Susan Ogrodnik-Smith feels right at home, whether she’s finding a way to insure a submarine, volunteering with the Boys & Girls Clubs or the Junior League of Boston or mentoring up-and-coming colleagues.
Ogrodnik-Smith, chief sales officer for personal insurance at Hub International New England for the past nine years, said she has a particular passion for helping families figure out “what they don’t know” regarding insurance needs. She oversees Hub’s 20 offices and works with wealth advisors, financial planners, attorneys and life insurance professionals to provide personal insurance plans for high net worth clients. Such items include traditional insurable possessions like homes, cars, jewelry, artwork, boats and airplanes.
But Ogrodnik-Smith also works on insuring unusual items, like submarines (only one so far), the occasional flying car or amphibious watercraft, and identifying coverage for Barbie doll or juke box collections. She even works on insuring wealthy families who like to travel against kidnappings and potential ransom demands.
As she tells it: “It’s about insuring intangible wealth and protecting wealthy families in terms of liability risk.” For perspective, these are clients, she said, who consider a “normal” home value to be $7 to $8 million.
“You would think wealthier clients are going to have the best advisors and that they’re savvy and have the best insurance programs in place. They quite often don’t because they’re so busy being successful that insurance falls to the bottom of their list,” said Ogrodnik-Smith, who has worked in insurance for x26 years.
Indeed, it’s the solution-oriented approach to her work that makes Ogrodnik-Smith so successful, said Brenda Reny, chief operating officer at Daintree Advisors LLC, a wealth management firm. “Always operating at a high energy level given her senior position within a demanding industry, Susan nonetheless takes the time necessary to listen and to understand when she meets with her peers and her clients. She is successful because she is committed to finding solutions that work for clients, versus just focusing on sales, a quality all too rare in the property and casualty industry,” Reny said in her nomination of Ogrodnik-Smith for a 2013 Women of FIRE Award.
A native of Manchester, Conn., Ogrodnik-Smith graduated with a dual degree in philosophy and English from Trinity College in Hartford. “I never in a million years thought I would do property-casualty insurance,” she said.
Though her hopes pinned on a job in public relations or advertising in New York after graduation, she said a job interview at Chubb Insurance made her “fascinated” by the business. She worked at Chubb in Boston for well over a decade, starting as an insurance underwriter and then moving on to manage the firm’s regional New England office. Chubb eventually sold PLI to Hub International, and Ogrodnik-Smith stayed on.
She is now the director of Hub’s family office practice, where she works with families that are worth over $150 million. But she is also passionate about women and families, reflected in her desire to mentor younger workers and devote free time to numerous philanthropic efforts. She has overseen the Hub Gives campaign, which has raised money for Boston-area Boys & Girls clubs, and she supports the Home for Little Wanderers and the Emerald Necklace Conservancy.
Mentoring is also at the top of Ogrodnik-Smith’s to-do list. Having been mentored by a high-ranking woman executive at Chubb when she first started her career, Ogrodnik-Smith said she turned to the Junior League of Boston to “reach other young women outside of the insurance business.” Now as a board member, she strives to help underprivileged women and children.
“All of us have people who have reached out their hand and helped us,” she said. “I definitely wanted to give back.”
