Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Christian Brindle, Founder & CEO of Everything Senior Insurance

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Christian Brindle is the founder and CEO of Everything Senior Insurance (formally known as Christian Brindle Insurance Services) and a nationally recognized expert in the field.He has published multiple books about Medicare, helped countless people with their plans all over the country, and hosts the extremely popular “Everything Medicare Podcast!”.Christian has been a top producer with multiple insurance companies, has built an agency with multi-thousands of clients, mentors thousands of agents all over the country, and is the creator of The Seven Figure Medicare Agent Facebook group and brand.Christian believes that understanding your choices is extremely important in making a good decision with your Medicare. Christian is also a father and loving husband.Learn more: https://eseniorinsurance.comInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-christian-brindle-founder-ceo-of-everything-senior-insurance

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. Influential Entrepreneurs is sponsored by Marketing Huddle, where we build an authority positioning portfolio for entrepreneurs that sells for you so that you don't have to. this unique approach to give credibility and trust to get clients using podcast and TV interviews and guaranteed press coverage. For more information, go to Mike Saunders 360.com. Today we have with us Christian Brindle, who's the founder and CEO of Everything Senior Insurance. Christian, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Mike. I'm excited to be here and big fan of your show.

Hey, thank you. And, you know, I always love to look at someone's name of a business or website and kind of go, there's a story there. And I love, love, love when I hear everything senior insurance. It's kind of like, you know, the one-stop shop for everything you need to know about senior insurance. So I'm excited to learn what you do and how you do it and why you do it. But get started first with a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into the industry? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Like a lot of people that find the insurance space, you know, this is my 11th year. So I started in 2024. I had a parent that was in the business. So my dad was actually in the business for about 25 years before I ever started. He had a nice little agency, you know, good bit of clients, you know, office, part-time employee assistant, if you will. And so I kind of came in that way and learned from him at the beginning. and, you know, I ended up starting my own agency, which it started out being named after me. You know, it was kind of like we were branding me at that time, and it was called Christian Brindle Insurance Services. And then years back, actually, the first piece of content creation that we actually started doing is we did a Medicare-focused podcast for consumers that was a lead gen tactic that worked extremely well. To this day, it's still the number one Medicare-specific informational podcast on the internet.

Like if you Google it, it'll always come up like one, if not two. Me. And it was called the Everything Medicare podcast. And so we were looking over the past couple of years to kind of rebrand the name of the agency. Because as we've grown, you know, we have, as a combined organization, we make up five insurance-based companies. But we have about 300 employees now. And, you know, there's so much more to the company than just me. And so we wanted to rebrand it.

And so, you know, it just kind of made sense. sense based on the success of that podcast. And a lot of people knew us on the Medicare side based on that podcast. So we went through, went with the everything name, you know, kind of playing on the Everything Medicare podcast name. We would have done everything Medicare, but, you know, Medicare has a lot of strict rules about having Medicare in your name. So we have to come up with a work around there.

But, but senior insurance that targets who you're going to serve. And also there are many other types. of things other than Medicare. There is the dental insurance. There's medical insurance. There's all kinds of things. Healthcare that you would need to talk about. So I love that choice of name. So tell us a little bit about the main when you are talking to someone that goes senior insurance, tell me more. Where do you start? Because like I just mentioned, there's dental insurance, there's health care, there's all kinds of things. Where's the first place that you were starting to help educate your clients? Yeah, absolutely. So for us,

like everything kind of started and ended with Medicare, although we did other things outside of Medicare, but Medicare is what I would call our bread and butter. But, you know, surrounding Medicare, you know, kind of like some of the things you hit on there, you know, dental insurance, we do a lot of dental insurance, we do life insurance, you know, so we play primarily in the health and life world for the most part. But there's so many different types of products that come associated with that, right? So, like, you know, Medicare has a lot of holes in gaps for consumers, and so, you know, whether it be dental insurance, whether it be cancer insurance, whether it be home health care insurance, you know, long-term care, short-term care, anything like that, there's a lot

of products that end up kind of, you know, connecting to the tree, if you will, that is, you know, the Medicare world and everything like that. And life insurance even can connect to it in a lot of ways as well. They kind of like go together like peanut butter and jelly. And so, you know, if I'm, if I was ever talking to, let's say, like a new agent and they'd want to know, like, you know, how do I break into this or something like that, you know, the best way, in my opinion, is to, you know, pick a lane, go really deep in that lane, and then from there start adding applicable products that makes sense from there, that relate. I feel like it's, especially when you're new, a lot of times for a lot of agents, some people do it really well, but it's tricky to try to be

doing health, life, investment products. securities, property and casualty. And they're trying to be like a one-man, you know, one-stop shop for everything. And that gets a little challenging. Yeah, that's a good point. And also, it's like just a general principle in business. What's the problem? What's the pain point?

How do you solve it? Yes. And if you can solve it in a logical, ethical, efficient way, boy, now when you're talking to people having them explain to you, okay, now how does it feel with this problem, whatever that is? now all of a sudden you're you're explaining your solutions and then you're listening because what you just said about all the other types of needs too you're solving the first problem you're solving that that you know that cut on their arm so to speak but then you're noticing that oh you know what it looks like you're starting to get a little infected why don't we go ahead and add this here so when you're talking to people about let's say you started off with Medicare well maybe they started also mentioning something else in their financial world that is a concern and then that could be an education point from there. Yeah, 100%.

I feel like, you know, what a lot of people make mistakes on in business is they go they go wide instead of going vertical. You know, they try to grow wide instead of vertical. And I feel like anytime you're adding something new to your business or you're adding another layer to your business or you're adding like another offering to your business, it just makes it exponentially easier for you if it relates and, intimately relates in a lot of cases to your primary source of revenue that your business is doing. You know, if they connect to each other, if they relate, if they maybe even in a sense help each other grow in some capacities.

And so, you know, I think that is such a good solution in business in general, opposed to, because a lot of businesses and a lot of entrepreneurs, they take a little while to learn that and they kind of end up all over the place. And ultimately it hurts them. It ends up being the, you know, what's the old saying, you know, he who catches two rabbits catches neither, right? It kind of ends up being in that type of situation. Well, and it reminds me, too, if you, have you ever read the book, Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller? I have not.

I have not, but I have heard the name before. I've heard it's a great book. Excellent book. I'd highly recommend it. But in there, he makes an interesting statement. When you confuse, you lose. That's a good one. I mean, and you can see, you know, when you sit down with someone for the first time,

you can see nine different things that they need. And you could just go to town and without taking a breath, just tell them all the solutions, all nine things. And they're like, you lost me at the first sentence. So I think that's a really good point that you're bringing up is kind of keep it simple, fix that first problem, see what else is out there. So when you're working with other ages, you're, you've got, you know, what, did you say 300 employees? So how many of those are agents that are working with serving clients?

Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, we have, we have, you know, a lot of different employees that do a lot of different things. But when it comes to just agents, it's probably less than 10 of those employees that are actually just agents. If we're talking, you know, independent contractors, we have in the insurance world, what they call contracted agents. That basically what that means is their insurance contracts with the various carriers. they sell plans for. They're tied to us. We're almost like, in a sense, they're upline. You know, insurance is very MLM-E in that way. And so we have about 600 of those contracted agents across the country that are separate. They're not employees of ours, but they're

partnered with us. And we provide them with support, guidance, resources, and just additional help to kind of helping them grow their business. But yeah, I mean, agents in that capacity we have about 600 but employed agents we probably have less than 10 and and that whole team like the independent contractors that's wonderful they're looking to you for guidance for support to help them grow you know and you are looking to them to bring in revenue because there's a revenue share that's wonderful what are the types of resources and tools and growth um guidance that you're able to give to an independent contractor um if someone were to want to come aboard your team Yeah, yeah. So I feel like our responsibility to them, there's really three basic principles, I think, that make up what we should be doing for them. I think the first one is training and guidance. And I feel like in our world, I think in a lot of businesses you see this, but in our world in particular, everybody says that they provide training, but not all training is created equal.

And so the training that we're providing is, you know, very industry-specific resources, but at the same time, also very, you know, practical business strategies and principles like, you know, how to hire people, how to manage people, how to train people, you know, how to build standard operating procedures, you know, how to, you know, how to, you know, see certain things. in people, how to interview with people, how to handle a situation when an employee isn't, you know, doing their job the way they're supposed to do, right? Structuring your business, marketing, advertising, promoting your business, content creation, you know, free versus organic versus paid marketing and those types of things. So like, we provide a lot of training about like A to Z how you can build an actual insurance business. My business partner calls it a business in a box, our training.

Yeah. Because we tried to leave no stone uncovered. And so I feel like that's a big piece of it. The other things are transparency, being available, you know, when someone needs help with something, you know, responding to emails in a timely manner, answering questions, just being very transparent about how things work, you know, what we can do for them, everything like that. And I feel like the third thing is, you know, technology tools. You know, so we have a CRM that we provide to our agents for free that's proprietary. It's something we do internally, amongst other tools as well that help them with quoting, enrollments and other things like that, recording their phone calls, everything like that.

So I feel like those are the three things that really make up like the principles of what we provide to those agents. And also, you probably've learned a thing or two over the years. And there's a internal community that you guys are building and you are leading where if someone has a question or a concern, one of your agents to go, oh, hey, I've got this client who, you know, how can I solve this? And then internally you guys are coming together to go, oh, I had that happen last month. Here's what we need to do. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I almost feel like a lot of people that are in my world that kind of do a similar thing to us that train agents, a lot of times they've never been agents or they don't run an agency currently.

And if they were, a lot of times it might have been 20, 30, 40 years ago, you know. And so I feel like in our organization, like we have multiple sides of our business, but, you know, we have an internal agency that's rocking and rolling every day, that's bringing on new clients every day, that's, you know, retaining our clients, that's putting together creative solutions for problems every day, that's marketing and trying to bring more business in the door. And so, like, we're in the game is the way that I look at it. Like, we're actively on the front lines every day in that way.

And so I feel like our training comes from the perspective. of this is what we're doing now that works. This is what we've done that hasn't worked. And it's a very modern and current approach to what they should be doing to grow their business. Yeah. And what you mentioned about someone that might have had some experience 20, 30 years ago, reminded me of a statement that I heard years and years ago.

It just really resonated. Like, do you have 10 years of experience or do you have one year of experience 10 times over? You know, meaning that person isn't growing, isn't learning. isn't learning, is it staying cutting edge? And I know from the way you're talking that you stay current in the industry, current in marketing techniques, current in technology and tools. And so you're able to pass those along to your whole organization to go, hey, guys, just discovered this.

This is working great for us. Give this a try because. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's definitely our focus, right? Like we want to provide them with real solutions to challenges they might be having in their business. And, you know, I mean, you know this, Mike. I mean, when you're running a business, there are a lot of different, you know, elements that determine if you're going to be successful or not.

You know, there's, there's, you know, your organization and your efficiency when doing things. There's, you know, how clearly do you communicate internally as a company? How clear are expectations made to all of the company about how things should be done and situations should be handled. You know, there's, there's, of course, you know, are you keeping up with the latest? technology trends, you know, are you keeping up with the newest and latest, greatest tools that can kind of help you out in your business, you know, whether it be AI, whether it be automation tools, whether it be whatever it might be. And of course, you know, are you marketing and continuously innovating your marketing? Because marketing is never finished. And, you know,

trends change, what's working changes, algorithms change, people change, society changes. And I think all of those things just constantly need to be, you know, worked on and revamped. And that's something that for us, we feel like the agents need that information passed down on a continuous basis. So they know what's working right now. 100%. Hey, so looking back at some of the lessons you learned, might maybe even have been from mistakes, but you learned it. And now you've polished that up.

What are some of the things that you wish you knew back when you started that you learned the hard way recently? Oh, that's a great question. I love it. You know, the things that there's a couple of things that come to my mind, you know, here in that question. I think the first thing that comes to my mind is, you know, early on in my career, I feel like, and probably like a lot of business owners, felt like that I, my efforts alone and my hard work and my grind could push me over the edge and push my company over the edge. and I didn't always want to spend money or invest into my business. I was always trying to hang on to every little penny I could in terms of investing into my business.

I didn't want to hire people. I didn't want to, you know, get systems to help me be more organized. I just wanted to outwork everybody and that would be good enough. And, you know, for a while it is. It helps get the business off the ground. But at some point, it gets to a place where your business isn't growing nearly to what its potential could be on what it could be growing to if you you'd kind of get out of your own way, right?

Like, we is always better than me. And, you know, even a team that can do 60 to 70 percent as good of a job as you can do on your own, if there's enough people, they can still outperform you even if you're going 100 miles an hour. And so I think a big one for me was investing into my business and understanding that when you spend money on your business, whether it be, whether it be marketing yourself, whether it be hiring employees, whether it be investing in new technology, new systems to help your business run more efficiently and operate better. It's not an expense. And I think in the early days,

I looked at it as a cost and as an expense, but it should be looked at as an investment. Yeah. And so that was a big one for me. Another one, I think, was understanding the value of my own time. This was something that took me years to really understand and truly understand it. People sometimes say they understand it, but then like they're importing data or something into their business, CRM or they're, you know, they're doing all these little manual, menial tasks themselves. You know, they're answering their own phone for customers and things like that. And at the beginning, you might have to do that. You might not have a choice. But at some point, like, I'll talk to business owners and I'm sure you do too. Like they've been in business for 20 years and they're still

answering their own phone. You know, they don't, and so there's a reason why they never grow past that because, you know, they just don't understand. It's not that the work is beneath them. That's not what I'm saying. But it's that there's other people they could bring into the business that could do just as good of job at that, if not better. And there's things that they could be putting their time in that only they are uniquely

qualified to do that could propel the business to grow exponentially. faster than doing things the way they were doing it. So I think those were to the two big things for me was being willing to spend money on my business and understanding the value of my time and that, you know, me jumping in and physically doing something that I shouldn't be doing, it might feel like in the moment that I'm helping the company, but I'm really hurting it. Because you think, it'll just take me three, four minutes, I can do this, I know how to do it, and it'll take me more time to explain it to someone else to do it. And then I'd always wonder if they, did it right. But in reality, that whole multitasking conundrum, you know, if you pop off and do

these little, tiny little things, you are so disjunct, really. And so I think, you know, Pareto's principle comes into there. You know, what is the 20% of things that you must be doing yourself to give 80% of the return of investment? And maybe it takes documenting, what if I, write down every hour, which you did the previous hour, do that for the next two weeks, and then look at it and go, what are the tasks that one of your admin people could have done at 20 bucks an hour versus you at your hourly rate of whatever? And I think that that becomes an aha moment. I think that is really huge that you bring up there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, I think another important, you know, piece to it is if you don't allow your employees to try to do something and potentially fail at it, then you're not allowing them to grow. and long term, they're not going to be as helpful or useful for your business as they could be if you gave them the opportunity to learn and to prove themselves to you. Yeah. You know, it kind of handicaps them in a way. You know, like I was having a conversation recently, and I, you know, one thing I had never really thought about before, but it came up in this conversation is, you know, they might never take their job that seriously because they know you're all.

always right behind them as like a safety blanket, like a hit, if you will, to catch their mistakes. There's no real consequence of them not following through on something. But if, let's say, you let the thing fall, whatever it is, and you don't catch it, it might hurt, it might hurt your company a little bit. It might piss off a customer. And that's never good, right? But long term, they will learn through experience. You know, the best lessons that are the best lessons that are that a lot of us learn are by pain. Through pain. Yeah, I was literally going to say Tony Robbins teaches,

we're more motivated to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. You know, it's like an insurance, right? You can, when you're learning insurance sales as a new agent, you can learn something, what I call book knowledge, until you're blue in the face. But until you go out into the field and you make a mistake on an application

and it costs you a client and you take that punch in the face, you will remember that forever. And you won't remember the book knowledge as much. So those experiences, they help us become better. And your employees are no different. And you need to allow them to have that a little bit. 100%.

Well, I'll tell you, Christian, it's been really eye-opening, learning what you do and how you do it and why you do it. If someone is interested in learning more and even coming to work on your team, what is the best way that they can reach out and connect with you? Yeah, by the way, thank you, Mike, for having me. This is a great conversation. I really enjoy your show and everything that you do. Yeah, the best way to get in contact with me is, you know, if you are an insurance agent or you're interested in becoming an insurance agent, we have a online Facebook group for Medicare agents specifically. And it's grown pretty big. It's called seven-figure Medicare agent, where we teach, you know, million-dollar principles on how agents can grow their business to the million-dollar mark and beyond in revenue.

it's got about 10,000 agents in there right now. It's extremely organic. It's a very, very, you know, engaged, I would say, is the word community. So that's a great place. Also on YouTube, you know, at Christian Brindle, Christian Brindle YouTube channel, we put out weekly trainings and weekly videos on how you can grow your business. We just passed 7,000 subscribers. We're on the grind to 10,000, so we'd love it if you wanted to check us out there.

You can also check us out on everything, senior insurance website, esseriorinsurance.com, and you can kind of learn more about what we do from there and reach out from there if you wanted to get in contact. Awesome. Well, Christian, thanks again for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you today.

Thank you for having me, Mike. Appreciate it. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, Visit www. www. www.

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