Why I Built InsureRoster

Kevin D. Haltiwanger — Founder, InsureRoster™ Licensed P&C and Personal Lines Agent — South Carolina

The Short Version (Elevator Pitch)

I spent five years as a licensed insurance agent — two in a national call center handling 70–100 customers a day across 30+ states, and three selling policies and managing an office. I'm still a working agent today. I've been on both sides of the counter. I know what agents need, and I know what customers go through.

Two problems kept showing up. First, consumers had no easy way to verify whether the agent they were talking to was actually licensed. Second, the leads industry was selling the same lead to a dozen agents and calling it a service.

InsureRoster fixes both. A living directory of verified, state-licensed insurance professionals — built on government records, not self-reported data. The goal: exclusive leads when possible, with a strict cap on how many agents can ever receive a single lead. That system is being built now. No recycled data. No phone number sold to the highest bidder. Your information is respected, and your Do Not Call preferences are honored — period.

Better for agents. Better for policyholders. Better for insurance.

The Full Story

I Learned Insurance from the Customer's Side First

I started in insurance at a national call center. Customer service — not sales. Payments, endorsements, policy changes, claims questions — the full spectrum. I got licensed in over 30 states because the calls came from everywhere, and I handled every one of them.

About four months in, COVID hit. They sent us home. I spent the next year and a half working remotely, taking seventy to a hundred calls a day, five days a week.

That volume teaches you things you can't learn from a textbook or a sales training. You learn what actually confuses people about insurance. You learn what makes them angry. You learn what makes them trust you — and what makes them hang up. You hear the same frustrations repeated hundreds of times until the patterns are impossible to ignore.

Then I Went Face to Face

When COVID started clearing up, I wanted more. I'd been a licensed agent for two years and hadn't sold a single policy — that felt like some kind of bad record. I wanted to work with customers directly, try my hand at the next level. So I went to work at a local office of a national insurance company, selling policies face to face.

I loved it. There's nothing like helping someone find a policy with a rate that's life-changing for them — and a few hundred bucks is usually all it takes. I love the personal interaction. My customers and I have a great relationship. I've been with many of my policyholders for years, and I always look forward to helping them solve their problems. I worked the sales floor for about a year and a half before getting promoted to store manager — at a location in a rough part of town, which taught me a whole different set of lessons about what insurance means to people who really need it.

My company didn't have a leads problem. The customers came in. But those customers had stories — and they were all the same story.

The Problem I Kept Hearing

"I put my information into one of those websites and my phone didn't stop ringing for three days."

"Six different agents called me in the first hour. I didn't even remember which one I wanted to talk to."

"I stopped answering my phone because I didn't know which calls were from agents and which were real."

Customers told me this constantly. I understood it because I'd seen it from the inside. The economics of the leads industry are simple and brutal: a lead broker collects a consumer's information, then sells that same lead to as many agents as they can to maximize revenue. Five agents, eight agents, twelve agents — all competing for the same person who filled out one form expecting one response.

The result: agents are in a mad dash fighting over scraps, paying premium prices for leads that are already cold by the time they call. Consumers are overwhelmed, distrustful, and turned off from the entire process of buying insurance. Both sides lose. The only winner is the broker in the middle.

But there was another problem that came up just as often, and it surprised me.

Customers weren't even sure if their agent was actually licensed. They'd search online and find a list of agents, but nothing told them whether those agents were legitimate — whether they held a real, active license in the line of authority they needed. With all the scams going on today, you can't be too careful. I'd tell people about the NIPR — the national registry where you can look up any agent's credentials — but it never stuck. It was too complicated, too buried, too hard for a regular person to navigate. The tools existed, but nobody could find them when it mattered.

That's when it clicked. The verification problem and the leads problem were two sides of the same coin. Consumers needed a simple way to confirm that the person trying to sell them insurance was actually qualified to do it. Agents needed a way to receive leads that hadn't been sold to everyone in the zip code. Both problems came down to the same thing: trust.

What I Set Out to Build

InsureRoster started with a question: what if one platform solved both?

A living directory built on truth. Not a review site. Not a pay-to-play listing. A real, searchable database of verified insurance professionals — built on state regulatory records that are updated regularly. Every profile is backed by a verifiable credential number pulled directly from government sources. You can see an agent's license type, their line of authority, and whether their credentials are active. No guessing. No hoping. No scams.

The directory currently holds nearly a million verified records from Florida's Department of Financial Services alone, with more states on the way.

Leads that respect everyone involved. The plan is exclusive when possible — if a consumer reaches out to a specific agent, that lead goes to that agent alone. That's the system we're building toward. When leads are shared, there's a strict cap on how many agents can ever receive them. Not a dozen. Not eight. A hard limit that ensures every agent has a real shot, and every consumer isn't buried under an avalanche of calls.

Premium leads exist because they're genuinely harder to come by — not because someone slapped a label on recycled data.

Do Not Call preferences honored completely. If a consumer doesn't want to be called, they won't be. No exceptions, no workarounds, no fine print. Their information will be protected, and their wishes respected. That's not a feature — it's a baseline.

The Bigger Picture

Insurance is a trust business. The entire industry runs on a consumer trusting that their agent is qualified, honest, and looking out for them. But the way things work today — the lead recycling, the verification gaps, the phone spam — all of it actively destroys that trust before the relationship even starts.

I'm building InsureRoster to fix the handshake. Treat customers the way you'd want to be treated — whether you're the agent or the policyholder. That's our posture. That's how every decision gets made.

I've talked to thousands of insurance customers. I've handled their payments, their claims, their complaints, and their questions — and they're always coming up with new ones. I built this because I've been in the room, on the phone, and at the desk. I know what both sides need because I've been both sides.

I'm a guy you can trust to protect your information and actually try to help you find an agent who is truly licensed in the line of authority you need. That's what InsureRoster is for.