When you work in insurance long enough, you’ll eventually get hit with the same question repeatedly: When will you hang a shingle of your own?
Many of the best insurance agents don’t want to be agents forever. Instead, their long-term goal is to open their own insurance agency. However, it’s not always clear how to go from selling insurance products on behalf of an agency to starting your own agency.
Fortunately, we’re here to clear some things up. Keep reading to discover the best ways to move from being an insurance agent to creating an insurance agency!
Work With an Existing Agency To Get Started
Here’s a fun paradox: If you’re reading this, it’s because you want to break away from others and go from insurance agent to agency ownership. However, the best way to learn how to start a new agency is to learn as much as possible from an existing agency.
One reason is that established agencies have resources, networks, and influence you don’t yet have. By discovering how the agency creates and nurtures each of these things, you’ll naturally learn how to do so on your own.
Do you like the idea of using current insurance agencies to learn how to start your own business? Here’s more good news: Below, we have a breakdown of how you can learn everything you need to get started as quickly as possible, turning those long-term goals into short-term goals.
Discover Whether the Agency Has Many Locations and Affiliated Agents
If you’re already at an agency you think can teach you everything you need to know, then nothing is wrong with staying there and mastering as much as possible. However, most insurance agents soon discover they need to join a different agency on their path to independence. That means finding the right one, and one of the first questions you should ask is whether the agency has many locations and affiliated agents.
There are two primary reasons why these factors are so important. The first, simply put, is that an agency brimming with locations and agents clearly knows how to grow its business, and that’s something you can (and should) learn from them. Second, if the agency continues to grow, it shows they are committed to expansions, which means it’ll be likelier to help you nourish your leadership skills (more on this soon).
Additionally, working for an agency with many affiliated agents can help you learn more about eventually recruiting talent for your own company.
Consider Working With an Agency That Focuses on Multiple Products and Carriers
Part of the beauty of the insurance industry is how certain simple things can be. For example, the more types of products you sell, the more sales you are going to close. This is a natural consequence of diversifying your products.
Therefore, it’s important to work with an insurance agency that works with multiple products and carriers. Working with such an agency will give you invaluable experience in liaising with various carriers even as you master selling different types of insurance, both of which will be vital to the success of your own eventual agency through constant innovation.
Find Vesting Guidelines That Meet Your Own Needs
Once you are certain you plan to open your own insurance agency someday, you need to figure out a timetable. In short, you need to know approximately when you plan to stop working for other agencies and start working for yourself.
A major reason this is so important is that different agencies have different vesting guidelines. It’s important for you and your future career to choose an agency whose vesting guidelines match your own schedule.
Explore Different Leadership Opportunities
No matter what agency you work for, you won’t reach your full potential if you just keep doing the same thing day in and day out. If you hope to develop enough leadership skills to run your own business one day, it’s important to explore different leadership opportunities at an existing agency first.
For you and the agency, this can be a real win-win situation. Once they provide the necessary training, you’ll be able to sell insurance products like never before. And once you receive enough training (especially management and advisory training), you’ll be able to use those valuable skills to open your own business.
Ultimately, you’ll learn much more about how to start an insurance agency. As importantly, you’ll learn more about protecting your insurance agency through things like EO insurance.
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