Why I Came to Work at Embroker – Brad Barkin

“The only thing more boring than being a lawyer or accountant is handling insurance for lawyers and accountants.”

That’s what I often told my clients during the first 11 years of my insurance career.  After two and a half years at Embroker, I tell people “we’re driving change to the biggest industry in the world.”

It’s still insurance, but it’s far from boring.

I left the best job I ever had, with the best people in my industry, to make a bet on myself and on driving change to a massive industry stuck in 1990. Specialty insurance (lawyers and accountants professional liability in particular) is fraught with very smart people exchanging hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Relationships are important and in recent years, insurance executives have increasingly spoken about getting smarter and more efficient with data. Yet they rarely speak about broadly passing savings onto the insured customer. Why is that?

These same insurance executives, who know they must get smarter with data, have often focused their attention the wrong way. Rather than looking at how to effectively pass savings onto the insured customer, they looked at how much they could get away with charging without losing business.

Law firms and CPA firms know they have to buy insurance, but they all hate it.  Get this; The big firms would spend 10-20 hours on an application for the privilege of spending $400,000 on a policy they probably wouldn’t even use.  At least the big firms received real advice. It was almost worse for the smaller firms. The partners would spend time answering applications, ship them out to several brokers, put the administrator at the mercy of figuring it all out, and hope for the best. Then they’d do it again, year after year after year.

My bet on Embroker and the industry was to find a better way for law firms and accounting firms to buy insurance. Additionally, I wanted to find a way for our carrier partners to use the capital more efficiently by passing savings on to the insured, all the while putting the broker’s in third place priority-wise, because if we take care of the customer and carrier first, we’ll do just fine in the end.

So how are we doing? In just under three years, we’ve helped hundreds of firms by giving honest advice, white glove service, and providing previously unseen technology to them. Some firms have gone from spending 20 hours on their application to one hour. The average firm spends under 10 minutes with Embroker.

We’ve driven premium cost savings of more than 15 percent to our new clients, provided pricing transparency and saving them countless hours of time. Clients have their insurance information (policies, applications, claims, certificates, etc.) available to them anytime and anywhere via their Embroker account.

Maybe the most telling KPI – our clients are happy and retention rates are well above expectations, even for the best of brokers.

The best part? We still have so much room for improvement. We’re capturing data but not utilizing it with carriers to the extent we could be. Embroker’s technology and buying experience are good but we continue to strive for improvement every week because that’s who we are.

To see how we can help your firm, create your Embroker account today.

We’re also always looking for gritty, smart people to drive change. Please reach out to me to talk further. You can find me at Brad@embroker.com