Bob Jacobs, CPCU

Who He Is

The Person Reading Your Policies Actually Understands Them

Most fabrication shops don't get misclassified because someone was careless. They get misclassified because the person placing the coverage has never walked a shop floor, never read a venue contract, and never sat on the other side of the desk deciding what a risk is worth.

Bob Jacobs has done all three.

Bob is the founder of Experiential Risk and President of Insurance Solutions & Services Inc. (ISSI). He built this practice around one kind of company: the shops that design and build physical things — sets, scenery, activations, immersive environments — and get treated like general contractors by brokers who don't know the difference.

Background

An Underwriter First

Bob has spent twelve years in commercial insurance, and he started on the carrier side — three years as a commercial underwriter at Zurich before moving to the broker side of the business. He learned how carriers assess a submission before he ever represented a client. Things like which words trigger a construction template, which controls earn a better rate, what makes an underwriter decline an account before they've understood it.

Bob holds the CPCU designation (Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter) and has spent his career on commercial risk. He joined ISSI in 2017 and became President of the firm in 2026. ISSI has placed commercial coverage for 32 years for clients nationwide.

Service

After the Policy Binds

Most brokers go quiet after they bind the account. The certificate requests get slow. The coverage questions get one-word answers or no answer at all. That's the part shops complain about most, and it's the part Bob built the practice around.

Certificates of insurance go out same day, correct the first time. No venue sends one back because the additional-insured wording was missing. When a contract question comes in, the answer is timely, specific, and something you can act on, not a wall of jargon and not a hedge you can't use. Bob has seen these same questions across an entire book of experiential and fabrication shops. He's already dealt with the issue you're calling about.

That's the thing clients tend to mention: they finally understand their own coverage. Bob knows the technical side cold and explains it in plain language, which means the answers you get are actual answers, the kind you can take back to a venue or a client and use.

And you're not relying on one person. Every client gets a dedicated account manager, an assistant account manager, and a claims rep, so there's always someone who knows your account and picks up.

The relationship goes past the policy, too. Bob reads how a shop actually operates and looks for places to make the risk itself smaller: helping formalize load-in and load-out procedures, tightening driver selection, standardizing training and onboarding, assessing tools like telematics. It's the difference between a broker who sells you a policy and one who works like part of your team.