The Ordinary is Death to the Insurance Broker

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When insurance is seen as something very ordinary, mundane, and ho hum – then it becomes what we dread: a commodity, an afterthought, and forgotten. When it’s seen as central to a client’s core values and goals in life they become engaged in the process and outcomes are always better.

Thursday, April 21st 2011, 9:15AM 2 Comments

by Russell Hutchinson

With ordinariness, on the other hand, insurance becomes like the nasty forms for the insurance you get when you rent a car. Something you are too busy to understand properly, which is too complicated for you to work out, and for which you routinely pay too much - and then feel resentful of.

As an insurance broker you can cope with almost anything - to paraphrase a famous writer: dinginess is death - you can cope with discomfort, rejection, poverty, trauma, and drama. All these don't matter a bit. In fact most good insurance brokers have seen plenty of each and have only been encouraged, in a way, by all of them. But the ordinary, the mean, small confines of what people expect, make good insurance advice impossible.

You see, insurance is connected by a golden thread to all that is worthwhile in life. The thread is risk. Here's a greater mind than mine on the subject: "It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home." Theodore Roosevelt said that. I puzzled for a little while that a man who accomplished so much should talk about how the great prizes are those connected with the home. But they are. Spouse, children, hobbies, and the things that you care about most. Work, is for those things - or it's a craft that is as much a part of you as your interests and skills are. Insurance is about protecting this fragile organism - your home life - from all the troubles of the wider world.

By doing that it confers great freedom on a person. A wealthy person can choose to take on risks because the amount at stake is a small proportion of their total. The vast majority of people cannot do the same. That's why insurance is the friend of the worker, giving independence and freedom for those that want to have a go at life.

You see, to win the things you want you have to take risks. Greed has a bad name, but wanting! Wanting a wife or husband, wanting a good home, to raise a good family. Thinking each year: can I just pay for the classes, the school fees, the holiday. All that is about having a go and taking risk.

You can claim that it's ordinary. It's as ordinary as Hollywood. Every film you have ever been to see uses one or more of the major plot devices: hero wants partner, hero meets friend, hero versus enemy, hero versus nature/ God / the Universe... but it's never ordinary. That would be death to it all.

Remind a client of their starring role in the great drama of their life and they see immediately the fragility of the endeavour - all the things that depend on them. All their dream are dependent on their ability, and they are their responsibility. They must shoot for the job, run the business, and try to put it all together. Some will fail.  Some will have their world cruelly shaken to pieces. But the risks must be taken. For a few dollars a month much of it can be covered too.

But shy away from the ordinary. Get involved, get interested in what they want, who they are, and how important it all is. Look through the eyes of the children in the household - especially the youngest that are so dependent. They look at Mum and Dad as super-beings from whom all good things come - and to an extent they are right, aren't they? But they also see them as being somehow invulnerable and there, there they are wrong. It is your duty to protect them.

There is a secret to the process of getting involved - and that is the reciprocation that comes with it. When you are involved and engaged in the process then your clients will be too. This is so much better than the grudging involvement that comes with ‘oh yeah, there's been a change in the law so we've got to fill in this big long form' - this is real engagement where the client cares about the outcome too. Where they want you to explain why the cover is better with one option than another, and how the whole should be set up so that when a claim is made the proceeds will go to the right people for the right purpose.

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