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The real news is the fact that they will sell off the thousands of policies in Southeast Wisconsin, they will only service a small number of clients within driving distance of their home office. They will not continue selling Home-Auto-umbrella coverage. They plan to sell off those clients and policies over the next 6-8 months to other insurance companies. They have not given you the whole story. They sell high risk auto and motorcyle coverage through Dairyland Insurance.
I had to call the main office to have a simple question answered because I was unable to reach my agent, only to be told that he no longer works there because they laid him off for good. I hope for your sake that this isn’t going to come back and bite you in the butt where your customers are concerned in doing this. You were considered number “ONE” in the insurance realm the way you provided for your customers. This really upsets me to think that you would do this to your good customers who have been with you a long time.
They employ 4300 workers and they need to lay off 27 home office workers? That is a small percent of their workforce, so it makes you wonder why they would do that rather than let retirements and attrition lower their staff level. If they have redundancies, retraining those workers to do jobs that are open makes more sense. I can understand agent layoffs, because some may not be in areas they care to service, or may not produce enough to be economical.
Most of their agents had their business handed to them by the company when they were hired on and didn’t work to grow. This was an unprofitable venture for Sentry. Dairyland makes them money via independent agents. The captive/employee agents were in La La land. Some were making 200k doing almost nothing with benefits and pension to boot.
You can bet your _ _ _ I’m taking my business somewhere else!
I worked there as an agent and WAS NOT handed any book. The older agents were from years ago, true. As a agent there, I didn’t make any kind of money. I saw the things Sentry was doing that was making my job harder to do (sign new customers) and I even told a friend I don’t know how they expect to continue on this path and make P&C work. So I went elsewhere. This is not profitable for them and apparently, they are not planning on making P&C work.
I worked for Sentry for two years in their commercial insurance line. They had/have a great product, but boy was it hard to work for them. The favored tactic of management was to threaten your job if sales didn’t meet expectations. Sorry to hear about folks losing their positions with the company, but perhaps it will lead to new thinking within a good old insurance company that could use some new approaches.
Give Pete some time, he’ll get this fixed. He should buy an Independend Insurance carrier soon, and set the same course as QBE and Liberty Mutual. Sentry has the cash, and the smarts.