IBA: Tell us a little bit about USI.
Phil Larson: USI was started in 1994 with about $6.5 million in revenue and 40 employees in California. USI is now over $1 billion in revenue, and we have over 4,200 employees in about 140 offices across the country. We’re focused on four core lines of business: commercial property & casualty, employee benefits, personal risk and retirement consulting.
IBA: What does USI stand for?
PL: It’s what we refer to as Understand, Service and Innovate. Understand refers to really understanding the specific needs of our clients based on their industry vertical, their size and their specific risk issues. Service refers to our very strong local client service model that is networked nationally. Innovate refers to our innovation of best in- class solutions. You will hear us talk a lot about the USI ONE Advantage. That’s a significant endeavour we’ve been working on for a while now to innovate the insurance brokerage industry.
IBA: How has USI been able to build its various P&C solutions?
PL: We’ve been building our verticals for many years. The industry vertical strategy is actually very much tied to our USI ONE Advantage strategy. Part of the USI ONE Advantage is that we spend a lot of time developing industry based solutions. We harness the collective knowledge of our associates from around the country and document and build out those solutions in what we call the Omni Knowledge Engine. We also have a large number of technical resources who are located in our field offices around the country, and they help to apply and deliver on those solutions that we have in Omni.
IBA: What is the USI ONE Advantage?
PL: It’s something we are really proud of, and it has been under development for a long time. When we say the USI ONE Advantage, ONE is actually an acronym. The first part of it is really the heart – the Omni Knowledge Engine. Many years ago, we spent a lot of time with experts from around the country in all the various industry verticals and all the different lines of business, and tried to pull out all of the best ideas and solutions they had to reduce cost and expand coverage for our clients in P&C. We also did the same thing for our other lines of business. Over time, we were able to develop that into an online tool with helpful automation.
The Omni is also connected to an online library, which contains support material for every solution, including online training, case studies, sample work products and explanations of how the financial impact is derived. So if you are a producer at USI and you are working on an opportunity or an existing client, you can enter client information into Omni, and it will give you access to hundreds of solutions and ideas. You can even look at financial impact, which is a very important part to help pick the solutions. We do about 30,000 of these a year, and there is also functionality within Omni that lets you see the most popular solutions or national expert recommendations for clients in that vertical.
The ‘N’ is the network. That is the hundreds and hundreds of technical resources that we have added to the fi rm. They are not sales consultants or account managers; rather, their role is to help sales consultants and account managers select, explain and implement the solutions for clients.
The last part, the ‘E,’ is the enterprise planning process, and that’s the approach where we bring it all together. So there are regularly scheduled meetings that leverage the Omni analytics with our networks of resources across the country.
IBA: What is the importance of USI ONE Advantage?
PL: Really, it is the only way that you can capture the collective knowledge of 4,200 professionals and make it readily available 24/7 to 1,000 sales consultants sitting in 140 offices around the country. The reason no one else does it is because it is really hard to pull off. We think it gives us a true differentiation in the middle market, and to our knowledge, no one else is even trying this approach. It has taken us years and years to build, and we are continuously innovating the solutions.
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