(Photo | by Mikhail Nilov of Pexels)
With health-related mandates changing regularly and a healthy dose of fear over the unknown, insurance industry professionals have had quite the roller-coaster ride in helping their clients navigate the storm of the past year and a half. But, as life settles down a bit now, we at Cascade Business News reached out to a few insurance experts to see how they are doing. Here’s what they had to say:
How is business going now?
Bill McCabe, Owner, President, United Risk & Insurance
Services, Sunriver
For us, it’s going great. We are busier now than before COVID. We are growing, hiring and getting new business. Through COVID, times were slow, but we managed through it, and in the past few months, business has picked up tremendously.
Patrick O’Keefe, Owner, Cascade Insurance Center, LLC, Bend
Business is good — maybe even busier than usual. Lots of people are buying, selling and refinancing their homes, each of which affects us. And on the employee benefits side, more and more businesses are deciding that a solid benefit package is becoming a must in order to attract and keep employees. These are employers who traditionally have not offered benefits. There are also about 11,000 people a day turning age 65 in this country, and sometimes I think they are all here in Bend. So we have a very brisk Medicare business.
Jeffrey W. Melville, Owner, High Desert Insurance & Financial Services, Bend
Surprisingly well. We have survived the pandemic quite well. People are still buying houses, cars, boats and RVs. We honestly didn’t see any slowdown this year at all due to COVID. On the health insurance side, we were very busy as well, through open enrollment and through the extended open enrollment period.
Jason Epple, Principal, Century Insurance Group, LLC
For the most part, Century Insurance was able to weather the COVID storm pretty well.
How have you navigated this past year; did the pandemic complicate the insurance industry?
Bill McCabe
From a customer service standpoint, helping clients manage risk internally was challenging. For business owners, from an insurance standpoint, navigating worker’s comp insurance has been difficult. Because COVID changed everything so much, there was a long period of time that employers were afraid to bring employees back. They didn’t want to be held liable if employees got sick. Rules were changing, sometimes on a weekly basis. So from an insurance standpoint, if you are a business owner, you are required to have a worker’s comp policy. There was a big time period of fear about if the worker’s comp policy would cover an employer if employees came back and got sick. There were worries about properly following the rules, masks, distancing, etc. And business owners were afraid of personal liability. There were lots of liability questions.
Patrick O’Keefe
There were a number of short- term rules and regulations that affected insurance policies. Things like extended late payment provisions imposed by the State for personal lines policies (home, auto, etc.). Open enrollment periods for health insurance were also extended.
Jeffrey W. Melville
We have a smaller office. Some of the agencies in town have 25 or more employees, so they couldn’t work from the office. We did end up having to lay off one employee due to COVID, but everyone here except that one is a family member, so we were able to work from the office.
Jason Epple
For years, Century folks have been set up to work one day a week from home. So, when the pandemic hit, the one day a week just became five. I’m really proud of everyone here and how well they adjusted. Taking care of our clients is the key to keeping this company strong and healthy. It was business as usual for us, we just didn’t see each other.
Did you have to change the way you do business due to COVID? How?
Bill McCabe
Now that mandates have been lifted, we are able to go out and pursue new business again. Traditionally, I would walk in and introduce myself; but for a year, we couldn’t do that. Our pursing of new business was limited during that time. We couldn’t just walk in, even with a mask sometimes. We had to make appointments. Now, we are back to building relationships face-to-face and getting new clients.
Patrick O’Keefe
We did. And it has been an interesting 15 or 16 months. We initially went full remote the end of March (2020). Unfortunately, we weren’t prepared, as we haven’t done that before. It meant buying computers for some of the staff (me included, as the system we use for our agency is Windows-based and at home I’m Apple). I needed to get my IT guy to get us all configured. We also had to redirect our phone system, change our mailing address to a P.O. box, etc. It was quite the experience. A few months later, about a third of my staff returned to the office, but we remained closed to clients until just recently. Then on July 6, the rest of the staff came back.
Jeffrey W. Melville
Most of our work is being conducted over the phone still. Even now, people are happy to do things over the phone versus coming into the office. I meet with 13-15 people per day during open enrollment. In 2019, all those people came into the office to meet in person, but in 2020, they all met with me over the phone.
Jason Epple
One of the first things we started doing was to reach out to our clients to reduce their estimated sales and payroll. The majority of business insurance premiums are based on either sales revenue or payroll. By doing this, we were able to quickly reduce insurance premiums to ease the pain of the shutdown. Our restaurant clients really benefited from this. Saving a few thousand dollars quickly when you can’t even pay yourself is a big deal.
How is staffing going?
Bill McCabe
We are having trouble finding teammates. To help with staffing issues; we are working longer hours, increasing pay for our existing employees and each taking on more tasks to help fill the gaps; we are doing everything we can do to find new teammates, especially here in Oregon.
Patrick O’Keefe
We were not affected like other industries such as hospitality. However, I did lose a couple of employees for reasons indirectly related to COVID.
Jeffrey W. Melville
We would like to increase our staffing. We want to hire one to two more people, but like everyone else, it’s very difficult to find someone with the experience, the license and the knowledge as opposed to bringing in someone to train. Staffing is definitely going to be a challenge moving forward. We are going to be busier coming out of COVID, and we need people, but they are harder to find.
What have been the greatest challenges?
Bill McCabe
Finding new clients during the closures. We kept most of our existing clients, but finding new ones was challenging. Prior to COVID, we had four permanent offices (San Diego, Los Angeles, Bend and Sunriver) and one satellite regional office (Las Vegas). We closed all the offices but one here in Central Oregon. Most people are still working from home. Our industry is more of a go-out-and-see-the-clients industry anyway, and even more so now.
Patrick O’Keefe
Learning how to work with our clients without seeing them face-to-face. Also, there is a certain amount of synergy that we lose not being together as a team. We did a lot of Zooming as you might expect, but it’s not the same.
Jeffrey W. Melville
The greatest challenge is the lack of personal contact, the lack of seeing clients face-to-face. But our book of business is quite established. We have some new clients come in each week, but a great majority of business is repeat customers. They are happy to meet over the phone, but I had a client today who I hadn’t seen in almost two years. In our personal and work lives, we don’t see the people. We may talk to them, but we don’t’ see them.
Jason Epple
COVID did bring a few additional battles our way. All the new temporary COBRA laws related to layoffs rolled out, and we had to be overnight experts on that. We had a lot of concerned employer groups, and the phones were very busy for the first few months. One of the biggest challenges in the insurance industry was the business income component found in commercial insurance and how it relates to civil authority. If the government shuts a place of business down because the structure is determined to be unsafe do to a direct physical loss, the business income piece of the policy is triggered. The insurance pays the loss of income due until the business is operational. A partial loss resulting from a small fire that left the building standing but sacrificed its structural integrity is a perfect example. The problem is, virus is specifically excluded on Civil Authority. A virus does not bring a direct physical loss, so the business income was never triggered. Many business owners were confident their insurance would take care of them. Unfortunately, this is not what insurance was designed for.
What have been the greatest triumphs? Any silver linings?
Bill McCabe
The silver lining for us as an organization was that we were able to help all of our clients through this scary time. I feel fortunate that no one who we know of passed away from this illness. The people we did know who got sick recovered. Our average client is seven-plus years, so we consider our clients family and friends. The ultimate silver lining is that all the people we work with have made it through so far without a lot of pain, which is not the case across the world.
Patrick O’Keefe
I would say learning how to adjust (I would say “pivot,” but I think everyone is beginning to hate that word) in a short period of time. And while we are no longer remote, I am sure some of the lessons we learned in the process will have future applications. But mainly, I am very proud of the fact that even though we couldn’t meet with clients for an extended period of time, we never missed a beat. We were able to effectively service our current clients as well as bring on many new clients.
Jeffrey W. Melville
It’s helped us to be more efficient. We’ve been able to work on efficiencies within the office; streamlining procedures and processes to meet the clients’ needs. We aren’t training new people; everybody here is very well trained. We been able to work on processes, and this has been very nice.
Jason Epple
COVID did change our office structure. We moved in January to a new office space nearly a third of the size we had prior. We worked with Domain Design Group, an interior design company here in Central Oregon. Together, we created this fantastic office using a collaborative office space concept. Jennifer Gooding, the owner, has done this for several years in California, and now we are lucky to have her in Bend. Today, our team has both the option of working from home or in the office at one of 12 floating or collaborative workstations. It’s a crazy cool concept that allows us to be scalable from an employee standpoint without the increased cost of rent. We can probably double in size without requiring more office space. We now have some of our team here to help in person, but we have learned that we don’t need everyone here all the time. Our team loves the flexibility, and we haven’t lost any productivity. This, I would say, is the COVID silver lining for Century Insurance. A super-cool office space, flexibility for our team to work both from home or in the office and the ability to go up and down in size without the need for space.
Anything else to add?
Bill McCabe
It’s been a roller coaster, but we fared well through it and we are excited about the future growth of Central Oregon.
Jeffrey W. Melville
One of the things we’ve seen is that since the wildfires last summer, we’ve seen an increase in homeowner’s insurance. I tell people that prices on insurance will continue to go up, especially here in Oregon. l once I explain it, they understand it, but before then, when they get their bills, they are shocked. The hurricanes in Florida won’t affect insurance here in Oregon, but the wildfires are affecting all of us. It’s been years and years since we have had anything of the magnitude of what the wildfires in Oregon were last summer.
Jason Epple
What I really want to say is how hard it is to get anything done. I think everyone working from home and living in their PJ’s has made a lot of American workers soft. We don’t get the responsiveness from insurance underwriting and claims handling that we did prior to COVID. That’s just my frustration, but I’m sure many others have the same.
unitedriskinsurance.com • cascadeinsure.com • highdesertinsurance.com • centuryins.com
