Bill Horton isn’t your average insurance broker. He was an amateur drag racer for more than two decades – and he turned that passion into a successful line of business.
Bill was working for a large insurance brokerage when he began selling race-car insurance. Bill met enough interested people at drag events to start offering policies for dragsters, he told us.
The brokerage changed ownership in 2010, but the national chain that bought it wasn’t interested in Bill’s racer customers. “What am I gonna do now?” he remembers thinking.
Fortunately for Bill, race-car insurance was in demand. After leaving his old brokerage, Bill launched a new agency (Horton Insurance Services) with dragster policies as its cornerstone. He later expanded into conventional insurance products (auto, home and life), as well.
It was in the setup phase for his own brokerage that Bill first discovered RingCentral. Initially, he signed up for an unlimited RingCentral Fax plan. Upon learning that RingCentral offers phone service, he was eager to sign up – especially after looking into conventional phone systems.
“Even a used PBX would have cost $2,000 or $3,000,” Bill said. “A business phone system isn’t cheap.”
Becoming a RingCentral Office customer has not only enabled Bill to save thousands of dollars on phone service – it’s given him access to tools and technologies that help him work more efficiently.
“With RingCentral, unlimited phone usage is very inexpensive. I love the reporting aspects, and I love being able to get every call and fax forwarded to my cell,” he observed.
Bill’s practice is still small: he only added a third person to his payroll in the past few months. But if he plans to grow in the future – or if he continues to share leads with the health-insurance brokerage in his office complex – RingCentral can scale as his business does.
“I could grow to 20 or more people, and I wouldn’t have to make plans for anything else,” Bill said. “My business has expanded by 40 percent since I signed up for RingCentral, and I attribute RingCentral to a big part of that growth.”
Originally published Feb 11, 2013, updated Aug 07, 2020