Tate Insurance Group

A Mostly New Commercial Team with Unreviewed Accounts

Tate Insurance Group's commercial team had a problem most agencies would recognize. After a period of rapid growth, with new hires, expanding headcount, and several book acquisitions, most of the agency's commercial account managers had been in the role for under a year. Behind the new staff was a deeper challenge. A backlog of legacy accounts had been quietly auto-renewing for years with no real review.

Additionally, producers were driving to properties to physically measure buildings and gather data. Account managers were spending 30 to 60 minutes per new quote hunting for ancillary information like protection class codes, fire department locations, VINs, and year built before they could even put a number together. Newer hires were Googling for context they should have had on hand. And underneath all of it, Faith Pezzulo, Tate’s Commercial Lines Department Manager, saw a real exposure in coverage decisions on long-renewing accounts that no one had recently revisited. “There’s so many accounts that are unknowns,” she said. “Did the account manager actually document and sign off on coverages that were rejected? Were they offered everything they needed? Were they quoted right?”

Applied Book Builder Built into Every Commercial Workflow

Faith made a call that’s rare for an agency manager. Applied Book Builder wouldn’t be a tool her team could pick up when it felt useful. It would be the way all commercial work got done. “Applied Book Builder isn’t optional for my team,” she said. “I track utilization heavily.”

She built Applied Book Builder into Tate’s existing 90-day renewal workflow within Applied Epic. Every commercial account triggers a Renewal Review Dash activity at the 90-day mark. Account managers are required to review the Applied Book Builder profile within two weeks, then schedule a one-hour meeting with each producer to walk through the accounts. Producers and account managers document what’s offered, what’s declined, and what gets remarketed. Every time, in writing.

Applied Book Builder analyzes risk attributes for every commercial account in Applied Epic, surfaces coverage gaps with the “why” behind each recommendation, and provides a structured profile that account managers and producers work from instead of hunting for context on their own.

The same tool reshapes Tate’s new business. When a six-location mattress retailer came in asking for a quote and only provided basic Dec pages, Faith ran an Applied Book Builder prospect profile and sent the producer back into the conversation with the full picture, including risk attributes, coverage gaps, and the right questions to ask. Applied Book Builder’s email-based prospecting feature pulls a profile on any inbound or referred prospect on demand.

For Faith’s mostly new account managers, the framing matters as much as the data. Walking into a client conversation with a structured rationale, like “here’s what you have, here’s what you need, here’s why,” is something newer commercial staff usually don’t get to do until they’ve put in a few years. With Applied Book Builder doing the upfront analysis, Tate’s mostly new account managers can have those conversations on day one. “It makes them more prepared and more confident to have those conversations,” Faith said.

More Business, Across More States

Two outcomes stand out for Tate Insurance Group, and the most immediate one is time. Account managers no longer spend 30 to 60 minutes hunting for protection class codes, fire department locations, VINs, and year built before they can sit down to quote. That data is in the Applied Book Builder report. “With Applied Book Builder, I can actually just sit down and quote it, whereas before, I was spending maybe 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the account, trying to look up all the ancillary information I was still missing,” Faith said.

The second outcome is one of reach. Tate has written approximately $350,000 in out-of-state commercial risks, accounts in Ohio and Virginia they would not have been able to underwrite quickly under the old workflow. Producers no longer have to drive to multiple sites to measure properties and gather data. The Applied Book Builder report carries that work.

Beyond time and reach, the workflow itself has hardened. Every commercial account at Tate is now reviewed each year, with coverage decisions documented in writing. The team is quoting more business than it typically would. And the newer account managers, most of whom were under a year into commercial work when Applied Book Builder went live, are walking into client conversations with the “why” behind every recommendation, not just the recommendation itself.