After 47 years in the lender-placed insurance business, SUI’s Mike Chapman will retire at the end of the year.
Mike, who is the Product Manager, Information Technology at SUI, wraps up a brilliant and successful career in both community banking and insurance leadership.
His passion for community bank collaboration began when he was only 16 years old at Kistler Financial Insurance Group. What started as a summer job through high school and college would blossom into a lifelong adventure. After graduating college, Mike returned to Kistler in July 1977. He moved his way up in the ranks, eventually becoming minority shareholder in 1991 and president in 1992. Around a decade later Mike became full owner of the company.
In April 2017, Mike sold Kistler to OSC, SUI’s sister company, after a lifelong professional friendship with Larry Overby, one of OSC’s founders. In the same year, Steamboat Group (Breckenridge Group at the time), purchased SUI, which happened to be Mike’s competitor at Kistler.
“The first couple of years I was an employee of OSC,” Mike said, “and my job was to roll over the business that they purchased from my agency into their systems, getting everything together and converted. The decision was made – which was a very good decision – to blend my agency into SUI because both of those businesses were in the community bank market space.”
Many of his client relationships are still a part of SUI today.
Mike’s role at SUI included dashboards, measurements, and financial projects – all work that benefited from his extensive experience in this sector. He’s the “business guy” on an IT team, helping them choose and communicate the relevant information needed to display on various systems. These systems are vital in SUI’s daily loan tracking for lending institutions. The SUI IT team has already started these system implementations with OSC.
“SUI is what I was working so hard to become when I owned Kistler,” Mike added. “What SUI has been so good at for so long is the quality of the employees they have.”
Mike said having long-tenured employees alongside improved sales and profitability has helped SUI continue to grow while staying a great business.
“I think I’ve made good contributions and given all that I might be able to help them with,” Mike said. “Now they’re going to keep running with it. And I’m going to the airport to take a trip.”
Everyone at the company wishes Mike the absolute best in his retirement adventures. Thank you for all you have done to make SUI, OSC, and Steamboat Group successful, Mike! You will be missed.
