Benchmarking in business measures the quality, performance and growth of your organization by analyzing the processes and procedures of others in the insurance industry. Firms can collect and analyze data from successful brokerages and agencies to gather valuable insights and compare industry performance. Leveraging valuable metrics and data points to identify opportunities of improvement and where to throttle profitable operations for continued growth.
Benchmarking is intended to help company leaders make decisions to improve the efficiency of their organizations. It can help leaders find unnecessary expenses, overstaffing/understaffing and a litany of other resource misallocations that can hurt profits. However, not all benchmarking tools are the same – and misreading data can lead to the wrong decisions for improving performance and driving growth.
Benchmark Your Business Against Industry Leaders
MarshBerry Connect is an executive peer exchange network of businesses and advisors in the insurance industry, intended to help members out-perform, out-earn, and outlast their competition. With over 145 Members, Connect maximizes the power of peer exchange to explore new strategies, share data, ideas and best practices to help each other and elevate the insurance industry.
Part of being a member of Connect includes access to world-class resources, peer exchange events and MarshBerry’s proprietary benchmarking tools for the insurance brokerage industry like Perspectives for High Performance (PHP) and the Employee Engagement Survey (EES).
Gather Data and Trends to Improve Employee Performance
The EES provides companies with a holistic portrait of how well their organization is functioning internally. It gives employees a forum to voice their opinions honestly and confidentially to spark meaningful change. Results from the survey are benchmarked against MarshBerry’s database of other insurance firm responses. Nearly 2,000 responses are received to the survey annually, which allows consultants to compare each firm’s results to industry averages. For example, in 2022, employees report that insurance distribution firms are ranked highest in the category of “Tools and Environment” but rank the lowest in the industry for “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.” How do you think your firm compares?
Understanding the areas for firm improvement is the first step in selecting focus areas and developing action plans in hopes to see improvement in EES year-over-year.
Performance Benchmarking Tools Can Transform Your Business
Perspectives for High Performance (PHP) is MarshBerry’s proprietary financial and productivity benchmarking system. This tool uses more than $5 billion in aggregate agency and brokerage revenue from nearly 1,000 independent insurance firms, to provide performance benchmarks across 745+ unique metrics.
Many clients use PHP metrics to not only understand their firm’s current state, but also set realistic goals comparative to firm peers of similar size. Because of the proprietary PHP data, it’s understood that the Top 25% of Connect members deliver an average annual organic growth of 14.2% – versus 5.9% generated by firms not in the Connect network.1
MarshBerry consultants have frequent conversations about how Connect firms stack up to other peers in the insurance industry. Benchmarking tools come complete with a debrief analysis and tactical conversation about how to deploy change to move the needle on the items that need improvement, while encouraging our clients to celebrate what is best in class.
Looking to identify areas for improvement within your firm? Find out how to access MarshBerry’s benchmarking tools for greater growth. Please email or call Brooke Lugonjic, Senior Vice President, at 616.828.0741.
1 Data as of September 2022. MarshBerry proprietary financial and productivity management benchmarking system Perspectives for High Performance (“PHP”). The system calculates critical financial and productivity ratios and compares these ratios to the Average Performance and Best 25% of the group. Data from each subscriber is updated every quarter, but in total the database changes almost daily.
