2014 40 Under 40 Broker Awards: John D. Crowley
Northeast Region Reprints
Account executive
Cook Maran & Associates
Age: 38
Educating clients is a big part of any insurance broker's job, so the experience of teaching in New York's public school system made John Crowley a natural at selling insurance.
“The education aspect of it helped me tremendously with educating clients about changes going on in the industry — that aspect of it helped a lot” Mr. Crowley said.
Working with parents of children with greatly varying and sometimes challenging needs increased his level of comfort in speaking with prospective and existing clients.
“I would say the life experience helped tremendously,” said Mr. Crowley. “I think those people skills really helped me develop a skill set you would need to be in sales. That was really one of the best things I got out of teaching.”
Mr. Crowley is proud that he has lost only one account, a measure of his success in six years in the brokerage business.
“I think that the metric is the retention rate,” he said.
Mr. Crowley has been an account executive at Melville, New York-based Cook Maran since 2008.
“The customer is first with John,” said Victor Cangro, president of Cangro Industries Inc., a Farmingdale, New York-based power transmission equipment and bearing provider. “He jumps right on things.”
“What comes forward first with John is he's looking to help people,” said Mark Fitzgerald, director of sales at Cook Maran.
What Mr. Crowley likes best about the business “is the diversity of what I see on a daily basis. I am not tied down to a desk or a cubicle. ... I could be in a manufacturing facility one day, at a contractor's office the next day and at a job site for a contractor on the day after that,” he said.
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