When Mike Brouwers and his dad Paul decided to move their small independent agency from Middleville to Grand Rapids, Michigan, they knew they needed a new carrier appointment to maintain momentum.

But Brouwers didn’t want just any carrier—he wanted Auto Owners, the “pinnacle appointment” in the state.

His strategy? Call everyone he knew from working with his state’s Young Agents Committee, and ask them to vouch for him.

“I had two or three folks send letters to regional reps, the CEO and the president saying, ‘If you’re looking for anybody in West Michigan, this is your guy for sure,’” recalls Brouwers, 36. “Within 90 days, we were on board.”

BEST-KEPT SALES SECRET?

We’re appointed with some of the top personal lines carriers in the state, and it’s because I put in the time networking with the YAC board instead of sitting behind the desk selling insurance. What good is your good reputation if nobody knows who you are?

There are so many young people who don’t see any value in the big association, or the state association as a branch of the big association. It’s so important to get involved and get your name out there. I know you don’t have time to do it—neither does anybody else. But you figure it out. It pays off in more ways than you can count.

THE AGENT COMMUNITY?

As independent agents, we are asked to do so many different things. Right now, I’m working on an auto insurance quote for somebody whose brother-in-law has a car that is owned by my insured, and he uses it for business. That’s complicated, right? That’s not in the underwriting manual. Being able to send out an email to six people you like and trust and say, “Who do I go to? Should he even be doing this?”—that’s huge.

And as a young agent specifically, you can really get overwhelmed. The vast majority of agencies don’t have a robust training program in place. You tend to get the agency principal who hires a young person, follows them around for a week and then says, “Go do it.” Getting to know other agents and being able to bounce stuff off them gave me great footing when I was starting out.

YOUR BACKGROUND?

I was born and raised within 20 miles of here, and my family was involved in another business that ended up dissolving. My dad was really close friends with an independent insurance agent who did my dad a favor—he said, “Come work for me for two years, and any customer and carrier you can get to come with you after that, you can take.” He went out on his own in 1990.

Fast-forward to me: I did three years in an undergraduate computer science software development program, and after I did my internship I said, “Hmm, maybe this is not what I want to do.” What I didn’t like about software development was working in the middle of a warehouse. It couldn’t be any more cliché as far as computer programming stereotypes—you literally didn’t see the light of day except lunch.

With three years and 90 credits under my belt, I quit and went and worked for my dad. He said, “Listen—I need to hire somebody, you don’t know what you want to do, so why don’t you take a break and figure this out?” That was 15 years ago last week. I ended up going back to school for my business degree, and I’ve been here ever since.

WHAT SETS YOUR AGENCY APART?

Our agency is about 85% personal lines, and in this world where anybody can go online get a quote in a few seconds and be done with it, how we differentiate ourselves is fixing people’s mistakes. The direct writers, the online platforms—they don’t take the time, and they don’t have the education. At the end of the day, there’s a hundred other really nice insurance agents out there. We hold ourselves to a higher standard.

THE ROLE OF TECH?

What we need to do as an industry, as an association, as an agency, is to continue to evaluate and implement technology where appropriate. We have long quote forms on our website. A lot of agents just have name, phone number and email, but as a 36-year-old tech person, I’m never going to enter my info into something like that, because I know all you’re going to do is call me, and I don’t want that. I want to enter it all online and get a number back. We have people filling out our online quote form with VIN numbers and license numbers every single day, and usually with a couple of follow-up emails or texts, you can provide a comprehensive quote with a page-long email explaining, “This is why we did what we did, and this is what we recommend.”

I think that’s a big thing they’re still struggling with in the 100% online space—recommendations. Sure, they can go in there and enter these limits and deductibles, but they don’t know what any of that means or why they picked it. If we can offer an online quoting experience with competitive rates while also providing recommendations and reasons for why we’ve done what we’ve done, I think that goes a long way.

BIGGEST MOTIVATOR?

I have four kids (ages 8, 5, 3 and 1), and being able to provide my family with the life and education we want is enough motivation to make money and work hard. But the other side of it is educating people and fixing what’s wrong. It’s just too important and too overlooked. Something I say a lot is, “Even if you don’t go with me, you should do this, this and this. Take this back to your agent and ask about it, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense. If they can do it for less money and get you the right coverage, great—you should stay with them.” We just want people to be well-served.