Back in the early days of my busi­ness career, I used to pre­pare insur­ance pro­pos­als. Of course, we always wanted to know what price and cov­er­ages we were quot­ing against — it was nat­ural to want to beat both so we would be in a good posi­tion to get the order for the pol­icy. There were a few times when we couldn’t quite beat the price the client was pay­ing else­where, and as I reviewed some of these pro­pos­als with the bro­ker­age owner, I would ask if I should try to sharpen it fur­ther some­how. Some­times we would try, but if the rates already looked rea­son­able to us, he’d say, “No–if you get it on price, you’ll lose it on price.”