Agency Profile: Renewed Focus

By: williamjones
September 2, 2014

By: Sheryl Feminis

Herbie Wiles Insurance

St. Augustine, Fla.
Founded: 1961
Employees: 34

How do consumers benefit from doing business with a Best Practices agency? Doug Wiles says what’s relevant to the industry—efficiency, profitability and doing more with less—sometimes conflicts with public perception of agency performance.

Wiles uses Best Practices as a tool to validate what the agency does well and identify areas for improvement. The staff strives for exceptional customer service to achieve increased sales and income as well as the opportunity to do more operationally—hire, purchase technology tools and share profits among the entire team.

Agency leadership credits success to an extensive overhaul of processes and procedures, as well as careful attention to giving team members the right roles. Letha Wiseman spearheaded the complex initiative, considering every personality, workflow, task and piece of paper in the organization. Success relied on embracing change.

WAYNE E. HOWELL, JR. VICE PRESIDENT

Best Practices information showed us how to burn cleaner fuel—to focus on what increases agency value. We changed from a generalist agency to servicing niches that indicate higher premium dollars and therefore higher revenue. We were always interested in writing certain niches, but we waited for them to come to us. Now we have a statewide campaign to actively search out these categories.

DOUG WILES, PRESIDENT

Sometimes, our challenge is effective communication. Overall, we do it well because it’s part of our process. When there’s a relevant issue—Biggert-Waters flood insurance legislation, for instance—we map a process for communicating what’s in clients’ best interests. We break down the plan into parts and determine how the communication will be handled and the roles of everyone involved. Our clients and staff experience less confusion and appreciate the clear communication.

LETHA WISEMAN, VICE PRESIDENT, OPERATIONS

We focus on education and training internally for insurance, as well as processes and procedures. It’s important we have someone looking over our shoulder, so we regularly have outside audits of processes and procedures, providing positive and negative feedback. Our retention stats demonstrate a remarkable turnaround since we overhauled the way we operate. Retention percentage improved for personal lines from the mid-70s to the mid-90s. For commercial lines, percentages went from the 60s to the low 90s.