Setting ourselves appart

The insurance business is basically simple.

To the agent there is only three things that a managing general agent can deliver:

1. A good policy (a strong form and secure paper)

2. A good price.

3. Ease of doing business with the managing general agent.

When you consider these three factors, there is only one that any managing and general agent can do to be unique.

You may have a good policy, but you will never be the only one who has a good policy for a sustained period of time. If you are making money in a line of business, there are 100 other underwriters who will jump in behind you. We all know that this is a business of copycats. Nothing is secret because all of your actuarial information is passed around among the reinsurance community and the regulators.

You may have a good price. But this industry is littered with the remains of the irrational player who has come in and undercut prices, gotten themselves in trouble and disappeared.

So this is what's so odd.

When I went to the various associations to find out what the average time was for a quotation and for policy delivery, no one is even keeping the industry best practice metric. When you ask these guys how fast do you turn around a quote, you usually get the same answer: "We can turn it around really quickly if we have to."

But that is not the question I asked. The question I asked can be answered with a number of hours. When I asked how long does it take you to produce a quote I would hope that someone could say we return a quote in 21.4 working hours.

But nobody actually tracks it.

Effective May 1, 2010 Lime Tree Underwriters will track the number of business hours every single one of our quotes takes. We will note how long we take. We will note how long our underwriting partners take. Our goal is to always make that number smaller.

Not only that, we will put the time it took us on the cover letter of every single quote we send to our agents.

Yes, part of what we're doing is screaming to the market "were faster than everybody else"

But what we're really doing is causing ourselves to focus on that number. And by focusing on that number we truly will be faster.

It is just one of the ways we think we can distinguish ourselves as the easiest people to do business with. We believe we can sustain that advantage over time.