The Salty Adjuster

Casual Professionals, Chronically Unhinged. Certified Professional Chaos Understander. Claims People Crying Uncontrollably. We’re pretty sure CPCU stands for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter, but we have some proposals. Salty objects to “crying uncontrollably” because you have to be able to turn it off when the phone rings. In this Grains of Salty episode, Associate Producer Heather Blevins, our resident Insurance Rebel and an actual CPCU, gets Salty and Producer Brett ready for In2Risk in Las Vegas next week. It’s Salty’s first Vegas trip beyond the airport, and Heather is responsible for getting us invited. Please direct all risk assessment questions to her. Heather shares how chasing a trip to Hawaii led to a designation and a community that changed her career, why you don’t need those four letters to get involved, and how mentoring and connections can put your name in rooms you haven’t entered yet. We also cover comfortable shoes, depleted social batteries and a proposed CPCU dinosaur mascot with an endorsement for its fourth appendage. Headed to In2Risk? Come find us. We’re friendly, curious and apparently someone’s acceptable risk.

“Once you get that binder, once you get the policy, that’s your ticket to dance. That’s not the end of the relationship, that’s the very beginning of it.” Matthew Struck joins Salty and Producer Brett to talk about what happens after the sale, when coverage meets a catastrophe and someone is counting on you to help them get their life back. The insurance broker, entrepreneur and Ungovernable podcast host traces his unlikely path from biomedical engineering to building an agency from scratch. He shares what Hurricane Sandy taught him about the business, why brokers and adjusters need to understand each other’s work, and how good advocacy can move a claim forward without adding another person yelling into the phone. We also get into the cost of owning your own business, an industry that keeps poaching talent while expecting someone else to train it, and what Matthew learned by questioning his own assumptions. Plus: an emergency penguin rescue, a wildly underfunded movie pitch and a Nirvana entrance worthy of an insurance conference. Come as you are. Bring your questions. And please don't forget to vote for The Salty Adjuster in the Signal Awards! Signal Listener's Choice

“The people that are busy telling you they’re important usually aren’t that good.” Alex Bond spends his days helping InsurTech businesses hire leaders. He’s picked up a few things about the ones people actually want to work for. The FinPro founder, recruiter and Leadership in Insurance podcast host joins Salty and Producer Brett for a candid conversation about why people leave jobs, what “we work hard and play hard” might be hiding, and the trouble with founders who decide they’ve mastered insurance before hiring anyone who’s worked in it. We talk about curiosity, ego and choosing a career that fits your own definition of success. Alex also shares what he’s learned from supporting women in InsurTech, including why women keep getting asked about motherhood and imposter syndrome when they came to talk about their expertise. Then we hand him three hires to build his InsurTech dream team. He names names, risks some friendships and gives us a little MySpace Top 8 drama. Plus: why he’d keep podcasts and put LinkedIn in the bin, the interview question worth asking, and a compelling case for hiring a velociraptor to run compliance.

An insurance broker, a hurricane and an aquarium full of penguins. Naturally, we’re trying to get Tom Hardy involved. Matthew Struck joins Salty and Producer Brett with a Hurricane Sandy story involving a failing generator, an emergency gasoline run he nearly had to make and penguins he absolutely could not let down. Within minutes, we’re pitching a rescue movie with laser guns, Terminators and a suspicious resemblance to Mad Max meets Operation Dumbo Drop. Get a taste of our conversation with Matthew, then catch the full episode (S2E7) of The Salty Adjuster coming tomorrow. Tom Hardy, your people can call our people. Love our goofy trailers? PLEASE vote for us in the Signal Awards people's choice for BEST TRAILER! We are honored to be a finalist and need your help to take home the gold.Vote here: Signal Listener's Choice

“I had no idea that just showing up to work, a smile on my face, was doing anything but masking my own pain and my own agony.” Natalie Arroyave was a teenager rebuilding her life after Hurricane Katrina when someone told her that her presence had helped save their life. She hadn’t known what they were going through. They hadn’t known the full weight of what she was carrying, either. That experience stayed with her. So did losing her family’s home, which sat under 13 feet of water for three weeks. Years later, she pursued claims because she knew what it felt like to be the person who had lost everything. For World Mental Health Day, we’re sharing “After the Storm,” our conversation with Natalie about mental health, claims and showing up for each other. Natalie is a Certified General Adjuster, president of the Louisiana Claims Association, a RISE mentor and Baton Rouge ambassador, and the host of Adjuster Hour. Her show began with an hour she set aside every day for her adjusting crew to ask questions, work through claims and get to know one another. She and Salty talk about the loneliness of fieldwork, burnout and what happens when you’re struggling but don’t know whether it’s safe to tell your manager. They also get specific about support: making time for your team, helping with an overwhelming workload and taking their concerns seriously. There are laughs along the way. Salty immediately calls the collaboration “The Salty Adjuster Hour,” and they compare notes on roof arguments, deleted email responses and why Natalie wants absolutely nothing to do with your crawl space. Read Natalie's moving post about suicide prevention which we reference throughout the episode, here: https://lnkd.in/p/gS85X4Se And if you'd like to vote for The Salty Adjuster in The Signal Awards as referenced during the show's commercial, here is the link to do so. https://bit.ly/3U7kBrf⁠ We appreciate each and every one of you!

"If you want to be treated as a trusted advisor, act like a trusted advisor. Even if it’s detrimental or if it’s risky for you.” Tell clients the bad news early. Know their business. Return the call. And when a claim happens, be there. Chris Poveromo , president of the brokerage division at Poms & Associates , joins Salty and Producer Brett to talk about the everyday work that earns a broker the next call, the next referral and the client’s trust. Chris once swore he’d never follow his dad into insurance. Twenty-five years into the business, he shares what separates a great broker from an average one: understanding a client’s industry, preventing losses and helping them through the claims that can turn their business upside down. We talk about giving clients months of warning before a difficult renewal, why empathy can mean pushing someone toward an uncomfortable decision and how AI helps Chris ask better questions. He also gets candid about brokerage consolidation, investing in producers and why Poms is committed to staying private. Plus: his former life as a baseball umpire, why preparation now beats instinct and a dinosaur name that takes the whole team to figure out. Enjoy our conversation with Chris Poveromo of Poms & Associates.

“If I have a friend who is eating, I see has a pack of Starbursts and I ask for one and they hand me a yellow, they’re not the friend I thought they were.” She’s new here, but she already knows where she stands. Assistant Producer Sophia Fouse joins Salty and Producer Brett for a family episode about how Team Salty came together, what 32 episodes taught us and becoming a Signal Awards finalist in our first four months. First, the origin story: Sophia moved to Chicago looking for opportunities. Brett and Salty walked into the restaurant where she was serving, looking for lunch. One conversation and a handwritten exchange of contact information later, we had a new teammate. Then Sophia turns the questions on us. We revisit the conversation with Precious Norman Walton , for which the trailer became a Signal Awards finalist. We also talking openly about how grief matters to listeners and what it felt like to realize people we’d never met were listening. And, if you've EVER dreamed of starting your own podcast, we give you the full scoop from both Salty's and Producer Brett's perspectives. One of them says "DO IT" and the other's answer is a little more complex. You might be surprised by what you learn. “I also once worked in the produce department of a grocery store and I don’t eat fruits or vegetables.” — Salty Naturally, we finish with cereal theology, Starburst loyalties, dinosaurs and rapid-fire answers that are absolutely not rapid, plus the worst thing Starbucks has ever called Brett. Welcome to our chosen Salty family, Sophia. Pink Starbursts are on us. Support Team Salty by voting for The Salty Adjuster in the Signal Awards HERE ( https://bit.ly/3U7kBrf ) , and PLEASE subscibe and follow the show wherever you listen. Have a rapid-fire question for us? Send it to thesaltyadjuster@gmail.com .

Welcome to Season 2 and to our new "minisode" series "Grains of Salty: Behind the Episode." Going forward, these five minute snippets will capture Team Salty's reaction to pivotal conversations. Today, Assistant Producer Sophia interviews Salty and Producer Brett on being named Signal Award Finalists in the "Best Trailer" category. If you didn't listen to the episode that earned them these accolades, go back and revisit Season 1: Episode 20 "Lament" with Precious Norman Walton here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5nRgHRnD0pYsjpsjuIVpEq?si=Cg9rfEOgRGaVvz_XvbLJwQ Salty reflects on why this particular episode is the one he's the proudest of, and Producer Brett gives the details behind assembling the trailer that earned the nomination. Speaking of the Signal Awards... We need your support to take home the GOLD! You can vote here (please do!): https://bit.ly/3U7kBrf

“I don’t have to know everything. I just have to know where to go to get the answers.” — Chris Stanley That’s one of the most valuable things Chris Stanley learned during six months of training with his father-in-law. He was 20, working at Walmart distribution and learning auto damage appraising four days a week. He’d never even changed his own oil. Eighteen years later, he’s helping other people get their start. Chris is the founder of IA Path , which has certified about 700 appraisers, and the author of 32 books. Those include the Independent Adjuster’s Playbook and the Burned Out Adjuster’s Playbook, co-written with fellow Season 2 guest Chris Casaleggio. He also travels full time with his wife and three boys between a sailboat and a converted school bus. In this hour-long conversation, Chris, Salty and Producer Brett get into what it takes to build a claims career and why the industry makes it harder than it needs to be. We talk about: • The experience catch-22. Companies want someone with two to five years under their belt. Who’s supposed to train that person? • Confidence without pretending. Knowing when to ask questions, where to find answers and why admitting you don’t know something can make you better at the job. • The “fossil workforce.” What years of repetition, difficult files and pressure teach experienced insurance professionals, and how to pass that knowledge along. • “Bench and burn.” Keeping capable people in the same seat because they’re too useful there, then wondering why they leave. • The human skills that matter. Recognizing candidates who can listen, communicate and help someone through a terrible day. • AI and your own voice. Chris shares what happened when he experimented with AI-assisted writing and the boundaries he set afterward. • Mentorship that actually teaches. Making the knowledge in someone’s head useful to the next person doing the work. And despite having an author and mentor in the room, Salty makes his own position clear: “I’m not the guy you come to for wise sayings.” Fortunately, we booked Chris.PLEASE SHOW YOUR LOVE FOR THE SALTY ADJUSTER by voting for us in the Signal Awards: https://bit.ly/3U7kBrf

“The insurance industry doesn’t have a talent problem. It really has a taste problem.” — Chris Stanley Chris Stanley has a question for the insurance industry: If you’ve found someone you want on your team, why not teach them claims? The IA Path founder, author and independent adjuster mentor joins Salty and Producer Brett to talk about the people getting overlooked while companies keep searching for candidates with all the right experience. People who have paid for their own training, earned their licenses and put in the work, only to be told they won’t even get an interview. Meanwhile, the person standing in a flooded home needs someone who can listen, explain what happens next and answer basic questions about their coverage. Their first question probably isn’t about your AI efficiency metrics. “That’s the hard part to find, is the good human in the room,” Chris says. In this trailer, we talk about recognizing that person, giving them a chance and taking responsibility for teaching the skills we keep insisting everyone should already have. The full episode with Chris Stanley drops later today on The Salty Adjuster!

“I don’t think you’re as salty as everyone says.” Well. We’re back. And we're a SIGNAL AWARD FINALIST! You can vote for us right here (please do!). After a two-week hiatus, The Salty Adjuster is kicking off Season 2 with author Chris Casaleggio, who wasted approximately 30 seconds before questioning the entire premise of this podcast. According to Chris, property adjusters might be “lightly salted.” Coming from auto liability, he considers his people “more heavily salted.” Brett’s interpretation: “He just said you’re not salty enough.” Once Salty recovered, we actually talked about careers. Chris is a longtime claims professional, forensic expert and six-time author. His newest book, Claims Crossroads: Fresh Starts, Smart Pivots & New Paths for Adjusters , explores something we care a lot about on this show: where a career in claims can take you. (You can find his entire collection of books at Because, as Chris puts it, “Adjusters are professional problem solvers who happen to work in insurance.” Investigation. Negotiation. Writing. Conflict management. Decision making when you don’t have perfect information. Those skills travel. Chris and Salty talk about career pivots, lateral moves, mentorship, networking, taking the files that scare you, what actually gets people promoted and the seven things Chris wishes he’d done differently in his own career. We also get the most insurance-specific dinosaur answer we’ve heard yet: Triceratops. Three horns. Coverage, liability and damages. The Salty Adjuster is back for Season 2. “The Times They Are A-Changin’: Author Chris Casaleggio on Where a Career in Claims Can Take You.” Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

“Adjusters are professional problem solvers who happen to work in insurance.” Chris Casaleggio has spent his career in claims, serves as a forensic expert and regional director at MC Consultants, and has written six books about the profession, including his newest, Claims Crossroads: Fresh Starts, Smart Pivots & New Paths for Adjusters . So when he says adjusters may underestimate just how transferable their skills are, he knows what he’s talking about. Investigation. Negotiation. Writing. Conflict management. Making decisions when the information is incomplete and the stakes are real. In this preview of The Salty Adjuster, Chris and Salty talk about where those skills can take you, from underwriting and learning and development to insurtech, consulting and, apparently, podcasting. Season TWO of our show kicks off on Wednesday 9/30! Don't miss it.

"I don’t like this.” - Salty What happens when you let (aka “are bullied into letting”) your guest ask you the rapid fire questions instead? The Salty Adjuster found out the hard way when Morgan Blocher pulled off a hostile takeover. Is soup cereal? Does the color gray go with… other gray? Turns out everybody’s got salty opinions. ICYMI, here’s an excerpt from Season 1 Episode 30, our BrokerTech Connect MEGASODE. Want YOUR chance to grill The Salty Adjuster AND Producer Brett ? We will be doing a Reddit AMA on 10/19. Details coming SOON so follow us on Reddit here: https://lnkd.in/deNi565N

🌹 “We tend to compare our everyday selves to what we see and what we think is real with people we put on a pedestal... we’re comparing our everyday to their best day.” — ⁠ Rose Hall, PE , RH Business Ventures, LLC Rose Hall has spent a career doing some pretty impressive things. She’s an engineer. An insurance and construction veteran. An innovation strategist. Her last three roles, inside of carriers and out, were jobs she helped create herself. But #RosesRenaissance has also been about letting people see more than the resume. On this episode of The Salty Adjuster, Rose talks about career reinvention, long COVID, authenticity and why she’s willing to share the hard parts alongside the accomplishments. We also get appropriately salty about one of insurance’s favorite words: innovation. Rose’s definition? “Creating new value where it didn’t exist before.” An idea isn’t innovation. A shiny new piece of technology isn’t automatically innovation. And sometimes innovation means being willing to admit something didn’t work, learn from it and change direction. Salty also shares some of his own mental health story and recommends Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “ Richard Cory ,” a poem that fits remarkably well with Rose’s point about comparing our everyday lives to someone else’s best day. And the conversation continues at ITC Vegas. Headed to ITC? On Tuesday, Sept. 29, Rose will moderate “From Reactive to Resilient: How Tech is Rewriting the Rules of Risk,” alongside Valkyrie Holmes of Faura, Christina Villena of Hanover Insurance and Peter Mielert of The Hartford. Don't miss it, and don't miss following #RosesRenaissance on Linkedin.

“Conversations with real human beings are so much more valuable than applications.” — Josh Fischer The claims job market is weird right now. Experienced adjusters are applying to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of jobs and hearing nothing. Recruiters are getting buried under hundreds of applications for a single opening. Hiring managers are struggling to find the right people. And somehow everyone involved thinks the process sucks. So we brought in Josh Fischer , founder of and recruiter at Kru Talent Group and host of Claims Recruiter Office Hours, to talk about what actually works. Josh joins Salty and Brett to dig into why blindly applying for more jobs may be making your search worse, how to build relationships before you need them, the value of your existing network and what adjusters should know about LinkedIn, recruiters and the infamous green Open to Work banner. They also get into career pivots, burnout and overloaded claims desks, why adjusters may be overlooking skills that can take them far beyond traditional claims roles, and Josh’s goal of helping 100 people land jobs in 2026. Plus: cover letters are dead, Salty would like a $200,000 remote job with a company car, and Josh actually did research before answering the dinosaur question. Listen to Josh’s Claims Recruiter Office Hours every Tuesday and connect with him on LinkedIn.

“I guess the question that’s probably on all of our listeners’ minds is: How does The Salty Adjuster show up to a conference with his face?” Episode 30 of The Salty Adjuster takes us to BrokerTech Ventures ' BrokerTech Connect in Chicago (8/31-9/2), the pod's first major trade show event and Salty’s first ever insurtech trade show. Turns out an anonymous podcast host can move through a conference pretty easily when, to everyone else in the elevator, he's just a normal dude. We recap Salty and Producer Brett's experience before sharing three of our chats from the show with Advance CEO Omer Rimoch (14:39), Advance Director of Sales Morgan Blocher (30:13), and RevUp's Marissa Buckley (44:52). “How are we still pushing so many papers, literal physical papers?” Omer Rimoch, co-founder and CEO of Advance, came to insurance from FinTech and found an industry talking about AI while still dealing with checks, trust accounts, manual reconciliation and customers asking for invoices through physical mail. We talk about the “boring plumbing” underneath insurance and why some of the least sexy problems may be the ones most worth solving. “If I am the smartest person in that room, I’m in the wrong room.” Advance Director of Sales Morgan Blocher talks mentorship, relationships and why “garbage in, garbage out” still applies when everyone wants to throw AI at a problem. Then she and Producer Brett "bully" Salty into being on the receiving end of some spicy rapid fires. “[Adjusters have] got great instinct that can’t be coded.” RevUp Studios’ Marissa Buckley joins Salty to unpack the Wired story reporting that 98% of Glassdoor reviews from claims adjusters mentioning AI were negative. They get into what happens when companies roll out technology without enough training, communication or investment in the humans expected to use it, and why bringing frontline adjusters into the process early can save a whole lot of pain later. And because apparently this is still The Salty Adjuster: “I guess cereal could be a form of soup. It’s like a crunchy gazpacho.” Episode 30. Live from BrokerTech Connect. It got serious. It got... soupy? It got salty. Enjoy.

How does an anonymous podcast host attend and cover a trade show? We're spilling the salt. The Salty Adjuster team had an absolute blast at BrokerTech Connect in Chicago Aug. 31 - Sept. 2, where we recorded minisodes with Omer Rimoch , CEO of Advance; his colleague Morgan Blocher, Director at Advance and long-time friend of Producer Brett; and the one and only Marissa Buckley of RevUp. This tailer teases our forthcoming episode (our 30th!!! We can't believe it either), dropping first thing Monday, 9/14.

“You don’t have to be an insurance person to be successful in insurance. It certainly helps, but you should acknowledge what you understand and what you don’t understand.” — Chris Luiz Chris Luiz has seen enough insurtech pitches to know the difference between a founder who has done the homework and one who thinks insurance is an industry just waiting for technology to come save it. As the founder of Scout Insurtech , Chris has built a community around connecting insurance leaders, founders and emerging technology in a decidedly different way. Scout has no expo floor. You literally cannot pay Chris to put you on stage. And what started with buying insurance people beers has grown into one of the industry’s most talked-about events. In “this episode,” Chris joins The Salty Adjuster for a wide-ranging conversation packed with advice for anyone building, buying or working with insurance technology. Founders, take notes. Chris gets into some must-hear do’s and don’ts: know the specific problem you solve, understand where you fit in this enormous industry, be realistic about the carriers you can actually land, surround yourself with people who know what you don’t, and ask a LOT of questions. He also takes on the current AI frenzy, explains why “we serve all of insurance” is a major red flag, talks about emerging areas of risk he believes deserve more attention and shares why he thinks technology could fundamentally reshape traditional insurance career paths. And then there’s LinkedIn. Chris hates reply bots. Like, publicly-threaten-to-eviscerate-them hates reply bots. Naturally, Salty and Producer Brett relate. Plus: hate mail, why insurance conferences need fewer sales pitches and better conversations, the future of human relationships in an increasingly automated industry, swearing at your LLM, and which dinosaur Chris would invite to Scout. It turns out the answer to a lot of what Chris believes about insurance, technology and community comes back to one thing: Real Connection.

“What part of the industry do you serve? ‘We serve all of it.’ Okay, that’s a pretty aggressive stance. What problem are you focusing on? ‘Oh, we can do anything.’ It’s like, well, you’re literally dead in the water.” — Chris Luiz If you've listened to any of The Salty Adjuster thus far, you know we love a claimstech founder who has done the work to understand the adjuster ecosystem. We don't so much love when outsiders come in uneducated with tech prescriptions for problems they have never had to face. Chris Luiz sees a lot of InsurTech startups. As the founder of Scout InsurTech , he’s become one of the industry’s sharpest eyes for spotting which founders understand the insurance market, which ideas have real potential, and which pitches start falling apart as soon as you ask a few questions. In this trailer for his upcoming episode of The Salty Adjuster, Chris gives us some of his biggest red and green flags. 🚩 “We serve all of insurance.” 🚩 “We can do anything.” 🚩 A target list that is basically the biggest carrier logos in the industry. Green flag behaviors? 🟢 Founders who know what they don’t know. 🟢 Teams that bring real insurance expertise into the room. 🟢 Startups with a specific problem, market and path to getting their first customers. 🟢 People who ask a lot of questions. Chris has spent years helping founders navigate insurance, building the Scout community and creating one of the industry’s most talked-about InsurTech events. And as you’ll hear in the full episode, he has some thoughts about AI, insurance conferences, LinkedIn reply bots and what the next generation of insurance companies might look like. Our full episode with Chris drops tomorrow, Tuesday, September 8. Enjoy the trailer.

What happens when two claims people meet on LinkedIn, become friends and decide risk management desperately needs to be more fun? You get Riskfetti . Sandy Avina and Angel Guerra both came up through claims before building careers in risk management, giving them a front-row seat to what happens when the textbook version of insurance collides with actual human beings. They also discovered they make a pretty damn good team. Angel is the big-picture, “why don’t we just do it?” half of the partnership. Sandy brings the details, the execution and some of the best comedic timing in insurance. Together, they wrote Riskfetti in six months and built something designed for the people actually doing the work, especially those who suddenly find themselves responsible for risk without a giant department or unlimited resources behind them. They join Salty and Producer Brett to talk about their claims roots, why risk managers shouldn’t be the “fun police,” the pathway to yes, why insurance has such a hard time educating people and the realities of managing risk that rarely make it into a textbook. There’s also Nick Fury, Darth Vader, a $2,000 vacuum cleaner, questionable mascot hygiene and perhaps the most convincing argument for starting the thing you keep talking about starting: “We’re on a floating rock hurtling through space. There’s no rules. We can write a book. Who’s gonna stop us?”