45 Minutes, Five Systems, One Quote. Better Agency’s Whole Thesis Is Collapsing That Into Five Minutes, One Screen.

Will Shaw played tight end in the NFL for roughly two and a half years, with the Steelers and Eagles, before transitioning into tech — first at a local Phoenix company, then running a tech-enabled services firm implementing Salesforce and HubSpot integrations for clients. Around 2016 that work started pulling him into insurance specifically, and a pattern became obvious fast: agencies kept asking for the same fixes, and in solving them one integration at a time, his team was often creating new problems — dual data entry, multiple points of failure, general multi-system chaos.

That observation became Better Agency’s founding thesis at the end of 2019: independent P&C agencies are fundamentally sales organizations, and the right product isn’t another point integration — it’s an all-in-one CRM and sales/marketing automation platform built specifically for how independent agencies actually sell.

In Episode 95 of InsurTechTalk, Will and I covered why he insists on calling Better Agency “broker tech” rather than insurtech, the specific 45-minutes-to-5-minutes efficiency gap the product targets, and why he thinks regional carriers and MGAs — not big-name direct insurtechs — represent the real missed opportunity in agent-facing technology.

About Will Shaw

Will Shaw is CEO and co-founder of Better Agency, a CRM and agency management platform built for independent P&C insurance agencies, founded at the end of 2019. Before insurance, he played tight end in the NFL for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles, then built a tech-enabled services business implementing Salesforce and HubSpot for various industries before specializing in insurance around 2016. Better Agency operates with a team of roughly 35-40, most of them in product, engineering, and customer success.

The Advisor Role Isn’t Going Away — But Who Holds It Is Shifting

I opened by asking how Will sees the definition and control of the “insurance agent” role evolving over the next decade, given the generational handoff already underway. His answer pushed back gently on the premise that the role itself is at risk: the advisor relationship is what actually distinguishes an independent agent from a pure sales rep, and he doesn’t see that function disappearing — if anything, it’s the core differentiator independent agents should be doubling down on, not away from.

What is genuinely shifting: the average age of agency ownership is trending younger, the barrier to entry for starting a new agency has dropped, and agencies are increasingly finding success by verticalizing — specializing in cyber, or a specific clientele, rather than staying fully generalist — which lets a smaller shop scale faster than a broad, undifferentiated book ever could. He also flagged growing PE interest and roll-up activity in the space as a durable trend, likely producing more (and often smaller, more specialized) agencies rather than fewer.

Where Direct Insurtech Excels, and Where It Fails

Will’s framing of the strategic gap Better Agency is built to close is sharp and specific. Direct-to-consumer insurtech (his examples implicit — the Lemonades of the world) has genuinely nailed the buying experience: simple, online, comparable to an Amazon or Google purchase, meeting modern consumer expectations for how a transaction should feel.

What that same category has done badly: conversion rates are poor, customer acquisition is expensive, and retention is weak.

Independent agents have the inverse profile: historically bad at scaling top-of-funnel lead-to-quote-to-sale efficiency, but with customer satisfaction and retention rates no direct-to-consumer competitor can touch. Better Agency’s positioning is explicitly to graft the direct insurtech’s online buying UX onto the independent agent’s retention strength — giving a small agency in Birmingham or Omaha the same polished online experience a national insurtech offers, but with a human advisor positioned to step in at exactly the point a pure digital funnel typically loses the customer.

The Core Efficiency Number: 45 Minutes and Five Systems, Down to Five Minutes and One

This is the concrete number underlying Better Agency’s entire value proposition, drawn from surveying thousands of agents directly. For even a simple, standardized policy — personal auto or home — the average agent workflow from “prospect ready for a quote” to “bound policy” took roughly 45 minutes across five separate systems: carrier websites, comparative raters, the CRM, the AMS, and whatever else sat in between.

Better Agency’s explicit design target: collapse that five-system, 45-minute process into a single experience taking roughly five minutes, freeing the reclaimed time for actual relationship-building and prospecting rather than administrative system-hopping.

Broker Tech, Not Insurtech — a Deliberate Distinction

I pushed Will on where Better Agency sits categorically, and his answer was precise rather than evasive: Better Agency is broker technology, not insurtech, by his own definition — a technology company selling into P&C agencies, not a company distributing policies or bearing any part of the insurance risk itself. His dividing line: insurtech, in his usage, means anything actually distributing policies or managing risk up or down the value chain. Better Agency doesn’t hold a license and doesn’t touch risk — it enables the people who do.

Layering AI Onto an Existing Data Model, Deliberately

Better Agency already runs rules-based automation — flagging, for instance, that a client’s demographic profile suggests they’re a likely candidate for a specific policy type, surfaced to the agent as a one-click opportunity. Will’s team is now investigating how generative AI layers onto that existing structured data model specifically for adaptive, proactive communication: using what’s already known about a client (current coverage, gaps, renewal timing) to change communication style and content in real time, surfacing a fully-prepared renewal or cross-sell opportunity the agent only has to approve, rather than assemble from scratch.

His explicit framing on intent: the goal isn’t replacing the agent — it’s compressing the 30-60 minutes an agent currently spends manually reconstructing a client’s full picture (renewal pricing changes, remembered details from prior conversations, cross-sell opportunities) down to a single review-and-approve action, with the analytical legwork already done.

The Real Gap: Regional Carriers and MGAs Without a Tech Stack

This was the most actionable market insight in the conversation. Will’s observation, developed specifically through Better Agency’s push to connect with more regional carriers and MGAs: a meaningful number of genuinely strong, well-run agencies and advisors simply aren’t connected to the regional carriers and MGAs that would be a great fit for their book — not because of product mismatch, but because those smaller, regional players often lack the technology infrastructure (APIs, integration capability) to reach agencies outside a handful of large, already-networked distribution relationships.

Better Agency’s pitch to that segment: providing the connectivity layer — on both the policy management side (via AMS integration) and the rating/quoting side — that lets a five-, ten-, or fifteen-person agency access regional carrier and MGA products they’d otherwise never discover or be able to efficiently transact with, purely due to a missing technical bridge rather than any lack of appetite on either side.

Why Agency Tech Adoption Actually Sticks: Consolidation, Not Features

Asked directly what problem agencies cite most when explaining why they adopted Better Agency, Will’s data was specific: 70-75% cite technology consolidation as their primary reason for joining, and roughly 65% cite the same consolidation as their reason for staying. Improved close rates and administrative efficiency register as real but secondary factors — genuine, but Will frames them as a downstream consequence of consolidation (eliminating dual data entry and system-switching friction), not a separately marketed feature.

Advice: Walk Into Every Conversation Assuming You Know Nothing

Asked for closing advice, Will’s answer was refreshingly self-deprecating: he doesn’t consider himself well-positioned to hand out advice, generally preferring to receive it. His actual operating principle, though, is a real discipline worth naming: he tries to enter every conversation and situation assuming he knows nothing, seeking to understand before presenting his own perspective — on the reasoning that his opinions should keep changing as new information arrives, which happens constantly in a fast-moving industry. His stated advice, distilled: be open to advice, and hold your own views loosely enough that new data can actually change them.

Key Takeaways

• The advisor relationship, not transactional sales ability, is what Will considers the durable core of the independent agent role — a function he expects to persist and even strengthen as verticalization increases
• Direct-to-consumer insurtech nailed the buying experience but consistently struggles with conversion cost and retention; independent agents have the inverse strength profile — Better Agency is built to combine both
• Collapsing a documented 45-minute, five-system quoting workflow into a five-minute, single-screen experience is the concrete efficiency thesis underlying the entire product
• “Broker tech” versus “insurtech” is a meaningful distinction, not just branding — Better Agency deliberately positions itself as an enabler with no license and no risk exposure, distinct from companies actually distributing policies
• AI investment is being layered onto an existing structured data model to enable proactive, pre-assembled renewal and cross-sell recommendations, not to replace agent judgment
• Regional carriers and MGAs represent a significant, underexplored connectivity gap — many lack the technical infrastructure to reach smaller agencies that would genuinely be a strong distribution fit for their products
• Technology consolidation, not individual feature value, is the primary reason agencies both adopt and retain agency management platforms — a useful signal for how this category should actually be marketed and sold