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The person behind the board

Jimenez Julien

Founder and product lead of BinderRenew. He writes the roadmap, sits on the demo calls, and answers the support mail that arrives at seven in the morning when a producer cannot find a renewal.

Why I built a renewal board instead of another CRM

I did not grow up in insurance. I came to it the way a lot of software people come to a trade, by being asked to fix a spreadsheet, and then discovering the spreadsheet was holding up an entire small business. A principal in a two producer agency showed me a workbook with 1,900 rows in it, color coded by hand, and told me that the yellow rows were the households she was worried about losing that quarter. She had been maintaining that file for eleven years. It was, honestly, better than most software I had seen sold into her market.

What it could not do was tell her what happened. She knew which policies expired. She did not know which of them had been called, by whom, on what day, or what the client had said. When a household left she found out from the carrier download six weeks later, and by then there was nothing to learn from it except a number. That gap, between knowing an expiration date and knowing whether the work was done, is the entire reason BinderRenew exists.

I spent the better part of two years around independent property and casualty agencies before I wrote anything that shipped. I sat behind the front desk in a storefront office in a town of eleven thousand people. I listened to a CSR explain a wind deductible to a homeowner four times in one afternoon. I watched a producer lose a $34,000 premium contractor account because the audit came back ugly, the renewal quote sat in a portal for nine days, and nobody was watching the portal. None of that was a technology failure. It was a queue failure, and queues are a solvable problem.

So the product is deliberately narrow. BinderRenew does not write policies, it does not touch accounting, it does not try to become the system of record. It takes an expiration list and turns it into a sequence of dated obligations with an owner attached to each one, and then it keeps score honestly, including when the score is bad. Agencies keep telling me that the uncomfortable part is the first month, when the board shows them how many accounts inside sixty days have never been opened. I would rather ship a product that makes that visible than one that flatters the user.

I work with operators, not with committees. Every feature on the board started as a request from someone who works a book: the rate change threshold came from a personal lines manager in Ohio who was tired of chasing 3 percent increases, the multi policy account view came from a commercial producer in Alabama with contractor clients carrying six policies each, and the nonrenewal reinstatement window came from a CSR who lost a policy by two days. I run a call with a working agency every week, unedited, and I take notes rather than demos.

What I am accountable for is specific. The board is correct about dates, or it is worthless, so date handling is the part I test hardest and the part I will roll back a release for. Your policy data belongs to your agency and leaves whenever you ask, in a format you can open. Prices on this site are the prices you pay, with no annual lock and no surprise per policy fee at 5,000 records. If I get something wrong, my name and my email are on this page, and the reply comes from me.

Experience and expertise

  • Fourteen years building operational software for small businesses, the last four of them entirely inside insurance distribution.
  • Field research across 40 independent agencies in the United States, from single producer shops to a six location group in the Southeast.
  • Working knowledge of agency management system exports from AMS360, EZLynx, Applied Epic, HawkSoft and QQCatalyst, and the reasons their date columns disagree.
  • Hands on with the renewal cycle for personal auto, homeowners, dwelling fire, BOP, commercial auto, workers compensation and contractor general liability.
  • Publication director of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes BinderRenew and stands behind its invoices and its contracts.

How this product is built and maintained

Every claim on this site is one I can show you in a report. The retention figures come from agencies that ran the board for four full quarters and agreed to let their prior year be used as the comparison; when the sample changes, the number on the page changes with it. Nothing here is modeled, projected or rounded in our favor.

Releases go out on a two week rhythm, and anything that affects how a renewal date is calculated goes through a fixture set of 6,000 real world date patterns before it ships. Support mail is answered by a person inside one business day, seven days a week during the January and July renewal peaks. When something breaks, we say what broke on the status page rather than describing it as intermittent.

Editorially, the pages you read here are written in house and reviewed against the product before publication. We do not run guest posts, sponsored placements or affiliate links, and no third party pays to appear in the FAQ. If a feature is on the roadmap rather than in the product, it is not described on this site as though it exists today.

Published articles

Everything Jimenez Julien has written for The Renewal Desk, the BinderRenew magazine for independent property and casualty agents, is listed here in the order it appears on the magazine index.

Open The Renewal Desk and read the full magazine.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with your agency name, your state and the systems you already use. Demo requests, pricing questions, complaints about a release and requests to delete your data all go to the same inbox, and they all get read. If you would rather talk, ask for a time and you will get a 25 minute call scheduled outside your renewal rush.

You can also reach him on the profiles listed beside this article, or start with the demo request form on the home page.

This page is maintained by Jimenez Julien for MLJ, SASU, publisher of BinderRenew. Read the legal notice for company details.