Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - How to Use the Insurance Technology You Already Have with Peter MacDonald

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyA dynamic conversation with Peter MacDonald, founder of Wunderite, as we consider the integration of semantic search, the dance of regulatory changes, and the promise held within the folds of technology that already exists in our agency.✅ Join the Insurance Growth Masterclass: https://masterclass.insure✅ For daily insights and ideas on peak performance: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley/✅ Hire me to speak at your next event: https://ryanhanley.com/speaking--✅ Peter MacDonald's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petemacdonald/✅ Steve's website: https://wunderite.com/** More about this episode **Have you ever stood on the brink of achievement only to find yourself peering over the edge into a void of dissatisfaction?Let's traverse that expanse together, exploring 'The Gap and the Gain', as I share how shifting your mindset from what's missing to what's been accomplished can revolutionize your sense of fulfillment and growth.We'll tap into the wisdom of Dan Sullivan's Strategic Coach program and my own formative experiences, discovering how to relish the journey, not just the destination, and embrace perseverance as the true art of success.Remember, in the symphony of our daily hustle, sometimes the quietest notes speak the loudest.Enter the complex world of insurance, a behemoth of potential and pitfalls, where I'm joined by a visionary from Wunderite to add layers to our discourse. We'll consider the integration of semantic search, the dance of regulatory changes, and the promise held within the folds of technology, such as WonderRite's breakthrough platform.As we wrap up, you'll find your inner skeptic awakened and your intellectual curiosity piqued, with a side serving of conspiracy theories that’s sure to entertain.Join us; it's a conversation that promises to challenge, enlighten, and maybe even amuse you.#gratitude #findingpeak #insurance--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

If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Granger for auto reordering. With on-time restocks, your team will have the cut-resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift. And you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800 Granger, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. 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. So unless you're trying to go, and I really think this is, and I really think this is the answer to the question, is that you have to decide, like, are you shooting for a number and a lifestyle, or are you trying to grow something that is bigger than that? And depending on what you, you know, and that's a goal you have to decide.

Some people want to grow big enterprises and that's what they want to do. That's phenomenal. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Peter McDonald, one of my favorite people in the industry, one of the smartest guys in the industry, the founder of WonderWrite, a tool that we used heavily at my last agency that I highly recommend that I think is well positioned for fast-growing agencies, particularly those who are

seeing a mix of both direct and, say, E&S or wholesale business that want to make sure that they're gathering the right information, but doing it in a way that delivers an ease of use to their customer that matches that kind of human optimized experience that I preached so much about. But, you know, we're not here to talk about Wonder Right, although Peter does give us an update at the end, Peter's dialed into the industry and just has a very thoughtful and unique perspective. And coming out of both kind of the Boston and SureTech area, which is different than other sections of the country, as well as having gone through some of the well-known incubators and raised money, et cetera, I love Peter's perspective. I love what he's trying to do. I love that his experience

is born out of an independent agency, like so many of the most useful and successful insuretecs are, and just any chance I get any opportunity that I get to have a chance to talk with Peter about the industry, about all kinds of different things, leadership, growth, entrepreneurship, etc. is worthwhile and tremendously valuable. And I know you're going to enjoy this conversation. Before we get there, though, I just want to remind you guys that my consulting firm, my coaching agency, finding peak, we will be launching an official program that you can sign up for, be a part of. The first iteration of this is going to be, a membership program in which you can come in.

We're going to have monthly lectures. We're going to have some coursework that you can take. But really, it's going to be kind of a DIY system for you to build out the three modules of success from an inbound standpoint, being kind of filling the funnel, one call close, and then obviously maximizing lifetime value of those customers. And that program is going to be open to anybody. You can come in. You can follow the coursework, come to the lectures, be part of the community. That is going to be launching in February.

And I'm launching that part of the consulting firm first because this is what finding peaks, the membership part, the master class part of finding peak, the reason that I want to get this out first and it's going to be, you know, an affordable price point is because I'm building this for me when I was two or three years into the business. new insurance when I had it when I had a good feel for the product when I good feel for what I wanted this for what I for for for this career but I would but I didn't know how to consistently get business in when I was struggling with prospecting when I was struggling with with with branding with with

with letting people know who I was what I did what value I added you know that portion that part of my career I wanted to make something that was accessible all the way down to that individual right so if you're in an agency where maybe you know just for whatever reason you don't have the resources to overinvest in large scale expensive consulting programs and you like to get your hands dirty. I want to make accessible for that person all the way up to, you know, the top 100 brokerage who has producers that are out in the world that want to build, you know, kind of branded niches and drive business in in addition to their outbrown prospecting. And this kind of baseline

monthly program is exactly what that's going to be. And to get on the waiting list, if you're listening to this before the actual launch, which will be in February, Masterclass, dot ensure just go to masterclass. dot ensure put your name put your email in you'll be on the wait list as soon as we go live you'll be the first to know guys I'm so excited about what this program is is a culmination of 18 years of experience thousands and thousands of conversations uh you know kind of let's see I've done two three four I've implemented this program in more of the four different businesses and in just under two dozen coaching clients

that I've had kind of on the side that I don't normally talk about and won't talk about specifically just for reasons of being respectful to them. And then my ongoing learnings as I go, like this program is going to be where as I learn things, as I see things coming, I deliver that information to this group. Couldn't be more excited about it. There will be in-depth programming eventually, you know, down the line, we're going to have take on, you know, kind of a higher level, kind of mastermind style, we're digging hand-to-hand combat, you know, one-on-one coaching with people. And if you're interested in that, you can always email me at Ryan at findingpeak.com. But guys, I just, I couldn't be more excited. I feel that energy coming back. I feel like, you know, helping you guys grow

is what I love to do. And I've always found more satisfaction and watching the light come on for others and success in others and being that amplifier or accelerator than my own personal success. And this, what we're building at Finding Peak, I just couldn't be more proud of. So I want to get that in front of you, Masterclass. And sure, if you have questions, comments, or you're looking for something else, just email me, Ryan at Findingpeak.com. I'm out on the speaking circuit again. So if I see you at an in-person event, I can't wait for that.

And, guys, I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Peter McDonald. good buddy doing real good i am um coming out of the fog of uh the holidays and you know life transitions and my house is coming together and life is good you know yeah man you've uh had a lot going on haven't you yeah that seems to be what the universe has lined up for me so i've decided to embrace it and um and you know i don't like to complain in general so i just tend to keep moving forward and that seems to work pretty well. And if you don't complain,

I'm actually reading an awesome book. Have you ever read The Gap and the Gain by Benjamin Hardy? My dad's talked about it a lot. This is like, I think Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach probably referenced it. Yes, so it's a Dan Sullivan concept. So there's this really cool series of books that I highly recommend anybody who's like growth-focused

And like read. And these have been, I've read two of them. I'm going to read the third. It's not as high on my priority list because I think it's one of the concepts that I just intrinsically understand a little more. But I read, there's three books. So Dan Sullivan has all these ideas. And Dan Sullivan's strategic coach is incredible, but it's so much. He partnered with a guy by the name of Ben Hardy, Benjamin Hardy, and he's a doctor.

He, well, not the like medicine kind. like the philosophical kind or whatever. And he wrote, he basically took these three concepts and broke them down into a series of books. I'm reading them in reverse order. So the one I read was 10x is easier than 2X, which was my best and number one recommended book for 2023, just absolutely incredible. And now I'm reading the gap and the gain. And then the first one that they did in the series was who not how, which people rave about as well. Although, you know, like I said, I just feel like intrinsically that's a concept I understand a little better.

But this, the gap in the gain is really interesting because it was like, you know, I'm only four chapters in, to be fair to the book. But when they first introduced the concept, it like hit me like a ton of bricks that it like completely defined when I feel good about something and when I don't feel good about something. And the concept is basically we have where we started, where we're at, and our ideal. And what most people do is they measure themselves between where they're at and the ideal. And that's called the gap. And what Dan Sullivan recommends is measuring yourself from the start and where you're at. And he calls that the gain. And that if you're always operating in the gain from saying like, hey, I used to be able to run a nine-minute mile or a 10-minute mile.

and now I'm running a nine minute mile. And even though my best friend can run a seven-a-half-minute mile, I'm actually a minute quicker than I used to be. And I should be happy for that one-minute gain, not the fact that I'm still a minute and a half behind my friend. And the reason I like this concept, and then we'll talk about something relevant to why you're on. But the reason why I like, I just,

I read it for like an hour this morning. I like couldn't put the book down. My kids were almost late to school. because I was like I couldn't put it down. The reason I like it is because, and this is what they were getting into, was this idea that, and it's something I've been talking about, success is often just outlasting, you know, outlasting your desire to quit, not necessarily, you know, hitting some mark.

And that's really what Dan Sullivan's concept is, is that as leaders, as entrepreneurs, as growth-focused people, when we operate in the gap, we get frustrated, we get, you know, we get depressed. We start having negative thoughts. And that's where we, oh, I'm going to give up or I'm going to make a bad decision. Where in the gain, you're always coming from a place of positivity because you're like, yeah, our goal may have been 300 customers by the end of the year. But we started with 50 and now we're at 275.

And even though we missed our goal by 25, geez, we put 225 new customers on the books. And that's pretty darn good. And I just thought that's, I've just, that kind of stuff. really just resonates with me. I know it's kind of ethereal, but I like live off that shit. No, yeah, it's funny. So my dad did strategic coach for, I don't know, a decade or something. And he taught me about gaping the game when I was in high school.

He'd like, Peter, you're gaping on me. You're gaping on me. So it's funny because he's been talking about the book. I've never read it. I probably should. But the concept, I think you did a great job explaining at least how I've learned it. Are you a big reader? You know, recently, honestly, Ryan, like, haven't been.

And it's one of those things where I'm like, I should make time for it. But I've just been, it's like I have young kids and then the startup. And it's just like wake up, get the kids off, work. And then kids go to bed, like back to work. Yeah. So it's one of those habits from like, I should probably make time for it. I also think like, you know, my brother reads like a book a week. I know you're a big reader.

I feel like some of the times you read books and you're just like, man, there's so much filler content. They could just condense these things down to like, you know, a quarter of what's in there. And then I think, and you commented on that thing I posted from Daniel Goggins. Because I do read a ton, by the way. Like I'm on Twitter a lot. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm like reading a ton of news stuff relevant to the industry. So I do read a ton just like not necessarily books.

Yeah. And I do listen to a lot of podcasts. I love audio. I, you know, listen to audio or videos at two X. bead because it's just like it's so much better but that Daniel Goggins he's like you already know what to do like just go do it yeah trying to build a business it's like just go get those 300 clients yeah it doesn't matter if half of them come from cold calling and half of them come from an intro and whatever it's like just go you know what you need to do just go do it yeah and so um

I do love reading man if I could get into reading right now I feel like I want to read like the hobbit or something or like Lord of the Rings you know it wouldn't even like a business book it'd be like I need to just escape and unplug you know what I read uh I read, oh my gosh, not 1984. Brave New World. I have that right behind me, by that. I literally had it like on my background, 1984. Both great books.

Yes. So I've read 1984 a long time ago just after I finished college, but not for the reasons that I would read it today. I read it mostly for the story, not with the political undertones. I just didn't understand all the complexities that were interwoven into the narrative. which is a great story. If you're not even reading it for like the political commentary,

the narrative is phenomenal. I will say, and I almost feel like my understanding of the political undertones of Brave New World wrecked the story for me a little bit. It's a great book and I loved it. I finished it. It's like real life too much. You're like, yeah.

Unfortunately today because I want to say, I do, I hate to say this because I know like every guru success expert is like, don't listen to politics and don't get involved. I do enjoy. So if I go back and do my, do my like, it's hard not to. If I could go back and do my, my college career again, I would have done economics and psychology because I love business. I love how business works.

But I also. Would you have gone to college? What? You did it again. You know what? Would you have gone to college, you know, again? In that day, without. the internet without the access to information that exists today. Now, today, like if I were to go

in 2024, would I go to college? If I wasn't playing sports, I would not have gone to college today. Yeah. I also think that it's like, it's like a country club. It's like a country club with like an academic component and like networking. Yes. Yeah. I, I, given the option today without sports. So at the time, you know, I have talked a little bit about this. I came from this little shit town of less than 900 people. My parents did the best I can. I was blessed that I had two parents to love me, but they had nothing, right? So for me, college was like the only way I could envision getting out of that little shithole.

So, like, that was it. Like, playing sports, even though I love them was like my way out. Getting good grades was like my way out. Wasn't that I loved school. I mean, I did love sports, but like, it was how I got out. So back then, yes, just to like escape. But to be honest with you, I love economics and financial shit and I love psychology. So like, so like I get into politics.

not so much for like the like my side winning or whatever like because I don't really have a side because I flip flopped so many times if you were to like look at my political register you know what I've registered I've been Democrat independent Republican independent Republican independent Republican Democrat independent Republican it's like that because it's more for me like I just the psychology of how all this stuff works and like how you could say something and I could say it in the way look, how you deliver it, the timing, the venue, the color shirt you're wearing, who's standing next to you or behind you, how loud the crowd cheers when you say, all these things impact whether I believe you and don't believe me or believe me and don't believe you. And like,

that's what I find fascinating. It's like, why? Like, why is that the case? I just, I don't know. I'm so intrigued by it. I think that the smartest people are like the hermits. They're like the prophets who go out into the wilderness and they just shut themselves off. And I know people like this, they're like, don't read the news anymore. I don't watch it because it's all made up. Yeah. And they go off and they have these breakthrough ideas because they're not bombarded with the thing of the day. And there's so many things of the day and it just gets your blood to boil if you feed into it and you start bleeding all the conspiracy theories that are out there. I know you and I chatted about like aliens and other things that are out there. But like,

I think as a leader, you know, You need to be well versed in it. You need to know what's going on the sports. Like if you look at someone who's running for president, it's like they got to throw that pitch to open the game. And like they need to know who's like who's going to the Super Bowl, who's going to the playoffs, who are they rooting for? It's just like one of those things where you kind of have to be,

it's almost like you have to be aware of it and operate your business within it without getting mentally sucked into it, which is the challenge. Dude, I think it's seasons of your career, right? when you are in a, like I remember the early days, and I'm sure with WonderWrite, it's the same thing. And I want to talk about Wonder Right. I want to talk about the industry a lot. So I don't want to get to,

I know sometimes when we get on here and these shows, I could go off the rails. I want to talk. I'm very interested in some of your takes and some of the things that are going on in the space. And I want to get to that. And I have some notes, too, by the way. I prepared.

Oh, yeah. And I love it. I love it. You know what I love that. But this idea, and I'd like your thoughts on this. So in examining my own career, obviously, I've had, if you look at my LinkedIn, you're like, what, you know, I did this, I did this podcast. I got invited on this, like, entrepreneurs podcast randomly by two guys that didn't know.

And it was, it was a lot of fun. And they were asking me, they saw the, like, rogue story of like the startup and the insurance industry. And they were, they were interested in, like, entrepreneurial stories in what they were calling, like, almost like Cody Sand, like boring businesses kind of thing, right? And, yeah, sure. And it was, and that's where they brought me on. And then they're like, we'll give us the Tencent tour. of how you got to hear.

And I was like, I don't know that I can tell it with 10 cents, but I'm going to do the best that I can. So I broke down like the last 18 years of my life. And the guys got done and they like had nothing to say. And they're like, holy shit. Like that's quite the journey that you've been on. And I was like, yeah. So I reflect on that quite a bit.

And what I've come to is this idea. And I'm very interested because you are obviously past initial startup phase, but still probably still feel very much in that startup. mode and growing wonder right but i feel like we have to be very intentional with the season of our career and what i mean by that is in the early days of rogue i mean i mean you couldn't avoid covid but other than that a bomb could have went off in in my town and i wouldn't have known right i'm 16 hours a day like you said if the kids aren't awake and home i am at my computer doing some sort of work trying to grow my business and i didn't know anything else that was going on and then as i kind of

started at some employees and hit a next phase. And I don't know that we ever actually, we were almost at escape velocity when, when Rogue was shut down. But, but we did get to a point where I had to pick my head up and start to say, what's going on in the industry, what's going on with the economy, what is this hard market all about? How are we going to position our business? You know, like, I had to take my head out of like that what you, like that hermit mentality and engage because otherwise there were there would be blind spots that I could run my business into and I think that we have to be very cognizant of that if you want to be that high level leader of an organization I don't think you can have your head in the sand if you

want to be that unique disruptive creator then going into the woods maybe is the best play for you and being smart about those things does that make sense and how do you feel about that yeah 100 100 percent I think by the way you talk to any startup founder and I know you've gone through this like there's a season where you need to go fundraise yeah um people think that you're always fundraising and that's not true like for i think for the best it's like you might be building relationships but like honestly like the best investors like you don't necessarily need a relationship it's like if this is a great investment i want to i want to buy right now i don't care about the relationship that i've had historically and so when i go into

fundraise mode it's like all i do the entire day until midnight every day yeah is fundraise It's like, and I stack my calendar morning tonight, meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. That's all I do. And you get really good at the conversations. They get better every time. You get a sense of the market and I block everything else out. There's nothing else that I do.

I ignore everything. I ignore my emails. I ignore my text. Nothing. I remember in the earliest days of wonder, I, Ryan, when I was literally coding. I couldn't check my email. I would wake up and I would just code all day and I'd code all night every day and you ignore everything.

Like that's the way that you get. to be successful. I think that the hermit mentality is like, it's like you go out, you shut off everything, and you just, you focus and that's where you get, you know,

the brilliance. But on the flip side, when you come back and all of a sudden you're running an organization, you need to be aware, like, hey, and this is one of the things I'll talk about that I see coming this year,

like, what's happening with non-competes? What's happening with pay transparency? Yep. These are like political issues we need to be aware of. Some of them, it's like,

they might be like, you know, maybe more make your blood boil where it's more of a current issue, social work setting, layoff stuff that's going on. Like, it's going to be aware of, but it doesn't really impact your business. But if you're an insurance, like, hey, what's happening

non-competes? New York just shut it down. Like, California's accelerating. And Massachusetts, like, what does that mean for me? What does it mean from hiring? So there's things that are good to be aware of. But for the most part, I would 100% agree. Like, you just got to shut it out of your mind

and just focus on what you need to do right now. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I get asked a lot, if your agency was so successful, why did you sell? And there's a bunch of reasons. One reason that I don't talk too much about because I am not in any way a financial guru, so I do not want to even pretend to position myself as such. But I will tell you that part of the reason that I sold when I did had to do with the fact that I saw hard financial times coming because I read, I have like, I have like a half

dozen independent financial journalists that I read. What's up guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In an exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, etc. This helps the show grow. it helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales.

The things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business, but they all check out comments, ratings, reviews, they check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. share the show, subscribe if you're not subscribed, and I love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments, or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show, and I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do, creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here.

Peace. Let's get back to the episode. They're not emmacy. It's not Jim Kramer. It's stuff that I get directly to my inbox. Two of them actually pay for every month, and I read these things in my downtime. because I feel like this cross cut of individuals, you know, give me a good feel for what's happening. And no one ever knows exactly what's happening. But what I did know for a fact back in 2022, something was coming, right?

We had seen some initial rate increases. There was COVID had impacted us in a way. And I was like, you know what? If I don't raise money and or sell this business today, what am I going to be able to do two or three years from now? like what is this going to look like, right? And we had to make a move because for different reasons. So there were other variables, but it was like, and then you see people in 2023 talking

about how they didn't see the hard market coming or what do we do about this hard market? It's like, guys, if you had had your head up, right, and had been, you know, I'm not talking every minute of every day scanning the environment, but if you had been looking a little out ahead and reading some things and being aware of your environment, maybe you could have started position your agency, position your business in a way, whether you're raising funds or just the products you're selling, how you're setting up your employment or your staff, you know, et cetera, you could have made some adjustments to handle these huge rate increases in some of the disruptions that have come from

them. And again, no one can prognosticate what's going to happen in the future. But I do think to your point, as a leader, we have to. It is mandatory that we every once in a while put our periscope up and see what the heck is going on. Yeah, I think if you've seen that movie The Big Short, I think Christian Bale, and he predicts like, he predicts, you know, basically the mortgage crisis. Yes. And he profits from it. And I think that's the perfect example. Like this crazy guy who doesn't wear shoes in the office blocks himself off.

And he figure something out that the biggest banks of the country are laughing at him. Yeah. And that's where I think, and this is where I think Ryan, where I think you've done a great job is, you know, being true to yourself. I think you've always kind of looked internally and been like, you know, who am I, what I want. And you haven't been, you haven't been, I think a lot of people self-centered themselves on their thoughts and whatnot. I think you've done a good job of like,

this is who I am and this is what I believe and this is what I know. So yeah, I agree. You got to kind of know what's, what we think is coming in the next, you know, in the year, two, three years. Yeah. I, uh, some of that might be the hardcore ADHD, ADHD, ADD that I have that I just can't stop my mouth from moving. And if I don't keep it moving at all times,

then all those thoughts get bottled up in my head and I start to get crazy. that could be what it is, who the hell knows. But dude, you took notes, so I'm interested. What did you take? You came prepared. I'm going to let you drive this. What was so relevant to your mind that you wanted to do some preparation on? I'm excited because, guys, in case you don't know, and I will have said that's in the intro.

We have one of these smartest dudes in the industry on the show today. I absolutely adore Peter in the way his brain works. And plus, on a sneak when you get a pop in him, he's also a conspiracy theorist, which makes me enjoy and admire him even more. But we won't go, we're not going there today. We won't go there today. I want to talk, we want to talk insurance. So what was the first thing that came to your mind, man?

Let's dig into it. Yeah, I think the conspiracy theories, Ryan, man. It's just, it's, I don't believe a ton of conspiracy theories, but I think that you can't believe everything that's on the surface. And like, it's just, it's like there's just too many things where it's like, and by the way, I tell my kids this. My kids are in preschool and in second grade and then even younger, you know, baby. But I'm like, they'll tell me things.

I'm like, why do you believe that? I think this, a skill that we need is to ask questions and to think critically. That is the number one skill you need to learn in school is like think for yourself, think critically. Just don't accept answers that are giving you. Like, you have to think. Yes. I think it's okay to like, when your doctor tells you something, it's okay to be like, hey, net, net, like, I probably should listen to my doctor.

But you got to think critically. So, I think that's my conspiracy theories are so interesting. And probably just like, if nothing else, there's just fun mental gymnastics to think through. That and most of them have ended up being true recently. So, you know, I think that's the other part that's. I love how every Thanksgiving now. The meme is, you know, it'll be like some guy like walking in all happy.

And I'd be like me walking into Thanksgiving dinner with all my relatives who told me I was crazy for my conspiracy theories. You know what I mean? And it's like the list of all the things that actually were true. You know, this is also, so that's basically what you're advocating for. And I completely, I'm with is like the Socratic method, which is basically just that continuing to ask why until you can't ask why again. And I'll tell you, I saw Jordan, one of the guys who I think embodies this.

And it's why I love him so much in terms of like following him and listening to him. And I don't agree with everything this guy says. But Jordan Peterson, I saw him live this year. Chris Paradiso invited me to an event out in Utah, and I went along. Wasn't he just censored in Canada or something? Yeah, Canada is basically a communist country at this point. I can't even stand it. So we went to Utah, and Jordan Peterson was speaking at this event live,

and you got to see this dude. I mean, I think you would really appreciate the way he works. I mean, it's cool to watch him on video, but dude, live, he's working through a problem. I mean, obviously it's a problem he's thought about and talked about before, but you can see him literally, he's asking himself, he'll say something, and then you can literally see him asking himself, why did I say that? Do I believe that?

And then he'll either reframe it or he'll ask himself another question to go deeper. And like, he's basically operating the Socratic method on himself in real time as he works through these thoughts. So by the end, like if you were to take where he starts and where he finishes, it isn't the standard speaker stump speech where it's like, I'm going to start here and then I'm going to say this and then I'm going to say this. It's like he starts with an idea and like he kind of wants to get somewhere over here. But how he gets there and exactly where he ends is 100% based on him working through this process in real time.

It is freaking amazing to watch. And you can tell. That's cool. And you just can tell how honest it is, whether you agree with him or not. You could think his conclusion is completely crap. and you don't believe it. But what you do believe, and I think this is important for people who are in leadership positions as well, when you work this method that you're describing,

people believe that you believe it, which I think is incredibly important, right? They believe that you are giving them your honest take on this topic. And I think that's almost more important than whether I agree with you or not in today's world, right? Because you just don't know who's telling you the truth. No. You got to be able to think critically. You got to be able to put yourself in the other person's shoes, like, think through from their perspective, steal me in the argument. But yeah, so I think Ryan, you had texted me. I think I was on like, ski vacation with my kids. Which we're going to do this winters. We are going to get out this winter. I promise. I've already been out nine days. It's middle of January. I've been up nine days. And like, it's, I went all in. Like, we're doing it. Season's past. We're going every weekend. But you were like, hey, you want to come on the podcast and discuss what you see happening in 2024. That's kind of the tech. And so I'm like, yeah, like, what do I see coming? And then I'm like, what do I see coming? I'm like, it's one of these things where I'm like, right now I'm the hermit working on the business, like just like in the weeds.

And I'm like, dude, I haven't even thought about that. I probably should think about what I see coming. I know I see coming from my business. But I think like, so when you said like, hey, what notes have I taken? I just, I put down a few thoughts. I think one of the things that I see is data warehouse slash data lake. So in the insurance world, every conversation, every top brokerage, is talking about like data warehouse data lake so for those who are initialized like a warehouse

is like just think about like an actual warehouse it's like you have this stuff that lives in it and it's like packaged and like ready to go ready to use if you have a lot of data package ready to go a lake is like yeah you have this data not necessarily structured but it's there you could use it later at some point it's like raw data and I think as agencies um you know we're all excited about AI, you know, we see it, we know there's a huge potential. We think about voice, you know, interfaces, we think about training AI models, we think about targeting prospects better, identifying prospects better. I think right now you go to the average agency and I know this because we work with hundreds of them and we look at their data when we do integrations, like the data's a mess.

Even our own, even at Wonder, our own sales force. Like, is it, do we use New York or do we use NY? Do we use USA or United States? It's like small little things. And you, and you have to go through systematically thousands and hundreds of thousands of records. So I think we have bad data across the industry, maybe a key contact left. There's just a lot of issues. But so if you can get that data in a clean spot, how do you take all that data to run your agency much better? I think for agents, we've, agents we've had an AMS system like AMS 360 or Epic or whatever. We have a sales CRM, Salesforce or agency zoom. And then we have a forms tool like an Indio or a wonder right. You have a website and web chat. You have photo.

and videos, your contacts, like all this stuff. How do you use that to advance your business? I think that the big picture theme is, if you think about the customer journey, how do you make a seamless customer journey for your customers from beginning to end? And it's not going to happen if you have things living and, well, if you have 20 different systems

to make the experience happen, like how do you get that data to live and talk to each other? I don't even know, so I don't know how to like make, make this whole thing work. I just know that I hear this. It's definitely, you know, people are talking about it. They want to basically get a place to have all their data where they, whether it lives in your AMS, whether it lives in your sales force, whether it lives in your LinkedIn or whatever or any correspondence or email, how do you pull that data, extract it and do what you need to do before

you get back to your team or your customer. So that's probably one of the biggest themes that I've heard that I would double down on for 2024. And I don't know how relevant it is for small agencies. I mean, they still have the same challenges. I just don't know how to solve them at scale. Can I ask you a technical question? I want to ask a technical question about data warehouse and data. And this is an honest question that I, that I've just always wondered. When it comes to data quality, and the really kind of specific example that you gave, do you use in your AMS, do you use NY or New York or NY State or whatever, right? Like, what do you use in that field? And, you know, we, you can even see this.

If you run a report in your agency management system and one of your CSRs is using NY and your producer is putting New York and you run a report and you're like, where's all our New York accounts? And it's like, oh, wait, we also have to run a separate report for the, right? Okay. Right. So. And again, this is a neophy. This is a naive question I'm asking. Why is there not a, like, Google has like semantic search.

Right. I remember back in like the early 2012 to 2014, a big, a big leap in search functionality was semantic search, where if I typed New York, Google knew that NY in a page meant New York. So if I took like Best Insurance in New York, Google could, Google knew that if I created a video that said Best NY Insurance, that those were the same thing, that that person was asking the same question that's like semantic search is what they called and again i'm uh naive so i'll clean up my speech if if you need to why can't we do that like why isn't there an algorithm or a bot or something in our industry that you can run through our ams and and clean that shit up like then it doesn't

matter whether tammy's writing n y and tommy's writing new y it the the semantic you know this this this this bot can tell that they're the same thing. Like, I guess what is the hold up to that or is there, or maybe that exists? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think that broadly the issue is economics. I've just come like, if you, you know, I think you said you're interested in economics, right? Like, you'd study if you went back to college.

I think the insurance is the prime industry that's driven by economics. You have thousands of competitive companies that, from, you know, a high level perspective, not that it's a commodity product, but it's like, it's, more or less the same who you buy it from. Obviously, you can have risk management and whatnot, but it's like there's so much in general commoditization. I know, again, differentiation, you want to sell differentiated process, win through broker record, etc. I'm not saying that's not fair and true. But it's literally, it's just like driven by economics and it's such a vast industry. So, and then it comes down to like the economics of your insurance agency. Like how much money

are you as an agent willing to spend on stuff? And I think the reality is, and I think you actually asked this question when we did the CEO panel back in August, the Indy Tech, the question that you kind of rudely grabbed the microphone, well, you didn't know you were supposed to grab the microphone. I didn't know. I was supposed to not ask live questions. I didn't know that. I said, can I ask a question? Sure. Yeah, but you basically were like, how do you build, and this is for the leaders of, you know, I think Verte4 and Applied and Ivins. You're like, how do you build a product when, you know, a third of your customers or a quarter of your customers are the leading edge customers, but the middle does like doesn't care, won't care, can implement.

Yeah. And I think so the reality is how many agents out there would raise their hand? Like, I want this tool. Yeah. And implement it. And if you're listening to this right now, you're like, oh, I would definitely want that. I would want clean data. It's like, well, there's a company right now called Relativity Six.

You've interviewed them. So if you listen to Ryan Hanley, like, you probably should know about relativity six. But they can literally like just tell you like what the appropriate next. codes are for all your customers, like the end, programmatically. And so I think that, like, the tools are out there? It's just the economics of, like, are people interested in hearing about them and paying for it? And the answer is no.

It's a huge market, but it's also a small market when you compare to, like, Google is looking at, like, every business in the world. Yeah. Not just, like, insurance agencies in the United States. You know, it's funny. I love this. So obviously, customer journey. all this, this is like core to what I love.

It's, you know, all my work comes back to how do we create this experience for our customers that maximizes their lifetime value for us. So it's not just the virtuous, you know, I want you to be happy as a customer. If you're happy as a customer, it maximizes my lifetime value or your lifetime value to my agency. So that's why I enjoy this process. That being said, one of the things that I've found over and over. and over again, is as much lip service as we give to data, our industry, I believe, is unique in this one characteristic,

is it doesn't matter, right? Like, you write the business with the carrier, the carrier sends you a check and you cash the check. Does it matter how much data you have on the client? It really, to be six, now there is a certain level where I think you start to, there's a diminished return on crappy data. But when you're in the early, this is, and I think this is a big part of the problem, is in the early stages, when you're grinding it out and you've got to sell every policy you can just to put enough revenue on the books to keep the lights on and keep going.

To slow down and make sure you have good data quality is not an option. It's quite literally not an option to move that slow. And then what happens is you get to $500,750, a million dollars in revenue where now you can maybe exhale a little bit, depending on how your operation is set up. and you're like, oh my God, my data is horrible, right? I have some just in carrier, some's in my agency management, some's just in my CRM, some's in my phone in text messages, personal text messages to my clients, right? Right.

And then you go, oh my God, it doesn't matter because I'm making this amount, which I never imagined I would make, and all of a sudden you're like, eh, what? I got to spend 50 grand to clean all this up and that for what, right? So unless you're trying to go, And I really think this is the answer to the question is that you have to decide.

Like, are you shooting for a number and a lifestyle or are you trying to grow something that is bigger than that? And depending on what you, you know, and that's a goal you have to decide. Some people want to grow big enterprises and that's what they want to do. That's phenomenal. I think in that case, stepping back, doing things like cleaning up data, really focusing on customer journey matter. if all you care about is making enough money to provide a lifestyle for yourself and your family, then you don't need any of that. You could run it all off a spreadsheet or off your phone.

The carrier's got all the data. You can just log into their back end. You literally don't even need to have an AMS or a CRM or any of it. You have WonderWrite for the forms that you need. The carriers send you the things in the mail. And that's all you freaking need. I mean, honestly, I don't know that you need more than that. To get to.

We need, you know that. I need to do a meme generator. You know like the bell curve meme? Yes. Like the total like whatever loser on the left and the total like whizzed kid on the right with the hoodie on. And then like the weird mid guy in the middle. Yeah.

Who's like the middle guy is like, I need clean data and I need to spend all this money to clean everything up. And like the guy in the left and the guy on the right of the bell curve are just like sell more insurance. Yeah, sell more insurance. Like if you want to make more money and run a great business like just sell more insurance. Right. But on the edges it's like or you know, the part about the.

Clean data is like if you really care about this stuff, like once you get to a million dollars or $2 million in revenue, now it's like, hey, how do I optimize my placement of my book of business? Because I can get an extra point of commission by like getting rid of my bad carriers and only working with the good ones, right? Yeah. There's just like so much stuff that you can do. And again, for the most part, it's like if you try, if you start to really focus on that and you distract yourself from just sell more insurance, like you probably could be losing.

But that's why I said in the beginning with data warehouse for the really big. big agencies that have scale, that point really, really matters. Yeah. And so you can afford to employ teams where that's all they think about, customer journey, like optimizing their book of business placement. But the producers, the salespeople, like, they're not necessarily looking at that. Yeah. They're just like, how do I sell more business?

And really, they shouldn't be. I think it's the leader, I think it's leadership's job to make those decisions. I mean, I was talking to, it wasn't, top 100 broker, but they were probably top 250. It was like a vice president, regional vice president, whatever. We're just chit-chatting. And in his region, they used four different agency management systems. So as a producer, you could be in one, you know, in one segment of that region, you could be working on an account and applied and then have a renewal for another account in vertiphor and then another one's in, or AMS 360, another one's in Sejita, and you're just like,

I'm like, oh my God, like, just think about that. Data Warehouse, by the way. Yeah. Because, like, I think there's one idea, which is like, hey, like, get everybody in the same AMS. And it's like, you know how much like people are going to cry? Oh my gosh. Tears you're going to have.

It's brutal. So, like, what if you're just like, hey, you know, let's just keep all the AMS's in, like, data warehouse? And I think. With the data, it can live in sales serum. It can live in Verte, can live in. Who cares? And I think there's people trying to do this.

It is definitely the agency management systems are fighting it. I think some people have tried to do it with Salesforce. I do not think Salesforce is the tool to do this. It's too big. It's too expensive. And I don't think it's the answer. I do think there are companies out there trying to solve this problem and probably could if the vendors of the industry wanted to solve it.

I'm not just blaming the agency management system. But let's just talk about your example, right? You're talking about a sales guy. You're like, hey, my sales guy needs to access data from Salesforce, Verta4 applied. Like, it shouldn't be that hard via API to pull, like, just basic account info from all three of those systems and put it into one interface. And maybe Salesforce as well.

Like, well, yeah, but, like, if it's, hey, I don't need to have a thousand fields. I don't need to have everything that ever happened under the history of the sun with this account. I just need to know the account names so that my producer can know, like, whether the accounts in our books already. Yeah. You know, like, there's some things you can do. So, again, I'm not an expert on Data Warehouse.

I hear it a lot. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think the biggest agencies are going after at 2024, I'd be like, this is probably a theme that's going to continue as like data warehouse. And I don't know what it means for small agencies, but there's probably a thread there of like,

how can you leverage your data across multiple systems? And I think to some extent, honestly, like, and I even chatting with, you know, with Jason Cass, I know he's doing some stuff with tech to kind of like create this whole tech stack and ecosystem where it's basically what he's trying to do is get the tools to talk to each other better.

So you can have better flows, as more integrations. And I think it's kind of a similar idea as like integrations. You're trying to have like a unified experience. Yeah. I think for smaller agencies, less, more accurate data is always is the answer.

You don't need, like, people are like, well, what? I need to know the, I need to have the liability limits in my AMS. Do you really? Do you really need to know the liability limits in the AMS? Because one, your small agency, All you need to do is sell more insurance. That's it. That's literally your job.

What policies they have, maybe the policy numbers and effective dates. That's about all you need for the policies. And then basic contact information, et cetera, like in notes around the account. You don't really need anything more than that to cross-sell, upsell, to service the accounts, and then to know where else to go to write more insurance. And I think we get bogged down sometimes, especially someone who's, who is, you know, growth-focused, maybe technology focused, et cetera, maybe younger to the industry,

not necessarily young and age, but younger to, and they're coming from another space and they've seen what other industries can do and they're like, well, I need to know this. And it's like you don't. Get the basics, have the basics be accurate. And as you said, sell more insurance.

If the tool is not helping you sell more insurance, then it's not valuable to you until a certain point, until optimizing your book becomes relevant. So, okay, awesome. I love this. Data warehouse, data lake, structured unstructured data. I love it. And I completely agree with you.

It's an issue of economics because I can't not go contextual when it's there. There was a post on this economic like Instagram channel that I filed called Financials Simplified. And it was a graphic meme. And it was 85% of all, 85% something like 85%. percent of all post-40 research goes into erectile dysfunction, yet only 19 percent of men have erectile dysfunction, where only 15 percent of post-40 research goes into PMS and menopause, yet 100 percent of women experience PMS and menopause. And I was like, and you know, and the point of the thing was like, men will pay to make sure,

men will pay anything to make sure that this function in their body is operating properly. And it was like, you know, his point, it's a guy that puts this channel together, I think. And he, I'm, that is a, I don't know that for a fact. But it was just, his point was like, the research goes where people will pay. And if you can't do that function and you're a dude, you will pay just about anything to make sure that you can. And that's why the research was there. It was just, it was funny. I don't know.

And I saw it 10 minutes before we went live, so that's why I was on my head. Okay. A rectile dysfunction aside. Maybe you can put that in the show notes for the listeners to go check out the graph. Yeah, yeah. They can be like, what the hell is Ryan talking about? All right. So, okay, what else does you have?

Well, I think the next thing, you know, obviously, you know, insurance, just in general. I think, like, hard market, like, that's been a massive change for those of who's been around for more than 10 years in the industry. Like, we've never seen this before. So I think like that's just a theme. Like, so let's talk through a couple of things I see in insurance. So hard market, obviously, one with just like the cash in the system. I think like housing, commercial real estate is like interesting. That's already happening.

And like if you're listening, like you're probably, yeah, duh. And again, I think that's like an economics problem because insurance is driven by economics. There was a ton of free cash and now there's not. And there's less capacity. There's less surplus at these insurance carriers. They don't, like they can't sell as much insurance. I think like what are some of the impacts you might see from that.

I'd be curious of like insurance. I'm hearing this actually that some insurance companies are forcing agents to use portals as opposed to Raiders. It's been a theme forever. But like almost like now it's like, hey, if you come to our website, you're more intentional. And we're trying to be more selective. And this is like now like a decision driven by the economics of like who's the best client for an insurance company, most profitable, you know, least likely to lose customers. So what are the impacts of like hard market? It'll be interesting to see what the carriers do.

Because I think if you're an insurance carrier, you need to implement multiple strategies to make sure that you are writing the best economic business. So I think some will be solved with tech. I think that, you know, you might see, I know one of my persons that I know started a venture capital firm focused on wildfire startups.

I think you're going to see better, you know, you're going to see some tech out there for better underwriting. I think, you know, the insurance industry has been behind a lot of things like two-factor authentication on computers. It's like if you don't have two-factor authentication, you can't get cyber insurance anymore, right? If you don't have airbags, anti-theft, anti-lock brakes, you can't, like, get car insurance. If you don't have building codes and sprinklers, like we can't insure your restaurant. I think in the construction industry, there's so much opportunity to be building better buildings.

And I think, you'll continue to see that more pushed just from the economics perspective. I think, you know, self-driving cars. Waymo did over 700,000 trips with no human behind the wheel last year. Which, it's like no human behind the wheel. And so it's like this thing that it has been promised forever is like full self-driving level five, which maybe, you know, and again, just I guess for high level for the listeners, level zero, no driving automation, right? Level one, you have driver assistance.

It's like adaptive cruise control. level two is partial driving automation so it's like your car can steer and do the speed control like in a traffic jam like when it pulls you off the rumble strip automatically right like you get a little close I mean I don't pulls you back to center yeah yeah I'm not an expert on the different levels but I think it's yeah more or less the car can kind of steer for you in a traffic jam probably like what a Tesla does level three conditional driving it's like the car can do all aspects of driving, you can take your hand off the wheel and your eye off the road. That's level three in most situations, but you've got to be ready if the car beeps at you to tell you to take over. Level four,

high driving automation. It means the car is fully autonomous in most situations. So when I was driving back in the snowstorm, it's like, hey, the car probably couldn't do that. You know, at level four, but level five, it's like, no, the car can do full automatic, don't need to have a driver anymore, drive you in the snowstorm. Maybe we never get to level five. But like clearly, clearly, when there's 700,000 trips with no human behind the wheel, it's like something as interesting is happening. And when you look at insurance, like I have a whole thing on triggers to shop for insurance. Why do people buy insurance? A lot of the times, most of the times, it's because a government body is requiring you or a bank is requiring you to buy insurance. So car insurance, you get a car,

government requires you to buy insurance. You know, what's the impact of having 700,000 trips and no driver behind the wheel? That's something I think about, um, what does that mean? for our industry in the next five, 10 years. And I think just like electric cars in general, there's a lot of regulation about, I think in Massachusetts apparently, like they won't be allowed to sell gas cars in 2035, which it's like, it's crazy because you're like,

how this is ever going to work? Like, the economics are going to work at this? No. Are there enough batteries that are out there? Are people going to want them? It's like a regulation as opposed to a market demand. But I think like our grid's not ready. you're already seeing issues with like fires from batteries you know scooters had the same thing i know

i read in norway a shipping company banned electric cars from going on the ferry and norway is like one of the biggest purchases of electric cars in the world and the and the ferry operator was like it's it's a critical you know the risk is too high basically yep um and so like if if people are like hey if you have a bunch of electric cars together and one catches on fire like this is not good And so we're in the insurance industry, like underwriting. And it's not just cars. You're going to have the Tesla power walls in the house. I had read recently about a stove, a startup that builds a stove that has like a giant battery inside of it because it can it can heat your water faster.

And it can also like recharge your house when the power is the low. Like so they're just and it's like what are the new risks that come from that? So I think what if you're plugging your car into be the generator for your house if you have like what are the new F150s or whatever? There's just a lot of things with like cars, self-driving cars, batteries, second, third-order effects that it's like these are going to be questions on your application, right? Like, do you use your car as a generator? Like, that should probably be a question on home insurance and auto insurance if it isn't already.

Or, you know, maybe it would in the future. So these are some of the things on the insurance side between hard market, you know, technologies that can solve it, self-driving cars, EVs that I've got a thought would be interesting for 2024. Yeah, I think I love the idea. And again, I think this goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation we were talking about as a leader. Again, if you're grinding out in a production role and you haven't hit escape velocity in your life yet, don't worry about any of these things. Right.

More insurance. Like, don't waste your time. And I'm saying to me that if you're an entrepreneur starting a company, you're in your production career, et cetera, don't worry about these things. Don't think about these things. Like, right? Think about tactics. Think about strategy. Think about prospecting, et cetera.

But if you're a leader. Unless you're a niche specialist, Ryan. I know you love niches. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I love it. Talk about taking a shot. I couldn't help myself.

I couldn't help myself. We can get to that in a second. We can get to that a second. But if you're a niche specialist in electric something with insurance, like maybe you should pay a little bit more. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if it's your,

if it is your target market, et cetera. But like you think about second and third order effects. Like I have, so I'm renovating a home that I live in currently, very excited post-divorce, had an apartment, finally got a house. but needed some renovation, doing that.

Okay. So something I didn't realize when I purchased the house is that we are actually slightly below the water table in our basement. Now, it's not bad, and we're not in like a high volume water area, but at all times water is trickling into the home. And, you know, every, depending on how what's going on every 15, 20 minutes, some pump kicks on, pushes the water out. Okay, great. don't currently have a generator. It's something I have to do, but just, you know,

of all the things I have to do, I haven't got there yet. If the power went out today, in about five hours, that would overflow into my basement. So I have a backup battery-powered sum pump as well, which would get me 24-plus hours on the backup. So it's not like I'm completely out to lunch.

But the idea here is, look at California, right? As they push towards EVs only, the power grid cannot, sustain it. We do not have the capabilities. And because for some reason, climate changers don't won't embrace nuclear or nuclear or however you properly pronounce it. I want to do the other way than George Bush, which I always forget what it is. You know, since nuclear power is something that we seemingly can't wrap our head around, there is no way to produce enough electricity for every,

even American, let alone the world, to have an electric vehicle, not even close, not even 10%. or a heat pump in your home or a battery backup. So when we're talking second, third order effects here, and just things to consider and that the insurance industry, and this is why I love the industry that we're in, because it's ever evolving to what's coming. So say rolling blackouts become an issue, which if the Democrats have their way is most likely going to be in our future.

Well, probably all of our establishments, because Nikki Haley would do it. Just to that point, like my furnace is breaking Ryan, and I have a gas furnace. And like, there's big subsidies to put, an electric heat pump and an electric water heater in the house. And it's like literally the government would pay like half the cost and give me zero percent loan. If you do gas, it's like you have to pay it 100 percent.

There's no subsidy. And it's like, okay, like we have gas. It's already here. And so what you're saying is we're going to have an electric vehicle. We're going to have electric heat pump for heat and air conditioning. We're going to have electric heat pump for water heating. All this stuff. Yeah, what's it all add up to?

And if you don't eat your bug pills, Peter, they're going to turn off the power. and you are out. No. You know, you think about these things. And if you're paying with your digital wallet at the government controls and they're going to shut you off like Canada did with the truckers, right?

Exactly, exactly. This is the conspiracy theory part. This is why you have to bury all your gold around the county in which you live. Like Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. No, I do think it's interesting. Like you look at like areas that have been damned, right? I mean, again, not to bash California

because not all of this were Democrats in California, Republicans did this too. But what they've done with their water supply and how they've dammed off different water systems and different things have drastically impacted water issues related to California, which, you know, in part, in part, you know, some would say have played a role in some of the wildfires because, you know, rivers don't flow the same. They've changed ecological systems. Okay. I know it's not the only reason, whatever. My point is not who's to blame or what it is, but there are many decisions being made

at all times and there are second and third order decisions. And as leaders in our company, I think that's where we need to spend our time is thinking what's happening today and then if this, if X happens, then how do I make sure that my business is set up to sustain such a thing? But you were going to fit, I interrupted you.

You were just going to say that if the battery, the power went out for a certain amount of time, like your house is going to flood. Yes. And that's kind of my thing is like, okay, let's say I'm a homeowner's insurance carrier and I know that you have some whack job, communist Democrat like Kathy Hocel running the state, right?

who has literally said electric gas stoves. She's the same one who just shut down non-competes, right? Yes. And it's putting an exit tax into our state. How shitty a fucking leader are you if you have to put an exit tax into your state so that people don't leave? That's another point. But the thing is, she has passed initial legislation. No, she shut down the other states.

She shut down the non-compete so they weren't going to be a thing into you were. I thought like, right? That was like a big deal. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think, I think. Anyway.

I can't remember if that guy. beat and it's now being repositioned or something's going on. But oh, yeah, this, we do. New York is going full communist and, you know, it's working out really well. I just, not to be a dead horse here, but I thought non-competes, it was like, it was going nationwide and then New York was like, no, no, no, like we need non-competes. Oh, no. No.

No, the other way. We're, I'm pretty sure that, I'm pretty sure that, I'm pretty sure the big eye of New York was fighting the fact that New York wanted to go. So in California, if you hire a producer in California, which I did not know, I had at one time I had three producers. No, not compete. Great guys. This is not an indictment of them.

Just in doing research and having people in California, which I had never had an employee in California before, they could at any given time say, hey, I'm out, take their entire book with them, move it to someone else, move it someplace else, and there was literally nothing I could do. When you say take their book, I mean, they would have to actually like solicit them,

have them signed BORs. Yes, but I mean, I could not go, I cannot go after them for taking their book with them, right? Like, yeah, there's not like a document. sign, but like they could just say, hey, come over, come over, come over, come over, come over, come over, and that would be nothing I could do. New York is headed that way of Hocel gets her way. So, so yeah, go ahead. To finish my point on this, on this electric thing, so say you have, regardless, it could be

whoever, say you're in a state that is, that's doing all this electric stuff. And you know, from past experience, looking at California, looking at some of the Norwegian states, et cetera, that when you over index on electric, you get rolling blackouts. So now, you're looking at homeowners, you're looking at your homeowners book going, oh my gosh, if it's the wintertime in upstate New York and they start getting rolling blackouts, what happens is now you start to have frozen pipe issues, you start to have flooded basement issues, you start to have, so what happened, you get all kinds of shit with the eaves because the water starts to melt because the heat's, you know, the heat issues and then it freezes underneath the eaves. So like,

it, you know, this is a second or third order problem to the, you know, someone just, you know, some legislator being bought by the by the by by whoever's buying up all these politicians around this electric stuff and saying okay we're going to make our state this fully electric by 2035 yet we do not have the infrastructure to do it you get rolling blackouts and all of a sudden homeowners claims go up um you know that's the kind of thing that I think we have to be thinking through and what makes our industry so interesting is because now that's a problem that we have to solve and protect our clients against, which continually makes the insurance industry relevant and important to the, you know, sustainability of, you know, our lives.

Absolutely. I think, like, it's not a pure market adoption. It's like an accelerated adoption. I mean, you have accelerated adoptions. Like, there's impacts. And I think it's 100%. All these things are pretty interesting. I was chatting with a friend of mine recently.

He is an electric car. He's in a condo association. He's like, we need to install hookup pedestals so you can plug your car. What are the insurance impacts of like installing, you know, electric pedestals in the Condo Association from a liability perspective? And it's, there's interesting questions. So I think a lot to be aware of. I think, you know, the insurance companies that are out there, like, they don't have to ask questions on the underwriting right away because they'll look at the claims data. Yeah.

But I think you need to be aware of like, hey, high level, what are some trends that are happening? Oh, electrification is a theme. What are some of these second, third, or it impacts? oh, let's go reanalyze our claims and be like, was there an incidence of like, you know, was there some sort of data that can tell us about incidents about an uptick and freeze-ups because of heat pump systems failing and not having a backup? Something like that. And like, let's go analyze our claims and see if this is like if there's something there.

And I think you made a point earlier as well. If you're an agent, you can look at these things and say, can I talk to my carriers, find out who maybe is looking out ahead at electric vehicles, electric appliances inside of homes and become an expert or find some way to prospect these types of people who are building homes this way or are improving their homes in this way and can I be the agent or agency for that type of client? And I think, you know, again, we can use these things in as both from prospecting and from risk management, etc. But I think it's really interesting. Before you go, and I know we're getting close to the number,

and I want to be respectful of your time. I want to just hear a little bit about WonderWrite. I'm a big fan. We were a client for almost three years at Rogue Risk. I love what you're doing. I love you as a leader. And I'm obviously always trying to promote Wonder Right just because I think it's a great tool for the industry.

But tell us a little bit about what's going on and what you're up to. Ryan, we didn't even get to AI yet. So we'll have to save that for another day. Yeah, we'll have to come back on AI. Let's come back on AI. Yeah. No, so things with the Wonderite, you know, they're going great. We have an integration we've been working on with VerteFOR, direct integration,

and it's in production with a number of agencies. It's really cool to see. We've put a lot of time into it. That's been a big thing we've been doing. But yeah, I think, you know, big picture, what is one right for those who aren't aware? It's like the fastest and easiest way to complete insurance applications, supplementals, accords, whatever. You literally just type in the name of the form you're looking for, and chances are we already have it in our forms library. We have over 6,000 forms. And so you can instantly share it with your customer the same way you would share like a loom video. It's so fast, it's so easy or anything like a Dropbox link. You just share the link or you send them an email.

They can fill up the form digitally. At Wonderite, I went through this with my own family agency. We bought a bigger, you know, tech, you know, cyber liability policy. I literally was sitting in bed at 1030 at night, filled out a few quick questions, assigned the cyber questions to my VP of engineering. He answered them. and then I signed the document that would be like Wonder Rights equivalent of DocuSign.

It goes back to the agency and with a Vertifor integration it can automatically like put that back into your agency management system system of records. Like that's exciting. I think that's like a big thing. Another big thing we've had going on is you know cross-form mapping. So let's say you are marketing cyber insurance.

You fill out one application with travelers because it's a hard market. You want to go to multiple markets. You want to like be the first to market so that you're not getting beat out by a competitor. we can map the data from one form to like five other forms. And it's a huge undertaking to get that right because if you're familiar with like the AI tools that are out there, you have to have like this level of precision.

And it's tough to do well. So we built that tooling about a year ago. We've been rolling it out slowly across our forms library. It's like that's pretty exciting. As I think about not just filling out like a cyber form, but let's say like a single intake form that doesn't even tied to a PDF or supplemental. but now you can take that data. And this was kind of the whole thesis of Wunderite is like capture the data once and then use it like infinitely wherever you need it to be used.

And so that's like a pretty exciting thing that's out there. Yeah, I know right towards the end with Rogue, we had dropped DocuSign and we were using Wunderite as our as our E-Sign tool, which, you know, I know that's not your primary value proposition. But, you know, in conjunction with these forms, you don't, you know, with a lot of other tools, you have to export. the forms and then import them into the e-sign and then send them out. And, you know, it was saving us a tremendous amount of time. And to your point, just data quality in different places, we just, we would build everything into WonderWrite. And then, you know, any questions we didn't gather in the initial kind of, you know,

if you're thinking through, if anyone's been listening to me around my one call closed system, right, we try to gather either we can, anything we missed. We said we would send out two or three questions that we needed answer just from the Wonder right form. That would come back. market it once we had our you know whoever we were going with bam we just send it right out of that system back for e-sign and it just created a much easier flow one of the things that was very important to me or is very important to me

when I'm bringing on any piece of software technology that I do not think we think about enough is how easy is it to train my team on this tool and that was one of the things that I really liked about wonder right is that it was like finger snap easy to train you know There are tools that are really, really well done. And I'm not, you know, not knocking anyone else. Like tools that have tons of firepower are great for your agency. But it might take three months for someone to become comfortable using the tool. And for me, personally, how easy it is to train my team on a tool is a really important data point when I'm making a decision on what to use.

And I found that to be the case of Wonder right. So, dude, yeah. I was just saying I appreciate mentioning that. I think like that was something that was something that was. critical for us, even like in the software, we actually wanted something you could try for free. And we didn't have that originally. When you signed up, you couldn't try one right for free because it wasn't easy enough. It's actually easy enough now, I think. And so we actually turn on, this is new for us as well. We have a free trial. You can use one right for free today for 14 days.

And we have, we open a power producer pricing for like one user. So it's literally like, we wanted to have something that was the easiest thing to buy. You don't even have to talk to a salesperson. You can try it. And we're seeing really good conversions for people that they, they if they try it. Because I think when I was at my age, it's like that was, like, you just want to try it yourself. And if you can figure it out in like 30 minutes, you're like, all right, like, let's give this a shot. Yeah. So that's like something else that's big for us.

But yeah. It's tough to pitch the boss on a tool that you've never actually had your hands on before. You know, like if you've never actually gotten in and used it and you want to bring it to the boss and say, hey, I think this is something we should integrate in the agency. It's almost impossible to make that pitch if you haven't, if you haven't actually had a chance to, like, get your hands in there and use it. Yeah. this climate where like there's so many tools that's another theme for 2024 is like hey what

tools are going to stick it out but there's so many tools and like everybody's looking at belt tightening and like hey what am I doing with our expenses what are we keeping what are we cutting yeah I love it dude um well now I want to bring you back in to talk about the AI thing but I also want to be cognizant of your time and of the audience's time I appreciate the hell out of you I love our conversations a big fan of what you're doing at Wonder right have been from the beginning and then any chance we get IRL to dive deep into conspiracy conspiracy theories is also a fun time for me because you're one of the few people who will placate my absurd viewpoints on certain topics. And I appreciate that about you. So, thank you so

much, man. That's the best. Hey, thanks for having me. And yeah, I can't wait to go deep and, you know, scratch that itch, that curiosity is, which I think is what it is. It's like pursuing curiosity, right? And thinking critically, so 100%. All right, brother. Be good. All right, take it easy. going to Shaboons. 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.

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