Liberty Mutual & Safeco President's Aware Trip to Dana Point, California
Liberty Mutual & Safeco President's Aware Trip to Dana Point, California
Last week my wife and I flew out to Dana Point, California for Liberty Mutual's President's Award trip. The Waldorf Astoria sits right on the cliffs, and the view from our room looked straight out over the Pacific.
We arrived Tuesday and settled in. The pace of the week was a nice mix of work and rest. Mornings were for sessions. Afternoons were ours.
Wednesday morning was the Liberty Mutual update. They walked through the one-brand transition and the sunset of the Safeco name. Tyler, who led Safeco, spoke about the company's history. Hard to hear a brand with that kind of reputation go away, but the rationale made sense.
That afternoon we hiked a trail up the mountain overlooking the Laguna Beach coast. Worth every step once you hit the top.
Thursday morning held the two sessions. Brian Dietz from Reagan Consulting gave the State of the Industry. The short version: the easy years are over. Rates are softening, and organic growth across agents and brokers dropped from double digits in 2023 and 2024 to 5.9% in Q1. The only piece of the growth equation agents fully control is sales velocity, so recruiting and developing producers matters more now than it has in a long time. He covered the public broker stock drop after February's Ensurify-ChatGPT announcement, and Howden's aggressive talent raids on Marsh and Brown & Brown. M&A is quieter on the surface but still active underneath, and valuations stay strong if you can show real organic growth. AI, in his view, is an operational advantage right now, not a revenue disruption. Yet.
The second Thursday session was my friend Dale Steinke's Agent for the Future. Agent for the Future is free and open to every agent, not just Liberty or Safeco appointees. The site is agentforthefuture.com, and they're going hard on AI training right now. Dale shared prompting tips and tools other agents are using. I wrote a piece for them last year if you want to check it out: Workplace Wellness: Making a 4-Day Week Work.
Thursday afternoon we went whale watching. We only caught a glimpse of fin and belly from the boat, but a drone shot showed the full picture: a mom and her calf, gliding right next to us. Very cool.
Friday was a free day, and we spent it walking on the south coast of Laguna Beach. Worth knowing if you're ever in the area: artist Norman St. Clair arrived in 1903 and is widely credited with helping establish the town as an artists’ colony, a reputation that has carried on for more than a century. There are now more than 80 art galleries and hundreds of working artists in Laguna Beach, and the Laguna Art Museum traces its roots back to 1918, making it one of California’s earliest museums dedicated to California art. You feel it walking the streets, galleries on every block, sculptures tucked into corners, and the ocean doing its part in the background.
The biggest takeaway from a trip like this isn't the hotel or the free flight. It's the access. You sit at dinner with people running the company. You compare notes with agents from every corner of the country. And bringing your spouse along, after a year of running hard, changes the whole feel of it. Grateful to Liberty Mutual for the invitation, and grateful for the few days of quiet with my wife.
The industry is shifting underneath us. Worth paying attention.