Andy NearyI help insurance professionals turn brand awareness into business growth.

Is small business where accounts go to die? It is time to either fully get in or get out

14 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker reflects on how the company historically relegated its "core" accounts—essentially small‑business clients—to a neglected status, describing it as a place where accounts went to die. He explains that mid‑market producers struggled to grow their book of business beyond the $1 million to $1.5 million range without adding a large number of service staff, which erodes margins through overservicing. A former CFO, during a committee meeting, challenged the team to decide whether to fully commit to the small‑business segment or exit it, emphasizing that genuine commitment requires dedicated full‑time leadership and resources. The speaker concludes that while the organization claims to care about small business, it has not truly lived that commitment.

Chapters

We still say this today, I hate it, but back in the day it was where accounts went to die. Literally kind of how we treated what we called at the time core. And I'm sure there's plenty of agencies that still use that word core. It was kind of where we'd put stuff to die. So once we started looking at this and we started seeing the bottleneck and seeing some of our mid-market producers finding that it was incredibly hard to grow their books beyond the $1 million mark, the $1.5 million mark. Yep. without a boatload of service people behind them, which kills on the margin, right? And again, you're, 'cause you're overservicing. How do we create a different model for this, right? Yeah. And so we set out to set the division, but where we landed, and it was from our former CFO who retired, we were in a committee meeting and at one point he looked at all of us and said, when are we gonna either get in or get out? And if we're in, we need people full-time dedicated to this. I'm talking leadership. Like right now we're saying we care about small business, but we ain't living it. And we weren't.