Just have to stop focusing on maintaining your own role in either its past or present form.
- SF didn't get downgraded.....its overall financial outlook did, because the P&C insurance industry is undergoing massive changes (environmental and societal).
- Because of #1, neither SF or any other company can possibly go back to a turn of the millenium operation ever again. It will never again have real people picking up the phone all day in order to help each other to help the customer.
- Claims are going to be very difficult to rein in. Adequate premiums are going to be extremely difficult to get approved, much less collect. So the biggest part of the solution is going to have to be expense control.
- SF is going all in on trying to make the agent of the future (like by the end of this year) a financial services provider FIRST, and a P&C seller second. The new model is the multi office agent--who CLEARLY cannot be personally meeting every customer in three different offices every day. There's no way the new or future agent is going to be able to get rich selling just car and home insurance.
- Agents will have to focus on volume and expense control as well.....though SF is not going to coach them on this. SF will be very happy to allow agents to continue trying to provide that SF itself will not. It will be impossible for agents to a) grow and b) properly service that growth on P&C commissions. Growth happens when premiums (& commissions) drop. But growth creates expense in the need to hire more staff to service it.
I have no doubt that SF will figure out how to survive. But it will come at the expense of agents and employees. Some agents will figure out how to thrive in it. Many of us will opt for retirement in the very near future.
I'm reposting this from @1Qrrs+1oMqe9WQ for more visibility. Perfectly said.