Welcome to the Max Revenue Letter. Recapping the news, trends, and top producer insights from the week. I was on vacay last week in BFE, so sorry for missing last week’s newsletter. Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.

Today: 3 briefs, 3 podcasts, 1 article. LFG🔥

BI claims are getting pricey. The average claim now tops $950,000, according to an Allianz Commercial analysis of nearly 8,000 claims worth $7.82 billion from 2021 to 2025. That’s 70% more than the average property damage claim. Claim counts held steady, but the average cost per claim jumped more than 30% a year over the last two years. Fire and explosion drove over 40% of total value, with natural catastrophes next at 34%.

So why the spike? The fires aren’t getting bigger, the restarts are taking longer. Allianz points to fragile supply chains, a handful of key suppliers, tariffs, and inflation, which stretch every shutdown and make each extra day cost more.

Our hot take: At renewal, rerun each client’s BI limit with a longer rebuild timeline and ask which single supplier could shut them down. A limit built on pre-2020 rebuild times is probably too light.

Workers’ comp is still the golden child of commercial lines, but AM Best just noticed the gas light is on. The line ran a 93.2 combined ratio in 2025, beating every major long-tail casualty line and commercial lines overall. Impressive, until you remember it was 88.8 the year before. Most of that profit came from releasing old reserves, and AM Best says the redundancy is now at its lowest level since 2021. Meanwhile, the midyear 2026 direct incurred loss ratio hit a five-year high and price cuts are speeding up. Oh, and The Hartford dethroned Travelers as the top comp writer after Travelers trimmed its book by 3.7%.

Our hot take: Comp is still a buyer’s market, so remarket your clean accounts while carriers are discounting to keep them. Just keep an eye on whoever is cutting most, since this year’s cheapest rate is usually the first to snap back.

E&S is slowing to a crawl. Premium rose 2.8% to $47.6 billion in the first half of 2026, a far cry from last year’s 13.2%, according to a WSIA report. Property is doing most of the dragging, with premium down 13.7% and some rates off 30% to 40%. Casualty is holding its ground, and accounts with ugly loss runs can still expect double-digit bumps. The bigger news is the unwanted guests. Executives at WSIA’s San Diego marketplace say private equity, newer reinsurers, and fronting companies are piling in and cutting prices faster than the risks justify.

Our hot take: Cheap capacity is great until you ask who’s really paying for it. Private equity wants its returns on a shorter clock, and fronting companies get paid on volume, not on how the claims shake out. Follow the money and you’ll notice most in that chain don’t plan to stick around.

In this episode, Brandon Schuh digs into the Aon and Macy’s story, alleging $13.2 million in commission on roughly $35 million in ancillary benefits premium. He also talks through Corgi’s new sports vertical, Golden. Finally, they look at how WithCoverage is positioning itself against traditional brokers and what producers should know as they start seeing them in the market.

In this episode, Micah Salas sits down with AI consultant Josh Guth, the guy who set up Micah's new workflow and is now building him a smarter, AI-powered prospecting and networking engine. Micah walks through how he uses it every Monday to plan his week and keep renewals from slipping through the cracks, and Josh breaks down how he turned a three-day enrollment process into about 90 seconds for another agency. They also get real about what it costs, the security questions agencies need to think through, and how to use AI without getting sucked down the rabbit hole.

In this episode, Trey sits down with Derek Lazniak a $3.5M producer out of Wisconsin. He made partner at 28, built deep niches in manufacturing, metal stamping and cyber, then substance abuse and a string of bad decisions led to his arrest and three months in jail, and he lost it all. Trey sits down with Derek to talk honestly about how he built the book, where it went wrong, and how he’s rebuilding it in half the time.

by Derek Laczniak, CIC

Let’s be honest.

In a soft market, declinations stack up like unopened mail on the kitchen counter. And most brokers handle them about as well as that mail. They hear the verbal “no,” shrug, mumble something about the carrier’s appetite, and move on to the next submission.

That’s a waste of a perfectly good rejection!

Here are five things to do instead, I learned the expensive way at the school of hard knocks…

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