The best places to work....

I have always liked companies that hold themselves out to be the best places to work. You see it plastered on the side of Southwest Airlines planes and at other quality companies. I've always noticed that the quality of the product that I purchased from them is always very very good when they are one of the best places to work.

I have known a number of people here in Austin who have made the Austin business Journal's best places to work list. I found these people engaging intelligent and they really have the loyalty of their people. On top of all that they turned out great work.

I recently discovered that Business Insurance magazine sponsors a list of the best places to work in the insurance industry. They have a category divided up into small medium and large institutions. Being me of course I want to have nothing to do with in becoming a large institution. Small is great with the definition of up to 250 people.

As soon as I found out about the list, I read it. I saw the top 10 small companies to work for in the 2009. And low and behold, a guy know who runs an agency in Las Vegas Nevada Capstone Brokerage was on the list. In all my dealings with them may have been selfless and just downright charitable with her time: Way to go Jade! While it doesn't surprise me, congratulations!

Having said all this, while I do not like to add to our company goals, less we chase too many of them: I really would like to make this list within three years. So I'm putting it out there publicly so that all of you may hold me accountable to this goal. It's the one goal I cannot have my employees hold me accountable for.

Making it Better

As you all well know, Lime Tree Underwriters uses a very advanced online platform.

In the brief time we have been in business, we are proud to say that we have done exceptionally well in the number of new agents we have appointed and the amount of new business we have quoted and bound.

What is fundamentally different at Lime Tree is that we are open about what we do. We know we are not perfect. We believe that discussing our weaknesses with our partners, rather than trying to hide them, is simply better business.

It seems we have one of those "good problems". Our online platform has generated so much business that the backroom has not been able to keep up. And, while our online platform is one of the best, the binding & issuing steps simply were not perfect.

A number of changes have been made to our platform that have gone live this morning:

• Single click preparation of property policies and an invoice for a mortgage company. They should make closings and mortgage billed much easier.
  
  
• The eSignature option has become far more simple.
  
  
• The process for getting a paper signature and binding things without the online eSignature has been improved. (It's a night and day difference!)

For those of you who have shown a commitment to doing business with Lime Tree Underwriters, we will soon be rolling out an account current monthly bill program to make your lives easier.

 

eSignatures are live today..

The paper chase in the insurance industry is just silly. Today we implemented the 2.0 version of our eSignature platform. Here is a quick YouTube video to describe it. We hope it makes everyones life easier. You people who still print out your email probably won't like it...

Silliness among regulators.

I am beginning to get a bit concerned with the amount for the amount of outright stupidity committed by people who work for government agencies. Now, we all see this as a regular joke. We all have come to expect that the TSA guy at the airport or the courts that processes your parking ticket is going to do something wrong. The problem is this. These regulators are getting dumber and dumber however they have absolute power over our lives. A regulator can, make a career out of making your life miserable if you rub them the wrong way.

Recently Lime Tree Underwriters moved to a new address. We filed a form LHL389 (November 2005 edition) Licensee Name/Address Change Request with the department of insurance.

Believe it or not they rejected the application!

It seems that they cannot read my signature. Can it be I am a freak and my signature is not legible? Perhaps it's too many years dealing in with doctors in medical malpractice insurance... imagine if the Texas state Board of medical examiners rejected every doctor signature. How many bills that the president has signed into law would have been rejected?

So I got on the phone with the Texas Department of Insurance. They told me I need to write my signature more legibly. (I suspect I had a small minded bureaucrat who simply thinks he needs to defend the inane decision of one of his coworkers -- thus providing a new inane answer himself).

I suggested to the Department of Insurance that signing my signature differently then the hundreds of thousands of prior signatures probably would not make my signature legally binding. They didn't want to hear it.

So I'm signing a special signature that is completely legible and sending it back to the Department of Insurance.

The funny thing is that all of this was done by US mail. All of the rejection letters they sent me are being sent to the new address. This despite the fact that they rejected the address change...

It never ends.