Dear Colleagues, Clients, and Communities:

It’s hard to believe we are entering our fourth week of working from home. With “Shelter-in-Place” orders extending until at least May 3 in California and “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” looking to extend through May 4 in Washington state, we must continue to hunker down, virtually lock arms, and get through this challenge together.

At the onset of the pandemic, we established guiding objectives in support of our ABD team members and our valued clients:

Continuity of client service

• Order and deliver the necessary equipment to make WFH as comfortable and productive as possible.

• Encourage team members to stay well and take time for themselves.

• Encourage teams to communicate and support each other, with a direct line to leadership for help and support.

Fortifying relationships

• Leverage technology to streamline communications with a focus on employers, individuals, and business operations.

• Bring ABD and our resources to all in need: clients, prospects, our communities.

Sustainability

• Protect the team and be good stewards of our resources.

Adjusting and Planning

• Be vigilant. Actively remind ourselves and peers that we need to remain nimble and flexible, responding professionally to the external environment, which is out of our control.

Our Team meets weekly via a Town Hall video conference to reiterate our guiding objectives, review progress managing through this crisis, stay connect and support employee needs, and virtually live our ethos of Work, Love, Play. With Shelter-In-Place indicated until May 3 at the earliest,  we felt it was appropriate to remind our team last week the origination of our ethos, which is the heart and soul of our values, and our approach to culture and service. In times like these, the true culture of a company comes out. You either live your values or you don’t. This ABD Team lives its values!

As we close our weekly meetings, we are focusing on one of the ABD Core Values – Committed, Accountable, Expert, Forward-Looking, and In This Together  –  to remind each other why we’re here, why we each chose and continue to choose ABD, and why our clients choose ABD.

Last week we discussed EXPERT. WE DO OUR BEST TO BE OUR BEST.

Intentionally, ABD has endeavored to attract the best and brightest, recruiting preeminent experts so we can deliver world class service to you, our clients. Now more than ever, our clients need us. Our IT team responded to the call and managed the most seamless transition to work from home imaginable. This was made possible due to years of visionary planning and execution. Our people managers are prepared because of the amazing work our POps team does in training and developing our colleagues. We are able to react quickly with a clear understanding of our financial picture due to our fantastic finance team. Our Marketing team quickly responded, creating a COVID-19 Portal and infrastructure enabling our professionals – our experts – to shine and to engage with our customers deeply, across the depth and breadth of our expertise. We are proud of the depth and breadth of the ABD Team, with the timely communications around health and wellness and compliance, worker wellness and safety, business continuity, financial wellness, HR policies and tools, and the list goes on.

Indeed, we are experts. Insurance and financial services are formally recognized as ESSENTIAL BUSINESSES. Individuals and businesses need their insurance. They need their advisors. And this drives a passion in all of us to take care of our clients and to bring more clients into the fold. We should not shy away from business development during this crisis. Quite the contrary. We have something that individuals and businesses desperately need. And we know that our brand of service delivers results. There are businesses out there that need us. Businesses that will benefit from our expertise and our commitment. The ABD Team is committed to helping as many people and businesses as possible through these trying times by flexing and leveraging our expertise.

Please watch for our weekly updates, as we will continue to share insights, messages, and stories along the way.