Staffing for insurance agencies, scoped below the licensing line

Your most expensive people are doing your cheapest work

An agency's cost base is licensed people. Some of what fills their day needs no license at all: keying a change your licensed staff have already decided, pre-filling an ACORD 125 for their review, chasing a loss run, preparing a certificate from a policy that already says what it says. Count it in your own week rather than take our word for it.

You feel it worst in the run-up to 1/1, when renewal prep starts 90 days out and the certificate queue does not slow to make room. Hiring another licensed account manager to absorb clerical work is the most expensive way to solve a clerical problem, because the local market prices that person against producers, not against clerks.

The seat works from the record and routes the judgment

One rule governs how these seats get scoped. The contractor works from records that already exist, applies no judgment about coverage, and routes anything that needs judgment to your licensed staff. Selling, soliciting and negotiating insurance are licensed acts, and soliciting is the one that catches a support seat first. Steering someone toward a particular policy or a particular carrier is enough on its own, even in passing, even helpfully.

So the seat does not quote. Not once, not incidentally, not read off a rate sheet as a favor to someone on hold. It does not bind. It does not tell an insured whether something is covered and it does not advise on coverage. It does not sign. And it does not present as licensed staff, so titles and signature blocks that read agent, producer, account manager or customer representative are out. Regulators do not agree with each other at the edges of this, and we scope to the version that holds up under the strictest of them rather than the most forgiving, so the scope holds in every state. That is a condition of the placement, not a preference.

A contractor engaged through us is not on your agency's staff. Whatever latitude your own employees have on clerical work, we do not assume it carries across, so we scope the seat as if none of it applies. There is less room to improvise than there is with a domestic hire, which is why the boundary gets written down before the search opens instead of discovered afterward. Where exactly the line falls in your state is a question for your licensed principal and your counsel, and nothing on this page is legal advice.

What these seats cost, and where the money stops

These are administrative, finance and accounting seats, so we quote per role. A certificate seat in a personal lines agency and a commission reconciliation seat in a regional brokerage are different jobs at different rates. An international contractor costs a fraction of a comparable US hire. These seats stay engaged through us on the monthly model; contract to hire and direct placement are options we offer for Tier 3 technical and technical management seats only.

The flat fee is a control, not just a price. Pay for one of these seats never tracks premium, policies written or retention, because the moment pay follows production the work starts to look like the licensed kind. Premium is not the agency's money to move, so the contractor reconciles and prepares while your people approve and release. No seat initiates a payment, holds a bank token, or is an authorized voice for confirming or changing payment instructions. That is a condition of the placement.

Your management system goes into the scope before the search opens and the skills test is built around it, rather than assuming a candidate arrives fluent in Applied Epic or AMS360. We recruit in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and South Africa. The model works on the gap between labor markets, not on paying anyone poorly.

Where this is the wrong answer for an agency

Every licensed seat is out. Producing, remarketing, advising on limits, negotiating terms with an underwriter, binding, or telling an insured that coverage is bound all need a licensed and appointed person. Those seats are not placeable through us at any price, and no scoping document changes that. Surplus lines placement is out. So is claims adjusting, which is a separate license carrying its own duties to the insured, and sitting in another country puts nobody outside them.

On-site work is out too: inspections, property photographs, loss control surveys, wet signatures, physical mail and premium checks, and the in-person relationship work that some agencies are built entirely around. Ordering MVRs and consumer reports stays out of scope and stays with your own staff. We also decline seasonal cover. A catastrophe claims surge, an Epic migration or a post-acquisition book rollover are the wrong shape, and so is hiring for 1/1 alone. The seat only pays off if the same queue is still there in March.

We are slower than a firm that forwards resumes, deliberately. The seat gets scoped first, and that includes your licensed principal confirming in writing which tasks need a license in your state and which do not. If that boundary cannot be agreed and signed, the search does not open. Five screening gates run before you meet anyone, and we will not quote a time to shortlist. A $500 deposit opens the search and comes back off your first monthly invoice. This is built for seats you expect to keep filled a year or more, but nothing that long gets signed. The commitment is 90 days of fees, and a wrong fit inside it means we run the search again with the deposit waived.