2013 40 Under 40: Joshua Warren
Midwest Region Reprints
Vice president for global risk, technology, innovation and marketing
Equity Risk Partners Inc.
Age: 39
Joshua Warren, the Chicago-based vice president for global risk, technology, innovation and marketing at insurance brokerage and risk management consulting firm Equity Risk Partners Inc., got into the insurance industry by accident.
Mr. Warren said he was close friends with a family who owned an agency in the Chicago suburbs. He called the agency one day, asked for a job and had a job three days later.
When he started, he was surprised by how difficult working in insurance can be.
“From the day I came to work in this industry, it's been a constant learning curve,” he said. “It is definitely an industry where you must have a willingness to learn.”
A willingness to learn and be challenged has been very useful for Mr. Warren in his 15-year career. Mr. Warren was lucky to pair with a rapidly growing company like San Francisco-based Equity Risk Partners, he said. It has created a lot of opportunities for him since he was more of a generalist agent when he started his career.
Today, Mr. Warren works on bringing better services to clients and being able to respond to needs all over the globe, he said.
“Everything I'm working on has to do with making us a more efficient and more global organization,” he said.
Al Leonhardt, the vice president and chief financial officer of Peerless Industrial Group Inc., has been working with Mr. Warren for eight to nine years.
“He has always been attentive to our needs,” Mr. Leonhardt said in an email. “As he grew in his role with ERP, he began to look above and beyond what we were asking with just insurance needs and he started proactively to help us with other concerns.”
