You’ve heard me say it a thousand times when this thing is over; every single account is up for grabs. What you have to remember is you do not want to abandon a value-based approach. Now more than ever is an opportunity for you to distance yourself from the status quo. Let’s talk about how you can do that. COVID has undoubtedly taken its toll on everybody, and I have said it a ton when this thing is over, businesses are going to be looking for ways to save. Every account is up for grabs. Nobody is safe. I don’t care how long your relationship has been in place or how awesome of a job you have done. If you have slipped up even in the slightest, someone has an opportunity to get in and take your relationship from you. Things you need to be considering right now are how you can adhere to a value-based sales process during price shopping.
The first thing you have to do is you have to choose your words very, very carefully. Don’t say things like price, premium, anything along those lines. You can talk about the cost because we want them to be thinking about the total cost of risk, and they’ll automatically translate that subconsciously. So one thing that I’m doing is I’m having a webinar tomorrow about five ways that you can reduce costs inside of your workers’ compensation program. Maybe that has something to do with insurance. Perhaps it has nothing to do with insurance, but at the end of the day, they’re going to figure out ways that they can save money that they haven’t been saving.
The second thing you can do is be extremely proactive. You should be reviewing every single account that’s in your book of business right now to make sure that it is airtight. You can’t have any coverage gaps, coverage mistakes, service slip-ups, or anything. Go through everything with a fine-toothed comb. Make sure there are no mistakes. Make sure that if there are, you get them corrected as quickly as possible and proactively check everything in your book. Look, I don’t care if you look at me right now and say, “I don’t need to check. It’s perfect.” Guess what? Are you 100% confident that if I walked in and called on your client tomorrow that I wouldn’t find something? Check. I’m doing the same thing. I’m practicing what I preach.
The third thing that you can do is you can be building out your prospect pipeline right now. If you have not taken the time to build out your pipeline throughout the last couple of years, do it. If you’ve been living on easy street and allowing the referrals to come in, now is the time for you to get your pipeline entirely built out so that when all the restrictions get lifted, you can hit the ground running. If you don’t know how to identify your ideal prospect profile, start with that. Determine who your perfect prospect is and then fill your pipeline full of those. If you can do those three things, as soon as the COVID restrictions are gone, you and your team are going to kill it in commercial insurance.
If you are still walking into meetings talking about premiums, coverage forms, and carrier options, you are already behind.
The middle market is evolving. Business owners are more sophisticated. They are more aware of their financials. And most importantly, they are tired of writing checks for insurance year after year without seeing a return.
Workers’ compensation is one of the most misunderstood and underestimated lines of coverage in the middle market. Too many producers view it as a commodity, something to quote, bind, and move on from. But as the market heads toward 2026, that mindset is becoming a liability.
For years, commercial insurance producers could survive by being good enough across a wide range of industries. They could write a little construction, a little manufacturing, a little hospitality, and a little habitational business and still build a respectable book.
The commercial insurance industry is in the middle of a quiet evolution.
While most conversations still revolve around premiums, deductibles, limits, and carrier appetite, a different category of risk transfer has been gaining traction beneath the surface—parametric insurance. It is not new, but it is finally becoming accessible, relevant, and actionable for middle market producers who are willing to think differently about risk.
In a recent episode of the Power Producers Podcast, I sat down with Brian Thompson from Descartes Underwriting to unpack what parametric insurance actually is, what it is not, and why producers who ignore it may be leaving their clients—and themselves—exposed.
This article breaks that conversation down into practical, producer-friendly language and shows how parametric insurance fits into modern middle market risk management.
The last several years have reshaped the landscape of property insurance across the country. While most national carriers have retreated from coastal states, wildfire zones, and other catastrophe-exposed regions, a handful of disciplined players have taken the opposite path—leaning into difficult markets with a strategic, data-driven approach.
For most entrepreneurs, the decision to start a business is rooted in the promise of freedom. Freedom from a boss, freedom to control income, and freedom to build something meaningful. Yet for many business owners, particularly in service-based industries and middle-market companies, that freedom slowly erodes. What begins as ownership eventually turns into obligation, where the business demands constant attention and the owner becomes the single point of failure.
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