Agency Operations

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…