Operating system for an
early-stage insurance brokerage

An early-stage Ontario insurance brokerage was growing faster than its operating infrastructure. Core knowledge was fragmented across people, documents, external platforms, inboxes, and memory.

Staff needed a shared way to manage leads, find operational information, follow consistent workflows, and understand what happened next.

Informal habits do not scale across new staff and a growing volume of work. Work that depends on who happens to handle it is hard to repeat, hard to teach, and hard to check.

The operation needed one shared way of working: written down, teachable, and built into the tools staff used every day.

I joined the organization in a brokerage role, but my responsibilities quickly expanded into business analysis, process design, systems development, training, implementation, and operational support.

• Learned the actual workflows by doing the work
• Identified recurring operational gaps
• Gathered requirements through daily use and conversations with staff
• Standardized repeatable processes and documented them
• Designed, developed, and deployed the platform
• Trained users, then iterated on the platform based on real use

The operating platform

• Centralized lead intake, lead assignment, and lead pipeline management, with website and contact-form intake
• Follow-up tracking, task and reminder workflows, and shared calendars
• Documentation, reusable templates, and training resources for onboarding staff
• A searchable, staff-maintained underwriting knowledge system centralizing guidance and operational information across multiple insurer relationships
• Contact and reference directories, and calculators
• Operational reporting, website performance information, upcoming carrier rate changes, and notifications
• Email workflow support, Google integrations, and OpenAI-powered content tools

Operating processes

• Standardized workflows across lead intake, quoting, underwriting support, submissions, client servicing, documentation, follow-up, and claims
• Onboarded and trained staff, and helped colleagues understand the workflows and prepare for licensing
• Built self-service learning resources, and kept improving the platform from staff feedback

Technical path: V1 was built with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP in the original web hosting environment. As the platform grew in scope and became increasingly relied upon, I rebuilt the application in Laravel to create a more maintainable and extensible foundation.

Lead intake

External websites fed one shared lead API. Intake saved contact information early in a multi-step flow, so a partially completed submission was still actionable. Each site could carry its own form, with questions tailored to its line of business. Each later answer enriched the same record, and a flexible structured payload let different websites feed the same platform. A completed lead triggered broker notifications and follow-up.

Commercial submissions

The portal supported commercial submissions with resources and a repeatable process. I designed the workflow around the broker’s real sequence of work:

• A commercial lead arrives and is assigned to a broker, who identifies the general type of business or risk
• The broker finds the matching quote template in the document manager; it lists the questions to ask for a complete submission
• The broker collects the information
• From there, the broker could use RiskPair, or continue with the portal-supported process
• On the portal path, the broker downloads a fresh commercial quote spreadsheet and fills it in
• Underwriting contacts are held in one place, so the broker selects the relevant ones and uses prepared email templates instead of finding each contact and writing each submission from scratch
• Quotes come back, and the broker presents the suitable ones to the client
• If the opportunity does not close, the outcome can be logged and a future follow-up (x-date) reminder created

Centralizing the templates, the spreadsheet, and the underwriting contacts turned a repetitive manual process into a fast, repeatable workflow.

For more complex commercial risks, brokers could also use RiskPair, a separate application I developed for AI-assisted research and submission preparation.

Training and adoption

Training resources and documentation live in the same system, so a new person learns the process in the tool they will use. I rolled changes out by training the team, then kept developing the platform as people used it.

Platform structure

Simplified illustration, not a screenshot or measured data.

Workflow overview Challenge Approach

I designed and built one platform for lead management, workflow and task tracking, documentation, training resources, and underwriting knowledge. It became the operational backbone used across the organization.

Commercial lead-to-outcome workflow

Simplified illustration, not a screenshot or measured data.

One commercial path from a new lead to a logged outcome. The portal is the operating hub: it holds the templates, resources, contacts, and follow-up reminders. RiskPair is a separate application a broker could use instead of the spreadsheet path, and both end at the same carriers.

The platform became a central part of daily operations, giving the team a shared place for workflows, resources, lead management, training, follow-up, and operational knowledge.

The broader work helped move the organization toward a more structured and repeatable operating model during a period of significant growth.

It is an internal system, so there is no public link or demo.

Certain organizational details have been generalized to respect employer confidentiality.