Communications, People and Technology Ride High on Canter’s ‘To Do’ List

Louise “BeBe” Canter, senior vice president of Patterson/Smith Associates, Falls Church, Va., was installed as president of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America Inc. (IIABA) during the Association’s InfoXchange, held in Las Vegas Sept. 21 – 24.

Canter’s career is one of many “firsts.” Early in her career, she was the first woman in sales at the agency where she worked at the time. She was one of the first women in sales in the Washington, D.C., area. Elected to the IIABA Executive Committee in October 1998, Canter was the first woman elected to IIABA’s top leadership panel. Now, she is the first woman president of the “Big I.”

An advocate for independent agents with legislators and regulators as well as the public, insurance companies and other industry organizations, Canter has been involved with the association on every level, having served the Metropolitan Washington Association of Independent Insurance Agents (MWAIIA) in many capacities. She also served as chairman of the Southern Agents Conference and as a member of the IIABA Large Agents Committee.

Canter took time out of her busy schedule in Las Vegas to talk with Insurance Journal about issues of importance to her and her plans for her year as IIABA president.

Insurance Journal: What programs do you plan to concentrate on during your term as IIABA president?

BeBe Canter: There are a couple of different things that have been of interest to me. I think the primary one that I’d like to focus on is how we communicate with our members. In this day and age of e-mails and cell phones and people being bombarded with information, how do we get information out to our members? How do we present it so that they actually read it or pay attention to it, and choose to read our information or look at our information along with so much other information that they receive?

IJ: What sort of solutions do you envision for that?

BC: That’s the $64,000 question. What I’ve done is appointed a new task force of member agents. What we want to do is get together and brainstorm—these are all very, very different insurance agents—and say, ‘Okay on a daily basis, what do you read? What do you pay attention to? What do you feel would strike your fancy if you say—hey, I really want to know more about that?’ …

Whether it’s media, whether it’s magazines or it’s newsletters sitting on desks—I know I get stacks of magazines and newsletters—you get busy so you just initial them and start routing them and passing them along. What I’d love to do is figure out some way for short messages to be forwarded, whether it’s via e-mail or whether it’s linked to other sites.

IJ: What are some of the most important issues facing independent agents in the current business environment?

BC: I think it cuts across all agency sizes—people and technology. How do we get younger people into our industry? How do we get them interested? How do we get them excited about the insurance field? I think when you look around at many meetings you see so many of the agents who have been around for a while. We’re not getting younger, so you have to look over your shoulder and say, ‘How do you get young people into the business?’

And there are a couple of different programs that are already in existence. One of my goals is to publicize those programs and try to get as much support for them that we can.

The other item would be technology. It’s something everyone is grappling with. As I go out to see my clients, my insureds, they’re also struggling. It cuts across all lines, whether it’s a service business or a school or a plumbing company, so much is dependent on the use of technology.

And I think we can almost tie these two together because kids coming out of school or, if you have kids, they live on the ‘net they live in chat rooms, they live using technology … So you can use the technology in the back room and you can say to these kids—’You’ve got the best of both worlds. You can still have interaction with other people but have the back room technology.’

IJ: How did you get into the insurance industry and what challenges have you encountered as a woman in this business?

BC: I got into it I think the way many, many people got into it—purely by chance. I answered an ad my senior year high school for a summer job before I went off to college. It turns out it was a receptionist position and it happened to be with an insurance agency. Before I went to the interview I had no idea what the business was, and it was an agency in Washington, D.C. I ended up going back to that agency every summer and every spring break when I was in college. And then they offered me a job when I graduated.

It sounds a little crazy but I just never paid any attention to the fact that I couldn’t do something. It wasn’t male/female, it was just, ‘go ahead and try it.’ I was one of the first women in sales in the Washington area and you had to work a little harder and you had to make sure that you were a little bit more prepared. But if you were saving someone, if you were presenting a good insurance program to someone and giving them a cost effective program, they didn’t care whether you were male or female, they just wanted the best program out there.

IJ: Now you’re being installed as the first woman president of the “Big I.” Why do you think it’s taken so long for a woman to rise to this position?

BC: I think that if you look at the independent agency system, traditionally it has been comprised of small agencies and small agency owners. And historically most of those owners were men. I think it’s taken a while for women to get to the position where they can either be an owner in an agency or own their own agency. I think as agencies become larger and there are several owners, it will be easier for women to become part of those networks by being a principal or being a successful salesperson and being part of an organization that can encourage (them).

I’m hoping that if I can do it, anyone can do it.

IJ: What are some of the milestones in your career that you feel were crucial to your advancement?

BC: I think there were two things. When I first started out I wanted to go into sales. And the reason I wanted to go into sales was, in our agency where I worked the people with the big offices and the windows and the cars were in sales. …

And at that point, the head of the agency—I went in said this is what I want to do—and I still remember what he said, “If you’re crazy enough to want to try it, go ahead.” So he supported me in that and gave me a desk and a telephone. I did cold calling for about a year and that’s how I started. That was someone having the courage to say ‘Yeah,’ and to give someone the opportunity to try it.

I think also being involved with the agents association—the networking was incredible. Meeting people my own age, whether it was young agents or other agents in the Washington area. It gave you a real sense that you had a place in the insurance industry and you could do different things in this industry.

IJ: At last year’s InfoXchange, the IIABA unveiled its Large Agent & Broker Roundtable. How has that evolved and how successful has it been?

BC: It’s been a great success. It’s not quite a year old. I’ve been a part of that committee and the gentleman heading it is from Massachusetts—he’s done an excellent job—Don Lewis. He’s from Hastings-Tapley Insurance Agency. What we’ve done is gotten together five or six larger agencies across the country and identified needs that larger agencies are facing. They go back to the same, basically, people and technology. What we’re trying to do is put together a game plan so we can start developing programs to bring young kids either right out of high school or junior college or out of college, and give them a career path to come into larger agencies.

We’re also talking about, how do we get folks wanting to return to the workplace? Someone who may have worked before, has taken some time off, and now wants to come back into the workplace. How do we attract those people and give them the opportunities to come into the agencies?

It’s interesting when you talk to people across the country, different size agencies, that it’s all the same needs.

IJ: What is the status of IIABA’s Trusted Choice branding initiative?

BC: It’s going very well, it’s on target. We have approximately 3,200 agencies signed up. The insurance companies’ support has been incredible. I would say … a wonderful aspect of the program is how much the insurance companies have embraced the whole idea … It’s been very, very gratifying for us to see that.

For the agents, it is also an education process because it’s not the former “Big I” symbol—it’s a new logo, it’s a new slogan. So it’s been a process of getting agents to understand, giving them enough information to understand what the whole concept of branding is.

IJ: Looking back over the two years since the attacks of Sept. 11 on New York and Washington, D.C., how have those events affected the way the insurance industry operates?

BC: You’re asking someone from Washington, D.C. and you’re asking someone who writes a lot of commercial property in Washington, D.C. So the word terrorism, the situation with terrorism insurance, I’ve lived through it to the extent that many of the buildings I insure have mortgagees that require terrorism [insurance] regardless of the cost. Then you have insureds who are forced to purchase the insurance regardless of the cost. So it’s been an interesting dynamic.

But I will tell you that I think one of the most impressive things is how well the industry did respond after 9/11, and coming up with and working with the terrorism bill. When the bill went through, it was mandated that all the insurance companies who participated in the program would offer terrorism. Well, unfortunately for many of the companies they had no mechanism for pricing that. It wasn’t in their computer system, it wasn’t in their rating system. So you’re asking an industry that’s fairly well set in their rating formulas and their structure to have to react very quickly. And I will tell you they reacted very quickly and very well—very, very well. I thought very fairly in terms of the pricing, I thought very fairly in terms of the information given out to consumers. If there’s an area that I think our companies really, really did a shining job it was reacting to the whole situation.

IJ: What advice do you have for young agents who are beginning to build their careers?

BC: I am a living example of the young agent system at work. Because that’s what got me into the “Big I” network. Someone called me up one day and said, ‘Would you come to a young agents meeting?’ And I wasn’t familiar with it, I had no idea what it was.

I went to this meeting—there were only five people there—and it was the start of the young agents group in the Washington, D.C., area. And what’s fun about it is, many of those people during that first year, I’m still friends with, still know, still consider some of my closest colleagues in the Washington area.

IJ: What’s next after “Big I” president?

BC: A vacation would be great. It’s exciting, it really is. You meet a lot of people, do a lot of traveling, lot of meetings, and it’s fun. But I think at this point I’ll just take one step at a time.

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