The person needed funds to get a replacement vehicle, but when Mr. Wood contacted the wholesaler to ask when the payment might come in, the broker responded: "There's no way that I'm going to advance funds on a London claim, so you'll just have to wait."

"I was just really shocked and taken aback by that approach," Mr. Wood said. "Here's an opportunity for customer service, because we're not getting it from this guy," he thought, making the decision to team up with another agent who worked with him at the retail agency.

"We talked about this and said, 'There's an opportunity here,'" Mr. Wood said, recalling that defining moment.

Tough times, however, came quickly for the new venture, which hit a major stumbling block soon after opening its doors. Although the insurer's marketing representative promised that the company would set the new firm up with a computer system, putting it online to write a lot of business, within weeks the marketing rep reported the insurer was pulling out of the state and the contract with the new wholesaler was being cancelled.

"We had just left good-paying jobs, I had two kids at home, and no market to place business with in a hard market," Mr. Wood remembered. He added that retailers were showing up and saying: "If you have a market, you can have this risk," but the new wholesaler was forced to respond: "We can't help you."

At that point, "we could have just folded our tent and gotten jobs somewhere," but the two entrepreneurs decided they wanted to make the business work, Mr. Wood said.

"You become creative. You become focused on your objectives. You just go to work every day and hope it works out," he said. "Necessity is the mother of invention, so we looked around and tried to start brokering business here and there. We built on successes and just kept going."

While Mr. Wood modestly had to be coaxed to share the secrets of his success, he freely offered the encouragement to others faced with a reality that doesn't initially match a vision.

"There is hope," he said. "Some people wait for the right time to do something, [but] opportunity is there. You just have to have the wherewithal to go after it."

Expanding from one office to four--in Shreveport, Baton Rouge and Ridgeland, Miss., and Grapevine, Texas--Specialty Risk Associates serves more than 600 retail agents today.

"We're lucky that we represent many of the top companies in the industry," Mr. Wood said, referring to the nearly two dozen carrier relationships his firm has today.

Maintaining such relationships takes more than luck, however. "The minute you step across the line and start to build a business, you're building a reputation. And you want a reputation for doing the right thing--being reliable and being responsive--and never cutting corners," he said.

Mr. Wood gave one example of what he meant in an earlier interview with NU last year on the subject of carrier-MGA relationships. "I can't just write business. It has to be profitable business, which involves using underwriting discipline," he said. "I can't always do what's right for me. I have to think about my partner--the company."

Having started his career as an underwriting trainee, Mr. Wood got a chance to see the business from an insurer's perspective for four years at Commercial Union. Then he answered the call to join a retail agency, offering him a chance to work in his hometown of Shreveport.

Eight years as an account executive there, he said, gave him the ability to empathize with the situation that his customers are in when they call upon him now as a wholesaler. "When they have an urgent situation--I call it a puzzle that needs to be solved--you know where they are, what they're trying to do," he said.

"The company side gave me some technical expertise and experience. But the customer service standpoint--doing a good job and having a satisfied customer is really important to me," he said, highlighting the characteristic of a producer's role that's been most rewarding.

Puzzles have ranged from Specialty Risk's first big umbrella account--another defining moment in the firm's history--to more out-of-the-ordinary ones, like writing a general liability policy on "Samson The Wrestling Bear," a barroom attraction allowing patrons the opportunity to get in a ring and tussle with a bear.

The account probably didn't last two weeks, Mr. Wood said. "I think Samson always won. You don't have much chance against a bear," he explained, although he didn't recall any particular difficulty convincing an insurer to write the risk in the first place.

"I guess I just made the right call to somebody," he said, noting that another seemingly challenging risk was an animal mortality policy for a woman looking to insure her parrot. A little research will reveal that parrots actually often outlive their owners, Mr. Wood added.

The possibility that he might someday be educating himself on the lifespan of pet birds to place insurance coverage was clearly not on the radar screen back when Mr. Wood had ideas about joining the Air Force as a teenager--a plan that didn't work out.

Visions of becoming an insurance underwriter didn't emerge until he was nearing the end of his college career at Louisiana Tech University.

"I didn't even know what an insurance underwriter was," he said, revealing that a motivating Commerce Day presentation delivered to college seniors by Lawson Swearingen, who ran the local office of Commercial Union, intrigued him.

Prompted by the speech to seek career advice, Mr. Swearingen--who ultimately became the CEO of the Commercial Union's North American operations--pointed Mr. Wood in the right direction.

"Those people that can see options, rather than dead ends, [are the] people that seem to be successful," Mr. Wood said later in the interview, not referring to the end of his career dreams as an Air Force navigator but to some of the challenges posed by the present insurance environment.

Personally, Mr. Wood predicts a future bright with opportunity for the E&S segment in his local market in Louisiana. In spite of a continuing soft insurance market and dismal economic forecasts for his home state in the early days following Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Wood sees opportunity all around him in the northwestern corner of the state.

Currently, Specialty Risk Associates writes both commercial and personal lines insurance, with some specialty niches emerging from the local economy.

"We're in an area where there's a lot of logging and lumbering, and there's a lot of oil and gas, which we write," he said, noting that the business was built on a core of general liability and property packages, later expanding to include auto, umbrella and professional coverages.

The oil and gas segment is poised for growth in the years ahead, Mr. Wood reported, noting that a huge natural gas formation, called the Haynesville Shale, was recently discovered in northwest Louisiana.

In the past landowners would typically get $150 or $200 per acre for their mineral rights. Now they're getting upfront lease payments of $20,000 to $30,000 an acre, he noted.

"We're turning people into millionaires. This has happened in the last three or four months," he said, noting that the Treasury Department has estimated that $2.5 billion in revenues has been pumped into the local economy in that short timeframe.

With a huge number of oil and gas companies now coming to the area, ultimately there's going to be a trickle-down effect to E&S insurers and their broker partners, Mr. Wood predicted.

"We're positioned in a great place in our state," he said. While most of Louisiana's population in the past was in the south--in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lake Charles--"Shreveport is on the verge of an awakening," he said, noting that several interstate highways and a now navigable portion of the Red River has turned the area into a transportation hub.

In addition, there's talk that an Air Force Cyber Command Center is coming to Shreveport-Bossier, potentially creating a huge economic boom and opportunities to insure businesses that will support the Command Center.