Evaluating Your Broker in the Hard Market
The market is terrible right now (your correspondent has edited out his profane choice of word). There’s no easy button. Yesterday’s price is no longer available, but constantly benchmarked against. The sage advice in the industry is to warn our clients, educate them. But there’s no amount of education that’s going to make a huge jump in cost a happy outcome. The aim, therefore, is creating trust.
Trust that no matter how poor the outcome of a renewal all feasible options have been considered and vetted. That means a lot of work. Which is where businesses should concentrate their insurance broker evaluation.
Are they staffed to execute on exhaustive market searches?
Have they undergone reductions in force due to COVID, or are they reinvesting in the future?
What technologies have been adopted to facilitate easier underwriting and account servicing to ease the burden on your staff and theirs?
Traditional wisdom and buying styles encourage buying the least expensive commodity. It’s the market at work. But there’s a difference between cost and value. Insurance is not a commodity like sheet metal. There’s intellectual capital involved. There are deep organizational and personal relationships. There are coverage and exposure nuances. Despite the best efforts of InsureTechs (including our own SimplyIOA) there are no easy quote and compare tools for anything other than personal and the most simple business insurance.
Experts are needed to ensure that insurance is there when you need it. Because the only thing worse than paying $200,000 for insurance is paying $150,000 for insurance that doesn’t pay a claim.
So speak to your insurance advisors. Gather a feel for their expertise. Do they have answers to your questions? Are they educated, straightforward, and trustworthy? Are they listening to and understanding your goals and giving you honest feedback on which can be accomplished, and which cannot?
When you find the broker and team that you trust: trust them. Your expertise is in your business. The broker’s job is to bring you the best option the market can bare. That’s not always your desired outcome, but that outcome may not be achievable now.
The best of us are professionals with deep industry connections and respect, decades of knowledge, dedicated teams, and a passion and commitment to help enable your success. The worst of us are used car salesmen just trying to churn and burn, bringing on new clients at a pace that will equal the losses.
My clients are my friends. I care about their success, their families, and their employees.
My underwriters are my friends. They care about the same causes, and they care about helping me and my team achieve success.
It’s the best type of symbiosis. We all want to succeed together.
The market is terrible right now. But the professionals have never been better or worked harder.
The team at IOA is poised to execute for you at a high level.
