What's going on everyone? Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the Bronx
Attorney broadcast. I'm your host, Will Forero. On today's episode, we have Matt Patterson.
Matt is a wholesale insurance broker at CRC Group, and insurance isn't always the most
fun thing to do on the weekends, update your policy, but it's certainly something that
you're always going to need, whether it's homeowner's insurance or car insurance, or
in the instances that we talk about when you're going to open your own business or open your
own law firm. Matt gives us a nice overview of what you should be on the lookout for when
you're seeking that insurance policy. What's going on, buddy?
What's up, man? How are you? Good to see you.
How are you doing?
Matt, we're trying out here. We used to do them on Zoom. Now we're going to have a nice
little background, maybe make the YouTube videos look a little bit more fancy. We'll
see how that goes.
Cool. Happy to be the guinea pig.
We were talking a little bit a couple of weeks ago about what you do and how you could provide
some good information to people who are some listeners about the insurance industry. Just
to get started, can you just introduce yourself, tell me a little bit about where you're working
and what you do there?
Sure. Yeah. My name is Matt Patterson. I'm the vice president of professional management,
cyber liability at the Jenkins Town office of CRC Group. CRC is actually, after 2022,
we are the nation's largest specialty wholesale broker for commercial insurance in the country.
We are now number one. That's pretty cool. What we do is we are a wholesale brokerage
for commercial insurance mainly. There is people that do personal insurance too, but
that's much smaller part of what we do. 99% of what we do is commercial insurance. We
work in between insurance agents, customer-facing people, consumer-facing people, such as your
law firm, you go to an insurance agent to find your insurance. Our customer is actually
that insurance agent. When they can't find specific coverages or maybe they don't have
the right appointments or contacts at certain underwriting shops, they will come to somebody
like me. I'm basically a gatekeeper to a much broader scope of insurance markets. They
send me the submission. I go out and talk to my underwriters, negotiate a quote for
them, and then bring it back to my client and then advise them on the benefits, maybe
some exclusions or some issues that might be on the quote and coach a lot of people
on coverages and how to sell some of the policies that we offer.
There's a bunch of different types of ways you can work in insurance. You mentioned there's
like the broker or the wholesaler. What are the other... And then there's actually the
insurance companies themselves that are offering the policies, right?
Yeah. There is so much to do in insurance. It's a much bigger industry than people really
think. A lot of people, they'll just see their state farm agent driving around town and think
that guy works for a state farm or whatever. All the insurance commercials on TV are really
all that's out there. You could work in many different facets all the way up the chain
from an insurance agency and like a captive agent working for state farm, or you could
be an independent agent and work for an independent agency that has specific contracts that they
negotiated with other carriers. You could work in many facets in those companies. You
could work as a wholesaler like us and we have different positions that we work into.
We have some people that are actual underwriters that have appointments with certain carriers
to underwrite on their behalf. You have obviously carriers with underwriters and marketing people
and actuaries and just everybody that's involved in the development of an insurance policy and
the rates and controlling a loss ratio and selling that product.
You also have to know that there's even insurance for insurance companies which we call reinsurance
and they have to abide by those reinsurance treaties that they negotiate on their end.
Then there's even reinsurance underwriters. There's reinsurance brokers. There's reinsurance
wholesalers. There's a whole new environment and different landscapes of insurance all over
the country. It's quite a bit more complex than people might think it is sometimes.
A lot of the people that I've been talking with are either they're a small business owner
or they're somebody who has to, within where they're working, they have to build their
own book of business. Is that a similar type of situation that you're in?
Me personally, yeah. I'm an independent broker. I've built my own book of business, 100%
commission type of position where I go out and I market myself. I market what I can
do. People give me opportunities on pieces of business that they're looking to write
and I help them write them and we basically share in the wealth essentially. I market
myself with the backing of obviously the largest independent wholesale broker in the country,
which helps obviously when you knock on somebody's door or give them a call or shoot them an
email and say, I work for CRC. It helps with the brand recognition, but realistically,
I am my own little business essentially. I am the product.
How have you gone about building your book of business?
You just got to be persistent. I guess the best word would be persistent, that how I
went about building a book because you don't get an opportunity on the first time you talk
to everybody. If you talk to one person and they gave you their best piece of business
the first time you ever spoke with them, this would be really easy and everybody would be
pretty rich. It's approaching it with a positive mindset and just being more and more persistent
about it. There's an old sales saying, not that my position is really sales based, it's
really more of an advisory position to be honest, but it takes six to 11 touches on a
perspective sale for them to agree to it. I would have to potentially contact somebody
six to 11 times before they send me one piece of business, which is somewhat accurate. Obviously,
a lot of the times when I first started doing it, CRC has agency partners that we partner
with, certain agency clusters that we partner with. You approach those clusters first and
you try and take your easiest shots and find some of the easier business you can find.
Then it's just being persistent and staying on top of it and doing it constantly. What
I've learned is when you get lazy on your marketing, your business tends to suffer on
the back end. You could be super busy for two months and you're like, oh man, I'm killing
it. I'm having a great first quarter and then March comes around and the birds are chirping
and you're like, oh man, how am I going to hit my numbers this month? That's because
you didn't spend enough time in January, February marketing and getting the message
out there. Just being persistent, being consistent and not letting it wear you down. Having that
positive attitude. When you're marketing, are you more so maintaining relationships
or you're trying to make new sales so that eventually you'll be able to be doing that
business in the next quarter or what? It's a mix. It depends on the client. This is
something that we're actually trying to in our office especially trying to focus a lot
more on 2023 is figuring out what our clients need. There's some clients that want to see
us all the time and they want to hit the lunches and do the dinners and grab a drink at a happy
hour after work and talk shop and get to know you. Then there's other clients that don't
ever want to see you. They'd rather you answer the email they sent you or pick up the phone
when they call you right away than they don't care about the dinners. They just want to
write business. They want to be there for their clients. It's identifying who needs
what and then spending the time on the clients that need the attention and like to do that
type of stuff and then also mixing in meetings on the new business side. It's finding a
balance really of who needs the the attention in the dinners who doesn't and then getting
in new opportunities as much as you can really. Apparently you're pretty good at that right
because didn't you just win an award or something like that? I saw you post something.
In our industry when you hit a million dollars in revenue which I eclipsed in 2022 for the
first time it's kind of a big deal for an individual broker which basically means a million dollars
in revenue typically equates around ten million dollars in premium. So I wrote about ten million
dollars in premium last year and I grew my independent book 53% over my previous years
revenue. So they did recognize me. It was a good accomplishment great accomplishment
for my team and myself. So you could say I'm decent at it. I got a lot to learn and a lot
to grow and hopefully 2023 I can grow it even further and keep attacking the business.
And you have people that are working like for you on your on your team or how does like
the you know are you hiring people to work for you or you know what is that like?
I do you know I do I have two assistants right now. One we she just started in January so
she's fresh out of school and still learning you know what a wholesaler does how we operate.
My other assistant's been with me for a little over a year so he's starting to dig into a
little bit more of the account management stuff really digging into policy forms and
how marketing and negotiating a deal goes into play for our job. But yeah you know they
do assist me. They send out a lot of the quotes they send out the binders they you know set
up renewals just a lot of the administrative work that would simply bog me down and not
allow me to be in front of my clients and market their deals and negotiate their deals
efficiently. So you know CRC does give us the ability to build teams and you know at
least our idea in our office is to build you know the new hires up into potential brokers
in however long it takes right. So we have a long term focus on building producers and
that's what we like to do. Sure other offices might have different approaches but anybody
that we hire we have a long term goal of hopefully if they want to they don't have to but being
a broker themselves.
This episode of the Bronx attorney broadcast was brought to you by me will Ferro. I'm an
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show.
You know a lot of the people that I've been talking with for the purposes of the podcast
they have either a small business or a small law firm and you know they might just pick
up the phone and call the first you know person that pops up about insurance and they say
hey I need insurance for my business and they just get whatever. So if you want to be a
little bit more diligent about you know getting the right insurance for your small business
or for your law firm what should people be looking for when they're trying to find insurance?
You know that's really on a client per client basis and you know insurance is one of those
things where it can either be required by a contract or you know it's really what you're
able and willing to pay for because you really do get what you pay for in insurance. So you
know if you were starting a business you know I would highly recommend consulting with you
know an experienced insurance agent to do a risk management review of what you really
need but most people are going to tell you that you obviously need a general liability
policy if you have people that are coming into your office or even employees in your
office or just an office in general you definitely need general liability and most likely some
property coverage. And then on top of that again it depends on what you're doing you
know like a law firm obviously with a law firm you need errors and emissions coverage
that's basically requirement for that type of service if you're rendering a professional
service. Right and that's like if I commit malpractice
and a client sues me saying that I messed up their case my errors and emissions policy
will cover that. Potentially yes so you know there's obviously
language within each individual policy form that would respond to an allegation. Now depending
on which policy you buy there could be different terminology within that policy that you know
the insured obviously needs to read and understand so when they are submitting a claim to their
carrier they can be confident whether or not there would be a coverage trigger within the
allegation. So you know highly recommend reading your insurance policies and if you don't understand
them I would highly recommend consulting with your chosen agent to explain it to you to
a point where you understand because it's very important to understand what you are
and what you are not covered for and what can and could not potentially trigger a policy.
Interesting so how do you go about reading an insurance policy is there anything that
you you know recommend people like specifically look for or you know that people need to be
looking out for. Well you know if you're looking to take a nap that is definitely one thing
to do. No you know you can you can find certain interests in insurance policies for sure.
Now it depends again on what we're looking at now if you wanted to speak specifically
to you know a law firm and an E&O policy there is some specific areas where they should pay
attention to and just make sure again they speak with their agent and they understand
what their policy is saying because in the professional E&O realm a lot of these policies
have different wording and terminology so it can be confusing. It's not your standard
general liability policies which are generally the same. A lot of these E&O policies will
vary depending on who the carrier is and what their appetite is and what their intent coverage
is but one thing that they really should look at and make sure that they fully understand
is whether or not the policy is occurrence based or if it's claims made based. So those
two things are very different and they're very important for your notice to your carrier
for a claim so if it's an occurrence based policy that would mean that the trigger is
when the occurrence happens. So if something happened today you know you slipped and fell
today right on a geo policy and you submit that to an insurance carrier the policy that
was in effect at the time of the occurrence is the one that would potentially pay out
that claim. Okay. When it claims made policy the policy that's an effect at the time the
claim is made is the policy that would potentially trigger to any allegation made in the lawsuit.
So if you render a service to one of your clients and two years later they say that
you caused them a financial loss due to an error in the mission and you're rendering
of a professional service as an attorney. The policy that is in effect at the time the
claim is made against you is the policy that would then potentially trigger for the allegation.
So that's very important especially if you do have an E&O policy and it is claims made
you need to keep that policy in effect year over year because you can't just buy it for
one year and then expect all your services that you rendered in that year to be covered
forever because once you let that expire there's no more coverage unless there's a policy in
effect at the time the claim is made. So that's extremely important for people to understand
and when they're speaking to their agent and reading their policy they should really look
into that and make sure they are fully in understanding of whether it's an occurrence
based or if it's a claims made policy. So if it's like a claims made policy and you
retire you got to keep your policy going right so that if somebody makes a claim you're covered.
No you don't. There's an option in an E&O policy it's called an extended reporting period.
Now depending on if you were to retire or just non renew you wanted to shut down the
law firm you know we're going out of business. Maybe you get purchased by a larger firm that
then would give you insurance through their policy. You have the option if you were to
non renew your policy to extend your reporting period for a certain amount of time depending
on the policy some carriers only offer 12 months of extended reporting period some carriers
with underwriter approval will offer up to six years and I've even heard of certain carriers
offering unlimited ERPs. I'm not super familiar with that but I've certainly heard some of
my agents say that they were able to acquire them from some of their carriers but if you
were to end an E&O policy at any point in time non renew it for whatever reason I would
highly recommend you consider an extended reporting period just to make sure if a claim
were to be made against you after the end of that policy there's still potential that
you would have some coverage and at least you know you get it into the carrier and see
if there's any option there for you to get some coverage.
Got it and so your clients are like the insurance brokers right?
Yeah so broker is basically a very a term insurance broker yeah it's broad so I'm a
broker you know all the insurance agents are brokers okay so the more like consumer facing
agents or brokers are the people who become your clients essentially.
Yes my clients are insurance agents yes.
And so like how do you knowing that how do you tailor your services to make sure that
you're serving your ideal client in the best possible way?
Well in insurance and what we do probably the number one most important thing is responsiveness
and accuracy.
Being responsive for somebody and making sure that their questions get answered in a timely
manner is extremely important in anything you do and especially insurance because sometimes
there can be things that take a long time and you know just having that response to
say listen I've received this I'm on it I'm figuring it out for you and that's really
the number one thing that people are looking for a lot of the times in addition to some
expertise in certain areas but responsiveness and just being able to trust you know your
broker or your underwriter or whoever it may be that you know they're doing the right thing
for you and they're working hard that's really what people are looking for.
Are there a lot of wholesalers out there do you have a lot of competition with you know
trying to pick up clients?
Yeah I mean there is a lot of competition in the space I mean insurance has to be one
of the most competitive marketplaces and industries out there.
There's 5100 employees in CRC alone so there's tons of brokers in CRC.
The big top 3 commercial wholesale brokers really in the United States are CRC, ANWIMS
and RT, RT Specialty.
Those are the biggest ones and now there's a ton, a ton of smaller shops.
Under there's big corporations but yeah there's just and there's tens of thousands of retail
agencies out there and there is just so much competition in insurance and so much opportunity
really I should say because there's just a lot of availability and opportunity and you
know that's why you got to stay in front and be consistent and persistent with your clients
to get opportunities.
So like when you say persistent like what are you doing to be persistent with trying
to get the business?
I guess just you know like I said before taking that 6 to 11 opportunities to try and get
some business out of somebody before you give up.
I mean again you never know when somebody has a change in I'm trying to think of the
right word not like change of heart but maybe a redirection in their business strategy on
the retail side to give you an opportunity.
So your best ability is availability and insurance to be honest so being there and available
and just kind of you know even if you don't get a lot of business right off the bat just
keeping persistent and not giving up on a prospective client right away is really what
I mean you know it's a marathon it's not a sprint so you're really trying to build a
long term relationship over the course of many years instead of expecting a lot right
away.
It's just building that relationship and that trust over a very long period of time.
Are most of the policies yearly policies or do they fluctuate in length?
So yeah I mean 99% of the time we're writing an annual policy for 12 months you know we
can short term certain things or long term certain things if they need to.
You know a lot of the times you'll write something in the middle you know in June when somebody
already has all their GL and their workers comp and their property and their employee
benefits it's all 1-1 so you might extend that long term for you know an 18 month policy
so it renews on 1-1 with the rest of their deals.
It makes it easier for budgeting and just so you know the insurance agent doesn't have
to go back to them and do another presentation in the middle of the year after they did 1-1
just keeping out of the client's care and just making things easier for everybody but
yeah 99% of the time it's annualized premiums.
Do the consumer facing agents shop the insurance policies on like a yearly basis?
That's up to them and their marketing strategy.
We typically look at the market and what we expect on the wholesale side now you know
can I say do I know if my clients are shopping my policies every term?
I have no idea.
You know I don't lose a lot of them so even if they are shopping them you know it seems
to go.
You're doing pretty well.
Right sure but that's totally up to them.
They have the right and you know the ability to do that with their direct markets if they
so pleased but again that all goes back to the relationship you might have built with
them and the trust that they have in you as a broker.
Yeah a lot of it has to do with the market too.
Yeah I really don't know much about and not too much about insurance policies and writing
them.
I typically get involved when somebody tells me they're not going to give my client the
money that we think that they deserve so this has been an informative discussion about
how it gets started.
Yeah it is a for profit business in the end of the day so they got a perfect order.
You know what if they rolled over all the time maybe I wouldn't have a job so you know.
If they rolled over all the time there wouldn't be insurance companies out there to take claims
they'd probably all just close the doors.
That's true too.
So you did a million dollars in revenue last year.
Do you have any goals for this year or the upcoming five or ten years that you're thinking
about?
No just right now focusing on 2023.
Backwards isn't in my DNA so we're looking to grow.
We're looking to attack the market in specific areas that we think we can be of assistance
to our clients.
Looking to get out back in front of my clients and do the lunch tours and start helping people
out again.
We do have lofty goals again this year.
Double digit growth goals.
So again we're looking to be aggressive in five years.
Man I'm probably going to be a lot grayer for sure.
I don't know if that's a goal though Matt.
Well you know if I'm a lot grayer that means I wrote a lot of business.
That certainly could be a goal for me.
But you know in five years just still sticking around still being able to produce that same
high quality service to my clients and still have a good solid strong reputation in the
industry and just keep helping people.
It's really what the goal is.
Is there any like any secret weapons that you have for making a sale?
Is there any like special lunch spots or anything like that that you whip out when you really
got to make the sale?
Yeah you know I'm not really like I'm not making a sale to be totally honest with you.
You know my clients are the ones that are the customer facing individuals and I just
provide the tools and the ammunition to assist them in providing the service that they need
to provide.
But you know it's not a secret.
This industry is not a secret.
It's just being consistent in providing a high quality service to your clients and that's
really all you need to do.
Now that gets more and more difficult the longer you do this and you know the more business
you write it gets more and more difficult the more volume you have.
But building a team that has that same similar mindset of providing the absolute best service
and response time and accuracy you can is really the best advice I could give anybody.
If that's a secret you know then that's the secret.
I don't think it's much of a secret but that's really what the whole goal is in our whole
industry.
Yeah.
You have any plans on growing your team at all?
Well that just depends on how big we can build the book.
So you know as you need additional people as the book gets bigger you need some more
help.
And you know we look at that as the years go on.
So you know you look back at what you did and what you're projecting for the next year
and you kind of take that one step at a time.
We're always looking for new talent in the insurance industry.
I would highly recommend any younger people out there that might catch this that might
still be in college to look into you know if your school is offering a risk management
program to look into it.
It's a lot more interesting than what it seems you know it seems dry and dusty and what old
people do but I can tell you right now that the average age for an insurance agent in
the country is 65 years old.
No way.
And the average age yeah it's a very old industry and the average age for an insurance
broker for what I do is 55.
So within the next decade there's going to be a serious turnover in the insurance industry
to the younger generation and we're certainly looking for young hungry talent that wants
to get involved and there's a lot of really smart kids out there that are spending way
too much time on TikTok.
You know I did take an insurance law class in law school but those cases were about like
like the surgeon that had the policy and then he you know chops his thumb off on purpose
with the hatchet in the state house you know.
I think we call that fraud.
It's certainly fraud yeah that's what the case law said.
He did not get covered by the insurance.
There you go that's funny that's funny.
So you got any more nuggets of insurance wisdom before we wrap up today?
Not off the top of my head.
I mean again the most important thing for somebody in a buying position is to make sure
you fully understand the language.
These policies are written by lawyers so if you're a business owner and you're going to
spend a lot of money on insurance policy it might not even be a bad idea to contact your
local attorney to just make sure that you understand what it's saying because you know
you don't have to be an attorney to sell insurance and sometimes it's better to get a second
opinion before you purchase something to again make sure that you're fully fully aware of
what you're buying.
Got it got it yeah and then you know for in my opinion what I think people should do is
when they when they ask their agency to get something make sure you specifically put in
writing what you want that way you know if there's any mistakes you got your you got
your butt covered a little bit.
Yeah you know you're going to find it hard pressed to get a lot of insurance people to
put you know claims and everything in writing because you know every claim is very different
and it's subject to the review of a claims professional at the insurance carrier.
You know best we can do is provide the intent and at least our opinion on what the language
intends to mean so that's about as far as you're going to get an insurance person to
tell you.
Alright so you know do you if an agent's trying to shop some policies and they want to reach
out to somebody on the wholesaler side how do they find you.
Yeah so if you're an insurance agent and you're looking to do business with CRC Group specifically
me you can you can get me at my email it's just matt Patterson at CRCgroup.com and you
can find my LinkedIn too you know my name on there is Matthew Patterson there's probably
a lot of them but I'm in the Philadelphia area so you can find me that way as well.
Got it nice talking you buddy till next time.
Yeah you too man.
Yeah good luck with everything.
Later.
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