MARK MOHAMMADPOUR, INSURANCE KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND TEAM FACILITATOR
Your Insurance Leaders Are Brilliant On Their Own. Help Them Win Together.
Mark helps insurance teams say the things that keep great producers from walking out the door.
Trusted by insurance leaders.
“More than 95 percent of attendees responded with a highly favorable opinion of the talks. Mark’s unique ability to take his approach to employee well-being, adapt it perfectly to his audience, and deliver something relatable, practical, and actionable is inspiring. So much so that teams are more mindful of building empathetic relationships and taking time to check in with one another more authentically.”
— Ashley Hickson, Mutual of Omaha
About Mark
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A former communications executive who led teams and strategy for global brands like Adobe, Microsoft, and Samsung, Mark lost 150 pounds and has kept it off for more than a decade.
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Today, his most requested topics, Leading with Empathy, The Buoyant Leader, and Lead a Culture of Well-being, are built around one belief: healthy employees are your greatest competitive advantage.
Mark has worked with insurance executives and industry associations where commission-driven cultures, relentless performance pressure, and high turnover create a compounding leadership challenge, and where the standard “self-care” messaging falls flat in a room full of people who don’t have time.
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His keynote conversations blend full attendee engagement, actionable insights, and current research. Today, his most requested topics, Leading with Empathy, The Buoyant Leader, and Lead a Culture of Well-being, are built around one belief: healthy employees are your greatest competitive advantage.
Who We Help
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The Goal: Reducing "Compassion Fatigue" in claims and stabilizing the underwriting talent pool.
The Result: Lower operational risk, fewer burnout-induced errors, and higher employee loyalty.
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The Goal: Protecting employee health and ensuring high-touch client service.
The Result: Improved client retention and a culture that attracts top-tier talent.
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The Goal: Delivering "Sticky" professional development that members can use to grow their business.
The Result: Increased member engagement and high-impact conference programming.
What We Address
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A workforce that's aging out faster than it's being replaced.
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Agents and brokers who feel like a number, not a person, inside their own firm.
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Leadership teams that talk about culture in the boardroom and lose it in the daily grind.
“Illustrating key concepts gave participants an opportunity to witness empathy in action while keeping the stakes low and the mood light. We would highly recommend Mark as a speaker with the ability to both elevate and motivate his audience.”
— Gallagher
How to work with Mark:
Keynote Conversation
Start here. An interactive session built around your people and your industry. 45 to 90 minutes, steeped in data, insights, humor, and engagement. Your audience walks out with something they can use the same day.
Team Facilitation & Offsites
Go deeper. Mark sits with your team and names what's been going unsaid. No personality colors. No letter types. No trust falls. Half-day, full-day, or multi-day. You leave with a written plan: decisions, owners, dates.
The Three-Point Impact™
Make it stick. Mark’s signature program. Includes one keynote, a facilitated team session, and follow-up coaching on priority topics. This is a long-term investment that builds healthy, confident, and connected teams.
Keynote Conversation Topics
Mark's Leadership Keynote Conversations
Lead With Empathy
Turns empathy into a performance skill leaders can use under pressure.
Insurance is built on trust, and trust is built or lost in the daily interactions between leaders and their teams, long before a client ever feels the impact. Your leaders practice empathy live, in the moments where it is hardest: the producer who has gone quiet, the adjuster running on empty, the client calling on the worst day of their year. They leave with moves they can use the same day, not a definition.
Why now: Employees with highly empathic senior leaders report being innovative 61% of the time, compared with 13% under less empathic leaders, and 76% report being engaged, versus 32%. (Catalyst)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Use perspective-taking to connect across claims, underwriting, and the field
- Build the internal trust that every client relationship rests on
- Apply specific moves the same day, not after the next training cycle
Pairs with The Empathy in Action workshop: Paired conversations and real scenarios from your own book, where leaders practice hearing the thing underneath what was said.
Work in Sunlight
Reconnects your people to the work and to each other.
Insurance professionals chose this career to protect people, to be the voice on the other end of the phone when everything goes wrong. Between production targets, regulatory change, and the pace, that can get buried, and it costs agencies their best producers one quiet exit at a time. We name where belonging is slipping and build the habits that rebuild it, right there in the room.
Why now: Employees with a strong sense of belonging show 56% higher job performance and 50% lower turnover risk. (BetterUp)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Measure performance by energy, clarity, and connection
- Recognize the relationship builders, not just the top of the production board
- Run a shared, team-built plan for staying connected
Pairs with The Sunlight workshop: Small daily habits, regular peer check-ins, and a connection map the team builds together, so belonging survives the quarters between sales meetings.
Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being
Makes well-being how your team works, not a perk you offer.
The most successful insurance organizations treat well-being the way they treat their risk models: as a system that needs active management. The ones losing producers are still treating it as a perk. Your leaders examine their everyday habits, from how a new producer is onboarded to how a team meeting runs after a tough claims quarter, and decide together, in the room, which one to change first.
Why now: 52% of employees say their employer doesn't support their well-being in meaningful ways, and 69% of executives admit they have no way to measure it. (Deloitte)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Manage well-being like a risk model, not a perk
- See how small leadership choices build or drain a team
- Run onboarding, team meetings, and recognition so they build energy
Pairs with The Team Culture OS workshop: Your leadership team walks through its own onboarding, team meetings, and recognition habits, decides which one to change first, and agrees on how they will talk about workload from then on.
The Buoyant Leader
Turns pressure into the thing your steadiest leaders are known for.
Insurance leaders carry a particular kind of pressure: protecting clients from risk while managing an industry in disruption. Most push through it. The leaders their teams trust most stay grounded inside it, and their team feels the difference. Your leaders work through a real high-pressure moment together and practice staying clear enough to make the right call.
Why now: 77% of workers reported work-related stress in the past month, and 57% reported effects tied to burnout. (American Psychological Association)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Stay steady with a routine that holds up through a tough claims quarter
- Read stress as a signal and use it to make a sharper call
- Use calm as a competitive advantage, so their team can feel it and follow
Pairs with Leading with Clarity and Calm: Live scenarios and group coaching for your managers and directors, so the frameworks get practiced before the next hard quarter rather than heard once and filed.
REWORK: The Future-Ready Leader
Rebuilds the leadership playbook for a modern workplace.
The industry is facing its largest talent exodus in a generation, and the leadership habits of the last decade are working against the people using them. Your leaders rebuild their approach around capacity rather than pressure, then test the new moves together before taking them back to the team.
Why now: Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the second straight annual decline and the lowest level since 2020. Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. (Gallup)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Lead around capacity, not pressure
- Treat protecting producers' energy as the retention strategy it is
- Build the motivation a team creates together instead of waiting for it
Pairs with The REWORK Sprint workshop: Leaders map where their energy actually goes, pair up with someone outside their own agency or department, and leave with a 30-day plan they run together.
The four facilitation topics teams ask for most.
Offsite themes
For teams seeking clarity and purpose
Gets everyone pointed at the same thing, in writing, before anyone leaves the room.
When you're merging departments, onboarding new leadership, or pivoting strategy, an offsite is the fastest way to align the compass. Mark designs the session to cut through the confusion instead of talking around it.
Why now: Across 124 organizations, only 28% of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's strategic priorities. (MIT Sloan Management Review)
- Before: A short team pulse and a conversation with you about what success looks like in the first 90 days.
- The offsite: Working sessions on mission, vision, and values that end in a written Team Charter.
- After: A 30/60/90-day plan and a follow-up guide, so clarity turns into consistency.
What the team walks away with:
- A shared purpose everyone can say out loud.
- Clear norms for how decisions get made and communicated.
- A foundation for a culture of well-being and accountability.
Pairs with the Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being keynote and The Team Culture OS workshop. The keynote makes the case that culture is built through everyday decisions rather than programs. The offsite writes your team's version down. The workshop keeps it running after you leave the room.
For teams building confidence
Builds the nerve to say the thing in the room where it gets decided.
Your people are good at the work. They're less sure of themselves in the room where it gets decided. This offsite builds the confidence to speak up, be heard, and be trusted, under pressure and in front of leadership.
Why now: 61% of employees say they regularly watch colleagues stay silent rather than share a differing opinion, and 45% name psychological safety and trust as their single biggest concern at work. (Radical Candor, 2026 workplace report)
- Before: Each person picks a real upcoming conversation they're nervous about: a board update, a budget ask, a hard piece of feedback.
- The offsite: Hands-on work on influence, storytelling, and presence, ending with a live practice round in front of the group.
- After: A 90-day follow-through plan with checkpoints, so the confidence sticks.
What the team walks away with:
- Practical tools for influencing at the executive level.
- More clarity and more calm when the stakes are high.
- A team that speaks up before the hallway conversation.
Pairs with the The Buoyant Leader keynote and Leading with Clarity and Calm workshop. Confidence rests on calm. The keynote gives the room the idea and the language for it. The offsite gives them the reps, in front of people whose opinion they care about.
For executive teams and boards
Gets the hard decision made instead of postponed again.
High-stakes environments require high-stakes conversations. Mark provides the neutral structure that keeps dominant personalities from hijacking the agenda, so the hard decisions actually get made.
Why now: In a survey of more than 1,200 managers, 61% said at least half the time they spend making decisions is wasted. The strongest predictor of fast, high-quality decisions was the presence of real debate. (McKinsey & Company)
- Before: An anonymous team survey to surface where communication is strong and where it's stuck.
- The offsite: Structured work on the real disagreements, ending in a written operating agreement for how this team decides.
- After: A leadership health check at 30 and 60 days to track whether it's holding.
What the team walks away with:
- Faster decisions, because the real disagreement finally gets said out loud.
- Shared expectations and healthy boundaries.
- Stronger trust, transparency, and performance.
Pairs with the Lead With Empathy keynote and The Empathy in Action Lab workshop. Hard decisions need people who can hear the thing underneath what was said, especially when they disagree. That is the exact skill the keynote introduces and the lab drills.
For teams rebuilding after a hard year
Repairs the trust the last year quietly cost you.
A reorg. A round of layoffs. A leader who left. High turnover that never quite stopped. When a team has been through it, the work keeps going, but the trust doesn't. This offsite is about the health in healthy teams are wealthy teams: psychological safety, well-being, and repairing what got fractured.
Why now: Across 146 companies that conducted layoffs, employee confidence in the organization fell nearly 17 points, and engagement took 12 to 24 months to return to where it had been. (Harvard Business Review)
- Before: An anonymous pulse on how people are actually doing, plus a private conversation with you about what's been hardest.
- The offsite: Honest conversation about what the team has been carrying, guided so it stays safe and productive, ending in agreements on workload, boundaries, and how this team looks after each other.
- After: A well-being check-in at 30 and 60 days, so the agreements hold instead of fading.
What the team walks away with:
- Permission to say what's been hard, and a team that can hear it.
- Shared boundaries around workload and availability.
- A team that trusts each other again, and a leader they trust to keep it that way.
Pairs with the Work in Sunlight keynote and The Sunlight Series workshop. The keynote reconnects people to the work and to each other in a way that feels safe because everyone is in it together. The offsite repairs what got fractured. The series keeps belonging alive through the months that follow.
Any theme below can run as a half-day, full-day, or multi-day offsite. Mark builds the agenda around what your team actually needs.
“I appreciated Mark's intentionality and the way he listened to the needs of our organization, while still providing us new thinking and recommendations. His session was chock-full of value and I'd recommend him to anyone!”
— Ellen O’Brien, United Healthcare
Contact Mark about your event.
Email Mark at mark@chasingthesunpdx.com, call him at 360.609.1077, or fill out the form below.
Mark will respond to you within one business day.
Frequently asked questions:
How can insurance carriers reduce burnout in high-stress claims departments?
By changing the conditions rather than suggesting people take better care of themselves. Mark helps carriers deal with the exhaustion that comes from handling other people's worst days, by getting teams clear on who does what and rebuilding trust between adjusters and management. Clear boundaries steady staffing.
What is the link between insurance staff well-being and operational risk?
There is a direct line between attrition and errors. When underwriters or adjusters are worn down, shortcuts and missed details go up, and that shows up in claims costs. Mark treats culture as a way to manage risk. Steady, supported people make fewer expensive mistakes.
Why is producer retention the biggest competitive advantage for brokerages?
In a market where every brokerage offers much the same thing, the relationship between a producer and their client is what you actually own. When a producer leaves over a culture problem, they take institutional knowledge and client trust with them. Mark helps brokerages build the kind of place producers stay.
Do you speak at insurance conferences and carrier leadership meetings?
Yes. Mark speaks at carrier leadership meetings, brokerage annual meetings, and insurance industry conferences, and facilitates leadership offsites for claims, underwriting, and distribution teams. Sessions are built around what that organization is dealing with rather than general leadership advice.
How much does an insurance keynote cost?
The fee depends on the format, the length of the session, travel, and whether you add a follow-up workshop or coaching. Email mark@chasingthesunpdx.com with your date, location, and audience size, and you will have a number back within one business day.
