Page 67 - The UnCaptive Agent

40 THE UNCAPTIVE AGENT

are most competitive in writing. Every insurance com-
pany will give you what they call a hit list, which is the
kind of business they’ve written in the most recent two
or three months. When you look at those lists, you’ll see
that they are very broad and not very helpful in picking
a niche. What I like to ask a carrier is, “If you received
a hundred submissions on a similar kind of risk in the
last ninety days, which risk type did you write fifty to
one hundred percent of the time?” In other words, what
are you really competitive in writing currently? With
that information, you can begin to market much more
effectively to a smaller group of homogenous risks.
Homogeneity in a niche book of business is import-
ant. One of the first niches I focused on as a new agent
was restaurants. I began writing restaurant workers’
compensation and then expanded into the other lines
of business. I did this because I had several competitive
workers’ compensation carriers who would also entertain
the property and liability exposures as well—not because
I knew anything about restaurants. I quickly learned
that there are lots of different kinds of restaurants with
different exposures. I needed to further focus on the
demographics (the common set of characteristics) of the
restaurants I could be successful with. You should do
the same thing. The formula for success is competitive
carrier and product plus highly defined demographic
characteristics times large number of prospects.
Once you’ve built a book of business in that niche,
you can increasingly focus your carrier selection on
those insurance companies that serve that niche. Your
agency can build itself into a broad-based agency with
a large number of niches over time. This recipe works
better for building rapid growth (as well as long-term
success) than trying to write everyone who shows up
at your door.