn’t. I asked him what he makes, and he said, you could make $15,000 a year. At that time, that was three times what a teacher was making. I said if he could do it, so could I,” beams Ed.
“Originally, maybe 18-20 insurance companies turned me down. I didn’t fit the profile, the basic format, the education, grades, family, married, everything on the chart said I didn’t fit. I eventually got on at The Equitable in December of 1960. I later found out that I got on because my boss needed to fill a quota on new hires. Not a racial quota, but a body quota. He had to hire at least two guys a year. I’m sure he would have hired that first guy who came in with a tie on. The first six months I made $36,000. Over the next four or five years I sold a lot of insurance,” smiles Chin.
Ed later moved on and was made a vice president of First American Life Insurance Company formed with capital he helped raise from Asian backers who later moved the company to Arizona. “One morning I woke up in Arizona and went down to the office and the place was empty,” exclaims Chin. “Everything, including the phones. I was in Arizona with only $300 to my name. I gave all my commissions to the company to help build it. Rather than come home and have everybody say, I told you so, I stayed down there and sold insurance and I worked it out and paid everybody off.”
“I later went to a couple of people I knew to raise $5,000 apiece from them. They liked me. So they gave me the money to start my first agency. I later bought out my partners over the next three or four years. I grew the business and sold it in 1975 and retired. Retirement lasted only six months.”
Currently Chin is 100% owner of $25+ million, AIS Corporation, which specializes in helping clients in the employee benefits area. Today, AIS provides benefits to more than 15,000 individuals, employees, executives and owners of small to mid-sized companies. “We found our niche,” explains Chin. “The Asian marketplace is our focus. We dominate it. We have over 1,500 companies we insure. We grow by over 20 companies each month. Our sophistication is far more superior than anyone in this industry. We also speak the language, whether it be Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese or Taiwanese. There are 300 different styles of the Chinese language. All of my people here speak a minimum of two or three languages. We do all our meetings in the client’s choice of language.”
AIS works very closely with the local multi-ethnic communities they serve. Chin has given back considerably to the area he was born and raised in. Recently, he donated $250,000 to the local Asian Cultural Center for their auditorium which now bears his name. Our strong and innovative leader has also been recognized as Asian Entrepreneur of the Year, Businessman of the Year and was recently in a feature profile in the June, 1997 issue of Money Magazine.
Even with all of the hundreds of awards he and his team have earned, Ed Chin still manages to remain a loyal, humble and proud American who remembers his roots and reminds us, “When you think of America, you think of all of the great opportunities it has to offer us.”
Resource Information:
AIS Corporation
Phone: (800) 788-6524
info@ais-insurance.com
Fortune Small Business Featuring Ed Chin -- "Minority Entrepreneurs", December 2003/January 2004
MINORITY ENTREPRENEURS
New Voices
Article found in Fortune Small Business, December 2003/January 2004
ED CHIN
AIS Corp.
Chin is the first to admit that he's cocky and outspoken. So it's no surprise that this third-generation Chinese American "raised hell" at the insurance company where he worked in the 1960s after noticing that Asians were being overcharged for insurance products. But seeing not enough progress, Chin - who calls insurance companies glorified 'bookies "-quit his job and in 1979 started AIS Corp. in Oakland. Today AIS provides small- and mid-sized companies the kinds of sophisticated insurance packages and benefits usually reserved for corporate America.
Chin found his niche by paying special attention to the Asian marketplace. Everyone on his 25-person staff speaks at least two languages, allowing Asian immigrants who call the agency to speak to a representative not only in their native language but often in their particular dialect too. In 1981 he started the revolutionary practice of sending clients a single bill with all their different insurance charges. Over the years he's won numerous industry awards, and clients have spread the word about his company outside the Asian community, keeping AlS growing. Last year his company generated $40 million in sales, twice its revenue six years ago. -CORA DANIELS
I STARTED IN THE INSURANCE BUSINESS BACK IN 1960. MY FATHER was ill, and we didn't have the $5,000 to cover his hospital bill. The insurance agent came to the hospital and said my dad had a "preexisting condition," so they wouldn't pay it. At the time, I was 20 years old and going to the University of California at Berkeley to become a teacher. I quit school and began working odd jobs to pay the bill so they would release him. It took two months.
While I was at the hospital, I asked the insurance agent how much money he made. He had a suit and tie on but didn't impress me as being really bright. He said someone could make $15,000 a year for selling $1 million worth of insurance. Teachers then only made $4,800 a year. I gave up dreams of teaching and applied for jobs in insurance instead. I must have had 20 interviews and was turned down by everyone. I didn't fit the profile: blond, blue-eyed college graduate, 25 years old with a family. In December 1960,1 finally got a job as an agent at a major insurance firm.
My first six months I made $36,000 in commissions. They asked me if I would sell to the Asian marketplace. They said I could run a Chinatown branch one day. I asked my manager, a Castilian from Spain, why he didn't go and run a Mexican branch.
I was a troublemaker from the beginning, but I did start selling to the Asian market. There was a lot of discrimination against Asians when it came to insurance. Like members of other minority groups, they were sold the products with the highest premiums. On claim forms you had to mark off your race. The choices were Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Other. Mongoloid? Are we supposed to be mentally retarded? I started raising hell about it. But no one could answer that question. I was a leading producer in the agency, but by 1975, when I was 36, I had had enough and retired.
Then, in 1979, I met my wife, so I had to work again. I wanted to start a company that would offer Asian-owned businesses all types of insurance at fair prices. But in California at the time, none of the big carriers wanted to sell insurance through a small, unknown agency. I knew it could work because I knew the insurance business and I knew the Asian community. I speak several dialects of Chinese, as well as Japanese. So I went into the deep corners of Chinatown, Koreatown, and Japantown, and lined up dozens of prospective clients. By 1981, I was selling half a dozen kinds of insurance from companies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield and VSP.
Long before I started my company, I thought that if I could persuade Asian businesses to pool together, they could get better rates. But I knew it was going to be challenging to persuade them to do this. White corporate America doesn't understand that you've got segregation like you wouldn't believe in the Asian marketplace. The Canton guys work with the Cantonese, Shanghainese work with the Shanghainese; then there's the Mandarins, Taiwanese, Koreans, whoever, and everyone looks down on each other. I encouraged them to form business organizations so they could buy in a group. Now we provide insurance to 7,000 businesses and organizations across ten states and have the biggest names in the field working with us. We charge clients for all of their insurance on a single, customized bill, which most agencies say isn't done.
Five years ago, 95% of my business was with Asian businesses. Then I started getting calls from other businesses wondering if we would work with them too. Today my clients are probably 60% Asian, 40% non-Asian. My crusade has always been to bring a picture of what goes on in the Asian community to white corporate America-and bring what goes on in white corporate America to the Asian community.