Agency Operations

Can Our Agency Cancel or Non-Renew a Client?

In recent months, this has become a hot topic: Can our agency cancel or non-renew a nightmare client?

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Five Areas the Best Practices Program Can Help Any Agency

Virtually every industry has a model for comparing results to other businesses in the same field. For the independent agency system, that model is the Big “I” Best Practices program.

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Insurance in Your Wildest Imagination

What does the future of insurance hold for we mere mortals? Your guess is as good as mine, but we need to imagine it. Technology and the world in general are changing quickly; insurance has historically been very slow to respond to change – but we can’t wait like we could in the past. Take…

An Excellent Strategy: Hire Incompetent Producers

Insurance agency consultant Chris Burand sheds light on the fallacious opinion held by some agency owners and even some agency consultants that a bad producer is better than no producer at all. Burand puts this to the “dollars and sense” test. (Yes, I know it says “sense.”)

Insurance CE and “Micro Learning”

According to research the average person has a total of 24 minutes a week to dedicate to learning. Our current insurance education system doesn’t cater to this reality. The industry needs to adopt “micro learning” as an alternative to the current multi-hour sessions. State DOIs tend to have issues with this concept; this article addresses…

Grow Your Agency Book: Understand the Importance of the Qualified Lead Ratio

The qualified lead ratio tells the agency if their database of leads is beneficial or wholly useless by answering the question, what percentage of leads in its database are good leads and which ones are just names taking up memory space? In simplest terms, the qualified lead ratio tells an agency how beneficial its prospect…

Insurance is Sexy

According to the experts, our industry is in almost immediate need of nearly 400,000 new workers due to retirements and other transitions. However, many hiring managers say the industry is having the same problem it has always had – insurance is not sexy. Well, I beg to differ! Insurance is the sexiest profession out there!

The Wall Street Journal Looks at Various New Insurance Products

The Wall Street Journal has taken an interest in some of the new(ish) insurance products now available such as “Active Shooter” policies, Tuition Insurance, and Cyber coverage.

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Are You One of the Many or One of the Few

The title pretty much says it all. Are you a “many” agent focused on the price-based easy sell or are you among the few who understand that insurance requires a consultative approach?

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Fair Owners’ Compensation

Agency owner compensation should be based on productivity and management responsibilities. Equal pay is not a requirement among agency owners.