Pros
If you can jump through their hoops as a producer for 5-10 years you can make a decent living
Cons
TL:DR: this is a PE backed sweat shop that offers very little to it’s clients and producers Keep in mind that this review is specific to small commercial lines (Select). When you accept your offer to join the Select team you will feel accomplished as you’ve done a ton of interviews to get to this stage. About two months after joining the company, I looked back at my interview process and became suspicious that the recruiters and practice leader over prepared me for my interviews, likely because they have big incentives to grow headcount even if the people they hire aren’t a great fit. I believe this because most of my teammates left, were fired or produced very little business in their first 12 months at USI. They will coach you with their “solutions” to the point of exhaustion and pretend that selling commercial insurance is a science rather than an art. The company believes this because they’ve convinced themselves that small commercial is a high growth vertical based off the assumption that small business owners rarely change their agent. This is absolutely wrong because a small business owner cares more about price rather than coverage solutions. Their plan is too hire 100 producers every year, fully knowing that 10 of them will succeed and that everyone is else with either leave or get fired. Management will tout USI’s “resources” but you will find that the Omni and standard work products are lackluster. They will push you to sell the Omni platform and I honestly felt like a fraud touting its capabilities. It is a low tech PowerPoint generator and it offers very little value to clients. To add insult to injury, they are draconian about Producers being in the office. The recruiters will tout USI’s flexibility in respect to work life balance but management will expect you to be in the office 4x a week because they believe everyone can learn a lot of from their colleagues. Even if their colleagues are a bunch of life long producers who have have never made it beyond a $1k deal. Think about it, if your practice leader or Select colleagues were ever close to being a good Producer in the past, why are they in Select? Having a book of business that renews every year is 100x better than adhering to USI’s system. I believe that if we didn’t live in a low interest rate environment, USI wouldn’t exist today. The company frequently acquires other agencies but won’t report their organic growth. They also hired cheap sales coaching consultants to teach Practice Leaders how to get Producers excited about PEAK but they aren’t willing to offer any details about the company’s financials. They will squawk that USI stock doubles every five years but won’t comment on why. If they were serious about risk management they’d be concerned about the E&O exposure from promoting a phantom stock security that doesn’t have transparent financials. When successful producers leave, it’s their clients that lose the most. My clients now have to solely deal with their account manager, who will only market their account every three years. Overall, I worked with a lot of nice people but my experience with USI was disappointing. I hope this review provides good insight on the drawbacks of joining USI Select.