The 3 simple shifts that take women business owners from owner-operator to CEO of a business that runs without them.
(An insurance-specific masterclass is in the Agency Collective.)
Real strategy, real numbers, and real stories from the businesses I coach. New essays each week.
An agency owner will tell you they know the difference between a good lead and a tire-kicker. Then they will run eight quotes that week, close two, and discover six months later that both of the closed households...
Keep reading →Most agencies do not have a marketing plan. They have a handful of marketing activities that have accumulated over the years. A carrier co-op campaign here. A local sponsorship there. A newsletter that goes out irregularly. A social...
Keep reading →Ask most personal lines agency owners about commercial and you will hear a version of the same response. It is complicated. The service burden is heavier. The sales cycle is longer. The relationships are harder to build. Most...
Keep reading →A family leaves the agency this month. They had auto, home, and umbrella with you for seven years. What did that cost the agency? Most agency owners cannot answer this precisely. They know it is bad. They have...
Keep reading →Every agency owner has told themselves the same story about referrals. We get them. They just come in organically. We do not really have a system. It kind of works. The story is usually almost true and completely...
Keep reading →The average independent agency has never charged a fee for advisory work. Not once. They give away coverage reviews, risk assessments, claims consultations, and renewal strategy sessions, all under the assumption that commission is the only acceptable way...
Keep reading →Pull up your book. Find a household that has been with you for five years with only an auto policy. Look at their situation. No home coverage, no umbrella, no life. That client has probably bought a house,...
Keep reading →Most independent agencies have one revenue stream: commission. It has been the default for the industry for decades, and for a long time, it was enough. The agencies that are growing fastest today have built on top of...
Keep reading →Most agencies grow flat. Five years in the same premium range. Ten years in a slow drift. Twenty years as a comfortable practice that never quite got past the owner's personal ceiling. The industry story about why this...
Keep reading →The same things happen every year in every agency. Renewals cluster in certain months. Carrier contingency discussions happen at specific times. Open enrollment affects group business on a predictable calendar. State licensing deadlines show up in the same...
Keep reading →Most agencies have an operations manual. It lives as a PDF in a shared drive. Nobody has opened it in eighteen months. The last person who updated it left the agency two years ago. Half the processes inside...
Keep reading →Pull up last month's credit card statement. Count the software subscriptions. Now count the ones your team actively uses every week. For most agencies, those two numbers are not close. The first number is usually between ten and...
Keep reading →Ask ten agency owners what their weekly routine looks like, and nine of them will describe reactive chaos with a few standing meetings thrown in. The tenth one is probably running a well-run agency, and the reason they...
Keep reading →Every agency wants to retain more. Almost every agency has the same mediocre retention, somewhere between eighty and eighty-five percent, and nobody is quite sure how to move the number. The industry default answer is to care more...
Keep reading →Most agency owners try to delegate the same way, and it produces the same predictable problem. They hand over a task. They say let me know if you have questions. The team member does the task somewhat differently...
Keep reading →Most new producers are onboarded like this. They show up on day one. They shadow someone for a few days. They make a list of carriers to get appointed with. They start trying to write business while also...
Keep reading →The first hire in an independent agency is almost always rough. Not because the person is wrong. Because the hiring process was wrong, and the hire was set up to fail before they started. Most agency owners hire...
Keep reading →If you sold your agency tomorrow, how much of the carrier relationship value would transfer with it? For most independent agencies, the honest answer is: some of it. The carrier appointments transfer. The contracts transfer. But the relationship...
Keep reading →Most service workflows in most agencies were designed by the owner, in their head, over a decade. They never got written down. They never got stress-tested. And when the owner finally sits down to document them, the result...
Keep reading →If you build one SOP this year, which one? This is a better question than how many SOPs should I have. The right answer for most agencies is not zero and it is not fifty. It is six,...
Keep reading →Most agency owners have been told they need SOPs for the past decade. Most have not built them. The guilt has been accumulating the whole time. Here is the good news. The version of SOPs you have been...
Keep reading →Every agency that has ever scaled past the owner has installed the same basic operating architecture. The logos are different, the states are different, the commercial-to-personal mix is different. The architecture is almost identical. Four systems. In this...
Keep reading →Ask an agency owner to describe themselves and watch what happens in the first sentence. Nine times out of ten, it goes something like this. I have a three-million-dollar book in the Midwest, focused on small commercial and...
Keep reading →Go look at your agency's values right now. The ones on the website. The ones in the employee handbook. The ones that were the output of a retreat two years ago and got printed on a nice poster....
Keep reading →At the end of every month, most agency owners do one of three things. They close out the commission report, look at the premium number, and move on. Or they think about doing a review, decide they are...
Keep reading →You have been tired for a long time. Not sleepy tired. Bone tired. The kind where a weekend off does not actually restore anything, because by Sunday night the weight is already sitting on your chest for Monday....
Keep reading →You sit down at your desk at eight. By eight-seventeen, you have been pulled into three things that were not on your plan for the day. A CSR needs an answer about an endorsement. A carrier rep wants...
Keep reading →Ask ten agency owners how their agency is doing, and nine of them will answer with a premium number. Five million. Three million. Up twelve percent year over year. Down a little, honestly. Premium is what we track...
Keep reading →When was the last time you took two uninterrupted hours to think about the agency instead of run it? For most owners, the honest answer is some version of never, or some version of last January, with the...
Keep reading →Your team calls you the closer. They say it like a compliment. You are the one who saves the accounts that are about to leave. You are the one who handles the hard carrier conversation. You are the...
Keep reading →You feel like you are working all the time. You are also not sure what you actually did this week. That combination is the most reliable sign that an agency owner is due for a time audit. Not...
Keep reading →Ask the average agency owner what the agency's vision is, and the answer is usually a number. Five million in premium. Double the book. Ten thousand households. Break into commercial. Those are goals. Those are not vision. The...
Keep reading →You get a referral from a long-time client. A friend of theirs. Good risk, good premium, and a relationship that would be easy to close. You could hand it to your producer. You know you should hand it...
Keep reading →Look at last month's commissions. Whose name is at the top of the report? If it is yours, and it has been yours for three or more years running, you have a growth problem that has nothing to...
Keep reading →It is Tuesday morning. Your CSR just sent a text because the carrier pulled a quote. There are ten emails, three voicemails, and a renewal that needs a decision before eleven. A carrier rep wants a call back...
Keep reading →One useful idea. One honest behind-the-scenes story. One tool I actually use. Every Tuesday.