Part 1: How Your Insurance Agency Can Weather the Global Pandemic and Economic Downturn

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This is the first in a seven-part weekly series, "Thriving During the Coronavirus," on how insurance agencies and companies should handle the pandemic and ways to work around new economic challenges.

It might seem counterintuitive to talk about your insurance agency thriving during a pandemic and a worldwide economic downturn. But as you’ll see in this series of articles, there are a lot of decisions you can make that will not just keep you in business but put you in a stronger position than ever.

Over the next six months and in the 12 to 18 months after that, you will face a series of choices on how to run your agency. Here’s how to choose wisely.​

What Have You Done So Far?
For better or worse, you have already made a number of significant decisions in response to the pandemic and the accompanying business shutdowns.

Treat these as early learning opportunities. You now have experiences to look at and use to measure results. What worked? What caused problems?

The Problem
Fortunately, this pandemic is not yet as lethal as the Plague or the influenza epidemic of 1918. The Plague killed around 30 percent of the world population. The 1918 flu pandemic killed between 5 percent and 10 percent of the world population. This flu looks to be on track to be much less lethal.

In those cases, we also did not understand what caused the disease or how the disease spread. These two events had enormous economic and historical impact because of their widespread effects. The mass deaths affected both demand as well as the supply of available workers.

Today, thanks to science, we understand both the cause of the disease and how it spreads. This knowledge has made it possible for us as a whole to reduce the spread and control the death rate.

But exercising this control has direct economic effects. Thankfully, we now also have the economic theory and past examples to understand how to mitigate negative effects.

We have and are going to have to continue to take actions to stop both the disease and the economic damage.

By taking planned and thoughtful actions you can not only have your business survive, you can lead your business to thrive.

Define Your Goals in Writing
If you do not know where you are going, you will never know if you are on the right road, so the first step is to define your goals in writing.

You may not have the answer, but at least you have a plan.

You have to be able to measure your results against your goals. Only then can you see your progress and control your own destiny.

If you do not write it down, if you cannot speak it in words, you will not be able to apply your experience and smarts to solving the problem.

The next article in this seven-part weekly series will focus on planning for reduced revenue, so be sure to check back next week. 

By Duke Williams, Founder of Simply Easier Payments