u/wrob

What insurance companies are people using for coverage for their work truck?

We're opening an office in California and I'm trying to figure out what appointments I need to be competitive in commercial auto. We'll probably see mostly small business contractors/tradesmen/etc so not big fleets or trucking.

I'm curious how others go about this. We're still building up our markets. It takes some effort to get an appointment and also to manage it, so we don't want to just shotgun a million requests to carriers. The issue is when we get a hot lead that's difficult for us to place, there's not enough time to go add appointments specifically for them and then you're on to the next.

Obviously, every niche has their own markets, but I'm interested in how people go about figuring that out practically.

I'm sort of curious about the meta process. How do you figure out that you have a gap? How do figure out how to fill it? How do you think about adding a new niche?

We go through wholesalers for some stuff, but sometimes they can be slow and it's annoying to try to get them to work on a small monoline policy that's there to fill a gap in another bigger policy(s).

The game I'm looking at it basically sold out aside from standing only tickets and the resale tickets have a big markup buying directly from https://valkyries.wnba.com/

Anyone have a suggestion?

We're a new agency, and I've been a little surprised what a mess this all is. Most of our payments are either direct-bill or through a financing company who handles payments; however, sometimes we have an agency-bill policy and the customer wants to pay upfront. It's usually a smaller business or LRO's so somewhere from $600 to $10K typically. Right now, we ask them to wire it to us, but I'd love to be able to send them a payment link to do card or ACH. The problem is the fees get pretty gnarly. A 3% credit card payment fee is nearly 25% of our revenue.

I would use Stripe for it's simplicity, but it requires a 3rd party tool if I want to charge the customer the payment processing fees. I know there are other dedicated insurance ones and I've got demos with them this week. Curious what directions others have gone.

I'm considering just using Stripe and only doing ACH so I can add a flat surcharge manually since Stripe fees for ACH invoices are capped. Credit cards don't feel like they are worth the hassle.