In 2018, FCCI dedicated a tremendous amount of time and effort to gather insights from our teammates and key agents in order to craft our 2025 strategic plan. It was based on plans first prepared by each of the regions. These plans were then combined with those of the Home Office departments to create the overall plan. The strategic plan is a roadmap showing where we want to be in 2025 and how we are going to get there. The plan also affirms our business model as a regional, middle market insurer and solidifies our mission, pillars and values. Tom Johnson, FCCI Senior Vice President, Business Development & Strategy, was one of the leaders and champions of the process. “Our local presence is core to who we are as a company and will remain so,” Johnson said. “We wanted to empower the Regions with this strategic plan to run their businesses with even greater autonomy. To start the process, we asked each Regional Vice President to envision what their regions could be and to develop their own seven-year plans. We asked them to tell us what tools and resources they needed to execute their plans.” Each region came to the Home Office and presented their plans to the senior executive team. The Home Office divisions were then charged with crafting their own plans for how they would support and service the regions’ plans in a cost-effective way. Once complete, the Home Office divisions presented their plans to the senior executives and the regions. “This was truly a collaborative effort,” said Johnson. “Everyone was listening, asking questions and commenting on each other’s business plans. The result was a very robust, complete process with a great deal of transparency.”

Once the plans were presented and consolidated, the strategic plan was crafted. The officers of FCCI reviewed the plan at their annual off-site meeting before it was presented to the Board and approved in December 2018. While the plan doesn’t change anything about our business itself, it sets into motion several initiatives. The most important of these includes organizational realignments to enhance responsibility and accountability in our regions and establish the necessary governance corporately. The second most important includes several large IT-related projects already in process as well as other future projects. These will allow us to leverage technology as a competitive advantage and achieve our 2025 objectives. “The completion of our IT projects will allow us to provide many of the services our regions asked for in the planning process,” Johnson said. “Once they’re complete, we can bring new products online and much more easily enter new states like Pennsylvania, Kansas and others.” In the interim, the strategic plan showed us where we can still grow organically. “We can more fully utilize our core capabilities and competitive advantages to better support our agents and create more growth and density in current territories,” Johnson said. Combined, these initiatives and others in the plan will help us achieve our goals to generate more than $1.2 billion in direct written premiums by 2025 while maintaining a combined ratio under 100%. This will allow us to serve more of our agents and policyholders’ coverage needs, while remaining good stewards of our corporate resources.