What sets us apart
History of Excellence
For more than four decades, SWZ has never wavered from its focus on offering business clients exceptional, comprehensive coverage, at the most competitive premiums available in the industry. We insist on partnering only with A- X rated or better insurance companies with a special focus on the industries which we know best.
We work hand in hand with our clients, whether it’s advising a client on coverage recommendations, industry compliance questions, a complex claim, or working with a client to make sure they meet complex insurance requirements as set forth by contracts or MSA’s. For our larger clients, we can also custom craft policy language to address unique exposures or risks.
Comprehensive Coverage
“Is your agent a policy peddler, or a professional insurance broker?”
Saving money for our clients in and of itself is not our only priority. If it were, we would simply be policy peddlers. Rather, we challenge ourselves to find additional ways to improve coverage for every client while simultaneously working to reduce our client’s insurance premium expenditures. Coverage improvements occur on a regular basis when SWZ experts analyze a client’s business and its needs, in order to find efficiencies and to close gaps in coverage. No short cut or price matching scheme can replace experience and hard work.
Keeping the Best Company
Jon D. Tanner is Executive Vice President of SWZ. He also happens to have a law degree. Safety and compliance are a priority at SWZ. That is why we have a Safety and Compliance Department that works with our legal experts to help clients stay in compliance with state and federal regulations such as OSHA, DOT and FMCSA. Moreover, we work to represent many of our clients when it comes to negotiating contracts and insurance requirements with their own clients, vendors, shippers and suppliers.
It is our sincere belief that an insurance broker should be a specialist, as opposed to a jack of all trades. As such, we are focused on select industries for which we bring an exceptional amount of knowledge to the table when compared to our competitors. Our firm has dedicated specialists for each of our chosen areas of specialization. Most importantly, all of the insurance carriers with which we have contracted have been hand-selected based on the carrier’s reputation and ability in our chosen area of specialization.
We trace our roots back to 1975, when we started out as a small-town insurance agency which served the farmers, ranchers and other residents of a rural county in northwest Texas. Over the years, we have evolved into a sophisticated Dallas/Fort Worth-based firm of insurance professionals with a national reach, yet which have retained a local touch.
Most clients do not realize the amount of work that we put into each and every account prior to putting it into the underwriter’s hands. A client will send requested information on their company to us so that we can prepare a quote, and this information is put together into what is called a “submission,” and then the submission is sent to the various underwriters for their review and pricing. We know from our time spent on the underwriting side of the industry that most agents simply repackage, or forward, the same data as it is received from the client onto the company underwriter, and then hope for the best. We are firm believers that a professional insurance broker should do more than regurgitate client data to the insurance company underwriter.
Our job is to understand each account, and the associated risk with the account, and then professionally present the account to the underwriters in an educated format. This entails a detailed analysis of your company and the day-to-day operations of your company. We write a detailed narrative on each client which will detail the history of the company, the operations of the company, and any important details such as whether or not there is a pre-existing safety program which has been implemented or any formal employee training program.
In addition, we truly study your prior loss history by breaking down and stratifying your loss runs over a 3-5 year period, analyzing the types of losses your company is having and trying to identify patterns which can be presented to the underwriter. An underwriter does not have the time to do all of this work, and if they are simply presented a set of loss runs with no prior analysis having been performed, you can rest assured that you will not be presented with an optimal insurance premium for your business.
These are the types of things which unfortunately are uncommon in many agencies these days, and what sets us apart as being professional insurance brokers versus policy peddlers. Our mantra is: “There is a vast difference between hoping for the best and preparing for an optimal outcome!”
