Page 190 - The UnCaptive Agent

ON YOUR OWN: AGGREGATION OR AGENCY COACHING 163

call these organizations Insurance Agency Development
Organizations, and I have also coined the term Agency
Growth Coaching Organizations. These organizations
combine the option of carrier representation with much
lower-volume commitments, which allows the agency
to represent more insurance carriers, just as aggregators
and clusters do. And their size creates leverage with
the insurance companies, which can result in higher
commission income for the member agencies as well
as higher profit-sharing bonuses and other incentives,
just as aggregators do.
These development organizations, however, also
offer a very important distinction compared to aggre-
gators and clusters and offer significant non-carrier
resources to their members. The idea is that, by com-
bining resources, agents can provide more sophisticated
carrier management, access to training and education,
and other resources to help the agencies grow faster,
larger, and more profitable than they could with either
an aggregator or on their own. Today, of the roughly
38,000 insurance agencies in the United States, approx-
imately twenty-six percent belong to either an insurance
aggregation organization or an agency network, accord-
ing to the 2018 Conning Study on Property-Casualty
Insurance Distribution.
As you have no doubt been thinking as you read this
book, the complexity of starting and insurance agency
from scratch is daunting. And you are probably won-
dering if you can do it yourself. I believe you can if you
are talented and dedicated, but I also believe that the
challenges faced by my retail agency partner over thirty
years ago when he began are agency were—in some
respects—much easier. That is why agency development
organizations have come into being and why they offer
more assistance to their members than ever before. Most