Challenge

Thorough research cost hours the team didn’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 professionalism and expertise that match what they actually need. The boutique commercial and high-net-worth private client agency makes thoroughness its advantage. 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.” 

Producers land the prospect, and the service team takes the account from there, so most of the research fell to Dumas and her team on top of everything else. With so many sources, it was hard to standardize, and service executives risked entering first conversations without a complete picture of the client’s operations – and with it, missed exposures and coverage gaps.