Growing Your Book of Business in 2026

• March 24, 2026

By Matthew Fastow

For decades, growing an insurance book of business followed a familiar formula. Build a strong reputation in your community, develop a deep network of referral partners and simply outwork the next broker. Producers who consistently showed up, made the calls and maintained relationships were the ones who won.

Those fundamentals still matter. But the reality facing agencies in 2026 is that relationships alone are no longer enough to drive growth.

Buyers expect faster turnaround, clearer explanations of coverage and more professional presentations of their options. The insurance industry faces a significant staffing challenge: approximately half of its professionals aged 55 and older are projected to retire by the early 2030s, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s The America Works Report: Industry Perspectives. Critically, the influx of new talent is insufficient to replace these outgoing workers. Producers are still expected to grow their books, but they must now do it while navigating increasing operational complexity with fewer experienced people behind them.

In most agencies, this tension shows up day to day. BCG found that administrative tasks consume more than 50% of an agent’s time rather than client-facing activity., which severely limits the capacity for business development and high-value client engagement.

Every hour spent formatting proposals or organizing coverage comparisons is an hour not spent prospecting or strengthening relationships. Most agency leaders know this intuitively. Far fewer have actually measured it. The problem is not that people are underworking. The problem is that experienced, expensive talent is absorbed by work that does not require their expertise.

Ellerbrock-Norris, an independent risk management brokerage with nearly 120 years of experience, saw this clearly. Their account managers were spending nearly 4 hours on each manual policy review.

As Molly Honke, commercial insurance operations manager at Ellerbrock-Norris, put it, “By shifting work off the front-end team, they can stay focused on what actually adds value to the client instead of spending time on work that just needs to get done.”

After adopting automated policy-checking tools, they found that review time dropped to roughly 10 minutes per policy, saving over 9,300 agent hours and allowing the team to handle 30% more volume without adding headcount.

This points to a harder question that the industry has been slow to confront. Most agencies still measure growth primarily by new business written. That number matters, but it obscures the operational costs of servicing and retaining the business already in place.

An agency can write a strong year of new business and still see flat revenue per employee if the back office is drowning in manual work or if renewal retention is eroding because no one has time to conduct a meaningful coverage review. Growth without operational leverage is just a more expensive version of standing still.

Speed compounds this advantage. When multiple brokers compete for the same account, the first advisor to deliver a clear and organized proposal often shapes the entire conversation. Most agencies have some version of a proposal template. The difference between agencies that win on speed and those that merely talk about it comes down to workflow discipline.

Having a template is not the same as having a process that ensures every proposal goes out consistently, within a defined turnaround window, with genuinely useful coverage comparisons rather than decorative. The template is table stakes. The workflow behind it is where competitive separation happens.

Agencies must also balance speed with accuracy. As policy forms grow more complex, the margin for error narrows. Nearly every agency has some form of internal review process, but the question that separates a genuinely protective system from a performative one is whether the process catches errors the individual handler missed—or whether it simply asks the same person to confirm their own work.

Sterling Thompson Company, a Kentucky-based full service property & casualty agency, experienced both sides of this. Manual policy checks were straining the team and leaving them in a reactive posture—relying on carrier notices to trigger client conversations.

After implementing automated coverage review, the agency reduced errors & omissions exposure by an estimated 80% and cut policy check time by 75%. Nikki Young, the agency’s director of personal insurance, described the shift simply.

“We’re steps ahead of the competition—from both an efficiency standpoint and a better client experience,” she said.

More importantly, the agency moved from reactive to proactive, with advisors initiating outreach grounded in documented coverage reviews rather than waiting for renewal notices to dictate the rhythm of engagement.

This proactive capacity has a direct line to retention. While an average agency maintains a client retention rate of approximately 84%–85%, top-performing firms consistently hit the mid-90s. In fact, the 2024 Best Practices Study by Reagan Consulting shows that “Top Quartile” agencies achieve commercial property & casualty renewal rates between 96.6% and 105.2%. The differentiator is structured engagement. According to the Agency Performance Partners Renewal Review Report, clients who engage in substantive discussions with their agent prior to the renewal cycle—such as a structured mid-cycle review—are 80% more likely to remain with the agency.

Even something as straightforward as a mid-year review with the top 20% of accounts by revenue tends to surface opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed—and signals a level of attentiveness that makes it harder for a competing broker to gain a foothold.

This is where technology is beginning to play a meaningful role. Many forward-looking brokerages are adopting tools that automate parts of the proposal and coverage-comparison process, freeing producers and account managers to focus on higher-value work. The enthusiasm is warranted, but it comes with a caveat operators should take seriously: technology layered on top of a broken workflow will automate the dysfunction rather than fix it.

The agencies seeing the strongest returns are those that first clarified their processes—defined turnaround expectations, standardized deliverables and segmented work by complexity—and then adopted tools that accelerated what was already working.

For agency leaders thinking about growth in the coming year, the key question may no longer be simply how many new prospects producers can reach. It may also be how efficiently the agency supports the work that happens after the opportunity appears. The metrics worth watching are the ones most agencies do not track closely enough: average time-to-proposal, the percentage of renewals receiving a full coverage review, revenue per employee and the ratio of administrative hours to client-facing hours.

These numbers reveal more about real growth capacity than new business production alone—and they expose the operational drag that quietly erodes margins even when the top line looks strong.

Relationships will always remain the heart of the insurance business. But in today’s environment, the agencies that combine strong relationships with operational efficiency will be the ones best positioned to grow.

Matthew Fastow is CEO and founder of Coverflow.

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