Nexo

A commercial insurance agency carves out a healthy chunk of the fitness market.   

This California-based company is succeeding in a category known for risk.

For owners and operators of fitness facilities, finding the right commercial insurance coverage is a serious workout.

“I started at the agency in 2009,” said Eric Reingen, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Nexo Insurance Services. “In fitness, we saw a constantly evolving industry with owners really struggling to find the right coverage. Specializing gave us a real edge.”

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Helping gym owners sleep at night.  

There is no shortage of concerns to keep fitness facility owners awake at night. Liability is a constant worry, and membership will suffer if equipment is broken or damaged and ownership doesn’t have the capital to make repairs quickly.

Nervous yet? Because we could go on—trainers are often contractors, members often ignore serious health issues, closing for even a few days when a facility is damaged can create a devastating loss of income.

“Owning and operating a gym or any kind of fitness facility is, to put it mildly, challenging,” Reingen remarked. “It’s a stressful business, and definitely not for the faint of heart.”

Providing commercial insurance without all the heavy lifting.  

With their focus on fitness, Nexo brings valuable experience and expertise that translates into comprehensive, affordable coverage for their clients. But in an industry with many moving parts—literally and figuratively—the agency also realized that simplifying the application and renewal process would dramatically improve the customer experience. 

“The people who run these businesses successfully know the most valuable commodity they have is time,” Reingen said. “We want to be an agency that does everything it can to help them get more of it.”

Working their way through dated, static application and renewal forms was not only tedious for gym owners, it consumed the time of agents, too. Let’s face it—neither entrepreneurs nor sales professionals are the kind of people who leap at the opportunity to tackle administrative work.   

To speed the process, Nexo considered building its own platform. The investment of time and resources, however, was steep. And the expense could not be justified once the agency tried the affordable, turnkey solution that Broker Buddha provides.

Since introducing the platform, the feedback from clients and potential clients has been overwhelmingly positive. The online Smart Forms make completing applications and renewals intuitive and easy, since it’s familiar to anyone who has been on the internet. In other words, everyone.

In addition to improving client relationships, the software saves all kinds of time for agents. One of the features of Broker Buddha that is a personal favorite of Reingen is the ability to market to multiple carriers at once.

“Instead of sending separate emails to all the carriers who might underwrite a policy, we can automatically send the application to multiple companies with one click,” said Reingen. “That saves an incredible amount of time for an agent.”

Information gets fitter, too.    

The Broker Buddha platform also improves the integrity of the data Nexo collects. In an industry that fluctuates as much as fitness, thorough updates are vital whenever a policy is renewed—membership numbers are fluid, staff turnover is high, and introducing new classes or equipment is something that successful gyms do regularly. Now that the application and renewal process has been made so much easier, Nexo clients are more likely to complete the forms accurately.

“It also helps that we can pre-fill forms with existing information and can tailor supplemental apps so clients see only the sections they’re required to complete,” Reingen noted.

Agents at Nexo also love the explanations that can be embedded throughout the Smart Forms. Now when clients are unclear about something, they often find the answer as they’re working through the application or renewal. That prevents the typical back-and-forth—email chains, phone tag—that can slow down the process.

“Broker Buddha has made us so much more efficient,” Reingen added. “And when clients know they’ll spend less time filling out forms, retention gets easier, too.”