Key Takeaways
Lean staffing has a ceiling. When every role doubles up, added capacity has to come from better-connected systems, not just another hire.
Skogman Insurance runs a sixth-generation, family-owned agency out of one office with just over 20 employees and grew capacity without growing headcount.
Applied Pay gave Skogman's one accountant a branded, self-serve payment option, and Epic Dashboards put production and retention numbers in one place.
Small independent agencies run lean by necessity. There is no dedicated invoicing team, no analyst whose only job is pulling reports, no producer who exists solely to manage inboxes. Every task doubles up on someone's plate, and that person is usually already covering two or three other roles. The tradeoff is supposed to be worth it: a level of personal service and relationship depth that a larger shop can't replicate. But leanness has a ceiling, and agencies that hit it face a familiar choice. Hire more people, or find a way to make the people they already have go further.
More agencies are choosing the second path, and the tool doing the heavy lifting is often not a new hire but a more connected tech stack.
Skogman Insurance, a sixth-generation, family-owned agency in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is a clear example. With just over 20 employees and a single office, the agency prides itself on the kind of service only a small independent shop can offer. But that small footprint meant real strain in a few specific places. Producers were juggling multiple clients along with tedious follow-up work like summarizing emails and calls. The accounting side was tighter still.
"Agency bill has been a particularly sore spot at our agency because we have one accountant that handles the insurance arm of our business, as well as the other entities, so she doesn't have time to create and send invoices for every client. We also didn't have a payment portal, so we had to direct customers to a different website," said Lisa Anthofer, Operations Manager at Skogman Insurance.
Rather than adding headcount to absorb the load, Skogman moved to Epic Browser, the fully browser-native version of Applied Epic, and layered in Epic Dashboards and Applied Pay. The shift was as much about connectivity as it was about any single feature.
"Being able to integrate these platforms has created a level of connectivity that saves us time and makes our staff more efficient so that our small but mighty team can operate with the efficiency of a larger agency," Anthofer said.
The time savings showed up fastest in the small, repetitive tasks that quietly eat a producer's day. Epic Browser's spell check and email summarization tools meant staff no longer had to open individual emails to recap them by hand. One team member reported saving up to two hours a day.
"It's hard to put into words how much it does help our agency save time," Anthofer said. "What once took 2 or 3 minutes now takes a single click."
Applied Pay solved the accounting bottleneck in a different way. Because full Applied Pay functionality is only available through the browser version of Applied Epic, being on Epic Browser was a prerequisite, not an afterthought. It gave Skogman's single accountant a branded, self-serve payment option instead of a manual invoicing process spread across multiple entities.
"The payment email comes from our agency, rather than our accountant. It gives our clients peace of mind because it's clear who they are communicating with to make their payments," Anthofer said. "No extra URLs or explanations needed."
Epic Dashboards closed the loop on visibility, giving Anthofer a single place to check production reports and pull monthly retention numbers without wrestling with templates. "Everything is right there in my personalized dashboard," she said.
None of this required Skogman to grow its staff to grow its capacity. It required its systems to talk to each other. That is the real lesson for small agencies feeling the same squeeze: the fix for being stretched thin usually isn't found in the next hire. It's found in closing the gaps between the tools already in use, so the people already on staff spend less time on manual handoffs and more time on the relationships that make a small agency worth choosing in the first place.
Author
Applied Communications
For more than 40 years, Applied Systems has led an industry we helped to create with a mission to continuously improve the business of insurance. Insurance agencies and brokerages have faced new challenges and demands on their businesses over time, and we have been there to guide them. Since 1983, Applied has been at the forefront of insurance technology, leading the way through innovation. As the insurance industry becomes increasingly global, we are delivering new technology and expanded multinational capabilities for this changing marketplace.
