Paying to be Listed as Great

When I was a high school senior, I received an invitation to be listed in the Who’s Who of American High School Students. I was excited. My ego was growing exponentially by the minute. And then I read that to be listed, all I had to do was pay $29.99.

I thought, “What a joke! My ego hasn’t inflated enough to pay so that my ego can be further inflated!”

What's the goal here? Obviously, the publication’s goal is to make money off people who need some kind of stamp giving them legitimacy, a type of affirmation of their status. Other customers might be people who are signaling status. They already believe they are great but need to send a public signal to others. These situations may be completely egocentric or extremely strategic. It depends on how egocentric the person is because that determines whether they use the opportunity strategically.

Corporations regularly pay to be listed as great on the Top 10, Top 50 or Top 100 lists. To be fair, most of these listing companies require the listees to achieve something AND pay. Payment might be disguised as data submission, for example, but that’s kind of joke with insurance companies because all the data is public. Most of the time, the public data is readily available and easily accessible. (Please note: A.M. Best processes this public data and analyzes it in ways that are a great service, and they are not publishing these kinds of lists, so I don’t consider them one of these publications.)

Because I regularly review this public data, I often have people ask me why so and so is not on this or that list of top companies or top brokers. Some excellent insurance firms tend to want to operate strategically rather than signaling their status, so they are not listed in these lists.

Pay attention to those entities operating strategically rather than signaling. Those signaling often have different agendas, quite often shallow agendas that suggest a weakness that may be taken advantage of.

But more importantly, the metrics behind being listed are sometimes flawed. The metrics are often simple and might signal success without correlating to success. In fact, I’ve recently noticed a few rather financially weak insurance entities showing up on "top" lists when they are mostly incompetent. A company that hasn’t grown in 10 years is not great. A company that loses $1 billion annually is not great. They’re not good. They’re not even middling. In this industry where carriers made record profits in 2023 and 2024, losing another billion might actually require effort.

And especially at the agency level, people are excessively competitive so then they want to be on the list too! They then start chasing the wrong rabbit.

Few true strategic thinkers exist in this industry. But the ones that do exist have the upper hand. I believe we’ll see those carriers with the best strategic thinkers cause a tsunami of changes in the next 24 months. Rather than reading the lists, most of which are useless, think strategically and pay for true data insights rather than to be listed – unless you need an ego boost.

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