THE AGENCY ownership life-span includes three phases: acquiring the agency, operating and growing it, and selling or perpetuating it at retirement. Each phase brings its own challenges and rewards. About once a year, I encourage readers of this column to engage in creative brooding–thinking about their agencies' present phase and planning for the next one.

My most recent bout of creative brooding was prompted by the arrival of New York State Insurance Department personnel for an onsite examination of a self-insured health-care plan our agency manages as a fee-for-service contractor. In our state, insurance companies are subject to such onsite visits every five years, and examinations can take up to a year to complete, although ours was scheduled to last only one month. Earlier we had met with department representatives in Albany and also had participated in a virtual meeting with representatives from the department's New York City bureau via two-way video conferencing. When the examination team arrived at our office, they outlined the process and gave us a long list of the documents they required, which amounted to about 800 pages of information spanning five years of operations. When we told the officials we would retrieve the information and deliver it to them within a few minutes, they clearly were shocked. Apparently, gathering such data normally takes about a week.

For the past five years, we have retained all our health-care plan records in a digital format, so we simply transferred the requested records to a data CD and handed it to them. Doing so took less than 10 minutes and saved us both time and money. Our staff didn't have to dig through five years' worth of paper files stored in filing cabinets, and we paid less to the insurance department, which charges us for the time its personnel spend with us.