Interview with Rob Rickard, VP Senior Advisor Development Consultant with Simplicity InsurMark Discussing- How to Scale Your Practice With
00:00Welcome 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. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach.Today we have back with us Rob Rickard, who's a VP Senior Advisor Development Consultant with Simplicity in Shermark, and we'll be talking abouthow to scale your practice without losing your sanity.Rob, welcome back to the program.Glad to be back. Thanks, Mike.You know, I think in our series we've been talking about a lot of great, great points,
00:41but at the end of the day, most successful firms and financial services agency ownerswant to make sure, hey, I want to grow, but I just don't want to feel like I'm workinga thousand hours a week and, you know, just going insane in the process.So talk a little bit about that point where agents hit where more business simply creates more stress and they hesitate on putting things in place to grow because I just feel like I'm, you know, comfortable right now and I don't want to grow.Then that is a trend that I'm seeing in the industry.Again, because our industry is an older industry.Most of our advisors in the late 50s, early 60s, even into the 70s.So we're on that other side of the age.
01:32I am on that other side of the age wall.And there just comes a point in time when you're starting to say, I really like my lifestyle,but I'm spending all of my time creating the cash flow or revenue.I'm not really living.So we're seeing this point where people are trying to change somewhat of the direction of their practice,but without decreasing the opportunity for income in their practice.I do $10 million of annuity production.I've been working six days a week to do that.
02:04I'd like to find a way to keep the $10 million in production working four days a week.So that's an area where we start to talk about the word of scaling your practice.And scaling is something a little different than growing your practice.You know, growing your practice, you have a tendency to add more people.you take on more business, your time is becoming constrained.You're really just adding more bricks to that wheelbarrel,and you're trying to carry more and more bricks in order to grow your practice.Scaling is a process of adding the bricks to the wheelbarrel,
02:45but in essence without creating the weight of that new brick load, let's say,to take you away.In our industry, and I use this analogy, it's kind of like a barbershop.up. A barber has only so many appointments in a calendar year or in a week. So he is entirelylimited upon the number of slots he's got to cut hair. Once that, those spots are all filled,his revenue is complete. So the next step for him is how do I increase what I'm doing? And that bringsin the word scaling. Now maybe I need to find a product.of adding a few more slots to the calendar by adding another talented barber that works underneath
03:35me. So we start now the concept of, are you working in the business or are you working onthe business? Let's evaluate what's going on in the business side. Wow. Yeah, that's a great point.You know, it makes me also think of something else, which is in any industry.You know, and, you know, we can use financial services.We can use the barber analogy, you know, like the barber analogy, like, I cut hair.Okay, well, for what?Male, female, long hair, short hair, military style, this ethnicity.So what do you feel about niche specialization for growing and growing the right way in this respect?
04:18Because part of growth, if you're just trying to take.any little bit of business from any little thing and using financial services. If you work withmultimillionaires all the way down to, you know, recent college grads, their needs are going to bevery different. And you need to be an expert in all of that and you can't be. That's correct. Yeah.In our environment today, you have to be different, meaning you have to have a specialty. You know,that's why in my pod of people that work with me, I'm your annuity specialist. I'm not your lifespecialist. I can't do both. So the same thing happens with an advisor. He can't be everything to everybody.There's an example. There was an advisor that we ran into that was an airline pilot. And I believe it was
05:05continental. And he became a financial agent in helping people in their retirement plan. His niche wasairline pilots with continental, not Delta, not yours.United, his specific niche was this one category. He did very well. The other niche, I've got a couple ofwomen advisors that have focused solely on women and money, even to the point of dissecting thatindustry to, I work with married women, single women, divorced women, widowed women, or women in whichthat predominantly the bread earner of the family.All of those have different needs.So she has focused down into only working with women
05:57because they have specific.So yes, a niche market is an incredible wayto elevate the revenue of your practiceby you opened up those, you know, like you were saying,I'm only going to work on male hair.Well, if I've been doing both men and women,I now have open seats that I get to fill again.That's the same thing here.
06:22Exactly.And using your analogy with the, you know, airline pilot and working with just continentalpilots, that doesn't limit you because once you exhaust that, and I would submit to youwould take a long time to exhaust that because you can join the association and you can goto their luncheons and dinners and you can network and all of a sudden your name gets aroundthere.But then there's nothing to stop you from you.or hiring a business development person in your firm to focus on airline pilots for United or whatever the case is.
06:55So don't let the specialization say, oh, yeah, that limits me.No, it just means that you're going to create a campaign and an outreach for that and work it until you are just known,the big fish in that small pond.And then, yes, your firm, you can hire someone else in there to become, you know, the specialist in whatever.And I think that's what happened with this individual.If you were a continental pilot, there was only one person you were open to talking to.That's him.Everybody knew about him.
07:29Everybody referred people to him within that organization.So yes, you're absolutely correct.But you're also correct.If, in fact, you now have captured a strong position there, the next part of scaling, it would be to move to another airline.But now I have to make some changes within my organization.I may need to hire some additional people to ramp up the availability of time within that organization.Yes.And one of the benefits of doing that is it becomes a predictable process because you've got the
08:03proof of concept.You know the lingo.You know the airline little acronyms.And you know, you know, the needs and fears and desires.And you become entrenched in that.And now all you're doing is changing, you know, the, you know,know, like from United to Continental to American to whatever the case is.So I think that that's something that people need to think about.
08:23So let's move on to your word that you used a couple times, a system.I've always heard it, you know, like the acronym, save yourself, time, energy, and money.You know, and it's like, oh, that's something that's really, really powerful because a system can save you time, energy, and money.So what systems should be put into place if you want to see revenues grow,without working more hours.It kind of comes down to, you know,let's say that I am out there making phone calls,you know, leaving voicemails,
08:56and I'm just randomly leaving voicemailsand I don't get any phone calls back.Well, there's no way of evaluating the effectiveness of my callbecause every voicemail was different.So you have to leave the same voicemail a thousand timesto see what the return is.The same thing is in your practice.If you have a system of onboarding people
09:15into your organization.Everybody follows that same step,and it's either not working or it is working.You can start to tweak it to find the changes that you need to make so that it does work.You know that everybody that sat down in that chair got the same questions asked about the discovery process,so we had a system to pull the information we needed in order to help them with their financial planning.That's kind of the concept of a system.How do I run them through maybe a financial plan software?
09:52If I'm using the same software, I know what's coming out and I'm more prepared with the individual to present it.I'm not winging it in any process.I think that's what we're trying to do is eliminate this uncertainty of every appointment that you have seems to be different.How are you going to know what's going on?Systems work.People fail.We always change what we're doing.The system is not.
10:20Yeah, that's huge.And also, if you have the right system in place, you can go back and see where that, you know, many failure actually happen, make a little tweak and then now things are running forward.So, you know, in a system does not have to be technology, right?It could just be a SOP, you know, a process.But nonetheless, you can look back and look at step one.through four and go, okay, that's working good.Oh, five is kind of creating that little, you know, issue.So having a process in place documented helps you then to have a playbook for number one scaling.
10:58But also I would venture to say that when you are working with your agents on hiring,boy, if you know that you're hiring for an administrative position and you've got theplaybook in place, here's the SOP, the process, the system, follow this.That just frees up a lot of time, right?And it does.You know, the concept is when somebody enters the office, there's a process of welcoming them to the office moving on to the next steps.One of our advisors actually runs his practice very much like a doctor's office.There may be three or four offices, but he's able to move from office to office to office because his staff is following the same process with each couple.
11:38Everybody knows what's going on.There's no ambiguities and anything going on throughout that day.That's huge.So, you know, you've mentioned before that agencies should spend more time with clients and less time in the minutia of managing the business.What are some of the operational bottlenecks that you see that tend to kind of trip people up?Because I would venture to say that, you know, when you think about delegation or outsourcing or you shouldn't be the one doing this, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm good.And I can just do it in just a few minutes.but if you have many of those things,
12:15then that's like a two-hour block of your time.That's right.And that's the problem we have, again, in our industry.I am the best at gathering information from clients.I am the best of putting together a financial plan.I am the best at every.No, there has to come a time when you add people to the process to take overand making them the specialists in that.
12:41because again, what we've got to do is, again, I'm going to kind of go back to the barber concept,but our problem is we can't do everything for everybody.But if I have people that I can spread that out amongst, then I'm not spending my time doing thatbecause my time needs to be spent face to face with the client, evaluating the positionand giving them solutions.It's not the process of gathering the information to find out where they're at, family, thingsand that I'm the execution.I make the decisions as to where it's to go.
13:16What we need to do is scaling, though, is maybe I'm working with people that have$250,000 of investable assets.Well, in order to move up the next rung, my marketing needs to change to where I'mattracting $500,000 of investable assets, a million.So I'm still working in the same time constraints that I've imposed on mymy company, but I'm working with bigger individuals within that organization, bigger fishwithin the financial markets.That's another way of scaling.
13:52And we kind of, we want to help everybody, but we can't.That's right.Yeah, you don't neglect the others because maybe you have a junior advisor or a para planneror somebody in your organization that you're going to go, hey, you handle these from now on,I'm going to handle the biggest and the biggest.And that all of a sudden freeze up your time.you might find, and I've seen this work its way out there before, you might find that youenjoy your day a lot more because you're not the one filing the paperwork or uploading this
14:22document. You've got a team doing that. Well, and that comes to the point that, again, we're agingif you have a process or a system in place that allows you to take that individual with $250,000of investable assets that needs help, like you said, moving it to a junior advisor orjust another advisor within the organization, you're not only helping the client because he'snow got someone that's got the time to help him, but you're right. The value of your day nowhas been improved because you're not running all of the time and doing everything in theorganization. So scaling also is a process of delegation, which we're not very good at in sales.We like to be the kingpin of everything that goes on. You know,
15:11about 15, 18 years ago, I went through a coaching program and the very first thing that they hadme do was, and this was in the days where you printed off a piece of paper and wrote on thatpiece of paper. You know, you didn't even track it online, but they wanted me to track what I didin like 30 minute increments all throughout the day for two weeks. Like, what did you do theprevious 30 minutes? Oh, well, I, whatever it was. And then we looked at that and it's like, okay,should you have been the one doing that one, or could someone else have done that? And they also had medo this. You know, what did you make last year? How many hours do you, did you work on averagecounting vacations? So what is your hourly rate? And I would venture to say that if you were an agent
15:51going, hey, last year I made X and I worked this many hours, my hourly rate is whatever. Manyof these tasks in this, you know, daily, weekly, couple week time frame, you could be going,hey, should you be the one doing that? You're earning X per hour. You should be having a teammate oror a staff member doing that.Have you ever seen that kind of light people's eyes up and go that the light bulb justwent off?Again, it's because of the industry that we're in.We're in the industry of insurance where we help people.
16:21But we're also in sales, which means, again, we can do absolutely everything, but you can't.So we actually, I guess, implemented a program with our organization for people to just gothrough that exercise you said.Yeah.Is that a $50 an hour activity or is that a $1,000?$1,000 an hour activity.If it's $50 an hour, you need to hire people to do that.So you need to be growing your admin staff to help take care of what needs to be done,
16:51but it's only $50 an hour to free you up again to do what you do.And that's to sit and help people.Don't do everything else before or after that.That's your focus.That's your strength.So let's kind of wrap up with this last section.When an agent is implementing many of these things that you've laid out, putting the right team in place, technology, systems, support, all of that.And they're seeing growth and scaling.
17:24What is that, and they do it in the right way when they're actually making more, doing more, making more impact with working less hours.What does that do to their quality of life?it's not only their quality of life but it's the clients that they're working with because you you are no longer rushing through your day you're actually spending time and again you got to remember we're in the insurance industry and the insurance industry is known for sitting at the kitchen table and hearing about people's lives and then doing things to improve their lives that hasn't changed we may not sit at the kitchen table it allows thatrelationship time that people need to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to be trusted, that has to occurwith time. And if you haven't scaled your practice to give the time to do that, your practice willdie. Because we're a people entity. You know, I was going to bring this up. We have in the industrywhat's called the capacity wall. There's only so much that can happen. And what happens is when you hitthat wall, that's when things deteriorate. Your attitude deteriorate. Your clients are not feeling loved.
18:42Everything will then begin to crumble and the wall will fall down. So prior to hitting the wall,you need to make some changes so that there's a nice little gate that allows everybody to moveinto the next chapter of the process comfortably. So yes, life gets better for everybody if you scale yourbusiness and you scale it around what you're trying to accomplish, which in many cases, again,because of the age of our industry, it's more of a work-life business. Insurance agents never retire.They don't have to. That's where a people organization. You can be, and I have several in their80s that are continuing to run a very nice practice because they don't have to retire.Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's huge. You know, I think that here's something that I, I,
19:32feel like would be the ultimate next step, which is, okay, I've polished things up, I've innovated,I've, you know, we're scaling, we're growing, I'm working less hours, yay, what's the,what's the last and final step that a lot of financial professionals look at? Well, maybe thatexit. Maybe I'm in my whatever age group and I'm going to throttle back and I want a big check andI'm walking away. Or maybe I don't want a big check and walk away, but I want to work one day a week,one day a month. What does that look like with some of the professionals you're working with?again, that is now becoming a regular step.I'm seeing now a lot of family organizations.
20:12I'm bringing my children into the organization.That I'm seeing a lot of.So it's becoming a family enterprise,which is a very good way to look atbecause the clients that you're working with,when you're working with someone in their 70s and 80s,that's the advisor, the agent,you start to think to yourself,
20:32who's going to take care of me when they retire or when they pass away?So you have to have that continuity.So whether it be your kids or bringing on younger individuals,that will I have the ability to take over the practice someday.That's one of the things that we would look at.The other thing is making again sure that your process and your systems allows for time in everybody's life.And again, we just don't focus back down on ourselves much of the time.And I think as an example, I have one advisor at the beginning of every year
21:09pulls out his calendar for the year.And he fills in the calendar first with all of his and his family's vacations and time.That is the most important thing is his life.Business comes in after that.That's okay.Yeah, I've heard it called what are your non-negotiables?Well, my family time, boom, that goes in first.That's right.
21:33That's right.Yeah.We have that ability when you run your own business.That's the benefit you have for what you're doing.Take it.Yep, exactly.Well, I love this.This has been a wonderful conversation, Rob.
21:46If someone is interested in having you look at their practice and see where they can scale and actually do more in less time with more sanity, what's the best way they can reach out and connect with you?I would start with just a review of the Insuremark website,www.www.It's I-N-S-U-R-M-A-R-K dot net.Then the second thing would be to give me a call.800-752-0-207.Let's schedule a few minutes to talk.
22:20Maybe we have somewhere we can go.Maybe we don't, but I think it would be worth the call.Wonderful.Rob, thank you so much for coming back on.It's been a real pleasure talking again.Thank you, Mike.Appreciate it.You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.
22:36To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes,visit www. www.influentialentrepreneursradio.com.
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