Reading time: 5 minutes

There is a quiet dysfunction that plagues even the best brokerages.

It’s the account manager who doesn't remember the coverage conversation from six months ago. It’s the service team that used to show up in person, now everything is on zoom. It’s the senior partner who shows up for the sale, then vanishes until the renewal.

How do we know this?

Because we lived in it for decades.

We thrived inside the machine. We did exactly what the industry required: we wore "exhaustion" like a badge of honor. Long hours. Weekly travel. Drinking too much.

We kept telling ourselves, "It's just the business. It's just the way it is." Reality: it was grueling and massively unhealthy.

It became crystal clear when my co-founder TASH and I walked away from it all at the end of 2022.

It took us six months just to decompress.

I spent that time reading Ryan Holiday books. Near everyone recommended reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, since we were starting an insurance brokerage business and a media company at the same time. I picked up my Bible again.

Then a friend recommended The Blue Zones Kitchen.

I started studying Okinawa and Sardinia. Places where longevity is a system, not an accident.

Meanwhile, Tash was coming to the same conclusion from a different angle. She spent that year getting certified as a Pilates instructor. Four hundred fifty hours of training.

She watched high performers show up depleted, push through, and then return to environments that broke them down. Her insight was sharp: "The workout wasn't the problem. The recovery system didn't exist."

We realized the industry’s problem wasn't training, technology, or talent.

The problem was that the people serving you are running on empty. So we asked: "What if we built a brokerage using Blue Zone rules?"

A place where high performance doesn't require normalizing anxiety.

Here is what we built. And why a "Corporate Blue Zone" is the safest place for your risk program to live.

The Insurance Blue Zone

The biggest risk to your insurance program isn't the market. It's your broker's burnout.

The traditional brokerage model runs on churn. Mega-firms hire talented people, grind them down with administrative chaos and 60-hour weeks, and replace them every 18 months. For clients, this means a revolving door of account managers who don't know your business, don't remember your history, and are too exhausted to fight for your claims.

You can't get elite outcomes from a broken human engine.

We built something different. Inspired by the world's Blue Zones. Regions like Okinawa and Sardinia where people live longest due to their systems, not their genetics—we designed an environment for professional longevity. We call it the Insurance Blue Zone.

This is an operating system that produces better results for clients through three disciplines: integrated wellness, ownership alignment, and service excellence as a natural byproduct.

When your broker thrives, you benefit.

Wellness Is Integrated Into Operations

Some firms talk about wellness. We built it into how we work.

The traditional model treats exhaustion as a badge of honor. Sleep is weakness. Vacation is for closers. The result is brokers operating in survival mode, reactive, foggy, and making mistakes they wouldn't make with a clear head. You're trusting your coverage to someone running on caffeine and cortisol.

We rejected that model completely.

At LION, wellness isn't a perk buried in an HR handbook. It's integrated into the culture and driven by leadership. Wellness credits for fitness, massage, or whatever keeps you sharp. Midday workouts that are encouraged, not tolerated. Team retreats built around physical challenge and recovery, not just happy hours. Rest treated as a performance drug, not a reward for hitting quota.

This creates brokers with the mental clarity to spot gaps that exhausted competitors miss. The 8-12 coverage holes we find in most programs we review? They get found because our team has the cognitive bandwidth to look for them.

We go hard. But we recover harder. And sustained clarity beats heroic chaos every time.

Ownership Creates Genuine Buy-In

Nobody washes a rental car.

In the mega-broker model, your account manager is an employee hitting a number. When the quota is met, or when the grind becomes unbearable, they leave. Your institutional knowledge walks out the door with them, and you spend six months training their replacement.

We built an equity structure where key team members share in the success of the firm. Real ownership, real upside, real skin in the game.

This changes everything. When your broker is an owner, they're not just bought into their quota—they're bought into the client, the process, the outcome. They stay because they're building something, not just earning a paycheck. They care because caring is aligned with their own interests.

The result for clients: you work with the same senior partners for years, not months. We remember the claim you had five years ago, and we use that institutional memory to negotiate the renewal you have today. Continuity is a byproduct of how we're structured.

Ninety-two percent team retention over twenty months. In an industry built on churn, that number is the proof.

Service Excellence Becomes Natural

When people are taken care of, genuinely happy, and actually want to be there, you almost don't have to teach client service. It emerges naturally.

This is the part most firms get backward. They try to train service excellence into burned-out, disengaged employees. They build scripts and protocols to force behaviors that should be instinctive. You can't manufacture caring.

The Blue Zone approach inverts the equation. We create an environment where people thrive physically, professionally, and financially. They're not grinding toward an exit; they're building something they own. They're not competing against teammates; they're collaborating as an ensemble where knowledge flows freely because everyone wins when anyone wins.

In that environment, exceptional client service isn't a mandate. It's the natural output of the system.

Clients feel the difference. Responsiveness that doesn't require chasing and proactive communication that doesn't require reminding. A team that remembers your context and builds on previous conversations instead of starting over every call. The kind of service that makes you feel like you're our only client! Because genuinely engaged people have the capacity to make you feel that way.

Thirty percent faster project delivery. Sustainable systems outperform frantic ones.

The Client Benefit

We built the Insurance Blue Zone because thriving brokers produce better outcomes for clients.

The exhausted broker misses the exclusion. The disengaged account manager doesn't fight for your claim. The revolving door means nobody remembers your history. Every dysfunction in the traditional model eventually shows up in your results.

The Blue Zone fixes the human engine so the commercial outcomes follow. Sharper analysis. Fiercer advocacy. Institutional memory that compounds over years. Service that doesn't require heroics because the system makes excellence sustainable.

Your broker's wellbeing isn't separate from your coverage quality. It's the foundation of it.

Thank you for reading today's edition!

Want to share this edition via text, email or social media? Simply copy-and-paste the link below:

​http://lionspecialty.ck.page/posts/why-your-broker-s-burnout-is-your-exposure​

And if this briefing was forwarded to you, subscribe directly here.

Stay Covered,

TASH & FLIP