The Independent Insurance Agent Broker Concept vs the Captive Agent Concept, Understanding The Difference.A Brief Overview of the independent insurance agent broker ConceptThe Insurance Industry has two key marketing concepts to help deliver their products to the public. The captive Insurance agent concept and the independent agent or broker concept. This page will discuss the independent insurance agent (or) broker concept.
The Independent Insurance Agent Broker concept is the purest of the free enterprise system. You are hanging out your own shingle. You are your own boss. You can build a business that you may be able to sell in the future, and can reap all the benefits if it is successful. You can hire people under your ground rules. However, you will need to put up all the operating capital to make this happen.. _________________________________________________________________
The Independent Insurance Agent Broker Conceptis usually for someone who has several years under their belt, and is going to take their knowledge and experience and insurance marketing ideas to start their own General agency or open their own independent office. They have also been in the business long enough to generate a monthly income stream to help them make this step.Here you are your own person. You pay for everything. Companies may charge you for their flyers, their marketing material and so on. However, you can represent as many companies as you want. You are on a true earned commission. There usually is very little help in terms of a financial training allowance or marketing help.
I have seen many agents go into the independent insurance agent broker (broker) arena for the wrong reasons.and that is that they want to carry as many different products as possible, to cover as many different possible financial scenarios. If that is your life insurance sales objective, in my opinion, you may want to reconsider.Whats that old saying “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” That's what happens here.
Additionaly you will need to try and keep up to date with schooling, training and so on with a number of different companies, etc. and when you have 15 different commission statements coming in and you try to reconcile them every month, it becomes very time consuming, among other things.
The biggest problem I had with being an Independent Insurance Agent Broker was trying to juggle all the different companies to try and make them happy. Most companies want some type of minimum commitment in terms of business. If you have a hard time chewing gum and driving at the same time, then take a hard look at going this route, especially in the early years of your insurance career. If you are thinking about coming into the business as an Independent Insurance Agent Broker, you need to due your due diligence to make sure you are aware of the financial commitments you will be responsible for.
Insurance agents that specialize in a certain product or marketing concept will become very successful, whether a independent insurance agent broker or a captive agent. As an example, I use the analogy of McDonald's, Kentucky fried chicken or Pizza hut. They are the leaders. Why, because they specialized in basically one product and continue to refine and define their market and stay on track. Now look at all these big financial companies out there today that wanted to combine banking, insurance, stocks, etc. under one roof. They wanted to be eveything to everybody. And What happen, many of these big companies today are peeling off all these satellite operations and going back to what they done best. Chrysler specialized in the mini-van and then got greedy and tried to get involved in other markets by buying other companies. Now look where they are at. My point here is that whether you become a life insurance agent broker or a captive life insurance agent , learn to specialize. Don’t try to be everything to everybody. Keep it simple in the early years. Learn and Earn. Concentrate on developing your block of business with a lead product or concept. Learn and Earn Return from this independent insurance agent broker page to the insurance jobs main topic page for more information on the various insurance career opportunities.
|
