Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Building the Next Generation of Insurance Technology with Margeaux Giles

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyUnlock the secrets to balancing the human touch with high-tech efficiency in our latest podcast, featuring a renowned insurance industry expert, Margeaux Giles.✅ Join the Insurance Growth Masterclass: https://masterclass.insure✅ For daily insights and ideas on peak performance: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley/✅ Hire me to speak at your next event: https://ryanhanley.com/speakingConnect with Margeaux Giles✅ Margeaux's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margogiles/✅ Website: https://iryscloud.com/Their insights illuminate the delicate dance of automation—where too much can alienate clients, but just the right amount enhances interactions and frees agents to do what they do best: connect.We grapple with the realities of over-automation, advocating for an approach that prioritizes personal connections by relegating the mundane to machines, thus enabling agents to elevate the customer experience with their expertise and empathy.The conversation shifts to the transformation of commercial insurance placement, where artificial intelligence meets the seasoned agent's wisdom.Our guest's profound knowledge sheds light on the symbiosis of tech and human experience, revolutionizing policy placement and market analysis. We examine the challenges of training newcomers in the field, the potential of AI chatbots for internal data management, and the pressing need to overhaul legacy systems.All this is juxtaposed with the realities of technology adoption within the workforce—how it can either spur growth or stifle it, depending on how closely it aligns with both employees' expectations and the company's strategic goals.Finally, we wrap up with reflections on fostering a progressive work environment in an era where legacy technology can be a deal-breaker for the tech-savvy generations entering the workforce. We discuss the importance of offering tools that not only meet but exceed their expectations, ensuring a satisfying and productive work life.Our guest departs with a hearty message of innovation and the unyielding importance of the human element in a world marching steadily towards automation.Join us for this journey through the intersection of insurance, technology, and the timeless value of genuine relationships.--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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at www.webrew.com slash audio. That's 60% off for a limited time, but only when you go to www.webrew.com slash audio. No, but that, so for us, like as a core, that was a huge hurdle in my agencies as well, right? Like I said, I have, I have age ranges all over the place that are agents, but a technology adoption. So I went from, I think we've done two or three really large, and I'm talking like AMS overhaul, CRM overhauls through the 15 years. And it didn't matter what it was. There's always resistance to change, right?

And I learned very early on that change management is so critical. I mean, it is so critical. Crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Margo Giles, broker and insureTech CEO to Iris InsureTech, a next generation insurance software. And this is a conversation I've been looking forward to for a while. while. We kind of been going back and forth with our schedules, which happens a lot when you're

booking guests for a show. And it just absolute pleasure to have Margo on. We had a chance to connect IRL out in Utah at an event and watched her present, actually her product to in SureTech, Utah, an event that Wes Anderson put on. Funomenal, phenomenal stuff. And Margo's perspective, I think, blends the perfect mix of like that gutsy entrepreneur have to make waves with a pragmatic and real understanding of what it takes to be successful in our industry, which is exactly what you need to build productive and useful technology in this space. And it's just an absolute pleasure to have her on a show and share her perspective with you if you have not had a chance to connect.

I highly recommend you connect with Margot on LinkedIn and follow along what's going on with Iris. Even if you have no intention of moving AMS's or any of that kind of stuff, you're perfectly happy. This is one, she is one of the individuals and her technology is one of such that I believe we just need to have it on our radar, right? At a minimum, have this stuff on your radar. So, guys, great conversation, very nerdy, very geeky insurance conversation. If you're into that kind of stuff, you're going to love this.

Before we get there, I want to remind you that depending on when you're listening to this, either the insurance growth masterclass is coming very soon and you want to get on the wait list. or we've already launched and you want to become part of this community, of this membership group, this master class, learning how to grow your agency through inbound marketing and inbound sales. Guys, there is nobody teaching this stuff on the market. It is what has made me successful over and over again in every venture that I've been a part of, whether it's a traditional independent agency, my own independent agency, and all the

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Guys, I love doing this show. I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Margo Jiles. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I'm excited to chat with you. And, you know, I think we got a lot to talk about it. You've obviously been kicking butt and it's been fun to watch. You know, I wanted to connect again since Utah, but life is so crazy.

I know. I'm actually in Utah again. I'm in Park City right now. Are you really? Yeah, I'm at Marshbury. They have like an executive. Oh, cool. State of the Union for retail and distribute.

distribution so yeah awesome i have never worked with marshberry i you know that's one of the few organizations like literally one of the very few organizations in the insurance industry that i have never haven't worked they're fantastic i mean i hadn't everything i've ever heard about them yeah yeah yeah really really good like so many good stats this morning where just all the things you want to know about retail and distribution and brokers and agents and i just was eating it up this morning oh that's awesome that's awesome well i want to get into it with actually a not a back and forth because that means it's not an avatorial, but something that I saw on LinkedIn today,

a comment that you posted. So for the audience at home, we'll throw this up on the video or whatever, but I thought this was a really interesting place to start our conversation. So Ryan Matheson from Glovebox posted, is it possible that agents are over automating currently? The client experience can degrade quickly. If you can try to automate every step in the customer journey,

the industry's tech just isn't there yet, whatever. And there's a ton of comments, whatever. But you commented, And there's no possible scenario where agents are automating too much. They don't have access to the kind of technology that can even facilitate that. They are, however, automating the wrong shit, which I firmly and utterly agree with you on. So it can feel like their process are very impersonal. And then you went on to talk about like Rayquot bind on websites, which I couldn't also agree with you more.

But I wanted to start with this idea of over-automating. And what I liked particularly about your comment wasn't the first. part, but that second part, they're automating the wrong things. And I think some of that has to do with slightly out of context reference, but like the medium is the message kind of thing, like the actual, some of the tools that they're currently using don't allow them to automate the right stuff. But I'd love you to just expand on that a little bit because this is so much of what you're building. Well, it's funny because the focus is always right and agents is on sales. Like how do we make sales more efficient? How do we get drive ROI? And so that's the first place people automate. But I always like that to me is the

last place you actually want to automate. What you want to do is get menial tasks, right, in automation or business process management or any, you know, whatever it is workflow, whatever you call it, that gives you enough time and energy to focus on the consumer, the customer, the human being that you're speaking to, to procure insurance. And so you see a lot right now, like, if you go into the market, it's like, and I'm going to try not to use vendors names because I don't want to like call anybody out, but there's a lot on the CR. Like there's a lot of front end CRM. There's a lot of automate mass emails, automate mass text messaging,

get them to your website, get them quotes. Like I think I commented that in the comment on Ryan's post. And to me, that's like, first of all, if you look at any of the data right now, mass email campaigns are dying. Like no one is responding, these cold blast emails, like you're not getting the customers you want from them. So why are you investing and automating in somewhere that's not working? Yeah.

There's, same thing with text messages, right? So we're coming up against the time frame now where people don't want mass tax. There's a lot of regulation going into it, by the way. You know, what kind of clients are you getting even in response to those things? Are you looking for someone that wants the cheapest price? Okay, but is that really how you want to build your book? So like this is where the con, and especially with AI too, like this is where all the concentration is. And I feel like the concentration is on the wrong part where you should be using automation as things like,

data gathering, like scraping information, right? And so that when you do have that first contact with that customer, you're coming to the conversation educated. That is a really great use of automation technology, AI. And then you know how I feel about all of that being back into the AMS and that your AMS really should be like your war chest. Like this is where you go to do everything. And so I think there's a lot of missed opportunity there. But that piece where we're just going to automate the entire process of building a connection with our customers to me is just like way off the mark. Yeah, I did a post a couple weeks ago where I basically said like everything, AI is trying to be more human.

Yeah, we are trying to, yeah, everything we do with AI makes us less human. So I'm like, are we missing the connection there? Like are we like like guys like everybody that's building tech right now is trying to make the AI more human. Yeah, we are disconnecting ourselves. We're trying to spend less time with our customers. We're trying to be more arms-length with them. And I'm like, that is the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

We should be, as you said, leveraging these tools so that we can be more face-to-face with them, more phone calls, more time in market, in person, whatever, because all these things in the background are getting done and getting done. And this is really, you know, kind of where I would love to you to take your next answer is like, how do we get them done accurately? Like, there's a lot of stuff that happens. and it sounds amazing. But then when you see the output, you're like, this might actually be more work. So I run this automation,

but then I have to hire a VA to make sure the automation is accurate. Like, I'm not sure how all that happens. Well, because it's not embedded in the workflow. So like, when I think of how we build workflows at Iris, the first thing I think of is like, how does a customer interact with the workflow? And we all used to think of workflow as like,

okay, we go step one, step two, step three, step four, right and a lot of that is you might have four or five tools but you're still putting data in here and then you're leaving that screen and you're going to another tool and you're putting data in there and the tools giving you the response that it sold you they're not captured in any type of like coalesced way so you end up having to go back to whatever that platform is or whatever that piece in the workflow is to go back to that data or the output so what what my goal is is like okay If I'm doing something like quoting, right, and I'm entering customer data, like, where is my AI that's like popping up as I'm typing and saying things like, hey, have you thought about

this? Like, or, you know, this data is, you know, X, Y, Z, therefore we think you should offer the client, you know, this package. And so like, it's unless of a, I'm going to go somewhere and do something, I'm going to get a result, and then me as the human, I'm going to put all the pieces together and figure out what the outcome is. that should be happening. We have the technology for that to be happening in a single interface where a user is not the one that's going out and doing all of the actual business process.

But then that AI is giving us sort of almost like breadcrumbs as we're going. Think of it a lot like a personal assistant. And so for me, that's where I'm focusing less of like I'm going to go chat to a bot and get an answer back from the bot, which is still right, light years ahead of where we are today. but like how does that AI actually integrate into the workflow so that as I'm doing my physical work, it's redirecting me and directing me in the way that I need to be directed, if that makes sense. No, it completely does.

And, you know, I've been saying for a while, and really this was something that my mind was changed on. So when I first started Rogue Risk back in 2020, I was all about commercial lines rating. I was like, this is going to be a game changer, et cetera. over the course from 2020 to now 2024, my mind has completely changed. And to me, I believe that commercial lines rating

is actually an antiquated technology already. And the reason for that is going into a raider, it's another system, another disconnect, another place for this API, not talking to this API, et cetera, et cetera, okay. And what actually we found, and when we became the most efficient and we're closing and our conversion ratio,

shows were the highest was when we got to the point where we knew the market before we quoted, right? We just knew this is Hartford. This is travelers. This is a wholesaler, right? We just knew where to go. And what I found is that agents, independent agents have been doing this in their brain in their local markets forever, right?

They had that engine in their mind. They just knew, you know, Tammy knows the bot business. So go ask Tammy. She'll know exactly where to go, right? Where do I put in church, go to this person? I've never written this. So you had that before. And I speak about this a lot because my own mother, who's 62, works at our agency.

She's our highest producing commercial agent. And I laugh all the time because she has all of this knowledge in her brain. And she's 62. So she's talking about retirement. And I'm thinking to myself, how do we extract all of this amazing institutional knowledge that these producers who have been in the market for 30 years and know, there's nowhere in an AMS to. put that kind of data. There's nowhere in a CRM to put that kind of data. So what are they doing?

Well, they have their own spreadsheets or they've got their own matrix somewhere in a notebook and they're using like, why are we not leveraging that as an agency? And that is a fantastic first place for an AI use case, right? So if I look at your historical policy placement and I can do things like, okay, line of business, coverage type, the type of risk, the location of the risk, some of the profiles of the people. This is not complicated algorithm stuff we're talking. You can build this. And you put that into a

machine learning or an AI bot. You can get those types of results, even through Gen. AI. So you could type into an AI at this point and say, hey, I have a risk. Here's the characteristics of this risk. Where should I place it? And when the AI gets good enough

and the data is large enough, and agents band together, because I'm going to pitch, right? And we all discuss whether or not we're going to share our data. That is where we leverage things where we are actually determining where the market goes. We are analyzing the market before the carrier even knows where the appetite is moving towards because we can't rely on carrier appetite guides. I'm sorry, they're not accurate. And so then we get into like, how do we train new employees that are coming into insurance, how to be effective? Well, let's just give them a raider

and we spaghetti against the wall. And if you know anything about the technical, interworkings of most rating platforms, their indications at best, right? They're not bindable, but it's very few can go all the way through to binding and give you bindable quote. You're still having to jump to that carrier portal to run an RCE or an MBR,

and it's just right now, to me, raiders are a great data transfer mechanism. So what they do well is they take data from your one place and they put them into all your carrier portals. Beyond that, it's not really that great. It's really great. And, you know, and I found this with, you know, the big awakening for me was at some point,

we got a call from one of our reps of our better carriers and like, they're like, what happened to all your quote volume? And I'm like, you know, I would stay on it. But at this point, we have like 15 people and I'm not on every quote done every day. You know, I look at stuff at a large level. And I go, oh, well, okay, let me look. And I saw that this particular carrier's quote volume was way down. And I, so I'm like, man, what the heck?

So I come to find out. Now, this person who called me didn't even realize that internally, that carrier had decided to remove a discount that they previously had allowed to push through to the Raider. They had removed the ability to push it through. So now all of a sudden, and that discount was legitimate, like it actually applied. But now we just weren't seeing it. So now all of a sudden, they're ranking X higher than other carriers because that discount isn't being pushed through based on a technical decision.

And now my people weren't putting business with them, even though they were. probably the right carrier to go through for that business. And I'm going, this is insane. Like, we know automatically for this type of business, this is the right carrier. And they're not getting the quotes because of some technical decision made in an API. So it doesn't pass through. I'm just like, this has to be solved. So how we solve this and this is, there's way, you guys are building a better mousetrap. So I don't want to pretend. But how we did this was we started exactly what you said. We found some, you know, internal AI chat. about that ran off Chaggy before or whatever.

The name of it doesn't matter. And it was internal only. And we did exactly what you said. We put all the appetites for the carriers in. Then we put very anonymously type of business policies that we had written. And then we created a PDF that was our rules document that was literally like this carrier rank one, this carrier rank two, et cetera. And it was very basic.

But it gave our people a snappy. It would be like bakery, Wisconsin, you know, Hartford, then travelers, then Chubb. Okay, great. You know what I mean? And they would know, try this. And if it doesn't work, go here, et cetera. And, man, just that very hacked up, you know, whatever version of things, there was a significant efficiency increase.

And the other thing people don't think about and then I'll be quiet because I know you're supposed to be doing the talking here, but I'm a terrible interviewer. Is you probably already know. No, don't worry about it. Is that one of the things I think we don't. think about. I'd love your idea. 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 going to 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 want to bring them in

and share their stories with you. I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I'd 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. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. Being a technology creator, I love your thoughts on this.

We don't consider the brain cycles that it takes our people to get things done. Right. So one of the things towards the end of rogue risk was we started making our technology decisions, one of the primary data points that we would take in. And whether we took a new piece of technology on or not was how easy it was to train people on that tool. Oh my gosh. This is our third pillar. Yes. It became, that was like, to me, I was like, if it takes a month to train someone on a piece of technology or three months to train someone, I don't want it.

That doesn't help me. Like it just bogs us down. It's brain cycles that people are using to do things. So instead of making good decisions or using that brand energy to communicate with a customer, they're thinking about all these other things. So I'll leave you with that. No, but that. So for us, like as a core, that was a huge hurdle in my agencies as well.

Right? Like I said, I have, I have age ranges all over the place that are agents. But technology adoption. So I went from, I think we've done two or three. really large. And I'm talking like AMS overhaul, CRM overhauls through the 15 years. And it didn't matter what it was.

There's always resistance to change, right? And I learned very early on that change management is so critical. I mean, it is so critical. So like, and I would tell anybody listening to like, we're going to do a whole bunch of education around this this year. It's one of our initiatives.

But you need to understand your business. processes and what your goals are before you even think about buying a piece of technology. Because if you're just constantly buying the shiny thing, right, and you have no strategy behind what it's going to provide and how it's going to be implemented and what the rollout of that implementation looks like, even if it's a small piece of technology, there has to be strategy around it. And you need buy-in from your employee. So if you are an operator or an agency owner and you are not bringing in your best CSR, your bookkeeper, your, you know what I mean, your biggest, you know, advocates on your sales team. Like, and they are not a part of the buying

process. You are already set up for failure because now once you buy that technology, you're placing the responsibility of selling that technology on your technology providers. And they may or may not be good at that job. But now you're immediately creating an environment where it's like head, you're budding heads, right? I purchase this thing. You must use it. I don't care if it's useful to you.

I didn't ask your opinion, but you're going to use it now. And immediately that's adversarial. And it never works out well. But also I find in change management a lot of times, ownership is always, and rightfully so, is looking at everything from a managerial,

high level KPI point of view, right? I need a system that gives me this result. And a lot of times those results, are not user-based. So it's like, I need a system that's going to give me the ability to see a report that looks like X, right? And that's really important to management, and it's really important to ownership. It couldn't be, it's not even tracking on your CSR's mind, right?

They're worried about how do I get this process done that takes me 70 minutes to complete. Yeah, I'm producing your KPI now, but you've just made my workday infinitely harder. So what's that going to cause? People are going to leave. because no one wants to do that. And they're going to reject the technology because there was no holistic approach to it. So that's my soapbox of,

and it makes my sales cycles longer, right? But in reality, when we have clients that approach it that way, they are always more successful with the rollout. The tech sticks longer, and they're happier in general with, you know, the overall result. And so I would tell owners to think about those things before they even look at it. And I'm sure you had a similar experience when you guys rolling out your tech.

Yes. Yeah. So I had a very interesting experience with, so I became incredibly frustrated about two years in with Rogue with just our inability to do what you're building at Iris. Right. So like bringing it all in, making it modern. And I went on this, you know, this is probably the biggest thing. boondoggle mistake I've ever made is we tried to wedge our business into HubSpot. I've been there.

I have been there. And I'll tell you, you know, the hard part for me was, and really, I did try to get buy-in. I did have some buy-in from people, but probably not everyone I needed. But the issue was the way HubSpot approached sales, customer service, the gathering of it, how you brought people into one account, how you track things. I was like, this is exactly what we need. Like, this is it. This is how it should work.

This is how the insurance. But then there were all these other pieces that were wedging in and you couldn't get this data in. The data wasn't formed. And it became this boondaga. And the problem was, and while I became a mistake, was that I brought in sales and sales loved it. Service hated it. Accounting wanted to stab me. If she wasn't remote, she probably would have stabbed me.

And, you know, but then, but then some of the other leaders loved it because they could see everything their team was doing. So you had like, you started to create these factions. And that's really, and I allowed it to go too long. That was really the mistake was I didn't get everyone's buy in. I got what I thought was most important at the time. Sales is buy in. And then then these factions created where half the team love this thing.

It was helping them. They could see everything, et cetera. and the other half the team was just, you know, poking my voodoo doll every day at their desk because it was so miserable. And, you know, that ultimately we had to unwind it. And so that ended up being an expensive and valuable lesson. But if I had, to your point, brought all of the relevant decision makers or influencers in the company in and gotten their feedback, I probably could have missed that because like I said, sales loved it. Service from the jump hated it. And if I got that feedback, maybe I don't make that mistake.

So I think that's really good. Well, and that speaks to like the difficulties of marrying CRM and AMS or PMS, whatever it is, right? Marrying a sales and service system, it's what we're doing is not easy. And we're not the only vertical in industry that's having this sort of moment either. It's happening in banking. We see it a lot in financial services. So like we're not unique in this problem because those two people have very, different needs out of a system, right? But the problem with insurance is that we are not like retail.

We're cyclical. So like there is no difference between sales and service realistically because our whole model is built on renewal business. Right. So our whole goal is to get somebody back into the loop to begin with and keep them in the loop where if you think of retail, it's very linear. It's like you go on website, you buy a shirt, you got the shirt. You may not find the same shirt again unless, you know, it tears or something. So like it's not cyclical. And all of these systems like hubs, like a lot of that's made for more of like a retail type business. And the problem, like if you want to dissect it, is what we sell. Our product is highly complex when you talk about data modeling and data structure.

So you're talking about like what fields do I need and all of these things. Like those, when you have a very static product and you're in a CRM, it's really easy to point to a product and say, I sold a car. The car has some attributes, right? Like here's its bin number. I sold it. Now we track it. When you're talking about insurance, you're talking about coverage and limits and clauses and contracts. And you're pointing and trying to dissect, you know, this person is associated with this coverage on this policy.

And so it gets wildly complex really fast. And so when we started building the data structure around like how could we point an, we call it opportunity. I think most people do like an opportunity or a, a sale and how do we marry that with a product. And when you're into systems, if you're trying to run data analytics off of us, and there are many people listening to this that probably have a sales system where they're entering customer data, maybe like a high level line of business, maybe, or they're just saying, I have a sale, it's worth this much, it's in this stage of my pipeline.

I'm going to close it out. And then now the service person picks it up and puts it into a separate system. that chasm is where all of your data that you need lives. How did you get from sales to serve? What were the versions of that? Did you offer them these coverages and they rejected them? And then they came back and you guys settled on this coverage. Okay, then you took that coverage and you took it to market and you sent those out.

And what was the market's response? Did they return the exact coverage you requested or did you have to negotiate with the market? So all of that data is what drives AI. That's what drives analytics. that's what drives the market prediction and all of that. Like, so you're missing and most agencies are missing like the best part of their data, right? Because that drives your things, like how efficient your renewal process is. What are you offering them next time around?

Are you upselling? Are you cross-selling? Like, you can't see any of that data. And so, but the problem is that even if you do get it in the unified system, it's a lot of data to enter. Like, it's cumbersome amounts of data. So the first thing you have to do is marry the two. then you have to figure out the connectivity between all the parties because you're getting data from an insured.

Then you're supplementing that data a lot of times with your own research, your own underwriting stuff. You're going to their website or you're getting data about their credits for, whatever it is. Then you're having to take that to a bunch of different third parties in the marketplace. And so it's not an easy feat. And so we started looking at Iris in the beginning, we really wanted to focus on like the human connection. we really wanted to gather more data about the person and their buying habits and how they affected our agencies. But we couldn't leave out the fact that eventually we were going to have to compare that against coverage that we were offering. So it's a huge problem to solve.

There are many people involved, lots of stakeholders that have to buy in. But at the end of the day, we couldn't build a one-off product. We had to build the arc because somewhere, somewhere down the line, somebody has to have a system that is going to allow for, seamless communication between multiple stakeholders and not just via API, but also like future proofing, right? Because we talk a lot about API. There's an entire world beyond API too, where we're talking about how do we transfer data that is like you said, anonymized, that is secure. How do we run AI modeling off a very segmented submeditated data? That's a problem that we can't fix right now because of the way that core systems are structured.

still from the 80s and 90s that don't allow for that. So like there was no other option but to go back and fix the root of the problem so that then we could interact with the insure texts that are popping up everywhere that really have really great solutions and offer what we need, but not outside of the workflow that we need them to be done in. Yeah. Let me ask you this question. How much data does an agency actually need to be successful?

They, agencies have no idea. I want to write a book about this one day. You agencies, in particular, and if agencies ever decided they were going to ban together, which we're seeing a lot of that right now in the market, we would control carrier appetite. Like, we are the underwriter. Like, we are the first contact with the customer.

And a lot of times, I know that carriers have different views on this, and especially for underwriters, right, the agent is always lying, right? That might be true for some agencies, and it may be true for really small premiums, that are very transactional. But I'm not putting my E&O on the line for a $3 million trucking policy.

So I'm underwriting that file, right? Like, and so the amount of data we collect, and you see this with, I'll say the bad word, like the Ivan's problem with commercial download, if you've ever tried to do Ivans commercial download. Like I'm curating so much data. I'm then sending, I'm then putting it in a PDF, which is ridiculous, because that PDF I'm putting it in

doesn't even allow me to put the data I need. So if you ever look at a cord and its structure, like it's not even capturing the actual underwriting data really that an underwriter needs, which is why we have supplementals to supplement the fact that the form we all decided to use doesn't work. I'm putting that in a PDF. I'm sending it in an email. A carrier has taken that PDF. They're scraping the data off of it, putting it into their system. Like it's the worst game of telephone that I have ever seen. And so we need to get to a point where there's more trust between the agent and the carrier, right? And we can facilitate trust by verifying data in the beginnings as agent. Like if we're

using the same data providers and we're using the same type of technologies that a carrier's using and we're transferring those things to the carrier securely, why is the carrier doing double, triple work of the work that we've just done? Yeah. I mean, why? I mean, why? And Why is that happening? Because that slows down all of the processing. That's why you're waiting two weeks for a quote back for anything over $10,000 in premium on a commercial P&C policy. It's not necessary.

And the reason why is because all of the technology that's in place when you go between those things is antiquated. And it is meant to divide us because there's a financial incentive to divide, to keep us separate. Because if we've decided that we didn't want to be separated and we, wanted to exchange data this way, then how would all these middlemen make all their money? Yeah, one of the things that I've been advocating for as a mindset shift that I think solves some of these things is, and not everyone likes to hear this, but I've been saying we have to stop

thinking about carriers as partners. They're suppliers. It doesn't mean we can't have a great relationship with them. It doesn't mean they can't be important to us. But we give, we give, carriers in particular so much leeway because there are partners, right? And we're sold this like partnership idea where anybody who's ever been on any internal agency council, any carrier ever or any side conversation, they refer to agents as their distribution arm, right? So we're their distribution arm, but they are our partners. And like we have to stop this like fantasy that you are anything more than essentially a manufacturing distribution chain here. You have to think about this, right?

And my point in that is not to say carriers are wrong or whatever. We have to start to be rational about what they really are, about the role that they play. They're a supplier. And when the product that they're supplying is no longer addressing my market, I have to go find a new supplier. And because we've locked in this mental concept of partnership, we feel loyalty to them. And I'm like, you know, and I learned this the hard way. I had a carrier who spouts partnership, partnership, partnership, agents, agents,

partnerships, partnership. And I'm like, you know, and okay. And we've been building with them and growing with them. And I got invited to this sales thing, whatever. And you would think that we're like a good partner theirs. And then we got this really nice account. It was like a half a million dollar premium account. Come to us, we package it up.

It is a perfect fit. I can show them on their website. It's a perfect fit. I can show them in their internal dog and it's a perfect fit. And just not being a moron, it's a perfect fit for them. And I send it to them and, you know, come back and blah. And finally, some guy that I don't know in some office with a VP in front of his name decides that for some reason, this is an account we don't want and blows the whole thing up.

It doesn't happen. and I'm left after a month of work in a large. And their response is, sorry. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's how you treat a partner? No. That's how you treat a distributor of your partner, of your product that you don't care about. And to me, we just have to realign our relationship so that we can start to do things like

what you're saying, right? If I have a group of suppliers, I have no problem pooling my data with other people to better understand how my suppliers provide. But when I have a partner, and I know this sounds like semantics, but I do think it's important psychological thing. When I have partners, it's like, I don't want to do that.

They're my partner. They take care of me. And I'm like, no, Tammy the underwriter takes care of you. The carrier does not take care of you. You have a great relationship with Tammy. Tammy's awesome. She's great. But the rest of that people in that building

don't know you from Adam or Eve, and they don't care. You know what I mean? Right. Well, or it's like, I mean, so two points there. it's your partner until you have a shock loss. Yep. Anybody that's own agency long enough has been through that.

I live in Florida. I had to bookroll my entire business every two years because a carrier would come into the market. They would undercut the market by 20% on the commercial PNC side. And it usually was auto. And then they'd get their ass kicked in losses. And then they'd say, we don't write this business anymore.

You have 30, 60, 90 days to move this book to another carrier. And we were doing that every two years. So in Florida, I'm with you that we definitely had more of a supplier-type relationship as opposed to partnership. I will say, though, what irks me a lot about the workflow that's so common right now in the insurance place is this idea that, I don't know, when it was five, ten years ago, everybody started building portals, carrier portals. And so agents said, well, instead of collecting the data and then having to go to every agent portal, which again, not, not, the way that that should have been built if anybody had taken five minutes to think that that process through. But now what they're doing is giving up everything to the carrier. So now you're

taking all of the autonomy, which is your data, your customers, and you're just saying, I'm not going to capture any of this information. This is so true in personal lines. If you look at personal lines flow, it's like lead comes in, they go right to the raider. They splatter the stuff to the raider. They pick out their one carrier. And then at the end of all that telephone game, They let Ivan's deposit the data back into their database. And I'm like, you have just given all rights to everything that makes your business, your business in that type of a workflow. Now, I know why it's happening because it's impossible.

I mean, we have tons of agencies all over the country. Now, I mean, we have hundreds of between brokers and wholesalers and carriers, hundreds of portals, right? So like, how do you even manage that process? I know why it's happening. But agents need to wake up and realize that that is not a symbiotic partnership. You dumping data to carriers and then hoping they give it back to you, that's not how you should be running your business. Yeah.

It's a sticking point for me. It's a hard, you know, I know, and I know the guys and gals that are listening who are like, yeah, but I only have so much time and where, you know, how do I get this done? Because I get it. I know, you know, and it's funny, you know, the, the. you know, the four years that I, that I ran rogue, it, it was so interesting the emotional struggles you have with data. Like, it really is an emotional journey that you go through. You're like, I want all the data. And then you're like, yeah, but it's so much work. What data do I really need? You know, oh, you know, all that matters is that more money comes in

than goes out. You know, me, like, like, you have like all these crazy mood swings and thought swings. And, you know, I guess, you know, where I'd like to take this, you know, now in our conversation, is like, all right, so you're building a solution to this. What does that look like? You know, where, how are you starting to address some of these things? And for the people who are listening to this that maybe are just fed up or have seen what you guys are doing or heard, like, what are you guys building? Where is this differentiation?

And how did all these ideas that we've spent the first, you know, kind of 30, 40 minutes talking, how do all these things start to come together in your tool? Yeah. So we started, there's three big differentiators. So for me, I wrote down like, what are the three things that are just killing me? Because I could not, like, I got to a point with our agency where we could not do business with the technology that we had. Like it was so preventative for my CSRs and my agents exactly what we're describing. Like, I am not going to be the kind of owner that makes my agents go to seven portals to enter data.

Like, we're not going to do it. But we also didn't have technology providers that were solving that problem. I mean, beyond a raider, that was the answer. Well, here's a raider. Like, that's not good enough. Like, when are we as agents going to start saying, like, I'm not going to pay for your shitty software anymore? It doesn't do what I needed to do.

So that was first. That was the catalyst for me. I'm not doing it, especially in larger agencies where you're paying hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to providers that are not providing you, the base level. So there were three things for us. First, it was, I cannot see the people I am selling insurance to.

They're listed as a contact. on an account somewhere. Maybe they're listed as a driver inside of a policy that lives in a PDF. Like, who are the people that are buying from me? And why can't I not see them? And so we had to go back and say, in legacy tech, we kind of got into this, there's an account, there's a policy, and there's a premium number, right? And then somewhere along one of those three, I call them objects, there may be a contact or a person or multiple people associated with that. So, Typically, you see an account that's like it's a household or it's a business or it's a person. I mean, it's there's no standard there whatsoever.

Yeah. I wanted to know. And this came from my own frustration. So there were two things that drove this. One, I called into my own agency one time. And I needed to make a policy change. And I was listed as a driver on my husband's account. And that was the old, so like the SLA that this person who was,

it was in the call center environment, saw the name and they thought, this is just a driver on an account, right? Had no insight to the fact that, one, I own the damn agency, okay? But two, that like, yeah, I was a driver on this personal policy, but we had group benefits through the corporation, like in the system. We had rental properties. I had RVs, blah, blah, blah. And so immediately I was like, oh, my God,

these people cannot at the basic level see what, where I influence just the book that's already on the books, let alone how I could potentially influence things that you may not even know about. It's like how I might be on the board of directors for a charity. And like, so you talk about cross-sell upsell, like there's no insight to that. So we had to go back and get and basically build like cutting-edge technology

to be able to look at human beings with personas in a database. may play many roles in many different ways. And there may be people in your database that don't even have a policy. So like, how are those people represented in your database now? Like I said, maybe they're a member of a household. And now they've aged out, they're 18 and their own household. How are you going after that business? Like, how are you, how do you know that's even happening? Right. So we had to fix all of that. Once we fixed that, it led us to the second differentiator, which was how do we allow the free flow of external data, so supplemental data, if I wanted to have like an Equifax or a Zoom info or something that comes in and helps me

populate vins and property information and people information, right? So I'm not having to manually type that in. And then how do we get all of this coalesce that we can push it out to different vendors, right? So different services behind the scene to perform some of the functions that Iris is not going to build. We are not going to go rebuild e-signature. I am not going to go rebuild DocuSign or Doc management. I'm not going to go rebuild on Cork or process management, right? So, like, how do we become an experience layer where the user is having a single journey,

but the software is having a whole bunch of journeys on the back end that the user is not aware of. And to do that, that's really technologically advanced. It's also incredibly expensive. And it's what has been stopping AMS's from coming to the market is not just this hill we have to climb of like, oh, another AMS, it's not going to work or it's going to get bought, right? So I'm not going to switch. But the business model behind it,

the technology that you actually need in place is incredibly expensive. And so you have to as a provider create this platform that may have multiple pieces of other people's services that you have to wrap together and then serve to an agency, well, if that wrapper cost $100,000 a year for me to provide to you, you're not going to be able to afford it. So we had to go and figure out how to get a platform wrapped that would allow the service layer to be separate from the UI layer

and that we could call on all these what are typically expensive underlying platforms so that we could hand it to an agent in a way that made sense. And that was the secret sauce of how we figured out how to do that is why no one can beat us. Because I can offer tech that a agency that's 400 million in revenue can pay for to an agency that's for people. That was the hardest part. And then the third part was like how much money can we just dump into user experience? Like how can we make this so easy and so intuitive that somebody who has never been in insurance before can come into an agency, turn the, thing on and understand in plain English how they start a process, where they need to enter the

data. Because insurance people, we love our acronyms. We love our complicated, you know, data sets, right? But like, that doesn't really serve us well. So if you're looking at legacy platforms and you look at like just field names and you're like, what does this field even mean? And sometimes as like a tenured agent, I'm looking at it. I'm like, I'm really not sure what they're asking me to put in here. Let alone, I have a gray screen that's a box that has a thousand fields on it. And as a new insurance person, I don't know what's important here to fill out. Do I have to get all of this information from the client? And now your brand new agent is like, no, thanks. I'll go work in retail or I'll pick something else up because this is way too

complicated. And the system is like not offering them easy adaptability and onboarding. And I'm telling you with 50% of this insurance market retiring in the next five years, like, this is a problem that you cannot get ahead of soon enough. How are we going to get people into insurance, especially on the agency side? And we're going to plop them in front of a Windows 95 screen and say, I hope you can figure this out. Yeah. This is a major problem.

And it's why, it's why, like we said before, towards the end, you know, I shouldn't say towards the end, but probably the last year of Roe when we were recruiting, where, you know, everything we did was about how easy to train people. And it's funny. actually on a, I got asked by an AMS vendor to come on this like webinar, whatever, so whatever, fine. And I'm talking to them about answering different questions. A lot of it was about marketing, whatever.

And then someone said, I made an offhandy comment about recruiting and how we never really had a problem recruiting. And one of the agents in the room asked a question, you know, how can that be the case? Everyone has such a hard time recruiting, recruiting. There's recruiting keynotes at every conference. every conference. Yeah. And I actually don't understand why it's hard.

I said, one, would you work for your business? And two, is the technology built in the last five years? Yeah. It's really not hard because nobody young wants to come in and be using Instagram and Slack and then go to some technology that they have to like literally like they watch it in like 1980s movies. And they see it and they're like, wait a minute. Like I don't understand like this like.

that's a complete turn off them. It's not exciting because it doesn't feel like growth and innovation. And nobody who's 25 wants to be in a business that isn't going anywhere. And I said, so ask yourself, would you work, is your agency fun to work for? Like, again, you're asking me why you want to come to work. Yes. Like, I get it. Like a 55 year old person who's been coming to the same place for 30 years, you're used to it. It's fine. You don't see these things. But when you're 25 to 35 and a hard charging, ambitious, you have time, like you want to grow. This is some of the biggest leaps in your career are going to happen during this time period.

And you walk into a place and the technology is slow and tough to manage, tough to learn. It doesn't feel like growth. Your brand, everything about you, feel slow and static. Why would they come working? Like, no, duh, it's hard to recruit people. Would you at 25 go work for your agency? And if the answer is no, there you go.

And then so, and then there's the other point that I always like to drive home is the systems that you're asking them to utilize are not giving them anything in return. So like, think about, right? So I'm a sales rep and I'm like, and I, I'm, let's say I'm a sales manager. And I'm like, listen, you got to enter your leads. You got to enter there. You got to go back in. And, and they're like, that is a menial task because it's just a, I'm going to show you what I did today, right? Because managers are using that. And, and, They're not getting anything. The system is not doing anything to help them tomorrow when they sign on to the system. It's just a black box repository for data. If you are not giving people reasons to interact with software, whether that's insights or like what we do at Iris is, you know, like filling their pipeline with like suggested opportunities that we find through our machine learning algorithms.

Like there's an incentive for a salesperson to enter data into Iris because when they wake up the next morning, they're going to have a warm. lead list that they can work through. If your system isn't doing that, then what is the point? Like, they're not going to engage with it and they're not going to want to do it. So then you end up with, you might have shiny tech that you think is great, but if it's not providing any use to the people that are using it, they're not going to use it, no matter how nice it looks.

Yeah. To me, it is insane that we want people to sell. And then we force them to use tools that don't help them sell. Right? Like we're like, sell, sell, what's wrong with this generation? Why won't they sell? And they're like, because half my day is putting information into this thing just so it's in there. Like, I don't get it.

Right. And I, you know, 25 years ago, maybe that was acceptable. But every other business that they're applying for, that they're considering every other industry they're considering working in, whatever, they're looking at all these other enterprises going, wow, there, I'm completely facilitated life insurance. Like it's just go, go, go, go, go. Right? And then they come here and it's like, no, half my day is data entry into systems.

I can't stand that hurt my eyes. I get data back that doesn't make sense. I'm fighting constantly with our quoting team and our account management team over where the data is and I didn't put a comma in. And this system can't handle the fact that if there's not a comma, then it doesn't think it's a number. It thinks the word. And you're just like, there's not a dash in the right plot.

Yeah. And then we wonder why. these people don't want to come work here. And it's like you have to build something that they want to use. And when you can show them and I love, you know, I love the kind of predictive pipeline building that you're describing. Like when you can say, hey, you come here, you're going to be selling.

And yeah, there's a little bit of whatever. But like what this tool is going to do if you learn it and you commit to it, the way we're asking you to is it's going to give you more and more and more and more and more opportunities. And if you put something in a long drip, it's going to cycle it back in. when there's a change. And now all of a sudden, your job is 80% of the day is just call, close, you know, whatever you're.

Yeah. That is what gets people jacked up because now what they're seeing is dollar signs. It's like play to what they want. They want to make money. That's why they're a salesperson. Yeah. So facilitate that. And how many agencies do you know that you think have a rounded book?

I have never walked into an agency and been like, wow, this is, your book is so rounded out. Like every possible upsell cross-sell is there. And it's not because they don't want. to it's because they don't have the tools to see what the hell the cross-sill upsell even could be. And so for us, it was like, that's place one. Like, that's where we wanted to start was like, how do we look at the people? And then how do we understand what they could potentially need to buy?

And then people are not static, which again, these systems are so point in time. They're so like, once that data is in, it's in. And that's it. When people move, they get married, they buy houses, they have babies. They do. They buy businesses. they sell properties. Like this is a constant thing that people in your business are doing.

So if you're just like point in time, just not being able to adjust. You can put a sticky note on the file so that when someone comes back in, they know to, you can put a sticky note on it. You know, you can also throw the credit card number on that sticky note and any of their HIPAA data on there,

which is like the worst thing, which we all know is happening. To me, that's such a cop out. The sticky note and the notes feel, this is like really getting nerdy with my data. Like if I see a notes field, I know that whoever engineered that data structure had no idea what they were doing. They're basically like, here's a big empty text field, put whatever I forgot in this box and you're never going to see it again.

You can't report on it. You can't do anything with it. Yeah. When you think about, you know, the concept that I think is so unique to our business coming back to your like T-shirt idea. And we're going up against the number. So this will be the end of our conversation. But the concept that I always come back to that I feel like everyone, who builds technology in our space, obviously not everyone, but the vast majority of the systems

that we are commenting on, seemingly we're built by people who don't understand the concept of earned premium. And they don't understand that our sale, we make zero money when we sell something. It is every day that the person uses our product and that policy is enforced, we are actually making money. Now, again, if there's like a 25% earned premium or whatever, then I, you know, I guess there is a portion of it. But the idea is that- or fully earned if you're in the commercial side. Yeah, yeah. So depending on the policy type, there can be differences.

But the idea here is that we are literally earning their business every single day. And when you build a system that is a point in time system, it does not take into account the fact that you could have a major policy change, three quarters of the way in that drastically changes the nature, the dynamic, the quality, whether it's a level one or a level three, et cetera. You could add a 15 vehicle fleet. And all of a sudden it goes from, you know, just, hey, we're just going to service this at this level to this. And there's no way of changing that dynamic.

There's no way of- Manually. You can go into the field and your CSR or your service person can remember in their mind that, hey, once this is a certain premium, I better change this SLA level to gold instead. Right? But that's stupid because that's the easiest thing to put into a system if you're constantly evaluating whether or not your system is still accurate for your market, to me, the biggest, the biggest thing that I've seen with Legacy is that it's the unwillingness

to evolve the technology. Like, to truly evolve. Honest question. Do you think that it's an unwillingness or do you think the legacy code blow in so many of these systems has made it so that it's almost impossible for them to make a change? And that's an honest question. When you are operating an almost billion dollar revenue company, that's a choice. okay so I'm not saying it's an overnight thing but you I mean how many other industries you've got

innovation labs you've got you know departments within these tech companies that do nothing but sit around and think about how the next big thing is going to come around like have you seen that in insurance anywhere because I have not so you're making a conscious choice to say this is the product we're going to incrementally maybe make it better over time but we have no plans to completely reinvent this and here's the timeline we're going to do it and here's what we're looking at none of that is happening it's like here's the thing come to the event every year we're going to tell you how we made this feel from 40 characters to 180 and everybody's supposed to be excited like where is the innovation yeah i love it where can people this has been an awesome conversation i appreciate

the hell out of you where can people connect where should people go to learn more uh connect with you personally and with iris and all that and getting more information where do you want to send them? Yeah, we have a great LinkedIn presence. We do a lot of work there. My team is, and you can always message me on LinkedIn or anyone else on the IRIS team. And then our website, iriscloud.com. And I can give you the specifics on that.

We maybe put them up on the screen or something. But yeah, I mean, we have, we're very active on social. And so we're always available. Well, I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. I love that you're pushing the envelope. I think you're getting a ton of attention, which is phenomenal. and I love these conversations. I wish you nothing but success.

And guys, I'll have links. If you didn't pick up on it, just verbally, we'll have links both in the show notes, wherever you're watching, this, listening, et cetera. And if you just Google, you'll find all the information too, I'm sure. So thank you so much for your time,

and I wish you nothing but the best. Thank you. All right, Ryan, thanks. Good, bye-bye. I'm going to Shaboo! Twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible, it's not. With the one-call closed system,

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