Happy day Bob,

Thank you for taking the time to help me better frame this for an eventual showdown.  I believe that the ultimate answer from the clients will be three-fold: 

1.  It is too expensive to register their companies with the states in which they would like to sell insurance.

2.  The insurance sales contracts the agencies offer are to individuals and not their companies as either required by state law or chosen by the agency.

3.  There may be a federal/state rule that says that a license follows a human and not an entity.

All of them result in the same options for the clients:

1.  Accept and move on

2.  Pay me a lot of money to come up with a management service organization model that all the agents could own and pay fees to in exchange for legitimately-provided services, then pay the profits back out to the owners or some such thing

3.  Find agencies in states that will do business the way they want to do business

4.  Pay me a lot of money for listening to their tortured cries

I vote for #4!

Thank you.