Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - A Random Conversation with James Jenkins

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyIn this episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, Ryan Hanley is joined by James Jenkins, CIC, CRM, CRIS, Founder of RiskWell Insurance. This is what happens when you hit record on a random conversation with James Jenkins... you're welcome.Episode Highlights:James mentions a cool thing about his conversations with Ryan. (6:56)James shares why Ryan’s approach on podcasts is different from his. (10:19)James explains the two opposing absolutes. (17:23)James shares one of the most significant things that emerging agents and tenured agents need to pay more attention to. (26:22)James shares the conversation he had with their Q3 quarterly prep yesterday. (39:11)James explains the beauty of having the right mindset. (47:10)James gives us fives steps that every agent should do to gain more growth opportunities. (57:35)Key Quotes:“This is the meat and potatoes of why I just love talking with you. Because, there is no black and white in this conversation. There is entirely shades of gray, there are nuanced places on a spectrum between two opposing absolutes.” - James Jenkins“I think everyone is better when the agency principal comes ready to play. Because, the agency principal, all of the producers are going to fall in line behind however the principal is doing business, and the industry as a whole is better for it.” - James Jenkins“If somebody wants to talk to you, make them talk to you then. Just having that tribal mindset of the independent agency, the retail IA...We are a tribe together. - James JenkinsResources Mentioned:James Jenkins, CIC, CRM, CRIS LinkedInRiskWell InsuranceReach out to Ryan Hanley--Recommended Tools for GrowthOpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opusRiverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riversideWhisperFlow: Never waste time typing on your keyboard again: https://link.ryanhanley.com/whisperflowCaptionsApp: One app for all your social media video creation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/captionsappGoHighLevel: It's time to take your business workflow to the Next Level: https://link.ryanhanley.com/gohighlevelPerspective.co: The #1 funnel builder for lead generation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/perspective--Episodes You Might Enjoy:From $2 Million Loss to World-Class Entrepreneur: https://lnk.to/delkFrom One Man Shop to $200M in Revenue: https://lnk.to/tommymelloIs Psilocybin the Gateway to Self-Mastery? https://lnk.to/80upZ9This show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Hello, everyone and welcome back to the show. Today actually is a random conversation that I have with James Jenkins in which, you know, probably had been too long, but usually, you know, once a month or so, he and I will just jump on a call and chat about business and what's going on and just share notes on, you know, wherever we are in our own businesses and the ecosystem and other random things. And this time, you know, we got two minutes in the conversation. And James was like, why don't we just turn us into a podcast? And I was like, let's do it. So we hit record. And what you got is, I think, an incredibly valuable and fun conversation that came out of just a randomly scheduled call.

And I think you're going to take a ton of value out of it because we talk about a lot of really cool things. Hopefully it'll get you thinking. Questions, comments that you have about the show? Hit us up. Let us know. Guys, I appreciate you for listening to this show. Maybe I say that too much.

Maybe I don't say it enough. But it means a lot to me. And as I get busier here with Rogue and we kind of hit the next level of. of what we're doing here. I'm committed to the show and sharing with you. It takes time out of growing my own business. And I think a lot of consultants would say, you know, cut it out, you know, do away with it for a year. The audience will be there when you get back.

And I say, screw that. I love you guys too much. I love sharing with you. I love trying to get ideas in your head that might help you grow your own businesses or do something better or make a connection that helps you grow your business. I just feel this deep-seated obligation in the most positive sense to help the industry because of all everything it's done for me. And I just want to say that I'm going to continue working this show as long as I possibly can. It has become harder for me to get episodes out consistently.

But I will continue to try to do that and batch and put conversations like this one that I'm having with James in front of you as often as I possibly can. I hope you'll stick with me. If you have guest ideas, send them to me. I'm always looking for great ones. Not that I don't have enough people to talk to, but I always love talking to people who are referred into the show. And either way, I'm going to keep working for you. I hope you keep working for you. And if there's anything I can do, you know how to get a hold of me. Before we get on to James, just want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor, and that is Podium. Podium is the tool that has driven net increase in leads to our business. It helps us text. It helps us get in front of our customers. It gives them an easy way to respond. We move

those customers out to our CRM pretty quickly over to agency Zoom and those conversations are happening in real time and it's possible because of Podium's ability to have a text to chat feature that we use. We use a couple of other features and they have some streamlined tools and just in general I like a lightweight tool that doesn't bog down my website but provides tremendous value and that's what podium does. I think it's worth giving podium a look. Go to P-O-D-I-U-M.com. Podium. Just search Podium. You can search Podium web chat or podium insurance, whatever you're going to find Podium. But head on over. Take a look at what they have going on. If you go to Rogris.com, you can see the web chat in action on my site. We use it

every day. We get text, you know, or we get conversations started and then the text feature going back and forth every single day, multiple times a day. So it's working. for us, there's a pretty good chance. It'll work for you. It is at least worth knowing about the technology. I also want to give a quick shout out to Mick Hunt. I know I give shoutouts to Mick Hunt all the time, but we have been kind of doubling into our relationship with Mick, and he has been doing some training work with my people, and it has just been incredible, just absolutely incredible. What Mick does at Premier Strategy Box and his team is just absolutely phenomenal. best in class in our industry, I believe.

And if you're looking to go into growth mode and you need some help to get there, there's no one better in the business. Check out my strategybox.com. My strategybox.com. Go to my strategybox.com today. All right. On to this random yet incredibly valuable conversation with James Jenkins. So, you know, when I bring in, when I bring in guests that aren't in the insurance

industry. It's usually because I just find them interesting. And I always try to get them to talk through the lens of insurance. Even sometimes they're uncomfortable with it. And I think that's fine. Like even some of their flailing to position their expertise to an insurance audience is really interesting because sometimes you can see who is either. And I won't say that I've had anybody that I thought was a poser. But certainly people that are more single track. And that's a negative. It's just, you know, like James Altucher, Clint Pulver, they were able to take their expertise and layer it on top of or weave it in with the insurance industry so nicely that they just, there were awesome interviews. And other people as well, but just those two came to mind. And then

I had another guy whose name is escaping me, who was marketing focused. And I thought his content marketing advice was tremendous. I mean, there's tremendous value in the episode. But when I tried to get him to position it to insurance specifically really struggled, then we ultimately just left it because, you know, it just wasn't in his, he wasn't able to do that. And I just find both scenarios to be intriguing. No, dude, I can completely get where you're coming from. from as I'm starting to, you know, build out this guest list for AFP and realizing, like you've said before, like it doesn't just happen. Like the idea, it's kind of the cool thing to do now is, oh, I'm going to start a podcast,

you know, whether it's a local, like, specific to your city thing, or it's super nichey in some hobby area or whatever. The building of the narrative, the idea. and we're not having an episode on how to do a podcast. That's, I think the cool thing about conversations with you is we don't really have a plan. Like we literally were just like, hey, we should record this. This is probably a good episode because it's two guys that, you know, have reasonably good things to say most of the time. I had no idea.

I wouldn't, and it's probably not me. Bro, I mean, the amount of time that I have spent listening to your back catalog in the last, six months. I'm a little embarrassed to say. But like when Cass reached out was like, hey, I want you to consider doing a podcast. I'm like, okay, that sounds cool. I had no idea how much work would be into making it a thing because getting it started

is not the hard part. Like Carruthers told me a year ago, is like staying in front of it, making sure that you deliver consistently good content, you don't just phone it in. so you, you know, stay current with your schedule of episodes. Because, I mean, if you phone it in a couple of times, most people are going to be like, this is crap. I'm not listening to this anymore.

You have to enjoy it. You have to enjoy it. And this is why, so sometimes I get bored talking about insurance. Just do. It's what we do all day long. You know, we talk, you know, you have people that you call to ask questions about or that you network with. I mean, you know, all of us do.

So sometimes I'm just bored with insurance. And like, that's why I slip in people from other industries or technologists or, or like, you know, I just made, I had one of the, I hate calling them insured tech carriers because I think that it, I don't think that describes who they are. I think digital carriers, clear cover, hippo, pie, branch, right? So I have a lot of those, I try to get a lot of those CEOs on because I just think the way that they're building. is not without its weaknesses and obstacles,

but I do think that when it comes to, as my agency evolves into what I feel like it was meant to be, there are realities in those carriers that make my business possible that the nationals just simply aren't interested in. And so I like to have them on because they're also, ultimately, they're young in the business or they're young in that business and that's very interesting. So I think you just have to like doing it. And then every once in a while, and you've probably seen this because you've done a lot of solo episodes so

far, it's really fun to do a solo episode. And I haven't done a solo episode in a while, but sometimes just turning on the microphone and just talking. Like I won't even know where I'm going to go. I just will be like, you know what? I want to talk about this. this and then now we'll turn into something else and then now we'll turn into something else. And then I'll get to a certain point. I'll be like, okay, I'm good. Turn it off. I don't know. You just have to like it because it's freaking work. No, it's, it is so cool to hear your process and to see your finished product. And it's kind of funny, this is a podcast about podcast right now, which is kind of reductive and

weird, but whatever. Your approach is very different than my approach because I am, I'm literally sitting down and drafting an outline and making sure that I know, okay, I don't know where I'm going to go with the in between, but I'm going to make sure on this episode, there's the point, there's the point, there's the point. So between those points, I have no idea what's coming out of my mouth. But I'm going to make sure that I get, I hit my waypoints on the destination. Beyond that, good luck, dude. I have no idea. Just to, to, to digress for just a second. I think like to Nagasaki, the Clearcover CEO.

Kyle, Nagasaki. Yeah. Like, I think what's really interesting about these folks is at the end of the day, those of us that are doing this game correctly and running an agency, where business owners first and insurance agents second. I think you have to be. And if you're doing it right, that's how you're doing it. And I think it's really cool to see these guys that are coming in that all.

are tech people, their serial entrepreneurs, their Silicon Valley wonks or VC people or whatever, they came to insurance after they came to business. And they see the potential in the insurance vertical. I think that's really cool because these guys are 100% bleeding edge business. And it's, I mean, they could just as easily be doing any other industry pushing the conversation forward, driving the needle, making existing legacy business is really uncomfortable like they're doing with insurance. I mean, there's a lot of carriers that I would imagine the C-suite is sitting there going, oh, crap, we're going to have to up our game in here, here, here, here and here, because otherwise the clear covers and the other fully digital native carriers are just going to

smoke them. I'll give you an example of this. I'll give you an example of this. So my business pivoted hard in August from middle market commercial to small commercial. And that's really what we are today. So we made the conscious decision to stop offering personal lines to anyone who wasn't one of our commercial lines clients about a month ago. Wow. In August, September, we pivoted from middle market to small commercial. Now, we took a lot of the lessons, teachings, thought processes that I learned in killing commercial, which I think is by far, uh, one of, if not the best, commercial sales and just operational. I don't even know how to describe it anymore.

It's so much more than a than a course. It's a community, a system. It's almost like a religion to a certain extent. And brought that down into small commercial. But in really focusing on that market, I've started to reach out to a lot of national and regional small business. You know, I'm trying to find the best portfolio of small business. carriers who want to move at the pace and do the things that we want to do.

And in all these discussions, the number one company that the nationals are the most worried about is Next Insurance. And I think they should be. I used to think Next was just like a B or C player. I no longer think that. And the reason is one, when they got that Amazon contract, that showed that they're a primetime player and that they're a red, ready for prime time because Amazon would not have made that announcement, done PR, no matter what

the integration actually is or looks like, Amazon put Next on the map, right? I mean, they made them legitimate. And next, and my very first instinct was, and I called my business partners and I said, you know, we're going to win. And they said, why? I said, Amazon just made the wrong choice. Amazon's in play in three years. You can't, you can't win with a single option solution. Can't win. You cannot win with a single option solution. It doesn't matter. It's why every D to C play by every national,

I hope all of their people are listening, you cannot win with a single player option. Now, the dirty little secret is they all have agencies behind the scenes. But, but, you know, so, okay, so you can't win. So I'm like, we're in the driver's seat with what we're building at Rogue. And then they bought AP Indigo. AP Indigo is a embedded insurance solution. It's essentially an agency.

and now next has the ability to shop multiple carriers while presenting themselves first on the business that they want to write and it gives them more reach and it gives them more distribution. And I went, if I were in the small commercial vertical of any carrier in this country today,

next would scare the shit out of me because they move fast, they're smart and they obviously are ambitious. And I think it's a professional, example of what you just said. I absolutely love the user interface, the client experience, their marketing is on point. I see it all the time in my YouTube or, you know, Google audience, like the banner ads all over the place. Once they figure out their forms, once they figure out their endorsement offers and really those two things,

their form is absolutely trash. The insurance wonks care about that shit, though, don't. That's the thing that we have to think about. And I'm super interested in your opinion on this because I'm very interested in your opinion on this. Because as as I at so I don't even really sell that much anymore. I've I've gotten I, you know, the reason that I hired the producer that I did was so that I, I hate selling insurance. It's just not who I am. I like running the business of insurance and I love the insurance business and I love the product. I just don't like selling it. It doesn't matter. So. The more I become a business owner and less an insurance agent, the more I realize how I don't give two flying shits if their forms aren't perfect. Now, granted, there are some E&O concerns. There are some coverage concerns. And those parts, I think, are very legitimate. But what I'm interested in your take is when you're thinking about a customer could care less,

really about the details of a policy versus customer experience, and if the key is to get them insured and insured as properly as possible, and that's significantly easier with an easier customer experience, or let's make it really hard and difficult, but we'll get them all the right coverages they need. Like, what is that percentage for you or is that even a question? Does that make sense what I'm asking you? Well, and this, once again, sir, like our last conversation,

this is the meat and potatoes of why I just love talking with you, because really it is, there is no black and white in this conversation. There is entirely shades of gray. There is nuanced places on a spectrum between two opposing absolutes. One absolute, as you said, is the easiest, fastest, most seamless client experience you've ever seen, but trash coverage that had, you know, good price, but bad coverage, bad claim experience when the client finds out when it's too late, oopsie, that pause doesn't cover that thing, that just happened.

That's one. And then the other is the legacy carrier that has a, you know, a cord submission that has excellent coverage and an okay price. But the user experience, they're going to lean on the retail agent to have a good user experience. Client portal, download your own certificates. You know, they're going to lean on the retail agency to make up for their own bad UI.

And they may not even have a DTC channel. So where I fall on this is, For us, for risk, well, I'm going to lean on our resources as an agency to make up for the failings of some of our carrier partners that have a less than ideal experience. The challenge, and you said it, the average insurance buyer, and I'll steal a line from Charles Speck, the average insurance buyer has the mentality of a four-year-old. They don't know what they don't know. they're irrational, they're impatient, and they don't really care. They want it now. They want it fast and easy and leave me alone. For the direct channel, I think that's fine. If Next wants to ride the direct channel to the moon, okay, great, it's going to work just fine for them. They're going to be wildly successful because of Amazon and they're aforementioned. They're really, really deep pockets, great marketing, et cetera. If they're going to excel working the IA channel, the low-hanging fruit, the

And I don't mean this in any way as an attack on my fellow IAs. A lot of IAs don't read the forms, don't know anything about the policy that they're selling other than it's a GL policy. The class code is right. The revenue is right. All right, cool, sell it. Most of them don't know. They're not students of the industry. They are not professionals in their craft.

They're insurance agents. They're not professionals. For that circle of retail agents, they're going to be just fine. for the people like me, and I think it's maybe 15, 20% of the IAs out there that really care about making sure it's the right product for the client. I mean, if it's a retail flower shop on Main Street, USA, next is probably a good option because that flower shop doesn't really care anything beyond slip and fall. They want premises liability. They want a little bit of coverage for their BPP and lost business income. And that's it. They don't really care about that.

For that kind of business, Next is great. I would go to Next in a heartbeat if I didn't have a super easy bob with like six different carriers. But for anybody, like the contractors that they push, like I saw an ad for Next for an excavation contractor. It was like picturing like a front load or excavator. And I'm like, you guys don't even offer the right coverage for Inland Marine. Like leased equipment, you don't even offer that. Your Inland Marine program is trash. like come on guys that's a little what they're saying is we offer the we'll write liability for that yeah

that's what they're saying i'm sitting here going if i'm an excavation contractor i'm going to feel like it's a bait and switch when i call them up and go oh you can't insure my dump truck you can't insure my equipment oh you can't do work comp for me for my employees oh you know contractors pollution well i can't get any of that with you i can get basic monoline gll and sorry nothing else so to an extent, I think they're really good. And Next is a great example of this emerging class of carriers. It's a digital native carrier. That's the language that I use.

I don't know. That's better than whatever. I think that is better than, I think just about anything is better than in, there are insurance technology companies that should be called insure techs. I don't think next should be called an insure tech carrier. That's, that's my, I like digital native. I think that's a good way to describe it. Digital first is another good way.

To answer your question, it really is going to be a difficult balancing act. And I think that's an area where retail independent agents are going to have to figure out what's our play in this. What's our position as an office? How are we going to handle the balance between fast and easy and good? Because fast and easy and good are usually somewhat incompatible when we're talking about choosing the right carrier. So yeah I think what I love about next coterie tune clear cover brand what I hit pie we actually have been writing more and more business with pie and and you know the reason for that is they write the business like yeah it's it's if I have to like I I love Amtrust I think Amtrust is a

great company for workers comm they say no I mean I called my underwriter I'm like you're my nine let my last nine submissions you've declined with with no discussion just decline and I'm like guys this this is not how this can't work this way like I know I wrote I wrote all nine accounts or actually no that's not sure I wrote seven in the nine accounts I'm like so I know they can be written you say you write these classes but you're just declining everything like that and I said once and I called my guy and he goes well geez you know you haven't written anything with us in a month and I said go look at my report. He goes, well, there's a lot of declines on here. I said, so if you decline nine things in a row, how likely are, do you think that I become less likely to keep coming back to you? Because I just am

assuming a decline. Yeah. Well, it's like, it's like an abusive dating relationship. Exactly. Like, if you're on the market and you're casually dating a lot of people, you know, and I don't mean to make light of domestic violence at all. That's not my point. Uh, if you're in, you know, dating four people and one of those four people might smack you around from time to time. Or just be verbally abusive or just be non-physical violence. Well, but in an abusive in general relationship, if you're casually dating four people, you're never going to go around that person because you never know when you're going to have a bad experience. Yes. So yeah, verbally abusive, sorry. Again, I don't at all make light of domestic violence at all. I'm probably a terrible person

for even thinking about that analogy. That's right. I like when my My wife smacks me in the face. So I, that's a whole different podcast, though. Okay. So I think that I completely agree with you. You know, I've been honest with all my carrier partners. And I say like, I basically take every appointment I can get at this point. Because, and I say to them up front, I don't trust you.

I don't trust you. You have to earn my trust as much as you want me to earn your trust. because there is codery who I really like. There is next who for certain things I like in right business. There is Pye who for not for everything, but for certain things I really like. They've been actually, I'll tell you what, I had some problems with Pye early on

and they're not a sponsor to show or whatever. I'm just an appointing agent with them. I had some problems with some of the things they were doing early on. I got on the phone with my direct contact and the VP of our region. And in two months, those problems were fixed. And now we're writing consistent business with them because they made some changes. They actually listened and said, oh, hey, here's a simple fix to that problem that will make us

right business. And I'll be honest with you, this is the struggle. Now, you get this a lot of times from regional mutuals, but the nationals are tough. And then I say that. And at the same time, I've had some really good conversations. to Liberty who's been really open to me. That's a company of 55,000 plus people. So, you know, I think, I think the key is, I think we have to demand more in a reasonable

way from our carriers, not just taking what's given to us, right? If you have a problem, if you're able to present a business case to them, which is what I'm trying to do, right? I have a business case. I have a marketing plan. I have a whole deck that I sit down with these carriers and I go through and say, here's what we're trying to do. Do you fit this? Are you interested? And, um, and, and, and you get a lot more. Like, I'm pitching myself to them, but I'm demanding stuff in return. And I feel like,

unfortunately, what too many of our brothers and sisters in arms do is go, please give me an appointment. Please, please, please, please, please give me. Okay, take the appointment. And now I'm just going to bitch about you. And it's like, well, you didn't set the rules of the game. Then you can't really complain now. I think the, one of the most important. things that emerging agents and even, you know, tenured agents need to pay more attention to is stewarding those relationships well and thinking of it as a two-way street. Because to your point, I mean, someone in your shoes, you, because of the business model that Rogue has set up, it doesn't really hurt you to take on a bunch of appointments and, you know, throw everything at the

wall and see what sticks. And if you need to retire some appointments, because they just don't work with your business model, okay, rogue's not going to miss a beat at all. There are a lot of agents like Risk Well, for instance, we're the other end of the spectrum. We're very careful with who we take on. And we have that conversation of, you know, I use the analogy of being a head coach on a football team. You know, I have to put 22 best players on the field, 11 for offense, 11 for defense. a quarterback. I need one, maybe two quarterbacks. I need a star running back. I need a wide receiver. I need a lock down corner who's going to shut down the other wide receiver, just to use that analogy. I don't need seven running backs who do exactly the same thing, who have the same skill set,

who deliver the same solutions. I want one or two running backs. Once I got that, good. I don't need that anymore. And we, we retired our nationwide contract because there was so much overlap with Liberty and State Auto. We have chosen to not take on CNA as an example because Chubb and Hartford, between the two of them, 100% cover CNA's appetite. So just encouraging our brothers and sisters to think very intentionally about the relationship. And like you said, the whole like bring a business plan to the meeting of, hey, this is what I'm doing. This is where I want to be going. These are my marketing efforts. This is what I bring to the marketplace. Do you want this? Does this fit with what your carrier wants to do? I mean, I know you and I both do that. I would venture to say that the

overwhelming majority of our colleagues aren't doing that. And I think everyone is better when the agency principal comes ready to play. Because if the agency principal, is all of the producers are going to fall in line behind however the principal is doing business and the industry as a whole is better for it yeah and you said this very early on and this is the key you have to choose whether you're going to be a producer or a business owner neither solution is wrong neither solution is wrong but if you're trying to be top producer and business owner these are the things that fall through the cracks and rightly so because there's a million things that need to be done if you are top producer or if you're a business owner, let alone if you have both those

hats on you. Yeah. And you're not. Maybe you can be both those things if you are really properly staffed underneath. Like if you have a if you have if you have so I I, I, I, my personal opinion is that most agencies are drastically understaffed. I think that's a big part of it. I think we all get hung up on optimizing revenue and whatever. is you're running around doing 10 million things. Things are falling through the cracks. And I seen this in my own business. I mean, I just got, I just had a woman that I save $750 on her and I don't write auto anymore. I did it because a guy referred me to her. And I was like, oh, I don't want to do this. But she was very nice. Save her $750 bucks,

better coverage, got her an umbrella. And she left me a three star review because we messed up her billing, which we did. I thought I, you know, thought I had her on auto pay. We didn't have her on auto pay. We only made the down payment. It was a mistake on to my part because I haven't gotten to documenting the issuance process yet. We're documenting everything in our agency right now, but I just haven't gotten to that process yet. That step gets missed three-star review on Google. And I'm like, and I called her and I was like,

Tammy, we had like a great, I thought we had a great relationship. Like, you know, we work through all these things. I got you, I saved you all this money. We got you this better coverage. And she's like, yeah, Ryan, but geez, I mean, how could you, you know, and I wasn't going to fight with her. And I wasn't going to tell her to,

change her review because we earned it, right? Like, I'm okay taking those lumps because I want my team to see. I want to see. You fuck that up. Like that was our fault. And, and that fell, that fell through the cracks because I was doing a million things. I was processing her account at 9 p.m. at night. And I, and I was like, this is why I have to get myself out of producing because I can't document process, manage process, build new relationships. If I'm also processing payments at 11 o'clock at night. Like, so totally unsustainable, man. Yeah, that's just a big, it's a big issue.

Like you can't bring, you're not going to take four hours on a Wednesday to create a carrier partnership deck that's going to walk through your business plan model and future. If you're also have a billion other things to do, you're just not going to do it. What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode. but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In an exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast,

whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, etc. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup. of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales,

the things that are gonna help you grow as a person and grow your business, but they all check out comments, ratings, reviews, they check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and wanna bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show, subscribe if you're not subscribed, and I love for you to leave a comment about the show

because I read all the comments, or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do, creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Let's get back to the episode. Well, and the I know you and I are both very familiar with EOS, the entrepreneur's operating system. I think there's a lot of really positive things there.

There are some definite challenges. Okay. I see your VTO, baby. T.O, baby. Okay. Literally yesterday. We just had our quarterly yesterday and it's on my desk right now. We had a full day offsite. We do that once a quarter. But to your point, there are, in my mind, there are three absolutely critical seats that have to be filled. Not just two, because I think to use Carruthers language, that cold-blooded killer, that sales first team member. Sometimes that's the agency principle. in an optimal situation. But to use the EOS language, if the visionary is stuck also being the integrator,

that ops guru, that, you know, make sure everything just hums like a machine. I don't see that anyone is in an optimal situation. And I know there's a lot of people that will comment in these groups of, oh, I'm a solo operator and I'm great.

I'm like, yeah, your version of great is a lot smaller than my version of great. Yeah. I am probably one of the most self-confident people in the entire industry, but I'm also realistic. And I get that in order for me to reach my goals, which are big, scary, massive takeover the world kind of goals, I need probably at least 20 to 25 people total at a minimum. And that's if all 20 to 25 people are like freaking rock stars. So when we when we talk about those three, the visionary.

has to be one person, someone who's just completely comfortable being the forward thinking, look over the three hills from now kind of person. You got to have an integrator. You know, jobs wasn't anything until Wozniak joined him. You know, Steve Allen. For non-E-OS people think C-O-O as integrator. Yeah. Sorry. I should have clarified that for those that aren't familiar. Just because people may not know EOS. Yeah. Integrator is Steve Wozniak. Visionary, obviously, Steve jobs. You know, Bill Gates was great, but he wasn't anything until Steve Allen found him. And the two of them together, Steve Allen, integrator, Bill Gates, visionary. Like you go down the list of, of, what's it, Jim Collins, good to great. Like, go down the list of good to great companies of all the

big names, Google, Apple, whatever, like all of them have one visionary and one integrator. And you look at the great agencies in our industry. Almost all of them have a visionary and an integrator, two people. The third person that often gets missed is that just rock star sales monster, who all they're doing all day every day is taking meetings, closing deals. Like they're not involved in the back office at all. They don't care about HR. They don't care about process documentation.

They don't care about building slick, cool automations. All they want to do is talk to people. and sell stuff and close deals. Like that's what pumps their blood. And I think if we as the agency principle, if we are ego driven enough to think that we can be both a great visionary and that cold-blooded sales monster in our office, I think we're really missing a good opportunity.

I actually think there's one more position. I think you need a head of insurance. I think you need someone who runs the insurance operation. And what I mean by that is there is so much more to an insurance business than just insurance. So if you're going to be growing, and again, we're talking about growth focused agencies. If you are, if you are, if you are running and I mean this in the most non-derogatory way ever. So please everyone listening, do not take this personally because I don't mean it to be. If you are, if you are operating and even growing, a lifestyle agency, an agency that allows you to golf every Friday and do this stuff, which is,

Guys, it's amazing. It's completely amazing. And hopefully I sell my business before I ever have to choose to do that because that's my goal. But I, that's not this, right? That's a different thing. You can kind of flatten out and kind of take on multiple roles when you've established yourself, you're mature, you're 20 years in. People know the deal. You have this rock solid base. I think you can you can take some of this away. That being said, when you're growing, And you're growing. You need a, and this is how I've mapped it out in my, I'm still learning EOS. We're only a month in. But what do they call the chart with the positions? Accountability chart. Or chart. Accountability chart.

So I think you have visionary integrator. Then you need, then you need next to the integrator, but slightly below like on a chart, would be head of insurance, head of revenue. Right. So like, so like those two positions, aren't the integrator visionary relationship, but they're that next layer down because you need someone who's making sure

eyes are getting crossed, T's are getting dotted, someone who's reading policy forms, someone who's keeping up on, you know, this company's claim service is a two out of five. You know, we need to look someplace else. Where's our, where's all our business going? You know, what's going?

Like is the flow? Where are our bottlenecks? You know, what are our unprofitable lines? Like that's all. stuff that it's that's insurance and then you want someone next to that person who is the polar opposite which is grow baby grow right sell babies you know if it's fog and a mirror we're putting it on the books and then we're going to the next one and at the end of the day we're going to pound our chest and yell and listen to whatever gangster rap or rock right up wolf of wall street

yes just well like you need to have i think both of those personalities because i think that is the ying and yang to the visionary integrator ying and yang that runs the actual business And I put a lot of thought into that. And like right now, you know, I need an, when I look at it, I need an integrator. I am not an integrator. I'm just not. That's where I fall apart. I'm the plans that we have, the partnerships that I'm building, that's where I'm best suited. And what I'm struggling with today is I need an integrator. I need someone who wants to to take all this shit that I've come up with. and actually make it into the things that I know it can be. And that's kind of where our, you know, what I'm working towards. But it is, but you can't think this way, in my opinion, and you've said it, we've kind of beat this up. If you're trying to grow at pace and wearing too many hats, you just can't,

you don't have enough brain cycles to get here. And I've only really been able to make this leap in the last five, six weeks since Matt joined. Sarah was a great start, my account manager, and she's awesome. awesome, right? She got some of the service work out. And then when Matt joined, now I had 90% of my service work and 90% of my sales work taken off my plate. And man, just in the five weeks that I've had both of them, we've, I mean, we're, we're on a whole other trajectory. Oh, man, I love hearing that. And just yesterday with our Q3 quarterly prep, we had the whole conversation of activity qualifiers. And for a full hour, my team and I ran through literally every

generic activity that we do in the office, quoting service claims, remarketing, prospecting, building channel partner relationships, et cetera, literally a full hour of the whole terminate, automate, delegate, do it yourself thing. And there was so much in there that they're like, oh, we're doing this manually. I'm like, why are you doing that manually? Why haven't I built an automation for that that should be automated. Oh, I'm sending out those reminders and the checkup with people. It was like, I built an automation. Or are you not using that? Oh, I hit no in better agency. When I get to that screen, it was like, I spent like three hours building that campaign. Like the text, the email, the copy, the timing. It's beautiful. You're not using it? It was like,

no, should I be using like, yes, you should be using it. So just having that terminate, automate, delegate conversation. And only if it passes those three filters, do you as the agency principal need to do it? Man, I coming out of, I had a full head of steam coming in the office this morning. I'm like, that was really good. Okay. We have a better grasp of the day-to-day activity. And my guy, I hired him back in February. And he's feeling down because his production this month is behind pace. But I keep telling him, I'm looking at the leading indicators. You're activity, you're calling, your prospecting, you're setting appointments, you're talking to people and going out there and doing the work to fill the pipeline. And he's looking at lagging indicators. He's

looking at his pending pipeline that has, I mean, the conversion is not where he wants it to be. But I'm sitting here from the bigger picture going, hey, you're doing the right thing. The activity is the right thing. I think too often as agency owners, we get stuck on lagging indicators, that are nothing more than an example of what's already happened, whereas we really should be focusing hard on those leading indicators, knowing full well that as long as we are faithful to take care of the action on the front end that needs to happen, the results will happen. It's just a matter of law of large numbers.

Because I pulled this quarterly, I'm like, you had $195,000 in premium production between April 1st and today. And he was like, really? Okay. No, that's cool. is just having that activity check rather than being stuck on numbers because depending on what you're into, I mean, like Caruthos said a hundred times on his podcast, the tail on a lot of these deals can be really long.

Like you can be six months and not hit anything and then all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, and you got half a million in premium sitting in front of you. So I just, I think it's really important that we, in this conversation of how do we, we set up for growth? How do we get ready to exit that initial startup phase? We've got to be more focused on activity because the cool little widget, the little tech thing, the new vendor, the silver bullet doesn't exist. You know, faithful activity is the way to grow. Yeah. So I don't know. There's my soapbox for to no, no, no. I know. I think that those are great points and really I just piggyback on them. So I talked to a parody so a lot.

he's a mentor, I guess. Yeah, I mean, A plus all the way around. To be able to have the conversations that I have with him. And, you know, he's really the one that got me hooked on EOS. And I was starting, I was reading the book and starting to really get into the idea as far before we implemented it like a month ago. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, that came to me was just if you If you don't know, if you, if you can't separate, when you separate yourself from the business, right, when you separate yourself from and you can rely on the process and procedures and you know what they are

and you have faith that your people are following. And yeah, you always got to check up on them and you've got to be accountable and that's what the meetings are for. But like when the processes are in place and you can wake up in the morning and go, you know, that email came in, I don't love that email. But I know that Johnny or Tammy or Sally or Sue or Jimmy or John. Johnny, whoever's in charge of that email, is going to work that thing through our process to solve that problem. Then you know what you don't have to do? You don't have to give it any more than the singular brain cycle that it takes to go,

Johnny's going to handle that. And then you can open your mind up to what are the bigger issues that have to be solved. And, you know, this is what was, you know, I've talked about it before in the show, like during the summertime even. Like I was in a very dark place emotionally because here I launched this business. It's a dream. I've kind of been deriving this concept for years and all these conversations. And then COVID hits and I'm not selling and blah, all,

every excuse in the world. And so much of it was I couldn't get out above these day to day, you know, things that just felt they didn't, they, there weren't, they weren't, I couldn't get out of the day to day. And since I've removed myself and if people looked at my agency, looked at the revenue and everything that we have, they'd go, you shouldn't have two employees.

you're losing money every month. And I'm like, no shit, I'm losing money every month. But you know what we're doing? No. I'm willing to burn a thousand or $1,500, whatever, our burn rate's like right around there right now because I have the money in the bank and it's not like I'm not properly budgeting. But I'm willing to burn that today and live off scraps personally to build the agency

that's going to have rocket ship growth in the not too distant future. But if I just kept plugging along and being one of those d-bags in I-A-O-A who's like, I didn't hire my first CSR to add $2 million in premium and you're an asshole. If you, you know, you're giving away revenue. I'll give away revenue to my employees all day if it means that I'm going to hit my goal five years from now. Like that's, I didn't build this to get rich tomorrow. I built this to one, shove it down the throat of every a hole who's ever typed in the comment section of something I've created. What is he ever done?

Which you know who you are because you're probably still listening to the show. And I love you for listening, but you're still an a hole. but thanks for the motivation. You got to love those haters, man. Yeah. And two, I know where I want to be five to seven years from now, right? Like that's the key to me is five to seven years. That's, I have a specific place that I want to be.

And to try to maximize my personal income or profitability in month 16 doesn't make any sense. in getting me to where I want to be five to seven years from now. And I think that is a, I think that's just something that we have to really think about is where do you actually want to be, right? Yeah. If this is a, hey, I want to feed my family and have a good life and all, you know, I don't want a lot of stress and, you know, I just want three, 400 customers that pay me

my number, whatever it is. That's amazing. But know that. And then then you set your agency up for max profitability day. day one and and all those things. Um, you know, I want to be in trade journals and newspapers. I just do like call that an ego thing, but I want to build something that I want, I want, I want people to be scared of rogue. I want, you know what I mean? Like that's what I want. Yeah. It is a motivation. Like I'm, and I know, you know, you share, you have similar ambitions,

you know, yeah. It's like you just can't, there has to be tradeoffs in certain places. Well, and I think the beauty of having the. right mindset is hearing you say, I want an empire. Doesn't in any way make me nervous or jealous or anything because I know you and I both have the abundance mindset of having fellow warriors you're standing next to and it's okay. There's more than enough pie for all of us to eat. More than enough. There's more than enough pie. And I've said this many times in other conversations. The IAA channel has to stand together because the direct writers, the captives, the monolith national brokers that are gobbling up small agencies as fast as they can find them, those guys are the enemy. The privately held locally focused, even I shouldn't say locally focused all the way because we're in 37 states and counting.

But the IA channel, people like you and me and Paradiso and Carruthers and the rest of. of our colleagues, we are so much better off when we stand shoulder to shoulder instead of facing off with each other face to face. Because when we are constantly looking and eagerly helping each other, I mean, I was talking to Brandon Smith from Montana, and he and I were both of the Better Agency thing in Arizona back in April. And this was before I had launched the podcast. And I'm like, hey, dude, I see what you're doing.

I totally respect out of what you've built the last several years. How do you deal with building your empire at the same time as being a good colleague and setting aside some regular time to help all of the people that ask you questions and message and email you asking for help

or advice on such and such? Because it's happened faster than I thought it would. But I'm to the point now because of just being active in the group. I mean, I get five. or six requests every week for, hey, can you help me with such and such? Can we hop on a call? And he told me, put it all in one day, block out a set of hours all together in the week. And as somebody wants to talk to you, make them talk to you then.

And just having that tribal mindset of the independent agency, the retail IA, we are a tribe together. And the faster that we look at that as a real thing. like an actual thing and give of our time, post helpful things, share all of the secrets that we can, knowing full that 99% of the time, someone's either going to be missing the opportunity or the drive or the knowledge to implement whatever secret you shared with them, but freely giving of whatever we have for the betterment of the independent retail channel because we really are in this together. And if you win, it means that I win because you're stronger, you have more

cash flow. You have more freedom to hop on calls like this and put better podcasts out for the betterment of all of our friends and colleagues. And I don't mean to get on a kumbaya, you know, soapbox here. But I think we have to address that. Like the guy that was giving you crap, whoever that was, you know, throw in shade in the comment section, those kind of people just need to be drowned out with so much positive energy that, I mean, this, literally this morning. And this is the last thing I'll say on the subject because I'm beating a horse right now. There was a thread where a colleague of mine in Arizona that I've had referral stuff with previously posted asking for help with a couple of Airbnb properties, one in Oklahoma, one in Tennessee.

There was a couple of people that commented before. I don't pay any attention to that. I'm in both of those states. And Airbnb properties are something that we do extremely well. So I simply commented, hey, we're in both of those states. We can do that really well. We're well equipped for that. Let me know if I can help. And then it ends up being like a freaking comment war with but hurt dude who ended up ending it on a positive note and turned it around and made it a, okay, cool, you guys have a great day. So I'm cool. I'm not upset with this person. But it was just the whole like animosity between us. I'm just like, wait a second, hold on. It's okay of more than one person comments. That's totally fine. We're all in this together. And I even said, Flynn was like, hey, do you want this? Are you in both of these states?

because I am and it ended up being no big deal. But just the whole, guys, can we not fight each other? Like the whole idea of throwing shade on another retail IA in any way because we're not the enemy like the captives, the directs, the big nationals. Yeah. They're the enemy. So I have a bunch of thoughts on what you just said. I actually don't think that they're, I, I'm going to, in my,

My opinion has changed on this quite a bit over the years. So, you know, I've been doing the whole talking head thing for a long time. And, you know, my opinion today is that we really don't have competitors or enemies in the space. Like, I don't see the directs or captives. It's a different market. Every one of our national carriers also has a direct arm in an internal agency and would rather write the business themselves and have us write it. But, you know, I don't, their marketing is different, but it's not the case. There are some super regionals that are amazing and would never do that. And I believe that.

But I'm guarantee at some point in their history, not too recently, they've had someone in some meetings say, hey, what do you think it would be like to go direct? You know, what do you think we could do? Do you think we can test this? So what I really think is we all. are our own, like the enemy that we're fighting is ourselves. And that's kind of very like Carl Young, uh, kind of philosophical type of deal. But it's, it's where I've kind of gotten to because the guy who's yelling at you in the common section, because you answered a question after him of who can

write Airbnb's and it's like somehow in some crazy land. He thinks it's like a first person to comment wins game. Um, that guy's laughing at that. That guy's got his own issues. that he's dealing with, which are most likely he's hurting for revenue, can't figure out how to get it and trolls IAAAAA for people posting who writes and where so that he can try to pick up business. And, you know, that's not a knock. We're all at different places. We all have our own struggles. So I'm not trying to knock that. I'm saying, nothing wrong with that. I think that more than ever internal, personal and organizational development is the key. There are no enemies because everyone is someone we can either learn from, share with, build a partnership with.

Like, I know agencies, and I'm sure you do too, who's number one referral source is state farm agents who can't write a certain line of business in that state. So they go and they've built some relationships. So they sit that state farm agents send their commercial auto to them, right? Or whatever. And so it's like, okay, state farms are enemy except there are IRAs who either used to be day farm agents or used to be all state agents or their biggest referrals. So my, and my point seeing this is not that you said anything wrong, just that I think, um,

I think we really, as much as it sounds fluffy and it's not sexy and it's very, very hard because it's not, it's really tough for it to be tangible. The more I've gotten into documenting systems and processes in my agency and it's been a huge commitment for us in the last six, well, probably eight, eight weeks really, really since Sarah got here, I realized how, how I didn't have any and we were a complete effed up mess and I needed to do this. I just I just started to say like we we are our own worst enemy like there's to your point there is so much business that that that we both could grow to be world shaking empire builders and never bump into each other once and for that for that for that reason

I think it's just about it's about finding a community or a couple community that help you build the internal culture and process so that you can be what you need to be, whether it's killing commercial if you're in the middle market or you just like sales and commercial, whether it's something like Cassus thing or getting really deep into better agencies community because there's tons of great stuff in there or whatever, like find a very positive place and invest internally because as you get better internally, specifically with systems and process, one, you realize that you don't need everything. new tool that comes on the market, which we've all made that mistake, myself included,

right? Yep. Two, you'll see, wow, this person really is just an incredibly amazing person who's been undervalued and can take on even more. Or, wow, he's an a-hole. He really needs to go. He kind of pisses everybody else off and is super negative. And I wouldn't have said this six months ago, but having taken this journey of documenting

systems and processes and internal evaluation. and kind of setting our, in order to set ourselves up for something bigger, I've just realized that it just doesn't matter. There's so much business. There's so much business available that, you know, that's really the key. I don't know. I'm going to leave this right here. I know your viewers aren't seeing this.

After talking with, and I'll send you a copy of this. I was talking with Matt Namoli. Yeah. because absolutely. I mean, just a legend. He reached out to me first week of June and was like, hey dude, I'm on a mission to help 20 people this month. And you're one of the 20.

I'm like, cool. All right. Let's do that. There's a win. And so, I mean, yeah, I mean, 45 minutes of conversation later. Where do I buy that lottery ticket? And he, I know. It's like, I want that once a quarter for the rest of my career.

But he helped me kind of, because I'm on that same. documenting process journey. And I know you've got a hard stop in 90 seconds, so I'm going to stop talking. Yeah. Putting the processes into the bigger picture, figuring out, starting at the top of the agency itself, the core values. And to use, and I borrowed your term, I think it was, human optimization. Yep. Where the org chart, right, people write seats, documenting the roles and responsibilities, like all the way down into departments and then core processes and then like ground floor training on how to do specific things. Like, once we do. do all of that. We as in agents in general, once Riskwell does it, once Rogue does it.

Man, I mean, so much more opportunity for growth. But if you, if you don't have all of those steps, like all five of those things done, to your point, you are your own worst enemy. And I think that's a great place to stop this episode from my perspective. Dude, always enjoy our conversations. I'm very glad you said, hey, man, why don't we just make this into a podcast? Because we probably would have had this same discussion, whether we were recording or not. We totally would have. As always, just awesome see you success. Podcast is great.

Before we sign off here, I want you to tell everyone where they can listen to it. But definitely want to get together offline because I have a few offline questions. Unfortunately, now is not the time because my 7-year-old is graduating from first grade in 15 minutes. That's awesome. But, hey, the agency freedom podcast.com, the only thing that I would ask is I don't want to steal time from Hanley. If you know anyone in the captive world who wants to know more about the independent world or someone who is a former captive and wants to be better at the IA game, share the podcast with an agency freedom podcast.com or listen to it on the agency intelligence podcast network, the same place you're probably listening to Hanley's show. So there you go. There's my pitch.

Subscribe to both, listen often, comment, share. Guys, you know, I'll speak for James because I know he shares my opinion. Absolutely love that you guys take time out of your day or your activities. You have so many podcasts, so many pieces of content to listen to and the fact that you choose this show, us, our conversation and have listened this long. It means so much to both of us. And thank you. Thanks, guys. You'll take care.

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