Insurance Agency Business Planning Made Simple
Knowing where you're headed can help you get through challenging times.
A NextAgency Resource
Last Updated: May 10, 2026
Synopsis:
Life and health insurance agencies that operate with a written business plan are roughly twice as likely to grow 20% or more year-over-year than those that don’t, according to the Trailblazed Sales Project Study. The study, conducted by the Alan Katz Group with Miller Marketing Insights, surveyed 200 health insurance agents in seven states. The study found that the majority of agencies with less than 20% growth had no business plan at all. Once you have your plan in place, agency management software and insurance agency-specific CRM tools designed specifically for life and health insurance agencies can help you successfully implement it.
This article shows how to create a business plan for your agency that you and your team will actually use. The key: keep it simple and focus on results, not activities.
Picture two captains sailing through dangerous water. A storm is closing in. Both crews count on their captain to see them through.
One captain laid out a course before the weather turned. She knows exactly where she’s going — a sheltered cove on the lee side of an island. As she manages each oncoming wave, she’s also making her way toward that sanctuary.
The other captain has no map and no destination in mind. He’s responding to each wave as it comes.
Which crew would you rather be in?
Stormy seas lie ahead for agencies selling benefits, senior, and life policies. There are new products like ICHRA that create both opportunities and dangers. There’s drastically diminished commissions — and sometimes elimination — on Medicare Advantage plans by many carriers. Then there’s artificial intelligence, which some companies (like NextAgency) are using to amplify the value of agents while others are using it to displace them. Throw in inflation, economic uncertainty, and the challenges small businesses face even in the best of times and stormy weather doesn’t describe what’s ahead.
The Trailblazed Sales Project Study, conducted by the Alan Katz Group and Miller Marketing Insights addressed a simple question: what do high-growth producers do differently than their less-successful colleagues? “High-growth” was defined as year-over-year increase in sales of 20% or more.
Among the findings: high-growth producers were twice as likely to have a detailed business plan as low- and no-growth producers. Even low-growth producers — those whose business grew, but by less than 20% — were 20% more likely to have a plan than producers whose business had declined.
The study found that 55% of low-growth producers and over 60% of no-growth producers had no business plan at all. That doesn’t mean they don’t have drive, talent, or a work ethic. It means they apply those assets with no clear destination in mind.
Search online or ask your favorite AI for advice on business plans. You’ll see scores of articles all definitively claiming a business plan needs five, 10 or even more sections. But no one becomes an insurance agent because they like paperwork (it’s just part of the job). So I suggest keeping it simple — use just four elements that each answer a critical question:
Mission: To define your agency’s future (one per agency)
Strategy: To explain how you will achieve your mission (3-5 is usually enough)
Goals: To describe what needs to happen to implement those strategies (perhaps 5-to-7 per strategy)
Milestones: To lock down the discrete steps needed to achieve your goals (as many as you need and can tolerate)
What’s important is to be specific enough that if you gave your plan to a stranger — or a new hire — they would immediately know how to pitch in to help.
Creating a mission statement
Your mission is your agency’s north star. It is your destination — that first captain’s safe harbor. The more specific it is the more achievable it is.
A weak mission: “We will be a leading agency in our community.”
What does “leading” mean? Leading in what — number of clients, revenue, retention, market share? Over what time frame? Nobody on your team can act on this mission because nobody knows what success looks like.
A stronger mission: “We will increase overall commission revenues 20% each year for three years.”
That’s a target a team can work toward.
The difference between strategy and goals
Your strategy is how you plan to hit your mission. If your mission is to grow commission revenue 20% per year, your strategies could include expanding the types of policies you sell, cross selling more to your existing block of business, or implementing a new marketing strategy. Again, specificity matters.
Goals are where the rubber meets the road. They state what must get done to achieve your strategies. Goals don’t describe activities, they lay out the results of those activities. The strategy of expanding an agency’s product line generates a goal like: Develop and launch a direct-mail marketing campaign reaching 10,000 seniors and generating 200 sales of Medicare Supplement plans by January 1st.
Notice what that goal is not. It’s not “hold five seminars.” That describes what someone will do. Goals describe what someone will get done.
This distinction matters. Activity-based goals are easy to hit and prove almost nothing. “We held six seminars” — congratulations, you exceeded expectations. “We held five seminars generating $10,000 in commission revenue from Product X sales by October 1” is a result. Either it happens or it doesn’t.
Note: the search I mentioned earlier will turn up lots of business plan approaches that reverse the definitions of strategies and goals. It doesn’t matter. Use whatever works for you.
Generate SMART goals
One way to ensure your goals are result oriented is to make them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Agreed to, Realistic, and Timely.
Specific and measurable mean everyone understands what the target and how it will be assessed. Agreed to means everyone on your team (whether partners, employees, or carrier reps) are onboard with the plan. Realistic means that while it’s OK to have stretch goals, they can’t be impossible. Selling 10 times more policies next year is not a goal, it’s a wish. Timely means there’s a finish line for your strategies and goals — an end to the race.
Milestones: the agency to-do list
Milestones are the bite-sized steps required to achieve each goal. They’re your agency’s to-do list. This is where accountability is assigned and accountability is what gets things done. Milestones need to identify who is going to what by when. Without these explicit assignments, it’s likely nothing gets done. And that means goals aren’t met and strategies aren’t achieved.
A weak milestone: “Get all mailers sent out by August 1st.” Is vague.
A strong milestone: “Sally will select and contract with a mail house to manage mailer production and distribution by March 1st.”
Every producer is the quarterback of a team — even a producer working from a spare bedroom. The team may consist of a spouse handling the books, carrier reps, a general agency, friendly peers, and the kid who built your website.
A business plan is the huddle that gets everyone running the same play.
Imagine a football team is five yards from the end zone with ten seconds on the clock. The quarterback enters the huddle and encourages everyone to “do their best.” Everyone on the team has imagined this moment. The problem is they imagined it differently. So the running back fakes inside and breaks left for the goal line. The wide receiver slips between defenders to the back of the corner. The tight end blocks to give the quarterback more time. The quarterback drops back to throw to a tight end who isn’t there. Game over.
This is how most agencies run. Everyone has a general sense of an unspecified mission — sell more! — but they lack a shared understanding of how they can help make that happen. So they work at cross purposes or fail to support what one another because they don’t know how. Effort gets wasted. Morale suffers.
Putting your plan in writing is critical. It forces you and your team to think through your mission, strategies, goals, and milestones. This in and of itself is useful. But real power of creating a business plan is using it.
Modern insurance agency management software like NextAgency can help you do that. The integrated CRM in these platforms helps you all see the status of each sale and service issues. Your plan’s Milestones can be turned into tasks or checklists. The Timeline is an agencywide and team member-specific to-do list. Dashboards and reports help you measure progress.
We discuss the importance of tracking your agency’s implementation of your plan in the companion to this article, Using Your Insurance Agency’s Business Plan. For now, keep captains facing rough seas that we discussed previously. The captain with a plan couldn’t avoid the storm. She could just act more confidently, quickly, and effectively to survive it.
Key Takeaways:
- Life and health insurance agencies with a written business plan are roughly twice as likely to grow 20% or more year-over-year than agencies without one, according to the Trailblazed Sales Project Study of 200 health insurance agents in seven states.
- The same study found 55% of low-growth producers and over 60% of no-growth producers had no business plan at all.
- An effective insurance agency business plan needs only four elements: a mission, three to five strategies, results-oriented goals, and milestones that assign who does what by when.
- Goals should describe results, not activities — “generate $10,000 in commission revenue by October 1” is a goal; “hold five seminars” is not.
- An agency management system like NextAgency turns a plan into action by converting milestones into tasks and checklists and measuring progress through dashboards and reports.
Learn More:
.
Author Information
Trailblazed: Proven Paths to Sales Success by Alan Katz (NextAgency’s co-founder) and columns he wrote for Benefits Selling