It forced us to build a better agency
By Michael Cruz
In May 2024, we moved to a four-day, 32-hour workweek. The agency still operates Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; clients don’t notice any difference. But
no individual employee works more than four days.
This wasn’t a branding experiment, or a recruiting gimmick. And it definitely wasn’t because business was easy.
We did it because morale was shot.
The hard market had been grinding everyone down. Record-breaking rate increases meant nearly every call was an upset customer, frustrated, venting, and often borderline rude. My team was absorbing that negativity all day, every day. They were exhausted. I was exhausted.
I had to think outside the box if I wanted to reduce burnout and keep good people. What I didn’t expect was that the four-day workweek wouldn’t solve our problems; it would expose them. And in doing so, it forced us to build a much better agency than we had before.
Pitching the idea
My pitch to the team was straightforward: “I’ll pay you the same to work 80% of your hours, but your agreement is to give me 100% of your effort during those hours.”
Some thought it sounded too good to be true, and the team was concerned about falling behind with our high volume of work. But I framed it as a performance challenge. We weren’t going to work less; we were going to prove we could complete the same volume of calls, emails, tasks, and sales in four days that we were doing in five.
The catch? We had to fix everything that was inefficient about how we operated.
Cutting 20% of working hours sounds irresponsible in a hard market. That was my initial fear, too. But the reality is we were already paying for inefficiency, just in a different form.
The four-day workweek forced a hard constraint: the same volume of work had to be done in fewer hours. There was no room for “we’ll just stay late.” Either the system worked, or it broke.
Preparation
We’d actually been building toward this for years without realizing it. On the service side, we’d been using a shared inbox. Unlike a traditional agency, we didn’t assign customers to individual CSRs; we serviced accounts as a team. We had one main phone number for calls and texts and one email address for service; everything flowed into a central location so anyone could help any client.
We’d also standardized how we handled service tasks. Every team member followed the same process for the same type of request. But we hadn’t extended that thinking everywhere. Sales were still siloed. The documentation was inconsistent. Some processes were standardized, but others were tribal knowledge in someone’s head.
The four-day workweek became the pivotal point to double down on everything we knew would be required to run a well-run agency. We were structurally set up to make the leap. The commitment just made us finish the job.
Lessons learned
The first lesson was uncomfortable. Our agency was too dependent on individuals on the sales side.
If a salesperson was out and the lead called back, the sales process stopped until they returned. If the lead reached out via email, it sat in the rep’s inbox untouched. And because each rep had their own way of doing things, no one wanted to step in on someone else’s prospect.
That model collapses in a four-day workweek.
So, we defined the Foresight Insurance sales process, moved sales to our shared inbox, and duplicated the service structure we already had in place. We also encouraged the sales team to work together. If a lead was expecting a call back and the rep was going to be off, someone else would cover. I know this sounds too good to be true, and it can get complex, but with the right culture it’s doable. We’re doing it. We helped the sales team become a real team that collaborated, communicated, and had each other’s backs when someone was off.
Now with service and sales in the same inbox (info@foresighti.com), we restructured into four team inboxes within Help Scout; think of them like specialized folders inside the main inbox: licensed sales, licensed service, non-licensed client-facing, and back office.
Here’s how it works: An email comes into the main inbox; Help Scout’s AI automation reads the content and routes it to the correct team inbox, or someone manually transfers it if needed. From there, each team has a rotating daily lead who distributes tasks fairly within their group.
This structure gives teams ownership of their work, creates better collaboration, and most important, keeps workload distribution as fair as possible.
[I] framed it as a performance challenge. We weren’t going to work less;
we were going to prove we could complete the same volume of
calls, emails, tasks, and sales in four days that we were doing in five.
Scheduling and AI assistance
For the schedule, we created four rotation groups. Everyone works Mondays together; that’s when we hold team meetings. Then, Tuesday through Friday, the rotation happens. One group is off Tuesday, another Wednesday, another Thursday, another Friday. Everyone gets a Friday off once a month for a three-day weekend.
We’d run shared inboxes in Gmail and Outlook for years, but those platforms weren’t built for it, and we didn’t realize how much we were fighting the tool. It was manual, clunky, and hard to scale.
In January 2025, after a lot of research, I found Help Scout. The problem? No one in my industry was using it. I couldn’t call another agency owner and ask how it worked for them. I also had to get buy-in from my entire team for yet another new tool, which is never an easy sell.
It was a huge risk. But it paid off. HelpScout gave us features we didn’t know we needed: collision detection so two people don’t work on the same email, workflow automation that routes emails to the correct team based on content, and integration with our agency management system through an API. It’s now my team’s favorite tool in the agency.
We have built over 100-plus AI automated workflows in Help Scout—think Outlook rules but on steroids. Claims emails route to the licensed service team. Quote requests go to sales. Billing inquiries hit the client-facing team. Carrier communications go to the back office.
Then we set up a standard for handling emails in our shared inbox to keep it organized. For example, we transfer every email to a task in HawkSoft within four hours, then close the email in Help Scout. This helps with no email backlogs. It also makes HawkSoft our source of truth for notes and tasks.
Now, if someone is off, the work doesn’t stop. Anyone on the team can pick it up because the context is there. This alone removed a massive amount of stress, from the team and from me. We can also see workload by staff in real time and step in accordingly.
Results
Before the four-day workweek, SOPs were important. After the four-day workweek, they were essential.
When you have fewer hours, you can’t afford re-explaining things and you certainly can’t afford inconsistency.
We documented everything. Every repeatable task needed a standard process, clear expectations, a defined owner, and a clean system of record. If people have questions, they reference the documentation first. If a process changes, they will update the SOP.
We started to notice over time that training got faster, the errors went down, and the team’s confidence went up. Team members started proactively suggesting process improvements because they understood that efficiency directly translates to personal time. There’s less territorial behavior and more “how can we knock this out together” thinking.
Here are the numbers: Looking at a one-month comparison, we completed 1,309 tasks in May 2024 with five-day weeks vs. 1,303 tasks in May 2025 with four-day weeks. Same volume, 20% fewer workdays.
The agency’s new business premium through May 2024: $570,842. Through May 2025, it was $575,338. Same sales production and team despite a hard market with fewer opportunities.
The four-day workweek didn’t make us productive. It forced us to be productive.
Getting started
I don’t think every agency should jump to a four-day workweek tomorrow. But I do think every agency should ask the harder question it forces: ”If we had 20% fewer hours, what would break?”
Whatever the answer is—email, SOPs, handoffs, sales process, service structure—that’s where your real work is.
Start with your systems, not your schedule. If you don’t have documented processes, cross-trained staff, and performance metrics, a four-day week will expose every operational weakness you have.
Run a pilot with clear success criteria. Tell your team: “We’re going to try this for 90 days. If we can maintain our service levels and sales numbers, we’ll make it permanent. If not, we go back.” This removes the pressure and makes it a data-driven experiment.
Make it performance-based from the start. We track activity across our agency management system, phone system, email platform, and productivity software. If someone’s metrics fall, we can temporarily adjust their schedule to help them refocus. This maintains the standard that makes the benefit sustainable for everyone.
We started the four-day workweek to reduce burnout. What we got instead was better collaboration, clearer accountability, stronger systems, and a better run agency.
The time off for my staff is great. Don’t get me wrong. But the real win was building an agency that doesn’t fall apart when people step away.
Agencies that rely on heroics will burn people out. Agencies that build systems will survive and scale.
Conclusion
The four-day workweek isn’t the point.
Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time available. The reverse is also true; when you shrink the work time, you find out what’s actually necessary. Constraints expose truth.
If your agency can’t operate with fewer hours, it’s not a time problem; it’s a system problem. And the sooner you find out what needs to be improved, the quicker you can fix it.
The author
Michael Cruz is the founder and principal of Foresight Insurance LLC, an independent agency serving Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. He also serves as COO of Virtual Intelligence, which provides virtual employees to insurance agencies, and sits on ERIE Insurance’s Sales and Marketing Task Force. His agency was named Outstanding Agency Overall in Safeco’s 2024 Agent for the Future Awards. He can be reached at Michael.cruz@foresighti.com.
