Seeing Your Agency Today With the Eyes of Tomorrow

If you could see your agency today with the eyes of tomorrow, what would be the view? Too many agencies have no idea. Caught up in the continuing race to keep up with, if not ahead of, the competition, many agency principals delay decisions that will affect their future and, when they do, they’re assuring rocky roads ahead that could lead to oblivion.

Any agency or company, to assure continuity, let alone prosperity, must not only have a non-blinking eye focused on the future, but make plans today, not tomorrow, in order to be prepared as much as possible for what may be ahead. This isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, crystal ball gazing; rather, it concerns and demands a combined management and marketing plan.

Many agencies do not have such plans. Granted, there are only so many hours in each day and priorities often change on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis. But with time being the ever-elusive commodity, agencies must somehow look ahead, lest they be left behind.

What’s needed is to begin developing a management/marketing plan that takes into consideration current and future trends, challenges and opportunities as they relate to specific areas.

Those areas are quality, structure, style, technology, history, culture, productivity and marketing. Let’s take a quick look at each of these. The questions you’ll find listed are the same ones our organization asks of our insurance and financial services clientele.

Quality. Do you have more clients complaining about your service, reliability and accuracy? If so, what are you doing about it? The answer isn’t necessarily throwing more people (if indeed, they’re available) at the problem. Are you easy to do business with or bureaucratic and form-bound?

Structure. Possibly, your agency was designed around people and functions rather than the way the market and client wants service. Your needs may be to change the way the organization is organized so more people become accountable. Focus on specific customer segments, create client focus and one-stop shopping.

Style. Here’s something our organization, upon being called in by insurance/financial services organizations, has heard time and time again: “Our organization is too formal for what has to happen. We get locked into too many committees and rules that stifle growth and creativity. How do we get people focused on the mission and client instead of the rules and regulations of the internal organization?”

What’s needed is to get your people interested in the mission and client, and the rules and regulations probably have to change—and the less of them there are, the better. Empower people and expect them to perform.

Technology. Should you, depending upon the size of your agency, decentralize or centralize? How do you integrate the demands of the users and the need to keep some consistency and control? How can you use the technology as a weapon and lock in your customers? Yet how do you not allow technology alone to dictate the way you do business?

The fact is, as our organization has discovered to its chagrin, many organizations to this day continue to operate in an assembly-line approach, with one job being handed to another down the line. Redesign jobs to make staff members more efficient and responsible. And what’s always needed is to have all work stations focused squarely on the customer.

History. Once agencies decide to restructure, they usually want significant changes to take place. But, understandably, they often are nervous about how much can be changed, and at what pace.

They wonder how they can build on past strengths and still keep what has worked over time for them. The key here–always has been, always will be–is keeping your people informed of your plans every step of the way, and asking not only for their cooperation, but also their help and ideas every step of the way.

Culture. The environment along with the market changes quickly. So, how do you change the way your people attack a problem/challenge?

Again, the key is not to merely evaluate situations and let all decisions be confined to the boardroom and within an inner-circle. Ask your people for their input. Employees can be amazingly analytical when asked. We accept change best when we participate in its design and implementation.

Productivity. Does your agency have a constant trend of more revenue per employee, or has it flattened out? And have you combined functions and jobs and eliminated excessive layers of management?

Yet another and, perhaps, most relevant question of all. How motivated are your employees? If they’re ignored or given but lip service, you can be assured such inactions will cause low morale, employee turnover, and less than personalized and efficient service to your clients and prospects. And when/if this happens, make no mistake, it’s the death knoll for any organization.

Marketing. Your agency may be convinced that you need a more aggressive marketing strategy, one that will give you the growth needed. You may be wondering if you’re attacking the right niches, and you also may be wondering if your employees truly understand their role in spreading the word about your products and services.

All this, too, has to be considered in reorganizing the overall agency structure. And, with each step along the way, related due diligence must be given to what products to consider dropping and what products to consider adding to your portfolio—plus what marketing methodologies to drop or add, today and in the future.

Questions, questions. Questions that demand answers before you can begin the development of a combined management/marketing plan that should look three years down the pike. A plan with needed flexibility that demands review at least quarterly every year.

What is crystal clear is that agencies and companies must improve results at a faster pace and, to do that, they must change. There is no recourse to that truism.

A chief executive officer cited his experience to us this way: “We are having a lot of trouble getting any real energy into our company. I feel that we have a lot of super people but the system causes an awful lot of resistance to the many things we have to get done around here.”

Our organization’s experience has shown us that what has happened to the CEO and his company (and the comments are not that unusual and often apply to agencies) is that their success in the past actually contributed to a decline in the future.

A once lean, leading-edge operation began to show signs of sluggishness in the market–with excessive staff and bureaucratic procedures delaying any significant changes. This is natural but can be corrected.

So agency and company transformation has become increasingly important. The reasons, representing the echo of a theme, continue to resound. Employees are becoming more and more resistant to methods that are arbitrary and don’t involve them in some way. Yet there is a tremendous untapped energy in any organization to focus on a common vision.

Methods can be employed that make people feel good about being a part of change and, while some of the tools that may have to be employed could be more complicated than in the past, the rewards can be greater and longer lasting.

The first step, to bring all this to fruition, is to develop a management/marketing plan that will enable you to clearly see the problems, challenges and opportunities ahead—and be able to address them correctly and concisely.

Then your agency will be able to move forward confidently on the pathways to assured progress. Only then will you be able to achieve the future you envision.

John A. Uzzi is president of Roy W. Walter & Associates, a nationwide management consulting organization serving the insurance/financial services industry headquartered in Paramus, N.J. He can be reached by phone at: (201) 967-1148, or via e-mail: johnuzzi@roywalters.com.

Topics Agencies