Marketing

With the beating that many carriers have taken over the past few years in personal lines, it is more important than ever to improve loss ratios. In this article, our…

You’ve seen those headlines about unscrupulous corporate executives cooking the books. The passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is supposed to have forced many employers to take the ethical temperature of…

In March 2002, Ethics Awareness Month, we ran a contest with three ethical dilemmas, asking our newsletter readers to respond with their answers. Below is one of those questions, along with…

Since this “article” covers so much ground, the only logical spot for it was the Miscellaneous section of Agency Management. This was a question submitted to our “Ask an Expert”…

March is Ethics Awareness Month. I want to ask if you can afford to be ethical? You may be surprised to learn that my short answer may be “No.” It…

A question posed to our agency management faculty: “I am an agency owner. At one time we changed to an ‘S’ corporation and our CPA told us it was best…

Inertia is the greatest force against progress and change. Too often, agencies run into the “Inertia Wall.” The Inertia Wall is invisible. It is soft and comforting. It is “the…

As a cluster matures, you can actually see the lines between agencies blurring. The Virtual Insurance Agency (VIA) takes a maturing cluster to its logical conclusion, a mega-merger of all…

As an agent, you have knowledge of other agents telling their clients not to list youthful drivers. After all, the ISO PAP covers resident family members automatically whether listed or…

Many smaller agencies would like the market clout and economies of scale of larger agencies. Historically, about the only way to do this has been through mergers or clusters. Now…