Same difference. Seriously funny. I use these conflicting words together every day without a second thought.
At Keystone Agency Partners, we have another one that guides how we do business and inspires the entrepreneurial spirit that I think is within all of us – ‘Connected Autonomy’ are the seemingly contradictory words that define our firm’s market distinction and drive our passion.
I’ve chosen this topic for the first post on our new blog, which we’ve launched to be better connected with our current and future partner agencies and to provide insights you can bring forward for your own businesses.
In this post, I want to focus on our ‘secret sauce’ or the connected autonomy we provide our agency leaders when they come onboard with us. While we acquire majority stake of our agency partners, we expect them to maintain their identity and growth objectives, bolstered by the capital investment and consultative resources that a partnership with us affords them the runway to dream big.
We are not the owners of their vision, their future or their drive. Instead, we provide whatever we can to engage their entrepreneurial spirit and support their desire to be even better than they currently are.
So how does this happen? There are many nuances to our approach that take place through a great deal of collaboration and hard work. Four larger areas of focus include:
- Remove barriers. One of the first tasks Keystone Agency Partners incurs for its partner agencies is to eliminate the routine tasks – finance, HR, payroll, benefits, etc. – from their responsibilities. Keystone Agency Partners has significant expertise and scale in these areas. Our partner agency employees benefit from this knowledge and size by freeing up the leadership at the agencies to focus more on running the business and driving growth.
- Plot a distinct course. One of the first activities post-close is a multi-day session with agency leadership to tap their collective vision and refine strategic objectives to take them to new heights. The Keystone Agency Partners team—comprised of insurance industry experts with more than 100 years of collective experience in distinct functional areas—spends hundreds of hours engaging with our agency partners to tailor each partner agency’s course to success. Our team focuses on all business, cultural and emotive aspects of our partner agencies in these sessions.
- Connect the partner agency. Our platform network allows for agencies to share best practices across a peer class that they otherwise would never interact with except in competitive sales situations. We provide a network of collegial high-performers that push each other to define their value proposition in a way that drives collective and better performance.
- Learn continuously. We know from experience that success is only achieved through continuous exploration and discovery. We work with our partner agencies to provide an ongoing engagement in critical sessions for all staff to grow in their roles and provide even more meaningful contributions to their agency and our collective platform.
And these are just the beginning phases of our partnerships. We state that close is just the beginning, and this couldn’t be more true. Learn more about our mission to support your agency.
I look forward to sharing more about our approach in the months to come.
Welcome to our blog. Come back soon!
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