Maximum wage: Indiana's highest-paid CEOs.

• Author: Partington, Marta J.
• Position: Salaries of chief executive officers in Indiana corporations - Cover Story

MAXIMUM WAGE: Indiana's Highest-Paid CEOs

His career had been a relatively quiet affair, but these days Stephen Hilbert is all over the business headlines.

In recent months, countless stories have been written about the Conseco Inc. chairman's rise from rags to riches. We know, for instance, how as a college kid, Hilbert became one of the top-producing encyclopedia salesmen in the country. We know that Hilbert came from a nice but modest blue-collar family. His parents steered him from what would have been his first insurance job.

We've heard how the more mature thirty-something businessman took the concept of consolidation and parlayed it into a multibillion-dollar insurance holding company based in Carmel. We know that at age 45, Hilbert is the highest-paid CEO of an Indiana public company, making more than $2.15 million last year.

With Hilbert grabbing the headlines, Conseco itself often has been overshadowed. But Hilbert is trying to change that, trying to tell the good news about his insurance holding company and refute the charges of its skeptics. He's shown up to talk insurance on Cable News Network, and his company has garnered positive press in publications such as Business Week, USA Today and Investor's Daily.

Conseco has earned its headlines. Its stock has quadrupled in value in less than a year's time. Its earnings continue to soar. And Hilbert says the increased scrutiny has won over new champions of Conseco.

Just what is Conseco? "|Conseco' is Latin for |very profitable,'" Hilbert quips. In truth, the name came from the two original companies that were merged to form the parent company: Consolidated National Life and Security National of Indiana. But that occurred later in its relatively short corporate life. Let's start at the beginning.

Conseco came into being as Security National. Two friends, Hilbert and David Deeds, organized it as a holding company that would acquire and operate insurance companies. "We saw an opportunity in the late |70s when the insurance industry just literally changed overnight and the profit piece of our business switched from mortality - and the cost that the policyholders paid for their mortality premiums - to products that are more investment-oriented, like annuities and universal life products."

Small- and medium-sized companies, they felt, would have trouble competing as the products became more dependent upon costly computer technology. The idea was that by consolidating and centralizing...