CHOOSING INSURANCE

What Trade Offs Are You Making When Choosing Insurance for Your Business?

When choosing insurance for your business, and an agent to represent you to the insurer, most businesses have a checklist of major things they look for in this critical relationship:

• Industry expertise: finding a broker that understands your industry and speaks your language.
• Community presence: finding a local broker who you know, and who knows you.
• National resources: finding a broker that provides a comprehensive set of services, like large, national brokers do.

A business needing commercial insurance will of course want to check all of these boxes when getting insurance coverage. Most businesses, however, feel they have to make tradeoffs and end up with just one or perhaps two of these relationship attributes.

Many businesses will opt for a local broker, someone who they see in the community and with whom they can conveniently meet. There’s a lot of comfort in using a broker with a local presence who is right down the street. These local brokers may have general business knowledge instead of industry expertise, but they are there for you. If the local broker is with a small firm, the insurance client often trades the comprehensive services capabilities for the accessibility and availability of that local broker.

Other times businesses will opt for coverage from large, national brokers that have deep expertise in their clients’ industries. However, this expertise isn’t usually in the form of an agent who is just down the street. These firms also provide the full set of services that commercial insurance clients get value from, such as loss control, risk management, safety planning, and claims advocacy. These services typically aren’t available from small, independent agents. Clients of these large firms often find they are trading a local presence for the expertise and comprehensive set of services a national broker provides.

For businesses that feel that these two options leave something to be desired, there is a third option: a commercial business insurance provider with the resources of a national broker and the local presence of a local broker. Unlike unicorns, such an insurer exists, and this third option is the INSURICA business model. As a commercial insurance agency, INSURICA has industry expertise that lets its brokers speak the language of their customers, while offering the services of a national broker. An INSURICA broker combines the advantages of a local presence with the resources and services of a large, national firm.

“At INSURICA, we use a proprietary, proven process that is designed to take client companies and make them best-in-class businesses,” said Taylor Caraway, Director of Sales Resources for INSURICA. “We have claims specialists and risk management specialists on staff. We also have in-house loss control and in-house claims control, as well as access to an in-house third-party administrator. This makes INSURICA like a national broker, just on a smaller scale. Since we’re in the communities we serve, we provide local delivery of these national resources. It’s the best of both worlds because we maintain a local community presence and relationship, but give our customers access to this vast network of resources that is so much bigger than what a local broker can provide.”

Businesses that have outgrown their local agent’s ability to provide services, or that don’t qualify for those services of a large, national broker will find INSURICA is the ideal fit. “A business may have a coverage gap or service issues with their current agent,” said Caraway. “Or perhaps they’re with a small, local broker or they’re with an out of town, national broker. Either way, they probably have problems that they don’t know about. An INSURICA broker can meet with a business to discover the opportunities for lowering risk and improving coverage. There’s a better solution out there that doesn’t require a business making a tradeoff.”