The Squeeze
As the business owner of an insurance agency, you are clearly one of the “wealthy” business people in the country making “too much” money! Of course, I’m kidding but for some people, I’m sure they feel this way about us. What they don’t realize is the real cost of running an insurance agency. It feels like we are getting the squeeze from every direction. The cost of marketing, labor, office, and systems have all risen, and at the same time, carriers want to pay us less commission. At least premiums are rising!!
So what does all of this mean and why do I write this post? We can not help you pay less for your office space or your agency management system or marketing. What we can help you do is pay less for your labor costs. At Remote Insurance Team we offer our educated and talented team to fill roles across your agency. Until a few years ago I was not sure what unlicensed people could do in an agency. However, in the past few years, while studying state laws and using VAs across my own two agencies I have learned the power of using outsourced help.
So what type of help can our team bring you? We can help in marketing, customer service, post-sale tasks, and quotes. For example, let’s say you use a form to allow customers to answer questions to send you their information for quoting. Why do you need to use licensed, US labor to enter that information into your leads, system and then again into your quoting system? Also, what if you get a ton of emails every day in your main agency inbox? Why are you using licensed US labor to triage these messages for sales and your service team? We use our VAs to sort these messages, supply the teams with anything they need to help with resolution, and remove the noise themselves. One of the arguments we hear from owners sometimes is that these tasks only take a few minutes, but when you stack up many of them a day minutes become hours and hours become days. My partner and I agree that we want our US-licensed labor focused on income-producing tasks as much as possible.
Another cost advantage to us as agency owners, beyond the lower hourly cost, is no taxes. We simply pay companies like Remote Insurance Team as a vendor and we are not responsible for the tax burden we are with US employees. Keep in mind, I’m not saying we should not hire US employees but to be as profitable as possible we need a mix of US labor and outsourced labor. If you want to avoid the squeeze consider adding VAs to your team.
