Word and brown orange

By Bill Quinnan
For O.C. Register Special Sections

The Word & Brown Companies joined the ranks of firms named to the Orange County Register’s Top Workplaces in 2012. Among the positive attributes cited by employees during the Top Workplaces selection process were the company’s corporate training program, companywide activities and team-building events.

“We’re very excited to be joining such an elite group of employers in Orange County,” said co-founder John M. Word III. “It means a lot to me and my co-founding partner, Rusty Brown, that our employees have such high regard for us and for our organization. We thank each and every one of them for contributing to our success in providing insurance services to brokers, individuals and businesses of all sizes for nearly 30 years.”

Headquartered in Orange, the Word & Brown is among the nation’s leaders in developing and offering innovative technology, health-benefit plan models, and sophisticated employee benefits services to companies of all sizes. The Word & Brown Companies work to connect consumers and businesses to individual and family insurance plans, Medicare plans and group-benefits solutions through licensed insurance brokers.

Currently, the organization provides services through more than 50,000 brokers to nearly 60,000 employers with nearly 6.5 million eligible employees, as well as hundreds of thousands of consumers nationwide.

Since its initial founding in 1985 as Word & Brown Insurance Administrators, the organization has built a reputation for providing brokers, carriers, employers, individuals, and families with access to quality insurance products and services, innovative sales tools, and technology to help them select a plan.

Within the organization are several individual companies: Word & Brown General Agency, a leader in developing and distributing health-benefit plan models and solutions to licensed brokers in California and Nevada; CHOICE Administrators, a national leader in developing and administrating employee-choice health benefit programs; CONEXIS, which providing benefits solutions to clients nationwide, with expertise in COBRA and HIPAA administrative services, direct-bill services, and flexible-benefits administration, including flexible-spending accounts and Section 132 commuter benefits; Quotit Corporation, an Internet-application service provider for the health-insurance/employee-benefits industry; and HealthCompare, which works with brokers and carriers to help individuals and families research, compare, buy and enroll in health-insurance plans.

Word & Brown’s history goes back to 1985, when Word and Edward J. “Rusty” Brown Jr. founded Word & Brown Insurance Administrators, which later became the Word & Brown General Agency.

Word had come California in the 1970s, where he obtained his broker’s license and began his career as a licensed insurance agent. Among his early innovations – well ahead of the introduction of personal computers – was a software tool for collating carrier plans and enabling brokers to assemble quotes electronically.

Brown began his career in the early 1970s as an agent for the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company in upstate New York, becoming one of the youngest producers ever to be honored with entry into the 119-year-old company’s President’s Honors Club. In 1980, Brown transferred to the West Coast to assume the role of sales manager for the firm’s office in Newport Beach.

Brown launched his own local general agency, Innovative Cost Concepts, in 1982, before meeting Word. The two joined forces to establish a new firm, which would develop and market innovative sales tools and quoting systems to assist brokers in delivering group health-plan options to small businesses. Two years later, Word & Brown Insurance Administrators became the largest independent small group health distributor in the nation, according to the firm.

In 1996, The Word & Brown Companies launched CaliforniaChoice, which quickly became a leading employee-choice benefit program for employers with 2 to 50 employees. In 2004, CaliforniaChoice51+ was introduced for employers with 51 to199 employees.

As the company’s growth and innovations continued, the co-founders earned an Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young in 2001.

More recent achievements for the firm include establishing two new divisions last year to help brokers address different facets of the insurance marketplace – the Word & Brown Individual Division, focusing on individual, Medicare, life, and ancillary coverage, and the Word & Brown Group Division, which focuses on employer-sponsored and voluntary group medical, life and ancillary insurance.

Word & Brown launched CHOICE Administrators in 2011 to focus on bundled and unbundled programs for health plans and state agencies moving toward implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2009, the organization introduced Joppel.com, a Web site to help individuals, family members, and caregivers research, compare, and enroll in the Medicare plans.

Bill Quinnan is a freelance writer who lives in Orange County. Readers can send e-mail to him at bquinnan@sbcglobal.net. Bill cannot provide job leads.

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