Problems › Hiring a Strategic Planning Consultant › Insurance Brokers
A plan and a decision are different objects, and the annual process reliably produces the first while the business needed the second. This page works through it for insurance brokers specifically — including an unedited excerpt from a real analysis of an insurance broker.
A plan and a decision are different objects, and the annual process reliably produces the first while the business needed the second. For insurance brokers, this shows up in a particular place. The numbers that carry the answer are 19.0 and 91.2, and the complication specific to this industry is that 71 percent of revenue flows through carrier commissions while shifting an incremental 8 percent to fees would require replacing 142 renewal accounts and cut near-term margin by 1.8 to 2.3 points. The general version of this problem and the one you are actually in have different first moves.
Annual planning has a shape almost everywhere. Each function proposes what it would do with more resource, the numbers are added, the total is unaffordable, everything is scaled back proportionally, and the result is published as a strategy. Nothing in that process requires anyone to choose between two things they both want, which is what strategy is. It requires them to accept a haircut, which is what budgeting is. Both are necessary; only one of them is being bought.
The consultant is often hired to break that pattern and frequently cannot, because the constraint is not facilitation. The constraint is that the trade-off is politically expensive and the process is designed to avoid making anyone lose. An outside facilitator makes the conversation better organised without changing who has to lose, and the output reverts to a list.
The second common reason to hire one is legitimate and different: nobody internally has the time or the neutrality to assemble the evidence. Somebody has to pull five years of numbers, disaggregate them, and build the cases. That is real work, it is genuinely hard to do while running the business, and it is the part where an outsider adds obvious value — though it is also the part that is now largely automatable.
Corporate Strategy & Transformation (catalog id t5) does the second job: it assembles the evidence, builds the options with their arithmetic, and states what each one costs and what would have to be true for it to be right. It does not run your offsite and cannot make anyone accept a loss. Where the blocker is genuinely political rather than analytical, a good facilitator is the correct purchase and no software substitutes for one.
These three together are the signature. One on its own usually points somewhere else.
✓ The last plan contained no decision to stop doing something
✓ Initiative lists carry forward year to year with the same items unstarted
✓ The plan is written after the budget rather than deciding it
The move that usually makes it worse. Hiring a facilitator to fix a problem of authority, which produces a better-run meeting that reaches the same non-decision.
It is for you if you run or finance an insurance broker and the last plan contained no decision to stop doing something. It is the situation where the numbers are available but nobody has put them in an order that produces a decision.
It is not for you if Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
Below is an excerpt from a real run of this analysis on an insurance broker. It is a sample profile rather than a customer, and it is unedited engine output — this is the format you get, on your own numbers.
The subject is Kesterline Risk Partners, a sample company profile used for testing rather than a customer — 47.8 million dollars in total revenue from commissions and fees.
Excerpt from a real Percision run · Pricing Strategy · sample company profile
The move. Convert 460 commission accounts to fee retainers, funding a $3-5M digital workbench from productivity gains while staying inside the $4.8m investment ceiling.
| Investment required | $3.0-5.0M total (base $3.0M, upside $5.0M for accelerated digital workbench) |
| Expected return | 3.2-4.8× over 36 months on $3-5M investment, based on +$4.2-8.5M incremental fee revenue at 35-45% gross margin versus current 19% operating margin. |
| Revenue, year 1 | $50.1-51.8M total revenue (+$2.3-4.0M incremental fee) |
| Revenue, year 2 | $54.4-57.9M total revenue (+$6.6-10.1M incremental fee) |
| Revenue, year 3 | $58.2-64.8M total revenue (+$10.4-17.0M incremental fee) |
| Exit criteria | Strategy should be reversed if, within 12 months, pilot conversion rate falls below 15% OR incremental churn exceeds 5% OR producer productivity drops below $600k average; OR if, within 24 months, cumulative fee revenue does not reach $6.6M incremental run-rate. |
This is one move out of a full analysis. Read a complete report — every page, no email required.
This question routes to Corporate Strategy & Transformation, one of 29 engagements the platform runs. For insurance brokers it works through 19.0, 91.2, 664 and 31, then produces the sequence rather than a list of options — which move first, what it funds, and the observation that would say the sequence is wrong.
You watch the analysis get built before paying anything. Read a complete report here if you would rather see the depth first.
An independent facilitator running an offsite and producing a plan is commonly £8k–£30k. A firm running a full planning cycle with analysis is £60k–£200k. The range is wide because the two jobs are different: one is facilitation, one is evidence. Decide which you are short of before you compare quotes, because the cheap version of the wrong one is still wasted.
Short enough that the trade-offs are visible. A useful plan states where you will win, what you will stop, and the two or three things that must be true. Most of the length in a typical planning document is evidence supporting decisions that were already made, which belongs in an appendix nobody needs to read twice.
Set direction over three and commit resource over one. Three-year financial detail is invented precision in almost every business, and treating it as a commitment makes the plan brittle. The parts that genuinely need a three-year view are capacity, capital and capability, because those are the ones that cannot be changed inside a year.
Materially, yes. 71 percent of revenue flows through carrier commissions while shifting an incremental 8 percent to fees would require replacing 142 renewal accounts and cut near-term margin by 1.8 to 2.3 points — which changes both the diagnosis and the order of the fixes. The metrics that decide it here are 19.0, 91.2, 664, and an answer built on industry-general benchmarks will usually point at the wrong one first.
Less than most people expect. Your last twelve months of revenue and cost split the way you already split it, plus whatever you hold on 19.0 and 91.2. The analysis is explicit about what it is assuming where your data stops, which is more useful than waiting for numbers you may never have.
Percision is the wrong tool if you already know the answer and only need execution capacity, or if the business is pre-revenue — then the constraint is evidence about the market, not analysis of your own figures. Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library. Also wrong if you need facilitation, politics, or someone to sit with a lender or buyer. Those are human jobs.
Percision is not a lawyer, tax advisor, auditor, licensed appraiser, clinical or regulatory filer, or an AI implementation shop. It does not do HR casework, creative-only brand work, or impersonate a named consulting firm. It is a strategy analysis engine — not a template library.
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