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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?