FREQUENTLY
ASKED QUESTIONS

An insurance consultant is an insurance expert who provides advice and assistance to companies that buy insurance.  Insurance consultants help companies manage their relationships with their insurance brokers and insurance companies, and often help oversee the management of a company’s overall insurance program.  The insurance consultant often, effectively, becomes the company’s outsourced insurance department.

We’re Commercial Insurance Consultants, which means we help our clients understand their insurance and help them manage it better. In short, we don’t sell insurance. Rather, we become your out-sourced insurance department.

We work in a variety of industries worldwide, including commercial real estate, manufacturing, chemicals, technology, finance, retail, health care. We’ve developed substantial expertise in high-risk Property insurance, Pollution Liability, and Remediation, Cyber, Technology, Professional, and Crime coverage, International exposures, and high-hazard Products Liability, Auto, and Workers’ Compensation. In addition, a large part of our practice involves Insurance Due Diligence work, often associated with private equity acquisitions.

Insurance brokers are paid commissions by insurance companies to sell insurance policies.  Insurance consultants, on the other hand, do not collect fees or commissions from the broker or insurance company; instead, they are paid by the company buying the insurance.  Because their fee is not based on selling a policy, insurance consultants can provide unbiased advice to their clients, and often, effectively, become the company’s outsourced insurance department.

Insurance consultants charge their clients a fee to provide advice and to manage their insurance programs.  These fees depend on the size and complexity of the client’s business and their insurance program, but they are usually a small percentage of the client’s overall cost of insurance.

Managing Property and Casualty insurance coverage for any mid-sized company is complicated, and requires technical skill and experience.  Often, companies do not have internal staff that are sufficiently skilled to manage their insurance, so they often rely on their insurance broker for advice.  Other companies, on the other hand, often have internal insurance departments managing this function, or hire an insurance consultant to act as their outsourced insurance department.

If you decide to partner with us, we’ll become an integral part of your organization just like many of the trusted professionals that you work with in other fields. We’ll provide you with objective advice without conflict of interest, experienced negotiations, and cost and time savings. You’ll also receive clear communication and gain an accessible business partner.

Let’s start with a conversation — please give me a call — Mitch Davis, 512.334.9900. We can talk about your company, and your specific concerns and challenges.

In our many combined years of experience, we have developed expertise in many prominent industries, providing custom solutions to every company.

I am the principal of the MB Davis Group, and I’ve been active full-time in the insurance industry for nearly thirty years. We’re a small company, and I have three full-time staff working out of our New Jersey office. Every member of our staff has over twenty years of individual insurance industry experience and spent time at large, national firms before joining the MB Davis Group. (I like to say that, collectively, my company has over a century of insurance experience.) I’m very proud of our dedicated, expert, diligent, and very friendly team.

Our clients are in a variety of industries. We have dozens of clients and have worked on projects around the world. Roughly half of our clients are in commercial real estate, with the balance in manufacturing, chemicals, technology, finance, retail, and health care. We’ve developed expertise in high-risk Property insurance, Pollution Liability, and Remediation, Cyber, Technology, Professional, and Crime coverage, International exposures, and high-hazard Products Liability, Auto, and Workers’ Compensation. In addition, a large part of our practice is Insurance Due Diligence work, often associated with private equity acquisitions.

Our practice is national, with clients in the Boston/New York/Washington/ Florida corridor, Ontario, and Texas. Our clients also have holdings and throughout the country and the world. We’ve also recently opened an office in Austin, and we’re particularly looking to grow our business in Texas.

While insurance is a fundamental part of nearly every business, we find that it’s something very few business owners and senior managers are truly comfortable with. If you’re running a successful business, you likely have a sophisticated understanding of your company’s products, services, assets, leases, financial structure, client base, and regulatory oversight, not to mention the many other things that make your business successful. But if you’re a typical manager, you probably don’t understand your insurance as well as you understand the rest of your business.

The insurance audit helps address this knowledge gap.

When we perform an audit, we help you understand your insurance, how it works, what it does and doesn’t do, how it fits into your company’s overall strategy, and how, if necessary, it should be fixed.

Preparing an audit for our clients is usually a 4- to 6-week process consisting of interviews, questions, analysis, and lots of reading. A large part of the insurance audit process involves us getting to know you and your company so that we can better understand what your needs are, which in turn helps us all understand what changes in your insurance and risk management programs can best address these needs. We’ll then prepare our report and present it to you personally and give you the chance to ask as many questions as you’d like. And at the end of the process, you will understand your insurance much better, and have a clear sense of how to improve it.