Independent insurance brokerages are under pressure from consolidation trends, changing consumer expectations, and rapid digital transformation. To keep up, many brokerages face a choice: join a consolidator or scale independently through innovation.
Amid these changes, new brokerages like Solutions Insurance Group are proving that small can still be mighty. They’ve grown while maintaining their independence, building a strong culture, and adopting the right technology.
By using a few key strategies, brokerages can scale up and chart their own path to success.
Build the right team before you build your tech stack
Scaling an insurance brokerage involves having a team of more than just yourself. To get the right people in seat, be intentional about the culture you create and the people you surround yourself with.
Regardless of whether scaling means working as a team of three or eventually growing to multiple offices, successful brokerages hire and retain people who share their values. Consider who you want to work with, what your work style is, and what your own values are regarding how to serve clients and how you want to present yourself to the world.
“Having the right people has to be your number one above everything else. Above technology, above workflows,” said Paul Vaughan, VP of business development at Solutions Insurance Group. The Solutions team has been successful putting culture first, and Sri Nagumantri, president and CEO of Solutions, said her brokerage does that that by celebrating mutual wins and fostering healthy competition within the team. Define what that looks like for you: like celebrating achievements with a team dinner or offering prizes for topping the sales leaderboard.
With that team, technology enhances what they do, amplifying the culture you defined in building it.
Build a scalable foundation with technology
Just like the people you hire, the technology partner you choose will also be trusted with your business’ most important assets, and you’ll be working with the tech every day. For that reason, it pays to be thoughtful about the implementation, ongoing customer service, training, and usefulness of the tech.
A brokerage’s technology is the foundation the rest of the business is built on top of, and that starts with a brokerage management system. It should scale with the business as it grows and provide connections between solutions to remove friction as data and client information moves throughout the brokerage. A well implemented tech stack gives data insights that are essential for running an efficient business.
The Vertafore ecosystem, with its open architecture, can help run every part of a brokerage or use APIs to add on tools to handle specific functions. It’s not only capable of scaling alongside the brokerage but also providing the data insights to see how the business is performing and make informed decisions about how to improve.
Focus on relationships that drive growth
Strong relationships are a growth engine for independent brokerages, with clients, markets, and partners alike.
Vaughan of Solutions put it simply: “Having markets doesn’t mean having all the markets. The tighter you can keep your market relationships, the better collaboration, stronger support, and ultimately, more profitable growth.”
When carriers know your business and trust your team, they respond faster, offer better terms, and collaborate on solutions instead of transactions. That kind of partnership turns routine renewals into strategic conversations that lead to stronger retention and healthier margins.
The same principle applies to your technology partners. A connected partner helps you implement, integrate, and optimize technology so it actually works for your team, not against it.
Making scalability a strategy
Smart growth doesn’t happen by accident. It takes clear purpose, the right people, and technology that amplifies what your team already does best.
As Paul Vaughan said, “Scaling has to be really intentional. You can’t just be throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.”
When culture, technology, and relationships work in sync, brokerages can grow sustainably without losing what makes them independent. Vertafore helps brokerages scale smarter with connected technology and the support to grow on their own terms.
Key takeaways:
• Purpose-driven leadership builds trust.
• The right people and culture power growth.
• Integrated technology enables sustainable scaling.
• Strategic partnerships (like Vertafore) turn tech into a growth enabler.