What Are Your Options: Commit to Growth

One of the really great things about owning an independent insurance agency is that you are Independent! You can and do make choices every day that affect your agency’s performance and success, both in the short-term and long-term. In other words, you have options and you’re exercising them, some more purposefully than others.

As we look forward to 2015, now’s a great time to examine some of the options you have concerning the future of your agency.

Option Two: Commit to Growth

As we’ve talked about before, you must have the Three Cs if you want to grow your business: Commitment, Capacity and Capabilities. You just have to find the right systems and guidance that will create predictable and guaranteed sales and profit improvements. Also, you’ll need to invest at least two percent of your revenues for these growth initiatives. The goal is to create the “Agency’s Way” of growing that all team members buy into.

 Option Three: Shrink It & Initiate a Holding Pattern

In this scenario, you make the deliberate decision to shrink your business and go into a holding pattern. To me, it’s an ugly option, but it is an option! Here’s how you do it:

Eliminate the bottom 25% to 50% of your accounts. At best, this will represent somewhere between 5% and 10% of your revenues.

Once you’ve done that, you eliminate about one-third to one-half of your staff — and then you coast! Just keep in mind that you can only coast in one direction.

Again, this is not my preferred option. I’m just trying to present some possible choices.To do this, you can either put them into a Service Center and treat them with benign neglect or sell them off to a local competitor. Someone will always be willing to buy it.