Page 20 - The UnCaptive Agent

for what I could accomplish as an insurance agency
entrepreneur.
If you’ve picked up this book, you must be thinking
about starting your own business. As you do that, you
may be facing doubts of your own. I hope you’ll find
here not only practical assistance for getting started, but
encouragement and inspiration for taking the first steps.
My company, One Agents Alliance, is a Master
Agency for the national organization Strategic Insurance
Agents Alliance. When we started our business in 2000,
we were primarily engaged in helping smaller existing
independent insurance agencies eliminate the perpetual
agency owner’s problem of insurance carrier access and
ability to build enough volume to earn profit sharing.
At that time, we and other SIAA Master Agencies
were involved in fledgling efforts with a few captive
agents and producers to assist them in starting their
own independent insurance agencies. Some of our peers
were seeing success in helping these agents, and it was
time for us to adjust our business plan and begin to help
these insurance agents more aggressively.
Around 2003, we were able to help a Farmers
Insurance agent make the successful transition to be
an independent agency owner. Soon, we were doing
this on a regular basis. Our success attracted the atten-
tion of not only our colleagues in SIAA and our peer
Master Agencies, but also insurance companies who
recognized the opportunity these new agencies repre-
sented to increase the organic growth their stockholders
demanded. It was time for us to double down on starting
new agencies, which benefited everyone—the industry
itself and, most of all, those entrepreneurial agents long-
ing to set upon the path to independence. This happened
at a time when other industry forces, including carriers’
reliance on algorithms to drive automatic tiered pricing