Scaling as a Brokerage Using Distribution Technology

There are many ways to grow a brokerage business, but some are easier than others. As in any business, a leveraged approach is always better at scaling – these are ones that aren’t held back by limits such as your staff, your time, or your own capital.

I want to share with you a way to grow as a brokerage that makes use of technology and self service, that doesn’t require you to hire new brokers to handle your growth in clients, and can in fact free up your brokers to work on real value production (using their expertise to provide advice).

Generating scale and growth without the constraints of a brokers time being put into each client requires a few steps:

Identifying opportunities of scale

An opportunity of scale is one where you can sell the same insurance product to a large number of customers. Let’s
assume you have an insurance product which is a really great product specifically for electrical contractors that
work on the poles and wires of Australia’s electricity grid.

In Australia there are approximately 185,200 electricians, but not all electricians do the same kind of work. You
might be tempted to broadly target electricians, but this is a fool’s errand. You’ll end up with an offering that’s
too general to make a decent profit, without a point of difference.

However, some rough maths done by ChatGPT tells me that the number of electrical contractors that work on the poles
and wires of Australia’s electricity grid totals around 8,000.

ChatGPT also tells me that premiums for electrical contractors are about $1,300 per annum – although this doesn’t
consider the unique risks associated with those working on poles and wires in Australia’s electricity grid, so it
could be higher. Still, 8000 x $1,300 = ~$10m total market potential. This represents significant scale.

There are two industry associations whose members service poles and wires:

1. National Electrical and Communications Association (NECA)
2. Energy Networks Australia (ENA)

This gives us an easy way to target them.

I’m going to share a very different type of opportunity to help you to understand that there are many different ways to find scale in insurance within an industry niche.

Let’s take a look at a company which has been in the news quite a lot since their 2024 ASX listing: Guzman y Gomez (GYG). As of February 2025, they have 239 restaurants, and plan to open 31 in the fiscal year.

Each of their franchises need to take out insurance. As a franchisee, if you have an insurance option that’s endorsed by GYG, and has been tailored to the GYG business, you know it’s going to offer the best value and coverage to ensure the success of your business, and GYG (like any franchisor) are going to only endorse a product that they believe properly protects their franchisees. This presents an opportunity for brokerages to tailor a solution to franchisors, of which there are so many in this country.

Premiums for a high volume restaurant business covering PL, Property & Equipment, BI and other relevant insurances could be in excess of $15k per annum.

So 260 x 15k = ~ $3.9m total market potential (for a single franchisor), and for a business like GYG, this comes with a healthy growth rate of around 10% per annum.

Tailoring a product for your niche

One of the key elements that makes this work is that you are tailoring a product for your niche. If you sell a standard product, it doesn’t offer any value over the businesses going out to the market. But if you can provide a tailored product, you get the following benefits:

1. Buy-in from the association, franchise group, or any organisation that maintains a relationship with your target
   audience.
2. Immediate access to your target audience if you receive endorsement from such an organisation.
3. A loyal customer – they will not go elsewhere if their product uniquely meets their needs.
4. Better value for the customer – they will not have covers or limits they don’t need, and will have coverage,
   limits and add-ons that make sense for their business.
5. Better margins for the insurer – Knowing the risks within the target market allows them to better understand and
   price risk, and typically businesses associated with franchisors or industry associations educate their members
   to minimise those risks, leading to lower claims and better profit margins for the carrier. As a broker this
   helps to secure capacity for the long term too.
6. Higher margins / commission – given the uniqueness of the proposition, you don’t have to compromise on
   commissions.

No doubt as a brokerage you have relationships with insurers and underwriting agencies, and you can work with them to provide a product. However, uBind has relationships with many forward thinking insurers and MGAs, and can help put this together for you.

How to capture the market share for your niche

There are a number of ways to capture the market share for your niche. Whilst opportunities related to organisations such as franchisors and industry associations are a great way to capture market share easily, other niches still represent great opportunities, despite not having such a body in charge. In such cases, targeting them can be as simple as:

1. Targeting news sites those niches read and subscribe to
2. Doing a JV with a common supplier which those niches all use
3. Targeted digital advertising, including Google Adwords and social media
4. Doing a JV with educational organisations which are used by industry niche participants
5. Attending conferences, events and expos which target the niche (for example in the dental industry there are many events and conferences which dental businesses attend)

This is an area which you can get really creative with, and it’s quite exciting to be able to find an approach that works. The great thing here is that if you can identify a creative opportunity instead of paying for advertising, you’ll typically get:

• Access to your target audience much more easily, cheaply, or sometimes for free
• Stickiness: It will be hard for someone to come and take your market share in the future.

When working with an organisation such as a franchisor or industry body, they typically require their members to have insurance, and this is a pain point for them to manage and keep track of. If you have a technology partner that can provide a portal for them to log into to track, manage and report on this, and notify them of policy lapses or cancellations, this becomes an easy sell.

How to service your niche without hiring a team of brokers

This is where great technology comes into play. You’ll need to make use of an insurtech platform which provides an online user journey for your customers to quote, bind and pay for their insurance. Such a tech platform should also support:

• A broking portal so you can transact on behalf of customers and assist them, if they need help, and portal logins for the managing organisation
• A provider that understands how to design a user experience that removes or reduces friction, so that customers can fully transact, without getting stuck and having to call your brokers, or worse yet, go elsewhere because they found it too difficult
• A client portal so that your clients can log in, view their policy documents, download certificates of currency, make changes to their policy and lodge a claim
• An automated renewal process, so that clients are notified automatically by email and SMS of their need to update their business turnover and complete their renewal online, once again without any broker involvement (unless they specifically need advice).
• A provider that can easily integrate with your broking systems, the carrier’s systems and has great reporting capabilities, so that there’s no manual handling, and you can easily track and manage performance, optimising your venture for success and growth

At uBind, we’ve built our technology platform to be the best in the biz for these scenarios. Please don’t hesitate to reach out for a chat.

Growing your revenue

You may think that having a delivered a great solution to an industry niche, with commissions rolling in on auto-pilot is probably enough, but there are further benefits and opportunities that come from this approach and allow you to grow your revenue as a brokerage:

1. Natural growth – assuming you choose the right industry or organisation, you will likely achieve natural growth of upwards of 5% per annum, and then commissions will grow along with premiums that rise every year
2. Client growth – Having a digital, self-service offering that’s easy means that in today’s fast paced world of time poor business owners, you will naturally attract new clients to the scheme. We often see schemes endorsed by an industry association where non-association members purchase the insurance pack in droves, because it’s exactly what they need, and it’s super convenient.
3. Cross selling – You now have all of these new customers from your scheme. If you’ve not yet worked out what the lifetime value of a customer is I suggest you do it. If you’re doing things right, these businesses will need commercial motor insurance, some will want D&O, and many will want personal lines, boat / pleasurecraft and so on. Suddenly a $5m premium pool turns into $15m for your brokerage.

Rinse and repeat

Once you’ve done this with one franchisor, industry association or niche, you can rinse and repeat. There are too many of these untapped opportunities out there, and with the right technology solution, it opens them right up.

If you’d like uBind to help you scale your brokerage business, then reach out – let’s have a chat.