Pet Project

George needed serious medical care attention. Luckily, a $24-a-month insurance policy taken out on him helped defray the $1,701 in medical bills tied to the amputation of his injured tail.

See, George is a 4-year-old chocolate Lab, and he is among the half percent of dogs and cats in the United States whose owners, like Kirsten Fitos, of North Olmsted, are buying insurance policies for them. Currently, there are about 10 such companies in the United States competing for that half percent.

You may look at those statistics and say the market is already saturated with service providers, but Laura Bennett, a Brit ex-pat with an MBA from Wharton and three cats, sees potential. Bennett, the CEO of Embrace Pet Insurance, created her company based on the theory that the industry is poorly run. Claims were slow to be paid. Coverage was sketchy. Communication was dismal.

“The lack of trust that pet parents have had in pet health insurance has been well-earned over the years,” says Bennett, who uses the word “flighty” to describe pet coverage before Embrace. “The reason we got into pet insurance was to change it.”

Bennett grew up in England and Scotland, the daughter of a Royal Navy submariner father (she and her sister got kittens to keep them company when he went on three-month submarine tours) and an entrepreneurial mother who owned her own bookstore. The family moved to Canada when she was 16 and Bennett received her undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Western Ontario. She began her career working for the insurance company Canada Life.

It was a good job. Bennett became an actuary, spent four years working in Dublin, Ireland, and then returned to Toronto. By then, she was 34 and contemplating a big career question: What do you really want to do?

I’d love to run a company was always the answer. The obvious path would be to run her own insurance company. But that was also the problem. “I couldn’t think of anything more awful,” Bennett recalls. “I needed to find something that suited my nature more.”

It was clear to Bennett that she needed more education. In 2001, she entered the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. “To me, it was the best gift I ever gave myself,” she says. “It was all about me.”

She learned to play hockey; attended class with her future husband, John Burchard; joined a few boards; and even traveled to Ecuador as part of a Wharton leadership outing to climb the 19,000-foot Cotopaxi volcano — an experience that she describes as more painful than natural childbirth.

“I had no energy; I literally had to mentally will myself up,” she says. “Once you achieve something as crazy as that, you know what you can do.”

It was also at Wharton that Bennett and a classmate, Alex Krooglik (now chief marketing officer for Embrace), generated the idea that would lead to the company they own today. As part of a competition, the duo and two others formulated a business plan for a pet insurance company. They won.

Pet insurance had certainly been done in the United States before, but “very badly,” Bennett says.

Bennett and Burchard married in 2002. After graduating, he got a job offer from Progressive Insurance, which is how they ended up in Cleveland. Between the two of them, they had $165,000 in Wharton debt, and Bennett was aggressively trying to find investors for her company. That’s when Ellie, now 5, was born. (Little sister Erin followed two years later.)

A new routine was obviously in order. Ellie slept from midnight till 11 a.m., which gave Bennett precious quiet time in the morning to make phone calls. The rest of the day was a blend of playtime and work, with afternoons often spent by mother and daughter in a coffee shop.

Bennett’s two biggest victories came soon after. The first was finding a firm to underwrite Embrace’s insurance policies. After being rejected by multiple companies in the states, Bennett finally persuaded Lloyd’s of London to underwrite them. In England, pet insurance is far more common (about 25 percent of pet owners purchase it) — part of the reason Lloyd’s of London chose to do business with Embrace.

Bennett’s second break was getting funding for her business. She received a JumpStart investment of $800,000 and has received a total of $2.1 million in funding from NCT Ventures in Columbus. On the surface, Embrace may have looked like every other pet insurance company out there, but investors looked deeper than that.

“What Embrace believed was that there was huge room for improvement in the industry because customers were not being served well,” says Becca Braun, president of JumpStart Ventures. “They were willing to walk through walls to execute that, and they have done that.”

Life as an entrepreneur has involved a lot of sacrifice. Gone is the time for lunch dates, working out, shopping, movies or really any kind of leisure activity outside of what she does with her children. “I cannot get up any earlier than I get up,” she says. When you start your own business, “there’s a lot more misery than you expect.”

The romanticized notions of entrepreneurship quickly become overshadowed by the details. “It’s not about the big idea,” Bennett says. “It’s about getting it done.”

The hope, of course, is that the bigger rewards are around the corner. Currently, Embrace has sold policies for more than 7,000 pets and hopes to double that number within the next year. With every pet whose claim is quickly filled, they make progress toward that goal.

Fitos — and her George — are definitely happy customers. Their insurance covered a significant part of their expenses, they received emails explaining their benefits throughout George’s treatment, and their reimbursements were timely. “Everyone at Embrace was fantastic,” Fitos says. “I would recommend obtaining the coverage to anyone.”