When it comes to providing advice on how to create the best brokerage business possible, who better to coach insurance entrepreneurs than a professional cut from the same cloth?
A broker for 22 years in Hamilton, ON, Rick Bauman (pictured) came to realize that his passion was actually in coaching, training, and consulting, rather than operating a brokerage. That eureka moment led him to sell the business and start from scratch with a new plan, and a vision in-hand of working with a small group of clients, with whom he would have intimate relationships and be part of their management teams.
As Bauman cast around the marketplace, he identified a need for training in the broking space, and spent the next few years crisscrossing Canada, training brokers at all levels of enterprises, from leaders to frontline sales staff. Eventually, the business evolved into what it is today – the Intellectual Capital Coaching Corporation, known as iC3.
A key component of the firm’s business model is the Passionate Enterprise, which is a seven-step model that acts as a roadmap to guide iC3’s entrepreneurial clients on their path to transformation. Bauman gave Insurance Business some insight on how he created the Passionate Enterprise and the benefits that this approach offers brokerages.
“Everyone is seeking a sustainable competitive advantage and insurance is often bought and sold based on price, but that’s not a sustainable advantage, because I may have the best price today, but tomorrow, I may not,” he said. “My work led me to believe that the ultimate competitive advantage was in fact to have a team of passionate people working in your brokerage – people that love what they do, that love dealing with clients and solving client problems – and that if you have that passionate group of people, you will shine in comparison to almost any competitor.”
As many businesses, both in insurance and outside of the industry know, a strong company culture can have a huge impact on key processes within an organization. The iC3 team focused its efforts on helping insurance professionals build a high-performance culture based around the ‘passion’ of the people that work for the company.
According to the Passionate Enterprise model, a business centres around the vision and values of the owners, and those leaders then go on to assemble a team of passionate people who share their beliefs. That team should then focus on a specific customer profile, instead of trying to be all things to all people, and excel at taking care of that particular kind of customer. As a result, those customers become advocates for the brokerage and they stay onboard for a long time, keeping their insurance business in-house and referring the brokerage to others. Consequently, a business focused on the passion of its team will achieve exceptional results.
The reality of the broking industry, however, is that many brokerage leaders struggle to find time to work on their business because of the many responsibilities that can consume their days.
“If you want to have a busy day at the office, you don’t need a plan. All you have to do is show up and all kinds of things will happen,” said Bauman. “We characterize that as the ‘ITB virus’ or the ‘I’m too busy virus’ – too busy to work on the business because I’m putting out fires all day.”
Another challenge that brokerage leaders can encounter is differentiation, so being able to tell prospective clients why they should buy insurance from that brokerage. Bauman pinpointed the need for brokers to figure out ways to package the services that they offer and do so in a way that underscores enhanced value in the mind of the buyer.
The third challenge for brokers is employee engagement, in terms of both figuring out how to hire the right people, and then how to motivate, reward, and develop them, while making sure that everyone in the organization is on the same page, with the same set of values and the same vision for the business.
To overcome these challenges, iC3 and its well-developed set of coaching and training services are here to help.
“The brokers that we seek are those that would fit the description of being ambitious entrepreneurs who want to build a great company and achieve exceptional results,” said Bauman.
