Robert S. Bland, CLU
Chairman and Founder

Robert Bland is the driving force behind the Life Quotes, Inc.'s strategy to revolutionize and improve the way people buy insurance. After watching his fellow agency associates painstakingly calculate insurance premium quotations by hand, Mr. Bland wrote a business plan in 1984 which called for the automation of the comparative insurance rating process. Mr. Bland founded Quotesmith Corporation in 1984 and spent the next nine years building the databases, convincing over 300 leading insurance companies to contribute their information and providing the first online insurance quote services to agents and brokers. In 1993 the Company shifted its customer focus and began providing quotes and information directly to information-hungry consumers. Before founding Quotesmith in 1984, Mr. Bland was president of Security Funding Corporation, a privately held general lines insurance agency. In 1996, Quotesmith was among the very first firms to provide instant quotes on the Internet.

In August of 1999, Bland led the Company through a successful, $64 million initial public offering. By allowing people to obtain their own quotes and purchases from the company of their choice, Bland and his team have dramatically improved and streamlined the way people buy insurance. The Quotesmith.com website was launched in May 1996 and has won numerous awards and accolades including a "Top 100 Most Useful Website" by MSN Money in 2009. Quotesmith.com changed its name to Insure.com in May 2006. In 2009 the Insure.com name was sold for $16 million in cash, which was then widely reported as the highest-ever price paid for an Internet address.

Today, Mr. Bland currently serves as chairman, president and CEO of Life Quotes, Inc.SM, an internet-based agency that consists of 150 insurance professionals and work-from-home agents. Mr. Bland is active in the company on a full time basis, providing vision and strategic leadership to the Company as it accelerates its business and its consumer branding efforts. The Company specializes in the sale of term life insurance and has amassed a customer list that is nearing 300,000, making it one of the largest books of business ever assembled by a single agency. Current initiatives at Life Quotes for 2012 include introduction of America's first life insurance policy for skydivers, re-entry into the health insurance brokerage market and the launching of lead-generation website www.consumerinsuranceguide.com.

Mr. Bland holds a B.S. degree in marketing from the University of Colorado (1975) and earned his Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) designation in 2006. Mr. Bland is currently pursuing a Master's Degree in Business at the University of Notre Dame.