Be alert for the possiblity of a workers comp claim being fraudulent.  Pay special attention when:

• Your employee has a history of multiple claims, and is thus an experienced claimant, especially when they are in a short period of time.
• Longer absences than seem necessary and an unwillingness to come back to work.
• Your injured employee has problems at home - financial or domestic.
• Timing of the claim is suspicious - around layoffs, or completion of of a project that means they may no longer be needed.
• Your first notice of a claim comes from a lawyer or medical clinic.
• The injury follows disciplinary action, demotion or being passed over for promotion.
• There are no witnesses to the accident, or witnesses to the accident conflict with the claimant’s version or with one another.
• The accident or type of injury is unusual for the claimant’s line of work.
• Frequent changes of physicians during the claim or after returning to work.
• Fellow employees report suspicions.

If you suspect fraud in a workers comp case, notify your insurance company.

Hi Folks,

If we’ve not had a chance to meet personally yet, please click the link below to hear an interview I did last year. I just found it, and think you will appreciate what it has to offer anyone interested in reducing insurance costs.

Let me know what you think. For the link, click here

• lPublish your complete specs on demand.
• lKeep you acting efficiently/proactively with calendared actions
• lEnsure that you can obtain quotations at any time
• lEnsure that you have full access to all your documentation, at anytime

Don Bury - Your co-pilot for
avoiding sky-high insurance costs!

We are ready to produce and implement your ideal management system for containing insurance costs.

Let’s discuss your unique situation. Call me at 800-760-1867 or email me at donbury@icrs.biz

The core message of ICRS is amazingly simple.

Business owners who take possession of their insurance specifications become a little less dependent on their brokers, and do a lot better than those who don’t.  If you get that, and actually do it, you will find this notion surprisingly valuable.

From there, you will naturally start collecting market intelligence, because there is nothing to stop you.  You don’t have to get your broker’s permission to check things out for yourself.  You can simply email your specs to whoever you chose, and each time you do so, you will learn something valuable.  The efficiency yields fierce competition for your business, and the results are simply fascinating.

This insight has led us to go into the business of helping people put their specs together, and become a hub of market intelligence from which our clients can draw deep and valuable insights.   We needed tools to get this done efficiently, and when we couldn’t find them, we built our own custom online software.  Now we find ourselves cranking out specs for more and more clients, and accumulating ever more fascinating market intelligence.  This simple concept just keeps getting more and more interesting.

So, do yourself a big favor and take ownership over, and possession of, your insurance specifications.  It is totally within your power to do this yourself.  We’ve provided explicit instructions in The Buyers Guide To Business Insurance.  You can even get that book for free - just use the “Send Me The Book” button on the right side of this blog site.  If you lack the time or the energy, but would like to get it done, it is easy to have us do it for you.  With that job accomplished, you will be in an enviable position of power and knowledge as you deal with the insurance marketplace with extraordinary efficiency.

Whatever you do, don’t spend another day allowing outsiders to be in total control over insurance specifications that are essentially yours. Whether you realize it or not, there is a huge price tag associated with doing so.

-Don

Back in 1993, buried deep on page 208 of The Buyers Guide To Business Insurance (which is offered free to readers of this blog, by entering your information on the right side of the page at http://icrs.biz/blog), we wrote the following:

“The agent may feel justified in offering the client an attractive quote, while still withholding the best value possible for commission reasons….The agency may elect to present a higher-priced proposal from its favorite company to give itself a larger commission, or for other self-serving reasons. With the insurance market blocked, the agency is fairly well-assured that you will be forced to accept its proposal and pay a higher than necessary premium.”

The above was one of the primary reasons I originally felt the book had to be written. And, the original version of the above passage in the book was much less delicate and politically correct. They made me take out comments like “Insurance brokering is much like cattle ranching. Once they have you as a client, all they have to do is keep you fenced in, and milk you regularly.” That was called sensationalistic journalism by the political correctness gatekeepers of the publishing industry. However, it was, in fact, an entirely truthful statement, and more accurately represents how I feel the insurance industry works.

As an example of what goes on in this industry, take a look at the joint press release from New York’s attorney general and insurance department at Corpwatch.org. It appears one of the world largest brokerages, Marsh, got caught with it’s hand in the cookie jar. I suspect giving back $850 million was less painful than having to apologize for “unlawful and shameful conduct”. It reports Marsh steered its clients to insurers with which it had lucrative payoff agreements, and that the firm solicited rigged bids for insurance contracts.

Notice the word steered. Isn’t that a term from cattle ranching?

This past week, while working with one of our clients, an interesting situation came up that really caught my attention, and I believe will capture yours as well.

The scenario: Two brokers were given commercial auto insurance quotations by the same insurance carrier for the same client account. What was interesting about this was the way that the quotations came back. The client in question has an auto fleet containing roughly 10 vehicles, and the insurance carrier shall remain unnamed. A standard rule with most insurance companies (and one which often works very badly against the client) is that no broker shall be given a quote if another broker has already gotten a quotation from that insurance company. That rule was supposed to apply here, but somehow wires were crossed during the process, and the account ended up being quoted to both of the brokers.

Now, you might normally expect in a situation such as this that the quotations should be identical, or at least close to one another. However, they weren’t — In fact, they weren’t even close. One quote was over 30% lower than the other. The difference, as it turns out, was in the application of underwriter’s discretionary credits.

Just what the heck are discretionary credits, you ask?

Discretionary credits allow underwriters to discount base premium rates based on merit, or a competitive desire to write a account. Put simply, it’s the ’fudge factor’ in insurance rate quoting. In our scenario above, the high quote had no discretionary credit applied, while the low quote was the result of applying quite a bit of it. The discretionary part is just that, and it seems that it is completely up to the underwriter and the broker to apply these as they see fit. They use their judgment, and do whatever they wish – or are motivated – to do.

The best thing you can do with regards to all of this with your own business is to make sure the broker and underwriter have information that will encourage maximum use of discretionary credits. That will put money in your pocket. If you publish detailed specs to your broker, and avoid giving your broker a total monopoly on your access to the marketplace, it will do a lot towards getting more credits applied to your quotation. These are simply sound buying practices to help inoculate yourself against the broken and dysfunctional aspects of the insurance marketplace.

Last but not least, Happy 2007 to all of you! May the year ahead of you be filled with great success.

-Don

Using the systems defined in my book (and by my company ICRS) to control insurance costs and renewal cycles appeals to business people who value systematizing complex processes. Successful business people long ago bought into the idea of trying to boil down their entire operations into well thought-out, documented systems and procedures, that people perform over and over in the same way. They have a good idea of what they are doing and how they will do it. From there, they go to work at examining the systems, and trying to improve them.

Few have gotten around to doing a good job of this for establishing control of the commercial insurance renewal cycle. As a result, most are buffeted around by an endless series of surprising events, and most of the time they spend on the topic is in reacting to unexpected actions of insurance brokers and insurance companies.

By plugging into the system ICRS has developed, and is described in detail in my book (what’s that you say, you haven’t started receiving your free copy yet? You need only click that link sitting over there on the right side of this blog site and you’re on your way…), firms are able to rapidly maximize their control over their renewal cycles. They smile as they find the insurance industry reacting to them for a change. As usual, instituting a well thought-out system has the result of eliminating unexpected events and unwelcome surprises. It puts the user far in front of the renewal cycle. The once-troublesome process of dealing with insurance renewals becomes a well-managed process, and an valuable system asset of a well-managed firm.

-Don

A client recently asked me the following question:

Do you have a good filing system to recommend for my insurance policies? We keep them, but have never had a good system. This might be in your book that I have not read, but I think I would need something tailored to what I have. With all the policies there is some overlap between personal and business. I am looking for physical ideas (3 ring binders, accordion folders, etc.) and short term and long term storage ideas (how long to keep what policies for example.)

Since I imagine this is a question a few others out there might have, I thought I’d share my response here as well.

Personally, I advocate going digital as much as possible, and encouraging brokers and insurance companies to do the same. As brokers produce paper, ask them to provide digital versions as well. Digitally stored documents are much more accessible, and they can be emailed to anyone involved in the insurance negotiation, management, writing, and renewal processes.

A file naming system/convention for such digital files is helpful for example: coverage-type_source_year.pdf (e.g. liability-2006.pdf, workerscomp-2005.pdf, etc.). You might also consider setting up a file directory structure that organizes records by type of coverage or by source of document.

Also, don’t forget that you need to keep at least 10 years of your liability policies ready to hand to your attorney in the event of construction litigation.

Paper storage comments:

• Make sure no loose paper is in the file, and that everything is attached using a 2-hole punch.
• Make sure that there is one file per policy. Put endorsements on top, as they come in, and place correspondence on the inside jacket of the file.
• Sometimes brokers deliver policies and documents in 3-ring binders. These seem to be very durable, and my only complaint about them is they take up a lot of space, and don’t fit in file cabinet drawers. But people do find them easy to put on a shelf. So if documents arrive that way, I see no problem with storing them as they come.

Better organization of your insurance files will greatly improve your insurance management life and policy renewal cycles, and generally make it much easier for you and your staff to find things when they need them. In the case of paid staff members or hourly consultants who might be dealing with these files, it can also end up saving you money by making their jobs faster and easier.

-Don

The weather settling in outside right now got me thinking about today’s blog topic: That the insurance marketplace is about as fluid as molasses on a cold winter’s day.  It should run as freely as water, but instead it is bogged down and sluggish. One specific failure is that the industry fails to rapidly connect willing buyers with willing sellers on optimal terms, as happens readily in most other marketplaces. As a result, the insurance marketplace fails to function well — particularly for the buyer.

Insurance is replete with a bizarre set of dynamics that create friction and inertia in the market transacation process, which in turn prevents the process from moving about rapidly and efficiently. The end result is that most buyers are not matched with the optimal sellers for the services they’re seeking, and buyers end up paying higher prices and getting poorer service as a result. They become stuck wherever luck or fate (or their broker) landed them in terms of policies and pricing, and the forces of friction and inertia in the insurance industry conspire to keep them right there in the future.

What we seek to do through our work is to liquify this sluggish marketplace.  We heat up the molasses by helping our clients getting informed, organized, and prepared. We set them up so that they can access and sample any portion of the marketplace with the push of a button. We teach brokers that our clients expect, and deserve, rapid and excellent service.

Why shouldn’t a buyer interrogate the entire marketplace every time they spend money? If you were going to buy a car, would you simply drive up to the first lot you found and purchase whatever the salesperson there was suggesting? Buying insurance should be no different — except that additional steps will be necessary since the auto industry is a much more ‘liquified’ and competitive marketpace for buyers than insurance.

All we are doing is warming things up a bit, and helping the market flow along better. Believe me, it’s in desperate need of a little heat.

- Don

Policy renewal time. It’s a time of hope, opportunity, and a certain amount of drudgery. It’s also frought with potential pitfalls and slip-ups on both ends of the transaction.

For example, we just found out that a broker servicing one of our new clients did not receive an email from the client with information he needed to provide a quotation for one of our clients. The email was sent to him 5 weeks earlier, and the client had assumed he had received the information and was already utilizing it to generate new quotes.

In speaking with him yesterday (and correcting the problem) I found myself saying, “This is number 6,547 on the list of things that can go wrong with an insurance renewal.” I think if I kept a log of everything that went wrong with renewals, the number would be that high and rising.

Every case we handle presents its own challenges, difficulties, and problems in dealing with the insurance marketplace. To run a renewal properly is a very complex process. There are over 800 variables that go into a set of specifications. Loss runs may come from 10 to 20 different companies or more. You may be dealing with 3 or 4 different brokers. You may be getting quotes from as many as 10 to 15 companies. If you multiply all those numbers together, you get a complexity factor of 960,000. In this case, I supose you could say that there are actually 960,000 things that can go wrong with the renewal.

Of course, in order to manage this chaos, you’ll need a system that can intercept and negate all these potential sources of difficulty, expense, irritation, and wasted time to get your renewals done. Otherwise, you’re just increasing the likelihood that things will go wrong during the renewal.

- Don

Traditionally, as your insurance policy expiration date approaches, your insurance broker(s) will want to schedule sales interviews with you to deliver their quotations.  Of course, some may also try the “asleep at the wheel method” of renewal to see if they can get away with it, which is to simply mail you a renewal billing and hope that you pay it without comment or further action on their part. (Don’t let this be you!)

Since, as an insurance buyer, you are destined to experience one or more of these interviews, I would like to offer the following bit of counsel to help minimize your suffering, and save you valuable time. When you follow these procedures, the need for traditional sales interview is largely negated. Furthermore, the farther ahead of policy renewal time these procedures are executed, the easier your renewals will become. When renewals are properly managed, such meetings become more celebrations of a job already well done over the phone, email, and fax machine, rathering than a high-pressure last-minute negotiation session.

When a broker calls to announce a quotation is ready for delivery and asks to schedule a meeting, consider the following response in lieu of what you might normally say:

“Great. Thank you. Please (email/fax/mail) me the proposal so I have time to absorb it in preparation for your visit.” 

If you make that your standard response, brokers will come to expect you want information transmitted in advance. This single request is very powerful, and goes a long way towards protecting you from manipulative broker sales tactics. It does so because it helps to separate the commodity of insurance policies (the quotes, and their associated quality and pricing factors) from the professional relationship you have with your broker (the meeting, your broker relationship, the servicing of your account, etc.). 

Insisting on getting proposals sent to you in advance, and even asking the broker to include an agenda for the meeting, will do you a great deal of good. You will have time to understand your options and prepare your questions. The meetings will be more professional and productive. And, in some case you may even end up cancelling a meeting because the proposals sent proved unworthy of further consideration (saving you from wasting your valuable time, or worse — agreeing to a bad deal in a meeting due to the pressure of the moment or a sense of obligation). 

It is my strongly held opinion that ultimately, all professional insurance advice should be given, and purchased, separately from the financial commodity that we call insurance. I think that paying for advice via commissions is a dangerously flawed structure, and also represents one of the worst conflicts of interest in existence in the world of business today.

But that, as they say, is a topic for another day…

-Don

An insurance company underwriter just provided a workers compensation insurance quote to a broker for one of my clients. The broker was kind enough to pass it along to me in its entirety, and the contents provide some stunning revelations about the true nature of the insurance industry.

Quotation A is provided by the underwriter, and it has some very competitive numbers. The underwriter also provides Quotation B, which is 2% lower than quotation A. The underwriter comments to the broker that he is authorized to use the lower Quotation B, “if necessary”.

In this case, that 2% represents about $2,000. Do you feel it’s necessary that our client save that $2,000? I certainly do. In another example that happened last week, we witnessed an insurance company reduce a quotation by $20,000 in the face of authentic competition from another company. They published one quote in writing, then a week later published a second (coverage-identical) quote that was $20,000 lower.

I am not making this stuff up — It happens all the time. You need to take specific, methodical actions to get to the true “bottom” of the market. Otherwise, what your broker or insurance company is telling you is a “rock bottom” policy quote may be very, very far from it.

So how do you get to the bottom? For starters, read my book (subscribe for a free copy at http://icrs.biz/bookoffer/ or by clicking the eZine subscription on the right-side pane of this blog). You can also read the tips in this blog, or even call or email me for advice… whatever it takes to get your premiums down to where they *should* be, not where your insurance company and broker want them.

Unfortunately, the insurance market is an odd bird in that it doesn’t normalize pricing automatically through competition as is the case with other markets. With insurance, you’ll need to give it a little push to help it along. That happens to be something that I love helping companies do.

- Don

I was recently the featured guest interviewed on the show “Business Success Tips,” a podcast format program, produced by the good folks at NetCastCentral (http://www.netcastcentral.com).

The show, which enjoys a worldwide audience with podcast distribution via Apple’s iTunes network and the Libsyn.com syndication network, focuses on topics relevant to entrepreneurs and small business owners, and has recently been getting as many as 40,000 downloads per episode.

On the episode (#71, Business Insurance), I discuss the challenges facing commercial insurance buyers and business owners/managers, and how the default practices of the insurance industry make things difficult and expensive for them.

If you are interested in checking it out, here are a few links where you can find the show:

• Apple iTunes (opens iTunes application)
• Libsyn Syndication Network (select episode #71, Business Insurance)
• Direct MP3 Download (warning — file is around 30MB or so)

- Don

I advocate that those of you employers with employees driving company vehicles strongly consider subscribing to the California DMV’s Employer Pull Notice (EPN) Program. Under this program, employers are notified when their employee drivers receive citations, which can often help you to identify problem drivers before they start having accidents and become major company liabilities.

General information about the program can be found at the following link:

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vehindustry/epn/epngeninfo.htm

The program application can be found at the following URL link:

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/forms/epn/inf1104.pdf

We recently learned that this program only applies to employers who allow employees to drive company vehicles. So, if your employees are driving their own vehicles, the DMV Pull program doesn’t apply to you. Also, although California is one of the pioneers of this type of program, other state motor vehicle departments have similar programs, so if you’re not in California, be sure to visit your state’s DMV Web site to see if they have one in place.

- Don

It occurred to me while watching the movie The Perfect Storm recently that the insurance industry itself is a perfect storm of insurance buyer-hostile conditions. However, instead of the effects of tidal waves and flipping boats, we have hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted annually by businesses on their insurance premiums.

So what, you ask, are the conditions contributing to this “perfect” confluence of circumstances? Here’s a short list of the forces converging to work against you (which will in turn help you realize why skillful attention to controlling insurance costs is so rewarding):

1. Insurance companies and brokers generally favor extracting as much money as they dare from each transaction, while minimizing their costs by performing as little service as necessary to take that money (in the form of commissions).

2. Insurance is complicated by nature. It is common knowledge in the industry that most buyers don’t understand their own policies, and have no clue about how the insurance marketplace operates. Undereducated buyers are much more likely to overpay for products and services.

3. People hate dealing with insurance as much as taxes and laundry…sometimes even more (refer to #2 above). The more you neglect to control purchasing, the better the industry likes it.

4. He who controls the info controls the deal. Brokers control mountains of information that they’ve collected on your business, and only dole back out to you the minimum amount necessary. Brokers do not want you to have all the information you need to take matters into your own hands.

5. Brokers routinely lock out competition at every opportunity. If you are not well-informed, astute, and paying sharp attention, you have likely failed to create authentic competition in your policy quoting process (and no, unfortunately, having a broker who gets quotes from more than one insurance company does NOT ensure competition, as I recently discussed here). The more your broker commands your options, the less likely you will enjoy the best the market can offer.

6. There are hundreds of schools and training facilities all over the world that teach brokers clever ways to increase control over your insurance spending. To avoid being victims, buyers need to learn the skills necessary to counter such attempts to control their accounts, and to force the market to function fairly and efficiently for them. 

7. The government is expected to protect the public from abusive practices of bullying industries. Of course, this fails miserably, because the government cannot stop a storm of this magnitude (and not to mention one with such a large congressional lobby). Individual firms must defend themselves by applying sound buying practices that are proven to counteract the ever-present perils in the insurance buying process.

8. Competition is what normalizes prices in markets and keeps them efficient. The forces above regularly converge to sink competition and to minimize your options. They channel you into passively accepting your fate and into writing the next check.

We can’t promise you a smooth and safe ride in this storm. We can only help you prepare for the coming events, provide you information normally obscured from buyers, and help you navigate more wisely to avoid the worst of it.

- Don

Brokers control your account by controlling your access to your own information. They try to give you as little information as possible, since doing so risks eroding their control over your account. If you have too much information, it will be easier for you to obtain competitive quotes, and therefore create price pressure on them.

Here are 4 typical ways that brokers control the insurance quoting process and your account:

1) Controlling Access to Insurance Specifications. Brokers will rarely, if ever, provide you your insurance specs of their own freewill. Typically, they develop this information over numerous interviews and phone calls, and usually consider it their own proprietary work (which they most certainly do not want being utilized by their competitors). With your information, brokers develop submissions (applications) that can be sent to any insurance company. These submissions are important, because they are being used to describe you to the underwriters. They do not give them to you, because that would only weaken their control over your account. You having your specs only invites serious competition the broker doesn’t want.

2) Controlling Access to Loss Runs. Brokers generally resist giving you access to your loss run and loss summary information (or at least, on a timely basis — as in, quotation/renewal time). Complete, current loss runs are a vital element in obtaining insurance quotes, and they know very well that you will not get any competitive quotes without them. However, even asking for this information isn’t necessarily enough. Oftentimes, when asked for this information by a client, brokers will send useless loss runs that are outdated and/or incomplete, in an effort to stall the process and prevent you from getting what you actually need to get competitive quotes. And that’s assuming that they don’t ignore your request or stall you long enough for the renewal date to pass.

3) Insurance Market Developments. Brokers want to control your access to the insurance marketplace, and they will usually not inform you of new opportunities (products, strategies, etc.) that could save your company money, since in their mind that might risk losing money and/or control of your account. Usually, brokers keep themselves (intentionally or unintentionally) ignorant of insurance products and opportunities that don’t support their desired commission structure.

4) Blocking Access to Insurance Companies. Brokers regularly attempt to block access to insurance markets by other brokers. Once a submission is in to an insurance company, that company is blocked to other brokers. When a broker succeeds at blocking all the available markets, they are now securely in control of your account. They know all your options. They have a veritable monopoly on your access to the marketplace. As you can probably imagine, this situation can be very unhealthy to your checkbook.

Upset yet? Shocked? You should be. What’s truly shocking is how commonplace these activities are in today’s marketplace. In fact, I have found in my experience that the above practices are standard operating procedure for the majority of brokerages. These practices silently obstruct the free enterprise system from functioning to your advantage, and the result is less than optimal pricing, coverage, and broker services.

Those who take steps to break out of these insurance industry established (and supported) patterns stand to gain a great deal.

- Don

The insurance industry is an extremely inefficient marketplace, one that doesn`t function very well for its customers. It is loaded with friction, obstruction, murkiness, and bottlenecks; No wonder people hate dealing with it. They know it is an unfriendly, unknown territory where they are at a serious disadvantage. It discriminates in favor of the informed, and takes advantage of those unwise to its ways.

Free enterprise works wonderfully on a level playing field in an efficient marketplace with participation by informed buyers and sellers. Where things start to break down is when the buyer doesn’t understand what they are buying, or how the marketplace functions. With insurance, this situation is the norm.

I like to think of what I do in my insurance consulting work as being akin to running a training camp for the insurance buyers of the world. I get them organized, in shape, and prepared for their next “event” (i.e., insurance buying encounter) and if necessary, even coach them through that event the next time it comes around in order to help them achieve success. In this case, we measure our ultimate success together in dollars saved, and total aggravation avoided.

If you haven’t already, I suggest you start your training now, because the event is a regular one, and losing it can cost you and your organization a great deal of money.

- Don

I have been asked many times over the years about what first prompted me to write my book, The Buyer`s Guide to Business Insurance.  The truth is that my impetus for writing it was my emotional reaction to watching so many people get burned, either knowingly or unknowingly, by insurance brokers and companies over the years.  Quite frankly, my conscience insisted that I do so, out of compassion for these victims of the insurance system.

Having once participated in this industry on the agency side of the fence, I hesitate to say this out loud, but it is my experience that the insurance industry is organized around pure greed. The concept of genuine concern for client welfare gets plenty of lip service in the media, but in my extensive experience, it is a very rare event where one sees an insurance broker or agent genuinely subordinate their own financial interests in order to benefit their client. When dealing with insurance, it is generally safest to assume you will overpay and get underserved, unless you take specific, proactive steps to protect your business.

Here are a few baseline conclusions from my years of experience and testing:

1. If ever there was an activity demanding caveat emptor (”let the buyer beware”) it is that of purchasing commercial insurance.
2. The more wisely a buyer approaches the process of buying insurance, and the greater the due diligence done by the client, the better their end result will be.
3. Most people are not prepared to deal with insurance brokers, and have absolutely no idea how to get the best service and premium rates from them (or are even aware that it is possible to effect great changes – and savings – in their insurance rates and servicing).

So, you could say that I wrote the book to offer the world help in dealing with the insurance industry, using inside knowledge of the insurance game gained from my many years of industry experience.Readers who have followed the book’s guidance have written to me on numerous occasions to share their successes and the large amounts of money they have saved.  I suppose I was originally somewhat naïve in my imagination that the book would single-handedly level the business insurance playing field. The problem is, as always, getting the word out. Let’s face it: Many people, including insurance buyers for large companies, have a difficult time believing that there can be reward or value from reading any book about insurance (it’s not known for being the world’s sexiest topic). Although the book has and continues to play a strong part in this insurance crusade, as a book it also has some natural limitations in its sphere of effect. Therefore, I’m now embarking on new ways to “get the word out,” including the icrs.biz and upcoming insurancecostreduction.com Web sites, as well as the blog now sitting before you.

The other reality that I came face-to-face with shortly after completing the book is that not everyone is going to have, or make, the time to follow the procedures and methods I presented in my books, blogs, videos, and other avenues of communications, even though doing so stands to save their business an enormous sum of money. In fact, it was only after a dozen or so people said to me “Great book Don! Can you do all of these steps for me?,” I realized that we were only addressing part of the total solution to this problem. It was at that time that we formed ICRS as an outsourcing option allowing these businesses to get direct help in reducing their insurance costs. Being confident in our abilities to consistently achieve results, we even went so far to made it a no-risk situation for these clients, by providing a financial guarantee that we would not only pay for ourselves, but also save them at least 20% in their overall annual insurance costs.

However, the truth is that I honestly do not care which category you happen to be in. If you are a DIY type of individual who is capable and willing to follow the instructions provided by the book, this blog, or other sources of information we provide, I am just as pleased by that as if you hire us to help you directly. In the end, my sincere and heartfelt vision is to educate and empower the insurance-buying public, and by doing so, help to right the many wrongs present in insurance today. I look forward to helping you in that task in the coming weeks and months.

 - Don