Strong Game Plan, Respected Coach Drive N.J. Wholesalers Success

Princeton, N.J.

With a staff of just 11 people in a single office in New Jersey, Princeton Risk Managers places $20 million worth of business annually in over 30 different specialty insurance product segments through nearly 40 different insurance company markets.

If you ask James Griffith, the president of the wholesale brokerage, how his small firm has managed to attract so many markets (a virtual whos who of specialty lines insurers), or to deliver so many products (ranging from medical malpractice to contractors and everything in between), or to build a staff with over 150 years of commercial lines experience in his shop, hell modestly chalk all of it up to “good fortune.”

But Steve Gandley, senior vice president of the wholesale brokerage, will highlight other factorslike having a solid game plan developed by the Princeton team members and a respected coach in Mr. Griffith.

“Take a look at our white board,” Mr. Gandley says as he and Mr. Griffith lead the way to a conference room, where a diagram of the firms game planwritten on a large erasable white boardsits in one corner. On the board, a grid has been carefully printed in marker pen, listing the firms top-25 retail agency clients.

Mr. Gandley notes that for each of the 25 clients on the grid, the Princeton Risk Managers team tracks new commissions, renewal commissions, the number of submissions and the number of bound accounts. Most importantly, the team tracks the last visit and the next visit that staff members will make to the clients office”and the people who are accountable for making those visits.”

“Visibility and accountability,” he says, are critical components of the plan.

Pointing to the names of two Princeton Risk Managers employees on the white board, he says: “Theyve decided in the game plan that were going to see [this client] four times this year.”

He continues: “If thats what they said they were going to do, were going to make sure they do it,” noting that the team huddles in the conference room weekly to go over its strategy and progress.

“In our professional lives, we all come up with great ideas. [But] where 99 percent of us fall down is in the follow through. This is just a way of making sure that we follow through,” he said, noting that hes been involved at some firms that didnt look at their budgets and forecasts for a year until they were ready to sit down to make new ones for the next year.

“Just like in a football game, you may have a game plan, but a lot of things happen during the course of the game and you have to adjust,” he continued, noting that below a “really solid” 15 clients at the top of the grid, the bottom 10 can change during the year as other relationships develop.

In addition to weekly staff meetings, Princeton team members also exchange information on tough accounts by phone and e-mail. But for top clients, Team Coordinator Gandley and Coach Griffith stress the importance of making time for face-to-face meetings, even during a hard market when time is limited.

“You can send out all the information, all the propaganda, all the leaflets that you want to people, but its a personal business. It always has been,” Mr. Gandley says.

He points to Mr. Griffith as the model of someone whos built a career knowing the value of personal contact and relationships. “People see him as a goodwill ambassador,” Mr. Gandley says of Mr. Griffith.

With more than a dozen years of experience as a retail agent on his r?sum?, Mr. Griffithwho is not only president of Princeton Risk Managers but also president of NAPSLO, the largest organization of wholesale brokers in the United Stateshas been an ambassador and an advocate for independent retail agents for more than three decades.

Starting out at Kemper Insurance Company, he quickly moved to a position at The James S. Kemper Agency (an agency owned by Kemper) and later to local independent agency in Summit, N.J. While handling commercial lines accounts at the independent agencyRichland Knowles Mr. Griffith says he was encouraged to get involved with the local affiliate of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, joining the Big Is chapter in Union County. He became president of the group in 1970 and 1971.

At the time, the issue of bank involvement in insurance began to heat up, and Mr. Griffith met with lobbyists in Washington, D.C., as he says, to help “fight the good fight” of trying to convince lawmakers that it wouldnt be a good idea to have banks and insurers together.

In the 1970s, he served on the board of the Independent Insurance Agents of New Jersey and participated as a member of the Federal Affairs committee of the national association in Washington. In the spring of 1974, he was awarded the insurance person of the year award for the state of New Jersey.

Even when he started up his own wholesale brokerage in 1974, a “long-standing relationship” with the retailer associations continued, according to Mr. Griffith. Indeed, in the early 1990s, Mr. Griffith would again serve on the New Jersey Big Is board of directors.

More directly in line with his own interests as the head of a wholesale brokerage, Mr. Griffith also started to become active in the Kansas City, Mo.-based National Association of Professional Surplus Lines Offices, Ltd., serving on the groups legislative committee in the late 1980s and then again the mid-1990s.

Sprinting as he did through the ranks of the retail associations, Mr. Griffith was soon invited to be considered as a NAPSLO board member and one-and-a-half years later was asked to consider moving up the chairs, eventually becoming president of NAPSLO in September 2003.

Today, Mr. Griffiths key goals for NAPSLO reflect his career-long dedication to building relationships with independent agents.

“My theme this year as NAPSLO president has been partnering,” said Mr. Griffith, explaining that the group is dedicated to working with the Washington-based IIABA and other groups on the issue that he says concerns the retailers mostthe matter of who, going forward, will be regulating the industry. Like the IIABA, NAPSLO advocates improvements in state regulation, but at the federal levelnothing more than national standards to keep the system working efficiently.

A part of the partnership that affects the operations of retail agents more immediately involves an educational program, originally developed for NAPSLO members, delivering tips on how to craft and market an insurance risk successfully to insurance companies. “We have extended to the Big I national, the IIABA, the opportunity of having this course adapted for their use,” Mr. Griffith said.

Princeton Risk Managers has been using some of the principles described in the course for quite some time, according the Mr. Griffith. He highlighted the creation of a one-page account summary for each submission as one of the ways that the firm sets itself apart in the eyes of specialty insurance carriers.

“When we receive a risk, we log it in by its character, its assigned to someone who is skilled in that particular class of business, and then that person creates an account summarya one-page analysis of what the risk is, what the loss history is, what the objective is, and what are the expiring terms and conditions. All that is put on a piece of paper which covers the submissiona submission that could be an inch thick,” he said.

Underwriters can review that one page and quickly decide if they want to spend time on it or pass on the risk. “The companies appreciate that, and we find we get better results,” he said, noting that the process typically produces quick answers.

“Even if its a no, if its a quick no, believe me, its appreciated,” he said. “Well tell our client retail agents, Thats just one we cant do, and theyd much rather hear that after a day or so than two weeks later,” he said.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, February 20, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

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Strong Game Plan, Respected Coach Drive N.J. Wholesalers Success

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