Monoline: Beyond the Coverage
An educational podcast for insurance professionals that dives deep into personal umbrella insurance, industry trends, risk mitigation, and sales strategies. Hosted by Senior Underwriter Janessa Vanderheyden, each episode features expert insights, real-world case studies, and practical advice to help agents grow their business and better protect their clients.
Monoline: Beyond the Coverage
From Burritos to Umbrellas: How Four Friends Revolutionized Insurance
Monoline's four co-founders share the journey from their first entrepreneurial ventures to creating a revolutionary personal umbrella insurance platform, revealing how complementary skills and shared values became the foundation for their success.
Highlights:
- Ben and Jerod's early partnership included a short-lived late-night burrito company
- Greg and Carson's successful creation and growth of SportsEngine, eventually acquired by NBC Universal
- How the team came together through OpenTrack, an insurance platform for race cars
- The critical gap they identified: personal lines insurance lagging behind commercial in technology investment, and creating a customer council to validate their ideas and shape product development
- The strategic advantage of entering the personal umbrella market during a hard market cycle
- Their mission as an "Agent Ally" combining technology with human expertise
- The importance of stable capacity and underwriting expertise for long-term success
- Advice for budding entrepreneurs
Learn more about:
- OpenTrack
- SportEngine
- Convex
- What Do You Do with an Idea? by Kobi Yamada
Visit monoline.com to experience our revolutionary platform that's making personal umbrella insurance a breeze for agents across the country. Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest updates!
Welcome to Monoline Beyond the Coverage, the podcast that goes deeper than policy limits to explore why personal umbrella insurance matters more than ever. I'm Janessa Bien-Ryden and today we're kicking off our very first episode with a conversation about how Monoline came to be. We'll be hearing from our four co-founders, ben Phillips, jared Blakestead, greg Blasco and Carson Kipper, about their journeys, their first ventures and what led them to build Monoline together. Trust me, you're going to love this story. It includes late night burrito sales, a game changing sports technology, company race cars and a shared vision to revolutionize personal umbrella insurance. Let's jump in. I may be a bit biased, since I get to work with these four every day, but I'm so excited to have our four co-founders on today. With me I have Ben Phillips and, with his extensive experience in leadership, sales and business development within the insurance industry, ben is dedicated to building innovative solutions that simplify life for agents and account executives. Known for fostering a culture of autonomy and ownership, ben's focus on collaboration and innovation has been key to driving Monoline's growth. Next up, we have Jerod Blakestead. Jerod has worked in nearly every aspect of the insurance industry, including working for a carrier and large national broker, having had his own agency, Blakestad Insurance, which he sold in 2017, where Ben also worked, and he was also one of the co-founders, along with Ben again, for the track insurance company, OpenTrack. Jerod's commitment to empathy, gratitude and excellence is reflected in every aspect of Monoline's operations.
Jan:Next up, we have Greg Blasko. Greg has an extensive background in technology and entrepreneurship. Alongside Carson Kipfer, greg co-founded Sports Engine, a leading provider of sport relationship management software, acquired by NBC Universal in 2016. Greg also was a part of OpenTrack, with Ben and Jared At Monoline. Greg's innovative mindset and dedication to customer-centric solutions drive the revolution and the quoting and binding experience for personal lines, account executives and their clients. And, last but not least, we have Carson Kipfer. Carson's career has been built on a foundation of technology and design, with a clear focus on delivering exceptional user experiences. His commitment to innovative design is reflected in Monoline's intuitive quoting and binding platform, developed specifically with account executives in mind. Carson's passion for customer-centric solutions ensures that Monoline continually evolves, based on AE feedback, driving a culture of improvement that helps agencies operate more efficiently, deliver better service and build stronger client relationships. So, ben, I'm going to start with you. Welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to have you. Can you share a bit about your background before I'm on the line, so you can just start.
Ben:Okay, so I've been in the insurance business my entire career. I was actually studying marketing at the University of Northern Iowa. My brother was a claims leader at Allied Insurance in Des Moines and I had the opportunity to go do a claims internship between my sophomore and junior year. And so I went and did the claims internship, go back to college. The next summer comes. I was able to do an underwriting internship, and so I'm thinking at this point that I'm just going to do a couple of awesome internships with, you know, a great company out of Des Moines, and then I was going to go off down the marketing path, which is what I studied in college. But you know, oddly enough, I just fell in love with the insurance business early on and started full time with Allied in Des Moines, thinking at the time that I wanted to be a corporate guy, climb the ladder and be the president of Allied Insurance one day. And it wasn't until I got out into the field, living in Atlanta, georgia, and seeing what an insurance agent does on a daily basis, that I quickly understood that the insurance company side of the business was not quite the fit for me. That say, the agent and the broker side of the business was not quite the fit for me. That say, the agent and the broker side of the business was Right around.
Ben:That time is actually when I met Jared. So we have similar backgrounds. Our paths crossed a number of times over college and just after college, but we have actually never met. And shortly after he and I met, not only did we become fast friends and best friends, but we decided right away that we wanted to go into business together, and so we started down the path of becoming insurance brokers and joined Arthur J Gallagher running their private client brokerage and kind of spinning that up in Charleston, south Carolina. A fun little side note there is while we were also building our careers as insurance brokers, we got a wild hair, I think you know. You know, with some windshield time one day that we were going to build and launch a late night burrito company in Charleston, south Carolina. So Jared and I are the founders of about a month long project called Baritos, which the tagline was the best decision you'll make tonight. Come to find out.
Ben:Running a restaurant business, even if it is a late night burrito business, is a lot of work, and we quickly abandoned that after we realized that we couldn't really balance building an insurance career and also running a late night burrito company. But I still have the T-shirts and some of the swag from those days Super fond memories of doing that. But really just to kind of jump ahead, was on the brokerage side of the business for a long time and had the opportunity to found a company called Open Track and we insured race cars, to found a company called OpenTrack and we insured race cars right, and so that really took me down my true entrepreneurial path to kind of where we are today. Had a really fun run with Carson and Greg and Jared building and scaling and selling OpenTrack. And here we are at Monoline. So it is a officially 23-year career in the insurance business. If you want to go back to my intern days and the best years by far are the years working with my buddies, taking risks, building fun companies and running monoline with you guys.
Jan:Oh, I love that. We're so happy that you made it to monoline eventually. All right, Jared, I'm going to hand it off to you. Can you give the people a little background on you and just share a little bit?
Jerod:before Model Line yeah, so before Model Line I think I had like 36 or 38 jobs during college, really tried kind of everything, always loved the idea of like something new and different. And then found insurance right after college, like started the day I graduated. And so really my entire insurance career has been on the personal line side, which is pretty unique in most of or almost all of Ben's. I guess he sometimes is an underwriter on the commercial side but really focused on the personal line side of the business. Love insurance kind of love every part of it.
Jerod:As Ben mentioned, we ended up at Gallagher for a while and kind of got our feet wet on the broker side and shortly thereafter I just knew I needed to go do my own thing. I was never great at being told what to do or what not to do and felt like it was just time for me to branch out and do something on my own. So I actually left New York, do something on my own. So I actually left New York. Ben stayed behind in New York. I left, bought an agency independent agency in the Minneapolis area back moved back to Minneapolis, started what became Blakestad Private Client, and built that company up, actually even through part of the initial stage of OpenTrack. But but loved every part of the broker side of the business, loved the interactions with both clients and companies and yeah. So that's really kind of what led into OpenTrack and then Monoline.
Jan:Carson, you want to jump in first, and then Greg, you can go after.
Carson:Yeah, so I met Greg my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and he lived just down the hallway, so we just ran into each other first semester there at Eau Claire and realized pretty early on that we were both very entrepreneurial and we had kind of compatible interests in that he was very interested in the technology side of things and the technology aspects of business and I was very focused on design, and so some of our first projects were just teaming up on projects for businesses or for events. He was running a race series at the time and he needed a guidebook designed for the race series and so we talked through that and worked on that project together and so it was kind of a budding friendship and relationship.
Jan:Very cool.
Greg:So just to add to that, you know, we just kind of immediately kicked it off right. We had shared interests but complementary skill sets as well, right. So you know, in terms of the entrepreneurial spirit and two college kids, no money and were resourceful enough to kind of figure out how to do things, and both Carson and I could kind of share ideas with each other and, you know, make a really great, great product or whatever the project was at the time, right. And it's obviously evolved here for the last 20 plus years now as well.
Jan:That's amazing. You guys built something super cool with Sports Engine. Can you guys kind of talk about what gave you the idea, how it started? How'd you guys get off the ground and get some experiences from creating that together?
Carson:Yeah, absolutely. So what started as just a design business doing custom design for area businesses in the Eau Claire area and teaming up with one of our other Sports Engine co-founders, justin Coffenberg. And Justin's skill set and focus in college was much more on the business, sales, finance side of things that's what he was going to school for. So, again, finding someone that you work well with that has complementary skillset. And so very early on Justin was out selling these design projects and I was more on the production side of things and we would do the project and hand it off to the client and then move on to the next one. And at about that time there was this new business model of software as a service which I guess we're kind of dating ourselves here. But right early 2000s that was a big deal that you could access software online and pay a subscription and a monthly subscription fee to access that, and so we were very intrigued with that concept and again just asking ourselves is there the opportunity to create something in this new software as a service environment?
Carson:And all of our conversations led back to our experience participating in youth sports growing up. So you know, between all of us we played pretty much every sport imaginable. You know everything from hockey, soccer, baseball, you name it. And we had parents who were very involved as coaches and as volunteers, board members, and so we were able to kind of draw on those experiences and bring what we were doing on the design and technology side and create a solution that would make it very easy for these sports organizations that were run by volunteers to really organize their whole operations, communicate with coaches and with parents. And our first product was focused on website, so a content management system for youth sports organizations. So all the functionality was really focused in on the needs of these youth sports organizations.
Carson:And so we went to market with that as we were wrapping things up our senior year at UW-Eau Claire and began to gain a little bit of attraction in the youth hockey world. And that was where Justin specifically had a lot of connections, having grown up in Shakopee, a suburb of the Twin Cities here, and was able to tap on those and convinced his old head coach at Shakopee Hockey to buy the first site. And a couple of weeks later the Hockey Association down in Prior Lake gave us a call and we saw the Shakopee, the new Shakopee website. We love something like that for our association, and so high fives all the way around. This was the first time that I mean it was legitimate.
Carson:Right, there wasn't a favor that we were calling in, but there was a real product market fit, which was incredible, and, over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, began bringing on more and more youth hockey associations in the Twin Cities area, as word spread and people talked about how much time it was saving them and making their lives easier. At that time we took a really hard look at the technology platform that we had initially created and realized that we needed to re-architect that so that it wasn't just individual websites but a whole platform that would make it easier for an individual to have an account that could talk across sports organizations, which was really important, especially for parents. You have, you know, as a parent and you have multiple kids and they may be playing multiple sports, so to have that single login that you could utilize to access your entire youth sports life brought a lot of value and simplicity in a time where life can be pretty chaotic. And that's when Greg really started to dig in on the technical side of things and our fourth co-founder, michael Lewis, came on board as well, and so we rebuilt the platform really from the ground up to cater to all sports, not just a single sport of hockey, and it was kind of off to the races. As we achieved that product market fit and people began to hear about us and began to snowball from there.
Jan:Greg, do you have anything you want to add on kind of what made you want to help Carson and do this together?
Greg:I graduated college and was always an entrepreneur. Carson and Justin, our other co -founder. We all went to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, together. I was helping them when they were running the little design business doing some of the tech work but also running an event promotion company on the side. On the weekends Throughout the summer we were promoting, you know, mountain bike races and doing sports, timing, doing the race results for a bunch of different events.
Greg:And you know I just always remember my mom saying hey, Greg, you know you got to get a real job. It was a short stint that I actually took a job at at target, right out of college. I didn't know that and worked at Target HQ downtown Minneapolis. The dress code had just changed back to suit and tie every day. So here I was, you know, driving in from the suburbs parking, walking into the big corporate office and, you know, quickly realized that that wasn't for me and you know Carson's like Greg, you got to come back and we've spent a full time here. We know you don't like that corporate gig and so in retrospect, you know, nine months being at Target, I actually learned a bunch of stuff right. So at the time you you realize that you might not like it, but in terms of you know that corporate experience and the systems and structures that they have in place, you know I actually did learn an incredible amount in that nine months that you know actually really helped scale Sports Engine to the size that it got.
Jan:That's awesome. Can you guys kind of talk about how the four of you created OpenTrack and what made you guys want to start with that too?
Jerod:Yeah. So Ben had actually joined on with our brokerage agency in Minneapolis, so the two of us started working together again, which was fun. He brought his book of business over and so we started OpenTrack, really kind of in that stage and we were using a lot of the resources that we had already developed, just having our own agency in terms of, like some licenses and some of those other things, even just connections and contacts and kind of knowing how to run a business, to start OpenTrack. But what we quickly realized was without technology there's no way that we were going to be successful. We were at the time handling maybe, let's say, a hundred policyholders a year to do 105 would have like broke us, like we were at the end. Handling maybe, let's say, 100 policyholders a year to do 105 would have like broke us, like we were at wit's end because everything was like paper and Excel spreadsheets and handling payments over the phone and it was just a complete disaster. So we went down really kind of got to the finish line on a deal to bring some outside IT resources in to help us go to the next stage of open track.
Jerod:And at that time we had a friend, ryan Van Overbeck, successful business executive, but but really just super connected, and I was asking him for some advice. I'm like do you know anybody? Should we talk to somebody? And he's like you know, you should meet with my friend, carson Kipfer. Uh, he's built this company called Sports Engine IT genius, like they know this stuff.
Jerod:And so I met with Carson for lunch one day, for no reason other than to just get advice on what to do. So Carson and I met instantly, liked each other. It was like, hey, I need your advice. I don't know anything about technology. We need to be able to transact policies online. We need to build an internal system, we need to be able to do this and that. And I was like what do we do? And he's like if it were me, I wouldn't outsource it, because those people don't go to bed at night thinking about your project. They don't wake up in the morning thinking about your project. You should bring it in-house. And I was like god, that sounds completely daunting.
Jerod:Um, and I left that meeting and called ben and I was like, if both of you could get carson and this guy greg, he kept talking about I'm doing this on the it side and we actually kind of had a chuckle to that. And then, like a week later, carson called and he's like you know I was talking to Greg. We'd be interested in maybe doing something with OpenTrack and kind of coming on board. So that was like the cliff notes version of how we all came together and since then I think what we've realized is we're great friends, but together each of our individual superpowers right Like Carson's design and user experience. Greg is like the actual builder of the technology, ben handles kind of anything and everything administrative strategy, all that kind of stuff and then I'm usually on the sales and distribution side. So it's really worked out great.
Ben:Yeah, the one thing I'll add to that is when I left the firm I was with in New York and joined Blakestead so Jared and I could go kind of down this path of open track we sat down in Minneapolis one day and made the decision that we were first and foremost only going to do business with people that we liked in the future we had this opportunity again where we were going to be entrepreneurs, but on our own this time, not being backed by a big insurance brokerage, and the number one rule that we had is we have to.
Ben:we have to really like the people we do business with, and Carson and Greg came along on. The four of us just like immediately connected with one another.
Ben:And Jared and I kind of still chuckle to this day that they went from building this national or international like behemoth of sports engine to building the technology to our little itty bitty you know, startup, track, insurance, business. But I think what's kept us together, the glue that's held us together more than anything is is we really just enjoy being around each other and building together, and I think that's a really important aspect of the story.
Jan:Love that and you guys can just tell, like even just interacting with you all, just working with you all, how good of a friendship you guys have too, and I think that has been such a solid foundation for Model Line is you guys really set the bar of we work really well together, we work really hard, but we also have fun and respect each other, and I think we've just all taken that away from that as well. So, kind of transitioning into Monoline now, so you guys sold OpenTrack kind of, were figuring out what the next thing was going to be for you all, and then Monoline showed up, who is a personal lines wholesaler, and our first product is the primary layer umbrella.
Jan:So what problem did you guys see in the insurance space that wanted you to bring Monoline to life?
Jerod:Yeah, so great question, Jan. In our time as brokers we kept always having like these small things just bother us right. Kept always having like these small things just bother us right. Like being on the personal line side especially, everything always seemed to be geared towards commercial lines and employee benefits. And so even within within our own agency, whether it was our time at Gallagher, even back to our night at Allied, like everything was always very commercial and employee benefits focused. And so we always knew in the back of our heads at some point we wanted to do something to help solve problems at the desk level for personal lines.
Jerod:And as soon as we started thinking back to the Blakestad days, it was like where were our big inefficiencies? What were the things that drove our people nuts, what were the things that you know, when I saw a group of four or five people hovering around a computer trying to problem solve and you go over and ask the question like what were those issues? And I think this, this concept of a carriers being harder and harder to work with and we've seen this trend over the last decade right where it used to be, like my first few years of Blake's, that I had to turn down invites to go up for fancy steak dinners, right and like turn down trips that they were taking us on. So all of a sudden, you know now capacity is really hard to get, underwriting rules are tougher, and it felt like, instead of being like a true partner of independent agencies, it was almost became like this push and pull that was creating friction, and so that's a little bit of a backstop of just like.
Jerod:What always bothered us, but where we saw opportunity, especially starting out with personal umbrella, was just the the ability to come in and make something that should be simple, simple. So you take something that right now was taking weeks to actually put to bed in hours of time and you're talking about a twelve hundred dollar policy that you're getting 10% commission on. Like the math doesn't work. So that was our, that was really our idea of like where to start. And then we started a customer council where we pulled in agency personnel you know, account executives, admins on different levels, from boutique agencies all the way up to some of the larger nationals and starting asking questions to them of like what does that make sense, what do you wish was easier? And umbrella was always their number one choice. So that's really what kind of led us to the starting point. Ben, we'd love you to kind of fill in any gaps that I missed.
Ben:What we learned to do really really efficiently at OpenTrack is transact business, and not just at the point of purchase, but everything that comes after purchase policy, delivery, endorsements, renewals, claims, customer service, interactions, midterm Like we really had this. You know secret sauce at OpenTrack that, honestly, is a lot more challenging in a regulated finance business than a lot of people think. Like we go to amazoncom today or any other online retailer, it's simple to buy things. But in the insurance business, when you're dealing in 50 different states and jurisdictions, or 51 in some instances, there's a lot that goes into that, and so what we wanted to do is look for the same type of market in the personal line space that could benefit from that type of expertise that we had developed. And lastly, I'll say you know our business has been fortunate to have an unbelievable amount of capital flow into it in the past decade.
Ben:Like when we go to the InsureTech conferences. It's been a buzzword forever. It would shock most people to understand how little of that innovation has actually trickled all the way down to the desk of the people that are transacting and handling the business on a day-to-day basis. Every single piece of business in the independent channel is touched by somebody at the desk level that has to place that account, and there are a lot of steps involved in that. So little of that insurance technology capital has actually delivered solutions to those people, and that's just what we wanted to do. We wanted to take our expertise and deliver real value to the people that are actually placing business on a daily basis, and that's what Model Line is doing.
Jan:Yeah, I love that and I love our mission of our agent ally and bringing those old school values with that new technology too. So I think that's really cool that we've been able to implement that and just watch that come to life. Do you guys feel like when you created that customer council, that was the big aha moment, like this is something that's needed in this space? Or was there something before that where you guys were like, no, this is going to be a solid idea?
Ben:You nailed it there, Jan. I mean honestly, there's something unbelievably exhilarating about talking to an actual user of a potential product that you're thinking about building and having them reinforce all of the thoughts that you came into it with. And then not only that. What's really great about our business is if you interact with agents on a daily basis and the users. They give you more ideas, they tell you more things that you didn't know, things like download. We came away from those customer council meetings knowing that download was a critical component of placing standalone business that they're not getting elsewhere, and it was a huge time drag on the AE. And so we said from day one like okay, we're going to be different in that space. And that came 100% out of the customer council and was not an idea that we had on our own, but was just asking questions and listening to our customers.
Carson:Those early conversations, one after the next, of people just being excited about what we were doing and asking questions and engaged in asking when they could get their hands on it, when it would be available, every single conversation we had went like that.
Greg:There was essentially immediate product market fit right. Getting on. Each one of those calls was just additional validation, right. And there's so many founders of startups that have they're so excited and passionate about their idea but you know they never actually put it in front of potential customers. You know they build, build, build, build, release it and they're like, oh my God, like why isn't this working, why, why isn't anyone using this?
Greg:And you know, through our experience, of our experience of multiple companies here, we know how crucial that step is to getting things right and really sitting in their shoes, understanding their pain points, understanding their workflows, what's working for them, culmination of interviews, showing them mock-ups and screenshots of potential interfaces, where, you know, a lot of times we got it completely wrong. You know we'd show them something and we'd be like what do you think of this? Like, no, absolutely not. Like that's not how we do it, that is the worst idea. And then we're like, oh well, glad we showed them that. Right. Not only did we do that early on, we also continue to do that today with additional features that we released, whether that's endorsement workflows, renewal workflows, other little enhancements. It's always really important to get that in front of people and get their opinions, just outside of the employees of Model Line today, of Monoline today.
Jerod:If there's one piece of advice I could go back and give 25-year-old version of myself working in the field, it would be to just go in and ask questions and listen to agents. I would go in with this agenda of what I wanted to tell them about what Allied was doing, where I think I would have been 100 times more successful if I just would have said what do you need?
Jan:Yeah, and I think it's so powerful that we are not building Monoline off the assumption of what we think these AEs need. You guys went straight to the source, like you said, and you don't see a lot of carriers doing that anymore. So to be able to come in and just kind of bring this fresh perspective of we want to know how we can actually help you, but not just make this assumption of let's build this platform and just see if it works for you guys and if it doesn't, sorry but like you guys actually cared and you wanted to hear from them, and I think that's so cool as co-founders that you guys were able to do that and recognize that that's the right approach to do it too, for sure. Okay, so if you had to describe Monoline in one sentence right now, what would it be? And then, in five to 10 years, what do you think it'll be?
Carson:We talked about this, you know from when we're thinking about our messaging and how we're communicating to the market and its simplest form. It's making personal umbrella insurance a breeze, and I think that goes to the simplicity of the process, but also something that's fresh in the market, and it's not just all about technology. It's about a rock solid policy offering something that people can trust. And also, as we've been talking about here today, it's the people behind it, in the way that we're trying to wrap around and really support the agents and the account executives, right, and that, although that seems very obvious in the world of insurance, that's a little bit of an anomaly, right. I think when all of those components come together, it creates something pretty special it's got to be all encompassing too, right?
Greg:So as as good as the tech is, you know the company and our offering is is only as good as the people behind it as well.
Greg:So, you know, not only have we put a bunch of effort into the technology, you know the behind the scenes in terms of you know, Jan, what you're doing and everyone else is doing to to support the business. And interactions with the customer is so important, right Like that. We know that that's just never going to go away, right, there's just been so many insurance businesses out there that have just tried to push this whole tech play tech first tech forward and be a black box on the back end and be a black box on the back end. And we know from just talking to our customer council that that experience on the back end is just as important, that human interaction is super important. So in the days of AI and bots and all that, those are great, they can help, but it does not replace the human either, and we know that that's a super important piece, just as much as the tech, right. So it's kind of the coming together of both where I think, you know, we've created a pretty distinct advantage you know in this marketplace place.
Ben:The way that I look at Monoline today, in kind of one sentence, is this idea of bringing innovative and long-term stable capacity to the personal insurance market, but doing it with really cool and easy and user-friendly technology. I think we are this really incredible technology platform, but everything that we do from a technology perspective is to make people's lives better. We're not just building tech. We're building tech to actually help people. We're a people company that uses technology right. And so I'm super focused myself on this idea of long-term and stable capacity, because what that means is that means less time that our customers have to worry about re-quoting, re-marketing, replacing a monoline account. We want them to place their customers with us and then not have to worry about replacing it the next year.
Ben:And so when I think about where Monoline is going, I'm super laser-focused on that piece of it and building an underwriting first approach focused on risk selection, focused on risk-based pricing, and then also this really cool idea of being an expert in this market and having a solution for almost every single standalone monoline umbrella policy that an agent or insured needs right. Today, the market is really bifurcated. You can go get your one to five in one place, but if you need above $5 million, you need to go to another market. There isn't anywhere really today that you can go get that, and then if you need an excess on top of an excess, you need to go to a different market. And so we love this idea of innovating our insurance products around the current product that we have today and just continuing to build and grow, and so we are like a full service solution provider for all standalone and monoline umbrella in the agency.
Jerod:You can't be a true agent ally if you don't have stable capacity.
Jerod:You can't be an agent ally if you don't have a system that they love to use.
Jerod:I think, as I look at it, just keeping the agent at the center of everything that we're doing is my kind of main priority, and that really goes to like every interaction that they have with Monoline, right, which means every person that they interact with, every single thing that they're doing with monoline. My goal is just have that be their favorite of the day, right, like if they're interacting with us and it's their favorite interaction of the day because the system's great and because they know we're going to be long-term stable, but also because they love picking up the phone and calling you, jay, right, like those are the things that I think continue to separate us from anybody else that's in our space and that's really my main focus. Moving forward is like how do we just build those relationships, build that trust, have people want to place business with us because it's actually maybe fun and it's actually maybe a little bright spot on their day, versus dealing with kind of a nameless, faceless company that they're just like blasting emails off to?
Jan:Yeah, good answer. What excites you guys the most about the future of Monoline?
Carson:The thing that excites me the most is the team at Monoline that we are putting together to be able to, you know, show up at work every day and be inspired by the people that you work alongside of. I think very grateful and fortunate for that, and I see the growth of every member of the team as we build this business, and it makes me very excited for the future and the solutions that we're going to bring to bear.
Greg:From experience. We know that as soon as something goes live, we know that there's going to be little feature enhancements, tweaks, ways of making it even better and easier. So those pieces are just as important as offering new products as well. Being able to do both and really move quickly with the team we have is so important. Right, carson and I can look at something, a little issue, or you know some feedback that we get from an account executive. One of us can put a little mock-up together, share it with the rest of our team internally and, you know, a lot of times we push little updates like that out within days and it has big impact. So that, right there, really, you know, is fun and makes it exciting to you know, come to work every day to be able to do things like that and keep iterating from a tech perspective.
Ben:Yeah, I mean one thing that I've been thinking a lot about, that I'm super excited about when I think about, kind of, the future of Monoline is really centered around you, jan, and it's this idea of like building technology to amplify our underwriting strategy and to give power to our underwriters to make fast and quick and efficient and consistent decisions at the desk right.
Ben:We want to build technology to not only support agents and be that people first agent ally, but we want to be people first for our people as well. And when we build and when we think about, like, really developing our internal technological capabilities and thinking about, you know, building technology to amplify underwriting, because we are going to be an underwriting first company, we are going to be somebody who builds long-term and stable capacity, and to do that we need technology to support our A-plus people, and that is something that I'm super excited about. Plus, it makes bringing really bright, energetic, smart people into our organization as well, because we will have the technology to support them to grow and to do all the cool stuff that we're doing in the marketplace.
Ben:So I'm really excited about kind of how our tech is going to also start augmenting and impacting kind of what we do internally as an organization as well.
Jan:Talking about this hard market that we're in. I'll never forget this was like maybe my first week at Monoline and you guys had me travel to California with Jared and there was somebody who asked in such a hard market, why are you guys coming in when people are all leaving the space? And I think I remember sitting in that meeting and being like that's a really good question. Jared, I'm going to let you answer that and I remember listening to Jared and being like this is why I believe in Monoline, because the way you spoke about who we are and what we're building, I think it would just be really cool to have our listeners kind of hear why you guys are coming into this space when it is such a hard market.
Ben:So I get this question quite a bit about us entering during a hard market. So I get this question quite a bit about us entering during a hard market and I actually love it because I think it perfectly contextualizes our approach to the marketplace and kind of how we look at it. And it also reminds me of an article I read about our reinsurance partner, convex, and them. Entering the marine insurance market is the subtitle, because I don't really remember it, but it was something about a new insurer making its mark by entering when everyone else is scrambling out of the market and that there's no better time to enter a market than when it's hardening. It's an opportunity for us to really showcase our value to our agents by talking about the value of time and not just being focused on things like selling the lowest price.
Ben:Price is absolutely important. We are price competitive, as everybody else is raising rates once or twice in almost every state. We are maintaining stable right now. But what it does is it really showcases our technology platform, it showcases our product suite, it showcases our people and it allows us to really change the narrative around placing this business and giving time back to our agents so they can do more important things so they can remarket that really difficult to place coastal home property or focus on the more important lines and get back in front of customers and focus on relationship building or help out with a claim. So I'm actually super thrilled about kind of what's happening in the market and our timing coming in. We got a little lucky with the hard market but I think that we were in a position to really take advantage of it and showcase the value of our platform for our customers, the insurance agents, placing standalone umbrella, if you look back 10 years ago.
Jerod:Everyone who would ever teach you how to sell personalized insurance, especially the private client? They would tell you like sell the highest possible limit of umbrella. If you can sell 10, sell 15. If you can sell 15, sell 25. And capacity was just endless and they wanted to sell it, and it was because they were making money on it.
Jerod:Well, when you fast forward to today's market where look at what just happened in California the wildfires right, or the exposure that we have on the coast for hurricane, even Midwest hail I just got off a call yesterday in Nebraska Homeowners rates are going through the roof in Nebraska and companies are actually starting to maybe not pull out but start to make it really difficult to write business there, and so all of the turmoil in the property business is making capacity harder overall.
Jerod:So when you are a large provider and you're sitting on exposures of all different types across the country right, you're sitting on auto liability, you're sitting on property, you're sitting on personal jewelry schedules and then you're sitting on umbrella all of that together creates just this massive potential for loss in terms of like large numbers.
Jerod:But when you look at it specifically, it's not that umbrella is necessarily driving loss ratio issues across the board. Maybe for some companies, maybe not, but as Ben always likes to say, it isn't that there's always a bad risk, there's maybe just a bad price. And so, as we started looking at it and started talking with our friends over at Convex who are our capacity providers, they look at the world in the same way as us. They see opportunity more in niche silos than they do across the industry as a whole or a segment of the industry as a whole, like personal lines or commercial lines. And that's really how Convex started was looking at high performing segments of the insurance marketplace that they could jump in with expertise and really understand what they're getting involved with and dive into kind of that silo business versus like all right, we're going to take all the personal lines. And so that's really where at least the concept started from, as we started diving into some of the actuarial research.
Ben:Oddly enough, while everybody else is turning and running. It is the perfect time to come in with a different perspective and allow us to really add value at a time when a lot of agents have never experienced the hard market before and the pain has never been as substantial as it is today, and so we can add some real value.
Jan:Yeah, I love that. Thanks for diving into that. I feel like we get this question quite a bit, so it's just nice to hear it come from you guys and your perspective on that too. One last question If you could give advice to other entrepreneurs, what would it be?
Carson:I guess the piece of advice that I would share with an entrepreneur that's just starting out is to find someone or a group of people who have a different skillset that compliments your own skillset, that you really trust and you enjoy spending time with them.
Jan:Yeah.
Carson:I see a lot of startups where you might have a couple of co-founders and they have the exact same skillset and they have a huge blind spot or the inability to actually bring their idea to market. If you can have a founding team that can actually execute on the idea and that has different areas of expertise, that's a great place to start.
Greg:One other thing to add there is really spend time validating your idea and spend time on that business plan. Also, often we see startups one or two founders get so excited about whatever it may be, and then you start to ask them who are you selling the product to? You know who is your customer base? What feedback have they? Have they given to you what? How's your revenue model work? How are you actually going to make money to sustain the business? Right, you know, oftentimes you know founders are just so excited about you know, whatever that little product is and that is a really important piece of it. But if you don't spend time validating and getting that feedback, that's where there's a big, you know, red flag and a risk point that you know. Unfortunately, we just see too many founders fall into that trap. And so, you know, the more of that work you can do up front to kind of get feedback and pivot a little bit, that's where we oftentimes see a lot of success If you can do those things, you know, earlier on in the process.
Ben:For me personally, I would encourage anybody to not be afraid to take risk and take risk early. There's something incredibly liberating, not just professionally but personally as well, by putting yourself on the line, believing in your idea and actually pursuing it and running at it. I have two daughters, one of which is four, the other one is 18 months, and my four-year-old has this unbelievably cool book that talks about what do you do with an idea? That's the title of the book, and it's all about how, at the beginning your idea, you don't know what to do with it. It's new, it makes you feel uncomfortable, but then you kind of nurture it and you grow with it and it goes everywhere with you and then eventually it breaks out and you change the world with your idea.
Ben:It's one of my favorite books to read to her because A I think it instills a little bit of entrepreneurial thinking in her. But what comes along with that is you have to be willing to take the risk and put yourself out there to do it. And so whenever I talk to my nephews or younger people coming up in the business or just younger people that I've met is I tell them to not be afraid to pursue their ideas and take a little risk when you're younger, because I promise you it pays off down the road. There are a lot of sleepless nights. Jared's had a lot more than I've had over the years with owning Flakestead and building and scaling that, but it all pays off in the end if you really work hard and if you pursue it.
Jan:I love that.
Jerod:Mine are kind of short and sweet and it's focus on the customer and hire people that are smarter than you. That's it.
Jan:Thank you so much for hiring me. Yeah, that's it.
Jerod:Thank you so much for hiring me.
Jan:That wraps up our first episode of Monoline Beyond the Coverage. Huge thanks to Ben Jared, greg and Carson for sharing their stories and if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn for more insights into the world of personal umbrella insurance. Thanks for listening.
