2009 Annual Report 2009 Annual Report : Page 4
Message froM the ChairMan Continued We also had a very successful first year in our three new Western states – Arizona, Nevada, Utah – via our partnership with the Leavitt Group, whose independent agents distributed our commercial products to their “Main Street” small business customers. provide feedback to members of our senior management and regional management teams. We expediently initiated several actions based on our customers’ invaluable comments. More Listening Tours are planned throughout 2010. “Our strong financial standing will enable us to invest in new products and new technology to help our customers continue to profitably grow their ‘Main Street’ books of business with us.” In late November, we closed our affiliation with Indiana-domiciled Grain Dealers Mutual Insurance Company. We will benefit from the strength of Grain Dealers’ 108-year-old franchise as we enter Indiana and Mississippi in 2010, as well as increase our market share in several existing states including North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. We will also establish Indianapolis as our new Midwest Region headquarters as part of a regional realignment. The realignment, consisting of four regions, will enable us to incorporate new and overlapping Main Street America/Grain Dealers Mutual states efficiently. It will also help us improve the aggregation of states with similar demographic and industry issues within the same region. Our initiative to grow our volume of distribution points was not limited to our new markets. We appointed more than 100 new independent agents in our core Eastern Seaboard states. We also conducted a series of Listening Tours in many of these states. At these town hall meetings, our long-time customers were able to openly We also initiated Agency Technology Councils for commercial lines and personal lines to let our customers candidly provide their feedback about the functionality of our Main Street Station policy processing systems and identify areas for enhancement. Our customers repeatedly tell us that “The MSA Experience” – taking care of our customers and our customers’ customers better than anyone else – is Main Street America’s key differentiator in the marketplace. Hundreds of our customers have made us No. 1 or No. 2 in their agencies. We thank them for partnering with us and helping us to achieve the level of success we had in 2009, especially as they faced significant challenges in their respective markets. As the founding company partner of Trusted Choice® in 2001, we continue to champion the national branding program of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, which has grown to more than 10,500 agent members and 53 company partners. Trusted Choice enables independent agents, who typically brand themselves at the local level, to compete Tom Van Berkel Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer against other insurance companies with alternative distribution systems and strong national brands. The program also helps to reinforce that independent agents provide consumers with expertise and choice, and act as their trusted advisor. Everything we distribute in the marketplace is co-branded as The Main Street America Group and Trusted Choice – from our annual report to our product marketing materials to our quarterly results videos that are broadcast via our YouTube channel. Our 2009 performance positions us very well against the industry. Our strong financial standing will enable us to invest in new products and new technology to help our customers continue to profitably grow their “Main Street” books of business with us. We are extremely well-capitalized, which will allow us to pursue a variety of expansion opportunities in both existing states and new states – including affiliations, acquisitions and partnerships – enabling us to continue spreading risk and increasing scale. We look forward to partnering with our customers in 2010 to profitably grow and achieve our financial goals in what we hope will be a more stable economy for our customers and their customers alike. 4
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