Agency Profile: Friendliest of Takeovers

The Insurance Group, LLC

Knoxville, Tennessee
Founded: 1996
Employees: 13

Former owner Neil Zabo hired Josh Witt in 2006 and began grooming him to run and eventually purchase his agency. Ten years later, the perpetuation is complete, and gross revenues have held steady at $1.4 million for the past two years. Witt expects the same in 2017.

Zabo has stayed on in a production role, managing 15–20 accounts and actively seeking new business. The Insurance Group has about 1,600 personal lines and 1,200 commercial lines customers, and propane distributors and bottle fillers across the country account for 25% of business.

While the six-producer firm is relatively young, it has acquired agencies with roots in the mid-1920s, with plans to continue buying small personal lines agencies in the future.

DAVID EVANS, COMMERCIAL RISK MANAGER

We believe flexibility is utterly important in moving forward with tomorrow’s workforce, and our agency culture is built around a millennial staff. Our open office space helps breed creativity and collaboration. We focus on getting the job done rather than on how it gets done. We have a defined paid time off policy for vacation and sick days, but if an employee needs to run their child to the doctor or get their hair done, we allow them to just go do it. We have an employee who works from home because she was driving more than 60 miles one way to the office. We redefined her role, giving her responsibilities that could easily be done from home.

JOSH WITT, PRESIDENT

By April 2015, I was making the day-to-day decisions, and Neil was managing cash flow. I approached him and said, “Hey, if I can get someone to loan me money, do you want to work on a buyout?” He said, “Absolutely!”

One of my main management principles is that if you are getting the job done correctly, I will be a very hands-off leader. Reaching new prospects is our producers’ biggest challenge. Picking up the phone and dialing for dollars isn’t working like it used to. We have to figure out how to be in the same places our prospects are visiting.

NEIL ZABO, RISK MANAGEMENT SPECIALIST

We use Applied Systems Epic and also have the CSR24 product. We gained enough efficiency moving from TAM Online to Epic that we were able to choose to not replace a CSR who left. With Epic’s reporting capabilities and sales management piece, we have a firm grasp on what’s going on within the agency—from profitability to production to service—and our staff is able to spend more time with each client.

To learn to better communicate with clients and prospects, we attended Safeco’s Customers for Life program. To supplement our normal outreach—phone, text message and Facebook—we launched a newsletter in January. We have also implemented video quoting.