The Gann Agency is located in Bryant, AR. Nick Gann started his agency in 2005 as an independent insurance agency. The agency has always embraced technology, agents can work seamlessly from home or at the office. In fact, Nick is proud to say that his agency is open 365 days per year because his team will respond on nights, weekends and holidays to help a customer in need. After a strong start, Nick started to see growth become harder and slower. In fact there were several months that the agency was losing more than it was putting on the books. One of the core challenges they faced was a changing market. One of their carriers that had always had lower than market rates started to make substantial rate increases. Customers were not happy that there was no other competitive option.
Nick had found Agency Performance Partners through some mutual industry friends. We had chatted for several months on some basic ideas he could implement. Finally Nick decided to pull the trigger and become a client of APP. We conducted our agency assessment and found the following core challenges:
- The agency was losing more than it was selling
- Despite everyone being “busy”, the agency was 1.5-2 people over staffed
- The team didn’t have a clear handle on the numbers
- There was no clear organizational structure
- Nick’s focus had been on building a new home therefore his leadership and presence was missing in the agency
We immediately got to town on giving everyone clear job descriptions and clearly tracking the numbers each week. In doing this we held a team sales meeting to show them:
- What was being quoted
- What was sold
- What was lost
- Retention vs New Business
Everyone became motivated to use their management system accurately so that in the team meetings everyone could get recognized for their hard work. With everyone having clear job descriptions, within a few weeks one of the team members had found a new job that was a better fit for her personally. She was a great person and team member but with the decreased payroll the agency could breathe a little easier. We again moved some positions around and the team was humming.
We also gave Nick Gann a job. He became chief lead generator. Each week he had to hand out 10 business cards (no excuses) and network with his community. By doing that the phones started to really ring with high quality leads. His job was to lead the team 3 days per week and make it rain 2 days per week. By changing behavior to move toward a solid goal and focus on their jobs the agency has been thriving.
Nick recently shared this great news with us:
- They have quoted about 800 policies last year
- November was the second busiest sales month
- December was their most profitable month
- Nick is handing out more business cards than he can keep up with
- They are now focused on increasing their closing ratio in 2017
