Woodruff-Sawyer Focuses on Delivering Results

In our continuing series on Agency Insights, we look at Woodruff-Sawyer, a brokerage specializing in a variety of services. A member of Assurex, the company is led by CEO, Stan Loar, Chairman of the Board, Doug Morton, and President, Susan Hunt, and operational in all 50 states. Recently, Lisa Brinkmann, Chief Operating Officer of the San Francisco-based company, sat down with Insurance Journal to discuss the company’s growth, its plans for the future, etc.

Dave Thomas: Tell us a little bit about the company?

Lisa Brinkmann: Woodruff-Sawyer is a privately held brokerage firm that was founded in 1918. We became an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) company in 1994, upon Bob Sawyer’s retirement, and are currently owned by the ESOP and 18 individual shareholders. We are organized into Practice groups, by both industry sectors and coverage lines – Technology, Technology Risk Management, Construction & Real Estate, Commercial Risk Management, Employee Benefits, and D&O. Our directors & officers’ unit has been ranked number one in the nation by the Tillinghast Survey for the last two years. We employ approximately 210 employees and have grown over 155 percent in revenue in the past five years. This growth has been all internal, as we have made no acquisitions.

Dave Thomas: How do you differentiate yourself from the competition?

Lisa Brinkmann: What makes us stand out is that we are still an independent broker. We don’t have to answer to a bank or a large corporate office and I think that helps us be fairly nimble. We believe that as a firm, we are only as good as the people we employ. Consequently, we’ve hired from a variety of industries, not just insurance, and rely on our internal intellectual power to come up with creative approaches to client issues. We are extremely client-focused and I think we do a lot of things that maybe other agencies wouldn’t do. Client service is key for us. This may sound like a cliché, but it really isn’t. We try to get ahead of the renewal curve and really understand our clients’ operations, so we can better represent them. We approach many of our client’s issue as a team, tapping on the diversity and experiences of our staff. We’ve put a lot of resources into our claims group. We have property/casualty and workers’ comp claims people on board who align themselves with our Practices and make sure we’re managing, not just monitoring, our clients’ claims. We put more effort into loss control and managing the claims so that they get resolved quickly. Right now competition is tough… everybody is trying to look at what the other broker has and find a way to get it. There aren’t all the IPO and the new businesses starting up, so the market is what it is. We’re also facing a different market climate than what we’ve seen in the past 8-10 years. Our employees that have been in insurance for a long time understand these cycles. However, I think we’re in a different environment in that the “speed of change” is happening faster. The instability we’re seeing on the carrier side is making things difficult as well. Having a flexible, nimble organization is critical in our environment. Being independent with a diverse employee population helps us approach issues creatively, quickly and with the client’s best interest in mind.

Dave Thomas: How has California’s workers’ comp situation impacted your company?

Lisa Brinkmann: It is tough. We have fewer markets to go to. Our clients are having to pay higher premiums. Carriers are trying to reduce service and the commissions they are paying. We have a very difficult message to deliver to our clients. What we are trying to do is get out in front of the renewal curve and make sure our clients understand what is happening in the market so they can factor this into their planning. We keep on top of the market changes and communicate to our clients why their premiums have increased, what to expect going forward and how to factor mid-term adjustments into their their budgets. We don’t want them to take surprise financial hits because we haven’t given them the information to plan. Obviously, this requires that we spend more time talking with our clients to understand what’s important to them and determine their priorities. Are they able to absorb additional self-insurance limits? Are there loss control procedures that can be put in place to minimize claims over the long term? What is their appetite for risk?

Dave Thomas: Tell us about the feedback you get from clients and how you use it to improve service?

Lisa Brinkmann: We get feedback in a couple of ways. The most obvious means come when those face-to-face conversations take place. We put together service agreements for almost all of our clients, outlining what their expectations are and what our “deliverables” must be. We review these agreements periodically with the client to ensure we are meeting their expectations and, when possible, exceeding them. In addition to this, we have an annual client satisfaction survey, where we contract with a third party to contact our clients and conduct an objective survey with them, regarding our services. We communicate these results to the entire office at our quarterly meetings. In cases where improvement is necessary, we put an action plan together and assign accountability to ensuring this is completed.

Dave Thomas: What are the opportunities at Woodruff-Sawyer for employees?

Lisa Brinkmann: The fact that we continue to grow means that there are constant changes and with those come opportunities to develop individually and assume more responsiblities. We invest quite a bit in education. Outside of our continuing education responsibilities we have six or eight brown bag courses on different life-balance topics. We also have a corporate card for a computer-training organization nearby so whenever a manager feels their folks need to take some computer skill classes, they can go ahead and sign them up. Our reimbursement policy relative to education is very broad. As long as an employee is attending an accredited school, he/she can take whatever course they want. As long as they pass we will reimburse them. That was something Bob Sawyer put in place long before I started. His philosophy was that the broader an education our people have, the better able they would be to deal with the many issues that might come up from a clients’ perspective. If we’re too micro-focused on insurance, I think we lose out on our understanding of the other things in life. I think the fact that we have a lot of long-term employees translates into the availability of opportunity. We have many employees who have celebrated their 15, 20, 25, 30 and even 35-year anniversary.

Dave Thomas: How important is technology to the company?

Lisa Brinkmann: Technology is extremely important to us and is part of our corporate initiatives. When I started eight years ago, only a handful of employees had computers and few were networked. Now we all have Internet accesss, e-mail, and many of our employess work remotely from home. The thing that is interesting is the fundamental insurance process and what is important relative to serving the client really hasn’t changed. What’s different is how we process the paperwork and how quickly we need to respond to the client. We’ve invested a lot in technology and we feel that our folks have done extremely well. Our clients are technology companies and large construction or risk management accounts. The people are very sophisticated and our challenge has always been to provide them the level of service, response and technology that they take for granted. When you’re dealing with huge software companies, you have to answer them in a way they feel appropriate.

Dave Thomas: Any major issues affecting the company right now?

Lisa Brinkmann: Besides rising rates, the economy and uncertainty with the war, terrorism and SARS, I think the issues affecting our company now are how to maintain and build confidence in the minds of our clients – confidence that we will continue to bring them the best alternatives available. We will always be faced with the challenge of absorbing new employees, identifying new markets and providing the level of service we believe should be standard for the client. Many of our clients are looking to us to act as extensions of their own departments, which have been downsized, so the level of involvement and knowledge necessary is increasing.

Dave Thomas: Where do you see the company going in the coming years?

Lisa Brinkmann: As I mentioned before, we are passionate about remaining independent. This requires continual growth. We believe the best means for us to grow is through the sales efforts of existing and prospective producers, the retainment of our existing clients and our continual development of center of influence relationships. We always have an annual growth target, which we communicate to the entire company. Obviously we like to exceed our goals. We’ve been investing fairly heavily in our people. Part of the challenge of being independent is to stay independent and to perpetuate the company. We have recently added some key employees to our staff and opened an office in Portland, Oregon. As many producers become disenchanted with the big brokers, we hope to have the opportunity to entice them to work for us. Also, we are looking to recruit outside the immediate broker community. We want to be the firm companies turn to to provide solutions and deliver results that some of the larger firms cannot. In our marketing we state that we want to be considered the ‘clear best choice’ – we think we’re there now, and we definitely want to be there in five years.

Woodruff-Sawyer is a privately held brokerage firm organized into Practice groups, by both industry sectors and coverage lines – Technology, Technology Risk Management, Construction & Real Estate, Commercial Risk Management, Employee Benefits and D&O.

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