312 renewals rated in August. People touched 19.

Thornbury Group is three offices, in Omaha, Lincoln and Council Bluffs, that were three separate agencies until 2021. They share an AMS now. For a long time they did not share a way of doing renewals, and Devin Thornbury could tell which office a renewal came from by how late it was.

The Omaha office kept sticky notes on the wall beside the account managers, one per policy, moved left to right as the date came closer. Lincoln used a spreadsheet. Council Bluffs relied on one person’s memory, and she was very good, and she took a week off every July.

One window for three offices

Bevel pulls every policy 45 days from expiry out of Fairlead AMS at six each morning, whichever office wrote it. It re-rates the policy with the current schedule, attaches the comparison to the account and queues it for the carrier. If the premium moves less than 10% and nothing on the schedule has changed, nobody at Thornbury sees it until it is bound.

Devin switched renewals on for one carrier in January and watched review mode for three weeks rather than two, because a renewal takes longer to prove right than a certificate does. By March all fourteen carriers were live.

What nineteen exceptions look like

In August, 312 renewals came through the window. Bevel held 19 of them:

• Eleven had a premium change over 10%, most of them commercial auto.
• Five had a vehicle or a location on the schedule that no longer matched the insured’s last endorsement.
• Three were with a carrier that had stopped writing the class.

Those nineteen are the renewals an account manager should be spending an afternoon on. Before, they were buried in the other 293.

Nobody misses the wall. We took the sticky notes down in April and somebody framed the last one.

The change customers notice is the timing. Every insured gets a renewal summary the day their policy is re-rated, six weeks before it expires, instead of a call in the final few days. Retention on the commercial book is up 2.1 points on the same months last year, and Devin is careful to say that the earlier conversation, not the software, did that.