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Strategically consider how changing your customer experience and engagement can impact the long-term success of creating and maintaining loyal customers. Customer loyalty should be considered a critical success factor similar to profitability.

What can make your agency unique or different? Why should an individual or family do business with your agency instead of another one within a 20-minute driving radius? Are your products and services wildly different from your local or internet competitors?

You know insurance is a people-centric business. You prepare your insureds with the proper tools and reduce stressors for them. Part of your reward is the satisfaction from helping people and making that human connection.

Knowing and communicating the lifetime value of a typical customer to the staff can provide them a framework for maintaining customer relationships, rather than looking at them from a transactional basis.

When we work with professional, independent insurance professionals who want to build their agencies, we meet partners and owners who want to grow their agencies in specific ways. One practice-development tactic that can be successful is to build a niche. This is a good way to grow your book of business when you do it in the right way.

Some frightening possibilities follow: According to research, it is estimated that American businesses may only be operating at one-third of their capacity because of the lack of a true connection with their employees.

Cost containment has become the mantra over the last several years for almost everyone. People have been accepting the thought, sometimes reluctantly, that they need to do what it takes to survive the downturn.

Today a number of selling and business development tools are available to independent agents that make it is easy to lose sight of the big picture: a personal connection.

We were aware that any time people operate multiple locations or divisions, they are subject to a potential culture clash. But in preparing to help a build a team within a multinational client, we realized this can apply to much smaller organizations, even those operating locations across the street from each other.

"In five years, you'll be exactly where you are today, except for the people you meet and the books you read." Unless we consciously do something to change our thinking, we will be stuck where we are.

"It is usually not what we don't know that kills us. It is what we think we know that we don't that kills us."

Today's best managers and agency owners are leaders focused on bringing out the best thinking and commitment of all employees in order to develop and sustain the most effective work processes and the highest quality products and services.

I have noticed a troubling pattern. Despite how intellectually bright executives are at the top of the house, they seem to be suffering from one or more blind spots that color their view and inhibit their judgment.

I am hesitant to refer to passion as a management tool because I don't want to advocate manipulation in its most negative form. Instead, I want you to approach this as a form of booster rocket that you can adapt and use to get to where you want to go faster.

Baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, "If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else." What a simple statement, yet really quite profound.

I'll address one shortcoming in this article: not publicizing a list of corporate goals and objectives in priority order. Without a public list like this, people at every level of the organization are forced to guess at the most important criteria for making decisions.

Whether they refer to them as raving fans, zealots for their business, loyal customers, or long-term clients, most executives today are trying to ensure their companies get and keep profitable customers.

While we have just come through one of the biggest financial meltdowns in U.S. history, almost every industry has been forced to rethink its position in the marketplace and how its "go-to-market" strategies have been affected.

How would we be operating our enterprise if we were going through a turnaround right now? That led me to think about achieving transformation by thinking differently- without going through the massive pain and suffering a turnaround typically involves.

Employee engagement doesn't have to be relegated to some soft-headed, everybody-feel-good-and-sing-Kumbaya moments. It can deliver pragmatic outcomes that most execs would die for.

It doesn't matter whether you look at elected officials like Sanford, Blagojevich, Clinton, or Nixon or famous individuals such as Falwell, King, Jackson, Skilling, or Madoff, the underlying behavior is identical. What led to their public dressing down was their apparent belief that the rules of conduct that apply to other people somehow don't apply to them.

For example, when I ask executives, "What is your unique differentiation in the marketplace?" or "What does your organization really excel at?" they often reply, "It has to be our customer service." Almost no one will admit to being lousy in customer service, anymore than they will talk about living in an average town with average kids.

Imagine there was a relatively simple tool that could help you understand and predict how members of your team and organization would likely perform over a period of time. You may already know it as the universal change curve or the forming, storming, norming, and performing curve, a variation on the work of B.W. Tuckman that originally appeared in 1965.

Charles Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one most adaptable to change." If ever in the past fifty years a business owner must learn to adapt to change, it is today!

Should you add a VP of CHANGE to your staff? Nutsy you say. Well let's take a closer look. Ten years ago would you have considered a comptroller, HR Officer, IT Director, etc? Leaders must do the right things so managers can do things right that will have positive impact on positive results.

In many cases, the often-used phase, "It is not what we know that hurts us; but, rather, it is what we think we know that we do not, that gets in our way," still is appropriate.

Suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine an agency that never seems to lose many clients.

In this installment, we discuss the tactical transitions that must be successfully executed.

In this issue, we will identify and help you better understand the four major stages that an agency/organization must pass through on its way to greatness as well as the typical characteristics of those stages.

In this issue we will identify and help you better understand the six key organizational development tasks.

Starting with the most basic premise, entrepreneurs can face either the initial challenges surrounding creating a new venture from scratch, or building up a recent acquisition.

Having a solid strategy doesn't get "it" done in and of itself. In the current challenging business environment a solid execution plan rarely is a plan to do "it" faster, better and cheaper.

We all know the answer to the question in the title; we don't wash a rental car because we don't own it.

There is no doubt that we in the USA are being bombarded with new challenges on an ongoing basis. Failure to adapt will become a death sentence for many organizations.

How do we make sure that adding products brings positive results, short and long term?

Imagine an agency that never loses clients. Imagine clients that are not only loyal, but are enthusiastic promotors of your agency.

What is reasonable for agencies and companies to expect from each other? What advice or requests do insurance industry executives and former industry executives have for the agency owners today?

While significant improvement over the last decade in the number of agencies that have realized
hte necessity of having a perpetuation plan in place has been made, further improvement is still needed.

Simply put, it's everything a business does to attract customers, keep them coming back and refer others to your business.