SPECIAL REPORT
HOT 100 MICHAEL MILLER President and CEO BRIGHTWAY INSURANCE
TARA TROUT Senior vice president and shareholder AHT INSURANCE
The director of the farm and equine division at AHT, Tara Trout has spent most of her life competing, teaching and participating in several equestrian disciplines. During her career, she has racked up more than 18 years of experience in insurance for all things equestrian, including horse insurance, farm, auto, workers’ comp, trainer’s liability and high-net-worth private client portfolios. For Trout, success in this niche market is all about maintaining great relationships. “Clear communications, trust, expertise and dependability to your clients when they need you as their trusted advisor is critical,” she says. “My motivation comes from solving problems by building relationships.”
CHRISTIAAN DURDALLER Executive vice president INSURETRUST
As executive vice president of INSUREtrust, Christiaan Durdaller leads the corporate solutions brokering team and helps ensure INSUREtrust’s market competitiveness. “I am motivated by being given the opportunity to innovate and differentiate ourselves in the marketplace,” he says. “One of the unique things about the cyber marketplace is that the threat landscape continues to change every single day. With that change comes an opportunity for our team at INSUREtrust to consistently bring
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Michael Miller started Brightway Insurance with his brother, David, in the late 2000s. “After running an independent agency for five years, we looked at the market and asked ourselves, ‘What should we be?’ and invented the ‘You sell. We service’ business model that has helped Brightway grow into what it is today,” he says. This year, the company opened its 200th store, landed on the Franchise 500 list in Entrepreneur magazine and managed to drive growth despite COVID-19 and the economic recession. A seemingly endless string of local and regional awards attests to the company’s uniqueness. “We created Brightway to help everyone associated with the business reach their personal potential,” Miller says. “Helping others achieve their dreams and goals is incredibly rewarding and keeps us moving toward improvement every single day.” Outside the office, Miller is heavily involved in his local community in Jacksonville, Florida, and in driving diversity and inclusion across the insurance industry.
innovative solutions that better serve our clients and differentiate them in a positive way from their peers.” Durdaller has led INSUREtrust to win Advisen’s Cyber Risk Wholesale Broking Team of the Year Award for three years, and Durdaller himself was named Advisen Cyber Risk Person of the Year in 2018. Going forward, he expects insurance companies to take more refined look into cyber risk management. “I expect our risk management platform at INSUREtrust to play a larger role in our business in 2021 than it has in past years,” Durdaller says. “We are going to continue to move into a world where, in cyber, risk management and insurance are a part of the same discussion, as opposed to the historically bifurcated discussions.”
MARGARET REDD Executive director NATIONAL AFRICAN AMERICAN INSURANCE ASSOCIATION
Margaret Redd is a trailblazer for diversity and inclusion. More than 20 years ago, she helped found the first chapter of the National African American Insurance Association (NAAIA), where she currently serves as executive director of the national board. She has a diversified background in all lines of property & casualty insurance and specializes in helping organizations achieve their growth objectives by optimizing distribution platforms, organizational resources and best practices. “Real change means that African Americans’ representation in the industry will more closely resemble the country’s demographics,” Redd told IBA earlier this year. “It will also mean that, through our work, the insurance industry will become readily recognized as an attractive career choice. Last but not least, it means that African Americans will be appropriately recognized and rewarded for their talent, performance, and contributions, and the related data will support the fact that our work has served to mitigate the issue of racial inequity.”
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