A&B Insurance Celebrates its 20th Anniversary

By Diane Tait

Image courtesy Pexels

I can still remember the day I first opened my insurance company.  Back then, I was the chief, cook and bottle washer.  By that I mean I was the sole employee of A&B Insurance in Jacksonville, Florida.  Of course, back in 2000, the insurance game wasn’t all that complicated, unless you factored in how I was forced to manually search through the couple dozen insurance carriers I worked with to help find the best coverage at the best price for my customers.  Back then, there was no integrated database that did the work for you.  That meant a lot of my time was spent reading, then writing up proposals.  Today, all I have to do is feed in some data and hit a button to generate a report that takes into account 93 A-rated carriers.  Not only does this produce more precise results for my customers, it also saves me a ton of time that I can use for service instead of research.

Back to the Future – In the beginning, I just wanted to keep it simple so I could give customers more choices while giving back to the community.  It wasn’t long before I hired several local agents to work with me at my office.  Some of them are still with me to this day.  Over the years, I’ve managed to put together a great team that shares my vision for what an insurance agency needs to be.  Currently, I have a team of seven insurance specialists working at my two locations in Jacksonville and Fernandina Beach.  This way when someone calls A&B for a particular type of insurance, we connect them with the agent best qualified to help that customer. 

It also means we can offer our customers the ability to have all their insurance needs covered under one roof.  This alone can represent substantial savings as opposed to having your auto insurance with one agency, your homeowners with another and your boat, RV or business policy with yet a third agency.  This doesn’t mean that my agency didn’t have to overcome some hurdles during the past 20-years.  It wasn’t long before we outgrew the office where I started the business, which forced me to search for a bigger location.  We’ve also made a significant investment in technology that helps us save customers money. 

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Two decades has seen a lot of changes in everything from technology to the cost of coverage.  With more named storms in our future and ever more complicated cars and trucks on the road, you can’t afford to sit idly by as though these changes aren’t going to impact your wallet.  Since the turn of the century, the average cost of a homeowner’s policy has risen by more than a third and the average auto policy in Florida has nearly doubled.  While that takes into account the handful of named storms and hurricanes that have hit the state, combined with the ever more complicated state of our automobiles, this trend isn’t expected to abate any time soon.

Let’s be honest, back in 2000 our cars weren’t web-enabled vehicles chock full of computers.  There weren’t nearly as many distractions on the dashboard and teenagers (and some adults) had yet to discover the dangerous game of texting while driving.  The cost of vehicles has since gone through the roof as well.  In 2000, the average cost of a car was less than $10,000. You could buy some Chevy and Ford models for just over $5,000. Few vehicles with the exception of luxury models came equipped with airbags.  When a turn of the century vehicle was involved in a fender bender, it didn’t require the owner to replace the entire front end of the car.  While this complexity has made today’s cars safer, it has also made the average price of a car today skyrocket to $35,000.  Back in 2000, you could buy some houses in Jacksonville for that price.

You only get what you pay for. – While it’s true that you only get what you pay for, all too many insurance customers don’t realize that they are either paying too much for the coverage they currently possess, or their current coverage leaves a lot to be desired.  I tell my customers if they don’t have their auto policy assessed once a year and their homeowner’s policy scoped out every 2-3 years, then it could cost them big money in terms of coverage down the road.

For example, I had a customer walk into my office a couple of years ago who was looking to have someone check his auto policy to see if he had everything he needed.  When I did, I discovered he had a lot of gaps in his coverage.  Bear in mind this gentleman wasn’t a wealthy individual.  He was a blue-collar worker.  So, I did what I could to get him the coverage he needed at a price he could afford.  As fate would have it, a couple months later, he was in a terrible auto accident that involved him and his young daughter.  It was a traumatic incident for them both.  His daughter wound up in the hospital for several weeks.  When he came to my office after the accident, he wanted to thank me because if he hadn’t come to my office, he wouldn’t have been able to cover the costs incurred by the wreck.  More importantly, he was able to take several weeks off to stay by his daughter’s side while she recovered due to the adjustments I made to his auto policy.  All that because I took an extra couple of minutes to make sure he had what he needed.

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Another thing my agency is really good at providing is auto insurance for teenage drivers.  Having two daughters of my own, I know how difficult and expensive it can be to insure a teen.  Several of our agents also have teenage drivers in their household.  So, we made it a priority to not only find insurance companies that specialize in this kind of coverage, but we also went out of our way to discover several ways teenage drivers can qualify for discounts.  Before we write a policy for a teen, we educate their parents on what they need to do to qualify for these discounts.  When a parent realizes that adding their teen to their own policy is going to double the price of coverage, they’re more than willing to follow our instructions to do whatever it takes to knock their premium down a bit.

While I don’t have a crystal ball that allows me to predict what the future has in store, it’s clear that technology and climate change are going to continue to drive up the cost of insurance over the next 20 years.  The only thing I can predict is that I’ll do everything in my power to help our customers stay ahead of the curve between now and 2040. 

Diane Tait owns and operates A&B Insurance.  To find out more about how you can save money on insurance, go to her site or fill out the form at right.