James Edward Bennett

A lot of ponies in Paducah, Ky., wish it’d gone differently, but this farrier became an insurance salesman.Now he’s wrangling his stable of clients to pony up for Ronald McDonald House.

“My wife gets mad when I say it’s blind luck,” Ed Bennett says of his business success. “She says it’s hard work. No, shoeing horses is hard work.”
“My wife gets mad when I say it’s blind luck,” Ed Bennett says of his business success. “She says it’s hard work. No, shoeing horses is hard work.”

Ed Bennett goes to so many fundraisers and society functions his friends joke that he must sleep in a tuxedo. Knowing his back story makes the ribbing all the more entertaining.

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“He likes getting dressed up” to head out to a fundraiser, says Connie Bennett of her husband, Ed, “but he’s pretty happy out back by our pool with a Manhattan and our Welsh terrier.”

“You’ll find his picture sometimes two or three times in the same publication,” Steve Madigan, who works with Bennett at Regions Insurance, said. “He’s also quite a dapper Dan, a clothes hound, which is kind of interesting in that he’s from Paducah, Ky., and at one time made his living shoeing horses.”

Madigan isn’t exaggerating about Bennett’s social schedule, impeccable attire or early career.

Bennett’s first job was as a farrier, shoeing horses in the Illinois-Kentucky region where he grew up. He’s about as laconic and self-deprecating as you’d imagine your typical farrier to be.

“They’re not always welcoming to having their feet messed with,” he says. “It’s hot, there are flies. The way a horse gets flies off is to stomp their feet. They hit you in the face with their tail. It’s hard work.”

These days, he’s one of the most successful personal insurance brokers in the industry, with a niche serving affluent clients. “My wife gets mad when I say it’s blind luck,” Bennett, a senior vice president at Regions Insurance, says. “She says it’s hard work. No, shoeing horses is hard work.”

On Saturday, Ed and Connie Bennett will co-chair the Chocolate Fantasy Ball at the Statehouse Convention Center, a benefit for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Arkansas, which provides a home-away-from-home to the families of young patients at area hospitals.

Bennett doesn’t just go to parties. He’s a member of the boards of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, the foundation fund board of the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, and the advisory board of the Women & Children First shelter. That’s a lot of posterior-numbing meetings and big decisions.

Bennett says he gets involved “if it’s something I believe in,” and Ronald McDonald Houses are just that.

“My wife gets mad when I say it’s blind luck,” Ed Bennett says of his business success. “She says it’s hard work. No, shoeing horses is hard work.”

“You can imagine if you’re a parent and you wind up with a kid at [Arkansas] Children’s Hospital, it’s not good. Anything the Ronald McDonald House can do to make that easier, we should.”

Bennett, 55, was born and raised in the tip of rural southern Illinois bordered by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and known as “Little Egypt” for its coal mines. Bennett never wanted to work underground. His grandfather died in the West Frankfort, Ill., explosion that killed 119 miners on Christmas Eve in 1951. Bennett’s family raised cattle and row crops. He spent a lot of time on horseback as a kid and young man, competing as a team roper in rodeos across southern Illinois, northwestern Kentucky and southeastern Missouri.

LICENSED FARRIER

At 18, he became a licensed farrier and started traveling the region in his pickup truck to take care of horses. Although he thought about joining friends on Murray State University’s rodeo team, his college amounted to a few credits at the local junior college.

“I was making serious money shoeing horses,” he says. “I barely attended college. I, like, waved at it.”

Connie says one of Bennett’s friends tells a story about her husband’s college days: A professor asked him to shut a door in the rear of the classroom and Bennett did just that on his way out.

“College was not his thing,” Connie says. “It was all about his drive to work. He would rather be out shoeing horses and selling insurance.”

The opportunity — selling insurance — came when a horse owner in Paducah recruited him. There was money in horseshoes, but insurance was a career. Bennett went for training at the Country Financial insurance company school in Bloomington, Ill.

Connie, meanwhile, was just up Interstate 55 at Illinois State University in Normal. She had dated a friend of Bennett’s and was from the same part of southern Illinois. Young people away from home often find solace in the loosest of connections.

“He thought ‘I really don’t like this girl that much but I don’t have anything else to do for a month,’” Connie says. “And I was thinking ‘I’ll go out to eat with anybody. I’m starving here.’ We laugh about that, but that is actually how we got together.”

It wouldn’t be uncommon for dates to consist of Connie accompanying him to his “good job,” which was still shoeing horses.

“She’d get in the truck with me, hold horses,” Bennett remembers. “We went all over the country shoeing horses.”

“Now that’s true love when you will go with someone to shoe a horse,” Connie adds.

They married in 1986. By the time their daughter, Stacey, came along a couple of years later, Bennett had put aside his passion for horses.

“He’s so driven that once he had a family, he could not let his hobby of riding horses and being a rodeo guy run his life,” Connie said. “He couldn’t justify not providing for her.”

(If their daughter had been interested in horses, Connie thinks her husband “would have mortgaged everything” to get her one.)

As a new insurance agent, Bennett endured moving into a half-dozen different assignments and different houses in a couple of years. This for a guy who hates traveling and extended stays. He was also quickly promoted to sales manager, a job he says he also disliked, “probably because I’m horrible at it.”

Bennett wanted a position that would keep him in one place and let him deal with customers one on one. He got the first part of it when he was transferred to Little Rock in 1992 as sales manager for Country Financial in Arkansas.

Three years later, Country pulled out of the state. Bennett was offered a good post with the company back in Paducah.

“That was kind of a big decision at the time,” he said. “Paducah’s pretty much home, and it was an exciting [offer]. But we had lived here long enough that we decided we’d just risk it. This was like a gargantuan city to us and we loved it.”

Bennett went to work for Rebsamen Insurance, then the state’s largest agency.

MOVING CUSTOMERS

“They asked me if I thought I could move any of the Country company’s business over. I think my answer was absolutely not. I didn’t touch [my old] customers unless they were really mad” at Country Financial.

But, he adds, “We got together a plan to move some customers over and were fairly successful at it.” Bennett also accompanied agents who wrote commercial insurance policies to their meetings with executives, just to see if he could sell “the brass” insurance on their homes, cars and other personal property. Turns out he was persuasive.

Regions Financial Corp., which operates Regions Bank, entered the insurance business by acquiring Rebsamen in 2001.

Bennett handles insurance for clients’ homes and second homes, vehicles, jewelry and other valuable possessions. He calls it “stuff they touch a lot” and says insuring it leads to meaningful relationships.

“This sounds like a cliche, but I have literally thousands of customers who I consider friends,” he said.

“He insures a tremendous amount of the wealth in Arkansas,” said Fred Stone, chief executive officer of Regions Insurance of Arkansas.

“Ed very seldom talks about what things cost, it’s what it protects,” Stone said. The wealthiest clients “don’t care what things cost, but they sure don’t want to wake up one day and have a house on the coast of Florida that’s not covered well.”

Bennett is the top personal insurance broker for several insurance carriers, Stone says, in part because his work isn’t limited to Arkansas.

“He just seems to have a tremendous amount of referrals, probably more than I’ve ever seen in any line of business, and I’ve been in business for 30-something years. I don’t think Ed really goes out and asks for referrals. I just think that any time somebody comes to town and buys a new house, they say, ‘You should talk to Ed.’”

Bennett says he probably shouldn’t confirm that, then does. “I probably don’t ask eight people a year to buy insurance off me.”

He accomplishes all that despite what should be considered two handicaps for any top-shelf businessman — he detests flying and speaking in public.

Stone still laughs about the time an oxygen mask malfunctioned and hit Bennett in the head during a flight to Phoenix. Forced to introduce himself to a crowd later that day, Bennett accused Stone of trying to kill his No. 1 salesman.

Madigan says Bennett excels where it matters, in oneon-one interactions and client service.

“He’ll take the phone calls at all strange hours of the day and night. If there’s a disaster, Ed’s right on it.”

Stone, who asked the Bennetts to be godparents to his daughter, says he doubts Ed will ever quit working — an opinion shared by Connie. She says her husband was “bored out of his mind” after a recent three-day weekend.

“Ed can never retire,” she says. “He cannot sit still.”

“I’ve probably tried every hobby,” Bennett says. “It takes me a long time to figure out it’s something I’m not good at.”

Bennett may not have a ton of extracurriculars, but he does have interests. Connie says he loves rock ’n’ roll, especially the Grateful Dead, although he never managed to see them while Jerry Garcia was alive. Friends say he’s handy around a grill. He walks miles a day for exercise

— and to grab a smoke.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

Then there’s work for organizations and causes, which Connie says started about a decade ago when Cindy Murphy asked him to serve on the Women & Children First board. “That was his start into all this,” says Connie, a former pre-school teacher who’s also a board member of Women & Children First and the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion Association.

“He likes getting dressed up,” she says of the many events they attend, “but he’s pretty happy out back by our pool with a Manhattan and our Welsh terrier.”

As chairmen of the Chocolate Fantasy Ball, the Bennetts hope to raise a record amount for operating funds for Ronald McDonald Charities, which is wrapping up an $8.7 million capital campaign and is building a new facility at 10th Street and Martin Luther King Drive. It will triple the size of its facility near Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where Stacey Bennett is a nurse.

It’s the 13th year for the ball, which has been moved to the Wally Allen Ballroom to accommodate the hopedfor crowd. Bennett will be the svelte debonair one with the handsome wife on his arm — but don’t expect to hear him making a speech.

“Anybody that knows me knows I ain’t doing it,” he says. “I don’t face challenges anymore. I dodge ’em.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Ed Bennett

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Oct. 27, 1960, Benton, Ill.

FAVORITE TYPE OF CHOCOLATE: I rarely eat chocolate.

SCARIEST RODEO MOMENT: My roping partner caught his hand in his rope and nearly cut his thumb off. By the time I drove him to Lourdes Hospital in Paducah, Ky., I was so sick from seeing blood they admitted both of us.

BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT THE INSURANCE BUSINESS: I deal with disasters daily. People think it won’t happen to them. It can.

ACHIEVEMENT I’M PROUDEST OF: Raising my daughter.

I DRIVE a 2015 BMW X5

BEST ADVICE I EVER RECEIVED: Live within your means.

LAST BOOK I READ was Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham.

FAVORITE PLACE TO WALK: The beaches of northwest Florida.

MY WIFE THINKS I’M OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and she’s probably right.

GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY: Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and Jerry Jeff Walker.

ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE ME: Lucky

High Profile on 02/07/2016

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