The World Cup is happening right now, in our own backyard, and if you've been watching, you've noticed something. Reputation doesn't get you through the group stage. Scotland showed up with a proud football history, a passionate fanbase, and a manager who's been around forever. They went home without a point. Brazil put three past them Wednesday night and that was that. The tournament doesn't care who you used to be.
That same conversation just landed in golf.
Two days ago, the PGA Tour announced the biggest structural overhaul in the sport's history. Starting in 2028, professional golf gets promotion and relegation, straight out of the Premier League playbook. The top 90 players on the points list keep their Championship Series cards, their $20 million purse weeks, and their spots in the biggest rooms. Everyone else drops to the Challenger Series. No sponsor exemptions. No getting in on your name or your past. You perform or you play somewhere smaller for less money, and you earn your way back.
Tiger Woods chaired the committee that designed it. His framing was straightforward. The goal was meritocracy, with clearer pathways, higher stakes, and the best players competing together more consistently.
It's worth sitting with why golf, of all sports, just went here. Golf has always been the sport of the handshake deal, the membership, the sponsor invite, the career exemption. It's been comfortable protecting established names regardless of what they're actually doing on the course right now. And even golf just decided that model doesn't hold up anymore.
Insurance has been running a version of the old PGA Tour model for a long time, and the economics of it are more complicated than most people want to admit.
Here's the honest version of the conversation. A veteran producer sitting on a $2 million book of business is still generating somewhere between $1 million and $1.4 million in revenue for that agency every single year. You don't just blow that up. You don't walk into that person's office and hand them a relegation notice because they haven't grown the book in a few years. That would be both operationally reckless and, frankly, disloyal to someone who probably built something real.
But here's what the best firms are figuring out. The $2 million book isn't the problem. The ceiling on it is.
The firms doing this well aren't cutting their veteran producers. They're building around them. They're pairing the long tenured relationship asset, the person with twenty years of client trust and deep account knowledge, with a hungrier producer who has the energy and the prospecting instinct to grow what's already there. The veteran protects and services what exists. The new blood develops what's next. That's not relegation. That's roster construction. And done well, it's actually how you honor what someone built while being honest that the growth chapter belongs to someone else.
The problem isn't the veteran producer. The problem is when nobody's having the conversation about what comes next. When the $2 million book quietly becomes the ceiling for the whole team, and the agency keeps collecting its 50 to 70 percent while assuming the growth will somehow take care of itself. It usually doesn't.
The World Cup and the PGA Tour are both pointing toward the same place right now from completely different directions. Every competitive system that wants to stay relevant is moving toward honest roster thinking. You earn your spot, you keep your spot, and the distance between past performance and current contribution gets harder to paper over indefinitely.
The firms winning talent right now, and I work with these organizations nationally, are the ones thinking clearly about who on their team is in growth mode and who is in stewardship mode and building a structure that serves both well. The firms struggling with recruiting, retention, and growth are often the ones where that conversation keeps getting deferred because nobody wants to have it.
Scotland had a proud history. It didn't help them Wednesday night.
The question for your firm isn't whether meritocracy is coming to insurance. It's whether you're building a Championship Series roster before it does, and whether you know the difference between a player who needs to be replaced and one who just needs the right teammate.
If you're not sure where to start, that's exactly what I do.
Bror David Johnson
Founder & Executive Recruiter, Retention Search
773-573-5942 | bdjohnson@retentionsearch.com
www.retentionsearch.com