Thisaccisntreal
New Member
- 5
Hello,
I've seen a lot of good guidance here already just browsing so I figured I'd make my first post and see if I could get some help myself.
I am licensed in L/H and P/C, the L/H I've had for about 5 years the P/C is a newer endeavor and have only had for about a year. My family has owned an independent life and health agency focused on seniors for the last 30 or so years. We write in MD, PA, and WV and currently have about 5,000 clients with about 90% of them being Medicare Supplement clients. I've worked for the business and been successful for the past 5 years and will be taking over when my Dad retires.
I thought it was a good idea to get my P/C license so I did and wanted to explore adding P/C to our agency so that we could potentially be a one stop shop for our clients from when they are 20 to when they are 100. We had a hard time finding one of the "big names" that would let us keep our med supp business and appointments and long story short ended up opening an office with Farmers.
We have our Farmers agency operating out of the same office building as the family business so we have no overhead expenses, we don't pay for utilities or anything like that as that is covered by the family business, the only thing we pay for is the Farmer's mandated marketing expenses and things like that. We have maybe 6 or so other agents in the office who are older and part time and are only L/H licensed and our office manager who just handles minor customer service things, answers phones etc.
Fast forward to almost 8 months from opening our doors, I'm the only one in our office set to do anything with Farmers, out of the maybe 200-300ish people I've spoken too I might've sold roughly 15-20 households. If that. I perfectly understand selling value but I can't sell someone value on an auto policy that is 2 to 3 times more expensive than any other carrier I've seen. They have good home rates and that is where we have seen any success but that is even limited once people try to bundle or ask about other insurances. They have a very limited commercial appetite and I've had 4 or 5 decent sized for me, $10k+ commercial premiums walk because Farmer's couldn't do it, or again was way out of line price wise.
I've paid for Facebook ads, internet leads, anything you can think of. It just seems insane to me that maybe 1% of the people I talk to we can do anything for, it's getting to the point of me trying so much week in and week out with such little success that I'm getting into the "why bother" phase.
So I guess the advice I'm looking for is should I switch gears and look towards the independent route? Maybe scrap it and put more into the L/H business, the L/H business runs itself. Another thing is I still have a good bit of med supp clients I need to drop everything to service and I handle all new business for us so that was an issue when i was working leads and got tied up handling L/H business that I couldn't get to the leads in a timely manner. I don't know what I'm really looking for I just know I dread coming into our agency to push Farmer's every day and don't really know what to do and was hoping for some guidance. Thanks in advance and I'll happily answer any questions or provide more info if needed, thanks!
I've seen a lot of good guidance here already just browsing so I figured I'd make my first post and see if I could get some help myself.
I am licensed in L/H and P/C, the L/H I've had for about 5 years the P/C is a newer endeavor and have only had for about a year. My family has owned an independent life and health agency focused on seniors for the last 30 or so years. We write in MD, PA, and WV and currently have about 5,000 clients with about 90% of them being Medicare Supplement clients. I've worked for the business and been successful for the past 5 years and will be taking over when my Dad retires.
I thought it was a good idea to get my P/C license so I did and wanted to explore adding P/C to our agency so that we could potentially be a one stop shop for our clients from when they are 20 to when they are 100. We had a hard time finding one of the "big names" that would let us keep our med supp business and appointments and long story short ended up opening an office with Farmers.
We have our Farmers agency operating out of the same office building as the family business so we have no overhead expenses, we don't pay for utilities or anything like that as that is covered by the family business, the only thing we pay for is the Farmer's mandated marketing expenses and things like that. We have maybe 6 or so other agents in the office who are older and part time and are only L/H licensed and our office manager who just handles minor customer service things, answers phones etc.
Fast forward to almost 8 months from opening our doors, I'm the only one in our office set to do anything with Farmers, out of the maybe 200-300ish people I've spoken too I might've sold roughly 15-20 households. If that. I perfectly understand selling value but I can't sell someone value on an auto policy that is 2 to 3 times more expensive than any other carrier I've seen. They have good home rates and that is where we have seen any success but that is even limited once people try to bundle or ask about other insurances. They have a very limited commercial appetite and I've had 4 or 5 decent sized for me, $10k+ commercial premiums walk because Farmer's couldn't do it, or again was way out of line price wise.
I've paid for Facebook ads, internet leads, anything you can think of. It just seems insane to me that maybe 1% of the people I talk to we can do anything for, it's getting to the point of me trying so much week in and week out with such little success that I'm getting into the "why bother" phase.
So I guess the advice I'm looking for is should I switch gears and look towards the independent route? Maybe scrap it and put more into the L/H business, the L/H business runs itself. Another thing is I still have a good bit of med supp clients I need to drop everything to service and I handle all new business for us so that was an issue when i was working leads and got tied up handling L/H business that I couldn't get to the leads in a timely manner. I don't know what I'm really looking for I just know I dread coming into our agency to push Farmer's every day and don't really know what to do and was hoping for some guidance. Thanks in advance and I'll happily answer any questions or provide more info if needed, thanks!
