Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from Michael Grasher - Piper Jaffray
Michael Grasher – Piper Jaffray
Good morning gentlemen congratulations on a great year. I wanted to ask you about your geographic expansion and how you spoke to Florida being important in ’07, Texas and California here in ’08, where are the most significant growth areas that you’re seeing where you’re already up and running?
Michael Lee
Good morning Mike, we’re seeing very good growth in Florida. We started in Florida I guess early part of 2007 and really ramped up in the second half of the year and a lot of our wholesaler and annuities also have presence in Florida so that made it easier so we plugged into Florida with the same products that we distribute in the north east and had very, very positive results very early on. And I think that’s due to our experience in dealing with wholesale distribution systems so a lot of our products really are geared towards meeting the needs of the wholesale distribution system. We have a lot of products that we write on on admitted basis whereas a lot of their markets provide products on a non admitted basis so although we write on an ENS basis in Florida a lot of our products have similar features of an admitted product that we distribute in the north east. So that has resonated well with the wholesale distribution system in Florida. We’re also expanding into Texas. We did a lot of work in Texas in the third and fourth quarter of last year and now we’re up and running and we’re also up and running in California. So we think that we have a very good potential to grow our business significantly in 2008 as result of these initiatives that we started in 2007.
Michael Grasher – Piper Jaffray
And then by going into Florida as well as Texas has your exposure on a cat basis changed?
Michael Lee
No we don’t write homeowners, we don’t write a lot of property lines of business. Most of our products are really geared towards the small commercial package types of business and also we emphasize writing mono line general liability products so we’re not at all exposed to any type of cat type of catastrophic events that frequently occur in Florida as well as some of the other areas that we’re going into. So our approach is to really only distribute products that will give us consistency in terms of being able to generate underwriting profit on a consistent basis rather than going into these areas and writing a risk that are cat prone.
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