Building Your Dream Team

Growing agencies eventually need to hire employees to help with servicing, sales, or both.  We get asked several questions about agent hires:

  1. Is there an up-front fee for training?
  2. Is there a change in the monthly cost?
  3. Can they work remotely?
  4. Do they need to be licensed?

The answers are: No, yes, yes, and almost always. Here are some details.

  1. There is no up-front fee to get your employees set up with Firefly. We will train you and your staff when you initially start working with Firefly.  Producers and CSRs that join your agency later will need to be trained by you or a qualified member of your team.
  2. Regarding the monthly cost, it’s an extra $61 per employee per month, which gets them the same EZLynx rater, management system, and email address that you get
  3. Yes, they can work remotely, but they have to be within a 30-minute drive of your contracted location. You may wonder why they have to be relatively close: the answer is due to our carrier relationships:

Our carriers trust us and hold us accountable for profitability for the entire agency. We, in turn, hold you accountable to do your best to write profitable business. If you have producers, we consider it your responsibility to make sure they do the same.

It is hard to ensure that your employees are writing profitable business in towns and neighborhoods that you’re unfamiliar with. That is why your employees should be within a 30-minute drive – so we can reasonably expect that you will be able to hold them accountable for (and be familiar with) the business they write.

If a team member gets terminated from a carrier due to not following carrier guidelines, that would also be cause to terminate your appointment.

That is extremely rare, and we’d like to keep it that way. Having producers within a 30-minute drive of your contracted location helps accomplish that.

4. Your employees will usually be licensed. They need to be licensed if they act as an agent in any way: quoting, binding coverage, processing endorsements, discussing coverage with clients, etc. If you hire someone strictly to make cold calls, or to answer the phones and take messages, they technically wouldn’t need to be licensed.

Finally, regarding your employees, they can’t sell in a state where you aren’t licensed.

Another question we get asked as agents grow is, “Can I open up another location?”pins on map

The answer is “maybe”. The reality is, fewer agents are wanting to open multiple locations because most sales happen digitally. The return on opening a second office often doesn’t justify the cost.

However, if you’re an agent that wants to work with Firefly, and you already have multiple locations, we’re open to looking at your carrier reports, so you can show us that you’ve got a history of profitable business in both offices.

If you are hoping to open an additional office with Firefly down the road, we are also open to that, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. We are open to it if it is mutually beneficial.

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