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PODCAST OPENER
Welcome to the Inside Insight podcast presented by CR Solutions. Conversations with the brightest minds shaping the future of risk. Each episode, we sit down with innovators, leaders, and big thinkers who are transforming insurance, construction, and beyond. Our goal is simple, to share ideas, stories, and connections that help you grow your knowledge, strengthen your network, and spark your next big move. We’re glad you’re here with us on this journey of growth and discovery. Now, let’s dive into today’s episode.
INTRO (00:42 – 04:23)
Trevor Casey: We are back, back, back again, again. We’re back, back, back again, again. It’s the Inside Insight podcast with Beau and Trevor. You’re welcome, you’ll see me on Idol in January. Welcome back. I can’t do that anymore.
Beau Lunceford: That was also kind of out of your range, I think it went a little high on me.
Trevor Casey: And we’re a little, baby, lock them doors and turn the lights.
Beau Lunceford: Who did we do that for? Somebody is the CEO.
Trevor Casey: I don’t know, but we like to sing on this podcast.
Beau Lunceford: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know we were actually recording.
Trevor Casey: We have been recording, but that’s okay. Beau, we’re brought back to this episode with the queen?
Beau Lunceford: I think we actually ended up saying the mother.
Trevor Casey: The mother.
Beau Lunceford: The mother of Wrap-Ups.
Trevor Casey: Mother of Wrap-Ups. So, this is a special episode. I don’t want to give too much on the intro because the episode speaks for itself. And this is going to be a two-part episode. So, everybody hang in there and at the end of this, you’ll be like, I want more, but you’ll get it. Don’t worry. So, we are here with our good friend, Karen Frankel. Karen is a nationally recognized authority in construction insurance with nearly 50 years of experience spanning executive leadership, operations, and risk management. She was instrumental in pioneering OCIP, CCIP, and geo-only wrap-up programs, as well as creating many of the administrative tools and bid processes now standard in the industry. Karen began her career as a project accountant, later becoming Minnesota’s first female estimator and project manager for a major general contractor. Her portfolio includes high-profile projects like General Mills and Pillsbury Headquarters expansions. Over the decades, she has led national brokerage practices, served as a risk manager for large multi-state medical networks, and built trusted relationships with underwriters designed to innovate contractor-focused insurance solutions. Today, she brings her expertise to BuildSafe IQ, a risk intelligence platform using AI and construction insights to predict and prevent costly project risks.
Beau Lunceford: And what’s crazy is that is truly just the tip of the iceberg, and Karen’s going to tell us more about that soon. But in this conversation, we dig into a lot of stuff, and Karen is so thorough. So, after our conversation, she sent us a message, and she was like, ‘Oh, I have to make a correction’. So, we have a quick disclaimer for you. During our conversation, Karen mentioned that in the early Wrap-Up space, there were 10 people on the broker side and that she was the only woman. She has since come back and clarified that this was not the case, that Sandra Aiken and Nancy Brady were also part of that original group of 10. Karen also wanted to share that when she was selected to join Alexander & Alexander’s Chairman Council, reporting directly to the chairman and CEO, Frank Zarb, she was the only woman chosen among 42 global executives. At the time, she was 36 years old and leading the company’s national Wrap-Up practice, representing a team within an organization of 83,000 employees. Now, that all doesn’t make a whole lot of sense right now, probably, but as we get into this conversation, you’re going to hear all the moving pieces that come to make that disclaimer relevant and a reality. So, before we jump in, I want to say just thank you, Karen, for the time. You gave us so much information that we are going to come back and we’re going to continue this conversation and keep it going in a second follow-up episode. But please enjoy this first conversation that we had with Karen Frankel. Let’s jump in.
Interview (04:28 – 37:44)
Trevor Casey: All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Inside Insight podcast. We have a special guest, Karen Frankel, who has been in the industry and has really been in multiple facets within the industry. Some may call her the Wrap-Up queen. Karen, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m curious, what are you into? What are you working on right now?
Karen A. Frankel: Really exciting. You both know I came out of construction as an estimator project manager, and I’m making a 360 back into the business with a startup organization that is building a technology integration platform that takes the siloed systems contractors use to manage their business risk, scheduling, estimating, project manager, supply chain, weather, all those factors. And it pulls all the data from each of those siloed systems into a platform that then, using an AI technology, can help the field people, the C-suite, the risk management team, manage their business risk. Never been done before. It’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to continuing with this organization as we roll the product out.
Beau Lunceford: So that’s amazing. So I guess my next question, though, is kind of, I want to take a step back and say, that’s what you’re doing now, and already there’s so much to unpack out of that. So tell me a little bit about your history in the construction and the insurance space that got you really where you are today, but also this title that we’ve come to know you as the queen of Wrap-Ups. Tell us a little bit about that.
Karen A. Frankel: It kind of interesting background. In the 1970s, I went through an employment placement service, and I tested well in running a 10-key calculator and good with numbers. So they placed me with a large general contractor in the Minneapolis Twin Cities area as a project accountant. So I kept the numbers on the budget for the project, then showed an aptitude, and a couple of project managers advocated for me to go through a vocational training program in town. And I picked up estimating, drafting, and blueprint reading, and I moved into being the first female estimator in Minnesota in 1978. And then they sent me back in 79, and I picked up scheduling and project management. So I became the first female project manager in Minnesota on the likes of the addition to the corporate headquarters, the Caterpillar tractor plant in Davenport, Iowa. Just a number of projects with my boots on the ground, so to speak. I was a cute little girl of 19 when I entered. Took lots of crap from a lot of tough old guys, as you might imagine. Moved into insurance and surety in 1980 with a startup agency. A couple of people came out of surety and came out of insurance companies, and they started an agency and I joined them in 1980. And was with them for about four years before I was recruited to a national broker that doesn’t exist today, Alexander & Alexander. And they brought me in to work on the largest account they had in the Twin Cities market, which was M.A. Mortenson. Mortenson still exists today. Their multi-billion dollar construction operation globally, and I had the opportunity to work on that account for about 10, 11 years. I moved into project insurance, Wrap-Ups, was what it was known as back then. And when I walked into that space in 1983…
Beau Lunceford: I have a history question. I’m sorry. So you said that, this was the beginning of the Wrap-Up program. Were they always called Wrap-Ups in the beginning?
Karen A. Frankel: Good question. Actually, Wrap-Up has been around since post-World War II. So most people don’t know that, but there was a wonderful man at Alexander & Alexander who worked with the municipality, City of New York, and the federal government. When all these soldiers came back from the war, they needed to work. And so they said the most challenging thing for contracting firms is to worry about insurance. So why don’t we Wrap-Up the insurance on the project? And that way, the contractor only has to worry about the bidding on the materials, the equipment, the labor, and their skill to implement and roll out the project. So that’s where Wrap-Up came from. And at that time, there was one master work comp policy and one master general liability policy. The contractors made a phone call, because it was way before technology, and they called the broker, A&A, and they said, we’re going to be involved in this project. What do we do next? And they took the information over the phone, they typed up the letter, they sent it to the insurance company underwriter, and they endorsed the contractor onto the policy. That’s how it was done. There was no payroll collection, because you bid without the cost of insurance in your pricing. So there was nothing that any kind of reporting that went on. By the way, there were three insurance companies in the space when I entered in 83. There was Royal. We know them as a daily Wrap-Up carrier today, don’t we? Not so much. Argonaut, and AIG, which has fallen way by the wayside. Those were the three insurance companies that wrote Wrap-Ups. There were three brokers when I entered the space. It was Alexander & Alexander, which had pioneered the concept. It was Johnson & Higgins, and it was Marsh. And by the way, on the broker side, there were only 10 people in the United States when I entered the space that did Wrap-Ups.
Beau Lunceford: Only 10 individuals.
Karen A. Frankel: 10 individuals. You want their names?
Trevor Casey: Now you’ll have more than that in one office in one place.
Karen A. Frankel: Correct. But there was really no administration. Just taking a phone call from somebody and passing it on to an underwriter. And there were three insurance companies with five underwriters. So there were 15 people in the Wrap-Up space when I entered it in 1983. That’s it.
Beau Lunceford: Oh, wow.
Karen A. Frankel: We all knew each other, obviously. We all competed against each other in RFPs.
Beau Lunceford: Oh man. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to derail us on history stuff. That was just the way that you said that. It made me go, there’s history here. There’s something to know.
Trevor Casey: I am a little curious. So you were talking about how it started where they were not providing their cost of insurance. So really, like a net bid, when did a gross bid deduct start becoming more popular? Because you’re seeing that more now. Was that something you were seeing in the 80s or is that a new concept that you guys kind of created?
Karen A. Frankel: I’m guilty of that. I’m guilty of that concept. So here’s what happened. I inherited five projects when I entered the space. And at the end of those projects that finished in 86 or so, I had to stand in front of the board of directors of the largest utility in the Midwest. And they asked me, did we save money on this program? And I said, we don’t really know. We had no way to measure it. We didn’t know. Now we did know that during that time, the insurance industry suffered a major crash. I don’t know if you guys are aware of that, 84. And the markets just went out of business overnight. You couldn’t buy limits. We had a hundred million dollar limit built into the contract for the power plant, and we couldn’t buy for any amount of money more than 20. So that put us in breach of contract on that project with all the contractor participants. Lesson learned. You build into the contract a hundred million or whatever the market can bear in future contracts. Because then you’re not tied and put in breach. Because the only thing we had to measure on was certificates. And we watched the progression downward of the limits all the subcontractors had. So my defense of our program was not, did we save money? Yeah, we did emphatically. Couldn’t answer that. But what we could say was if you had required that a hundred million from your subcontractors, nobody would have been able to fulfill that. And here’s why. Here’s the progression of limits from the largest oil and gas and power plant builder in the United States, which was Black & Veatch at the time. They went from 50 million down to 5 million. That’s the only thing they could provide on a certificate because that’s all they could buy. So the only thing we were able to say to the board of directors was this project would have been grossly underinsured had we had to rely on the subcontractors. So how do we fix that situation? I always look at lessons learned from all these scenarios of things that can go wrong. And I said, having been an estimator and having bid on alternate bids in the scope of a project, you’re going to put a door here, you’re going to put a special something over here. You’re bidding alternates along with the core of the work as a general contractor. And somebody can accept your alternate or they can reject your alternate. It can never be elected or they can elect it and then add it to your contract value when a contract is executed. We can do the same thing on insurance. We can ask for an alternate bid on insurance. So contractor, subcontractor, if you had to provide the insurance on this project, what would your limits be? What would your cost of those limits be, etc.? And we took that worksheet. I developed a worksheet that laid that out. If they were on contract value, fine. If they were on payroll, fine. Whatever their program was driven on. And we captured that information in a worksheet and said, this is what your deduct would have been or your ad would have been? And then it just came down to meeting with the general contractor or the EPC contractor and saying, which is the most effective way to bid work in your industry? EPC had a different strategy than general builders. So they would elect a deduct alternate. The general contractor would elect an ad alternate and never exercise it. And that way you knew going into the project. And by the way, in those years, the projects were a hundred percent design developed, not like today. So we knew everything about the project. We knew there were very few change orders in that scope because the scope was drawn out in thick ring binders. We had drawings that were a hundred percent design developed. It was a completely different market than today when, when we’re talking about fast tracking and work is only maybe 10 or 15 percent design developed and they hand it off, they bid that piece and then they start building. It doesn’t happen that way. That’s how it is today, but that’s not how it was back then. So we were able to capture, I guess the term is ‘Avoided cost’. A lot of people use that term of what it would have been. Now the question comes, what do we do at change orders? And that’s where it became a little stickier because change orders, you kept insurance in and deducted it, or you did it net and you did the cost avoidance worksheet, but you had to have. So we went from just a phone call to enroll a contractor to an enrollment form that captured all their information, including their subs. We went and created add and deduct alternate bid approaches. We captured change order information. I wrote manuals of how to do all this. I attended pre-bid meetings and explained it all in the ugliest colored outfit I could wear. And the reason I did that is if they didn’t remember, they would remember me for my yellow suit or pea green or whatever it was and what that woman had to say rather than show up in something stiff and they would go forgettable.
Trevor Casey: So you built out this toolkit and you design the deduct. I’m just curious, how did you build that toolkit? What were all of the things in place that you were like, I need X, Y, and Z to do this? Because I’m thinking as myself, like I know insurance well enough, but I’m not thinking that if I was sitting in a boardroom 40 years ago, I’d be like, let’s implement this new program and this is how we’re going to do it. Change it the way it’s been done the last 50 years or whatever. I’m just interested on and how you developed that or what triggered it and started all of that.
Karen A. Frankel: Let me tell you, the catalyst was bathed by fire. I inherited five Wrap-Ups that were being various stages of enrollment, various stages of completion. And what Alexander & Alexander had done was they halted all progression on our Wrap-Up program until we could figure out if we were making money as a corporation. So all the information that came in the mail that came in, because this is all before computers.
Beau Lunceford: That is a wild concept to me. I was just thinking about that, how all this stuff was done via mail. It was all like typing up a manual would have been done by hand. I’m just showing my millennial age, but that is just a wild concept. Like our COO talks about how she used to sit in a trailer and take bids for things like, it throws me back into this idea of how labor intensive all this was. A lot of the things that you’re saying really comes out of a place of someone who wants to innovate. We do a lot of that today as people in the workforce, like we’re looking for better ways to do things, but for people in this particular element of time, it was a larger undertaking. It was like, let’s sit down and just four hours of blood and sweat and tears into developing this. I don’t want that to be understated on the work that you’ve done in this. I mean, this is your life. So, whenever you say it’s like, I just develop the manual. I just built the form. I just did the thing. And it’s like, oh my God.
Karen A. Frankel: The thing is that for six months, the mail came in, we had five active projects. A power plant, mixed use public works projects. The mail came in, it was opened. It was date stamped. It was put back in the envelopes. They were put in boxes and they were shoved into a conference room. And then the company said, we think that we better keep doing these because if we didn’t, we would lose them. IBM, General Motors, Chrysler, Anheuser-Busch, all of our city of New York, the airport authorities, we would lose all of our clients to Marsh. And then they said, now we’re back in business. We have any volunteers. And Karen said, I liked, I’m anal retentive. I like paper. And they opened the conference room door. And I went and looked from floor to ceiling at these stacks of boxes that had been put in this conference room and there were no instructions. There was no guidance. There was no national team. There was nobody that to show me what to do with the paper. So I painstakingly started wading through the boxes and putting things into piles of like kind. And then I said, now, what do I do with this? So I created the process of what to do with the paper. And I started writing it down. I created a filing system that was multi tabbed files with labels on them, color coded. And I put certain things in certain places in the files on those two hole punch things. And I created the process to work the paper. So I built our administration system by hand and then rolled it out to all the offices so that they knew how to deal with the paper.
Beau Lunceford: I mean, like you are really the ancestor of like CR Solutions at some point. Because basically what we do is a systematic software automation of the system you created of the Wrap-Up process. This is a little bit, I’m just putting these two pieces together in this moment right now and I’m a little blown away by it. And I’m not doing well with this information, because going into this conversation, I knew that you were a celebrity. I knew that in the insurance, in the Wrap-Up world, but the level of celebrity that has been achieved in my brain for you really just jumped really high. I’m feeling a lot of feelings at this current juncture.
Karen A. Frankel: Blow me a kiss.
Beau Lunceford: Of course.
Karen A. Frankel: When we did all of that and then we created a national Wrap-Up practice, obviously it was made sense for me to join a group of people, these other nine people that were within the ANA structure and technology was birthed. I mean, we had technology. When I was at this general contractor, the entire basement was a mainframe, computer stacks, and older ladies, we call them blue haired ladies at that time, and they were key punch operators. And heaven forbid they ever dropped a cardboard tray of the cards because they were all in there in order on purpose. But by the way, that technology was only for our payroll system. The entire basement of our office building was mainframe computers solely for our payroll.
Beau Lunceford: Because this was back when a computer took up a whole room.
Karen A. Frankel: Yeah, it did. Absolutely. Took up a whole room. I got to tell you, my first laptop was a Zenith. I was gifted a Zenith laptop. You’ve seen those old time computers where the monitors like this big six inches, and then the keyboard comes out and they’re kind of attached. So it was kind of a putty pewter, yellow, green plastic. That was my first laptop. It was the size of a hard drive today.
Trevor Casey: Oh my gosh.
Karen A. Frankel: And it came with two gigantic battery packs that lasted 20 minutes.
Beau Lunceford: But we didn’t get anything done. I’m sorry. I’m asking the wrong questions. Please keep going.
Karen A. Frankel: But the battery packs were like the old, you’ve ever watched the M*A*S*H TV show? Those portable telephones they used? That was the size of a battery pack.
Trevor Casey: Oh my gosh, for just 20 minutes.
Karen A. Frankel: So the first time I had to take it on a business trip, I felt a little like Santa Claus. I was bent over because the thing was so heavy. It was not in any way, shape or form portable. But that was my first laptop was a Zenith. So then we worked with an internal team of people at ANA and we started creating programming to move the technology from three ring binders and columnar pads into spreadsheets then into, and this was all before Microsoft, so I had wrote DOS programs and all of that in order to roll up the data. Lotus one, two, three.
Trevor Casey: Oh, wow.
Beau Lunceford: So you were coding too.
Karen A. Frankel: Yes. When we transitioned from paper over to some form of technology, I wrote the IF programs and the summations and all of the, you guys talk about the monthly reports you generate out of a system. I had to create all of those by hand by running a 10 key and running numbers and then typing it up and then putting it into spreadsheets when that finally became possible. And then we built ANA’s first actual Wrap-Up administration system in the nineties.
Trevor Casey: That’s incredible.
Karen A. Frankel: So you can see why I have the tagline of Wrap-Up queen because the guys didn’t do any of that. That was just me. Of the 10, I was the only woman.
Beau Lunceford: You need the title of like Wrap-Up emperor. I need something higher than queen…
Karen A. Frankel: Because I created it from nothing.
Beau Lunceford: Like this is insane. I’m sorry. I keep derailing us with just nonsense history things that are just so interesting to me. So you’re on this Wrap-Up team, this national group, so you’re the only woman on this team. So what was it that moved us from that spot where it’s just these nine people who were doing this stuff and into more close to where we are today? How does that progression happen?
Karen A. Frankel: It became a topic at IRMI. And by the way, I attended almost every year from 1980 until maybe five years ago. So the first IRMI was in 1980. It was in San Antonio, Texas. And there were about, I don’t know, I would say under 200 people that attended. Mostly brokers, mostly insurance company, underwriters, not many contractors attended back then. It was just in its infancy. Jack Gurney and Steve Davis was part of that group. And of course, Bill McIntyre and Wrap-Ups became kind of the flavor of the month. So we started at those round table discussions. If you’ve ever attended IRMI, we started a round table discussion about what Wrap-Ups are and how they function and so forth. And then thereafter, almost every year, they would have a session on Wrap-Ups at the round table and then ended up teaching sessions on them. So that’s how we kind of got the word out. And then we would drag people in kicking and screaming. For a long time, I had temporaries that worked with me that we hired out of employment temps to do the Wrap-Up administration with me. And I trained them. It was more important that you had good analytical people at the time if you’re doing manual work. And how fast, we used to have 10 key races on the calculator. See who could do the tape the quickest. And then we’d hold our tapes up to one another. And if the lumbers didn’t align, we knew we had a mistake someplace.
Beau Lunceford: The tape, I’m sorry.
Karen A. Frankel: Calculator tapes.
Beau Lunceford: I can’t stop getting caught up in all of this just deep history because we’ve just come so far. One of the things we talk about on this podcast all the time is innovation and the way that people are changing the game. And just to hear all of these old-school practices that were the innovation of the time both re-emphasizes how far we’ve come and how every single step that we take is such a big piece. But also how important the work that you were doing at that time is and was to what we’re doing today. I’m really having a really hard time wrapping my head around how important this is.
Karen A. Frankel: Can I jump forward a long way? I am troubled by the way Wrap-Ups are oversold and have been for a lot of years, which is kind of why I took a backseat to the Wrap-Up concept. People who went to an IRMI conference became an expert. Somebody bought the IRMI Wrap-Up guide that I helped author.
Beau Lunceford: No surprise, of course you did.
Karen A. Frankel: And when you look at that and then you see not too long ago, maybe September or so, I had the opportunity to look at, we had a contractor that was going to be involved in a new Wrap-Up. And I had an opportunity to, shits and grins, excuse me, to take a look at that program. And I was absolutely appalled, appalled that this program was put together, sold to somebody and everybody that participates is going to be a victim.
Beau Lunceford: Say more, how, why?
Karen A. Frankel: First of all, it’s a multifamily residential project. And they put together a program where they bought a $250,000 deductible and they bid out the work and then they introduced the manual to the contractors that are involved. And they passed every single dollar of the $100,000 deductible, $250,000 deductible onto each and every contractor. Here’s the problem with that. There’s no allocation of the policy deductible back to those that were involved in the loss. It’s GL. You have to prove negligence. When you write a contract that says each and every, even if you weren’t negligent, you got to kick in 250. Now what’s the problem with that? You’re making money on a deductible that violates the core principle of insurance. You do not make money on a loss. They did the same thing on the builder’s risk. They bought a 250 deductible on the builder’s risk. I don’t know whoever buys a 250 deductible on a builder’s risk, but the same wording was in that section. Each and every contractor is responsible for the policy deductible. It’s so wrong on so many fronts.
Trevor Casey: Secondly, they were making some big money on these possible. Wow.
Beau Lunceford: So what did you do when you got to review this?
Karen A. Frankel: They didn’t buy enough limits for all the contractors to share. And these were term limits. These aren’t annual limits. That was another problem. The limits don’t reinstate annually, not even the basket aggregate. So you’ve got all these contractors sharing a $25 million limit that they’re responsible for a 250 deductible on. Keep going. They’re asking for deduct on insurance. How do you do that? How do you do that when you’re responsible for a 250 deductible? Oh, did I forget to say completed ops in that state goes out to eight years after substantial completion, which means a claim can be bought for construction defect eight years after substantial completion, 250 deductible. Did I forget to tell you that they want to be named as an additional insured on the contractor’s policies? Can you believe that?
Trevor Casey: No, that’s insane audacity.
Karen A. Frankel: So what did I do? I called out all of that.
Beau Lunceford: And then what happened?
Karen A. Frankel: I don’t know.
Beau Lunceford: I guess that was just in September. So you may not have feedback on that.
Karen A. Frankel: I don’t have the outcome. I don’t know if the program ultimately fell apart. I don’t know. But you can’t spring that on some contractor after they’ve submitted pricing. You cannot do that.
Trevor Casey: It’s not fair at all.
Karen A. Frankel: And that’s probably the biggest abuse that I’ve seen in the Wrap-Ups over the last 20 years, I would say, is people get into selling Wrap-Ups and administering Wrap-Ups who’ve never been a contractor or serviced a contractor account. If you don’t know what contractors buy and what they pay for it. And how they structure their bids, you really are not representing the industry well, because it’s tough to put together a bid today when you have drawings that are 10, 15% design developed, putting a price on the table is almost impossible. And then now you’re doing all these other things and then you’re saying, by the way, somebody got in their mind, they want to take the overhead and profit on insurance too. So they think they’re smart because there would be overhead and profit if it was traditionally bid. That’s true. But there’s still paperwork to enroll. There’s still computer time to report payrolls. If you’re doing a payroll driven program, there’s still engagement on the part of the subcontractor and contractors involved that takes administrative time from their firm, you cannot just take their overhead and profit on the line item of insurance. So things have morphed because somebody thought they were more brilliant than my mind and I give that to people, but they have to know the core business and the challenges contractors have when they put their pricing together and have to live with that. Even though at my contracting firm, we bid low to make, I made it up on change orders because change orders are driven by schedule, but it’s still real challenging to put together your pricing when the design and scope docs aren’t complete.
Trevor Casey: Karen, this has been an incredibly insightful conversation. I feel like the questions that are going to come from this and the comments from just the industry, I’m excited to see, and I’m sure we’ll be more than happy to have you back if you’re willing to come back.
Beau Lunceford: Because I feel like we didn’t really even get to touch on so many things. We spent so much time. I dug into history too much, but this was so much great stuff in terms of understanding where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Karen, this was incredible. Thank you so much for carving out the time, the embryo of Wrap-Ups. This was just so wonderful.
Karen A. Frankel: Thank you. Guys, there’s a lot more in that history we can unpack too. Like how we went from Wrap-Ups to CIPs.
Trevor Casey: Oh, now you’re talking some language that I’d like to get into definitely on the next one. But for sake of time today, I’d really love it. We’ll kind of start wrapping this up, a little bit of pun intended, but we always like to Wrap-Up our conversation with our question of, what is your inside insight? You’ve been in the industry for a number of years. You are continually being innovative. You’re looking for new and creative ways to just continue to excel Wrap-Ups as a whole. So we’re just curious, what is it that keeps you craving to come back into the insurance space? Is it a mindset? Is it a song? Is it a poem? Is it just the hungry drive for innovation, and there is no right or wrong answer. We’re just always genuinely curious to hear what everybody has to say.
Karen A. Frankel: I personally believe that you have to define what drives you and it should be short, it should be succinct and you should wear it on the inside of your forehead. So the moment you wake up, that’s what radiates from you. So I live by two mantras. One is to do good every day. And the other is to learn something new every day. And I would challenge you both to quickly, shortly, succinctly define one or two, maybe there’s three, but define what drives you and I have always had passion to learn new things and to do something with what I learn and do good. So where you see a need, you fill it.
Beau Lunceford: Karen, that’s beautiful.
Trevor Casey: Perfect. Beautiful.
Beau Lunceford: And it also lines totally up with all the things that you’ve talked about with us today. Like, I think everything that you have done up to this point hits all those points. It like you are doing good for others. And then you are also learning something new. And then, honestly, I think that the cycle that you’re taking all the things that you’re learning, and then you’re using it to continue to do good. Karen, this conversation has been the most fun. As soon as we get off this call, I’m sending you another invite so that we can book part two, because I need more, even if it’s just me and you hanging out. I need more of this.
Karen A. Frankel: Well, I told you I could talk for two minutes or two days and I’m full of it. So there you go.
Beau Lunceford: Perfect.
Trevor Casey: We love it. After this conversation, I think I have decided that you are the mother of Wrap-Ups, because not the embryo, because the Wrap-Up itself is the child and you have birthed that into the world and you’ve surpassed the queen because the queen was once birthed. So you’re the mother of Wrap-Ups.
Karen A. Frankel: Just don’t put the other word behind that, because look at my name. My name has been used in vain in this generation. I’m not really a Karen, guys.
Trevor Casey: We love Wrap-Ups here. No, Karening involved. So thank you so much, Karen, for joining us and being the mother of Wrap-Ups and doing everything that you have done for the industry. We’re looking forward to having you back again soon. So until next time, guys, we’ll see you again.
Karen A. Frankel: Thank you.
OUTRO (37:50 – 39:25)
Trevor Casey: Wow.
Beau Lunceford: I might be the dumbest person who’s ever existed in this conversation.
Trevor Casey: I will say that money has always been the same and numbers have always been the same but that’s okay.
Beau Lunceford: It blew my mind a little bit. I’m like, everything about this conversation just threw me in the strangest way. So congratulations to everyone for making it through this episode. As I baffled myself over the invention of a calculator and the US mail system.
Trevor Casey: We’ll get a little bit better on the next one and making sure that we keep it a little more focused, but honestly, Karen, thank you so much. The, the insight that you continually bring to the industry is so well thought through and as Beau spoke to in the intro, everything that you do is to the T, I mean, you cross all your T’s, you dot all your I’s, you make sure that nobody feels unaccounted for and that everybody’s seen and heard. So just what you have done for this industry and for this space is incredible and we really appreciate it and we thank you for your time, we’re excited for the next episode coming in the next couple of weeks with Karen, where we kind of dive more into the world of Wrap-Ups and how she became the mother of Wrap-Up insurance.
Beau Lunceford: Karen, thank you so much. This was a delight. Thank you for the history. Thank you for the insight. You’re fantastic and amazing. And we can’t wait to hear more from you on the next episode of the inside insight podcast. So until next time, stay covered.
PODCAST CLOSER
Thanks for tuning in to Inside Insight presented by CR Solutions. We love bringing you these exciting conversations with the people shaping the future of risk. And we hope today’s episode sparks something new for you. If you enjoyed it, follow, rate, and share the show so more listeners like you can join the conversation. Got a question or idea you’d love for us to cover? Visit c-r-solutions.com/podcast to connect with us or email us at info@c-r-solutions.com. You’ll find all this information, including ways you can connect with our guests in the show notes. That’s a wrap on this episode. Join us next time on Inside Insight podcast presented by CR Solutions. Stay covered.
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