Louisiana’s Eagan Insurance: Carrying on a Family Tradition
Marc Eagan says he’s fortunate that his four children grew up in and around the insurance business. For Eagan, president of Eagan Insurance Agency located in the New Orleans-area, it means his firm is well-situated to carry on the family tradition.
Marc Eagan himself is a third-generation leader of the company, which was founded in 1954 by his father and four uncles. With roots as an industrial life insurance business specializing in pre-need insurance policies, Eagan Insurance today remains family-owned. But it has grown into a large independent property/casualty agency that appears on Insurance Journal‘s Top 100 Privately Held Independent Property/Casualty Agencies list, as well as IJ’s list of Top 50 Personal Lines Agencies.
Two of Eagan’s sons are producers, a third is in marketing and his daughter is involved in digital marketing and advertising for the firm.
Eagan believes the key to success for each of them and for the company is to make sure they are not competing against one another. Instead, each has his or her own separate area in which to shine.
In a way his children also act as magnets, bringing their peers into the company as well. These friend and acquaintances “are in their 20s, same as my kids. They are above average intelligence. We know the parents in a lot of cases. We test them, bring them on and hopefully they will be part of the firm, as well. We cherry pick the good kids out there. That has led, a lot, to our success,” Eagan says.
Property Focus
While Eagan Insurance is both a personal lines and commercial lines agency, it’s heavier on the commercial side of the book. About 20 percent of the agency’s business is in personal lines and about 78 percent of the agency’s volume is commercial, with life and health policies making up the remaining 2 percent, Eagan says.
“We seem to do property very, very well,” Eagan says.
Even so, the property side of the business has “been a challenge, particularly in South Louisiana, with the windstorm exposure. … It’s a tougher class to place these days, particularly since Hurricane Katrina.”
August of this year marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and it’s only since late in 2014 that Eagan has seen improvement in the property market.
“Really, just in the last year, about nine years after the storm, … have we seen the reinsurance cost drive down considerably. That has been reflected in the rates to us, through the insurance companies. We are seeing, even in some cases, double-digit rate decreases because of that in the property side,” Eagan says.
Deductible features are going down as well. “Where they used to be, maybe, 3 and 5 percent deductible percentages – 3 and 5 percent percentages on the values — now, we are looking at maybe 1 and 2 percent,” Eagan says.
While his agency has a healthy expertise in property insurance, Eagan recognizes that a shift toward specialization within the property environment will enable the firm to become even stronger.
“Within that property realm, I really think there are areas that the insurance companies are becoming specialists in and doing very well with it from a profit standpoint. They are providing world-class coverages to industries such as the medical industry, or technology, social services, education,” Eagan says.
That shift in carrier focus has inspired Eagan Insurance’s management to encourage staff to develop specialty areas.
“It’s forced us to … go to our staff and say, particularly to a young guy starting up, ‘Pick two things that you really want to do well in, and just learn as much as you can about, say, technology and social services, … and become an expert in that. You’ll be the go-to guy for that.'”
When you call on a client or potential client, ‘”we want you to know as much about that industry, or much of that business as they do, and you’ll have a good shot. You’ll have a greater chance, greater percentage of writing that account, because of your knowledge and specialty,'” he says.
Eagan concedes that it’s sometimes difficult for the younger producers to specialize because they are for the most part trying to write everything they can just to get ahead.
But “sometimes they need to really step back a little bit, and do a little bit more studying and concentration, and in the long run, they’ll be a better producer,” he says.
While personal lines are not a big part of the company percentage-wise, “we do have quite a bit of income on the personal line side. One of our areas of concentration has been on the affluent side,” says.
With that in mind, the company created a separate division — Eagan Private — that has dedicated account executives focused on homes over a million dollars and their affluent owners.
“We are really trying to gear ourselves to more of the sophisticated buyer of insurance, who knows people that can fix things, when things happen, instead of band aid their homes,” Eagan says. “They have all the toys that need special coverage, as well.”
Plus, many of the affluent clients own their own businesses, which in turn creates more opportunities with those clients.
A Wake Up Call
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the costliest hurricane ever to hit the United States, causing more than $41 billion in insured property damage (in 2005 dollars), not counting flood damage covered by the National Flood Insurance Program, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Katrina and its aftermath had a long-lasting impact on not only the property insurance market in southern Louisiana but agents and insurers, as well, Eagan says.
“After Katrina, when a lot of companies came in and denied claims because of flood waters, the clients thought that they should have been paid under the homeowners’ policy or the business owners’ policy, and they filed suit against the insurance company and also against the agents,” Eagan says.
Eagan Insurance, along with just about every agent in the New Orleans-area, was hit with a wide range of post-Katrina claim disputes, he says.
“Fortunately, a lot of those were not paid or they were settled,” Eagan says. Around the third year after the storm, especially, insurance companies started to settle a lot of claims and the suits dissipated.
“It was definitely a problem, and it was a wakeup call to all of the independent agents in our area, to improve our documentation, to do a better job with our clients, information-wise, and to let them know exactly what is not covered,” says.
A Driving Force
Eagan recently was named a “driving force” in the New Orleans area by New Orleans CityBusiness because of his community involvement and the contributions he’s made in the decade following Hurricane Katrina. But community involvement hasn’t always been a part of his work/life strategy.
“When I was just learning the business, in my 20s and early 30s, I really didn’t get involved much in the community. I really focused on trying to become a student of the insurance business, and just busy, busy, busy, doing it, doing it doing it … selling insurance and trying to build a nice book of business,” Eagan says. “As I got a little older and got involved on some boards and some nonprofit charity work, I realized that it’s very important to be part of the community.”
He also came to realize that he was writing lots of business “by taking part and not really trying to sell insurance, but just being around and rubbing elbows with the right people. It’s really come back.”
The people he works with in the community need somebody to write their insurance after all.
“I got to know them, and worked with them, and they entrusted us with their insurance. We really wrote a lot of insurance through our community effort,” he says. “I’m a big supporter of firms and individuals doing that now.”
He now urges his younger staff to get “involved in community work, because they touch so many different people, and it’s a people business. As you get around more and more people, you are going to write more insurance.”