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If like thousands of other insurance professionals, you take you career seriously, you have already been thinking about what regulatory changes are in store for you in 2010 and beyond, and how those changes will affect your business. Taking a page (or 23) from Celent's most recent, US Insurance Compliance Survey 2009, we have highlighted their best recommendations, those which each of us are able to implement right now.

• Market the importance of compliance to your whole organization – penalty fees, censures, market conduct exams, and increased scrutiny is NOT something your firm wants to contend with. Be proactive about compliance and make sure your firm and its producers remain properly licensed and appointed with carrier partners.
• Leverage automation – although yes, some states do still require paper applications, by using Sircon, even those forms can be completed without manual data reentry. Sircon's web-based solutions allow you to leverage trusted data and pre-populate most applications without typing a thing.
• Improve existing technology with low or no hard dollar cost – An investment in the right core technologies will actually SAVE you money, in the long run. Sircon offers flexible solutions that realize full ROI in just months. In fact, hard dollar savings as a result of increased efficiencies and streamlined compliance processes is the concept we’ve built our business around.

If you have questions about how to put any of the CELENT strategies to work for you, give us a call. We will be happy to discuss your options. Sircon's Agency and Brokerage Team can be reached at 877-876-4450.

If you're among the thousands lucky enough to find yourself in Hollywood, Florida this week for the National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies' NAILBA 28, we would love to see you at our booth. Join us to learn how your BGA can benefit from an exciting new partnership with Sircon, and while you're at it, register to win THE GREATEST PRIZE AT THE CONFERENCE (I hope you read that with your Wizard of Oz voice, as intended). While the prize is technically a secret, I feel like you deserve a hint, so here it is:

• What is handy, compact, and has an lcd screen?

Okay, in fairness, I've just decribed 90% of the electronics developed in the last five years. This one, however, could have your name on it!

Hope to see you at NAILBA - mention FirmAlchemy the agency and brokerage blog sent you, and receive 10% off Sircon for Agencies and Brokerages, if you sign by December 31.

If you made it to Phoenix this week and attended the 20th SILA National Education Conference, we hope you stopped by the Sircon booth and attended one or both of our great presentations. If you missed us at SILA and have yet to discover the benefits of becoming a Sircon subscriber, feel free to visit our Agency and Broker-specific pages via www.sircon.com for more information on what you missed!

As for us, we had a wonderul time at SILA. Kicking off the conference, we hosted a Sircon for Agencies and Brokerages presentation on Sunday night. During the presentation, we heard great questions from many of you and even rewarded one lucky Licensing Administrator with an iPod! Later that evening, and on Monday, Sircon's hospitality suite was the life of the party. Sirconopoly winners walked away with Monopoly-style house banks and cash prizes! Tuesday marked our Glance to the Past and Looking Onward to the Future presentation, where our VP of Marketing, Scott Morrison delivered a moving presentation filled with client stories and our vision for the next years ahead. Perhaps best of all, we met with so many of you - connecting faces with the names we may have known via phone and email for years.

If you were among those who could not attend, let me take a minute to shamelessly plug this hugely important event:

As many of you know, the SILA Conference is more than just a full agenda of important breakout sessions, subject matter experts, exhibitors, and regulators. SILA, perhaps more so than any other conference, gives you an opportunity to meet your peers, many of whom do the exact same job you do. In this penny-pinching climate, collaboration is a big deal. It gives you a chance to learn what others are doing in their agencies and brokerages to keep costs down and efficiencies high. Plus, explaining what you gained from four days of learning about the resulting efficiencies that uniformity, technology improvements, and streamlined regulation can bring gives you a chance to show your boss that sending you to tradeshows is about more than just your new assortment of cool pens. So next year, feel free to quote me and be sure to tell your firm just how important sending you to this particular conference really can be for your business.

A huge thanks to SILA for putting on one of the best conferences of all time. Happy 20th!

Last week, the Big "I" released its Best Practices Study, in which it found that the even in the midst of the soft market and still-climbing unemployment numbers, the largest agencies are still growing their producer channels. When increasing your sales and marketing channel has typically meant simultaneously adding administrative seats, how do the most successful firms continue to grow and still remain profitable?

The answer is simple. These very large and highly successful firms all adopted organizational commitments to hard dollar savings. This theme translates into making key investments in core technologies that will increase efficiency and in turn save their existing administrative teams huge amounts of time, which of course = money. As a result of implementing more efficient systems designed to streamline administrative duties like licensing producers and processing renewals, obtaining and maintaining accurate producer data, and efficiently allocating costs, the most successful firms' existing administrative staff can focus on more meaningful activities, leaving redundant manual data entry to fall by the wayside.

If the largest firms are able to support thousands of selling producers, doesn't it make you wonder how many more revenue-generating sales and marketing employees your firm could handle if your existing administrative staff could increase their bandwidth with the adoption of a simple solution?

Why is Sircon part of One Vertafore, you ask? Do you have 20 seconds?

Sircon is concerned with just one thing – keeping agencies, brokerages, MGAs, TPAs, carriers, continuing education providers, service aggregators, and even the states themselves connected and compliant. We've said it before, and we'll say it again: compliance is not optional. For Vertafore clients, Sircon's addition to the fold means easier access to the insurance industry's leading compliance innovations which result in less time spent battling getting your producers, adjusters, and CSRs licensed; less time spent worrying about renewals; less confusion around CE requirements and less trouble tracking them; and ultimately, a more harmonious, efficient, and compliant licensing department. And in the end, isn't easier compliance what we're all after? At Sircon, we certainly think so. So to all of you Vertafore clients, if you haven't explored what Sircon has to offer, you may want to ask yourself: If not now, when?

On September 23, Sircon will host a webinar for Agencies and Brokers titled "Achieving Sustainable Growth with One-Click Compliance™," featuring guest speaker Lynn Bischak, Licensing Administrator for the United States' 28th largest agency, Neace Lukens.

What can this webinar do for you, you ask? Frankly, those of you lucky enough to be experiencing even a little bit of growth in this economy or those fairer may not even know why, much less be able to replicate and sustain it. This webinar will give you a formula to take the guess work out of revenue growth and give you a solid plan for moving forward – One-Click Compliance™.

If you have 50 minutes to spare on Tuesday, the 23rd at 2:00PM EST, you'd be well served to attend. Rest assured, this is more than a tips and tricks seminar. Achieving Sustainable Growth will give you the most cutting edge information on how to streamline your licensing processes, effectively manage your producer data, and easily ensure producer and firm compliance.

As we mentioned, Licensing Administrator, Lynn Bischak will be presenting and will give you "day in the life" perspective on the challenges Neace Lukens faced before putting a sustainable growth plan together for themselves. Best of all, Lynn will then provide you with useful information on how to get your firm on the path to lasting revenue growth too. Click here to join us.

To view past Sircon for Agencies and Brokers webinars, click here.

If the firm down the street jumped off of a cliff, would you? Of course not. That being said, there is a lot more at stake when you don't adopt the same kinds of technology innovations rival agencies may already be using, in this highly competitive market.

The fact of the matter is, if you're not using single-entry solutions, if you're not 100% sure that your producers' appointments and the resulting hierarchies are being tracked accurately, and if you have to think for one minute about whether you might be missing the renewal dates of your licensees, you're already at a distinct disadvantage.

Successful firms like Beecher Carlson and Neace Lukens (both on the recently-released Top P&C Agency of 2008 List from Insurance Journal), and likely your neighbor down the street are already leveraging Sircon for Agencies and Brokerages' powerful producer credentialing and relationship rules engine which features integrated license applications and renewals, convenient reminders, and the industry's most powerful license and appointment tracking system.

Today, if you don't keep up, you're missing out. Missing out on increased revenues, missing out on huge time and in turn money savings, and missing out on attracting and keeping the very best producers. Size isn't an excuse. Whether you have 10 producers or 10,000; Sircon can help. And one last piece of advice - don't let your fist-shaking stand in the way of doing something about it. After all, in this case, the Jones's are on to something great.

To get in touch with our Sircon for Agencies and Brokerages Team and learn about the additional benefits of partnering with Sircon, email us at info@sircon.com, or call 877.876.4450.

Insurance Journal, one of our favorite publications, has recently published the Top 100 Property and Casualty Agencies List, of 2008. Did your firm make the cut?

Did you just scoff? If you're laughing, it's probably safe to say that you didn't find your firm's name on the list. Well, I guess we all can't be winners. And as your mom might say, there is always next year. Being the business-savvy person you are however, you know that success doesn't often randomly land in one's lap. The good news is, there are measures you can take which will have an immediate impact on your bottom line – measures that will give you the competitive edge and get you nearer to, if not in, the Winner's Circle in years to come.

More top-ranked firms use Sircon than any other licensing and compliance solution on the market today.

Did you know that Sircon for Agencies and Brokers™ can help you:

• Simplify license and renewal processing on behalf of your firm and its licensees
• Eliminate manual data entry
• Ensure data accuracy
• Achieve seamless integration with existing systems

To get in touch with our Sircon for Agencies and Brokers Team and learn about the additional benefits of partnering with Sircon, email me directly at firmalchemyfeedback@sircon.com, or call 877.876.4450. You'll be glad you did. And who knows, maybe next year, your name will be on the list.

In case you haven't heard the great news – Sircon is "taking it to the streets" during the first two weeks of September, 2009 to bring you Regional Meetings. Whether you can stay for just an hour, or if you can come for the whole day, you're sure to get valuable information from the industry leader in insurance compliance innovations. Regional Meetings are a great way to introduce yourself to new Sircon features and functions, tips and tricks, and learn about the very latest industry updates.

Regional Meetings include special presentations from Guest Speakers, and also provide Optional Training Sessions on a variety of topics, all for FREE!

Join us in the following cities in September:

• Chicago, IL | Wednesday | September 9th, 2009
• Hartford, CT | Thursday | September 10th, 2009
• Irvine, CA | Tuesday | September 15th, 2009

If great information, complimentary hands-on training, and a free lunch sound like as much fun to you as they do to me, I'll see you there! Click here for more information on the locations of our Regional Meetings.

As always, if you have questions or comments, please feel free to drop us a line directly by sending your email to firmalchemy@sircon.com.

Over time, we have conducted quite a few webinars featuring tips and tricks, full tours of new functionality, and discussions on issues of the day. As the Sircon for Agencies and Broker Team contemplates the next market-focused webinar, we would like to hear your input.

As you may recall, the last webinar we hosted in June featured Simplified Licensing. Before that, we invited Beecher Carlson's Director of Applications, Angela Ford, to join us as we discussed A New Way to Leverage Trusted Data.

Before we simply tell you what you're in store for next, we would like your feedback on which topic or topics would be the most meaningful for your firm. Here are a few we're considering:

• Growing a Sustainable Firm with One-Click™ Compliance
• Putting Real-Time™ to Work for You
• How to Achieve Painless Compliance
• Compliant Enough. Avoiding Fines and Censure in the Insurance Compliance Arena.

Give us your thoughts by emailing firmalchemyfeedback@sircon.com with your suggestions. And remember, while you may not work here, you are the reason we do what we do. Aren't democracies grand?

For those of you with firm websites, this little gem could greatly increase the number of incoming sales leads your agency receives, with very little effort and no cost on your part. Perhaps you have heard of a marketing strategy called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. If you perform a quick Google search on the definition of search engine optimization, your search will return this very long list. For our purposes, we will concentrate on SEO in the sense that strategic postings online could improve your incoming sales leads and possibly even the quantity of quality producers who knock on your door, looking for a good firm to join.

Online service directories are a great place to list your firm and improve your search engine optimization, while you're at it. Best of all, most of the directories are free. The more places you can list your firm online, the higher your agency will rank in "organic searches" (those you don't have to pay for). So get your firm out there and see if you don't begin receiving more incoming leads from great prospective clients, and some of the best producers in the market.

You can check out Sircon in the directories below:

• LinkCentre.com
• Yellowpages.com
• Roask.com

Last week, I stepped out of the office and onto the open road to experience some more of our great state. From Bay City, to Port Austin, to Holland and Grand Haven I drove, bought antiques I have no room for, and ate too much ice cream – all great things to do on a Wednesday and Thursday, if you ask me. Perhaps the most exciting part of my two-day adventure, was that while I touring the Thumb and West Coast of Michigan, the rest of my team was hard at work launching a new product. Best yet, even though I was in the car and strolling two coastlines, I was right there with my team, every step of the way, via email, phone, and shared applications from my BlackBerry.

Sometimes, as I'm sure you know, you really can't just leave it all behind. Deadlines approach, business doesn't stop, and in this day and age, that's a really good thing. Business aside (just a little anyway), I'm here to tell you, encroaching renewal deadlines, CE requirements don't have to stand in the way of your summer fun – you really can have it all. In fact, constant connectivity is something that Sircon delivers with each product and service we offer you. By leveraging the Software as a Service (SAAS) model, Sircon's web-based licensing and compliance tool, its powerful producer management and data repository technology, and it's robust compliance reference library and integrated evidence room, are all available anywhere you have a web connection, anytime, day or night. For a busy licensing specialist, compliance administrator, or producer on the go, this means 24/7 access to license applications, renewal submissions, CE inquiries, and much more with the click of a mouse, or the push of a button on your phone.

So go ahead, jump in the car and explore your state and be confident in knowing that no matter what deadline is fast approaching, using Sircon means you'll never have to miss a beat, or a sunset.

Send your favorite road trip stories to firmalchemyfeedback@sircon.com.

The software industry as a whole is tasked with sidestepping a nasty (and admittedly reputation-damaging) habit of developing new technology just for the sake of developing new technology. For those of you who have ever owned a cell phone, you know what I mean. Oftentimes owning "the latest and greatest" means being the proud owner of a feature you don't understand how to use, and likely can't even find.

On the flip side of the coin, here's a fun fact for you: Did you know that Sircon has whole teams of people, from each customer-facing department (Support, Development, Billing, Sales, Product and Project Management, and Marketing), that focus solely on improving our user's experience within existing Sircon products and services? It's true! For you, that means mindful development and design from the start, and responsive products that are always improving.

In addition to existing product improvement, we have major initiatives underway which will fuel the development of new products for the Agency and Broker market, built from your feedback. In the next months, and as I am authorized to let more of the proverbial "cat out of the bag", count on Firm Alchemy to be the first place to read about exciting new innovations from Sircon, built for you, straight from your wish list. As for now, I can tell you that regardless of your agency's size, one new technology in particular will revolutionize how you manage your producers, their licenses and renewal deadlines, CE course completions and requirements, and more, all from one convenient dashboard, accessible 24/7, online. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new service, right here, throughout the months of July and August – this is a Big One!

As always, if you have a suggestion you would like us to take into account, email: firmalchemyfeedback@sircon.com.