Headquarters: Welland, ON
Website: thebig.ca
Tell us a little about your brokerage.
Billyard Insurance Group (BIG) is an industry-leading and award-winning insurance brokerage in Ontario. Our family-run brokerage, founded in Welland in 1998, has recently grown to over 40 successful branch offices across Ontario, with an employee base of more than 500 staff. BIG’s rapid expansion was recognized on The Globe and Mail’s 2020 Report on Business – we were listed as one of Canada’s Top Growing Companies.
How do you maintain a competitive advantage?
Adopting a culture of change and improvement has been key to our success at BIG. We are always evaluating and re-evaluating every aspect of our brokerage to ensure we are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible. We continually seek out opportunities to innovate in technology and operations and develop new ways to do things.
What 2020 accomplishments are you most proud of?
In 2020, we launched BIG University – our digital learning platform designed to empower BIG brokers with access to hundreds of hours of video and audio content, covering insurance and systems training, as well as industry trends. The platform development was led by our learning and development manager, Jennifer Fraser, and director of personal lines, Sylvester Slowakiewicz, bringing together input from all our teams to create an industry-leading training solution that powers BIG’s growth.
We’re incredibly proud of the growth we’ve accomplished together at BIG in 2020. We continue to prove that BIG will consistently deliver profitable and sustainable growth year over year as we establish ourselves as a leaders in the brokerage space. Our plans for the years ahead are ambitious, and we’ve doubled our commitment to remaining a people-focused company, focused on empowering brokers with the tools, technology, training and resources they need to be successful.
What made 2020 a banner year for your brokerage?
We discovered how resilient we are as an organization. At the beginning of the pandemic, it quickly became clear that the way we do business was going to change forever. We rapidly deployed technology and a new strategy to adapt. The result was that our teams came together like never before, our communication improved, and we became even more effective at execution. It turned out that the event we thought could separate us actually brought our teams closer together.
What did you do differently last year?
In 2020, we strengthened our commitment to technological advancement. First, we began developing our own software to resolve operational needs that were not being met by the industry-standard offerings. This has opened our teams’ collective creativity to greater possibilities, and we have committed to taking on larger projects to improve our organizational efficiency and effectiveness. We also embraced video technology as the primary form of our marketing, training and communications; it has empowered us to connect in a way we never thought possible.
Providing our brokers with extensive market access and a stream-lined platform for growth and development has been our top priority. Brokers and markets are becoming more advanced in how we do business, and we are continuously evolving to drive that change. We are extremely fortunate to have such strong and supportive relationships with our markets that will allow us to continually innovate the BIG brokerage platform.
What can your wholesale or insurer partners do to help you write more business?
Connectivity remains the key. Brokerages need our insurance partners to enhance their technology, be responsive in sharing data and be capable of working with our technology to create meaningful integrations that help us manage our relationships effectively. Many carriers have made significant strides on this front in 2020, and it is with those partners that we see growth opportunities.
