Commercial insurance brokers compete in two markets.
#1: The CLIENT market.
#2: The TALENT market.
Most firms under-focus on the talent market.
(Theory: get more clients and then we can find more people to do the work.)
Hmm.
What happens when that doesn’t work?
What happens when you can’t find the people you need?
Productivity improvements can help you to get more output from your employees.
To a point.
You will hit a growth ceiling.
Where your lack of talent will cap your client capacity.
Talent will become your critical success/failure factor.
Talent will determine whether your commercial insurance brokerage grows and increases in value.
Or shrinks and decreases in value. Or dies.
Too many commercial insurance brokers are in bad shape.
Why?
They compete in the talent market with a casual (or no) plan with the wind howling in their face.
Demographics. An aging workforce.
Labor supply/demand imbalance. Zero or negative unemployment.
Continuing (often unfair) stigma of insurance. Perceptions that everybody in insurance sells life insurance at kitchen tables.
All this adds up to…a talent scarce environment.
Ignore talent scarcity?
Your workforce will continue to age in place.
Your staff will shrink through attrition and retirements.
Your firm will move closer to obsolescence.
Scarcity of talent will also increase your salary costs.
So, what do you do about the talent crisis?
What’s the fix?
The easy fix is to sell your firm – and your aging workforce problem – to somebody else.
Selling to an aggregator is a convenient way to dump your talent scarcity problem.
The harder fix: execute a talent strategy with several tactical avenues of attack.
Most of which will be familiar topics.
But, part of your strategy must include a plan – and a budget – to hire new talent,
Winning commercial insurance brokers shift resources to compete for and hire new talent.
They bring fierce competitive vigor to the talent market.
As you approach 2019, you can bury your head in the proverbial sand and ignore your talent problem.
Or you can choose to make 2019 the year that you stopped kicking the can on your aging talent problem.
(Let me know if your firm needs help finding new sales talent.)
