You want more business, you want more business, you want more business. I get it. All of us do, but here’s the problem. You’re running your business like an insurance agency. You got to cut that out. That’s the topic of today’s article.
So here’s the deal. We all want more sales. I get it, but the problem is that the average insurance agency out there is running their business like an insurance agency. That’s a problem. The deal is we’re not an agency and until we sell a policy.
My fundamental belief is that until we get the order to bind, we write coverage, and we have policy administration to do, we’re not an insurance agency at all. We’re a sales organization. That’s the thought process you have to have. If you think that way, your habits are going to change. Your investments are going to change in terms of where you put your time and energy. You will change the resources you use. For example, your technology stack is entirely different. Here’s why: I don’t know of a single sales organization out there that runs their organization off of an agency management system. Because they don’t, agency management systems are for insurance agencies. Do you know of a high performing sales team from a Fortune 500 company that is using Applied to run their sales processes? NO! They are using a CRM.
CRMs are for sales organizations. As long as we’re clear on that, we can continue down this road. You need a way to organize and track who’s going into the top of your funnel. Do you know who is going all the way through the buyer’s journey to the bottom of the funnel? How do you ever get enough data to improve your processes? How do you know what marketing efforts you need to replicate? How do you know how to help your salespeople? Maybe they are missing something in a followup stage. Perhaps they’re not hitting enough volume in their cold calls. Maybe their email template needs tweaked a little bit. All of this stuff is stuff you can help them with when you run your agency like it’s a sales organization because it is. You can transform the way that you think and quit running the front end of your process like an ages-old agency. You can adapt like a 21st-century sales organization, you and your team are going to kill it in commercial insurance.
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.
The insurance industry is full of shortcuts. Some producers look for ways to streamline the quoting process, others avoid hard conversations with clients, and many rely on endorsements or extensions because they are “easier” than diving into the details. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in the world of cyber insurance.
Too many agents assume that a cyber endorsement on a BOP or commercial package policy is “good enough.” It isn’t. In fact, treating a BOP cyber extension as a replacement for a standalone cyber policy leaves clients dangerously exposed, puts producers at risk of losing accounts, and opens the door to costly errors and omissions (E&O) claims.
Cyber threats evolve faster than any other area of risk, and endorsements simply can’t keep up. If producers want to protect their clients and themselves, it’s time to understand why standalone cyber insurance is non-negotiable.
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