Risk manager talks about relationships

Financial resources and stability are also key in selecting insurance partners

Risk manager talks about relationships

Risk Management News

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If you ask an insurance agent or broker how they have built their business, they may talk about various lines they offer and the insurers they represent. They may talk about their website and their staff. But in the end, they will always say “it’s a relationship business.”

What happens if you ask a client how they choose insurance agents?

“What I look for is all about the relationships,” said Steve Levine, director of risk management for a major restaurant company.

That was only his first answer, though.

Levine, who began his career as a safety engineer and a loss engineer with Chubb Insurance after graduating college with a finance degree in 1987, said he networks constantly with other risk managers and with people in the insurance business, paying attention to both the market and the people in it.

“I look at the resources that are available from the broker side. The broker is my conduit to the industry, so that is key. You need confidence in their bench strength, their capacity to manage your account. There are some big players like Marsh, Lockton, Willis, Aon, and Gallagher that have so many resources at their disposal that you have confidence that regardless of who you are working with they can find the resources you need. Then there are brokers who have an alignment with middle market services such as Assurex, which vets out different experts so they can seamlessly pull in the experts we might need, so I try not to filter those people out. At the end it really comes down to the face-to-face confidence you have in someone.

“I’m not an IBM, a Home Depot, a Wal-Mart, but we have 500 restaurants, 27,000 employees, so we are an attractive player for someone,” Levine said.

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