What’s The Plan?

Fall is here. The weather’s changing. Snow and cold are just around the corner. Thanksgiving and the Holidays will soon be upon us. 2015 is drawing to a close.

Insurance agents have other things on their minds this time of year. January renewals, year-end loss ratios and contingency checks to name a few. They also start to evaluate how successful they have been in achieving their plan for this year. That’s if they ever really created a written plan. Sounds harsh but there are still plenty of agencies that “fly by the seat of their pants.”

Last weekend was the start of daylight savings and we rolled the clocks back an hour. How many agents would like the opportunity to roll back 2015 and get a chance to do things differently? Unfortunately that can’t happen.

What can be done is to stop and really evaluate where you are and where you would like to be at the end of 2016. Make a commitment to create a well thought out plan, put it in place and review and adjust it during the year.

The insurance industry is going through some major changes. Some of them wouldn’t even have been considered five years ago. As I talk to agents here are some of the concerns they express:

• What is being done to attract intelligent, talented young people to our industry?
• How can they find, hire, train and retain new employees to replace the significant number of experienced staff that are retiring?
• How do they make changes in their agency to attract new clients and help them retain their existing clients?
• How do you train and mentor new producers when prospecting and producing have changed so significantly from how it previously was done?
• Mergers, acquisitions and perpetuation are significantly affecting our industry.
• How do we learn to better understand Millennials as both clients and new employees?
• How do independent agents compete in the marketplace against direct response companies, aggregators, mega-agencies and the non-traditional competitors coming into our industry?
• How do we become more customer-centric and provide clients with an exceptional customer experience?

This is not a complete list but it does represent some of the key things that agents have on their minds and that need to be addressed in their 2016 plans. I do have some good news. You don’t have to figure it out all by yourself and there are resources available to help you.

The key is to honestly assess the things you want to address in your planning, including growth objectives, and then prioritize what you develop. Once that is done you need to research what is available to deal with those issues.

Don’t try to do this alone. Your association membership offers a number of resources to help you work on these items in your plan. Reach out and ask for help. Your association can provide an enormous amount of information and assistance. They can also direct you to resources not currently available through them.

The decision to create a well thought out agency plan and put it in place is yours. You can just as easily “fly by the seat of your pants” or create a very limited plan that only addresses production and retention. The problem with those decisions are that in today’s highly competitive environment you will find it almost impossible to grow organically and profitably.

Don’t hesitate, take the time, create a well thought out plan and start moving forward toward increased growth and profitability. If you do, a year from now you should experience positive results. If you don’t, your chances of having a positive experience are not very likely.