“…A leader in their industry, recognized as the #2 broker for Chubb Insurance in the technology realm.

Insurenewmedia, however, has roots far deeper than the burgeoning New Media industry. Its parent company, Gaston & Associates, is a 4th generation family-owned insurance broker.

Fred is now the 4th generation active in the business started by his great-grandfather, Frederick K. Gaston, in 1895.

Gaston & Associates, Inc., has strong roots in the New York insurance community. In 1984, it shifted its focus to small to medium size concerns, with special emphasis on insuring financial institutions, technology companies and high net worth individuals.

It’s clear that Fred has been evolving his business idea and thinking deeply about his place in the broader marketplace. He is giving strong attention to his brand promise.

Fred began branding Insurenewmedia in 1999. His idea was to provide property and casualty insurance for people doing business online.

Rather than becoming a pure-play Internet company, Fred decided to take full advantage of the resources available to him through Gaston & Associates, making Insurenewmedia a division of his family’s existing company.

Insurenewmedia has its own employees, but it exists- literally and figuratively- under the same roof as Gaston & Associates.

Fred feels very strongly about the impact the Internet has had on the growth of the company.

"Our primary channel for obtaining new business has always been the internet, from day one. We’ve continued to develop our technology along the lines of that channel.

Unlike a traditional agency with a sales force who goes out there knocking on doors and making cold calls, we market exclusively through the Internet."

Once prospective clients are brought to the website, they’re introduced to Insurenewmedia’s "killer app," an online system called The Coverage Coach.

"We want to try to impress on people, from the first time they touch on our site, that we are bringing them a unique experience, a unique value, that they wouldn’t get elsewhere."

His Coverage Coach product is the embodiment of his brand’s promise. How it works and what it delivers is critical.

Execution of the brand promise has to be outstanding if the company is to gradually acquire market share. Anything less simply cycles customers through your company, and a massive sale effort is required just to replace the disillusioned people who are moving on. Once they’re gone they are seldom likely to return.

The creation of The Coverage Coach has proven vital to the company’s growth and success by simultaneously increasing efficiency of workflow, eliminating paperwork, facilitating the customers´ experience, and profiling the types and needs of customers.

"The objective of The Coverage Coach is to ask for a little information up front, nothing more than an email address in exchange for a free online analysis of their exposures and some customized recommendations based on these exposures."

More than just a beneficial tool for the prospect, it also serves as an up-front qualification mechanism used to determine, quickly and easily, if the prospect is a good fit for Insurenewmedia. It has also allowed them to see, quite clearly, the demographics of their customers.

"We’ve figured out their insurance buying patterns based on the 3 years of experience we’ve had. We profiled the types of products they bought and why they bought them and how long they kept them. We can compare and profile their customers, for example, the more aggressive expanding firm versus a public company: They use the site differently, they shop differently, the types of recommendations they want are different."

"We developed The Coverage Coach product to do a lot of this profiling. Now we’ve got this great system that’s doing all the things WE need it to do, and on the customer’s side, it’s doing what the customer needs it to do. And those are goals that are sometimes conflicting!"

By automating this profiling process and using artificial intelligence combined with traditional insurance agents, both the company and the client enjoy greater efficiency, and the automation keeps workflow in check so that nothing falls through the cracks.

Here, Fred has built an advantage by adapting a perspective of doing business unusually. Being able to find new, emerging patterns for doing business in the marketplace has been a differentiator for him and his business.

We asked Fred what he thought about his contemporaries- were any of them coming his way?

"There are contemporaries of mine who did the VC thing… most of my competition has gone out of business. They’ve sold their property casualty agencies, or they went whole-hog into the Internet, but we never did that. We branded it as a division. We never disassociated ourselves from Gaston & Associates."

"I’m not the first to sell beyond my local geography, however, to combine the vision, the technology, the resources available from the parent company, and put it all together is what has made this whole thing possible and given us our competitive advantage."

Has he found any difference between the web-savvy customers that come to Insurenewmedia versus traditional insurance customers?

"With Internet customers, you have to keep up with them and their expectations. They don’t want to wait around for weeks while you get your act together. You’ve got to be very, very efficient. Companies like Amazon have set the bar very high in terms of users´ expectations. You have to endeavor to give that kind of service."

It’s impossible to be prepared to compete at this level without understanding the state of the art for business practices within his chosen market niche.

How do others operate? What does the customer get consistently from others in this niche? Even if they aren’t direct competitors they are setting expectations. You have to look outside of yourself. Competitive intelligence is critical. Being self-referent is buying a ticket to Palooka Ville!

The other issue here is not falling in love with what you’re doing today. Staying with what brought you here after it becomes passé or obsolete is another recipe for stagnation. How do you manage this balance?

Fred plans to franchise The Coverage Coach to other agencies and businesses as an additional revenue stream. The system was developed with an eye for adaptability, so by simply changing the questions, The Coverage Coach can easily be used by companies outside Insurenewmedia’s realm. Without a doubt, his willingness to take calculated risks for success over time has paid off.

"Incremental improvement, adaptability, and staying power mean that we’ve stayed in the game, that we can afford to stay in the game, we didn’t bet the farm on it, we didn’t go outside for money, we just kept doing what we were doing. We’re long-term players."

"Insurenewmedia has been a trendsetter. It’s taught us a lot of valuable lessons that we’re using in other niches. Its success has changed our business. Everything that we’ve learned, we reapply to the rest of the business."

It’s apparent here, that Fred is continuing to modify what he does based on what he’s learning. There is a continuous cycle of doing - learning from what’s done – applying the lessons learned – doing again – learning – etc. The cycle continues to unfold. There is no assumption that “one tweak will do it.” He is also applying what he learns in one area to other areas of the business. In this sense he uses everything he can to ensure better performance. It’s a winning formula.

"I feel like we’re ahead of the curve, that’s where I like to be."

His final comment ties right into the lessons of the Boyd Cycle.

He’s playing the game like he means it!

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