What Are The 5 Questions You Must Be Able to Answer If You Want Your Agency To Grow?
The following is part one of a five part series developed for your insurance agency to play along! Each week, as we release a new question, take the time, effort, and energy to dive in 
and make sure you can factually answer each of these questions. Knowing the answers will allow you and your team to strategically grow based on your areas of opportunity.
Part 1: The Basics
In every business, owners must know some key facts. What we find in the insurance space is a reliance on carrier data or the biggest measuring stick: how much money is in the bank. In order to truly understand your growth potential, however, you need to know the answers to the following questions:
- How many policies does your agency have in force?
- How much revenue does your agency generate?
- What is the overall premium for your agency?
If your agency has multiple insurance departments you need to know these 3 stats for the agency and each department. It is critical you have this information each and every month and you review it against the following:
- The previous month
- The same month last year
- Year to date
Acting On The Numbers To Grow Your Agency
By understanding these core numbers we can start to have some fun in the coming weeks really identifying what each of these data points represents.
For example, if you have 3,000 policies in force but you have 40% mono-line book we can predict the revenue impact that will have on the agency. In this situation, it may be best to focus all attention on account rounding and pull back activities looking for new business.
Starting with the basics allows you to understand if you are growing, shrinking or staying stagnant. Many of you may have these data points already and review them frequently!
Unfortunately, one challenge we often find in insurance agencies is a lax effort in moving a lost customer to an inactive status. This means they still appear to be a customer in your management system reports; however, there are no active policies. One great tool Zywave has developed is the ability to run a quick report for you to make updates and correct data that can skew your reports!
How does your agency check for inconsistencies in data?
Check back on the Zywave blog next week when we talk about closing ratios!