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How to roll a book of business

What it takes to move a book of commercial accounts to a new agency or carrier: the sequence, the timing, the retention maths and where rolls go wrong.

Rolling a book means moving a set of existing accounts to a new agency, a new market, or both. It works one account at a time, at each account's own renewal date, and it fails for the same three reasons every time: bad timing, missing data, and assuming the relationship transfers when it does not.

Expect to keep well under all of it. Planning for total retention is the most common mistake in the exercise.

#Two things called "rolling a book"

Worth separating, because they run differently.

Moving your own book with you. You are changing agencies and want the accounts to follow. The constraint is contractual (non-solicit and non-compete terms in your agreement) and the relationships are already yours.

Taking over someone else's book. An acquisition, a retiring producer, a market that pulled out. The constraint is that the accounts do not know you, and their loyalty is to a person who is no longer in the picture.

Everything below applies to both. The second is harder.

#The sequence

1. Inventory what you actually have. Not the account list: the renewal calendar. Every account, its expiry date, its current market, its premium and its loss history. If the book came from someone else's system, this step takes longer than you think and is where most of the risk sits.

2. Sort by renewal date. A roll is not one event. It is twelve months of small events, each landing on its own date. The book rolls at the speed of its own calendar and no faster.

3. Triage. Not every account is worth moving. Some are underpriced and will not survive remarketing. Some are loss-heavy and you would be buying a problem. Decide before you spend effort, not after.

4. Contact ahead of each renewal. Far enough out to have a conversation, close enough that renewal is on the insured's mind. For commercial lines, weeks rather than months.

5. Remarket where it helps, and only there. Moving an account that is well-priced where it sits, purely to demonstrate activity, is how you lose it.

#Where rolls go wrong

Timing. Contacting an account after its renewal has bound means waiting a year. Across a book, the accounts you miss in month one are gone until month thirteen. This is why the calendar matters more than the list.

Data. Books arrive as a spreadsheet export with inconsistent names, missing renewal dates, and no loss history. Every gap is a conversation you have to have unprepared.

Assuming the relationship transfers. It transfers to a person, and only sometimes. If the producer is not coming, treat every account as a new-business opportunity you happen to have good information about.

Remarketing everything at once. Signals desperation and floods your markets with submissions they will not work properly.

Not knowing what changed. On a trucking book especially, accounts change between when the list was compiled and when you get to them: a carrier's authority lapses, its safety record deteriorates, it has already moved to another agent. Working a stale list burns credibility.

#Trucking books specifically

Commercial trucking has an advantage no other line has: a large part of each account's status is public.

For any motor carrier you can see, free and without asking the insured, who currently insures it, whether its operating authority is active, its safety record, and roughly when its coverage is up. That means an inherited spreadsheet can be validated against the public record before you make a single call: which accounts still exist, which have already moved, which are in trouble.

That validation pass is the single highest-value hour in a trucking roll.

Native Base Market Tracker was built around this: you import the book export from your AMS, it matches each account to its federal record, and it flags the ones where the insurer on file is not you, where authority is not active, or where a renewal is inside ninety days. See Book of business.

#The retention maths

Be honest with yourself before you start. A roll where you keep most of the accounts is a good roll. Model the outcome on that basis, decide whether the economics still work, and if they only work at full retention, they do not work.

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