Page 23 - BusinessWest June 23, 2021
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our way — organically,” he said, adding that he believes the company is certainly well-positioned to achieve that goal.
For this issue and its focus on insurance, Busi- nessWest talked with several team members at Borawski to get a full understanding of not only where it’s been, but where it wants to go and how it intends to get there.
business?’ and we continued to talk,” Borawski recalled, adding that, soon thereafter, he came back home to join the company as a salesperson; eventually, he would succeed his father as presi- dent in 1992.
By then, he was also working to take a friend- ship on the golf course with Malek to a much different level. The two were members at what
relationships with carriers (Borawski works with more than 30 of them), and — here comes that phrase again — relationship building.
“Business just doesn’t fly in the door — you’ve got to go find it,” he explained. “You have to hunt it and track it.”
That’s because the competition, as in bank- ing, is fierce. To stand out, an agency has to pos- sess those qualities listed above, said all those we spoke with, and especially a desire to work with clients to find solutions for them, not just get a signature at the bottom of a policy — or series of policies.
“One of the things that we try to do differently is evaluate someone’s insurance program, and not just from the perspective of price,” Malek said. “It’s important to understand what their needs are and what we’re trying to provide for them, rather than just focus on the bottom-line price, because, in most cases, that doesn’t end up working out.
“You get what you pay for, and we work to get people to pay for the right coverage,” he went on. “These days, people are always saying, ‘we can save you...,’ ‘we can save you...,’ ‘we can save you...’ — and that’s great until something goes wrong and all that savings took coverages away and didn’t provide what you should have had. No one goes to the cheapest doctor for a reason.”
Mark Rosa, senior account executive, agreed, and noted that he and others in similar positions at the company strive to be advisors, not merely salespeople.
“It’s not just a game of show and tell and sales-
Borawski
Continued on page 46
“Insurance is an intangible. You can’t touch or feel it until you need it. And we try to get people to understand just that — that everything is great until something goes wrong. And when it goes wrong, you need to know that you’re going to be put back to where you were prior to that.”
was Hickory Ridge Country Club in Amherst (the club closed a few years ago),
and while talking golf and shop — Malek had been in the insurance business for roughly a decade by then — a discussion commenced about Malek coming to the Borawski agency and “help- ing build something,” Bob said.
That something was the aforementioned commer-
     Independent Thinking
Borawski told BusinessWest that, upon gradu- ating from Stonehill College in 1980, he had no plans to join the family business. Instead, he went to work for then-emerging office-supply company W.B. Mason as a salesperson.
“There were probably 35 people there at the time; I really liked it and had no intention of leav- ing,” he said, adding that his career took a critical turn a few years later when, while he was home for Thanksgiving, his father, who joined the agen- cy in the early ’60s, commenced a discussion on succession.
“He said, ‘what am I going to do with this
cial-lines division that has grown so dramatically over time.
“We made a lot of cold calls over those years,” said Borawski, adding that, in addition to that time-honored strategy, the business has benefit- ed tremendously from referrals that have led to new customers of all sizes in both the commer- cial- and personal-lines sides of the business.
Overall, the company has decided to grow organically, not through acquisition, as many others have. Again, as in banking, growing organically means, to a large extent, taking cus- tomers from other players, something that’s accomplished through hard work, a strong track record, a deep portfolio of products and services,
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