Agency Operations

When Does Incentive Compensation Make Sense?

Incentive Compensation is a compensation method in which employees achieve increased compensation (raises) for increased productivity. It teaches employees the shocking truth about growth and profitability – we can only…

Employee Performance Evaluations and Compensation

When you mention employee evaluations in most insurance agencies, the owners begin to fidget, admitting that they do them sporadically, if at all. Too often, they admit that they give…

Pay for Play

Many agencies have provided levels of financial security for their producers (owners and employees) by guaranteeing them a salary, draw (with no financial pressure for returns if not earned) or…

Is Incentive Compensation Really for Your Agency?

Your employees, valued and hard working, are still expecting you to “treat them right” even though both your commission income and your bottom line continue to be stressed. Now you’re…

Producer Equity…Good Idea or Bad?

NEVER offer equity in a producer’s created book of business. Well, ‘NEVER’ may be too absolute. Let me put it this way. Never offer equity only in a producer’s book…

Incentive Compensation Programs

An Incentive Compensation Plan (ICP) ties compensation gains by employees to productivity and profit gains by the agency or company. While merit raise systems are most often based largely on…

Evaluating Employees

There are as many variations to employee evaluations as there are compensation programs. However, we have found some common ingredients to the most effective evaluation devices that can be easily…

Growth-Loaded Producer Compensation

We entice salespeople into the insurance field with the incentive of continuing growth of income through renewal commissions. Yet we have never properly addressed what happens when the producer reaches…

Measuring Employee Performance

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…

Are Your Employees Exempt or Non-Exempt?

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…