The Numbers Add Up Coeur D’Alene Software Company Carves Niche In Insurance Industry

If you sell a powerful and easy-touse product at a fraction of what your competitors charge, simple economics suggests you’ll do well.

Agency One’s success cannot be explained any more easily, said president and co-founder Anthony Paquin.

He and brother Gary’s 1989 foray into insurance software has them shipping the best-selling insuranceoffice automation product in the business, he said.

“We ship more units each month than all other insurance software products combined,” said Paquin from his spare but chair-filled office that doubles as one of the few conference rooms at tightly packed Agency One. “We found that these products usually cost in the range of $20,000. Ours sells for about $2,000.”

Paquin’s costs are a fraction of competitors’ because his sales staff does direct marketing to the small- and medium-sized insurance offices that Agency One targets. “The average sales call with a salesman going on the road to visit a client costs about $300. One of our calls and direct mailings to a customer costs us about $7.”

The company’s 75 employees sell and support all Agency One customers from the office off U.S. Highway 95 in Coeur d’Alene. That allows the Paquins to control the quality of the selling message and customer service. But it also means that the company that had about 12 employees in 1992 has had to do a little shoehorning to stay in an 11,000-square-foot building.

Relief is just months away, as a 30,000-square-foot building is under construction in the adjacent Silver Lake Office Park, Paquin said. He projects the move will occur this fall, and he predicts the company will grow between 10 percent and 20 percent in the next year.

The Paquins started Agency One in Phoenix in 1989, but like many other business owners, they fell in love with the Coeur d’Alene area while here on a business trip.

Since all of Agency One’s selling is done over the phone, the Paquins could move their business anywhere with overnight mail service and a phone line. They moved the company from Phoenix in 1992.

The Paquins had an advantage over other insurance automation sellers when writing the software, Anthony Paquin said. Since they had extensive programming but no insurance experience, the Paquins used extensive customer feedback to hone their product.

“Everything we have really done in creating AgencyOne was entirely customer-driven,” Paquin said, referring to the company’s primary product. “Customers would just simply tell us what it needed to do and we would tailor it to their needs.”

The software manages database information, marketing, does word processing and provides full accounting procedures for an insurance office. About 30 percent of agencies will need to automate their offices eventually, so Agency One has plenty of customers to go after.

Customers rave about the AgencyOne system’s flexibility and low cost. Judy Rapp, vice president and partner of Durall-Wolf-Rapp Inc., a Spokane Valley commercial insurance and bonding agency, said the product brought her office lightyears ahead.

“It took us from Jurassic Park to the USS Enterprise,” she said Tuesday. “I did a lot of research on getting a system, and I was just appalled at the prices of the highprofile systems that were out there.”

Then Rapp found AgencyOne, and after some easier-thanexpected training, she and her staff had thrown away the “rocks and chisels” they were using for accounting before. “It’s been great for us.”

Agency One’s Massachusetts parent company, AMS, is owned by several major insurance companies. The Paquins remain in control of Agency One operations, though, Anthony Paquin said.

“As we continue to grow, we’re becoming more and more involved in the community, supporting charities for example,” Paquin said. “That’s particularly important to us. We chose to move here and we want to make the best place to live that we can.”