Producer Update: Issue 1 – 2024

As I am writing this commentary, we have not yet reported our year-end financial results as a company to our Board of Directors, so I will refrain from going into specific details about our results. Suffice to say, we expect to see strong investment income which will overcome an underwriting loss and produce operating income (underwriting profit/loss plus investment income/loss) as well as net income before and after taxes. We expect to report an increase in policyholder surplus which will further strengthen our balance sheet, protecting you, your clients, and PLM against financial adversity that might be down the road. On the production front, we achieved our new business premium, pricing, retention, and bottom-line production goals.  

We were also successful in placing our full reinsurance program effective 1/1. We were pleased to see that we did not experience some of the problems others are seeing in the marketplace.  

As explained in the past, our poor underwriting results were driven by our unsatisfactory commercial auto results where we saw increased severity, as well as the impact of not only normal inflation, but also social inflation. We also note that the legal expenses we incurred to defend our insureds in various claims soared.  

Our property results were negatively impacted by the poor weather in 2023. Interestingly, fire-related claim events dropped which we were thankful to see. Expect to hear us talk more about the general liability line of business in 2024 where we are starting to see upward trends in losses involving things like slip and falls, forklift safety, loading and unloading, and the transfer of liability from contracts that many insureds sign in order to win the business. Here are some things to consider with your clients: do they have a slip and fall program? Are all their drivers certified? Do they have loss control programs in place for forklift and loading and unloading safety? If they do not have these in place, please reach out for assistance by contacting Dan Braiman, Loss Control Manager, at 317-875-3617 or at dbraiman@plmins.com. 

Green Tree Risk Partners (GTRP), our wholesale agency, finished strong this past year. We saw a significant increase in the number of brokers and insureds that worked with them to secure their workers’ compensation. Further, in the last few months of the year we began to have steady success in assisting brokers and insureds with those difficult to place wood-related business. While still a work in progress, Green Tree Risk Partners is beginning to gain traction. Expect us to ask for the opportunity to help place the workers’ comp in addition to the package lines that PLM writes. 

Our new program for small hardware stores, HardwareXpress (HX), is also beginning to gain some traction. Designed for smaller hardware stores (up to $3 million in values, up to $2 million in sales), this product offering is competitively priced with broad coverage. We can rapidly turn complete submissions into bindable quotes in 48 hours or less. If the store is too large to fit the HX program, it is automatically considered for standard coverage and pricing with PLM. We have written as many new accounts with HX as we have outside it through our normal channels. It is important to note that we do write rental exposures associated with hardware stores and building material dealers with the exception of businesses that rent scaffolding, large heavy equipment, or items like bouncy houses.  

Like many of you, we have been chasing quality staff since the beginning of the pandemic. It seems that around mid-2023 a switch was turned on, and we filled many positions with high-quality candidates. Of course, onboarding these people will take some time. We feel strongly that we have been able to improve the overall quality of our staff with every new hire. Our ongoing professional education program is helping with this as well. Everyone at PLM must be involved with an ongoing formal professional education program, including me. We as a company are only as good as the team we assemble. The better the team, the better the experience for you, our insureds, and PLM. We are proud to announce that two of our employees completed their CPCU designation, the insurance industry’s foremost recognized designation, this past year. Congratulations to Jaya Echevarria, and Sydney Stenson. 

Finally, with customer service in mind, I would also like to take a moment to talk about the Net Promoter Score (NPS) questionnaires you may have received from us. These are the surveys that we send out asking you to rate us on a scale of 1 to 10. When you receive a survey, we ask that you please take a moment to complete it, and to be honest with us! It’s nice to hear compliments, but if there are any problems in our relationship or performance from your perspective, we want to hear about them! We can only fix something we know about. So, when the next NPS questionnaire crosses your desk, take a moment to complete it and give us frank feedback on how we are doing. 

I wish you all the best this year in what is sure to be a more challenging environment than the past years before. But, working together, we can accomplish our mutual objectives. As always, I welcome your feedback, questions, and comments at jsmith@plmins.com.