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More muscle
Consultative & collaborative Agency Services Group brings
savvy & services to agencies
By Nancy Doucette
Most people would agree: Muscle is a good thing. At the gym, you might work with a personal trainer to help you buff up. In your agency, you might look for an organization whose mission includes helping agencies optimize their performance.
Rough Notes recently had the opportunity to speak with several agency representatives who had found such an organization in Agency Services Group, LLC (ASG). Based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, ASG was capitalized by Amerisure Insurance Company as a consulting and business improvement firm to deliver innovative business practices to insurance agencies.
ASG has been working exclusively with Amerisure’s contracted agencies since its inception as part of their capital commitment. As of January 2010, they now provide their services and solutions to all agencies committed to improving their performance.
Accountability
Mark Fisher, a partner with LSG Insurance Partners in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, says ASG serves his agency in much the same way that his agency serves its clients. “As agents we don’t accept the transfer of the risk for any of the bad things that might happen to our customers. We just make sure that our clients are with the right risk transfer entity that will do what the customer expects. And if things don’t go well, the client holds their agent accountable,” Fisher explains.
“With ASG I found an organization that would make sure they delivered a series of valuable services to our agency over time,” he continues. “ASG makes sure that the consultants they align us with are the right people for that task. And if some aspect of the engagement doesn’t go well, I have a single point of contact: ASG.”
Ken Brown is also pleased that he connected with ASG. He is owner/president of Insurance by Ken Brown in Altamonte Springs, Florida. “In the 35 years that we’ve been in business, we’ve never had an organization like ASG available to us. The resources and consultants they collaborate with give us access to specialists in given areas to assist us in the growth of our business,” Brown says.
“Coordinating resources can be a challenge for agents,” observes Todd Ruthruff, with Agency Services Group. “There are so many potential resources out there. Agencies trying to identify solutions on their own find that it’s a distraction from the core business—servicing clients and identifying new clients for the agency. Not to mention trying to find the resource that best matches the agency’s needs.”
ASG positions itself as a one-stop source for operational and strategic solutions for agencies. Its product and service offerings include:
• Operational efficiency and performance improvement
• Marketing and sales performance improvement
• Strategic business and perpetuation planning
• Human capital and organizational success
• Information technology and agency automation
• Security and compliance management
Ruthruff explains that ASG “contracts and aligns with a variety of providers who demonstrate expertise, extraordinary delivery capabilities and scalability in solutions for midmarket businesses, creating a preferred provider network. Some have deep insurance industry knowledge while others introduce established business practices from other industries that have proven to be a valuable resource for agents,” he says.
“We’ve talked to hundreds of providers. Part of our value proposition is that we pre-screen these resources,” says Jennifer DeMello-Johnson of ASG. “There are some projects that require a provider with specific insurance knowledge—workflow evaluation or producer recruitment, for example. Other services, such as an IT infrastructure assessment or disaster recovery consultation, require providers that can demonstrate a best-in-class solution for this industry,” she notes.
Getting to know you
In order to effectively understand what an agency wants to accomplish when it engages ASG, DeMello-Johnson says that ASG likes to have the agency begin by completing an online self-assessment using the Comprehensive Agency Assessment Tool (CAAT) that ASG and its providers created. It’s based on the six categories mentioned above and consists of approximately 25 questions per category.
“As a proprietary tool, CAAT allows insurance agencies to benchmark their performance against best practices. ASG can then help the agency identify and prioritize some of its key initiatives and regain focus on set objectives,” she points out. “ASG is then better able to orchestrate which services and solutions will be provided.”
“We’re engaging agencies in a non-biased manner,” Ruthruff points out. “We aren’t trying to sell any specific service. We first strive to understand their environment; then we are in a better position to know how ASG can help them.”
“When an agency contracts with ASG,” DeMello-Johnson says, “we’re not just making a referral to one of the providers with which we collaborate. We engage a provider contractually to provide that service. ASG is accountable to the agency.”
When the going gets tough
Agent Mark Fisher oversees sales and operations for LSG Insurance Partners. He engaged ASG to help him enhance the efficiency of his 100-person agency. “With the tough economic times here in Michigan, our focus is on prospecting and new sales more than ever,” he reports. At the same time, the agency is looking at reducing expenses and increasing efficiency.
In an effort to help LSG trim expenses, ASG introduced Fisher to a telecommunication consulting firm that would audit the agency’s telephone and Internet bills. “I was suspicious we were leaking money on our phone and Internet use,” Fisher says. He recalls that he had engaged firms on his own to perform this type of audit in the past, and that the results were less than stellar.
This time, the company that ASG contracted with on behalf of LSG delivered some useful takeaways. Fisher indicates that the agency implemented the recommended changes and in doing so saved about $25,000.
“Think about how much new revenue we’d need in order to cover that leak,” he says. “Plugging that leak was like finding $100,000 in new revenue.”
Beyond this, Fisher says he appreciates that “ASG has done the due diligence where the providers are concerned and vetted them.” Additionally, he says, “ASG has negotiated a better contract than I’d get on my own.”
As an agency principal, Fisher says he’s often engaged in the “battle between the urgent and the important.” As a result, he hadn’t noticed that the workflows in certain departments had become convoluted. That translated to ineffective and, therefore, costly.
ASG contracted on behalf of LSG with a consultant who focuses on operational efficiency for the insurance industry. She is working with the agency’s three P-C divisions—two commercial lines departments and the personal lines department—and re-evaluating the entire procedures manual in the process.
“We were doing some things that we didn’t even realize,” Fisher acknowledges. “They were expensive, ridiculous, and easy to correct. Having an outside consultant come in has forced us to take a step back and look at our processes.”
Bringing in new blood
Florida agent Ken Brown freely admits he’s had trouble finding “keepers” when it came to new producers. But in the spring of 2009, his luck changed. He met with ASG and explained that he wanted to expand the production team in his 20-person agency.
ASG contracted with a firm on Brown’s behalf. He learned that the firm not only identifies sales talent exclusively for the insurance industry but also develops that talent by way of its technology-enabled training curriculum.
In short order, the recruiting firm referred two candidates to Brown: Jason Martin and Kerry Tait. Both had sales experience outside the insurance business. “The recruiting company was looking for individuals with a sales background,” Brown explains. “Not insurance salespeople, just salespeople. They understood that we can teach them the technical aspects of insurance.”
In the six months since Martin and Tait joined Brown’s agency, they’ve made “tremendous progress,” Brown says. Both are exploring areas of interest in their sales activities. One is developing a book of business in the emerging solar industry as well as in the landscape and lawn maintenance field. The other came out of mortgage banking and has contacts in commercial developments. That’s generated quite a few referrals, Brown points out.
Brown attributes the new producers’ success in part to the year of training that the recruiting firm offers.
David Griffiths, vice president of sales for Insurance by Ken Brown, is complimentary of the training program. “It’s not just the information you’ll need to pass the licensing exam,” he says. “It drills down and gets into the details. It also includes a lot of sales training.”
He adds that he, Martin and Tait recently attended a sales school in Baltimore that is also part of the year of training. There the young producers learned about goal setting, prospecting and qualifying leads.
“This training gets the new producers up to speed much quicker,” Brown concludes. “They begin generating sales more quickly and we see a return on our investment sooner.”
The short horizon
Now that ASG’s consultative services offering is maturing, Ruthruff and DeMello-Johnson are ramping up some new offerings: Subscription Services and Hosting. “We will have these new offerings in place later this year. It’s a short horizon,” says Ruthruff.
“Every agency has certain internal functions where they’re engaging an outside source—Web site design/hosting, licensing support, legal/employment services, sales/pipeline management tools, and such,” he continues. “Our Subscription Services offering will be a ‘bundled’ approach, although services will be scaled to meet both the agency’s specific service needs and size.”
As with ASG’s consultative services, the subscription offering will provide agencies the convenience of consolidated contracts and a single point of contact as ASG will be negotiating services and pricing with the respective providers. “Our monthly subscriber fees are aggregated to be less than what the agency would pay independently. The providers have negotiated their standard rates to benefit ASG agencies,” notes DeMello-Johnson.
That said, she continues, “We have some very high expectations for our provider service level agreements regarding confidentiality, deliverables and engagement processes.”
“We can get a provider’s attention differently than an agency could get independently,” Ruthruff points out. “The terms, conditions, support level—how the agency is prioritized as a client—improve by way of this model. As an ASG subscription services client, agencies have a larger voice.”
ASG’s hosted offerings will address areas “that are often a distraction for the agency to self-administer,” Ruthruff explains. Initial services will include IT management, payroll services, and business processes such as policy checking and billing reconciliation.
In their conversations with agency representatives, Ruthruff and DeMello-Johnson have heard repeatedly that these three areas are pain points.
With respect to IT management, Ruthruff comments: “Many small to mid-sized agencies have significant IT demands and requirements, but not the budgets to support that type of demand. We are bringing to market a solution that has been applied in various other industries for years. It will provide agencies with the technical talent available to large companies at a cost equal to or less than their IT budgets today.”
DeMello-Johnson states, “Agencies tell us they want to be sure they’re operating in the most cost effective manner. They also tell us they want to drive growth. With ASG’s array of services—subscription, consulting and hosted—agencies will be better positioned to face today’s pressing challenges and better prepared to succeed in the future.”
For more information:
Agency Services Group, LLC
Web site: www.agencyservicesgroup.com
Phone:
(877) MYASG01 (692-7401) |
