Press Room

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.