Copyright © 2017 The Oklahoma Publishing Co.
It’s been almost a year since WeGoLook, the world’s first gig economy platform for enterprise customers, sold an 85 percent interest to Crawford & Company, for more than $36 million.
Today, with over 130 employees and 30,000 independent contractors (Lookers) dedicated to operations, WeGoLook operates as an independent subsidiary of Crawford & Company, the world’s largest publicly listed independent provider of claims management solutions.
“We are expanding our global footprint with Crawford, which was part of our reason for aligning with them in the first place,” said WeGoLook founder and CEO Robin Smith as the firm aggressively expands its industry leadership.
WeGoLook, which made the Inc. 5000 List in both 2016 and 2017, was founded eight years ago as a crowdsourced field services company to increase consumer confidence in the cars and other objects they were purchasing online. Today, WeGoLook has grown into a worldwide, contingent workforce that’s on-demand for individuals and for enterprise customers.
Lookers include licensed diesel mechanics and more than 2,200 licensed drone operators. There are Lookers with very specific skills to match very specific tasks. For example, a customer can request a bilingual Looker who is a notary and qualified to execute financial documents with a person who speaks Spanish.
WeGoLook is having a tremendous impact on the insurance industry, including helping victims of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma restart their lives.
When catastrophes the magnitude of these hurricanes happen, the traditional insurance claims adjusting model is hamstrung with challenges—from the number of adjusters needed to help people who are hurting, to the time it takes to get adjusters on site.
Because WeGoLook’s Lookers live in the areas they serve and are supported by the company’s robust mobile service applications, from Puerto Rico to Houston, they can respond faster.
And those 2,200 drone operators had drones in the air in the first 24 hours, allowing insurers to inspect 10 or more houses in flood zones per day instead of the usual three. WeGoLook was featured in the July 2017 InsurTech Briefing by Willis Towers Watson and lauded for reducing typical claims settlement times from two to three weeks to two to three days.
International travel and expanding a business she built from the ground up to other countries and continents is more than Robin Smith imagined growing up in Gracemont, OK.
“It’s fun,” Smith said, “this small-town Oklahoma girl going to London to meet with the top people in the insurance industry, including a red-carpet Lloyd’s of London personal tour. It’s a different culture and different people. The common denominator is that we are all working hard, but I’m always glad to come back home.”
A woman from an Oklahoma town of less than 400 folks builds a business on Oklahoma grit and values that will soon employ people around the world–there truly is no limit to what we can accomplish here.
Scott Meacham is president and CEO of i2E Inc., a nonprofit corporation that mentors many of the state’s technology-based startup companies. i2E receives state support from the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology. Contact Meacham at [email protected].
