Kevin Krupka knows what it takes to grow an insurance agency. He’s the owner of Mountain Insurance Brokers in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. Over the years, he’s learned that if he wants to achieve real success, he needs to give his clients what they want. By leveraging a network partnership, he’s been able to do just that.
A Better Way to Serve Clients
Like many of us, Kevin fell into an insurance career. After being referred to Allstate by a friend, he worked as a captive agent for nine years. During that time, he learned a lot about the insurance industry. In fact, he believes that captive companies are a great place to start. “I’ve now got more than 20 agents, and my top producers, are those who came from captive companies,” he explains.
While still a captive agent, he realized that if he wanted to increase service to his clients, he needed to make the switch to being an independent agent. “You realize that you are working for the company that you are employed with, and really not working for the client,” Kevin explains. “That’s what made me realize that there was a bigger, broader world out there where I could give clients more choices. That’s why I decided to go independent and start this agency in 1997.” 
No Walk in the Park
Once Kevin made the decision to go independent, he needed to figure out the ins and outs of running his own agency. He was able to use his connections to get his first appointment, which led to a second and third, and so on.
Kevin may not have struggled as much as some new agency owners, but this doesn’t mean it was a walk in the park. “It was definitely challenging,” Kevin says. “You constantly have to sell yourself to the carriers and commit to a certain amount of business. It wasn’t easy,” he adds.
An Elusive Carrier
Despite Kevin’s initial success, he had trouble getting one specific appointment. It was just one carrier, but that carrier was competitive in the state, and Kevin needed to have them in his product suite.
He began looking at his options and one day, while reading an industry publication, something about a network called Smart Choice caught his attention.
However, while he knew that Smart Choice might be able to get him the carrier appointment that had eluded him, he was still hesitant. He worried that signing up with a network would mean moving his entire business over to the network – something he had no interest in doing after how hard he had worked. Fortunately, when he researched the network further, he was surprised to discover that wasn’t the case with Smart Choice.
“There was no commitment,” Kevin says. “There was no quota or anything. There was just the understanding that there would be a commission split up to a certain threshold on any business I wrote through a carrier I obtained through them. And it didn’t change our operations at all. In fact, it enhanced our agency, by giving us another resource. We weren’t giving up anything; we were adding something. Smart Choice made it very simple,” he explains.
Internal Reluctance
As the agency owner, Kevin could see that partnering with Smart Choice was the right move, but some of his agents needed convincing.
“Some of my producers were reluctant because there was that commission split early on,” Kevin admits. He quickly quelled their fears by making the case that without the network partnership, they wouldn’t have access to the products needed to make more sales. “As I told them, it’s better to get 70% of something than 100% of nothing,” he says.
Before long, it was obvious that Kevin had been right - his agency’s book grew dramatically in just a few years, and Kevin says it’s because of that one connection. “We wrote a lot of business in a short amount of time because we were able to offer our clients the best value,” he says.
A Multitude of Advantages
Kevin may have signed up with Smart Choice to gain access to a particular carrier, but he soon discovered there were many other benefits to the partnership.
“There are a lot of resources and support,” he says. “We get support not only from the local marketing rep but also from the Smart Choice organization. They keep us apprised of what’s available in the marketplace. We’re a fairly good-sized agency with about 25 million in premium – mostly commercial. Still, even with our size, Smart Choice provides many resources that aid our success,” he explains.
Kevin’s been with Smart Choice for more than 5 years. Although his agency had already succeeded in securing many carrier appointments on its own by the time he joined Smart Choice, he knows that not all new agencies are so lucky. “Smart Choice is a great, great resource for agencies that are smaller,” he says. But as his own experience has shown, even larger agencies can still benefit from the additional resources and support.