So many insurance agencies are stuck in customer acquisition mode. It’s a normal place to start out. It’s a rough place to stay for the long term. I’m talking about spending all of your time prospecting to try to sell commodity products. I’m talking about racking up a policy to household ratio of 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 when it could be much higher, 2.5, 3.0 or even better when you’re not stuck in customer acquisition mode. One bad month can really hurt, a rate increase can be excruciating, and it’s like there’s really not a pipeline or a strategy every January First. It’s like we’re starting over from scratch.

As your insurance agency matured, it’s much better to move toward a sustainable growth model where we’re putting consistent effort into developing much deeper connections with our clients, trusting that that’s going to serve as better than just going after the transaction, but that can be hard to do if you’ve built your team, your processes and your priorities around commodity transactions, but that’s okay.

You don’t have to change your business in a day. You just have to make the decision to pivot in the direction of sustainability and then over time, you can realign your processes and your team and your priorities to fit that model. The key as the CEO of your agency is to make that strategic decision and then execute consistently and then your ability to perform and the responsiveness of your clients will improve over time, and that’s the future of the agency anyway.

If you start to pivot now, you’ll be able to insulate yourself from technology, price increases, and other things that will really challenge agencies who just stick with the status quo.