How Long Does It Take to Place a Client in a Captive?

How Long Does This Actually Take From First Conversation to My Client Being in a Captive?

The honest answer is that it depends on how quickly documents come in and how ready your client is when the process starts. But here's what I can tell you. The captive industry has trained agents to expect a six month to two year sales cycle. We think that's ridiculous and we built our process to be faster than that.

When an agent in one of the calls I was on told me he had a client two years in the making, my response was the sales cycle's way too long. It shouldn't take that long and the reason it does in most captive programs is because the process is backwards. Agents are handed a massive submission template on day one and told to go collect everything. The client gets overwhelmed, the incumbent agent starts slow-rolling the document requests, and the whole thing stalls.

We flip that process. Before you ask your client for a single document, we want to talk to you about the account. Give us the basics. What are they spending, what do their losses look like broadly, what industry are they in. We'll tell you quickly whether this is worth pursuing. If it is, then you go back to the client with a pricing calculator that shows them what they've been leaving on the table. That's what motivates them to get you the documents.

Once you have the documents, five years of policies, audits, and loss runs for each line of coverage, we build the submission. We do the heavy lifting on the template. We come back to you with specific questions about specific losses when we need context. That's a much faster and less painful process than handing an agent a blank spreadsheet and saying good luck.

From the time we have clean, complete documents, the underwriting process typically takes a matter of weeks, not months. Your client receives a proposal, reviews it, decides whether to accept the offer, wires the initial premium on a quarterly basis, and gets coverage in place.

The total timeline from first conversation to coverage depends mostly on two things. How long it takes to get your client motivated enough to retrieve their documents, and how complete those documents are when they arrive. The agents who move fastest are the ones who use the pricing calculator upfront to create urgency around the numbers, and who set the upfront contract conversation before the document request so there are no surprises.

Start the conversation right and this process moves. We'll be right there with you the whole way.

It's always your client. Never ours.