Telling it like it is

It's ironic. When we approach new agencies, one of the first questions they always have is "How long have you been in business?".

My sales team seems to have a bit of a hiccup with this question. Were brand-new. And for some reason their gut reaction is that that is some sort of a sin. It is almost like being a new is a problem. Like every great company didn't have a first today.

It would seem that the question is a way for the agents to quickly assess whether we are competent or not. I find it odd because so many of the people in my particular industry, insurance, really are not competent and somehow have managed to stay in business for 30 years.

Further, I have been in negotiations with the company that has been around more than 75 years on a joint venture project. The ironic thing is that the forward thinking people in that organization have come to the conclusion that "we have all the advantages and disadvantages of being a 75-year-old company. Lime Tree needs to slow down a bit so are people, who are set in their ways, can keep up"

So I started taking some of the calls myself. When the question came up I simply said "we are brand-new". And it seemed to satisfy the person asking the question. I can tell you that I get just as many requests for proposal from these agents as my sales team gets from one's when they dance around the question.

I think it comes down to this: Agents want to quickly assess whether we are competent or not. If we dance around the question, they will sense that we believe something is wrong. We don't believe anything is wrong. If we answer the question directly they will soon realize that we are in fact very competent because they see the way we do our job.

The other advantage of simply telling it like it is, is that, Americans like an underdog and people like to help people. If I take honest feedback from my agents to heart, they will give me the latitude that they would never give an established company. I also get them as a champion who has helped me and has "buy in" for my success.

It's so funny how the basic premises of business come down to what your mother taught you when you were four years old.

Activity creates miracles.

My very best friend on the planet once told me:

Activity creates miracles!

When it comes to sales and new business it's exactly that. Remember, sales is simply saying the right thing to the right person at the right time. I know that a lot of people spend a great deal of time refining the details of the sale, but it ultimately comes down to saying the right thing to the right person at the right time.

So, as a relatively new company, Lime Tree Underwriters went through the usual neophyte period of refining its message and defining its target audience. Now that we have "the right thing" and we know who the "right person" is: it's just a matter of saying it at the right time.

Now were on top of our proverbial soapbox, shouting our message to people that we think want to hear it. Then a funny thing happened: Sales have begun to take off.

We really didn't do anything new. We just did it. It was just a matter of activity.

Company culture and fruitcakes.

In order to get the very best people, and to get the most out of the best people it's necessary to create a corporate culture of extreme fun. This does not mean samba dancing in the cubicles. But, rather it means creating an organization of high-performance people where anyone from the outside looking in would say: "Man I would love to work there!"

I have always believed that after you earn a basic income, after that it is all about the game. It has to be a heck of a lot of fun.

So when recruiting, we look for exactly that. People that want to come with their a game on: take no prisoners. We advertise a message of high-performance, run with the big dogs: fun.

The problem is this. When we say to the outside world that this is the best place to work we get the best people.

But, we also get every fruitcake, weirdo, and loony who can read a classified ad. They want in on the fun too!

I truly want to get this company to position where we can do exactly what Jonathan Davis at Hire Better ( jd@hirebetter.com ) calls the virtual bench. This would mean that we wouldn't have to cull through the nut cases. This also means we would not be limiting ourselves to hiring talent that is simply available at the time.

After all, the very best people are probably not looking for a job.

Your rates are too high... no they're not... yes... no...

As long as I can remember, the conversation is the same. The carrier comes and asks what they can do for us.

We suggest that their rates for XXXX are too high in XXX County.

Their response: No they aren't.

Yes they are.

No they aren't.

Just like two schoolkids in the playground.

At Lime Tree Underwriters, we think we have come up with a way to avoid this silly and frivolous conversation. Each time you close an application that we did not write, our system will ask you why you lost the business. And if it's because of pricing, we will assemble your feedback along with the feedback of all our other agents. That way when "the carrier guy" comes to see us, he doesn't stand a chance!

Hiring these days.

Perhaps I'm just getting old. But recently I started a search for a new marketing representative. In the back of my mind, I had a fantasy about a hard-working guy or girl who I could send out into the world to represent us.

I put an ad on craigslist and I was swamped with resumes.

First of all, let me say there were some good people. I'm sure I'm going to find a good employee amongst them. What bothers me is the absolute lack of "getting it" on the part of so many job seekers.

So here is a short list of things, I would advise them to consider:

• Don't just take any job. Make sure that this is what you really want to do. If you don't like it from the beginning you are going to be unhappy. You are going to quit. Or, worse, you are going to underperform and be fired.

• Don't just blindly send your resume. I can't tell you the number of word documents that were sent with no explanation or even a subject line on e-mail. If your training is in pediatric emergency medicine, kindly tell me why you think you would be good at sales. (Because the way it is, you have ipso facto told me that you don't care what I'm trying to accomplish, you just want any job.)

• Don't try to pretend that you're something you're not. Eventually you will be unhappy or we will be unhappy.

• Remember you are on Facebook/MySpace/trendy social media site of the year. Special note to the guy with all the tattoos, piercings, implants and other body modifications: while we understand your generation goes in for this sort of thing, I'm not going to hire you. But thank you for posting all the pictures on and MySpace, except for the one of your right butt cheek, it made my decision easy.

Oh, I was just getting to that!

I can't count the number of times that, in my former life as an agent, I would submit a risk to an underwriter and wait. I would patiently wait. After three or four days I might not hear anything. ( Don't these underwriters know that the close ratio goes down with every ticking minute?)

The situation was the same every time. I would pick up the phone and I would call the underwriter:

"Oh yes, funny you should call. I was just looking at that right now!"

I must have ESP. It seems awfully strange that every time I called on a late application, it was the precise moment when the underwriter was reviewing it.

What does an underwriter do?

We took a good hard look at underwriting. We watched underwriters going about their daily work. If you can imagine the scene where there are guys in white lab coats, with stopwatches and clipboards in their hands, looking at our underwriters like they were "a bug in a bottle", you would not be too far from the truth.

Not surprisingly we found out, that underwriters only spend about 15% to 20% of their time working on the business that we actually want to write! You see, if you have a good agency force, the agents are sending you things that are already prequalified and they have a good idea that your pricing is good. This kind of risk, takes only seconds for the underwriter to say yes to.

But it is human nature to make the work fill the time available. This is where the danger comes in. While the underwriter is spending a lot of time trying to help the agent makes the risk fit, there is too much slack time. It turns out that the underwriters spends the bulk of their day, trying to find a way to fit marginal risks into the program. This is despite the fact, that we have to hold our regulators, reinsurers, actuaries, and everyone else in the transaction just what our underwriting appetite is.

What I would desperately like to know, is what the underwriting results are for that business that underwriters have squeezed in to the margins compared to the good clean stuff. I don't have any hard data to support this, but I suspect that the losses are much better for the in the box risks that the underwriter has spent little time on then the out of box risks where the underwriters spends all their time.