History
A Strong Foundation
Protective Today
Protective Life Corporation, which today offers a broad portfolio of life and specialty insurance and investment products, traces its roots to the Corporation's flagship company, Protective Life Insurance Company. Protective Life Insurance Company is a 100-year-old institution built upon a belief in hard work and integrity. Today, Protective's continued commitment to these basic principles is demonstrated through our dedication to three core values: Quality, Serving People, and Growth.
A Strong Foundation Protective's values-oriented management philosophy was established by its founder, former Alabama Governor, William Dorsey Jelks, who started Protective Life Insurance Company in 1907. Believing that serving people begins with being worthy of their trust, Jelks' commitment to Protective's customers, shareholders, and employees remains today the focus of the Company's leadership.
Beginning in the 1920s, Protective embarked on an expansion policy. In 1928, our Company made one of the first major landmark buildings in Birmingham its new home, and by the end of the decade brought the amount of insurance in force to almost $6 million, a substantial sum in 1928.
Protective continued to grow, even through the dark economic times of the 1930s. Colonel William J. Rushton assumed the top leadership position at the Company in 1937, and for the next three decades guided it with the same sound leadership that had come to characterize our Company. Colonel Rushton also helped reinforce Protective's culture of integrity and fairness, a culture that remains strong and healthy today.
When William J. Rushton, III assumed the helm of our Company in 1969, Protective had been operating primarily as a regional provider, serving customers throughout the South. The second Rushton to sit in Protective's CEO chair, William, or Billy as he insisted everyone call him, built upon his father's success, and drove substantial growth by introducing Protective's family of products to all 50 states. In addition, Billy is remembered for his strong commitment to infusing our Company with a sense of quality.
Whereas Billy expanded product distribution across the United States, Drayton Nabers, Jr., who succeeded Billy as CEO in 1992, grew Protective by increasing its distribution across a variety of channels. He achieved this through internal growth as well as acquisitions. The most significant of those acquisitions include: West Coast Life Insurance Company, which further solidified Protective's position on the West Coast; and the Lyndon Companies in St. Louis, Missouri, which doubled the size of Protective's Asset Protection Division.
Protective Today
In 2002, when John D. Johns became Protective's CEO, he brought with him many of the qualities that Protective's previous leaders had demonstrated over the Company's 100 year history. Those leadership qualities, combined with a continued reliance on our Company's core values and management philosophy, have helped Protective become one of the fastest growing companies in the life insurance industry.
Johns and the management team at Protective have outlined a growth strategy that is built upon the corporate philosophy to which our Company's thousands of associates around the country subscribe: Doing the right thing is smart business.® Johns believes that this statement captures the relationship between our Company's basic business philosophy and its success.
Over the last 100 years, Protective has remained true to and built upon the very same values on which it was founded.