Chalk & Gibbs Insurance

An agency ready to grow on a system that couldn’t keep up

For an agency that’s been in business for nearly a century, longevity is something you earn – one client relationship at a time. Chalk & Gibbs Insurance has been doing just that since 1925. However, as the agency grew, its technology wasn’t keeping pace.

After more than two decades on Applied TAM®, Chalk & Gibbs was running into a problem many established agencies know well: when a system lets everyone do things their own way, eventually no one is doing things the same way.

Samantha Earp described it plainly, saying Applied TAM “was a little bit more like the Wild West. You could do a little bit of this or that or not at all.” There was no wrong way to use the system, which also meant there was no consistent way. Client records varied. Workflows depended on whoever was handling the account. And as the agency looked toward its next chapter, that inconsistency started to look a lot like a vulnerability.

“We started out as a really small town, independent agency,” Samantha said. “The resources that come with Applied Epic [are] a substantial difference versus what Applied TAM offers, and we just needed to be brought into the 21st century.”

The decision to move forward wasn’t a small one. Chalk & Gibbs had been an Applied customer for more than 25 years, and changing platforms meant asking a tenured team to change the way they’d always worked. “I would be fibbing if I said that it was only a little difficult,” Samantha acknowledged. “Like any merge or move migration… we’ve been on this system for 25 years, so it was a big jump.”

But staying put wasn’t the answer. The agency needed a system that could hold everyone accountable – one built for how modern agencies operate, not just how they always had.

Process discipline and dedicated support with Applied Epic

Chalk & Gibbs migrated to Applied Epic® in February 2025. What set the experience apart wasn’t just the platform – it was the support that came with it.

The Applied Hypercare program provided dedicated implementation support throughout the transition, and Samantha said that access changed how the entire migration felt.

A consistent, scalable operation built to carry the agency forward

Applied Epic brought something the old system never could: structure. The platform’s built-in process management and workflow tools ensured everyone on the team followed the same path through every transaction. The Wild West days – where any step could be skipped, abbreviated, or handled differently depending on who was at the desk – gave way to a system where accountability is built in.

“But here you’re being held more accountable,” Samantha noted. “You have to do these steps. It makes information more consistent and accurate.”

That consistency is exactly what Applied Epic is designed to deliver – a single view of every client, every policy, and every workflow across the agency, on the world’s most widely-used agency management system.

This has also impacted training and onboarding. With everyone following the same workflows in Applied Epic, bringing new staff up to speed has changed fundamentally. “It’s so much easier to train them when you’re all doing the same thing,” Samantha said. New employees step into a system where the process is the process – no conflicting habits inherited from whoever trained them before, no workarounds to unlearn.

In addition to improving day-to-day efficiency, the transition to Applied Epic has given the Chalk & Gibbs team something harder to measure but equally important: operational confidence. The workflows are now consistent, data is accurate, and the agency is positioned to grow in a way its old system simply couldn’t support.