Agency Operations

We “have a feeling” when an employee is performing badly at their job, but we don’t know exactly how badly or how to measure the performance toward rehabilitating or replacing…

The FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) requires three things to make an employee exempt. Most agency employees are, by Department of Labor definition, non-exempt, regardless of how agency owners or…

Wouldn’t it be nice to have employees looking for more business to handle or helping to innovate to permit more work to be accomplished without the addition of staff? An…

During the soft market, most agents continued to grant salary increases and permitted their profits and personal incomes to erode each year. However, prudent agents implemented Incentive Compensation Programs (ICP)…

Courts have generally held that certificates of insurance are not contracts and, therefore, not enforceable. However, this doesn’t mean that agents are insulated from lawsuits involving certificates of insurance under…

All too often, agents are asked by third parties to sign an “agent affidavit” attesting that an insured’s insurance program complies with a contract the insured has signed with that…

We get more “Ask an Expert” questions about certificates of insurance than any other single topic…there isn’t even a close second. Most recently we were asked when should you check…

Is there any other nonrevenue generating agency activity that takes as much time and causes as much consternation as processing certificates of insurance and related documentation? Have you ever taken…

Recently we conducted teleconferences on certificates of insurance based on our white paper, “Certificates of Insurance: Issues and Answers.” Following these teleconferences, we received a number of questions which, along with “answers,”…

Some lenders are refusing to accept the current editions of the ACORD 27 and 28 and insist that agents issue the 2003 editions of these forms. There are several reasons…