Berkeley & Company

Staying competitive when thoroughness costs hours you don’t have

Berkeley & Company was built for the clients who fall through the cracks — too big for a small broker, overlooked by the national firms, and looking for a level of professionalism and expertise that matches what they actually need. The boutique commercial and high-net-worth private client agency makes thoroughness a competitive advantage with these clients. Every new prospect received deep upfront research: websites, government databases, Secretary of State listings, and any other public source that could reveal something about the client’s operations, exposures or history.

The problem was the cost of that standard. “Three or four hours of research is certainly not unusual for us,” said Debbie Dumas, Director of Operations. “As everyone knows these days, there’s so much information available on most topics that you can easily go down a rabbit hole and end up with a huge amount of information to compile.” Most of that research burden fell to Dumas and the service team. Producers focused on what they do best — building the relationship and landing the prospect — while Berkeley & Company's model calls for the service team to take the account from there. Building on the producer's knowledge for that handoff meant hours of dedicated research on top of everything else on the team's plate. That time had to come from somewhere, and it added up fast.

Online research was difficult to standardize due to the vast number of online resources, and building a fuller operational picture took hours the service team didn't always have before the first prospect conversation. This meant service executives risked entering first prospect conversations without a complete picture of the client’s operations, creating a risk of missed exposures and coverage gaps from the outset.

AI-powered intelligence that arrives before the first conversation

Berkeley & Company selected Applied Book Builder® to bring automated prospect and account intelligence directly into its Applied Epic® workflows. Applied Book Builder gathers publicly available information on every prospect and client, surfacing operational details, risk attributes and potential coverage gaps, and delivers it as a structured report via email. What once took Dumas and her team three to four hours now arrives in the team’s inbox while they are working on something else.

For Berkeley & Company, the hours of manual research on every prospect had become one of the team’s biggest operational pain points. “With Applied Book Builder, all that has been virtually eliminated. It’s been amazing,” said Dumas. The shift changed not just how much time the team spent on research, but how the entire agency showed up in prospect conversations. Because Applied Book Builder is integrated into Applied Epic, the service team walks into that first call with a wealth of information — now compiled automatically instead of pieced together over hours. “The service team is well aware of everything that there is to know about the client that’s available publicly,” said Dumas. “The client can easily see that we do what we say we’re going to do, and that we all work very well together.”

Applied Book Builder is also embedded in the agency’s renewal workflow. As a formal checklist item in the team's Applied Epic activity workflow, every account is reviewed through the platform before renewal begins — catching coverage changes, operational shifts and new exposures before they become problems.

In summary, Applied Book Builder eliminates hours of manual prospect research per account and delivers a structured email report the team reviews while continuing other work. It aligns the service team and producer on client knowledge before the first in-depth prospect conversation, surfaces coverage gaps and operational changes at renewal as a required step, and extends the agency’s capacity without adding headcount.

Where the time savings actually showed up

For Dumas, the impact came into focus when she looked at what every new account had previously demanded of her  small team. “For every prospect that comes in the door, we’ve gained easily three or four hours minimum,” she said. For a small agency where that research had largely fallen to two or three people, reclaiming those hours per prospect was significant. The team now spot-checks rather than verifies everything from scratch, because the reports have proven “so reliable and so accurate.”

But the impact that surprised the team most was the effect on how prospects perceived Berkeley & Company. With Applied Book Builder in hand, the service team walks into prospect conversations asking specific, informed questions about the client’s actual operations. “Clients are frequently taken off guard that we already know enough to ask the right questions,” said Dumas. “Applied Book Builder has allowed us to take our professionalism to the next level while reducing the time to get there.”