Agency Profile: The Purple Cows
BY RONIMARIE ACORD
Stratton Agency
San Carlos, California
Founded: 1914
Employees: 39
For a decade, a controlled
substance and drivers carrying less
than $20 have secured
year-over-year growth for Stratton
Agency.
“You can’t expect your producers to
be successful if they’re offering the
same products and pricing as every
other agent,” says James Marek,
CEO. “You have to find a way to be
that ‘purple cow’ and stand out in a crowd.”
The lessons of Seth Godin’s book, “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable,” have served
Marek and his team well. With five producers, five full-time employees in China and branches in San Ramon
and Roseville, California and Phoenix, Arizona, this Best Practices Agency earned gross revenues of $4.9 million
in 2016.
RYAN HEADLEY, COO
We are successful because we embrace new technology. Stratton is a strategic partner and beta agent for
Applied Systems products and also partners with ReSourcePro, through which we have five full-time employees
in Jinan, China. At the end of the business day, the U.S. team hands over any backlog of administrative work to
the China team. This improves our customer service, as we are able to complete client requests much faster. The
arrangement gives our U.S. account managers and producers more time to be customer facing, resulting in
increased up- and cross-selling.
JAMES MAREK, CEO
We saw an opportunity to be pioneers with our cannabis and Pizzasurance programs. But not many carriers
write cannabis business, and most avoid the non-owned auto risks associated with young drivers delivering
pizza. Proving compliance was key to convincing them to write the coverage. We are creating software that
will allow cannabis clients to track their various state and local licenses, employee medical marijuana record
cards and more. For pizzerias, we developed a cloud-based driver compliance management platform—StratTrax—to track acceptable driver guidelines and auto ID and motor vehicle records, and to notify store owners
and drivers of compliance issues.
Because we now have the highest level of compliance in the industry with loss ratios that are much lower
than the industry average, our Pizzasurance clients are doing less work and paying lower premiums. We
expect to see substantial growth of both the pizza and budding cannabis programs. As states legalize medical
and recreational use of cannabis, there will be unlimited opportunities to help educate these industry owners
on risk management and compliance.
Our human resources and safety division is becoming a bigger part of our overall risk management approach,
and we will continue its expansion. We also hope to add a third program to the division.
JESSE PARENTI, DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS
We successfully target our cannabis and Pizzasurance niches with online SEO marketing. We also find success
attending trade shows and corporate franchise conventions for the programs. We train our producers to see
the bigger picture and to be success partners for our clients. We find that clients respond to our professional
risk management approach by focusing less on price and more on proper protection for their businesses. And
when Stratton’s focus on technology allows us to provide them with solutions that make their businesses run
more efficiently and profitably, it becomes a whole lot easier for our producers to be successful—and for us to
retain them.
Photo by Anthony Lindsey