Agent Profile: Power Broker Engineers Success Through Creative Solutions

Everything in today’s world has been developed or improved by engineering. The products, tools, and systems we use in our daily lives are all the result of creative problem-solving. Even the food we eat and drinks we consume have been refined in one way or another with innovative ideas devised by engineers.

In the medical professional liability landscape, Brown & Brown Senior Vice President Scott Palde has flourished by applying engineering principles to his roles and responsibilities throughout his career. He is exactly who you would want as an advisor if you were a physician in search of superior coverage.

Growing up on Long Island, fixing things was second nature to Scott.

“When I was seven, my parents bought a money pit on the South Shore,” Scott said. “I love tinkering with things, so I would work with my dad on the house all the time. By the time I was graduating high school, I thought I wanted to go into construction. But my dad told me if I go into construction, I’d have to get out of the house. So it was either go to college or work construction and get a place to rent.”

Scott chose college, and his supportive mother and father put a mortgage on the house to send him off to Drexel University 80 miles away in Philadelphia. To help pay the bills and gain work experience, he participated in paid HVAC co-op programs and drove a shuttle bus for the University of Pennsylvania. His HVAC work and the engineering degree he earned then accelerated him off the slow roads of bus driving onto the fast track of an impressive employment opportunity in Trenton, New Jersey. 

Constraint

“I got a job as a production leader running a union assembly line of 70 workers. It taught me how to deal with all types of personalities and people of different backgrounds. They had to be on the line at 6:00 AM with two 15-minute breaks each day. Literally, a whistle blew and they started, then the whistle blew for their break, and when the whistle blew again, they would have to be back on the line. We were producing 360 furnaces a day, and if you had one person who didn’t want to work, it became infectious and would slow down the entire line. So, I had to discipline folks, but I also had to motivate them. For example, I’d have a flag on the last furnace that would raise in the last few minutes of our shift when we were close to making rate—and you’d see them speed up and finish strong. I’m proud to say we made rate that year more than any other line in the plant.”

After about a year, Scott moved over to manufacturing engineering, becoming part of a rare breed of university graduates who fully apply their college history to work right out of school. He engineered ergonomic solutions for workers, improved equipment and processes, and two years later, he was promoted to running all operations of the plant, which he did while earning his MBA on the company’s dime.

“I was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of product. I loved working there, but for the amount of responsibility, I wasn’t making a lot of money. After eight years with the company, I put in my notice to leave and got a call from the president. He said to me, ‘We had high hopes for you, we want you to stay . . . you’re going to leave now that we paid for your MBA?’ I told him that there were really no roles for me to go any higher than where I was and it was a tough decision, but I had to make it—and so I left.”

Scott had other offers on the table, and he selected Lutron—a lighting company he admired for its ingenuity, having invented the first solid-state dimmer.

It was at Lutron where his future was tested.

Criteria

“At first, I was placed in an advisory-type role. And when I was being hired, they had me take a Caliper Profile assessment—it measures your personality characteristics and motivations,” Scott explained. “Shortly into my time at Lutron, the COO took me under his wing and moved me into running all of customer service and inside sales. One day, I was giving a Caliper test to one of my employees, and I just happened to ask HR how I did on mine because they never told me my results. They said, ‘Oh my goodness, you did amazing in sales.’ I think their ultimate goal was to get me into outside sales because at one point they asked me if I wanted to run the China facility.”

But for Scott, it just wasn’t in the cards.

“About this time, I was talking to my uncle Steve Spina, who’s an underwriting executive, and he also encouraged me to go into sales. He told me he had a conversation with an associate of his, Chris Zuccarini, who had started his own agency and bases all of his hires on the Caliper assessment. ‘He’s very successful, you should have lunch with him someday,’ he said.”

Scott met with Chris, showed him his sales scores, and was immediately offered a job at the agency.

“This was yet another tough decision for me to make. I already had a well-paying job working for the COO at Lutron. And at this stage of my life, my goal was to become the CEO of a company. I thought to myself, ‘You have the manufacturing experience, the inside sales, the customer service, an MBA in financial management—if I do some outside sales, it’ll make me more well-rounded, and then maybe I can get a job running a company somewhere.’”

While he was still weighing his options, Scott decided to go on a sales presentation with Chris for a radiology group in New Jersey. And when Chris ended up getting the account, the excitement of the deal was enough to tip the scales for Scott. He put in his two weeks’ notice at Lutron and started working for the professional liability insurance agency in September of 2007. 

Then came Scott’s next test: Could he actually sell insurance?

“A funny story about my mother: When I told her I was going to quit working for the COO of Lutron to become an insurance agent, she broke down crying and asked me, ‘You’re an engineer with an MBA and you’re going to sell insurance?’ And she would call me several times after to see if I had enough money to pay my bills and take care of my family because she didn’t think I could make any money selling insurance.”

Boy, was she wrong.

Optimization

Starting with a blank book and a list of leads Chris gave him, Scott took to selling insurance like a fish to water—but by no means in a traditional way.

“Back then, all of the carriers’ filed rates and filed credits were published. So I figured out if a doctor in a specific specialty was claims-free in the state of New Jersey, their rate with carrier X would be one number, and I could get them a better rate with carrier Y, and by doing rate comparisons like that, I really just needed to pick up the phone or knock on the door and convince them to get coverage with carrier Y. So, I’d focus on one specialty, start building up my book with my successes with that specialty, and move on to another specialty. After that, I got referrals and we just grew the business, several times over.”

And that was just one of Scott’s many novel ideas on how to get ahead in the game.

He was familiar with building his own website, because while he was working for Lutron he was a licensed dealer for them and had continued his licensing after leaving with a website he built through a Yahoo! template.

“I called it Dim and Dimmer—a play on words, like the movie Dumb and Dumber. And I would drop-ship lighting products to make additional income. So when I became a medical professional liability producer, I noticed there wasn’t much of a local agent presence on the web, and I was able to buy the domain medmalbroker.com. I built my own little site that had some claims videos on it, information about carriers, and product descriptions of the types of insurance we offered. I did it just to get my name and the agency’s name out there, and it brought in some good business. Next thing we knew, some of our competitors were following suit.”

The agency kept expanding over the years and eventually sold to Risk Strategies in 2017. In 2022, Scott was recognized as a Risk & Insurance Health Care Power Broker. And towards the end of last year, Risk Strategies sold to Brown & Brown, following the trend of industry consolidation.

With moves like that, success seems inevitable. Although in Scott’s case, it seems his innate qualities and those he’s surrounded by are the core drivers of his achievements.

“I have one of the best jobs in the world because it fits my personality and what I like to do,” Scott said. “Deep down, I’m a people pleaser, and I actually get paid to be a people pleaser. I love helping others. I enjoy problem-solving—that’s the engineer in me. I have fun with the numbers and coming up with solutions to solving problems. I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been so successful—I truly enjoy helping clients and trying to save them money while getting them the most appropriate coverages I can for their practice. But I wouldn’t have gotten to this point without the strong support from my wife, from Steve and Chris, our Managing Director Regina Wintz and Senior Account Executive Amy Thistle, as well as our entire office staff who do an incredible job each and every day. It’d be selfish to take all the credit for where I’ve gotten to this point because this is very much a team-oriented business.”