So glad to be back home after six days in Detroit. Our office is flat in revenue this year, but up about 10% in retained income. Of course the discussion with corporate and my review centered around the revenue. I don't know, I am a bottom line guy. I could send the troops out and have them write under priced business and see our revenue spike up and lose money. I won't do that. The bottom line is profit and I have streamlined our operation whereby we are making more money on basically flat premium and I'm proud of that. Am I a little frustrated and slightly demotivated? Well, sure, but I really enjoy my job. I told Darla that I will retire at 65 and I will stick with that. We will have enough money to live on and I'll delay collecting Social Security until I turn 70. The issue we have is that Darla is seven years younger than me and when I sign up for Medicare, she has 7 years to carry health insurance until she is eligible. We will work that out. I'll be ready to retire. I have my friends asking me to come out and join them and play golf. I'll be there when I turn 65.
The meeting was very good and because of the 7 "Over BILLION dollar" Catastrophes that have occurred this year (California fires and 6 hurricanes), prices are expected to rise in 2018. The cost to the insurance industry of those 7 events is expected to be $100 BILLION dollars. The majority of that is Reinsurance and that price IS going up in 2018. All insurance is reinsured and when the cost of treaty reinsurance goes up that cost is passed on to policyholders in the form of higher rates. We expect about a 5% price increase and our company will write $1.4 billion in premiums in 2017, so we expect that to increase to at least $1.5 billion and our expectations are to write about $1.55 billion in 2017. The biggest issue we have as a company is getting our younger staff to realize that prices are going up. Most of them have never seen a hard market and have always sold price. We will have to sell expertise and service and try to take some of our competitors business that is also going up.
The pictures above from the meeting show the surprise visit from Jimmy Walker. He came in and spent the entire day and night with us. He took individual pictures with each of the managers and we rotated to his position by the golf simulator in small groups from our carrier meetings. I also hit the ball 9 feet and 5 inches from the hole and was the closest when I played. I got a high five from Jimmy. He left the meeting at 4 PM and went over to our Home office and met with all of the home office employees. He then met the managers back at the Detroit Zoo at 7 PM where we had a viewing of the Penguin sanctuary and then had dinner in the building with the dome shown above. That building houses the butterfly exhibit and has two stories for meetings. We had food stations set up with prime rib, Chinese food, Mexican food, salads and an apple crisp bar. It was fun in a way. I would have preferred to stay at the hotel, but Alan is a board member and benefactor at the zoo. I had a great conversation with Jimmy at the zoo and we talked about his wire to wire win at the PGA Championship in 2016. He said that he was "in the zone" on Sunday when he was playing in the final group and Jason Day (Number 1 in the world at the time) was in the group ahead of him going low. He won by one stroke when Jason eagled the final hole and Jimmy had to birdie it to beat him. That was by far the highlight of my trip.
We went downtown Wednesday night to the Detroit Athletic Club which we have done for the past four years. We had a social hour and then the graduation celebration for our Accelerated Management group. When we were leaving it was stacked up at the elevators as there were over 180 of us in the room. They wouldn't let us use the stairwell, which confused us, but we came to find out that our Human Resources VP had taken a header down the stairs and we saw her on the gurney with the paramedics. It turn out she cracked her head, had a concussion, broke her wrist and broke her kneecap. Sad situation. Apparently she just tripped heading down the stairs
The last picture is of some of the employees in my region that I work with and who were at the meetings. We had a work day on Saturday which is always fun after a busy week (Sarcasm intended). My flight out was 5:35 PM and I got back to Sacramento at about 9 PM. Darla and I went into the hot tub when I got home and then I went to bed as it was after 1 AM for me. Samson' reaction when I got home was hilarious. He was bouncing around and jumping and couldn't settle down. He was growling and dancing around and I finally had to hug him on the bed to get him to settle down. Darla and I had a good laugh over that.
They gave us some nice gifts this year. The VP gift is a blue tooth Sony speaker, the main gifts for all Managers was a specially designed watch that marks the 35th Leadership meeting. That watch is still being produced and will be delivered in December. The other gift was a BW "blackout" Titleist golf hat. Very nice this year.
I really suffered the jet lag this year and was to bed early both Wednesday and Thursday. I didn't go to the hospitality suite at all until Friday night and that was after the awards dinner and I had to be there to congratulate the winners. Peter in my office was a $1,000,000 income producer again and is now number 21 in the company. Congratulations to him. I had put our Operations Manager up for a Distinguished Service Award, but she did not make the cut.
I managed to get out and mow the lawn today and saw that the trees on the side yard have finally started to lose their leaves. I blow them off the lawn and pile them up and the city comes out each Monday and picks them all up. I also took a picture of the trees at the park that are all over 50 feet tall and will soon inundate my lawn and bushes with leaves. I'll have about a month of leave pickup and it will be over.
I will have a meeting with the entire staff tomorrow to go over the highlights of the meeting which include some new software that we have coming in 2017 that will include an optical reader that will pull information from applications sent into us and automatically load it into our quote portals. We will also move to Windows 10 in 2018. I have two young guys out of college that have been with me less than two years that will move into production. I continue to look for someone who is with a competitor in their 30's that I can move over to our office and bring their contacts and agents with us.
Well, I'm tired and have a full work week ahead. It looks like Mac and Sam went to the Las Vegas Knights game together today and he added a picture to his Instagram account that I stole. He also had a picture of Sam in her Halloween costume which ended up being the Mad Hatter and I grabbed that too.
I'll be at it again next week. Be well. Ciao
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