Drawing on the sales experience and concepts the brokers attending the session discussed with one another, Ms. Huling laid out several points agents should consider in formulating their sales strategies.

For MGAs, she said one major purpose behind their strategy should be to make the retail agent look good in the eyes of the policyholder.

Ms. Huling said this does not mean turning over significant portions of the MGA's services to the retail agent. She said it is a question about the focus of service. That focus, for both retail and wholesale agent, has to be on protecting the assets of the end user--the policyholder, she said.

To achieve this goal, MGAs need to focus on internal communication, making sure everyone within the agency works with one another and works together to achieve the same goal of taking care of the customer.

Growing the business also means assessing who you are working with. For the MGA, that means determining if they have aligned themselves with the right agencies, ones bringing business into the firm.

An MGA knows he or she has truly gained the trust of an agency when they get a call from a retail agent asking, "I don't know if you can help me, but I thought you might know something about this." She said this is the highest compliment any MGA can receive.

It is important, she noted, that an agency owner cannot expect to improve their business unless they are open to changing tactics and making changes to the business.

"You can't keep doing business the same way and expect a new result," she noted.

A totally separate driver of revenue for agents is the creation of captive insurance groups, according to Chris Kramer, senior vice president of Atlas Insurance Management, an insurance management firm based in Washington, D.C., and Gary Bowers, a tax partner in Johnson Lambert & Co., an accounting firm in Raleigh, N.C.

A captive program can be a very profitable venture for those putting up the investment to fund the creation of the risk retention vehicle for specific risk programs, said Mr. Kramer.

A typical captive involves the owner of the risk setting up the program and providing adequate financing to cover the risk. An MGA, as a manager of the vehicle, would make money from the commission.

However, by putting up the capital, the MGA can stand to make money from the program through investments made by the program and management of the risk. The financial growth of the captive would be paid in the form of dividends over an extended period of time.

A retail agency can also enjoy the same dividends by investing in a program with the MGA and creating a captive for their clients' insurance risks.

However, said Mr. Bowers, to avoid ethical conflicts over this close acquaintance, producers must be transparent and fully disclose the relationship to clients.

Mr. Kramer noted that captives are often used as a hard market solution but are set up in soft markets to take advantage of available insurance capacity. An agent needs to examine their business and determine what would be the most on the edge in a hard market, then develop a strategy to protect it.

However, noted Mr. Bowers, a captive must be a true risk vehicle that suffers losses or it will fail Internal Revenue Services tests for designation as an insurance vehicle.

What domicile a captive is created in is at the discretion of those creating the vehicle, said Mr. Kramer. Much will depend on how much capital the domicile requires and the willingness of the owners to travel to that domicile.

A successful captive keeps its expenses down, noted Mr. Kramer, but certain tax regulations need to be followed or the program could lose its status as an insurance company, observed Mr. Bowers.