Who's Running Your Business?

Insurance Agency owners are always asking me, how can I make more money on the business I'm already writing? That's a great question. I always answer that by asking a question of my own? Who's running your business? Is it you? Or is it one of your employees?

What insurance companies get the business? And we find that those decisions are made by the customer service representative as often as anyone else in the agency and that's the wrong place for the decision to get made.

Because the CSR's goal is to make her or his life as easy as possible, not necessarily to maximize revenue.

So one of the ways that any agency owner can correct that is by paying the customer service people a bonus or a commission in addition to salary. The pure service person is dead in our industry, service people need to be able to sell to ask for the order. But they also need to be incentivized to do what's in the best interest of the agency itself and its ownership.

And so if you have an insurance company that's offering you a new business production bonus, share some of that with your service person.

Otherwise, you're not going to get as much of it as you would like.

Do you have a company that pays you 16% or 17% commission instead of 12%? That's a 40% difference in compensation. If you want to make sure you maximize that opportunity, pay your CSR a bonus when they write business with that company, but no bonus when they write business with the lesser carrier.

Just a couple of ideas to think about.