A Sea of Yellow School Buses

How hard work and trying times can be a recipe for fond memories.

I was recently asked to speak at a leadership conference for the executives of NAMIC. The topic I was requested to speak about was very familiar to me and one that I’m very enthusiastic about so I was thrilled with the opportunity. The topic was “Portals or No Portals”, not a ground shaking topic to everyone in attendance but one that was important for them to hear and understand. Rarely speaking to such large audiences, I was a bit nervous but realized to get better at presenting I needed to embrace the opportunity.

The conference is very family oriented and I was encouraged to bring along my family. So to begin my presentation I decided to break the ice by sharing the exciting road trip my wife and four kids made from Saint John to Mont Tremblant. My youngest two are twin boys and they provide my wife and me with no shortage of great stories.

On the way we decided to stop overnight in Drummondville. We just got nicely settled into our room when the boys noticed that across the street was the biggest collection of school buses we’ve ever seen. The boys share a complete love affair for school buses. Bus, Bus, Bus, Bus was all that we heard until their heads hit their pillows that night. For them it was the greatest moment in their lives. For my wife and I, and anyone within earshot of our room, the noise was a nightmare. But the funny thing about memories are how soon we forget the bad and remember only the good. I fondly remember that moment and their excitement and will cherish it forever.

I highlight this point because it’s important to sometimes step back from the moment to realize how good things actually are. Brovada has been working diligently for over 6 years now to provide insurers and brokerages single entry solutions. We’ve made enhancements, added functionality, and created new solutions to allow for an effective transition to a utopian world of SEMCI.

Along the way we’ve had to deal with competitors - some reputable, others not. We had to convince brokers that our goal was the same as theirs even though they may have felt otherwise. We had to remove the image that we were doing something suspicious when it came to making portal usage more productive. And most importantly we’ve had to keep a balanced approach to the way we do business so as not to alienate either our insurer or broker customers.

As I think about what we’ve accomplished in the same light that I remember the school buses I am proud of our successes and the successes our customers have had using our solutions.

P.S. One specific sense of excitement looking back is that we have always pushed the fact that vendors (including ourselves) need to allow brokers the choice of whichever third party solutions make the most sense for them. This was a common philosophical agreement we shared with Vertafore and Ebix - the number 1 and 3 leading suppliers respectively of brokerage management solutions in the world. That philosophy also is shared with our Canadian partners. An article in Canadian Underwriter written by Pat Durepos of Keal titled Whose Data Is It Anyways? from June of 2007 is bang on. In the article Pat states that the data in the brokers systems belongs to the brokerages and should be freely available to them to utilize as they see fit.