By Eric Bloedorn, Director of Product Management

Bold Penguin is all about commercial insurance distribution. Our API-focused, rules-driven approach has provided the technical flexibility to support a wide range of Enterprise customers and use cases. Close collaboration with business and engineering teams from Carrier and Brokerage partners has helped us to deliver best in class commercial insurance software.

Our Agent Terminal platform represented a decision to open up a new market - Independent Agents. This introduced a new pile of engineering and operational challenges to master. How do we market, sell, enforce compliance, and ultimately launch new small commercial Independent Agencies, without the in-person white glove approach we take with our large enterprise partners? How can we do this at scale, launching hundreds of agencies a month, without overwhelming internal and partner systems? What does our team composition need to look like to support multiple go-lives before lunch each day?

The old adage “what is measured is improved” was true for us here. In late 2020, we started measuring Time-To-Value (TTV) as the time from a completed Agent Terminal sale to that Agency’s first successful quote on platform. The first time we made that chart, the results were not pretty.

So we got to work. We got serious about measuring each step of the process from Demo to Quote. We identified key bottlenecks, invested in automation to address those pain points, and then re-evaluated the funnel. New bottlenecks would emerge every time we solved another. Throughout this process we worked closely with our Carrier partners to improve operational efficiencies between our teams. We built out a Customer Success department to drive great support and growth experiences. And along the way, we kept on analyzing the constraints, rinse, lather, repeat… until early this summer, where Agent Terminal has successfully achieved the long standing goal of TTV=0.

I am tremendously proud of the team. In many ways, TTV was our “escape velocity” metric - if we failed to solve this problem, scale in the Independent Agent space was always going to be out of reach. TTV=0 is a key milestone marking Bold Penguin’s maturity in our SaaS offering to Independent Agents. Our mission is to deliver an effortless experience for Agents who want to quote and bind small commercial business insurance. If that is something you are interested in, sign up for a demo, or just take my word for it and create your account to get started with your first quote today!