Crafting commercial policies for your clients can feel a lot like ordering a la carte at a restaurant....

The holidays are over.  We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief, digest the cookies and pies that we ate and start to think about 2016.  Chances are good that you, your family members, or your customers received a gift over the holidays.  Let’s look at a few ways to help insure those new toys and gadgets. Emerald Coverage Tower Hill’s Emerald and Emerald Deluxe endorsements provide increased special limits of liability for...

Picture the P/C underwriting cycle as rolling waves on the open Atlantic Ocean.  There are crests (hard market) and troughs (soft market) as underwriting profitability goes up and down.  In this analogy, the insurance company represents the boat.  Customers should ask themselves – how safe is their boat and can it weather the ups and downs of the cycle?  Are they riding the S.S. Minnow?  The RMS Titanic? (And hopefully, as their agent,...

Have you experienced this before?  I drove past my childhood home for the first time in years.  I stopped my car across the street and double-checked that I had the correct address.  The house and yard looked so much smaller than I’d remembered. The house was built in 1962 and had 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, and 1,268 square feet.  For a house that held two parents, three boys, two dogs (and the occasional frog, turtle, and snake), it’s...

It’s that time of year. A jolly old customer of yours has reappeared from hibernation (where does he spend his off-season, anyway? The Villages? West Palm? Key West?). He only works one day a year – must be rough – and needs insurance and needs it fast. Here goes. He owns a large distribution center (good luck finding the latitude and longitude of One North Pole on Google Maps) that is off the grid (protection class 10) and employs...

Call it a midlife crisis. You’ve glanced at your book of business in the mirror and it isn’t pretty. There’s a little more flab around the stomach than you’ve noticed before, a few more wrinkles around the eyes, and it just doesn’t spring out of bed in the morning like it used to. Face it – your book of business is getting old! According to Lexis Nexis, the median home age in the U.S. is 35 years. Another study by the University of...