It Doesn't Feel Like Winning From the Inside
It Doesn't Feel Like Winning From the Inside
Rough Notes named Foresight its Agency of the Month for August, 2026. It's the oldest magazine in this industry and getting that call was an honor I didn't see coming. You can read the full feature here:
When you're in the middle of innovation, it rarely feels like you're winning. You keep moving the goalposts, finding new things to achieve and improve in the agency. That drive is what takes you to the next level. So you keep your head down and grind. Sometimes the progress gets blurry, because it's incremental and because you're standing too close to it.
A few years ago I decided the traditional P&C agency model design was the problem. Not my team. Not the market. The model itself. The owner is the bottleneck because everything runs through them. You can't keep good people because nothing is documented and there's no real training. Accounts get assigned to one person, so when that person is out, the client waits. Emails, calls, and texts live in individual inboxes and phones, so nobody has a real-time view of what's actually happening in the agency.
So, we started rebuilding. We documented SOPs. We moved work to teams instead of individuals, on both sales and service. Then, in May 2024, we cut the 5 day work week from 40 hours to 32 hours/4 days a week.
That constraint is what forced the rest without realizing it. With people rotating days off every week, we were always going to be down someone by design. It exposed every crack we had in our organization. If a process only worked because one specific person was working, it wasn't a process. It was a liability. So, we documented, standardized and cross-trained to cover the knowledge gaps.
One shared inbox for every client and prospect email interactions instead of scattered personal inboxes. One phone line answered round-robin by the whole team. Nobody is a single point of failure anymore.
And it worked. We complete the same volume of tasks in four days that used to take us five. We held our new business premium through one of the hardest markets I've seen, with fewer opportunities to write. The team is less burned out, not more.
I'm not going to pretend it's been all wins. We took a hit on retention when carriers pulled out of markets and rates went up with nobody wanting the risk. There's plenty I still want to fix. We're not where I want to be.
But the direction is right, and for the first time I can see how far we've come.
Here's what I want my team to hear. It's supposed to be hard. It's hard because we're doing it differently, because we're trying to change a business that's been stuck in its ways for a long time. We don't do it for recognition. We do it quietly. We do it so the people in my agency can build a career, provide for their families, and still have a life outside of work. So the pressure to perform stays healthy and never tips into burnout.
The recognition is nice. But it's not the point. We are doing something different, and it's working.