Pros
1. Farmers Insurance group offers thorough in-house and online training for its agents over several months and even flies you out to "Farmers college" if you meet certain goals. This prepares you better than most insurance companies would. 2. You get to use the Farmers name, it is well known and thus more trusted than the smaller companies. 3. High earning potential. No caps on commission but no salary either. You get residuals from previous years' sales to boost your profits and my agency even had a thing to buy back the "agency" you built over the years if it was sizable when you left.
Cons
Note this is for Farmers in the Fresno, CA area, anywhere else and your mileage may vary. If you're coming into the insurance industry blind Farmers may not be the place for you, at least not where I was at. You are an independent contractor building your own "agency" under the name of Farmers. You have to pay for your own licenses (~$400) if you don't already have them and overhead (~$800 a month for rent, fidelity bonds, E&O Insurance, bank accounts, and misc expenses) when you become a career agent. From licenses to career agent it takes about 3-4 months on average so hopefully you have another job while you do this. You need a huge web of influence to solicit for references and sales and a very outgoing personality to convince strangers and businesses for the same. Be prepared to work long hours as well for the first year (10-12 hours) because you're working for 100% commission where you get 8-12% per sale depending on what you sell. so you have to make lots of sales if you want to survive. Not for people just looking for a sales job, this is more for those with some money in your savings or currently in a "boring" job wanting to transition to another career for the long term. Besides this there are 3 big cons to Farmers at the agency I was at. 1. The trainers at my branch were negative and unprofessional. They would take things personally and get visibly upset when you questioned their methods or sayings. They acted like I knew absolutely nothing about insurance or selling and I was doomed to fail if I didn't follow things exactly how they wanted even though I already had my two licenses and a college degree before I met them. 2. Lack of information. It's a big risk having your own agency with Farmers, they know this and yet they still trickled information as slowly as they could. A few examples of this is how they glossed over the fact that you have to pay back the subsidiaries if you leave the company before a certain period of time so you're pretty much locked in for a few years unless you got the money to pay them back (adds up to you owing ~10K a year). They didn't have a basic figure of what the overhead usually looks like until I bugged them for it. It's obvious though why they do that because early in the job you have a lot of money going out and very little going in, and that's not appealing to anyone. Be careful about falling for their words, yes it is a lot of potential money to be made by you but it's also a big financial risk to be made by you as well. They told me about 4/20 potential hires become full-time every year that's a 20% chance. Keep that in mind always. 3. Very grassroots. If you expect to be given leads, able buy them, or be given useful direction on where to go for them then this is not the job for you. I was told to being my agency by soliciting to my friends and family to the point where it seemed like I was harassing them. Of course they don't care since it's not their friends or family. If you want to find leads outside of those groups then you get a "good luck" from them along with a few papers on the most obvious places to go solicit for leads and references (not very helpful). No experienced tips or hints from them. You just get the name "Farmers" to throw around at potentials. I understand their reasoning why they don't point the way for you in the beginning but almost zero help and all the work makes you wonder why you don't just work for yourself or get another agency.