What a Year it Was: 2019 Year in Review

by | Dec 9, 2019 | Our Take
It’s hard to believe that 2019 is drawing to a close! Where did the year go?  It was such a full year filled with many changes, improvements and milestone events.  Every December we take the time to look back on the year to reflect on everything that happened over the last 12 months.  We’re always amazed with how much transpires in just a short period of time. 2019 was no different, and we’d like to share some of what occurred here at RSS and with our RSS family. (This is a long post, so hang on…)

Supporting our Community

A huge focus of our year was supporting the community we love here in Colorado. In 2019 we once again continued to partner with numerous non-profits in our area on a monthly basis. In addition to donating $10 to charity for every referral we received, we actively volunteered and supported our chosen “Charities of the Quarter” as well.

In February we hosted a Diaper Drive to benefit A Precious Child and their Basics 4 Babies Program!  We are very excited to say that we collected 5,006 diapers, 13,646 wipes and 30 containers of formula! We couldn’t have done it without the generosity of our amazing customers and RSS team. (Learn more.) We also hosted our first ever Toy Drive to support their Precious Gifts program. Their Precious Gift program provides gifts to kids who would otherwise go without during monumental times in their lives.

In our efforts to serve A Precious Child, we volunteered at their facility twice this year! Once working in their Resource Center sorting and hanging donations and again in November setting up their Toy Store for the holidays.

Lastly, our commitment to our community earned our agency a 2019 Safeco Insurance Make More Happen Award. The honor came with a donation of $10,000 to A Precious Child from Safeco, on behalf of RSS.

In May, we closed our office and volunteered with Flatirons Habitat for Humanity. It was a beautiful day full of comradery, team-building, learning new skills and helping the nearby community of Boulder.  We were so proud of our team! They jumped into every task assigned with tireless effort, endless energy and a willingness to learn.

Later in the year, we again closed our office and volunteered at Food Bank of the Rockies. We spent the afternoon packing boxes of food through FBR’s reclamation program and packed almost three tons of food. That’s enough to feed approximately 17,460 individuals or 4,365 families of four in our community.  It was so fulfilling to hear that our team shared a part in having such an impact on Coloradans who struggle to put food on their table every day. We also had the privilege of raising over $1,000.00 for Food Bank of the Rockies through our Virtual Food Drive to support hungry Coloradans.

We also supported numerous other charities on a smaller scale and behind the scenes in 2019. Whew! It was a busy year, but we had such a great time helping these amazing charities! We encourage you to learn more about each and every one of them.

Building Our Team

2019 brought  a lot of team member changes as well. We welcomed FIVE amazing people into our RSS family this year! We hired Colleen Judge as our newest personal lines specialist, Dani Massingill as a commercial account manager, Jenny Reany as our certificate manager, Darin Kraft as our newest commercial insurance advisor, and Stephanie Moehlenpah as our agency administrative assistant.  All five have added a great deal to our team and we couldn’t be more pleased about having them on our team.

Elevating the RSS Experience

At RSS we are continually looking for ways to improve, update, and streamline our processes to enhance our client and team experiences.  We pay close attention to all of the trends of the ever-changing consumer and insurance landscape.  We want to be able to provide our clients with the best possible insurance purchasing experience, along with the best service, while excelling in our role of advisor and expert.

In addition to our ongoing dedication to the latest in-office technology, product offerings and services, in 2019 we invested in our clients and agency in several new ways.

  • We partnered with Indio Technologies earlier in the year to help us deliver a fully digital client experience. We will be able to gather information and data in a more unified, easy, and digital manner, allowing us to eliminate cumbersome PDF forms and spreadsheets. We are aiming to be fully operational with  Indio and all of it’s benefits in 2020.
  • We became fully SMS-enabled and clients can text our office directly at 303-429-3561.
  • We added a Web-Chat feature to our website so clients or anyone just visiting our site can contact us by clicking the little red chatbox in the lower right corner. See it?
  • We are also now utilizing a very easy to use system (Podium) for capturing client reviews. It’s so much easier now for clients to leave us comments and let us know how we’re doing. Our team members can simply text or email a link to our clients and within one click they can leave a review. How easy is that?!? Check it out: https://bit.ly/2RtLfb8
  • We’ve started experimenting with video production and added a YouTube channel. You can expect us to be releasing videos on a weekly basis in 2020. (When mobile video consumption is increasing by 100% every year and 78% of people watch videos online every week, this was a “no-brainer.”)

While we definitely added some new “tech” features to our agency, we also made another change that we feel allows for a more “personal touch” for our clients. While many business utilize a phone tree type system, we made the commitment to have one of our friendly team members answer the phone within the first three rings when someone calls our office. We made this adjustment because we are more committed than ever to developing, growing and maintaining relationships with our all of our clients. We love talking and visiting with you.

Amazing Employees, Amazing Events

2019 was packed full of special events and amazing accomplishments for our RSS team. While all 18 of us had many great experiences, created unique memories, and achieved many goals, we thought we’d share a few proud RSS moments of the past year.

We were thrilled for personal lines account manager, Shawna Railey on becoming a published author! Her first book to be published, The Messy Life of Blue, has been a long time coming as Shawna has dreamt of becoming a published author since she was a little girl. Our team couldn’t be happier to see her dream come to life.
PreOrder Shawna's Book
Click Here
We are so proud of our amazing team member, Dani Massingill, for breaking  FOUR world records at Powerlifting Worlds in Ireland in October. Click HERE to learn more about the records she broke, her training regimen, and what here experience in Ireland was like. And Dani isn’t stopping anytime soon. She was invited to a national meet in June where she plans to set new records and to qualify to be on the USA Team. Go Dani!!
Three of our talented RSS team also experienced milestone life events this year. Rena Kennedy had a destination wedding in the Dominican Republic in April, marrying her fiance Justin in a beautiful beach wedding. Jessica Beuten gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Dalton on September 17th. And Jenna Mahannah married her best friend Jim in Illinois on October 12th. Congratulations to you all ladies!
2019 was a very productive and busy year for our agency and our team! We’re very excited about the changes and additions we made and the non-profits and community we were able to support.  We can’t wait for 2020! We have so much more planned and we believe that this new decade will be aptly named the “Roaring 20’s” for RSS! Happy Holidays and here’s to a very happy and joy-filled New Year!