What's Inside

Even in the best of circumstances, entrepreneurs face enormous challenges when starting from scratch. So imagine an African-American woman trying to succeed in the overwhelmingly white, male-dominated insurance industry of the 1950s. The odds, as you’d expect, were nearly insurmountable.

And yet, E.G. Bowman Co., founded by Ernesta Procope in 1953 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, thrives today as America’s largest minority- and woman-owned insurance brokerage. At its current address in lower Manhattan, the firm serves Brooklyn homeowners as well as dozens of Fortune 500 clients, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and small businesses by offering an array of property, auto, and commercial insurance products.

“It’s very difficult to find good people, so if you have good people, you can’t afford to lose them. You have to give them all the gingerbread you can find.”

C.J. Prince, a former editor of CEO Magazine, writes this column from her home in Maplewood, New Jersey.

In her youth, running an insurance brokerage was hardly the career Procope had in mind. A pianist whose prodigious talent earned her an appearance at Carnegie Hall when she was 13, Procope planned to perform professionally after finishing at Oberlin College. “But I realized I couldn’t feed myself by playing the piano,” she says. Her husband at the time, Albin Bowman, a successful real-estate broker, convinced her to study insurance so that she could learn the business and then insure his many properties.

Bowman’s unexpected death left Procope a young widow with an insurance broker’s license and some serious decisions to make. Looking around Bedford-Stuyvesant, she found an underserved community of homeowners. “There was a real void there,” she recalls. “There were beautiful brownstones, owner-occupied, and there was nobody to write insurance for them.” In 1953, the same year she married her second husband, John Procope, she founded her brokerage firm, E.G. Bowman, with the intent of bringing insurance providers into the neighborhood to write policies for its residents.

That turned out to be a tough sell. In the years leading up to the race riots of the 1960s, insurance companies were fearful of venturing into the largely African-American neighborhoods. “They believed what they saw in the papers,” says Procope, who solved part of the problem by hiring limousines to chauffeur insurance executives from one block to the next so they could see the brownstones for themselves. “They didn’t realize that Bedford-Stuyvesant had a substantial group of homeowners, middle-class blacks and whites, who deserved coverage. They were in complete shock.”

Business went well for a time. But as racial tensions escalated, increasingly nervous insurance companies began to bail out on the neighborhood, canceling as many as 90 of E.G. Bowman’s homeowner policies in a single day. It was a blow that might have felled a less-determined entrepreneur, but Procope refused to give up. “I decided I needed to see the governor,” Procope recalls. She met personally with Governor Nelson Rockefeller and explained the problem on behalf of herself and other insurance brokers whose businesses were in jeopardy. “I said, ‘If this continues, the banks will foreclose on these properties, and then we’re going to have a real problem. We’re talking about rioting now — what would happen if people were to lose their homes as a result of not having insurance?’ ”

Rockefeller got the message, and in 1968 the New York state legislature passed the nation’s first Fair Access to Insurance Requirements law, known as the FAIR Plan. By obligating insurance companies to write insurance for properties in areas they’d previously designated as red, or uninsurable, this legislation effectively eliminated redlining. “We were able to capture the policies that had been canceled,” she says.

Still, the limitations of brokering only personal insurance hindered the firm’s opportunity for growth, so Procope decided to expand into commercial insurance. At the time, the doors to large U.S. insurers weren’t swinging open for small, or even large, minority-owned firms; race was a formidable barrier to entry.

Procope’s firm got a break when it won a bid to provide insurance for the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, founded by Senator Robert Kennedy. “That project demanded the same kinds of coverage that an IBM or an Avon Products would need, so we really got our feet wet,” Procope recalls. With some commercial-insurance experience now under its belt, and thanks in part to the emergence of affirmative action, E.G. Bowman was able to get appointments to make formal presentations to Fortune 500 companies. “That didn’t guarantee anything, of course. You still had to prove you could handle a specific piece of business — but it helped us get in the door,” Procope notes, adding that her firm’s client-centered focus has always been a competitive advantage. “We try to service the hell out of an account. We try to give them real personal attention.” Procope was also realistic about what the firm could handle and succeeded by going after very specific portions of a client’s insurance portfolio.

In the early 1970s, Bowman was awarded its first major client by a risk manager at PepsiCo. By the end of the decade, Procope had added several others to the commercial roster. But there was yet another hurdle. Most of the area’s insurance companies were located across the bridge in downtown Manhattan. E.G. Bowman’s Brooklyn address was starting to become a problem. “We found that the corporate people didn’t want to come to Bedford-Stuyvesant,” Procope recalls. Realizing closer proximity to potential clients would be critical to growth, Procope decided to relocate to 97 Wall Street, a stone’s throw from the Exchange. E.G. Bowman became the first major African-American–owned business on the block and earned Ernesta Procope the nickname “First Lady of Wall Street.”

Soon after the move, new corporate clients signed on. As the firm grew, Procope conscientiously maintained her focus on personal client attention and employee satisfaction. “If you treat your people well, they’ll stay with you,” she says. That means offering perks such as extra days off around the holidays, for example, as rewards for jobs well done. “It’s very difficult to find good people, so if you have good people, you can’t afford to lose them. You have to give them all the gingerbread you can find.”

The war for talent has been a consistent thorn for E.G. Bowman, Procope notes. She blames the insurance industry, at least partly, for not doing all it can to attract young, talented people to the profession. “This has been my complaint to them over the years. I started telling the industry in 1979 that they have to step into the educational arena,” she says. “They have to let young people know that there are many opportunities within the industry.”

Though she’s won numerous awards over the years for both her success in the industry and her accomplishments as an entrepreneur — including the Woman of the Year award presented by First Lady Patricia Nixon at the White House in 1972 — Procope isn’t one to wax sentimental. Even in her 70s, she is pragmatic, dedicated, and still gunning for new business. Recently, the company’s direct-mail campaign, so successful from the ’70s into the ’90s, has lost some of its potency in a digital age and has had to switch gears to adapt to business in the new millennia. “We’re trying it now with email to see if that will help,” she says, adding that no matter how many clients a business has, it can never afford to stop selling. “You have to have all kinds of projects going to generate new business,” she says. “You can’t just sit back and service the old.”

Even after all these years of success, she notes, it’s still challenging to get in the door of a big corporate client, perhaps even more so since the effects of affirmative action have diminished greatly. “Sometimes the roadblocks are so strong you wonder how you can overcome them,” she says. But looking at the enormously successful path she forged to build E.G. Bowman, it’s hard to believe she won’t find a way.