Business: Life Is Ruff. Buy Insurance
AMONG OTHER THINGS, forsaking maritime security in order to sell U.S. pet insurance has meant the Ashtons could stay in Philly and could work together every day. That’s something of a challenge for a lot of two-career couples, but it’s working well for Chris and Natasha. Over sandwiches, they finish one another’s sentences as they discuss the firm’s creation. “We did everything, including cleaning the toilets,” says Chris. He compares it to his experience in the Royal Marines, where officers and enlisted men undergo basic training together. “The officers get it much worse,” he says.
But the current shape of the firm — Natasha says they’ll grow from 28 to 100 employees in the next five years — has less to do with bathroom-cleaning excellence than with an early transaction. The key to solving the canine actuarial-odds puzzle, it turned out, was linking up with Petplan UK, the leading insurer back home. The Ashtons licensed the name and gained access to 30 years of data on breeds and diseases. Now, Petplan’s advertising plays up its coverage
for the knottiest hereditary conditions: “I inherited my mother’s good looks and my father’s bad hips,” a bulldog declares in an ad that ran in upscale dog magazine The Bark.
Petplan’s offices sit, somewhat improbably, in a 1960s office park opposite Philadelphia International Airport. You might imagine that International Plaza is full of people shipping machine tools to distant corners of the globe or ordering up tons of raw materials in return. And then you remember that Philadelphia doesn’t really trade in machine tools or industrial raw materials anymore.
In fact, Petplan’s story highlights Philadelphia’s current economic strengths, such as they are. First there was Wharton, where Chris and Natasha’s classmates included not just financiers, but people with actual actuarial experience. Teaming up with two of them, they won the school’s annual business-plan competition in 2003, positing that there was a better way to sell pet insurance. Research was made particularly convenient by their proximity to another unique local resource, Penn’s Matthew J. Ryan veterinary hospital, which has been called the Mayo Clinic of the pet world. The hospital let the business students rummage through reams of data.
Taking the idea from grad-school triumph to real proved tricky: The Ashtons and their contest teammates quickly split up — the other pair moved to Cleveland and started their own pet-insurance firm, Embrace. By staying in Philly, Petplan’s founders were able to benefit from a third local institution: Hill, the founder of Commerce Bank, who, over the past decade, has emerged as Philadelphia’s major doggie benefactor. Devoted to a Yorkshire terrier named Duffy, Hill endowed a new building at Penn’s veterinary school, opened the doors of Commerce branches to four-legged visitors, and led an annual pet parade through Rittenhouse Square. “Pets have become our kids,” says Hill. “And there’s no limit to what we will pay to keep our pets healthy.”
