Why premium isn’t enough
Premium written is the scoreboard. It says nothing about where business was lost, how long clients waited, which brokers convert, or whether the book is growing or churning underneath a flat top line. A brokerage that tracks only premium finds out about a leak when the number drops, which is a quarter after the leak started.
The six
- Quote-to-bind rate. Quotes issued that became bound policies, by product line and by broker. Under a third on commercial lines usually means quotes are going to unqualified enquiries; a broker well below the team average is a coaching conversation, not a mystery.
- Instruction to inception, in days. Median and the ten worst. The worst ten tell you which insurer, which product, and which step the practice sits on. This is the adviser’s underwriting turnaround in brokerage clothing.
- Renewal retention, monthly. Annual retention hides a bad quarter. Monthly, by product, with the reason for every lapse logged, and you can see a service problem before it’s a revenue problem.
- Revenue per client and products per client. A book of single-policy clients is a book waiting to churn. The cheapest growth in a brokerage is the second product to an existing client, and nobody measures whether it’s being asked for.
- Referral rate. New clients that came from existing ones, as a share of new business. If it’s under 20% the review conversation has no ask in it.
- Applications older than ten days. The operational canary. On one Monday screen, by owner, every week. When this number is low, numbers two and three take care of themselves.
Where they live
Not in the policy admin system, which is built for the insurer’s view of the world. In a pipeline (monday.com or HubSpot, usually) that tracks the client from enquiry to inception to renewal, with the admin system as the source for the policy record. Setting that up is Set up my CRM for a brokerage still on spreadsheets, or Reset my stages for one that already has a board, and the industry page shows the pipeline drawn properly.