What our agency can provide for you

Ryan-St. Marie is an Independent Insurance Agency. What does this mean to our insureds? It’s quite simple: we can offer flexibility and options for our clients to use different insurance companies. In other words, within our agency, we have the ability to search through multiple insurance companies and find the insurance company that is the best price and product for your needs.

When you buy insurance through an agent, you have two options: Captive Agent or Independent Agent. A typical Captive Agent is only permitted to offer insurance from a single company. Examples of typical Captive Agents are State Farm, Allstate or Nationwide. Under a typical Captive Agent agreement, a State Farm Agent can only offer you a State Farm policy and an Allstate Agent can only offer you an Allstate policy.

This is where Independent Agents greatly outperform Captive Agents! An Independent Agent has access to multiple insurance companies. When you get a quote from Ryan-St. Marie, our Service Team will obtain quotes from a multitude of different insurance companies and we will compare prices and policies for you. Through this process, we find what insurance company is the best fit for you! Every client is unique and has different needs and different insurance exposures. For example:

• Client Joe: Married, no kids in the house, retired, uses his vehicle for limited pleasure use, no driving violations, on a fixed income and has no pets and no pool.
• Client Jim: Single, two kids in the house, works in sales and drives to work appointments regularly, has two speeding tickets, owns two German Shepherds and has an above-ground pool.

The Service Team at Ryan-St. Marie will submit information for both of these clients to all of our insurance companies. Undoubtedly, the same company will not be the best fit for both Joe and Jim. Every insurance company has different prices and different rates for different exposures. A Captive Agent would be forced to place both Joe and Jim with the same company. An Independent Agent like Ryan-St. Marie would be able to use two different companies to insure both of Joe and Jim.

Joe and Jim are not the same. Joe and Jim have different exposures and insurance companies will look at them differently. Since every client is different, insurance placement cannot be a “one company fits all” approach. We are not a Captive Agency and we are proud that our Independent Agency platform better equips our agency to find the insurance company that is the right fit for our clients’ needs, whether you are a Joe or a Jim.

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