Roger Sandau
_________________
The Dimensions of a Dream
Tap tap tap, went the ruler on the shining
wood of the piano. Roger Sandau peered up
begrudgingly at his instructor, a stern woman
whose face and demeanor wore a permanent
scowl. He tried to keep his playing in time with
her metronomic tapping, but truth be told, he
found little gratification in the task. The young
boy loved to watch his father play, taken with the
immediacy of the creation of music before his very
eyes, but did not enjoy the task himself. It wasn’t
until the age of thirteen, when he sat down to play
at a friend’s house and was immediately
surrounded by dreamy-eyed girls,
that his perception of the art changed.
“I realized the ability to play music
has an attraction to people and
creates an emotion in the audience
that is unlike anything else,” he
remembers.
“I suddenly saw it
possessed the unique ability to
transcend
cultural,
linguistic,
geographic, and social boundaries.”
Now the CEO of Doodson Insurance
Brokerage LLC, Roger has created the
opportunity to build his career
around his passion—though not
exactly in the way he originally
planned.
After igniting his flair for playing and
composing as a young teen, he started his
freshman year of college with a roommate who,
much to his delight, had been a traveling musician.
“He was the first person I had ever met who had
actually made a record,” Roger marvels. The
relationship allowed him to bridge the mental gap
between goal and reality, and suddenly a light
went off.
After meeting people who had
successfully navigated the music business and
seeing that it was possible to put out a record,
Roger wanted to be a musician.
With this vision clear in his mind, he
graduated college and left town for San Francisco,
where he joined a band and played every
opportunity that came his way in the hopes of
being discovered. Despite this total immersion,
however, he eventually found that success was not
happening as fast as he had hoped or expected.
Instead of abandoning his dream, Roger instead
set about redrafting his mental blueprints. Noting
that the music business was largely run by
lawyers, he decided to go to law school while
continuing to play. The strategy bought him three
more years to pursue his dream while also
developing a career that would be a good entry
point into the business if his Plan A didn’t pan out.
When he hadn’t realized a record deal by the time
of his graduation and completion
of the bar exam, his brief career as a
professional musician ended and
his new career as an entertainment
lawyer commenced.
Following a decade of
representing musicians, concert
promoters, record companies and
music
publishers,
Roger
transitioned from his legal practice
to the insurance industry, upon
discovering the existence of
specialized insurance products
designed for the music and touring
industries. In 1995, by a purely
fortuitous stroke of curiosity and luck, he
answered a classified ad in an entertainment
magazine to work with a popular musical group
known as The Three Tenors. Luciano Pavarotti,
among the most commercially successful tenors to
date, was one of its members. The musicians
invested considerable funds each time they
performed a show, always aiming to present a
stadium-quality performance but also wary of the
high cost and impossibility of rescheduling a show
should something go wrong. Thus, Roger sought
to ensure that they had proper coverage for such
financial risks. “It was truly a turning point for
me,” he remembers. “If I hadn’t gotten involved
with them, I wouldn’t have developed an
appreciation for this unique aspect of the insurance
industry.”
Roger Sandau
Several years later, as The Three Tenors
approached retirement, Roger found himself
looking for an interim career move amidst the
boom of the dot-come era. Struck by the idea of
using the internet to sell wedding insurance, he set
about researching. The concept was not yet widely
available in the US, but it had a proven track
record as an insurance product in the UK, so he
signed deals with two major wedding portals and
launched the company that would broaden his
experience of the insurance industry. WedSafe
became one of the first companies to sell insurance
products online, developing all the technology to
deliver their services through electronic means.
Though
solid
in
its
initial
conceptualization, the fall of the dot-come era left
WedSafe unsellable in 2001. “With the devastation
and uncertainty caused by the events of 9/11, the
insurance industry was a mess, and we wrestled
with keeping an insurance carrier to support the
program,” Roger recalls.
Political and social
context improved, however, and the company was
finally acquired in 2005 by a Fortune 250 company
called Aon. Through this experience, he was
appointed CEO of Robertson Taylor Insurance
Brokers, becoming deeply enmeshed in the music
and touring insurance business. After running
Robertson Taylor for over four years, he departed
to work as the Chief Operating Officer of an
insurance captive for a short time and then
decided to set up his own insurance brokerage
firm. Thus, Crossfields Insurance Brokerage, LLC,
was born.
Rather than building a large specialty
infrastructure, his business model focused on
constructing a fabric of strategic partnerships with
outside firms. Strong client relationships were the
cornerstones of the enterprise, and this model
enabled him to service particular client needs
without having to build specific infrastructure for
each type of coverage need. Such needs generally
included niche insurance products applicable to
the entertainment, sports, and leisure industries,
such as non-appearance and event cancellation
coverage, high limit disability coverage, contract
bonus coverage, and an assortment of commercial
insurance products as well.
After building Crossfields into a
prominent player in the US music and
entertainment insurance industry, Roger was
approached by Arthur Doodson Brokers Ltd, a
leading independent insurance brokerage firm in
the United Kingdom founded in 1964 and
specializing in entertainment.
The firm had
created an umbrella organization known as
Doodson Broking Group to represent the various
companies in which they held majority or full
ownership. Through a number of acquisitions, the
organization had come to house three different UK
firms, which currently sit somewhere along the
continuum of absorption into Arthur Doodson
Brokers. The company was looking to expand into
the US and was familiar with Roger’s background
with Robertson Taylor, their most significant
competitor in the UK. They contacted Roger with
the hopes of integrating Crossfields into their
business, with Roger himself spearheading the
growth of Arthur Doodson on the US. Thus, in
early 2010, the company merged with Crossfields
to create an international live music and
entertainment
insurance
enterprise,
and
Crossfields changed its corporate name to
Doodson Insurance Brokerage, LLC, to reflect its
status as a fully-owned subsidiary of the
corporation.
The opportunity to merge Crossfields with
Doodson Broking Group was the perfect
opportunity arriving at the perfect time for Roger,
granting him the capacity to, for example, work
with the largest concert promoter in the world. It
also provided him with immediate liquidity of his
equity in the company, which posed a tremendous
advantage. Furthermore, it afforded the possibility
of leaving a larger global footprint, serving
international clients he might have otherwise
lacked the capacity to handle. Crossfields had
reached a point at which it needed a larger service
platform to work with more weighty and
expansive clients, while Doodson had reached a
point at which it had successfully transitioned
from an entrepreneurial single-owner business to a
multi-owner business while still maintaining its
status as a closely held corporation. Equipped
with a young and forward-facing management
team, Roger felt as though both businesses were
poised to truly pursue their growth through the
synergistic partnership.
If one were to go back in time and ask a
younger Roger where he projected his professional
path to lead, the chances of a reference to the
entertainment insurance industry are slim to none.
Yet it is precisely this unanticipated plot twist that
renders his story so compelling. While so many
young people give up on their dreams when
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area
reality confounds their options, Roger saw that
reality, though harsh, was not uncompromising.
Though his path did not go exactly as originally
planned, he has built a career that continues to
emulate the principles of music that first
impassioned him. “I grew up in a house where
my mother played the piano, so music has always
been a very tangible experience for me,” Roger
stresses. He observed how it brought people
together and allowed them to participate, and he
feels a similar sense of unity, engagement, and
immediacy when he promotes and witnesses live
performances today.
“It’s the same shared
experience and sense of community that draws
people to music and keeps the industry going
now,” he remarks.
Roger’s secret to success seems to be threefold. First, he advises an ongoing investment in
technical knowledge about your chosen field. This
is then supplemented by a true passion for the
information and work at hand. With these two
tools, individuals will be prepared to succeed in
whatever opportunity may arise. “As you go
through your career, you’ll be presented with
various opportunities through people that you
meet. Relationships lead to opportunities and you
can decide to either pursue a given opportunity, or
determine that it’s not right for you at the time,”
Roger advises.
Beyond this advice, Roger’s background
exhibits a resolve, resilience, and optimistic realism
that seem to be built into the very fabric of his
character. This is particularly fascinating in light
of the fact that his maternal grandparents were
Holocaust survivors and had a tremendously
challenging path through life, having struggled
through labor camps in Munich and then a
displaced persons camp in Germany.
After
witnessing one stillbirth and then one child who
died from the mass inoculations required before
immigrating to the US, they crossed the Atlantic to
a foreign land without speaking any English. “By
their very nature, they were survival people,”
Roger proclaims. “They were people who had
faced some of the greatest obstacles in life and had
persevered with diligence, hard work, prudence,
and tenacity. I see myself as continuing along this
trajectory, and whenever I’m facing obstacles, I
think of what my grandparents had to go through
and see that the challenges I’m facing aren’t that
formidable.”
This perspective is a valuable tool
whenever one pushes toward some form of
success, whether releasing a new piece of music
into the world or seeking to transform a company
through innovative theory and action.
“Our
greatest challenges and, conversely, our greatest
successes will always be taking an idea and seeing
how far it can go,” says Roger. “We create
something and then put it out there for people to
judge. The ability to do this is what advances the
world forward, and actually seeing the result of
your idea can be the greatest reward imaginable.”
Whether your dream is artistic, entrepreneurial,
business-oriented, or life-oriented, these universal
principles help ensure that, despite obstacles, we
allow our ideas and ourselves to achieve their full
potential.
© November 2010 Gordon J. Bernhardt. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission.
 By Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF®
About Gordon J. Bernhardt
President and founder of Bernhardt Wealth
Management and author of Profiles in Success:
Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the
Washington D.C. Area, Gordon provides financial
planning and wealth management services to affluent
individuals, families and business-owners throughout
the Washington, DC area. Since establishing his firm in
1994, he and his team have been focused on providing
high-quality service and independent financial advice to
help clients make informed decisions about their money.
For more information, visit www.BernhardtWealth.com
and Gordon’s Blog.
________________________
Roger Sandau
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area