Re-invention is not Re-branding

By Marc DeLeonibus and Ben Clarke

Around 60 years ago, when coffee started increasing in popularity, customers walked into diners all over America and ordered black coffee. There was one kind of coffee. Black. You didn’t need any further specification beyond size which was small, medium, or large, so the conversations between diners and servers were, well, short and simple.

But, across the pond in Europe the coffee conversation started to change, and specialty coffees began to gain popularity. The diner-server conversations slowly got longer, and customers gradually became more interested in the product and consequently more demanding.

Enter Starbucks. Starbucks sought to bring this special “new” coffee product to America. Trouble was, it wasn’t new. It was quite old, but it was being reinvented.

So, today, when you walk into Starbucks you don’t order a small, medium, or large coffee, instead you ask for a tall, grande, or venti. This naming convention was not only an ode to the European (Italian) origins of Starbucks inspiration, but also a way to subtly shift the customer’s mindset to understand this was truly something new. It wasn’t just a rebranding of black coffee. Everything from the longer conversations with baristas to the homey settings of Starbucks stores was meant to send a clear message. Quality. This is not just black coffee you can get at any diner.

But what does any of this have to do with insurance, or penguins for that matter?

At Bold Penguin, we focus on quality. We’re creating something new for the industry, and not just rebranding an existing product. So, when someone says that we do lead generation, we immediately correct them. We don’t use the “L word” around here.

That's right. We don't say the “L word” at Bold Penguin. To us, the “L word” is 1930s black coffee: cheap, undifferentiated, and you can get a cup of it anywhere.

Allow us to explain how we’re reinventing things in commercial insurance. It all starts with the Bold Penguin marketplace. The center of our process.

The commercial applications that enter the Bold Penguin marketplace originate with our send-side partners: agents, insurance companies, brokers, or channel partners. These partners send opportunities into the marketplace which are too big or complex for them, too small/micro for them, or for which they may just not have a competitive market available. For example, a Main Street agent may not have the time or resources to handle a larger business inquiry, or a major broker may not be able to cost-justify the time he or she will spend on a $5,000 premium-generating opportunity. Whatever the situation, commercial applications are sent into the Bold Penguin marketplace not because they are "ineligible," or "a bad fit," but because send-side partners are not able to deal with them efficiently.

From here, our baristas (just kidding, our customer success advocates) take over, with a heavy focus on quality. We validate all the data that comes into the marketplace, both programmatically and via a human interaction. We work hard to map the right data fields, questions, question sets, field value formats, knock out questions, and the order of each. We do this to create a smooth, simple binding process, and if that’s not possible, then to provide a graceful exit for the insured, the agent/broker, and the insurance company involved, so that everyone’s time is valued. 

Reducing the time it takes to do this upfront work allows our partners to have dramatically improved hit rates, higher bind ratios and better overall customer experiences. 

For the Bold Penguin marketplace to function optimally, there are three legs of the stool which must all be supported equally in the process: the insureds, the agents, and the insurance companies. That means insureds are in the right NAICs category, not the one perceived to be right, but instead the real, correct category that Bold Penguin’s customer success advocates have validated. It also means we’ve gathered all the data needed for an efficient bind. We never go into the price or coverage on any insurance coverage, as that's the trusted advisor’s job, the focus is on information quality…always.

 At the same time, the Bold Penguin carrier rules and recommendation engine, Emperor, is hard at work. Each field gets verified by both technology and the human touch. The data is then normalized, standardized, and run against the thousands of rules per field that are reflective of carrier underwriting requirements for quoting. This results in thousands of combinations and tens of thousands of potential outcomes. In the end, the process narrows the options down, finally focusing on one to three recommended carriers based on a tenant-specific, carrier ranking algorithm. Said differently, each agent/broker on the Bold Penguin platform gets to decide how to rank outcomes. We don’t decide for them, often giving a best practice setting, and allowing for full flexibility in the ranking.

Just one recommended agent and one carrier set. The best-matching agent coupled with the best-matching carrier product set.

The final handoff, often a three-way phone conversation, is a verified, qualified, quote transfer, with all the data ready for a bind.

In addition to receiving the quote transfer, Bold Penguin allows for receiving partners to filter for what they can efficiently manage. Important to note that our process handles detailed information on a business, not just a name and phone number of someone that may be looking for insurance. And we track each receiving partner’s efficiency by measuring results and issuing a quality score proprietary to Bold Penguin.

So, with all this in mind, hopefully you can start to see how Bold Penguin set out to redefine the space we’re in, instead of paving existing pathways. We encourage all our partners to adopt the same verbiage as well (although if you order a ‘small’ we won’t throw you out).

Bold Penguin’s platform accelerates quote-to-bind time from weeks to minutes, helps partners generate millions of dollars in revenue by better targeting ideal clients, and monetizes risks that did not fit by sending them to the Bold Penguin marketplace. This approach of being the intelligence engine of the commercial insurance industry made some people uncomfortable, and questions inevitably get asked.

Are you like X? Do you do it like this company Y? Do you generate traffic? Are you an aggregator? The short answer is no. We do it like Bold Penguin.

 "If you want to build a great enterprise, you have to have the courage to dream great dreams. If you dream small dreams, you may succeed in building something small. For many people, that is enough. But if you want to achieve widespread impact and lasting value, be bold ."

-Howard Schultz, Executive Chairman, Starbucks

At Bold Penguin, we believe in BOLD. We believe in the trusted advisor. We believe in doing things that have never been done before, in being comfortably uncomfortable.

Ben Clarke and Marc DeLeonibus are the co-founders of Bold Penguin. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected], respectively.