Fast Focus
	Benefits guy shows he can sell at p-c heavy Brown & Brown.
	Paschke was often brought to first close the benefits deal before the p-c guys made their move.
	He excels in recruiting and mergers and acquisitions.

Operating on the Margins

Mike Paschke benefits from cultivating the ethos of benefits in a p-c world.

By  Leslie Werstein Hann

[Page 2 of 6]

A Cleveland native, Paschke was the only freshman to play on the varsity basketball team at Baldwin-Wallace College, a small liberal arts school in the Ohio Athletic Conference. But he left in November 1979, early in his junior year. A new coach arrived during his sophomore year, and (surprise, surprise) the original B-W players weren’t seeing much playing time. The new coach brought his own crop of players.

“I saw the writing on the wall and I said, ‘I’m not going to sit around and let things happen to me,’” Paschke recalls. “I’m going to go take charge of my life.”

With $400 in his pocket, Paschke followed the sun and his eldest brother to Tempe, Ariz. Dan Paschke, one of the top high school football players in Ohio, had played on Hall of Fame Coach Frank Kush’s legendary Arizona State University teams in the mid-1970s.

While Mike Paschke’s college basketball career ended with the move to Arizona, he continued to play in competitive hoops leagues around town with the guy who eventually drew him into the insurance business.

“My brother met Mike at a gym and played in a pickup game with him,” recalls Dick Langhough, who was then a student at ASU. “He told me we have to get this guy on our team. He’s 6’5” and he can shoot.” Langhough figures that in the years since, they’ve played together on 15 teams in Tempe, Phoenix and Scottsdale.

Paschke also competed in triathlons, those maniacal feats of swim-bike-run endurance. “My buddies and I were doing triathlons out of college because we missed playing college sports, and we were looking for that butterfly in the stomach,” he says.

Connecting the Dots

If Paschke couldn’t sit on the bench at Baldwin-Wallace, neither could he sit out a business opportunity that grew out of his obsession with competitive sports. So when the entrepreneurial bug bit six months after he arrived in Tempe, Paschke’s plans to finish his degree at ASU fell by the wayside.

The opportunity was too good to resist. While bartending, Paschke met Kevin Blackwell, who today is CEO of Kahala Corp., a billion dollar franchising business that includes brands like Cold Stone Creamery and Blimpie. Back then, Blackwell was a surfer and triathlete who was mixing up high-energy juice concoctions. They competed intensely against each other in sports and worked together to build a business. Juice bars seemed a must-win business during the growing craze in which health clubs were becoming the 1980s version of singles bars.

“We put concessions inside these facilities for no rent because what we were doing, really, was giving the owner more value-added and selling more memberships,” Paschke says. “We were thinking this is a pretty good life because we’d work out all day, do our thing and run our little juice bars. It was great.”

Well, it was great until the health club chain went bankrupt five years later.

“We go to work one day and there’s tape around the building,” Paschke says. “We have equipment in there that we owe money on. It was the perfect entrepreneurial training.”