True North credits niche specialization for growth, with transportation revenue around $40M and Des Moines agriculture growing 25% annually. The company faces challenges scaling producer development and plans to launch a community practice in Des Moines, Denver, and Chicago.
Chapters
What's one area where you believe True north has really excelled in the sales, the production game? And what do you think is the biggest challenge from right now moving forward to continue that growth?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think, you know, where we've, where we've really excelled is where we've really gotten into niche specialization. So I mentioned transportation is a good example. Yeah, that was really the first niche, if you will, that we started to build a team around. Like that's the only thing these producers are going to target. Before that, when True north came together, one of the firms, they focused in larger risk management. But the producers had, you know, they had some trucking accounts. They also had some manufacturing accounts and some large contractors here in eastern Iowa. We, we really went deep. And when Jason came out of college in the late 90s and started at True north, he was the first to identify. I'm just going to call the trucking companies. And then, you know, a couple years later I joined and we, you know, some others and we started to build that focus and that team and, you know, we'll do 40 million or so of revenue in transportation today. We've got the, we've been blessed. We really targeted the larger trucking companies and so we work with a big chunk of the top 100. We've got a unique niche there. Most of our competition in that side actually has historically been, you know, Aon, McGriff, Marsh locked in. So it's kind of, it's been fun and particularly when we were younger and no one knew True north was. And then we'd show up competing with these guys. They're like, who is, who are we competing with? And we were able to play. We've, we've tried to replicate that. So our construction specialty group has really grown or we'll do 10 plus million of revenue there. We've got a professional liability group. We've got a, a really a thriving agriculture practice out of our Des Moines office. It's probably our fastest growing practice in all True North. In the last three years, they've grown at 25 each year. So I would say specialization has been huge for us. You know, the thing that's been interesting really, I'm going to probably list a couple challenges, if you will. One is one thing we identified as we really got in deep into specialty is we were ignoring our backyard. So it would be commonplace to be somewhere around town just seeing friends and, you know, they'd be talking about, you know, their insurance needs for whatever their local business is. And you know, I'd give a feedback and we didn't know True north did that. I thought you worked on mega deals and specialty. No, we can, we can actually, we have that ability too. So one of the things we did earlier this year is we started what we call our community practice to really focus on and address this, you know, eastern Iowa corridor. And it's working extremely well. And we're actually looking to replicate that in our other regional offices in Des Moines, Denver and Chicago. Another challenge I would say that we've been faced with is we've, you know, to your point, growing at 10% organically. When you get to these size of numbers, I mean, if you just take the True north part, which is 95 million to grow at 10%, we got to, we got to add basically the size of True north when it was founded as new business next year. Right. Which is a, that's a heavy lift. Now we have a healthy group of producers and it's, it's doable, but we need more producers. And one of the challenges we have is, is really that development dialing in, that development of production capacity. So, you know, it used to be more of a one on one mentorship approach and you could do that when we were smaller. Now we need to bring in classes of producers and so evolving our thinking to match their needs and give them the tools they need to succeed. That's, that's where we're at in our growth trajectory right now. That's, you know, part of our partnership with you guys is, is helping us through that, which is very valued, but it is a challenge. The other piece of it is, to your point, and I'd mentioned this, I mean, myself, Jason, others, we, we still are producers, but we're not, it's not a full time job. And for a long time you could count on a group of us to drive a lot of growth. And so in a roundabout way, and I know a lot of smaller agencies face this as well. I mean, you've taken the, the growth engine and diverted their energy to other things. And so we're trying to, how do we backfill for that? And that's a tough one and I think we're working through it, but it's definitely a growing challenge. What we, we're trying not to have to do is, is to just go out and start buying agencies to meet our growth goals. We are doing that with the first main side, but that's not, that's not the core and it's not kind of the larger account specialty world. That we're. We're trying to grow organically, so I don't know that I have a great answer yet other than we're trying to figure it out.
