If you’re wandering through the wilderness of the insurance world, do you need a plan to get home? The answer is a resounding yes. When your independent insurance agency has a strategic plan, you not only know where you’re going, you know where you’ve come from and who is going to get you from A to B.
Why Create a Strategic Plan?
When you’re caught up in the day-to-day of your insurance agency, it can be hard to see how a strategic plan can help. Why should you bother spending hours or even days on strategic planning when you could be out in the world, marketing your insurance business or focusing on your customers? According to the Insurance Journal, “only 15 percent of small businesses actually have a plan.”
Here’s why your insurance agency should be one of them.
Strategic Planning Helps You Understand Your Place
Where does your independent insurance agency belong in your community and in the wider world of other insurance agencies? Situational analysis is part of strategic planning. This analysis helps you examine your internal situation and resources and the external environment that surrounds you. A situational analysis will help your independent insurance agency see your opportunities and your areas of growth. It’s the terrain that you walk over as you make your way through the forest.
Know Where You’re Going and How to Get There
Strategic planning helps you hone your mission statement so that you’re not just doing work, you’re doing the right work. According to Management Help, a strategic plan “defines your organization’s view of success and prioritizes the activities that will make this view your reality.” Whether you need to decide whether or not to focus on a specific area of the insurance industry or expand to another geographic area, a mission statement helps you say yes or no to opportunities. It’s your map that gives you a high-level picture of where you stand in the insurance industry terrain.
After you’ve said yes or no to an opportunity, your goals and your action plans need to lead you from point A to point B. This is the level that you work at day to day, but without a situational analysis and mission statement, you could be going in the wrong direction altogether. Take the right steps before you commit to a goal for your agency, and you’ll feel more confident that the path you’ve chosen will take you to where you want to go.
Know Who Will Get You There
You have a map, but you’re not sure who will guide you on your path. A strategic plan not only creates a list of goals and actions: it also includes implementation and monitoring plans so that you can assure yourself that someone is responsible for taking each action and that someone is monitoring the success of each action and of the overall plan.
While a strategic plan is not a guarantee that your independent insurance agency will be successful in its goals, it provides an opportunity to understand your working environment, act with purpose, and constantly evaluate the success of your actions.
At American Agents Alliance, we’re here to help you achieve your business goals. Contact us and join our network of independent insurance agencies today.
