Here is another idea: When I was with Farmers I would go to the county courthouse every other month and look at the book of property transactions. You could see who had bought a house pretty easily. If they bought the house on June 1 you could be sure that their homeowners policy had the same effect...

Hello - I'm a former FIG agent myself, left a decade ago when the company could not stop screwing up Prematic billing on 10% of my households every month. They blamed it on Y2K preparation at the time. I had to get out to stay sane, went to the IA side before becoming a middle market underwriter. In...

CareerChanger, you made a comment about the ownership of Farmers. Here's my knowledge of the situation but you should learn more on this yourself. I might be off on the dates. Farmers started out and operated for a long time without any outside ownership, then was bought by BAT (British American Tob...

Career Changer, you need to sit down and analyze both situations carefully. I'm not very familiar with Allstate's program. I left Farmers in 1999 due to their screwed up technology. From the posts I read it sounds like not much has changed in that department. When I started with Farmers they had a c...

Hartford should take it as well. They probably will not BOP it since it's life science related but should be willing to write package. Hartford will probably not do the E&O.

Avoid Smith Hanley. Poor communicators.
Recommend Cindy LeMoine at Pinn Consulting cindy@pinnconsulting.com

When I got started in the biz I was with Farmers. It took me a month to produce my first policy! By six months I thought I was doing well writing 2-3 policies a week. After three years I had one week where I wrote something like 22 policies, however my usual monthly average was about 20-30 policies ...

I much prefer PTO. No one has to lie or give a reason why they want the day off, you just say "I want the day off". I was with Hartford for a number of years. As an underwriter I started with 19 PTO days, went up to 24 after 4 years. I could use them however I wanted but could not have mor...

For anyone who is looking for a recruiter I would recommend avoiding Smith Hanley in CT. Poor communicators.

A quote from one of my mentors:

"underwriting guidelines get dramatically relaxed as the end of the month approaches and goals have not been met".

What do you expect to start on - $100,000 accounts? Good luck.

Start small, work towards bigger fish, learn your lessons on little ones. Build a book of business with loyal customers. As you gain experience start trying for larger accounts.

15+ years in the business and I've never heard of anyone having an E&O problem with this issue. I've you've got enough volume to support losing those who get cancel notices you can afford to disregard them. When I was on the PL side of the biz I only called the ones I knew well. When I was a com...

Does your current carrier even know they are insuring a jewelry store? Many will not write property on these due to the increased risk of theft related damage. Try Jewelers Mutual or someone else for the right coverage. If they have a claim - highly likely in this type of account - you'd better have...

I did similar target marketing when I first entered the business. I was doing personal lines for Farmers in a city where they had no name recognition. I marked an area of the city map and x dated like crazy to sell as much as possible in that area. Worked pretty well, sold a decent number of homes i...

Clay, consider this: the industry has been in the soft market for several years and it's got to change sometime. This might be a good time to get started in an insurance sales career as long as you have the skills & are willing to work hard. If you start now with a broker and get your feet wet w...