New Allied president brings 30 years of experience

When he heard the offer, Kim Austen didn’t spend a lot of time thinking it over. After 30 years with the company, years that included several relocations and a number of job assignments, he was offered the chance to become president of Allied Insurance last February, and he took it.

“I would never say it [the presidency] was a specific goal,” said Austen, 51, “but I wouldn’t say I never thought about it.”

Austen replaced Kirt Walker, who stayed in the job about 2 ½ years before being summoned to Columbus, Ohio, to become president of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.’s eastern operations. Nationwide is the parent company of Allied.

Walker started his Allied career fresh out of college; Austen joined the company while he was still a student. A native of Fairbury, Neb., he went to the University of Nebraska to study actuarial science and major in mathematics. “But I started taking insurance courses,” he said, “and decided I liked the people side of the business.”

He began working evenings in the Lincoln office of Allied – then known as AID Insurance Co. “I was working in claims, taking recorded statements from people who couldn’t get away from work during the day,” Austen said. “In the summer, I worked storm claims all over the Midwest, as far as Western Kansas.”

When a professor posted a note that AID was looking for a couple of interns, Austen took that step. In the years since, he has worked in the company’s offices in Lincoln, Denver, Minneapolis and, three different times, Des Moines.

Austen and his family lived in Central Iowa in 1981-82, 1984-89 and from 1995 to the present, each time in Ankeny.

Such moves “change your perspective on how the world works,” he said. “Insurance issues are different in different regions.” For example, he said, Allied sells lots of workers’ compensation coverage in the Midwest, but in other places regulations make the product too unprofitable to offer. Different regions face different weather threats. In some places, personal lines of insurance are a company “mainstay,” but in others the action is in farm and commercial policies.

Austen spent most of his time in underwriting before moving into the management ranks. When he was tapped to be president, he was Nationwide’s senior vice president for commercial and agribusiness products and pricing.

In the new position, Austen finds himself in charge of a company that has been expanding its workforce and facilities dramatically. Just down the hall from his new office, construction workers have built a temporary wall as the first step toward removing the western façade of the Allied headquarters at 1100 Locust St. Finished in 2002, the big building is getting a 286,000-square-foot addition that will be complete by December 2007.

Next, the company will construct a 370,000-square-foot building to the west and a parking ramp, both linked to the city’s skywalk system.

Along with all of that physical expansion, Allied plans to add 1,570 jobs, and Austen sees that aspect as his primary responsibility. “My main emphasis is towards people,” he said. “My main job is to make sure we’re hiring, training and developing the right mix of people.”

That doesn’t mean that he’ll interview the applicants for all 1,570 positions. Austen intends to focus on developing the leaders who will do the hiring, and he’ll do that largely through a leadership program now in its third year.

In a yearlong process, emerging leaders are assigned to groups that meet to work on assignments apart from their usual duties. “It might be a way to increase sales or reduce costs, for example,” Austen said. “We assign a topic or let the teams propose their own ideas.”

Austen has had a number of mentors during the past 30 years and now serves as a mentor to perhaps a dozen people in the company, including some who work in Florida and New York. “Hopefully, we have a personal meeting or two, but a lot of it is done over the phone,” he said. “I try to help them think about different ways to do their job.”

On the more technical side of his job, Austen will be expected to help Nationwide move higher in the U.S. insurance industry rankings. According to the company Web site, Nationwide ranks sixth overall among U.S. property and casualty insurers.

“Nationwide has increased its market share each year for the last two or three years,” Austen said. “Last year, Nationwide’s property and casualty sales grew 6 percent while the industry as a whole grew 1.5 percent, and Allied grew 10.3 percent. Our goal at Allied this year is to grow our direct written sales 10.6 percent, and we’re on track to do that.”

Away from the office, Austen has served on the Science Center of Iowa board of directors for several years. “I came on just as they were deciding whether to build a new science center,” he said. “I couldn’t be more delighted with the way it has turned out.”

He also serves in leadership positions with the Ankeny Community School Foundation, the Central Iowa chapter of the American Red Cross and the Vaughan Institute of Risk and Insurance at the University of Iowa.

Austen’s wife of 28 years, Jean, is a member of the Ankeny Plan and Zoning Commission and served on that city’s park board for several years. They have a daughter attending Ankeny High School, a son at the University of Iowa and another son who has graduated from the U of I and now teaches English at Meredith Middle School.

For recreation, Austen plays golf and works on his model railroad – a salute to his family’s history. “My family goes back three generations in railroading,” Austen said. “My older brother has been with the Union Pacific all his life, my father was the station agent in Fairbury, and his father had that same job before him.”

Austen worked on the railroad himself a couple of times as a young man, including an entire summer removing old ties and installing new ones. Now he works strictly in HO scale.