Business Support Insurance Business Plan

Sarah Helpinghand, founder and owner received her Bachelor degree in business management from Willamette University. The summer of her last year she interned with State Farm Insurance which has a large corporate headquarter in Salem. From this internship Sarah was able to learn a lot about the insurance industry.

Upon graduation Sarah “fell into a job” through a contact at State Farm. Her friend knew an insurance agent who was retiring and looking for someone to take over their practice. Sarah came highly recommended and was offered the job. She readily accepted and spent five years as an agent. Toward the end of her tenure as an agent she was getting a bit restless. She was looking for a new challenge, something she could do all on her own. The idea one day dawned on her that she could leverage her industry knowledge of insurance, and with the bit of information she had about support services from college and create her own company.

6.1 Personnel Plan

Sarah will be working full time for Ideal. Her responsibilities will be generating contracts, training, payroll, customer service, and other back office tasks. During month two she will bring on board two support specialists. The headcount will remain at three until month five when the business generated will be too much for the two support staff and two more will be hired. The support staff will be paid $12 an hour, several dollars more an hour than the market rate. The purpose behind this is to protect Sarah’s investment in training the staff. It costs too much for her to invest time and money into training someone and have them leave after a few months. Paying the staff more than market is her insurance to keep them with the company.