Goldie Markham, self proclaimed Sun Goddess
Date: 7/18/2006Contact: Joan Barrett/800-690-0070
There’s more to the self-proclaimed Sun Goddess, Goldie Markham, than just all work. Neither is it all fun and the revelations are fascinating. She loves to have fun it’s true, but has high expectations of herself and those that she works with.
Chris Goldie (who’s that? You ask) began her career at CSAA in the Sunnyvale office more than twenty years ago. So the then Chris Goldie, carrying on the tradition of her father and her sister Laura worked for, and retired from, CSAA. She had transferred with CSAA to Sacramento because of a more favorable cost of living and has come to call the Sacramento area home. Chris, even though very female, was constantly receiving mailings intended for a male because of the unisex nature of her first name, so when she married she changed her first name as well as her last name and became Goldie Markham and sure enough, the draft notices stopped. None of her relatives took an early retirement as Goldie did, however, after she worked her way up from an inside auto adjuster in the Florin office to an estimator in the Power Inn office and back to Florin as an outside Homeowners adjuster.
Along the way, a friend at CSAA introduced her to the man she married and still thinks is a great guy and good father to her daughter Samantha. Even though she and her husband are now divorced, Goldie still admires and respects him and is grateful for his attention to their wonderful and beautiful daughter, now 15 years old.
After taking that early retirement in November of 2004, Goldie was trying to figure out how to break free from her career-long dependence on the insurance industry. Each plan had a serious flaw, she first tried the other side of the insurance industry fence and went to work for one of the vendors she knew when she was an adjuster, DelTech Environmental, in marketing. Goldie found that marketing was not for her and she began working with a temp agency for a major carrier handling inland marine claims. She feels that she learned a lot from the experience but it wasn’t something that she’d like to repeat. After a few more attempts to find something to do with her career in a new field, Goldie submitted to the idea that insurance is what she knew best and was very good at. Koning and Associates was the door that opened to her and Goldie is enthusiastic about the learning curve that she’s in. She admits that she previously had no ideas what an independent adjuster’s day was like and found the whole experience to be an eye-opener. She credits Diana Vaughn, Koning’s Sacramento branch manager with her intensive training in thinking like an independent adjuster and adjusting claims that were far from her range of experience as an auto and homeowner’s claim representative. The basics are the same, Goldie says, “Having respect for those you work with and taking care of those you work for is the basis for success”. Goldie fully admits that her relationship with the vendors that she relied on was one of the keys to her high marks from CSAA management in managing her costs while delivering excellent customer service.
Goldie also figures that a sense of humor (almost) never hurts. She has a larger-than-life style of being and a hearty laugh but when it’s time for business- it’s all business with her. “There’s a point where it has to get serious”, Goldie says, “its people’s lives we’re talking about here.”
From the unique perspective of having had a job on each side of the claims business, Goldie says “I do love what I’m doing. I love being out in a large territory, I’ve been to South Lake Tahoe, Farmington, Martinez, Redding and Lake Don Pedro in the last few weeks. I didn’t know there was a Lake Don Pedro! And it’s so beautiful this time of year! It restores my soul.” “Every area of business, not just insurance business, has its challenges. The carrier supervisors keep the heat on because someone higher up needs to cut costs and the adjuster is caught between the customer and the bottom line. The vendors are squeezed by the adjusters to reduce prices and their costs are going up but the prices are not. Independent adjusting firms are cutting their prices to get the business and they need the individual adjuster to make it work- so I’ve learned that there is no ideal place to be. My new philosophy is to be grateful that I can be helpful to folks that need me and someone is willing to pay me to do that.”