Jon W. Challoner – Narrative Employment History
I began my career in the insurance and risk management arena in 1964 when joining the Wausau Insurance Company as an adjuster trainee. In the following 22 years, I served in the position of multi-line claim adjuster, workers compensation claim supervisor, field claim manager, workers compensation claims manager and regional claim manager.
As the regional claim manager, I was responsible for managing multi-line claims for California, Hawaii and Nevada. I worked with our underwriters, loss control specialists and attorney’s in designing and marketing coverage for our commercial insurance customers. This involved developing and implementing special handling instructions and working with our policyholders to insure their problems would be timely and professionally handled.
Most of the business we were writing was for large commercial and residential contractors. Working closely with our contractors and setting up responsive customer service programs assisted them in solving many problems before they became a loss.
When a loss did occur, I was responsible to our policyholder to see the claim against their company was thoroughly and promptly investigated. If litigation was involved, I worked with our claim managers and supervisors to see that highly skilled experts were assigned to assist in the evaluation of the claims being made and hiring attorney’s with prior experience handling construction related losses.
During my time at Wausau, I served on various industry committees including but not limited to President of the San Francisco Claim Managers Council and President of the Industrial Claims Association.
In 1986 I joined one of the largest privately owned home building contractor and real estate developer in the country as their Chief Risk Officer. Because of the problems associated with insuring a residential contractor it was necessary to design a risk management program that combined large self-insured retentions and insurance coverage for catastrophic losses. Once the program was designed it then involved finding an insurance carrier and their underwriters who believed in our ability to manage the underlying risk. We were one of the first to handle our risks in this manner and over the years, saved the company millions of dollars while seeing that coverage disputes were kept to a minimum. In the last 10 years, I have been involved in developing and implementing owner controlled insurance programs as the next generation risk management tools for the construction industry.
In January 2006 I retired and setup Construction Risk Solutions, Inc. and act as a risk management consultant for several large clients and as Director of Risk Management for RSD Insurance Services. My services have included evaluation of losses, the handling of large complicated claims for contractors and assisting in the resolution of coverage problems with their insurance carriers. Assisting in the reorganization of their risk management programs to assume losses and reduce costs by doing so. Costs are reduced by eliminating coverage and setting up procedures to handle the losses internally.
I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss these matters further with you and to show you where this background and experience can be put to work for you.