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Diversity is essential to a strong, creative, adaptable workplace, and it comes in many forms. Diversity includes socio-economic and ethnicity factors, gender diversity (including trans or non-binary individuals), queer people, varied nationalities and languages and academic backgrounds, neurodiversity, and more. Yet diversity exists not just in where we’ve come from, but in how we think.

How does your agency foster team diversity, including diversity of thought? Background diversity stems from recruitment and onboarding practices. How are you describing job openings? What positions are you creating? Do you have specific roles to support diversity within your HR department? Where do you advertise job openings? How and where do you conduct interviews and what criteria do you prioritize in resumes and CVs?

It’s often helpful to get an outside perspective on such matters, as it can prove difficult to identify internal challenges (diversity-oriented or otherwise). But supporting and celebrating diversity can strengthen and empower teams in any number of ways. More diverse workplaces encourage a broader and more open exchange of ideas. They help everyone learn to express themselves and feel comfortable with who they are. The less someone feels they have to hide in the workplace, the more likely you are to get the most out of them as a team member.

Fostering diversity of thought is partly about recruitment and onboarding practices, but it’s also about what you do once the team is in place. Is your leadership communicating creativity-oriented priorities? How are new ideas handled in your organization? What praise, experimentation, bonuses, promotions, or other tools do you use to reward and validate dynamic and inventive thought?

Diversity, in its many forms, helps an agency reach its full potential. Most agencies lack meaningful diversity and lack a plan to achieve or leverage it. What’s your plan?

Cyberattacks are on the rise, so it’s no surprise that cyber insurance continues to be one of the fastest growing areas in the insurance industry. For insurance agencies, there are two sides to this issue: opportunity for cyber insurance related growth, and the potential for a malicious cyberattack against their own agency website. Consider some of these cyber stats:

• The average cost of a ransomware attack was $1.85 million in 2020, doubling the year before at $761,106. (Sophos, 2021)
• Data breaches exposed 36 billion records in the first half of 2020.
• 45% of breaches featured hacking, 17% were malware related and 22% involved phishing.
• 88% of organizations worldwide experienced phishing attempts (2019).
• Between 2005 and 2020, there have been over 11,000 recorded breaches.
• The top malicious email attachment types are .doc and .dot (37%), the next is .exe (19.5%).

How can you make your insurance agency website more secure and limit your exposure to a cyberattack or breach?

The Basics

• Install SSL. This is a mandatory step for all websites!
• Update your software frequently. This includes your operating environment, coding, theme, plugins, etc.
• Use complex passwords. All passwords for all user access to your website should be complex. It’s often best to use the computer-generated passwords provided by your system.
• Educate your users. Take the time to ensure all employees and contractors understand cyber security best practices including preventing phishing emails and other hacking emails.
• Use anti-malware solutions. Invest in anti-malware solutions for ongoing scans to and prevent malicious attacks.

Advanced

• Harden your server. Server hardening is a set of techniques used to improve the security of your server. For example, you should manage server access, minimize the external footprint (including hiding key files from public view), patch vulnerabilities, restrict admin access and minimized user access permissions.
• Use parameter queries to mitigate SQL injection attacks.
• Multifactor authentication should be used for login security. MFA is an excellent addition to your security protocol, and authenticator apps like LastPass, Microsoft Authenticator, and Google Authenticator are easy to use. They reside on your smartphone and allow you to enter a 6-digit code to validate secure login.
• Add a firewall. Most hosting environments offer a firewall option, and you should take advantage of this. For example, GoDaddy offers an optional Securi firewall to help prevent hacking attempts. These are an inexpensive addition and should be a standard. Note that you will need to change your DNS A record when adding a firewall.
• Protect against XSS attacks. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks can inject malicious JavaScript into your insurance agency web pages, which can change browser page content, or potentially steal information. The best defense is to limit how and what JavaScript is executed in the page. For example, your website can disallow the running of any non-hosted scripts (disallow inline JavaScript).
• Manually accept on-site comments. Don’t allow comments to automatically post, this cuts down on spam and script attacks.
• Use captchas. Every form should have a captcha, and in the event of cookie compliance captcha issues, create a mandatory field which requires the user to decide something. For example, 5+4=___).
• Encrypt data. If you’re capturing information of any kind, or as a general safeguard, encrypt your data while at rest.

A Better Alternative for Smaller Agencies: Flexible Perpetuation & Meaningful Equity Retention

The world of insurance has entered a new era. Large brokers have begun to acquire smaller agencies at a record pace. But not all acquisitions are created equal. In most cases, smaller agencies get totally absorbed into their new parent organizations, with the previous owners (and often management) either retiring or assuming new roles, submitting to new priorities and standards of corporate culture. For some brokers, this works well. For many, it’s a rigid structure with an abrupt transition – an imperfect fit at best.

What are the alternatives to complete transfer of ownership and identity? Some smaller agencies will choose to remain fully independent, but their limited pool of resources will make it increasingly difficult to compete with the ever-growing players around them. There is, however, another strategy for retaining a degree of independence and identity while also remaining relevant and competitive.

Unlike most brokerage acquisitions, Vantage leverages flexible perpetuation to enable partial sale, allowing for continued direct ownership, share in future profits, preserve day-to-day operating autonomy, and benefit from capital investments, and gain access to M&A capital and resources.

To break it down:

• Entrepreneurs sell a majority stake in their agency and retain a direct and personally meaningful minority equity position
• We provide investments in talent, technology, and infrastructure that are determined and implemented collaboratively
• Our non-intrusive operating model empowers partners to continue directing day-to-day operations with brand, principles, and standards unchanged
• Opportunities abound for cultivating organic revenue and margin-enhancing synergies through collaboration with other platform partners

Integrity, transparency, respect, and collaboration form our core values, and differentiate the Vantage model from more traditional, less flexible, and often less effective mergers and acquisitions.

To learn more about Vantage and your options in tomorrow’s brokerage marketplace, connect with us today!