Last year’s winner of the award for “Best Brokerage Under 10 People” says the award has lit a fire under his staff, who hope to get back in the winners’ circle this year.

Blair Tinianov, broker and co-owner at Louis Meier, which won at the Insurance Business Canada awards last year, said the award was hugely gratifying.

“We’ve been open for over 60 years and to finally be recognized that means, to us, that our staff is doing a good job and it means we’re doing right by our insurers and insureds,” he said. “It shows that we’re here for a reason - that we’ve got to that point where people are recognizing us, which is nice finally.

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“It felt good. We didn’t even know we were nominated by any of our companies. To just get the notification that we were nominated was amazing … It was great to find out that the companies that we were against are all companies we deal with, in a sense. Some of these companies are companies we respect and they do really well in the industry, and just to be put in a category with them was just amazing.”

The brokerage, in Downsview, Ontario, now has five staff. Last year, when it won, it had just three. The award energized the team, Tinianov said.

“It actually put a fire under our staff,” he commented. “We talk about it all the time. We want to win, we want to succeed. We want to be nominated, so we try to strive in customer service, etc. So I think [the award last year] did actually help with that.”

So does the Louis Meier brokerage want to try and get back to the same awards heights as 2016?

Indeed, Tinianov said. “We’d like to be back there.”


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