ON THE COVER
Q&A with
CANDI SHOUPE
Candi Shoupe is COO / Partner of CBM Insurance, a full-service independent agency in New Castle, DE. She also serves on the IA&B Board of Directors. Q. Tell us about your career path. What triggered your interest in the insurance industry, and what led you to an independent agency?
Q. The last two years have been a wild ride for employers. From management to agency operations, what lessons have you learned?
A. I started working part time at a small, independent insurance agency during my freshman year of college. Due to a family hardship, I was not able to return to school my sophomore year. At that point I had the insurance “bug” and began my full-time career in insurance.
A. The past two years have been an incredible challenge for so many reasons. In March 2020 when I sent our staff home with laptops, I very naively told them it would be for two weeks. Two years later, we are still learning lessons of this changed world.
Over the years I held many positions in the agency, from Personal Lines CSR to Commercial Lines CSR to Agency Claims Manager. Then I spent nine years managing a wholesale agency underwriting surplus lines policies. In 2008, I decided to give the company side a try and accepted a position with Main Street America Group.
At CBM we invest a lot of time in our agency culture. We always tell our employees that family comes first, and we try every day to live by these words. At no time has this been more important than during the struggles of the past two years.
One of my first agency appointments with MSA Group was a start-up operation, Clark Baffone & Matthews (now CBM Insurance). I met with Brandon Baffone & Drue Matthews and was inspired by their agency vision. I left MSA Group to join Brandon and Drue and manage their new agency in May 2009. Drue decided to leave the insurance industry in 2015 to pursue a calling to pastor a church. Shortly after that, Brandon put a plan in motion to have me join him as a partner in the agency. It has been an amazing adventure working with Brandon to build CBM Insurance. 10
MAY 2022
We had just purchased a small personal lines agency on March 1, 2020 and were in the process of acquiring IFS Insurance on Dec. 31, 2020. Onboarding two agencies during the pandemic, while trying to maintain our agency culture, took an enormous amount of planning. Keeping the lines of communication open is so important to make sure that everyone has the tools they need to be successful. Half our staff is working hybrid/remote with no plans to change in the near future. Our employees love the flexibility, and our agency service levels have all increased.
