Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - How Silicon Valley Rockstar David Davis is Leveling Up a Family Insurance Agency

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyDavid Davis went from traveling the world, solving Fortune 500 technology challenges to a single location independent insurance agency and is absolutely changing the game.Get more: https://ryanhanley.com--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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It really helps the show grow. From all of us at believe, have a Merry Christmas, everyone, and a happy holiday. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Ryan Hamley show. Today we have a fun episode because we get to talk to someone who is very recently an outsider of our industry, and that is David Davis. And here's a former Silicon Valley rock star flying around the world. world solving technology problems who makes a big transition to working for his father-in-law and his brother-in-law at fudge insurance, which is an incredible insurance agency down in Florida, and is now

taking his filters, his technology filters, and passing our industry through them and coming up with solutions. And it's not necessarily the sexy new business, some new fangled way to throw policies on the book's ideas that I think you'd expect from someone from Silicon Valley, and it's refreshing and it's exciting, and in general, Dave's just a super good guy, and I got to meet him at Iowa, and it was incredible to have him on the show. You're going to take a lot from this episode, and I think you're going to have a good time, too. Before we get there, though, we've got to talk about our sponsor for today's episode, and that is Evisor Evolved. That's advisor evolved. Chris Landgill and his team are creating the best websites in the marketplace for insurance

agents. I mean, just hands down. Now, the thing is, an advisory evolved website isn't just a website. It's a tool. It's a new business and retention generating tool. There's so much more to a website that you get from advisory evolved than just what you see on the interwebs. There are all kinds of processes, procedures, and tools behind the scenes, things like quote vids and other tools that I use at Rogue Risk. If you go check out RogueRisk.com, you can see the work that Chris and his team does and some of the best agents in the entire country are using Advisory Evolved as their digital storefront. And I think you should give them a look, too, if you are considering a new website. They are my first recommendation when people ask me where to go, and I'm happy to do so.

And as a user of their tool as well, I think I can say wholeheartedly that I'm incredibly happy with the product that I got, the service I get from Chris and his team, and I think you will be too. So with that, let's get on to David Davis. You know, it's hard for me to complain. I feel like I've taken a process that normally is like three to six months and bumped it up to like it's been nine weeks since like the company was four. Yeah. That's a testament to just the network that I have, the quality of the people. You know what I mean?

Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I'm willing to share and very blessed in that standpoint. So it, yeah, and just pushing hard. And I got a pretty clear vision of what I want to do. You know, what's been, what's been interesting, I'll tell you what's the most interesting thing to me is that as an outsider to the agency ownership space, ownership space. Sure.

You know, I see agency owners do things and I'm like, man, why do they do that? Why do they chase that rabbit or why do they, you know, get caught up in that thing? Yeah. And I have found myself making all those things. You know, like the technology game. Yeah, yeah. You know, chasing every carrier appointment. You know, most recently it was like trying to.

you know, working on low, low value lead funnel systems because, and part of it is boredom. And I don't mean that because I say that. Let me, you know, I say that because not boredom, but like I can't, I don't have a direct appointment yet. Right. And I think it's also like, you know, I mean, if you're like we are, I think, we end up. So like big things are cooking. But in between, we want to be working.

So we're like, wow, let me just spend some time on this, this little thing, which then becomes a bigger thing. and you're like, what am I doing? Why am I working on this, right? Yeah. I find myself, like an hour later, I've built out a funnel for a type of business that I don't even want to write. Like, I don't even want to write.

I just was like, I didn't have anything to do for an hour. Exactly. Yeah. And it's 100% of downloading, it's just, oh, just copywriting, ebooks. I'm like, what am I doing? I mean, it's true. I feel you, man. I feel you.

I think sometimes that's when, like, you know, I was telling you that it's been crazy week for us like I'm just I'm incredibly busy like startup busy but it's so fun and the thing the cool thing about it is I don't have I literally have zero minutes for those kind of distractions right which is nice because everything I'm working on is always like value add value add value add value at and it feels really good so I love those times yeah I'm with you man like I uh I said to my wife the other day she's like how's it going and um and she's been good she's been awesome about being slightly hands off. Like she's obviously, sure, but, you know, I'm a non-revenue producing spouse right now. Sure. Yeah, sure. So, you know, that's a stressful time for anyone. But I, he's been very good about not,

you know, about giving me a little bit of space because no one wants to be hounded when they're in growth mode. But she said, she said, how's it going? And I said, you know, I, part of me would love to have, like, a partner in this, you know, like, because there's this. There's this. like someone just to kind of say like don't do that thing like don't spend your time on that um that's not where you want to be because it is easy left to your own devices especially when you're a tinkerer to get on these time wasting paths and i absolutely and i'm i feel like i'm getting better at pulling myself back out but man you know i think i think highly productive people tend to do that right because we idle hands aren't aren't natural no you know what i mean and so you

end up like, well, you know what, I have, I have an hour or two hours here before this next big thing. Like, I bet you I could do this real quick. And, and you end up with all those threads. It's hard to control that, right? I mean, I feel you on that. Yeah. The other side of it is, is I love to know how things work. Like, even stupid things that I shouldn't really care about. I like to know how they work. Like, I've never been interested in, like, how a car works. Like, I understand a basic combustion engine system. Sure. I don't, never care to, like, break down my Ford and put it back together. In today's version, I couldn't even do that.

But like, but when it comes to business, I'm pretty much intrigued by almost every aspect of it, outside of maybe like accounting. But, you know, so all these different systems and processes, like, I know I should be outsourcing them, but at the same time. I don't know if I agree with that. Like, I get, look, I know there is economy of scale in outsourcing them. Yeah. But actually, my heart is closer to your heart in this and that first, I want to know about them.

But you know, second, honestly, sometimes, and you call this selfish or controlling or whatever, but I want to have those in-house sometimes, dude. Like, I don't know, outsourcing is great economically. And there are some places and some functions. I think it makes, like, enormous sense. Like, if you're not doing it, it's dumb. But, sorry, someone just slacked me and I lost my train of thought. But, you know, there are functions.

that I like to keep in-house because I have them there. I can touch them. I can see them. I can watch them. That's just my thing. Yeah. I also feel like, so yes. So I don't outsource a lot.

I also, one of my key things is that I only outsource stuff that I know how to do. Sure. That way. Sure. That's actually really smart. Yep. Yep. Yep.

So like a good one for me is my marketing automation. So I'm using Infusion Soft. and I'm working with Austin Moorhead from Lago Automation, who's a great guy, very smart. I know 85% of how automations work, but I hired Austin and his team because since I know how it works, I can talk to them as peers, and then they can just execute in a way that it's time I don't have to spend doing it.

But I know how it works. So it's not like, it's not like I'm talking to a market. or their talk. Yeah, right, right. So in that scenario, I feel like that's a, and, I don't know, this is probably the wrong word, but like an acceptable outsource because 100% what I'm doing is getting time back. A hundred percent. And it's the same, it's going to sound weird to say this and maybe it's going to sound privileged to say this, but like it's kind of the same logic to where, yeah, it is going to sound privileged, but it's kind of the same, it's kind of the same logic to where you make that decision for the first time that you're not going to mow your own

lawn anymore. You're going to pay a service to come mow your lawn for you. And you feel a little bit guilty because you're like, dude, I know how to mow a lawn. It's not that hard. It's good for me. I get to walk around. It's pride. You know, I get pride of ownership out of it. But you get your time back. Yes. And that's just, that's your most precious commodity. Yes. Right. This is a huge argument that my wife and I had when we first started outsourcing our mowing. Yes. Because, and she's like, everyone else mows alon and I'm like, well, first of all, no, that's not true. That's not true. Right. 90% of our community gets in one mode. I said you do, like it takes me. It takes me two and a half hours to mow our lawn.

Absolutely. Pick up shit, put everything to lead. So would you rather have me around going to baseball games and doing all the stuff that we do for two and a half hours? Or would you rather have me walking circles around the yard? Yeah. Because one of those things is actually productive and one is not, especially when you consider how much it actually cost to have someone to mow your lawn.

Like it's not that expensive. Exactly. Yeah. I love that your brain is where. working so fast that you have all these things in your hands right now that probably oh yeah yeah so far he's had a deck of cards and a fidget spinner in his hand and he's like his brain's like I want to focus on three other things other than Ryan but he's also sorry sorry I didn't know if we're doing recorded exposition or just exposition so we can uh you know

I just was talking that's what I'm yeah well that's good that's what it's about so let's let's Let's talk about like just what I, I guess now the only reason I wanted to have you on, but just I want to get to know you better. Sure. And podcasts are a good excuse for that. But, and I know you're recently on the Atomics podcast. It's a cool. I listen to that, which is awesome.

Awesome. But, you know, I'm, I'm interested in a bunch of things. I think I'm going to start kind of high level just to get our audience there. But just tell us a little bit more about and everyone at home, knows this and so they're going to hear it and they've already heard it but I do a little who you are at the beginning before this sure sure so you've all heard that and I've just told him that because I just get right into the recording but um the insurance industry right so um so you're you're you're from Silicon Valley uh which is super cool to be able to tell people

that um just immediately emasculates every other nerd around the valley um and then you come into insurance. So my first question is which one is nerdier? You know what? This actually may be surprising. So to caveat this answer, I've been in insurance for six months and I've been to, let's say, five or six insurance events. Nerdier. I think the people in Silicon Valley are nerdier in a pure nerd sense. But what may be surprising about the people in Silicon Valley is that they know how to part. after they're done being nerdy for the day in a way that probably people don't imagine, right? So at the at the nerdy Silicon Valley conferences the after parties

I mean they're you know it's like it's like entourage right and so the the insurance people I think in the office here much less nerdy much much cooler much hipper we have a young office and so you know I feel it is not very nerdy at all here in comparison to Silicon Valley but when I've gone to the insurance after parties and maybe I'm getting invited the right ones guys but when I've gone to the insurance after parties. They're pretty tame, man. Yeah, you're not going to the right party.

Next time we hang out, just, you know, see the text. You got it. You got it. Yeah, you got the right one. I was going to say the opposite of, like, the thing about insurance that I found when I started moving events on national stage, I thought was so interesting, is like, like, you know, when I was in college, I played on the baseball team, was an attorney. Like, you know, I've lived that life, you know?

Yeah. And then you kind of become a professional and air quotes and figure, whatever. And then I started going to these insurance events. And maybe it's just because I hang out with Cass when I go to them. But like insurance people know how to get down. Yeah. Definitely. I kind of feel like there's this hard worker, you know, hard having fun person

dichotomy that happens with people who are super driven. You know what I mean? Yeah. I don't see. And I've thought through that particular aspect of life a lot. And I keep coming back to like. I don't know that it is possible to be dialed in 24-7. Like you need to have a way to vent and is yelling crazy, ball-busting jokes at each other at some bar?

Like the most productive way to do it? I don't know. I think it kind of is. I do, I actually do too. I mean, I honestly, I do think that I think everybody's probably reached that point where you're so engrossed in what you're doing in a day. You reach that moment in the afternoon. and it's like 530 or whatever, and you're like, I should go home or I could order a pizza and keep working for another three hours because I've got that much stuff to do and I'm that

jazzed about it, right? Those are the moments where if I was with buddies, we would say, dude, let's cut out. Let's just be done for the day. Let's cut out. We'll start again early tomorrow. Let's go get some beers. And honestly, some of my best ideas have come three or four beers in at a bar, right? Yeah.

You know, so I, in a different life in the industry, I worked for a company called Adenc Nation. And we, so. So two of the guys that worked there in particular, Derek Hyde and Margety, Agatha and I, like after long days of conferencing or since we were a predominantly remote company, Marty actually moved in Minnesota, Derek lived in Milwaukee, I lived in Albany, when we would all be in the same place at the same time. We would hammer out a hard day's work. We were very hard workers.

And then six, seven o'clock would come around and you'd go and you'd get dinner. And then dinner would turn into drinks. And then drinks return into after drinks and then after drinks would turn into what bar is still open so we can have one more. But the truth is, like, some of me would say to myself, like, ah, that's pretty unhealthy behavior. The other part of it was agency nation as a company was born out of Derek Hyde and I being hammered drunk at a bar, 1130 at night.

And the whole idea for agency nation in a nutshell came out of us just like talking to each other. I mean, obviously, we're probably yelling at this point, but yelling at each other about, you know, here we need to do this. and we're, you know, this is what we're missing and bob and, like, and then he goes, well, I got this URL, agency nation. I was like, blah. We got it.

Yeah. You know, and then we, you know, and then that was how it all started. Yeah. So I think, I think you have to have both worlds. If you, if you're too constrained, you never let your mind wander into places that you don't, like, you know, there's like, I guess there's retreats you can go to that help you with this, too. But I just found like a couple of good IPAs or a good scotch and a buddy who will let you, you yell at them for a while, like will really help you let your mind go.

A hundred percent, man. A hundred percent. Real quickly on that thing, it made me think, like, when we, when I first started working, you know, in the previous role, I was all over the, I was all over the world. We had customers in different countries, right? And one of the, one of the things we did is we would take these classes on how to work with, you know, different cultures. And the one on how to work with Japan was very interesting to me because there was a,

there was something that I took, stuck with me and said, you know, In Japan, you're going to go to the business meeting and it's going to last two hours. And then after the business meeting, you're going to go to dinner. And that's where the deal is going to get closed, right? It's not at the meeting. Even if yeses are set around the table at the meeting, it doesn't matter because two, three beers and some sushi into the night is where the actual deal gets closed. And so I've always kind of kept that in my head to where, you know, our interactions as human beings, yeah, I mean, we've got our business side and we can sit here and be totally serious with each other and we can, you know, do it in a boardroom. but the relationship piece is what is what cements it, man.

And that's exactly what you're talking about, right? Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've bumped into different people and I think this is part, and I don't like to be generalationalist. Yeah, yeah. Does that make sense? It does to me. Yeah, but I do feel like people who I,

professionals that I run into that are, say, in their early 30s or younger, this is an idea, I think, that is lost on a lot of them. I've just found that they believe that a quality product in their mind to a company that supposedly has a need, that that deal should just get done.

Just why isn't that getting done? Like, I built this thing, it solves the problem that I perceive you have and you should just buy it. And that is, that, That is not where deals get done. Not at all. It's not like, yeah. You just know, it's almost like a ritual.

It's like a, it's like a, you're, the meeting, the actual meeting at 11 o'clock in the boardroom where you're sitting across from someone, that's just like this formal presentation of the guard. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you're taking hands and yeah, okay, and here's the kind, okay, this looks good. I'll have my people look at it. Okay, we'll give it.

And then you leave and you go get whatever, you know, afternoon drinks or you come back together for dinner. And then that's where it's, you're talking about families and hobbies and this. And then there's this moment where you look at each other and you're like, this is happening, right? Yeah. Okay, good. Let's go get hammered. And that's where you get your confidence from, right? Not from the boardroom piece, but from the over the table piece, right? Yeah. That's where you find out if the other person is crazy. Exactly. I think that's what the younger generation is missing or just people who don't understand this aspect of businesses. It's not about the drink. Because I've had people say to me, Ryan, you know, that's unfair because I'm not a big drinker.

No, I hear you. It's not about the drinking. Not at all. Drinking. It's not about the eating, right? I've had people say, well, you know, I'm, I don't, I'm vegan. I don't like going to steakhouses and stuff. It's not about the eating. That's where, because you can't, in a boardroom, we all have our battle armor on. We all have our uniforms on. Our team flag is behind us. And the fans are all watching. And we need to present our arms the best way possible. what the other side wants to know is is this a crazy or no like this person is that

me in the back or no yeah and your intuition on that like our all our intuition is finally tuned to pick those people out right and dither that in our head and when we all have our our battle colors on in that boardroom we're opaque in that way right we're much more opaque in that way yeah you get somebody out to dinner you get somebody out to wherever you start talking like you said about family you start talking about how did you get to this job you hear how you know you hear their life a little bit okay this person is legit like we're going to work together you know yes it's and it's it's it's very very important and that definitely i think that transcends industries um at least it seems to and it certainly is true in our industry in the insurance industry i think it's really interesting actually you know

transcending it's the there are certain skills that are very portable which i've found in a surprising way between industries. And this sort of interpersonal people skill stuff that we're talking about right now is one of those skills that is absolutely portable. So if you've ever read how to win friends and influence people, which is in my opinion the absolute best book ever written on how to do what we're talking about right now, that stuff is completely portable from one industry to the next. And it's just as important here in the insurance space as it is in Silicon Valley, honestly. Yeah. So you come from the technology space. traveling all over the world and now you work at a independent insurance agency.

Yeah. So, you know, I mean, first impressions. I mean, I know this is your brother-in-law, brother-in-law and father-in-law or brother-in-law and father-in-law? So it's not like you were completely naive to the world. I mean, you had been around, you heard them talking stuff. But you walk in the first day, you got the colors on. and you know what what are you like this is amazing or like holy shit what did I do I think there's probably somewhere in between those two things right so I'll tell you

what I was I was you know I from the moment I graduated college I was in a big corporate job right and so I had never really experienced anything other than a massive sort of corporate engine 100,000 person company you know full-fledged HR you know everything, full-fledged IT, everything you would imagine with a large corporation, you know, Fortune 50 type company. And so for me coming in here, I was immediately struck by sort of the scale, right, the difference in scale. But what surprised me in a good way was that actually the systems that were established here

are like legit, at least in this agency, like legit business operational systems. Like, oh, okay, we have, you know, you get here, everything works, it's functional. I'm going to stupid stuff. I'm mapping to network drives. I'm mapping to printers. I've got an extension, all my email and my slack and everything is going and it's all set up to go. And I'm like, wow, I figured this would be much more hacky. Yeah.

Because we're on such a smaller scale here. But no, it's not. And I was, again, you know, pleasantly surprised when I started looking at the P&Ls because I'm like, hey, like, this business is running well. Like, these profits are rad. You know, the revenue here is good. And the modeling is good. And, you know, we're not on a thousand lines of credit. And holy cow, this company is running in a profitable way.

And I don't think I, I mean, I did my research before I joined. I didn't want to join, you know, but I was surprised to see how much diligence, structure and goodness can be in the entrepreneurial space. Because I guess my impression, having never been there before, was that I was going to walk in and it was going to be like the blind leading the blind. It was going to be like a mess. And it really wasn't like that at all. So a lot of my first impressions were positive ones. But I can flip that around because on the other side of that coin,

there is an utter lack of process in some regards. So we've got people out here who are selling policies and they're doing an awesome job and they're kicking butt. But I don't think a single one of them uses our systems in the same way. They're effective, each in their own right. None of them are using our systems in the same way, which for me as a tech guy who's trying to do wonderful stuff with our technology and data is like a nightmare, right? Because getting down to the nitty-gritty of it, one person puts their reminder to do a task in a field called notes,

and the other one puts it in a field called tasks, and another one puts it in a field called extra, and nobody's doing the same thing. Nobody has a system. They're all closing. They're all producing. They're all hidden numbers. They're all doing it different ways, right? And coming from that big corporate space, like I was a very.

very big stickler on like process and procedure. Let's have a standard way to do things. You know, let's keep our, let's keep our data in order. Let's keep our information in order. If I had to take, if I had to send a book in a spaceship with a colony of people who are going to Mars and when they got to Mars, they could start an independent agency. What would I put in that book? And that's how I want my agency to run. Right. So those are sort of those were sort of my first impressions. There's a lot of good and sort of a lot of, oh, man, we could we could do better in some of these places. Yeah. Just give me, just for the audience's contextual, name of the agency, size of the years in business,

just some like back of the baseball card stats, just so they. Sure. Yeah. So the, yeah, the agency was started 14 years ago by our owner and president now his father. And so it's perpetuated to Doug, who is our. president and CEO. The agency is called Fudge Insurance, the last Doug Fudge, last name, so family name. We get a lot of good comments from that one at trade shows. And we have about 15 people on staff. Today, not all of those are sort of front of the house producing people. And then we have,

I guess I'm trying to figure out some other stats I can give you. But we're mostly a personal shop. So most of our stuff is personal. We're on a big push right now to grow the commercial side of our business. And we do a little life. So it's kind of the profile of the business. And you're hearing me, my voice get a little softer there because you're trading into the area where like as a technical guy, I'm still learning some of the insurance stuff and how to give you the baseball card stats. But that's, that's us in a nutshell. No, I think it's good. I mean, that seems like a perfectly reasonable job to make. And you should give yourself a hard time for that. So you said that, and some of these questions are going to be all over, but you said that you're thinking about moving into the commercial line side.

Like, why, I guess, first, and what does that look like moving into the commercial line side? Yeah, that's a great, great question. So we, so I say why. So we've always done, we've always had commercial writers with us and we've always done some amount of commercial business. But we've actually had a lot of turnover in that space. And this is before my time, but we've had enough turnover. over in that space that that side of the business really hasn't taken off. And so there's there's there's there's revenue there and it's it's not anything that I

would throw away, but it's it doesn't you know it's it's not super it's not a super representative piece of our revenue if I say it that way. And so we recently were able to acquire, you know, some commercial agents who I think we all think are top notch right. And so we we actually have the talent and so I think I listen to podcast with Billy Williams, right? And you guys talked a lot about, you know, do you pursue carriers, do you pursue business and then pursue carriers? And it was sort of this chicken and egg. How do you define what you're going to go after? Right or wrong, in this case, I think what I'm telling you is that we have some, we have a book of business now. We think we have a lot of

opportunities to cross-sell additional commercial business in addition to that book. But we just didn't have the staffing, the consistent staffing to be able to go execute on that stuff until now. And so one of the things we've chosen as sort of a growth vector for this year is, hey, we've got this really competent staff who's now on board. Let's just give them carte launch to go, you know, to go out in market, to go cross-sell, to go do good work. And we really think we have opportunity to grow there. As a technology guy, what are your thoughts around the, so I believe that insurance is still an incredibly human business, right? And you come in from it and I'm not saying that because your technology focused you don't believe that but

that would be someone's instinct right so uh actually I just saw someone shared something the other day Andrea estranged from and Jorowitz came out with this had this video that kind of i don't want to say went viral but like in nerdy bland it went viral around insurance about talking about how insurance layered into other products and that it's a it's a you know basically saying like this afterthought thing that does have a lot of revenue attached like everyone should be finding to bake it into their product. And my comment on the video was like if only insurance was that easy to sell, like and to keep and make profitable.

Like yes, I love the idea of everyone hates insurance. So we just bake your homeowners insurance into the next time you buy a dishwasher. And, you know, and it's all good. But, you know, I, the deeper I've gotten into this business over the last 15 years, the more I've come back to, I still don't see how you profitable, long-term profitability is separated from humans. I don't know how you do that yet. And I'm just interested, like you coming in,

looking at that, where are your thoughts, where do you stand? Yeah. Yeah. So in short, I agree with you 100%. And this is not because now I work at an independent agency

and I'm sort of like attached to it in any, there's in any way, right? So I think if you look at, you know, I think there's a lot of, in the IA space. I think a lot of IA owners are resistant to, you know, what we typically call maybe insure tech stuff or maybe carriers, you know, sort of continuing to develop their direct channels and disintermediating, you know, independent agents. And I think there's a lot of,

there's a lot of fear there. There's a lot of misunderstanding there. I also think there's a lack of empathy from the independent agency side for the carriers' situations. And you may, you may, you may think I'm sacrilegious for that. But there is a lack of empathy. I think honestly, if there was a little more trust between the primary entities in the ecosystem, we may be able to move faster. So let me explain what I mean. You know, I don't think that the carriers are out here trying to, you know, undo the independent or captive agent channel because they just don't like us and they're, you know, hellbent for profits or anything as nasty or all. awful as that. Like these guys got to make a buck too. These guys are also, and I know people think,

carriers, man, they have tons of money. Yeah, they have tons of money to underwrite their business, right? They don't necessarily have, you know, so here's a deal. Let me answer your question real quick. There are probably some very low complexity, simple types of business that are ripe and fit for personless transactions, right? Some type of insurance policy objects, or policies that can be done effectively on your phone quickly without human interaction, and quickly and acceptably. And equipment breakdown insurance. Exactly.

Lines and business right there. It's something that, you know, there's a couple of them. Those are great examples. That are their natural fits for that? No problem, right? I don't want to pay a middleman to help me sell a policy that I can do on a phone. But here's the deal. For personal policies,

and particularly like complex commercial policies, no way, man. It is a people business. I think that you'll continue to see people push direct options for stuff that, you know, they'll try and see how they can do it. But I really don't think that we're going to see in the long run that those things that are sold direct without the intervention of humans are going to have the kind of loss ratios or, you know, other statistics that are going to make them long term viable. That's just my prediction.

So there's so much. much there that I love. I love it. So we are of the same mind here. One of the things that's been interesting about my own career is Asian for eight years. Then I go into media technology consulting world for five years. And I see and I get to spend a lot of time with carriers, a lot of time with carriers. The West Bend's, the acuities, the Westfields, the centrals, the, you know, all these. And I have an affinity for, and this, for better or for worse, for super regional mutual companies.

I just love the way that they operate. I do. This is nothing against the big nationals. I've had experiences with Safeco and with Liberty and with some of the others. So I'm not knocking anybody, but just my, I have this affinity for, for this, for these type of models. Because, and I do believe that when people bang on carriers, they look. look at travelers, right? Travelers has an identity crisis. That's their problem. They're looking at

what they're looking at thin margins. We take top level and you're like, oh, they're Dow Jones Industrial Average. What the hell are you talking about? Don't do that. Don't do that. When you actually look after underwriting, after reserves, after everything goes in, their margins are pretty thin. Absolutely, dude. And they're actually competing against. They've ascended to a level in size and in scope both nationally and internationally where they're now competing against these mega mega companies and what's and what the problem is for a company like travelers because i think things travelers do radiate through the whole industry so i'm using this is not again a knock on travelers this is trying to talk through this topic which is they have one foot squarely in the

ia bucket and as matt wood uh who is um uh an incredible agent who who has become a buddy of mine who lives in Columbia County, which is not far from me, he made a comment the other day about Travis has this new flat fee auto insurance policy coming out. I agree with the general community that this is a path we do not want to take as an industry. That being said, Matt's comment, I don't mean to be blowing him up. I just think he's very smart about these particular topics, said, look, like, yes, this flappy thing is scary as hell, but look at the way travelers handles profit sharing and contingencies and bonuses. They have one of the best programs that side of the house.

So look at your total compensation versus just commission. And in my point in saying that is not, is Matt right, as other people right? My point is that I feel like too often, just as you said, IAs, we take this stance of they're our enemy, right? They're out to rip from us. And that is just simply not the case. It's not the case. There are no executives that deal with IAs for the most part.

Yeah. Who are going, we just want to take them out of the equation. Like, yes, does all state and nationwide and travelers make some decisions that are not always in our best interest, progressive maybe? Sure. But. Well, and to your point, and I'm sorry to speak over you, but to your point, I was having a conversation with one of my buddies from Westfield a few weeks ago. And, you know, we, which may have been over some birds. But we were talking about if we're inside a carrier and we're doing our due diligence to

understand how we're going to move our carrier forward profitably, we would be remiss not to be looking at direct options as part of that puzzle, right? I've been saying for years, every carrier, every carrier should have some small direct channel just to understand what everyone else is going through, just for channel knowledge, just to say, hey, I get that this is tough. We're doing a little bit of it here. And man, it's tough. And I was talking to a carrier one day and I think because this is what I believe, again,

perfect world, you know, you're sitting in a spot. I was like, I would love it if a carrier said, we're going to have channel knowledge in marketing and sales, we're going to run direct to consumer. And then we're going to write that business and then pass service off. to the closest local agent who hits a certain quality standard. And now they're not competing. A sense is getting free business in the door,

but the carrier is getting channel knowledge and building brand value. And I'm like this model. That's a really interesting idea. The problem is that there's too many sticks in the mud that are so old school that they see that as a gateway. Yeah, yeah, sure. But they go.

back to your original point and then I'll be quiet because I've been talking a lot. No, you're good. It's a lack of trust, empathy, and understanding between agent and carrier. They believe that if they give the carriers an inch, they will go all the way to cutting them out. And I could list 100 carriers right now that have zero intention of everything that. They trust their agent partners and love them to death. And frankly, I've put up with a lot of bullshit from them. Yeah, sure.

Probably shouldn't have had to deal with. Yep, yep. Yeah, I, you know, it's actually really good to hear you be passionate about this because a lot of times what I find is, and again, I'm brand new here. So when I say a lot of times, I mean, over the past six months as I've talked to to other, you know, agency owners, what I find is that, and part of this is understandable, so I'm not trying to knock anybody, but like people are concerned with their shop. Okay, everything that's happening inside their agency. And, They're caring about their customers, are taking care of their customers, they're selling policies. And they're doing a great job at that. But they're in that agency bubble almost with blinders on. And they don't have a lot of appreciation for how the ecosystem works beyond them. And maybe this is not something that everybody needs to have. But I am willing to bet you that the most successful independent agencies are the ones who understand the ecosystem and the channel

and how those different things. And we all read, maybe we read some statistics from, you know, AM Best or whatever, and we're figuring out how much is direct and how much is independent and how much is captive. And, you know, we all look at these statistics and we know the numbers and things. But to understand, one of the first things I wanted to do when I got into this job is I want to visualize what the sales channel looks like.

I want to understand who the retail people are, who the consumers are, who the middle people are, where, what are the carriers doing back to reinsurance? And so what does this channel look like visually? how do people communicate? Who relies on whom for what? You know, where are the pain points between the different players in the ecosystem? And I'm not saying, again,

everybody needs to have that knowledge, but I bet you that the most successful agencies do have that knowledge. One of the things that was very difficult for me when I first got on the national scene, I have a hard time not being 110% in and passionate about whatever I'm involved with. Help it.

Like even my last job, which wasn't in the insurance industry, I had very little passion for the space. But once I was there, I couldn't be anything but bought in. So when I got on the national scene, it was very difficult for me to, I couldn't understand why everyone wasn't looking at these global issues as big things. And it took a long time to say to myself, you know what? This guy just wants to run a business and coaches kids little league team and go to church and have a good relationship with his spouse and maybe do some fun. vacations and that's all he wants. Yep. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Absolutely not. Right? But that's sometimes for maybe for people like me and you who I don't know that I can't help but think big. I can't stop my brain from going there. Sometimes I have to rein it in and be like. It goes back to what you said earlier. You said you'd like to know how things work.

Oh, guess what? You want to know how your business works, right? Even outside the scope of your walls. Yeah. And again, to that guy who wants to, you know, go to church, coach his kids, little league team and do his business. Like, I say, you know, more power to you, dude, that's awesome. And I bet you that guy's going to be mad, successful doing his work.

And I'm not picking on, you know, that model at all. In fact, maybe I should have a little more of that model, but it's just not. I think that person's got to figure it out. Maybe we're doing. We were screw it up here, man. There have been these where I have life choices. Right. my wife said this the other day.

She goes, why can't you just like do the thing? Why do you always have to be involved? And I'm like, if I had an answer for that, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to be answered that. So, okay, so let's shift gears a little bit out of this. Sure. I'm like, so I'm interested in like what, what's got you excited?

Like you come into the space, you dig in. You realize like, oh, shit, like I can get on the network and the internet works and the phones work. Okay. So the basics are there. And I started digging in and you're going, you know, we've, I think a lot of people have beat up the things that maybe don't work as well as we like. But like, where are you coming? You're like, oh, man, I can fill this gap. And we can really push here.

Like, what's got you kind of jacked up? Yeah. So a lot of, that's a good question. A lot of what I did. Okay. So one of the things I think I'm proud of stuff that we did at the old job when I was working at Intel is that, you know, we were. responsible for enabling and support during the design phase for large data center installations. So to put that in sort of more understandable terms, perhaps, this is working with the Googles,

the Amazon, the Facebooks, the Apples, the Twitters of the world who are installing large, large, large, large scale data centers. We would help them build the machines that would go into those data centers, test those machines to deploy those machines, and then if those machines caught on fire, we would go help, you know, put them out, right? And so we had to develop a system that would allow us to support the customers, right? And it would allow us to track the customer's issues. It would allow us to, I mean, it's the same kind of human interaction stuff we've been talking about earlier, right?

We've got a lot of customers with a lot of really big problems. And we want to make sure that we're taking care of them and keeping them satisfied. And we're solving issues and we're moving the whole thing forward. And so we worked a lot on a system that would allow, you know, the 650 people that were doing this work to, be in touch with the customers, to track their work, to follow up on their work, to do the general things that you would think of that make a good. In this case, it wasn't sales, right? But it was essentially support and service, right? And so to be able to do those things in the best way possible, given the fact that we were doing it for a large bunch of people with a lot of complexity,

right? And we developed a system, when I say a system, I mean a piece of software that would allow us to do that kind of thing, right? And you can think of it as a mix between sort of like a CRM and a ticketing system. And once we had that in place, we were able to gather all kinds of cool statistics to tweak our business and do better. Okay. And when I came in here, I watched sort of how the agency runs their business day to day. And we have a system as well as the, as do most people in this business in the IA space as a system. I'll be honest with you. there are no systems here. Okay, well, there perhaps will be a system one day, even if it's just, you know, a Rolodex.

But I bet you that one day there will be a system. And, you know, again, this is not, I'm not trying to be negative here because we're profitable. And whatever system cobbled together we have that we're working, it's working, right? But I think we're successful in spite of our technology is a lot of what, you know, I like to say that a lot. And I think that it's not about, I mean, it is in part about. getting a better system, that's one piece of it. But it's what you get to in terms of insights once you've got better systems and processes that is the really important piece. Because it can really allow you to do things as simple as like load balance your work, you know, your work

effort. It can allow you to optimize the levels of care for particularly needy situations, times of year, accounts, things that, you know, we sort of do intuitively. We do this juggling thing. But as human beings, you know, once it gets to be beyond a certain amount of balls in the air. We're really not doing as good a job as we could and you need some help to help you categorize, visualize, share the load potentially. And as nerdy as that sounds, Ryan, that's the kind of thing that actually I'm excited about coming into this agency and helping do because these guys are out here kicking about already. I think that if we could, we could have a little more insight, not me as a manager looking down on other people, but together

collectively insight into the workload and where we're successful. I mean, I just, I think we could unlock all kinds of extra, extra good stuff. Talk to me a little bit about the idea of load balancing because I think I understand what you're saying. Sure. I also think that from other conversations anecdotally, I think that this is one of the more important concepts in our space today. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm using, I guess, a sort of a network or a computer term, right? So in any big old data center, when you have a bunch of traffic going through one particular node or one particular processor, there's always these schemes that are software-based that allow you to balance that load across multiple resources. So they're actually not bottlenecked by a particular given resource. So we can apply the same thinking to human beings, right? And we can say if, you know, Agent Mary or CSR Mary has, you know, an outstanding queue of work that's, you know, deeper than the average time per piece of work is going to give her an eight hour day to do, we have then overloaded or congested on that particular CSR. And can we be smart about how we load balance that work onto other CSRs or other places in the agency so that we can, you know, we don't end up backlogged through a particular resource. And it can also be instructive, I think, in hiring decisions, right?

And so if we consistently find ourselves backlogged, let's say, through our single commercial agent, which is a great problem to have, perhaps it's time that we need to go out and seek, you know, an additional commercial agent to help us with the work. And so what I really would like to do, and the way we saw it in the previous industry is we would have, you know, have a number of outstanding issues and we would have dashboards and statistics that we collectively could look at, not a manager thing, but an everybody thing. And you could go in and you could reassign work. And of course, there's nuances to reassigning work.

You know, sometimes there's a personal aspect to it that doesn't necessarily lend itself to switching midstream. But when there is work that's easily compartmentalized and shuffleable within different sort of facilities in the agency, that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about getting a benefit from. I'll give you a real example. I mean, it sounds you can talk big. You can say big words and stuff. But the real example is like we had all but I think two of our personal agents out for very, reasons, you know, a couple weeks ago. And we found ourselves stuck because there was a bunch of stuff that needed to get done that hadn't got done before they had to take off, not their fault,

just couldn't have gotten done. And there was a bunch of new stuff coming in and the other agents that were in the office already had their own workloads. So all of a sudden there's more work than there is people to do the work, right? And if we would have been able to perhaps anticipate the week before, the fact that we would have been down to two staff the next week, we could have perhaps load balance that a little bit better and got it kicked out so that we wouldn't pinch ourselves. in the coming week. And so it sounds very tactical, but it's real, right? And it allows us to keep up with our customers.

No, this is, so most agents, a common practice among, you're calling them agents or CSRs or whatever, is the alphabet method. Hey, Tammy, you have A through F and you have G through, you know, and what happens is there is no science to that at all. Chopping the alphabet up into thirds and distributing among your three CSRs does not mean, I mean, Tammy Sue could be there till 10 o'clock at night. Absolutely. John could have an hour's worth of work.

Absolutely. And this is one of the things, this is a big mission of mine in terms of just the messaging that I want to put out into the world is around the idea of expectation. And I think that there is this false concept that if they don't talk to Tammy Sue, every time they call that that person is going to be upset because they have a relationship with Tammy Sue, I actually think that that is horse, horsecraft. I do not think. Yeah. I think if you set the expectation that Tammy Sue is your personal servant and she's going to answer every one of your phone calls and drop everything at a dime and do what that client says.

Right. Yes, that's true. But if you say to her, we have a team of people, Tammy Sue is your primary, but if it's not Tammy Sue to be John or maybe to be Gina, maybe to be Kevin or whoever else, but she's your primary. That's cool to say. But then, like, we have a, team of people that can help you. Yeah, absolutely. That, this methodology that, that, that, that the only, the only thing that determines personal touch or good service is this, this like old world relationship where I just, to me, it is holding us back so much. I agree, but here's a deal. If you're not consistent, and I don't mean consistently good, but if you're not consistent on how you're handling folks, then it makes it much more difficult to have fungible resources like that.

So if their Tammy Sue experience is always per their expectations, but their experience with Jane is maybe it's per their expectations, but it's different, right? It's just a different stylistic approach. They're going to call the one they're most comfortable with, but if you've got some processes and procedures and standards that you have and the experience is pretty uniform across your people, then it won't be a big deal to transfer between people.

Do you know what I mean? I do. Dude, this is why I'm going full service center. That's why I'm, yeah, my, my business is going to be commercial and basically preferred slash high net worth personal. That's it. But predominantly, I'm a commercial lines agency. Got it. And if I write a package with whoever, their team back at where at that headquarters or wherever the call center, they are the best people. And the other thing is set expectations up front. Here's exactly why I'm doing it. And what I want, I know that if Cindy Hurliss at Central Insurance is managing her team of 35 customer care individuals that I trust her to make sure that experience

is uniform and high quality, I trust her a lot more than I trust myself, the low balance CSRs behind me, you know? I hear you. Yeah. And I think that, and again, not everyone has to go service center, but I guess my- But that's actually a really good point, though, right? that is actually a very good, and it's something that you just made me sort of think twice about, because that's a big benefit, though, that you can get by doing the model that you're doing, right? Instead of having to invent and or instill that in staff. So, yeah, I like that, actually. Well, I go back to your point of trust and empathy. I have decided, and again, this has been strategic, and I feel, I've said this a thousand times, I feel blessed that I've been able to

filter and build constructs and ideas from having a thousand conversations like the one we're having now right i've had thousands of these with all people and and and i take i have notebooks crazy ass notebooks i'm literally writing for articles off the things that you're saying over here i have all these crazy ass notebooks with notes filled with all these ideas sure one of the things that i believe and is that there are certain carriers in particular that i just trust i just trust i just trust that they're trying to do the best thing. Like, um, I just got my handover appointment in today. Sweet. I'm a handover appointed insurance agent. It's congrats, man. That's fantastic. And you want to know why? Because I trust, particularly Dick Levy and but then Steve Sebeli,

who's my local guy and every other person that I've met there, I trust that they have the best interest in my clients of mine. So when I chose to pursue them as a direct appointment, it was for that reason. And look, I don't, I also am not going into this relationship assuming that they're going to be perfect. Because if I had Kevin behind me the CSR, Kevin wouldn't be perfect either. Right. Exactly. Exactly. There's like this weird thing with service centers that like if SafeGo, like everyone, everyone tries SafeGo's call center. And then some people end up going, oh, it's no good. And I'm like, okay, why is it no good? Well, someone called for a car change and the car change didn't happen until the next day. And I'm like, okay, okay, I can understand that you're upset about that. How many frigging

times does that happen with your own people? And do you on them and post in the IAOA group that somehow doing that just because they made a mistake? Like they're not perfect. It doesn't mean you shouldn't address it. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't work through it and be cognizant of it. But somehow we are holding carrier service centers to this to this standard that we would never hold our own people to in a million years. Yep, I totally agree. Totally agree. Yeah, I don't know. But okay, so you're excited about load balancing, which I just like saying the word. So the other thing. Sounds really terrible when you say I'm excited.

That sounds like the worst thing I could possibly be excited about. I mean, I'm excited about spring training starting. I'm excited about, you know, chicken wings on a Friday night. But I guess, sure, yeah, load balancing too. I was going to bring you. You had to know when you said load balancing. It's just too good. So I want to be respectful of your time.

We have a few minutes. Sure, sure. But I would be completely remiss and not doing my job as an interviewer if I did not bring up your relationship with neon and the neon project and be atomic and what's going on there. So tell us a little bit about many people have heard neon. Some have an idea of what it is. Some have no idea. But why are what about it excites you? What about it interests you?

What about it intrigues you? You know, all the good stuff. Sure. I'll start with the softball answer, which is, you know, we talked a lot on this interview about how important it is to connect with a person on a personal level and, you know, really feel like you could hang out with a person and you get along with them and you did that sort of look in the eyes across the table and we're going to do this, right? Yeah, we're going to do this.

So I had many of those moments with the crew over at the neon. be atomic and a lot of that, there is motivation in and of itself just within those connections. Okay, number one, but that's not necessarily why you would enter into a business relationship. The real meaty answer, aside from the softball answer, is that I believe in the vision. And it fits right with the idea of what I explained earlier about the system that we worked so hard on back when I was in the other industry doing customer support and service, there is that similar vein of desire there to be able to sort of up-level to upgrade the way that agencies are managing their customers.

I'm sorry, I should actually say relationships, relationships with their customers, relationships with their carriers, relationships with other agencies. And so the vision there is very attractive to me. It is an audacious. It is an audacious, big-eyed vision that I not only wanted to be a part of because I wanted to reap the benefits of being a part of it, but I wanted to be a part of it because I actually think that we have something to bring to help build the best product to help deliver on the vision. And so, gosh, it doesn't sound like a very concrete answer for you. but I think that it is the system that we can move to, Ryan,

that will help us unlock some of those efficiencies that I talked about earlier, you know, knowing things about how we're executing our business, having insights into the way we execute, the way our people are servicing our customers, the way we're interacting with carriers, and most importantly, insights that help us tweak our business to make it better for our customers,

more profitable for us, more effective for our workers, all that good stuff. Yeah. What I think is interesting, and even if people, you know, I think people get lost in the details of neon. What continues to intrigue me about neon and beyond what the first thing you said, which is I, Seth and Sydney are two of the people. Yeah, you dig the people. Right.

Yeah. Not just an insurance, but in the world. You know, they, what intrigues me is that each new person who I have respect to, you know, I have respect for and I have I have respect for you and your opinion who comes into it. Their gut is telling them there's a there there. And that that to me it's not just it's not just homers trying to make a profit. It's not just crazy-eyed visionaries like Seth. I mean this is people from all different walks of life and in this case someone who's

done real deal hardcore international technology work is walking in and and in their guts telling them there's a they're there. And that to me, I just, I don't, that's special. And I think, uh, I think it's why this project, it needs to continue to be nurtured. And not everyone's going to be a part of it. But that doesn't mean you can't support it, even if you're not. Absolutely. And, you know, that's not.

And let's be perfectly honest. And, you know, in Seth, and if you're listening, right, this is not a dig. But, you know, uh, you know, a project of this. visionary status, you know, when you launch it on day one, it's not going to be for everybody, right? It's just not. It's not going to work. I mean, not everyone went out and, not everyone went out and bought the iPhone one because they realized on day one it was going to be the next best thing and it was going to take over everything, right? And I'm not trying to make a comparison there. I'm just saying that when you launch a new startup technology, a new piece of cool technology,

it takes a while, you know, you have to hit that tipping point. And there will be changes and growth, growing pains and all kinds of stuff that go along with that. But like I said, the vision, And the vision is solid. And based on my experience from other industries and watching, you know, what they've done as let's say they moved to cloud scale economy. They moved into, you know, data warehousing and data analysis. The vision is solid. I mean, I'm confident in that. Well, my man, this has been a tremendous hour of my life.

Yeah. Thank you. I enjoyed this. I think it's so intriguing to me when I can meet someone who comes from, you know, we all come from very different places, but like your background very different from my. somehow we both found our way into this space and yet philosophically and kind of from a virtue perspective we share a lot of things in common and I'm just I'm glad that we've had a chance to get to know each other a little better. I'm glad we could share some of your story. Absolutely. Yeah, me too, man. With the industry as a whole and man, I can't wait to see what you

start to build. I think really cool things starting to drip out of fudge. Cool stuff is happening. drip out of fun i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna put that on a t-cool thing starting to drip out of fun put it on a t-shirt maybe uh i like that yeah and uh dude i do think people are gonna be watching so thank you so much thanks rand i appreciate yeah all right brother take care twice as many deals by this time next week sound impossible it's not with the one call closed system, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients under three years during the pandemic.

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