Building Successful Remote Work Policies for Property and Casualty Insurance Teams

And before you think 'this doesn't apply to me' — the agents who say that are usually the ones who need to hear it most. Just ask any agency consultant. The blind spots are always biggest in the areas we're most confident about.

You've interviewed 12 candidates in 6 weeks. Three made it past the first call. One showed up on day one. None lasted 90 days. Sound familiar?

What's encouraging is that you don't need to be perfect at this. You just need to be better than you were last quarter. An agency that improves its process efficiency by 5% every quarter is 22% more efficient in a year. That's not incremental — that's transformative. And it's achievable for any agency willing to commit to the work.

When Kathleen Quinn Votaw came on the show, the conversation went somewhere none of us expected. The takeaway hit harder than any textbook advice.

Stop Hiring for Experience

The producers who last aren't the ones with the most industry knowledge. They're the ones with the right temperament for commission-only work: self-directed, rejection-resilient, and genuinely curious about people's lives. You can teach someone coverages. You can't teach them to handle 47 'no's in a row without spiraling.

"Six months is the minimum cadence to really assimilate and onboard somebody to your organization." — Kathleen Quinn Votaw

The Interview Questions That Reveal Everything

The non-compete conversation needs to happen on day one, not day 365. Be upfront about ownership of the book, what happens if they leave, and what the path to partnership looks like (if one exists). The agents who leave and take clients rarely do it because they're bad people — they do it because expectations were never set.

"Statistically, most people you bring on board are still interviewing. They haven't even made a commitment to you." — Kathleen Quinn Votaw

We've written about this in more depth — check out [INTERNAL: insurance-producer-onboarding] for the full breakdown.

Your First 90 Days Framework

Here's what a solid first 90 days looks like: Week 1-2 is licensing and shadowing. Week 3-4 is call listening with a scorecard. Week 5-8 is live quoting with a safety net. Week 9-12 is solo production with daily check-ins. If you don't have this mapped out before they start, you're setting them up to fail — and yourself up to re-hire in six months.

"If we do not provide what our people need, they'll just go find someone else to provide it for us." — Kathleen Quinn Votaw

If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this: the gap between knowing and doing is where all the money lives. Every agent we've interviewed who broke through — $1M, $3M, $5M — points to the moment they stopped consuming advice and started implementing it. Craig makes an important distinction in this episode between activity and productivity. A lot of agents are incredibly busy — 50, 55, 60 hours a week — but their book hasn't grown in two years. That's not a work ethic problem. That's an allocation problem. You're working hard on the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong order. Sequencing matters as much as effort.

Put This to Work

Here's the move: Create a 6-month onboarding plan with regular touchpoints and integration milestones

Your competition isn't implementing this. That's your window. The agents who act on what they learn — even imperfectly — outperform the ones who bookmark it and move on. Related reading: [INTERNAL: commission-split-new-agents], [INTERNAL: insurance-producer-onboarding].

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🎙️ Listen to the full episode: Kathleen’s Take On Retention and Remote Work In Insurance! PART 2 Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

The Insurance Dudes — Separating the real from the BS in insurance sales since 2019.

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