Howdy Friends,

I am constantly watching the tech trends in our industry and reading many of the same articles you read about autonomous cars, predictive analytics, drones, geospatial technologies, artificial intelligence, capital flows into Insuretech and Fintech startups, and on and on and on and on.  The list of things that are changing is endless and around every corner is a new shiny object or change that captivates or scares us.  These are things I grapple with as I ponder the future and how we will be impacted as independent agents.

Then today I read a quote by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and it gave me a bit of grounding and a reminder that while numerous things are changing, the timeless things that our customers want will not.

Read this quote, and think about the second question Bezos states:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’  Jeff Bezos

What are the things that are stable in our insurance world that we can build a long-term business strategy around?  Of course, we each will have opinions about these “things” and what they are.  This post is not designed to answer this question, rather the goal is to get you thinking.

Have you actually distilled your agency strategy around a handful of timeless and stable variables that will serve your growth strategy for years to come?

Cheers to question number two and your search for the answers!

Tony V