Max Thomas Kane

His transitory life as a military kid taught him to think on his feet and gave him the perseverance he’d need to become a change agent in the insurance business and for nonprofits like CARTI

“A lot of people don’t get involved because they don’t think they can make a difference, but the reality is, anything you can do to help somebody else is going to make a difference.”
“A lot of people don’t get involved because they don’t think they can make a difference, but the reality is, anything you can do to help somebody else is going to make a difference.”

Some people fear change and some people embrace it. And then there are some, like Tom Kane, who cause it.

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“He’s a thought leader,” said John Denery, executive vice president of Stephens Insurance and Tom Kane’s boss. “He’s very innovative, very handson with his clients.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Tom Kane

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Feb. 11, 1957, Heidelberg, Germany

FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY: The day my dad came home from the Vietnam War.

MY KIDS WOULD SAY I’M intentional.

I RELAX BY riding my bike.

I’D RATHER NOT wreck my bike. I have and it hurts!

IF I COULD CHANGE ONE THING ABOUT OUR COUNTRY, I’D get rid of all the hate and divisiveness.

MY BUCKET LIST INCLUDES: Cycling LAlpe d’ Huez in the French Alps with friends.

MY GO-TO SPOT FOR LUNCH: Capital Bar & Grill

BEST ADVICE FOR YOUNG BUSINESS ASSOCIATES: My dad told me, “Never be afraid to ask for a man’s business and never burn a bridge you don’t have to.”

FANTASY DINNER PARTY GUESTS: Thanksgiving with my parents, wife and kids. My mom never knew my wife and kids.

ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE ME: Contrarian

In the insurance business, Kane built up his own namesake agency, sold it to Stephens Insurance and is now focused on helping its clients reduce claims by encouraging their employees to lead healthier lives.

As a community leader, Kane has helped two nonprofits — CARTI and the Boys and Girls Club of Central Arkansas — tackle problems that threatened their very existence.

Change is motion, and it’s surely no coincidence that two of Kane’s passions — bicycling and snow skiing — involve plenty of it. Several mornings a week the 59-year-old rises before light, mounts his bike and gets in a 20-mile ride before many of us are up.

“Just being outside, moving fast,” Kane said of his fondness for cycling. “There’s a certain adrenaline rush.”

Cycling buddy John Johnson sees something else at work.

“He’s one of the most hardworking and competitive people I know,” said Johnson, a Pulaski County chief deputy prosecuting attorney. “He’s going to make you ride faster.”

And start on time, Johnson notes.

“I’ve been there on time, and I’ve been there early, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been there earlier than Tom.”

Kane’s ability to accept change probably goes back to his childhood in a military family.

“We traveled all over the world,” said Kane’s sister, Susan Patton, a professor of nursing at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Tom Kane was born in Heidelberg, Germany, and has lived in Korea, Greece, Virginia and Arkansas.

He was the youngest child and first son of Max and Josephine (known as Jo) Kane.

“He was always the apple of my parents’ eyes,” Patton, seven years older, said. “They would have kept on having children until they had a boy.”

Tom, in return, idolized his father. Max Kane enlisted in the Army during World War II, served in Korea and Vietnam and retired as a lieutenant colonel.

“I think Tom obviously learned a lot from him,” Patton said. “Traveling around and encountering people from different walks of life gives you an empathy and helps you in skills like negotiating.”

Kane says it wasn’t always easy being the new kid on the Army base.

“Typically the toughest kid would find you,” he says. “They had to re-establish the order. You learned to fight really well or develop friends really fast. I chose that I wanted to be friends really fast. Sometimes you didn’t get to make that choice.”

The transitions weren’t always smooth, his sister said.

“It seems like he was always getting in trouble right when we were moving. [Prior to the family’s move] from Virginia to Fayetteville, he climbed a tree and got stung by more than 100 bees and ended up in the hospital. He was just an active kid.”

When Tom was still in elementary school, reports of American casualties in Vietnam had become commonplace on the nightly news. When Jo Kane got word that the hotel in Saigon where her husband had been staying had been bombed, she had a nervous breakdown.

“It was a very difficult year for the family,” Kane said. “It was just a dark time in our lives.”

Jo Kane recovered and Max Kane retired from the Army in 1969, immediately beginning a second career in the insurance business with Blue Cross and Blue Shield. He rapidly worked his way up from salesman to vice president in the Little Rock office.

Tom Kane graduated from Parkview High School and went to UA, earning a business degree. His first job out of college was with Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Houma, La. “A bit of a rebel” in college, Kane found himself coaching a youth football team of kids from the rougher side of that town: the West Side Gators.

“A lot of people don’t get involved because they don’t think they can make a difference, but the reality is, anything you can do to help somebody else is going to make a difference.”

“We didn’t score a touchdown the first year,” he recalls. “We should have been called The Bad News Gators.”

Three years later, the Gators won a league championship. Kane said he never realized the significance until a team reunion 30 years later.

“They came up and told me what a difference I’d made in their lives,” he said. “It blew me away. A lot of people don’t get involved because they don’t think they can make a difference, but the reality is, anything you can do to help somebody else is going to make a difference.’

‘RETENTION IS CRITICAL’

Kane returned to Little Rock in 1984 for a job with Union Life, managing accounts for self-funded clients. That company changed hands in 1986 and Kane, then 29, decided to start his own agency, focusing on employee benefits.

“It was a struggle to get started,” he said. “Early on you’re just doing a lot of cold calling and just trying to get in front of people, get their basic information and present a proposal.”

After a couple of would-be partners didn’t work out, the business eventually settled into The Kane Agency, with eight employees and offices in Little Rock and Fayetteville serving more than 100 employer clients. Kane said the key to success was “perseverance. A lot of the revenue is low-level commissions. When you get a new client, it’s not suddenly a source of wealth. But if you keep adding clients for 10 or 15 years, the revenue stream builds up. Retention is critical.”

Kane turned down an offer to sell his agency to Brown & Brown, a Florida-based insurance company. But when that company’s Chief Executive Officer Marty Rhodes moved to Stephens Insurance and made a similar offer in 2005, Kane closed the deal quickly. Stephens “was the only entity I would consider selling my agency to,” Kane said.

“First of all, you need to understand Stephens,” Kane, a senior vice president at Stephens, said. “It is a rich part of Arkansas history. Plus, they’re large, with a lot of resources but privately held. And a lot of my friends worked there.”

The toughest part of the decision: giving up his Fayetteville office, a space on Dickson Street with his name on the building and French doors that opened to a view of Old Main.

Fayetteville is also where he drove on a nine-hour blind date with his wife-to-be, Rebecca, to see the Razorbacks basketball team play Alabama the same year they won a national championship. “Our relationship got off to a pretty good start,” he says with a smile.

Along with Matthew, 29, Kane’s son from his first marriage, he and Rebecca have two children: Claire, a sophomore at Davidson College in North Carolina, and Max, a sophomore at Little Rock Catholic High School. Rebecca Kane is an assistant attorney general for Arkansas. Matthew lives in Denver.

Kane has been around while Stephens Insurance grew from about a dozen employees to 150, making it the largest privately held full-service broker in the state. As an employee rather than owner, Kane says he sometimes misses “calling all the shots” and other times is glad he doesn’t have to. “My role hasn’t changed that much,” he said. “When you’re the principal in a firm that size, you’re going to be the top producer and sales person also. I’m not making any managerial type decisions anymore, I’m just working with clients and getting things done.”

Much of what he’s trying to do is to shift the focus from traditional insurance to risk management — for instance, helping employers identify employees with chronic or poorly managed diseases and give them incentives to make better health decisions.

“He’s a thought leader,” said John Denery, executive vice president of Stephens Insurance and Kane’s boss. “He’s very innovative, very hands-on with his clients.”

Says Kane: “It’s not so much about changing costs, it’s about changing lives.”

Kane served several terms on the board of CARTI during the period when the organization moved from providing radiation therapy for cancer patients to offering a broad range of treatment.

CHANGING

A BUSINESS MODEL

“It was a business model that didn’t really fit the future,” CARTI President and Chief Executive Jan Burford said of the nonprofit’s old approach. “We basically changed our business model, which most [organizations] don’t do that very often. Tom was very instrumental in that whole process.”

Burford called Kane “the sort of board member you love to have. He could serve on any committee — finance, strategy, executive — because he understood all aspects of business.”

He also wasn’t afraid of upsetting the status quo. In 2013, CARTI joined with other providers to open a $90 million, 170,000-square-foot center in west Little Rock. Kane had left the board but not before pushing the project in that direction.

“It was difficult because there were a lot of people in the community that didn’t want us to change, who saw us as becoming competitors,” Kane said. “There were some very interesting meetings.”

Kane has served on the board of the Boys and Girls Club of Central Arkansas for six years. Currently chairman, he used the position to get the number of board members reduced from 50 to 25. The organization also reduced the number of clubs it runs to six, turning one North Little Rock site back to that city’s parks and recreation department to conserve resources. As with the size of its board, the organization was operating more clubs than other cities its size.

Today, Kane said, “We are significantly better off financially than we were a year ago.”

Which doesn’t mean he’s anywhere near finished trying to drum up support. A July 12 fundraiser at Cache restaurant in the River Market District is one of several events designed to highlight the organization’s 100th anniversary.

“We’re crafting a message and trying to get it out in front of the community,” he said. “You know, there are several thousand kids we touch every day. You can’t ignore these kids, because the cost of ignoring them is a lot higher.”

The heart of that message is that the club serves educational purposes, rather than just being a place where kids go to play ball. This summer, for instance, the clubs plan to offer STEM (referring to education geared toward science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs.

“The whole idea is if you can get a 7-, 8- or 9-year-old to conceptualize a career or job by gaining a specific skill, then they’ve got a path that many of them have never had, and part of that path is to stay in school,” Kane said.

“Tom has made a real focus on making sure our kids are ready for the next step after they leave us, either entering the workforce or furthering their education,” said Cindy Doramus, chief executive officer of the Central Arkansas club.

The clubs also promote summer reading, since studies show many children fall back in reading skills while school is out. The clubs also provide children snacks and meals that Kane says are sometimes “the last meal they’re going to get” that day.

ELEMENT OF PURPOSE

Kane’s life underwent a profound change in recent years.

“In 2013, I came to Christ in my life. And so that has changed a lot of who I am. I just think the way I look at the world is different than it used to be. I’m less judgmental about people. It just kind of helps me have more of an inner peace than I’ve had before.”

The experience happened with a friend in the living room of Kane’s home. Two days later, a fire did significant damage to the house. “Having that recent experience really gave me a lot of strength to get through the crisis,” he said.

He and his wife attend Our Lady of the Holy Souls Catholic Church, although Kane says he often feels his faith just as strongly “on my bike out in the country.”

That faith has added an element of purpose to a life that already seemed pretty purposeful.

“Once you have faith in your life, you realize you’re here for a reason,” Kane said. “Is that reason helping kids at Boys and Girls Clubs? Is it trying to help people lead healthier lives? I’m here for a reason. I’m just trying to figure out what it is.”

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