In 1974, a mutual fund manager named John Bogle got fired. His firm had chased hot performance numbers into a merger, the market crashed, and he lost the corner office. What he built next — a company called Vanguard — didn't try to out-perform the market. It tried to give investors an honest, transparent look at exactly what they were paying for and why, and it structured itself so that its own success depended on getting that right for the people it served.
That idea is the reason we're in business.
What We Believe
Most insurance gets sold as a bundle: one premium, one number, once a year. Inside that number are several different things mixed together — the actual cost of the risk being covered, administrative overhead, distribution costs, and the carrier's margin — and the client doesn't always get to see any one piece clearly enough to ask about it. That's not because carriers are doing anything wrong; it's just how the traditional product is built, and for a lot of businesses, that simplicity is genuinely the right fit.
But we think clients deserve the option to see more, when they want it. Not a sales pitch about being different, but an actual commitment to showing people what they're paying for, explaining why, and building recommendations around what's genuinely best for their business. That's the Vanguard idea, applied to how we practice insurance: transparency and alignment with the client aren't a marketing angle, they're the standard we hold ourselves to.
We stand fully behind the carriers we partner with. We choose them because they come through on their commitments time and again and back their policies with industry-leading service, and that reliability is the foundation everything else we do is built on. Our job is to make sure clients understand exactly what that foundation includes, and to know when a different structure might serve them even better.
What We're Excited About
We're students of the industry, and we're paying close attention to the parts of it that are shifting the balance of power back toward the businesses buying coverage rather than the carriers selling it. Two areas we find genuinely exciting:
Unbundled health plans
Level-funded and self-funded arrangements break a health plan apart into its real components — claims costs, administration, stop-loss protection, pharmacy benefit management — instead of folding them into one opaque premium. Done well, this gives an employer real visibility into what's driving their costs, and a real chance to benefit when their group's health outcomes are good. It's already an established option in the market, not a fringe idea, and we think it represents a meaningfully better way for the right employers to structure their benefits.
Group captives
For businesses with real property & casualty exposure — fleets, general liability, workers' compensation — a group captive lets similarly-disciplined companies pool and manage a shared layer of risk together, rather than each buying a fully-insured policy separately. It rewards good operational discipline and safety records directly, instead of blending everyone into the same broad-market pricing.
We're actively exploring both of these as part of how we serve clients going forward — studying the mechanics, understanding who they genuinely fit, and making sure that if and when we bring them to a client, it's because we're confident it's the right structure for that business, not because it's the newest thing on the market.
Where This Leaves Us
We don't think insurance has to be a black box, and we don't think the only way to run a brokerage is to sell whatever a carrier bundles together. We're building toward being the kind of firm that stays on the leading edge of how risk can be innovatively structured — and pairing that with the kind of attentive, honest service that lets our clients know we are on their side of the table.
Want to talk about how your business is currently insured, and whether there's a better way to structure it? Let's talk.
About the Author
David Sabra
Managing Partner, Providence Insurance Services
David is a family man and Managing Partner at Providence Insurance Services. With a background in accounting & finance and executive operational leadership across multi-state enterprises, David approaches your risk management needs through an executive and fiduciary lens. Having managed payroll, cash flow, and workforce benefits firsthand, he helps implement strategies that care for businesses and protect individuals.
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