Whether you’re part of a larger insurance agency with multiple employees or a one-person shop, it’s essential to know which direction you want to take your business. For a solo practitioner, making a point to do this can give you something to strive for. With a larger staff, it has the additional benefit of making sure that everyone is rowing the boat in the same direction.
Keep yourself and your teammates focused by defining your philosophy as a business—namely, your agency’s values, vision, and mission.
Values
The easiest way to start defining your agency’s values is by jotting down 10-15 qualities that you want reflected in your business. This could include things like how you want to treat customers (warmth, authenticity), how you want your staff to do their work (competent, collaborative), how you want to approach leads (responsive, respectful) or any other category you can think of.
Without revealing your answers, ask other key players in your agency to do the same exercise. Once everyone has their own list, make a master on a large sheet of paper and hang it somewhere you’ll see it regularly. Then, let it marinate for a few days. If a word jumps out at you during this time, add a checkmark next to it and encourage others to do the same. Revisit your list after a week and see which concepts stand out or have the most checkmarks. Choose the five or six words that seem to be most important and add them to a fresh sheet of paper. If one of the words seems off, remove it and replace it with another from your master list. Your gut will tell you when you’ve got the right combination of words to reflect the values that are most important to your agency.
Vision
Now it’s time to think through where you want to see your agency down the line. Maybe you want to sell more policies than any other independent agency on the East Coast. Perhaps you want to focus on providing excellent insurance and advice to a particular minority community. Or maybe you want to zero in on selling policies primarily to high-income individuals and families.
Don’t focus on finding the perfect wording, just roughly fill in the blank on this sentence like this:
Our vision is for our agency is:
- More policies sold than any other independent insurance agency on the East Coast
- Ethical insurance advice and quality policies for the X community
- The go-to insurance source for high-income individuals and families
There’s no right or wrong answer. The goal is simply to create a clear and pointed vision for your future—one that you can reference to keep your agency focused and headed in the right direction.
In some cases, you may want to share your vision statement with the public on your website or in a frame on your wall. In other cases, you can keep it to yourself and your staff to use as an internal guide.
Mission
Equal parts inspirational and aspirational, a mission statement tells the world what you want to accomplish and, in some cases, how you’ll get there. Here are some examples:
- Warby Parker: To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses.
- Nike: Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *-If you have a body, you are an athlete.
- Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Because it is often shared with the public, you’ll want to take care with the wording of your mission statement. Start by using your values and vision to jot down rough ideas. Then, once you’ve narrowed your concept, draft several versions that express what you want to say and get feedback from a few trusted sources about which is most understandable. Strive for clarity and use common, everyday words instead of insurance industry jargon.
While there’s no rule that says you need all three—values, vision, and mission—the process of defining each can be a very useful exercise to sharpen your focus and inspire you and your staff going forward. And if any of the categories are 10 years old or more, revisiting and updating them can be a great way to inject fresh energy into your work.
At Hometown Quotes, we strive to provide our agents with the best experience in the industry. Give us a call at 800.820.2981, and get started with us today!
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