Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - How Independent Agents Dominate 2022

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyIn this solo episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, Ryan Hanley breaks down how he's positioning Rogue Risk for success in 2022 and what independent agents can do to put themselves in a position to dominate.Episode Highlights:Ryan opens the episode by telling his listeners his plans for 2022. (00:45)Ryan explains that it is important to recalibrate our minds on how we are going to plan for 2022. (3:18)Ryan shares why it is important to acknowledge our mistakes to create a better plan for the future. (7:52)Ryan expresses his love and appreciation to his listeners, company, and his podcast. (13:29)Ryan states that 2022 is going to be a big year for InsurTech. (15:30)Ryan shares his insights about giving importance to carriers, producers and vendors. (21:19)Ryan tells everyone to focus through the filter of who they are and who they want to be. (26:59)Ryan elaborates on the importance of not being afraid to try new things and get out of your comfort zone. (30:15)Ryan shares that no one really has the answer, but we all have parts to the solution. (35:11) Key Quotes:“We've been laser-focused on only working towards projects, on only thinking through tools, on only taking meetings or having discussions around things that pass through the filter of who we want to be.” - Ryan Hanley“I want Rogue to be one of the largest high volume writers of small commercial premium in the entire country someday.”  - Ryan Hanley“We have to try things. You have to learn, you have to be willing to fail. That's how we dominate 2022. That's what we do at Rouge. I have zero ego for failure. - Ryan HanleyResources Mentioned:Reach out to Ryan HanleyRouge Risk--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 is going to be hopefully a tremendous episode. I have no idea since this is a solo episode. We haven't done one of these in a long time. And I wanted to talk a little bit about where my head is at in terms of 2022. We're coming up on 2022 and I'm not exactly sure when this episode will come out, but sometime in December. And as 2020 approaches,

I think it's time, you know, just kind of recalibrate what we've seen here at Rogue, what we've been through, where my mind is at in terms of what is going to be, how we are going to determine our success in 2022 and what all that looks like. And, you know, so let's get there. Before we do, I want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsors. Pathpoint, guys, if you're trying to write E&S, if E&S is a problem for you, if you hate ENS, Pathpoint is the solution. Pathpoint has created kind of a Tarmica-esque quoting feature

where you can get multiple quotes on E&S business without submission of Accord forms. They're making ENS incredibly, incredibly easy. They're making ENS into something that you shouldn't be scared of. And for all those reasons, we are a big fan of Pathpoint at Rogue. We use Pathpoint all the time. and incredibly happy to have them as a sponsor. You can go back and listen to my interview with their CEO that we did a few weeks ago

and learn more about Pathpoint or just go to PathPoint.com. Mention Tarmica. Tarmica has been our longest running sponsor of this show. They continue to be a sponsor because we love them so much and they love you, the audience of this show. Guys, Tarmica makes small commercial profitable. I've been saying that for going on, well, we're going to be going on two plus years now. And I continue to support Tarmika, continue to use Tarmika because I believe in what they're doing.

I believe in the people, Raghav and the whole team there, the way they build, how they build, what they're building. It is, in my opinion, if small commercial is part of your business, it's a must-have tool. It's just a must-have tool. We continue to use them constantly. And they're just a major part of our agency. So as always, guys, T-A-R-M-I-K-A dot com, T-R-M-I-K-A dot com, go to T-R-M-I-K-A-D-A-K-A-com, check them out, get the demo, know what they're about.

But, guys, if you're doing small commercial, small commercials, small commercials are part of your agency, Tarmica is an absolute must. And I think Pathpoint is as well from my perspective. So, all right, with that out of the way, let's get into what I wanted to talk about today. So, you know, as 2020 approaches, it's important to,

take a minute and just recalibrate our minds around how are we going to turn 2020, 2020 into a year that we can be proud of, right? 2020 was a tough year. We all know that. I feel like 2021, any excuses from 2020 should be gone, right? So 21 was a year of pulling ourselves back together, getting back on the path. And now moving into 2022, there's no excuses. We're full steam ahead.

You know, the world has changed a little. And I think those are some of the things that I wanted to talk about. But it hasn't changed that much. And it certainly hasn't changed enough that we shouldn't be able to grow and shouldn't be able to capitalize on where we are in the market. And I think if anything, the independent agents position in the marketplace has gotten stronger. Certainly the agents who have done the world.

work and really focused on customer experience, really kind of captured how their customers want to interact with their agency, how their customers want to and do think about insurance and want to be served. Those agencies who've spent that time and done that work are killing it today. And we've had a lot of them on the show recently. You know, we've had a lot of great agency owners, a lot of great technologists doing amazing things. It's, It's just, you know, I've said this a bunch if you listen to this show regularly. It's just an absolutely tremendous time to be part of the insurance industry. It just is.

There is just an ungodly amount of opportunity. And while, you know, the economy is shaky, it probably will be until we get Biden out of office, certainly until 2022 when we get more Democrats out of office, you know, who just seem to have absolutely lost their mind. when it comes to real life. Not that Republicans are that much better, but certainly feels like right now the lesser of two evils, certainly for our economy and in business and people making money and stuff like that, capitalism and freedom and liberty and all those things that, if you're still listening to this show, are probably important to you just as they are important to me.

But regardless of what happens, none of it is an excuse for not being. being successful, right? Like, we're all playing the same game for the most part. You, you know, whether the rules are crazy and they're going to tax us into oblivion, or it's going to be free reign, you know, libertarian style capitalism, you know, no holds barred, or wherever in the middle of that spectrum we actually fall. There's no excuse. You're fighting the same game as all your competitors, right? Be they highly funded insured text to insurance carriers building out their own agencies, which they all basically have at this point, to, you know, new entrants to the franchise models, to legacies, to these roll-ups, to PE-backed agencies, to, you know, insert the just whatever,

100th iteration of what it means to be an insurance agency into the mix. And we're all playing the same game, right? We have to capture, we have to capture our prospect's attention. We have to communicate with them in a way that builds trust and respect for the process and for our agency and the product. And then we ultimately have to sell them insurance. On the back end, we have to engage with them and provide service and create a sustainability and longevity that really is what insurance is. So all that being said, you know, it may look different and we may attack it from different vectors, but we're all playing the same exact game.

All right. So how do we win in 2022? What does that actually look like? What are some of the things that we need to kind of get in our head and wrap our brain around if we're going to be successful moving forward? Well, you know, one of the things that I think is, I, I'm going to say this is the key. And then I'll give you the reasons why I think it's the key.

If this were, you know, if this were a TikTok video, it would be like, major key and we'd have the key emoji on there, right? Like, we have to know who we are. We have to know who we are. The mistakes that I've made at Rogue, the money that I've wasted, the time that I've wasted on different things. And, you know, I've wasted plenty of money and wasted plenty of time. has been chasing things that don't align with who we are as an agency or trying to be something

that we're not or not giving a process the time that it takes for that process to be successful and just forgetting who we are. So why is this concept so important? Well, first and foremost, It's important because our world is moving so fast. ZyWave buys a company like every week. Verte4 just bought agency Zoom, which for Verte4 AMS users probably is a really good thing. For non, for agency Zoom users who do not have Verte4 as their AMS, probably terrifies them.

As much as I love a lot of the people over at Virtifers, as humans, they don't have a tremendous track record of innovation, right? They tend to, when they buy something, they tend to take its innovation and throw an anchor on it and a governor and drastically slow the innovation of that product, which I think is what a lot of people are concerned about who are fans of agency Zoom. We use agency Zoom for now here at Rogue. And we're not Verte4 AMS. We are on NowSerts, which I have mixed emotions on.

If you follow me in social media, you're probably aware of that or listen to the show. You know, so you have nowserts creating their own or white labeling, wedging in their own white labeled version of someone else's marketing automation tool. They call it automate 365. Since they've started doing that, there's been a lot of issues in the connection that now search blames on agency zoom and seeing the way innovation works at those two companies, it's hard to blame agency Zoom because now search is usually the one that's messing up things from a technological perspective.

But, you know, so now you have that mess. And now if you're not a vertipore user, now you know that their focus is going to be on bringing agency zoom tighter with vertipore products, not necessarily with any other products. You know, in agency zooms, you know, what made agency Zoom so exciting was it felt like almost daily they were releasing new features and upgrades and I knew a lot of people that were on their advisory board and that was a really interesting thing, right? Because you'd have people texting them and then that night their CTO would be banging out new upgrades and new changes, a lot of which were small because, you know, major upgrades take time.

But it was just great to see that level of innovation and the rapid pace of change and it's exciting and it makes you bought into a tool, and now Verte4 has it, and there's going to be bureaucracy and stuff like that. And maybe that's a good thing for the stability of the project, or maybe it just doesn't really go much further, or maybe it's only as valuable as it could be if you're a Vertefor user,

which is another decision you have to make. Without overly focusing on agency Zoom, but just taking them as a microcosm, the world is moving so fast. There are so many mergers and acquisitions. There's so much M&A activity, right? There's, you know, this tech company is being bought by these guys and these guys are, you know, joining forces with this company over here

and this agency just got scooped up by this network or this, this PE company or whatever. It is very easy to get lost and all that. It's very easy to start to follow all those headlines, whether it's tools or systems or, you know, networks or acquisitions or multiples or, you know, whatever. New product lines. It's very, very easy to get caught up and lost and all that stuff because it feels like you

should, like it could impact you, right? And I guess, you know, one of the things that has helped us really grow and we've been growing probably since August or September, probably more like September, quite rapidly. You know, we crested 100,000 in premium for the first time a couple months ago. We've now consistently done that and are on our way to doing 200,000 in premium in a month. And we have three producers and we're hiring another account manager. And we have a lot of our flows and systems documented and we're really becoming a much tighter ship, a much more repeatable process.

We're able to put people into a system and have them be successful. And we only got there by figuring out who we were. And now, as hard as it is, you know, that I'm a shiny object chaser and that I love this stuff. We've been laser focused on only working towards projects, on only thinking through tools, on only taking meetings or having discussions around things that, that pass through the filter of who we want to be. And it creates, well, you know, there are things that maybe I don't have as good a feel for today as I would have six months ago.

I know the people to call if I have questions. That's a good thing. But ultimately, I don't need to know every single thing that's going on in the industry. If I know the things, if I know, if I'm able to spend more time on the things, on the things that are going to help rogue, right? Because that's my priority. And I love you guys and I love this podcast and I love doing the speaking gigs and I like taking the phone calls and I love helping people as much as I possibly can.

And I've told you guys that a thousand times. I'm so blessed by this industry. It's changed my life so much. It's provided me. It's afforded me the ability to provide my family and my kids a life that I could have never imagined growing up ever. So I'm happy to always give back and always wish. will. But I can't give back as much as I want to unless Rogue is successful. And I want to be

really successful. And we're on a path to do that. And to get to that point, we have to be aware of who we are and not allow anything that would distract us from that to enter into our frame of reference to enter into our mind space you know we don't want to we don't want to waste brain cycles on things that aren't who we are okay um because the world moves fast and if you do if you're if you're trying to you know follow every conversation on iowa or whatever mastermind or group that you're part of you know that's time away from and potential distractions of and just mental noise that you don't need all right that's kind of that's kind of super fluffy um But okay, so how does that play out in real life?

All right, so let's start to think about all the insure tech companies. Because I think I think 2020, blah, is going to be a big year, you know, a moving day kind of year for insuretech MGA carriers. Think codery, pie, clear cover, openly, hippo, branch insurance. also companies like propeller bonds. You know, I think this, I think, you know, again, not necessarily a carrier, but platforms like Pathpoint, like RT Connector, like pro writers, these platform plays, these platform resources for distribution are, I think 2020 is going to be a big year for them. If you're still clunky and hard to do business with and your backend system,

you know, is difficult. I just see more and more agencies moving away from those plays and spending more time in, you know, in companies and putting business with carriers that make their life easier. And I get it. Like, you know, a lot of the old school people are like, well, Ryan, you know, the game is stack your chips in the carriers. They're going to pay you overrides and contingencies.

And look, I get all of that. I completely get it. Trust me. I haven't cashed a contingency check yet and I can't wait until I do, right? There's something about that that makes you feel like you've finally made it. We won't cash a contingency check this year. But at least not that I know of. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that, which I can go into at another time.

But, you know, at what point do you start to say if it's going to take me three days or an hour, or whatever to get a quote from this company versus 15 minutes from this company over here. At what point do you start to say to yourself, like, I can't waste that time. Like, yeah, I could continue to stack with this company that I get a contingency check for and that's cool, but it's going to take me an hour to get a quote from them. Or I get a 15 minutes from this company over here and I could write four policies in the same amount of time. I just, you know, and again, a lot of people aren't high volume inbound. We're high volume inbound.

We're doing 250 plus inbound leads a month from around the country. We'll soon be licensed in the lower 48. You know, part of the reason why we don't get a contingency check for many one carriers because we have so many carriers that we write with in order to service all that. We're fairly widespread in our, you know, we have like 50 to 100K. premium with a bunch of companies versus, you know, stacking all that into one carrier. And that'll come with time. I mean, we're playing a big, long game.

So I'm not too worried about that today personally. You know, when, you know, I want Rogue to be one of the largest high volume writers of small commercial premium in the entire country someday. You know, we're pushing, you know, we're pushing in. the next three to five years to have between, you know, our goal is 400, 400 producers, 400 producers in the rogue system. And, you know, I can go into more detail. And you'll hear me talk more about our model for producer acceleration. And, you know, basically what we're doing is providing producers who, you know, who are sitting at stop signs for a decade in traditional

agencies whose agency owners don't want to get out of the way or refuse to provide paths for growth. You know, we have that path. If you want to own an agency and you feel hindered today and you think you can produce and you want to come in and learn the rogue way and grow a book, we now have a path for you to grow your book under us. You hit your phase one goals. You earn into phantom equity. You hit your phase two goals. And we talk about launching a joint venture agency that you own. I think that's a fairly unique model. It's a model that I feel my expertise is uniquely positioned to deliver to independent agencies or to producers, sorry, not to independent agencies to producers. And I don't have the ego to give a shit if someone grows a book and then

launches their own agency out of our, out of the rogue. You know, there's a model. You know, there's a model and a path to do that. And, you know, it would be a joint venture, you know, that kind of thing. But I don't know too many agencies that are willing to set producers on a path to give them freedom and to give them that sense of ownership and that sense of pride that they built something that their name is on that that, that's important, right? It's what I was never given. I was never given that opportunity. And I think that there are just a tremendous number of producers and just high quality sales and service client success people out there who are sick of the bureaucracy and the nonsense that kind of the traditional independent model has just made commonplace.

And I refuse to accept that that's the way business has to be done. And I refuse to accept that that's the way our employees should be treated. And is it easy? No. Is it the most profitable way for the business to do business? No. Is it a way to create an army of amazing professionals who care about our brand and write a shit ton of premium? Yes. And that's what I care about. 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 exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on you 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, et cetera. 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 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. for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. So, you know, I think, I think the way we're looking at the space is we want to give our producers here at Rogue the tools to be as successful as they possibly can. And I just don't care what your agent, what your carrier name is or what your vendor, you know, how long you've been around as a vendor or a technology company. I just don't care. We are going to do what's right for Rogue. We're going to, I can't care if people call us out on social media.

I don't care how many people on Twitter. You know, there's this whole like group of trolls on Twitter that hashtag like insurance guru and they make fun, you know, they kind of like indirectly call out because none of them have balls to call us out directly. You know, some of the podcasts or some other people that have opinions and are doing things. And I think it's amazing that that. that there's people out there who think what we're doing in our opinions are, you know, and when I say are, I mean, I'm talking about like David Carruthers or Bradley Flowers or Scott Howell

or Cass or, you know, any of the other people who are trying things, some of which work, some of which don't, and share those experiences with you guys. And, you know, I think that it's just such an interesting time that we live in. and I refuse to be, I absolutely positively refuse to be boxed in by technologists. I just refuse. I refuse to be boxed in by carriers. I refuse to be boxed in by anybody, right? We make a lot of mistakes at Rogue.

We do. We try things and they don't work. We try things and they take too much time. We try things and our customers don't care. We try things and our employee, you know, our team doesn't like it. We try things and it seems like more. work. We try things and, you know, we just hate, hate it for whatever reason. You know, and we got to back out of this and you try something else and you spend a little money and

that money goes to waste because you don't really like that tool. You thought you would. You didn't. They won't let you out of the contract. Okay, whatever. That's life. And we try things. And I think that's the key, guys, is that if you know who you are and you try things, you just try them, right? What's the worst that can freaking happen? One of your customers gets upset you know what you do you apologize hey we're sorry we're trying we're trying this new thing we thought it might be helpful what i'm hearing from you is it's not sorry we're going to remove it that's the worst thing that happens i mean i i just don't understand how we continue to feel like or or you know it's like we we we still see our space from a uh uh um like a scarcity mindset

This is such an abundant, like the insurance industry and insurance in general, especially insurance sales, is such an abundant. There's so much abundance. It is unbelievable. Like there's more business than you could ever want, ever. And you don't even have to be big to reap more than you could ever need personally. You don't have to be some mega thing, right? Like you just don't.

You can be a single location, seven person shop, run well. targeting a specific market and make more money than you could ever spend. It's completely possible, right? You can be as big as you want. You can only work one niche. You can work 10 niches. You can have no niche. You can do whatever you want.

It is an abundant, abundant industry. And there are so many people still operating from a scarcity mindset that, you know, this has probably become obvious over time, but I just don't want to help those people anymore. I just don't. I'm ready to take their lunch and put them out to pasture, and I'm not talking about their age. I'm just talking about in general.

People who operate from a scarcity mindset are going to get slaughtered. You can't build and grow the agency of 20 years ago today. You just can't. You can maintain it. You can continue to maintain an agency that's already built up a book or whatever. using that scarcity kind of, you know, every move is tentative and slow. You can maintain an agency doing that. For sure you can.

You can maintain it for a long time, but you can't grow it. And the people who are growing, the people who view our industry from that abundant mindset who see opportunity all over the place who are testing things and making moves and sharing and growing and learning and trying, those are the people that are going to. going to dominate this industry for the decades to come. And it may not be me. It may not be rogue. But I bet it's someone I know. I bet it's someone you know. I bet there's somebody you know out there right now that is just doing wacky shit, trying different stuff. You know, maybe they're out pounding the pavement putting stickers on shit with QR codes or they're,

you know, they're doing drop pin, uh, Google map placement. ads around specific roadways or intersections so that people are getting text pings or, I mean, some of this stuff I don't even know about, right? I'm kind of making half the stuff up. My point is, if you're not trying things, again, focus through the filter of who you are, right? Like if you're a personalized agency over indexing on small commercial just because you feel like you should would be the wrong path. That's not what I'm advocating.

saying, let's say you're a big time personal lines agency and you really got that rocking. Don't go into small commercial. Get freaking better at personal lines. Expand into another state. Figure out ways to cross-sell more products into that personal lines market. You know, try every crazy thing you can think of that fits exactly who you are. And see what works and the stuff that doesn't throw it out. You know, when you say it, it seems so simple, but it's a very tough mentality to wrap your brain around

because when you try things and they don't work, you open yourself up to criticism and you have to be aware that that's going to happen, right? You absolutely positively have to be aware that that's going to happen, that if you try crazy shit, if you try things that the agency down the street isn't doing or wasn't in the big-eye best practices manual, that people are going to criticize you and they're going to look at you funny and they're going to wonder why you're doing it. And you can't give a shit about that. I look at those people and I laugh and I just say, look, like, I now know something that you don't know.

Because just because maybe it's a public L doesn't mean it's an internal L. It could be an internal W, right? Hey, we learn that doing it this way doesn't work. But man, we learn that if we just tweak it this little bit, that does work. And now maybe you don't see that. Maybe you don't see the extra step in the funnel that we put in. that changes how we're able to free up time for our producers to sell more or, you know, hey, we hired someone who just does quoting

or we added a VA to this part of the section or we went out and got this tool and because we realized that doing this other way that everyone saw didn't work so we had to fix that, but now we know the solution to that. You don't, you can't, if you don't try stuff, you're never going to know what the answer is because I'm never going to tell you everything I know. Why would I do that?

That would be crazy, right? Like, one, I don't think any of you could handle it. Very few of you could. And two, you know, that's my business. I own a business. You know, I share a lot with you. I probably share 95% of what I know with you and what I've learned, but I don't share everything because that's mine.

I worked hard to get that information and you don't pay me. You know, you listen to the show, which is great. I appreciate that. I love you guys. You know that. But like some of this stuff you got go figure out for yourself, because even if I did give you the answer, my answers, the answers that work for rogue that work for us. Even if I gave you those answers, it doesn't mean it would work for you. It doesn't mean that our solutions would be the best solutions for you, right? The things that we're doing, being in 48 states, you know, writing, you know, 700 class codes of small commercial, that's not going to work for a single location personalized shop in Tennessee.

It's just, you know, it's completely different. There's no context there. And, you know, that to me is why we just got to try things, right? If you want to dominate 2022, if you really want to want to make 2022 a special year for your agency, for your business or for you as a producer, figure out who you are and then just go try stuff in that frame. In that filter, right? I had a producer call me who's in a classic situation where the agency owner, who's a family member,

you know, kind of completely comfortable, not willing to take a lot of risks, not willing to open things up or really give this younger second-generation producer an opportunity for all the classic reasons, right? The agency, you know, the agency principal in this case, the first generation, you know, they did all the work, they built it, all that stuff, which is all great for that person, right?

Like, we have to start to separate in a lot of these situations. That person, that first generation, they deserve to have a comfortable, slow, you know, sustainable business that doesn't force them to do a lot of crazy things because they've already put 25, 30, 40 years in, right? They deserve that. But that doesn't mean that's what's best for you if you're second generation. and that's where you have to open your eyes up. You may never get a shot at that agency.

Just because you're related to that person or just because they said some nice things to you, you have nothing until you have a contract. Nothing. Handshake agreements, we'll always take care of you, all that kind of nonsensical Thanksgiving table bullshit that goes on in our industry. It's nonsense.

It means. nothing until you have a contract. I don't care if it's your dad, your mom, your uncle. I don't care who it is. I don't care if it's your best friend. If you don't have a contract, you have nothing. So my point saying that to you is this individual, my advice to him was put your head down

and go crush, in this case he wanted to write small commercial, right? go crush small commercial for three years. Go build a book and crush small commercial for three years and pick your head up in three years and just see where you're at. Because I bet your situation will change in three years if you've crushed small commercial. And if it hasn't, guess what? There are a million agencies, rogue included,

that will pick you up, facilitate your growth, facilitate your book build, and ultimately put you on a path to own agency. agency, right? Well, I don't think most agencies will do that. That's specific to rogue. But that's out there for you. But you can't get there unless you figure out who you are, you focus up, you go try a ton of shit that may or may not work, that fits your filter, and just learn what makes you special, what makes you different, right? How do you move fast? Or how do you make your process easier? Or how do you provide additional experience?

or advice or risk management or services or connections or network or whatever what is going to be your thing and if you're just looking at the best practice report and doing shit the way it's always been done you're not special you're not unique you are the bar right you're you're the standard and i don't know that the standard stands out anymore standard certainly doesn't grow a business it doesn't grow an agency there's nobody doing standard business, you know, asking for a referral here or there, you know, taking a week to get back on a personal lines quote, those agencies aren't growing. They're not growing.

You can maybe send me a couple exceptions, but they're not growing. What makes you different? What is what what is your focus? What little thing have you learned from trying something that no one else knows? How do you do it just a little bit different? How are you adding a little more value? Why should I pay attention to you versus someone else? Why should I disrupt this relationship I have over here for a relationship with you?

Those are the questions we have to ask ourselves. And it comes from knowing who we are and trying a bunch of shit. We have to try shit. We have to. You have to try things. You have to learn. You have to be willing to fail. That's how we dominate 2022.

That's what we do at Rogue. I have zero ego for failure. I just don't care. I share a lot of them with you guys. And I think it's the key to getting ahead today because no one really has the answer. No one has the answer. I don't have the answer. Carruthers don't have the answer.

Parat Issa don't have the answer. Charles Speck don't have the answer. Mick Hunt doesn't have the answer. We all have parts of the answer. You know, we all have parts. Kelly Donahoe, Piro. All the consultants, you know, Brent Kelly, Sikkins, you know, Carrie Wallace, we all have parts, parts of the solution that work for some agencies. It's that unique mixture of all those things that make your agency special.

But unless you're out there trying them, you don't know. And you may not even know who you are. And you're missing the first step. So, guys, I hope that this has been helpful. It's been valuable. I hope you'll go out and try some stuff. Let me know what you're trying. I'd love to hear from you.

You hit me up at Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever. You know, obviously I always love to hear from you guys. I hope that you absolutely dominate 2022. I hope that, you know, you don't let COVID or the economy or, you know, whoever's in the president or whoever's your, you know, whatever the political crap is going on in your area. You know, I get caught up in some of that stuff too because obviously I have opinions. but, you know, we can't let it, right? At the end of the day, you know, it can be a huge distraction if we let it be,

and we can't use those as excuses. There's no excuse. We're all playing the same game, and I know you guys can do it, especially if you're willing to put up with this show and continue to listen to me. I know you have what it takes. I wish you absolutely nothing but the best. Go out and crush 2022. I'm out.

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please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening. Happy holidays. Want to give your host a gift consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show this holiday season. It really helps the show grow. From all of us at Believe, have a Merry Christmas, everyone, and a happy holiday.