Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Jeff Roy Explains Robotic Process Automation

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyIn this episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, Jeff Roy, Founder and President of Excalibur Insurance and one of the most innovative independent insurance agency owners in the world, joins the podcast for a conversation on digital virtual assistants, also known as robotic process automation.This is a conversation you don't want to miss.Episode Highlights:Ryan discusses Rogue Risk’s decision to switch to Nexure and change its agency management system. (10:34)Jeff mentions that during an interview with Taylor Rhodes for the Digital Insurance Plan podcast, he confirmed that Tarmika will be discontinued in 2025. (12:14)Ryan expresses his confusion as to why it is tough to create a CRM from an agency management system. (13:58)Ryan mentions that he really likes what Better Agency is doing and thinks that they've made a lot of progress to being a player in the industry. (18:03)Jeff explains that after seeing Applied Epic's demo, he became interested in the new feature that can run an AMS through the browser. (20:22)Ryan believes that understanding where the company goes without rating multiple carriers is the way to place business faster with the appropriate carrier. (24:33)Jeff explains that you need some AI and machine learning to be able to direct you to the proper company because companies are changing their prices and moving so quickly. (26:54)Jeff explains what it means to have a properly trained bot. (34:50)Jeff explains the difference between Robotic Process Automation and a Digital Virtual Assistant. (38:24)Jeff explains how robots function when assigned significant responsibilities. (40:34)Jeff mentions that their bot is safe with two-factor authentication and that it cannot be hacked in the same manner that their staff can. (44:43)Jeff mentions that if anyone is interested in learning more about robotic process automation, he will be giving a 30-minute lecture on how robots can make an agency more human. (50:42)Key Quotes:“You need some AI and machine learning to be able to direct you with the right company. Because companies are changing their rates and changing things.” - Jeff Roy“Why would you want to use a bot? Really, you want to replace anything that humans are doing that they don’t need to do with technology. And a bot, once it's trained, can do it reliable every time.” - Jeff Roy“The bot is secure double factor authentication, you know, there's no way of getting it hacked in any different than our staff. So that's why it was important that we had the double factor authentication to get in, because I don't want to log into anything without that.” - Jeff RoyResources Mentioned:Jeff Roy LinkedInExcalibur InsuranceReach out to Ryan Hanley--Recommended Tools for GrowthOpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opusRiverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riversideWhisperFlow: Never waste time typing on your keyboard again: https://link.ryanhanley.com/whisperflowCaptionsApp: One app for all your social media video creation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/captionsappGoHighLevel: It's time to take your business workflow to the Next Level: https://link.ryanhanley.com/gohighlevelPerspective.co: The #1 funnel builder for lead generation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/perspective--Episodes You Might Enjoy:From $2 Million Loss to World-Class Entrepreneur: https://lnk.to/delkFrom One Man Shop to $200M in Revenue: https://lnk.to/tommymelloIs Psilocybin the Gateway to Self-Mastery? https://lnk.to/80upZ9This show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails, and rewind mistakes, so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation at rubric.com. That's rubr-b-r-k.com. com. 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. Good laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you, a dynamic conversation with the man, the myth, the northern legend of the insurance industry, Jeff Roy, talking about robotic process automation, essentially. We talk about Jeff and his agency and what he's doing with what he's calling digital virtual assistance or essentially using bots, the things that normally come with negative connotations because they're used for like spamming or for hacking or anything like that.

Well, bots can also be used for altruistic purposes. And in this case, Jeff is using bots to do automated and robotic processes inside his agency management system that allows people to be more efficient and effective. It is an absolutely tremendous conversation. Every conversation I have with Jeff Roy is wonderful. And I think that you're going to love it. Before we get there, quick shout out to the sponsors that make this show possible. Show does have a cost. It's not just time. It is capital and other things as well. And our sponsor is Podium. P-O-D-I-U-M, P-O-D-I-U-M, for all your text messages and web chat needs. Love Podium, mostly because their response rate is incredibly high. When someone contacts you via text or via an online form and is often difficult to get them back.

on the phone if you don't get them immediately or to get like communications flowing again. And what I found with Podium is we have like a 95 plus contact rate, 95 plus percent contact rate. And that alone makes podium worth whatever the cost that you have to pay depending on your size of. So everyone pays different. That's why I say that. So go to P-O-D-I-U-M.com.

And guys, so many things going on at Rogue Risk. If you are a producer, if you are an agency principal, if you are wanting to, you are to get into a system, if you want to get into a set of process, into a career that allows you to grow and expand, that allows you to focus on what you do best, which is building relationships, solving problems, and selling, then go to join.orgis.com. Join j-o-i-n.rogrisk.com. Go to join. That roguerisk today. Check us out. If you want to be part of the roguerist team, we are always hiring quality people that fit our culture, that want to work. work in a results-based organization, and we'd love to have you.

So check us out, join.rogrisk.com, and now on to our conversation with Jeff Roy. Dude. What's going on? The man, the myth, the legend. Yeah, no, just Jeff Roy. Nobody is important. What's up, dude? How much, dude?

How was your trip? I saw you're down in. It was good. Yeah. I didn't know. I didn't know if you're actually back yet or not. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

We got back. We left last Tuesday and got back on Saturday. Okay. It was a lot of fun. We, you know, we'll see if it's the last family vacay that we end up going on. But, you know, we had had it planned and we wanted to go. I went to the Atlantis for those listening. And it was awesome.

We swam the dolphins in 85 and with a nice cool breeze. You just can't beat the Caribbean certain times a year. You just absolutely can't beat it. Oh, that's good. That's awesome. Great to see you get some time with your family and got to get away with the boys. So good things. Yeah.

Although one interesting part was, so listeners of the show probably know this, but I don't really do COVID or even really think about it day to day at all. Not that that's a good thing. Just don't. And so you had to take COVID tests to get into it. into the Bahamas. Now, they never, you know, whatever, you got to take them, I guess. So we took COVID tests and we get to the airport and they're like, those are the wrong COVID tests. And I was like, there's no way these are the wrong freaking COVID tests. They're the most expensive COVID tests that I could find. And we took them and like, here they are. We brought them in. So the

guy's giving us all this nonsense. And it's six, it's four 30 in the morning. The kids are, you know, whatever, 4.30 in the morning kids and, and Lauren's, you know, fairly upset because here we have this trip that we've had for, you know, almost a year planned and blah, blah. And she starts, you know, kind of, I don't want to say freaking out, but like getting a little on the guy. And finally, so he's going back and forth calling the manager. Finally, he's like, screw it, whatever. I don't care. I can see you don't have COVID. I'm just going to put you through and whatever happens happens. So we think we're done, right? So we're like, okay, great. you know, this guy did us a solid and obviously we didn't have him.

We literally took the test like 18 hours before we got on the plane or whatever. So we get, we don't we go through that, go through all the airports, we get all the way to the Bahamas, get to customs. And we just didn't think anything of it. And they're like, yeah, yeah, passports look good. Yeah, welcome. Just all we need to see is your COVID test. And we're like, okay, here they are.

They're like, yeah, no, those don't work. So, um, so now. you could just see like the look on both I would love to have like a camera on Lauren and Mike because both our faces probably just went bright white because here we are in a foreign country standing in the customs line with like a thousand people behind us. We don't have the right COVID test. But thank God we're in a country like the Bahamas. They're like, oh, no problem.

Just go sit over there. We're going to call this person. And so they called some woman. And they're like, yeah, you got cash, right? You got cash. And I was like, well, how much? $300. $300?

Yeah. Yeah, it was like $260 or something for Dr. Dr. Nick from the Simpsons came and took your test for it. Oh, dude, the same exact test that I took at home that I had in my bag, like that I showed them. It's the same exact test. It's the same brand. It's the same nose swabs, the same little containers.

Same exact test. I got to hand her $300 cash American. We take the test off. We go. It just was like one of those moments you were like, oh my God. I have no idea what's going to happen here. Are they going to kick us out? Are they going to put us on a boat and push us out into the ocean?

I'm surprised to give you the wrong test. Like we had it was crazy because Canada was one of the most lockdown countries and probably the one of the, a little different approach in the US. I'll leave it at that rightly or wrongly. But every time this year going down to the US, I had to up until probably a month ago, I had to get a COVID test.

$40. There was a rapid test that was done by a pharmacist. They charged $40 to make sure it was legit. And I had to get that to fly down. I didn't need something to get back, but I had to do that. And I thought that was quite funny. So I'm surprised that you said, hey, I'm traveling. They didn't give you the right test in the pharmacy, where we get it done.

Yeah. So I guess, I guess what it is is you, and this was a mistake by Delta. So on Delta's website, it says you can take an at home test. It has to be PCR at home test. No problem. Take it. What they didn't put in the thing. And I was, I'm yelling at the guy at the counter in Albany.

I'm going, look, right here. This is your website. I'm not making this up. This is not me. I would not have done this. It says right here, at home PCR test. In that little, in that little paragraph, it didn't say proctored at home test. So it just said at home test.

So I was like, at home test, great, perfect. I bought, I just buy the most expensive ones so that I know I got a good one or whatever. And the guys, you know, so it was just like this whole thing. And thank God, we, you know, it all ended up working out. Everything was fine. It was 30 minutes out of our day and $300 cash American to some random woman who gave me the same test that I had taken, you know. Oon and I went down to Mexico in November.

And we had to get, we had to prove every, we didn't have to get tested to go down. But when we got back, we had to get a test for $300 Mexican. And this guy shows up and he was doing. four or five tests in an hour. It was 300 US for two tests. And then he was going to email us the results, but he's like, hey, man, you got what's up? I said, yeah, I got what's up. So he sends me these $300 tests through what's up. And we were all good to go. So I asked him how many people tested positive in the resort. He said three people in the last two months. So they really didn't want you to test positive. So I don't know, you know, we didn't get COVID. We were fine. But

it seemed to be a really good industry. COVID tests. Good way to make some revenue, right? Yes, foreign, foreign country COVID tests is a really good way to make some, to make some coconut. There's no doubt. No, dude. Dude, how things go, man. Sorry, I'm on your podcast. I shouldn't be interviewing you. Oh, no, it's all good.

Um, uh, no, things are good, man. We're, uh, we're cranking along, you know, we're continuing to get integrated into SIA, continuing to grow, continue to hire. Um, we're dealing with, you know, a lot of the same problems that everyone, else does with scaling and systems, you know, it's, if I can get rid of systems issues, I, you know, that right there would take 40% of the nonsense out of my week. If I, if everyone could just get along internally from a people standpoint, that would take another 40% out of my week and then I could get back to doing what I do best, which is generate

leads and produce revenue. So, you know, it's a fairly, you know, our business, model is, you know, kind of, kind of unique, you know, kind of, you know, not, not wholly, kind of, a few interesting things. But for the most part, we're dealing with the same scaling issues that everyone does who tries to go fast and go digital. And, you know, we've learned some really interesting lessons, but ultimately, I feel very strong about what we're doing and strong about the industry and all that kind of stuff. You know, I think you'd be interested in this. We are changing agency management systems and we've decided on Necture. This is obviously made that decision a week before Tarmica decided to sell to applied.

Yeah, I just heard that a lot. I heard that. So that piece of information may have changed our ultimate decision. We looked at Epic. We looked at Epic pretty hard. It's just so overpriced, in my opinion versus peers. But, you know, if we, you know, if they're going to fully integrate Tarmacca, it would have been nice to have that piece of information beforehand. You know, not that it's anyone's fault. Couple ND, probably I'm sure there's a few NDAs

that I couldn't tell Ryan Hanley. Yes. It kind of got launched, right? I do feel like everyone should just feel like they have a mutual NDA with me no matter what and tell me all the inside dope like that. I think that's the way it should be. But unfortunately, the universe doesn't agree.

So we went with Necture. And I'm, I am excited about that. I really like what they're doing. I like their platform. They're kind of under the radar because they mostly deal with networks and MGA wholesalers, but they have a very robust retail platform that a lot of big shops are on. And, you know, I'm just excited to get off a NowSerts where it feels like, you know,

one step forward, two steps back all the time. And, you know, we just need something that we can count on. So that was a pretty big decision that we made. to move to next year. We're excited about it. Well, nice. Congratulations. We're doing our due diligence right now. We just like to epic. We had the epic people in. We're finishing our conversation up there. We're still on Tam. Tam says, actually, we did an interview with Taylor Rhodes last week for the digital insurance

pint podcast. So got a lot of good stuff that he shared with us. But we had heard prior and he confirmed they're going to be discontinuing Tam in 2025 and a lot of reasons, but partially because some of the software they built it on for Microsoft is not going to be supported anymore. So it's been around for like 30 years and a lot of these of them support one vertical. So I've been pretty impressed with how Taylor's come in there and he didn't have any dirty laundry and he's kind of changed the culture and applied greatly. You know, he's still got some work to go, but he's made some big changes there and really opened up their system, made them more PC versus the Apple World type thing. And yeah, so it's, you know, they've got some good stuff going. Canada, we don't have a ton of choices like you do in the U.S.

We kind of have, we have Acturus or Powerbroker, Keo, which is been bought by AMS-360. They haven't really done anything on the platform in Canada, AMA 360, so I'm not sure what's going to happen with their long-term, what their plan is. And obviously, applied, we got a few other ones, TBW custom software, a few other ones off to the side. So there's not really a ton of options in Canada. I know you've got a lot more in the U.S. You know, you get the Hawksoffs in there. You get a few other ones that we don't have, you know, now certs and you get some other people that do, you know, it's kind of a debate.

Are you a CRM? Are you an AMS or a BMS? What are you, right? And, you know, sometimes people start up as a CRM and then they become a, they start integrating backwards. So it's kind of a bit of a murky field from my observations. You would know better than me, Ryan, when you did all your research. But what are your thoughts on that about, you know, the crossover between CRM versus

versus AMS, BMS and people trying to get in each other's lanes or expand. Yeah, I don't understand why it's so difficult to build a CRM out of an agency management system. It doesn't make any sense to me. I think in large part it has to do that legacy technologists and vendors are making tactical decisions around product and they've never sold an insurance policy in their life, which is why it hasn't happened. I do think, so we came down, so I, I still believe that applied Epic is the best agency management system in the game. I honestly believe that it is the best. If you want the most, you know, kind of consistent, it's going to work. It's going to do everything you needed to do.

It's, you know, you're going to have good support. I think Epic is the best. I just, to me, the praise. point is bananas. It just is. Like, I look at the price per user and the, then if you want any of this other functionality, everything comes with an additional price and you look at the stacked cost and you're like, Jesus, this is, this is like borderline enterprise level Salesforce installation. And to me, I, I mean, I'm assuming there's justifications for the price. I just couldn't, I can't, it just feels like a handcuff. It feels like too big of a handcuff to me.

100%, 100% like you get into, if your AMS is like, you know, you're getting into three, four, five percent of your costs, having an AMS or a BMS, which is very costly. And when you get bigger, obviously that number goes down. But the number of our costs or for our AMS and BMS have gone up, but has the productivity efficiency improved? I would argue we haven't gone a lot better in the last 20 years. I would argue it's got worse because we've had portals dumped on us. So as technology got better, we've had to do double entry.

So if you start taking all your virtual assistants, all your robotic process automation people, all your staff, all your data entry people, and you look at how many policies that your account managers are really handling, you're going to get a rude awakening. And if you compare that versus five, 10, 15 years ago, it's probably not that much different. Not that much different. And then, but look how much the cost has gone up. And I feel like we're at an inflection or tipping point. As you master the scale, I was always talking about inflection points of when things you're going to tip. And I think we're maybe at a point now where a lot of data can move better. They've got newer databases.

You know, you can actually, you don't have to retype stuff five times because it's actually smart enough to display it the right away. We're starting to see some changes. So hopefully of the next two or three years, we get all the benefits that we've already paid out front for. Really, we've been paying more money than we really need to pay to help build these products for everybody in the future. And hopefully some days we can capitalize on them. But anyway, that's a nice little tangent there. But yeah, and that in to be honest, we so we that was what we came down. I mean, we looked, I've looked at AMS 360 a bunch of times. And while everyone from Vertifor who works are that I love and I appreciate you as humans, I just, it's a, it is a hard pass for me on AMS 360. I just, it doesn't seem like there's a real vision for the product. It still looks like Windows 97. Standard functionality and everyday usage is seen as like, you know, I just don't know who is driving. product build out for them. It doesn't make any sense. I don't understand their strategy.

I don't trust that they understand what agents need in the new environment. And for all those reasons, we kind of threw them out almost immediately. I don't want nothing to do with Salesforce AMS anymore. I did almost a years with a diligence on that and decided very strongly. I'm not interested in Salesforce as our AMS. And, you know, had looked at now, certs. Hawksoft is just way behind on integration and cloud development and the fact that they still haven't figured out how to go fully cloud to me shows a lack of either disposition or ability.

And ultimately that brought us to Epic, Nexure, and Better Agency. I really like what Better Agency is doing and I think the last 12, maybe even six months or so, they've made major, major improvements to be a player. Now, I don't think, if I'm one of the top 100 in my thinking about Better Agency, probably not. But if I'm a 20 person or below agency with a large personal lines book, say anywhere between 50 to 70 percent, I'm taking a really, really long look at better agency

today. I wouldn't have said that a year ago. But today, you know, and we did. Ultimately, for a few different reasons, they're just not ready and we needed to make a move off of NowSerts now. If I had another year, I probably would wait and watch and see what happens with better agency, but we just didn't have a year. Now search was failing us. So, cost benefit and now so that kind of cut them out then that left necksure and epic um and ultimately we did three different demos with next year and this is not i have no interest in them other than they're a vendor so i don't want they're not a sponsor anything i'm not trying to pitch them ultimately uh their functionality they're they're you know the one drawback to them is

they're kind of old school and how they integrate they have a wide open API with full function kit but you got to pay for it. And you have to build the integrations yourself. So they have some integrations and then the rest you have to build. Now, that being said, with a, with, you know, I've looked at and sent their API technology or API dev kit to a couple of people that I know that are developers. And they said it's not going to be a high cost. It's fairly robust and all that kind of stuff.

So, you know, really what we, really what we decided was we'll get into next year. We'll start to see what functionality we need. and then build those custom integrations as necessary. And hopefully it's just a few. So that's how we got there. Excited to make the move. And we'll see. I mean, I'm also very nervous too.

Excited also very nervous. Yeah, we'll be careful what you wish for, right? You can do all your due diligence, but implementation is hard. You always hit that, I call it the Valley of Despair, where we hit the very bottom of your implementation, and then you start going up. But the training and the onboarding has gotten better by the vendors, A lot more people have gone through different items.

So, you know, there's people that have blazed the trail. So as long as those trails are good, you know, you should be in a good spot. You know, the one thing I liked about Epic is their new browser base looks really good. The fact that you can run an AMS through your browser of that level was quite interesting. I saw a demo of it. So that's pretty neat. You know, it can really reduce your costs. Kind of makes it more sales force and other CRAM-like.

So it'll be interesting to see everything plays out. And, you know, Tarmacow, with their sale to apply, it'll be interesting. how if you get a lot more connectivity with them or does tarmica bring a lot more connectivity over to applied? I feel like that's what's going to happen because their commercial thing they launched last year, it applied, had a grand total of five companies on it. It wasn't really overwhelmingly amazing that that many people had signed up. Now, Tarmica, depending how they're going to integrate it with, you know, if Tarmaca and Indio, are they going to roll that together?

And it's some kind of super power thing. It'll be interesting to see where Tarmica have legs to stand on its own. it remains to be seen, right? Yeah, I really, really, really hope that applied allows Tarmica to continue to make and improve integrations with other platforms. You know, I struggle with why they would allow that to happen because, you know, if they could just push Tarmica strictly down into their own user base, they would triple or quadruple that I think the number of agents that,

that are on the tarmica platform. But you never know. And we'll ultimately see. I mean, I've been a huge proponent. And I'm so happy for Ragoff and the entire team, Chris, Gita, Pat, you know, Lauren, all the people that have been there for the last two, three, four years have been, you know, they've done a tremendous amount of work. They've been a bellwether for integration in our.

in our industry, especially integration, we carry a rating systems on the commercial line side. And, you know, I think, you know, in the annals of history of the insurance industry, I feel like there'll be a, at least a paragraph on Tarmica and its impact on our industry. And for all that, I'm very happy for them, very, very selfishly not being an applied user.

I'm concerned. But, you know, we'll see. And I'm sure nothing will happen quick. And anything that does happen, you know, there'll be plenty of lead time. and, you know, if we do lose access, not being applied user, there's other players. Again, remember Taylor and his team, like they've got Google and engineers, they've got money, they've got scale.

They can probably do things if Tarmic is the right direction. They want to put it on, you know, accelerate it or a catalyst to increase things quicker. They can put it on steroids and really fast track it if that's the right direction. Yeah. You know, is that going to be integrated with India? There's a lot of things that, you know, I'm sure they'll be able to map it out. Like we had policy works in Canada applied by policy works. So it wasn't as robust as Tarmica.

Tarmica was built a new technology policy works was, I wouldn't say old as the hills, but it was like a 19, you know, early 2000s product that needed a makeover, but it was the best way to get all your data in one spot, put a nice PDF and send it by fax, email. And then some companies that APIs upload into it, not a ton of them, but they just didn't quite go down that path, which applied just trying to read, that whole program, it'll be interesting to see where they go with the policy works makeover or if they just roll it right into Epic. And my guess is they'll roll it into Epic and then all the

policy work stuff will move in there. So it'll be interesting how applied, you know, pulls all this together. You know, they've got a lot of tools. Yeah, a lot of expertise at there. You know, they've been able to buy a lot of expertise in a certain areas. So we'll see where all shakes out. Yeah, I, you know, the interesting part for me too is that I don't ultimately think that comparative rating is the long-term best solution in commercial lines or even in personal lines. I think that I think the way comparative rating is set up today is actually, I don't know if this is even analogy, but it's more like it's more reactive than it is proactive. and what I actually think the solution to placing business faster with the appropriate carrier

is knowing where the business goes without rating multiple carriers. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't, you shouldn't rate multiple carriers, but I think it's, I think rating multiple carriers is a byproduct of not knowing where the business should go versus if you know where the business should go up front, then you only need to quote one carrier. and can place that business faster more accurately and more efficiently than you can if you're doing comparative rating. Because if I comparative rate among 10 commercial lines carriers, yes, am I going to be able to

most likely find the most competitive or a price within a few percentage points of the most competitive for sure. But I'm still rating 10 carriers. I still probably need to bridge some of those carriers over to the main platforms, get validated rates, et cetera. If on the other hand, I can learn over time as I place business and as I rate where certain lines of business and certain geographical areas for certain industries go most often and are placed most often, then I can have a system that actually recommends 92% of the time this line of business and this state for this carrier or for this industry is placed with Hartford. Just quote Hartford. There's no reason to quote anybody else.

the best you're going to get is a percentage or two point difference in premium, and that doesn't matter. So just go to Hartford or whoever. And in that way, and that's what we've done, Jeff, for 450 years as humans mentally. Like we play that mental game. We do that all day. But when you're doing this at scale over a large geographic region, it becomes very hard. And that's why I think moving it up to the front of the system is ultimately the solution. but that has to be built and no one seems to want to build it.

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All right. I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. Yeah. I'll give you an example. When I first got in the industry, I had, we had manuals. We had four companies in the office and you had to go grab a book and calculate everything by hand.

So back then, you know, he had a piece of paper. You wrote out, you know, we didn't have any computers at that point. I'm dating myself here, but you knew which company to place it with because you knew who was hot. You had that in your head. Your head was the AI. Now, the only thing, I like your idea, but you need some AI and machine learning and be able to direct you with the right company because companies are changing their rates and changing things. You know, I used to get that I get one manual update a year.

Now we're getting one change every two, three weeks, every month. They're tweaking things. The regulators are letting people file a little bit quicker, file and use. Like the things are moving so quickly. So it's so, you know, what's good this month can change by next month. And again, as you know, you actually got 900 carriers. We've got maybe 100 to 200 carriers, probably really 100 legitimate ones in Canada. It's just really hard to know who's writing what, where, when, and how.

And, you know, so I think the Raiders are going to be there for the simpler stuff. The value at is, hey, just because of the rate comes out at $1,000 for CAA and $1,200 for intact insurance, for instance, you have to explain what the difference between the companies are. And, you know, why we're different as agents and brokers than all these direct guys out there is we have a lot of shelves. We have a lot of products. We can offer a lot of options. Whereas ever all these other guys are one hit wonders. They got one product.

They've got very small width of stuff. And again, if you want it quick and easy and you don't care who you are, great. Go with one of these directs or insured. or direct writers, but when it comes down to having real problems, that's where the broken agent comes in. And that's where we need a technology to shop it and find the right match. But again, we have to know why you should be with this company, right? Why travelers the right one for your business over some other company, right? Yeah. Well, the answer to all things is you just sprinkle a little AI on it and then you're good.

So, you know, that's the way that seems to be the way. You just, we do this thing and then we put a little AI in there. and then everything's fixed. It's no problem. It's a cayenne pepper of nowadays. Exactly. I got a friend, Sharif from Truffla.

I'm not sure if you got a chance to meet with him or if he was ever on your podcast. A long time ago, I had an intro call. You, you retroed us, yes. He's got a thing. He's got a product that he can tell on renewal if you're with the right

company and he gives you like a red, a yellow and a green to tell you if you're leaving premium on the table, if the client's at risk. and he's using AI to compare all the bunch of people in that territory, the driving profile. So he's kind of built something to what you've said more in a renewal basis, not an upfront basis. And obviously, the more rates, the more people that goes in his database, the more reliable it is. So it's funny when you mentioned that, I thought of his new tool that he's got out through Truffala that does that. So he might be a cool guy to have one of your podcasts down the road to learn more about it.

Yeah, that'd be awesome. That'd be awesome. I mean, that's kind of your hands in the tech game is what was the impetus for. Now, one, I never need an excuse for us to chat because I love our conversations. But I actually reached out to you. The whole impetus for this podcast was quandary. So I hadn't an agent, a woman, I think she's from either North Carolina or South Carolina. And I am sorry if you were listening to this that while on the show right this minute,

I can't remember your name. I apologize when you see me in person. If we ever meet in person, you can punch me. I'm sorry. We had an awesome conversation. And during that conversation, she mentioned that she was doing some due diligence on this tool, quandary. And she said, you know, it's kind of sold as bots that are built specifically for your

AMS for a specific task or set of tasks. And they act almost as digital virtual assistance. because they perform this task and whatever. And then, you know, and it sounded kind of familiar to me. And then I scrolled down and I saw Excalibur insurance. And I was like, of course, Jeff is involved in this project. So then I reached out to you and said, hey, man, what's going on? And you said, well, why don't I come on the show and we can talk about it.

So, I mean, I'm not, I don't necessarily looking for you to sell us on quandary. But I'm super interested in the concept of a digital virtual assistant. and just kind of bots in general have a negative connotation. So we could talk through that. And just I'd love your thought process around this tool and how you're using it. And maybe just the technology in general and all that. And we can go from there. Okay, perfect.

Well, where do you want to unpack? Wherever you want to start. That's good. That's a good way to look at it. Right. There's so many. So I don't even know where to begin. But a lot of people think that the bots, you know, one of,

I guess probably the one of the more, interesting things when I talk increased profits and make our insurance brokerage more human. And people go, how the heck can you use a bot to make something more human? And I explain, well, the best thing is we get the bot to do boring mindless activities that people have to do over and over again. And we get them to do that. And we get our people doing the high value activities. So when I give the example of mindless activities, our staff,

when all the electronic document interface, all the ADI data exchange goes in every day, all our downloads come in and after the downloads are done, our system's not smart enough to label them properly. So our team's having to go into every single e-document and rename that it's a 2020 camera, or it's a 2021-a-e. So when we put it out on our CSR-24 app so we can find it easier, we have to rename that. We were spending probably 25 minutes renaming all our attachments and then renaming all our invoices because the automatic document invoicing just does a generic auto insurance. It can't tell you what vehicle was it's invoicing.

So we were spending 25 minutes with 10 people a day doing this double entry data entry and it wasn't the best use of time. So one of my friends from Saskatchewan had found the quandary guys and he was using them for Epic to do this exact task. and Brock, a Longhorth, super guy. And, you know, I trust him. I'm like, wow, if he's using it, this is the real deal. So we were able to hook up with the quandary guys, Jackson and Ferguson, they're, sorry, Jackson and Jameson, they're the two brothers. And they hooked up with us.

And I'm like, wow, can a bot really do this work for us? And then if it can, it can free my people up a ton of time. So that got me super intrigued. And we saw a demo of it. This is probably back in September, early October. they demoed it and we actually saw a videotape of the bot going in doing it. I thought it was a human doing it. It was the bot doing the work.

And this bot can do the work at 3 o'clock in the morning or whatever. So it was able to go in and do that. So we'd signed up and took the leap of faith and put, I think it was like $7 or $8,000 down to develop it. And lo and behold, within a month, we were able to get this bot working. So our bot is doing a bunch of really cool stuff. So that's kind of an example of, you know, people ask me, what do you want to, I guess to flip it over to you, Ryan, you know, why would you want to use a bot? Really, you want to replace anything that humans are doing that they don't need to do with technology and a bot once it's trained can do it reliable every time. Like, you know, our humans are great. They do a super job, but there's typos, there's mistakes. The bot does it perfectly every time. It can actually optically scan a deck page and take that information. and type it in the system. That's how smart it is.

So it's pretty cool. Okay. So my first question, and maybe this is not the right place to go, but you just let me know. What is properly trained mean? Like when you say you deploy a bot and it's properly trained, like what does that entail? What does that actually mean? That's a great point. What part of the process wants you to sign in the line?

and you get set up is Jackson and we'll sit down with you and Jamison, they'll sit down with you and their team and they'll actually watch the process. So we got in a Zoom call, we walked them through the process, we recorded it, we explained what we're doing, and they actually understood, hey, here's what you're doing so they could actually figure out how the bot could actually do it. So once they understand that, they've got special programmers back at their company that are experts, and they take that information and they build out the bot. And part of the process for us is we have double factor authentication.

So we had to set up the bot had to be able to log into our system using dual factors. So we had the same security as a human. We had to get that all set up. We had to get them into TAM, get them a license and set them up as an employee in the system at that point. So, you know, we have, we have, my wife, Una, came up with some cool names. Our one bot is called Bayleys. the other one's called Jameson's because she's Irish. So we named them after two great Irish drinks.

And so that's what happens. So what happens is once they figure out your process, understand it, they build the bot and they come back and they show you and go, hey, here's the bot working. Is everything working okay? And you try it. And then once everything's good to go, you launch it. So to give you an idea, once these bots were set up,

our process before was we had a staff member at home, 6 o'clock, 6.30 in the morning was logging into EDI. We didn't even realize, realized she was doing it home having a coffee starting the process before she got to work and sometimes it take an hour hour and a half sometimes two hours to run the EDI and the EDI now at one o'clock in the morning the bot goes out and logs in does all the EDI we re-reditt all our night utilities it goes out there and does our EDI process and part of the EDI process it

the automatic process we're not the automatic have to go in there match those clients up and attach the files or anything that's not attached properly into the system. It does all that stuff. Then after that's done, it will go in and rename all the invoices and rename all the attachments at that point. And bingo, it's all done. So by 7, 38 o'clock in the morning when our staff comes in, all that work's been done for them and they can get at the job of contacting clients doing protection reviews, upselling, cross-selling, getting referrals, the stuff that humans are really good at doing about building those relationships and connections, while the bots doing all the mindless work behind the scenes.

So that kind of explains what, you know, hey, how you set the bot up, how it gets working. And you're probably looking at a three to four week period. That period's going to be reduced. The good thing about quandary is they're working with a bunch of different BMS and AMS systems in both can in the U.S. And when they start building bots and they get one of the, the BMS is mastered, then they can hook up the next person that much easier.

So over the next number of months, it's going to get faster and more economical to sign in and get the boss. as they build these out over time. So there's a lot of different uses. I guess, Ryan, I don't know if you've thought about the different uses for a bot. That's what I was using it for originally, but there's a bunch of other things you can do with bots. Do you want me to kind of go over that?

Yes, I would love that because my mind is spinning. I mean, I'm thinking about, you know, I, you know, does could these bots, or, you know, for some reason I really like the term like a digital V. for some reason. Now, this is robotic process automation. Now, I'm actually talking to a company right now that I call it a digital virtual assistant where I can actually talk to you and it can answer the phone and it can actually go into a lot of database and I actually do quotes and capture all the information.

This one doesn't talk to you live. So I use this as robotic process automation, but it can replace some of the tasks that your virtual assistant does. And, you know, again, that's freeing up your virtual assistant to do more human tasks, right? So a digital virtual assistant would be somebody that's got AI and has natural language processing where it can talk to you back and forth. That's how I delineate it. And I've only know of one company that's close on that front and I'm in conversation with them. They're a company called Koyos, if you want to look them up.

They're doing a lot of really. And there's another one I think called float bot or something. There's a few companies that are getting into that space. Nobody's really nailed it down. But that's kind of the new frontier. It's kind of chat bots on steroids. So imagine this bot smart enough that they can answer. or questions for your own staff internally, but also can hook up to your phone and hook up to your

website and actually communicate with your clients and actually tap into your AMS or BMS database through an API and kind of roll like that. Imagine that. So that's, I just want to distinguish what a digital virtual assistant in my vocabulary is. This is robotic process automation. So I didn't want to get too mixed up. Does that make sense? It does.

It does make sense. And so the robotic process automation, Let's stay there. Yeah, RPA. RPA. RPA. Let's stay. RPA.

RPA. Yeah. So, um, one. So if you, uh, so, okay, so you have Jameson, right? And Jameson's role is the process. I'm just for, maybe it's, maybe it's Bailey's or whatever, but whichever one, they can do one process or one set of processes each or can you have them does, can they work multiple processes or how does that work? Like how does that scale out? If I had five different major tasks that I

needed done through RPAs, would I have to have five different bots running them or how does that work? Sometimes a bot, depending on the process, one bot can do multiple steps. Sometimes they'll create a new bot. Like we have a bot that does are closed day right now. It logs in and it does close day. Some of that stuff's built in newer BMSs or MMSs. We have a person physically doing that. So the bot will log in at five clock run closed day do that it's done so one less task so the other thing too is you have some brokerages that are massive they may need two or three bots doing the same thing so they might have to divide and conquer where if you've got thousands of thousands of files to go over then you might have two or three bots doing the same process to speed it up so it kind of depends on the situation

some ideas back to what we were going to talk about earlier yeah you know some ideas of how you can use bots edi which i talked about already electron document interface it works great renewal revision comparison. So the block can go in and compare premiums, coverages, limits, deductibles, you know, extract information from the customer profile and it can present it back to your team via an activity in, you know, for the AMS saying, hey, here's the coverages, there's a difference, you know, this renewal is missing flood coverage or your sewer backup limit

dropped to 20,000. Did you realize that I can do the checking for you? So that's one thing that the, that's called renewal revisions, PDF naming in which I've talked about. And one of the things we're looking at right now is carrier portals. So I was talking to Bradley Flowers. I just about fell off my chair of how bad it is down in the south where he's got to go into four or five portals to get a rate. Yeah. His companies don't even provide APIs. They're not in the comparative raters because they're probably scared that somebody might move business. Like it's very 1942 attitude, but that's kind of where they're at. And he has to go in there. And again, if you can get a virtual

assistant, go in and enter it. But this bot can go in and we're working on one right now. to do portal entry. Because as then, if you watch my digital insurance pint, we have the shirts, just say no to portals. Like I hate portals, double entry if I'm doing it multiple times.

It's so inefficient in an API world that our industry is losing millions of dollars because work has been dumped on us by our insurance companies and we've never been able to reclaim it back. So the bots a way to reclaim it back until we get these APIs built to connect. And our BMS vendors actually pick up the torch and connect with our companies,

which is starting to come a lot more. Like Tarmica is doing work on that right now, that's only going to get better. So the portal entry, you'd be able to type the information in, get a price, bring it back in, the bot could do those kind of activities. You know, certificates of insurance. There's a lot of different ideas.

Anything that you're manually doing or a VA is doing, you can generally train a bot to do it, which is just a whole different concept. But it's definitely something that you're going to need to use in your brokerage or agency, because that, you know, if you can replace something with the bot and it runs it every time. I always joke the bot, as long as there's not a power out of your cyber attack, it's going to work. Your VA, well, you could have a typhoon that goes through, take out a bunch of VA.

They could get eaten by a tiger tomorrow. They could leave. The VA could leave your company. You have to retrain them. You know, there's a lot of things where the VAs are great. And we have a VA, Kenneth, from Puerto Rico. We use agency VA. It's been, they've been great for us.

And he does a lot of great tasks. but there's some stuff that the robotic process automation can do better, faster, easier, more consistent. So it's nice to be able to bolt that on to your agency or brokerage to be able to improve the experience. Knowing who our audience is, I think it is fair to ask, are there any contractual or legal issues with deploying a bot inside your agency management system? We have not because same thing. Like I know people are in and had problems with virtual assistance. Like it's our agency.

You know, I can, you can get a rogue employee. So how do you guard against that? They can get into your, they can steal data. So we've had no issues whatsoever doing it. We've tell our companies that they thought it's really cool, the ones we've shared it with. There's, you know, the bot is secure double factor authentication. You know, there's no way of getting it hacked in it any different than our staff. So that's why I was important that we had to double.

or authentication to get in because I don't want to log into anything without that. So that was the big thing. That was the big deal thing for me. And they were able to accommodate that, no problem. So I've had no issues with it. But let's be honest, people, if it's different and people have to actually think about it, it's way easier for people to say no than to say yes. Yeah.

That's been my experience because they actually have to think and learn it. Oh my God forbid somebody has to learn a new idea and figure that out. A lot of people don't seem to want to be growing and looking at stuff like that. So they say no, but there's a ton of people using this right now. It's helping a lot of agencies and brokerages. It's starting to spread. A bunch of Canadians are getting on to it. And as the product gets more and more people through it, it gets better.

So quandary has been a great company to deal with. I found them awesome to deal with. Jameson and Jackson, Frugo are the owners. And they're two young entrepreneurs and they're very customer focused. And they got great people skills. A lot of times you deal with tech companies and they have no people skills. it's really tough to communicate with them. They've been fantastic to deal with.

So I've been very bullish and we've been very happy we made the move last fall. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, my mind is spinning with possibilities. You know, I think about things like rounding out accounts. You know, one of the things that we deal with is especially with the volume of inbound that we get is we don't write whole accounts most of the time. We solve whatever the initial problem is and then we go back through, you know, a week, two

weeks a month later and round out the rest of the account. Well, like all things with humans, you know, you don't have time, you don't get back to it, you forget. And, you know, the first thing that came to my mind was if we had, you know, an RPA constantly running in the background, pulling out the accounts that need to be rounded out, that have round out potential based on different factors, maybe even the ability to go out and get quotes in certain systems for certain lines of business that we see like an automatic EPLI quote pull for everyone who doesn't have EPLI and it's pulling back and pushing out, you know, even automated emails with with quote numbers and hey, we, you know, we're estimating you're at $2,200 for

the EPLI for the year. Is this something you're interested in? I mean, that's the kind of stuff that look, you still need the human salesperson to sell it. You still. We still need the human salesperson for respect and trust and for rapport and service and relationship. That is inherent. That will be an inherent part of our business for the foreseeable future. That being said, you know, this whole idea that I started Rogon of a human optimized agency, it's things like RPAs which allow, which allow for the optimization piece of the

humans. Like this isn't, I think so many people get caught up in this replacing humans. That's not the point. The point is they'll allow humans to spend more time in the places where they do the best work. And I know, dude, for sure, you are always on the forefront of that. And when I saw your name associated with this company, and it may even be cool to have one or both of the founders on at some point if they be interested. Because I'm just very interested in this concept. 100%.

I'll get Jameson Jackson to be. I'm sure they'd love to be on the show. I'll definitely hook you up. The listeners are so much more, a lot deeper they can go into than I can. My day job is still an insurance brokerage owner. You know, I understand the technology from, you know, maybe a 5,000 foot level. So at least I can figure out how to deploy it, what it should be doing. And then if things go off the rails, you know, again, the good thing about them is I stayed out of it.

My team, Una and her team of account managers work with them directly. I stayed out of the project. And I wanted to make sure we build capacity and they did a great job. They really didn't need me at all. There's a few things that we had some issues with our night utilities and the bot. That's nothing to do with our team. team. That's just like, hey, these are things that created new problems that we had to work through. And we did. A few times the bot didn't work. We had a bad problem. CSIO, which is like

your accord, which we, I guess it would be more, sorry, it'd be like your Ivins for download. We get all our downloads from Cizio, which is owned by the industry, whereas Ivan's is owned by applied. You get all your downloads from. They went to upgrade their mailboxes and everything went bad. And we lost downloads for almost a week. And on our world, we live, off or downloads, almost 98% of our stuff comes in through an e-doc and with electronic data pushing it in. That's how we work. We don't get any mail, very little mail anymore. And if we do, it gets scanned and build into our process. So we lost that for almost a week. So we had to shut the bot down. And we had to start doing it. And we didn't have anything coming in and we had to play catch up.

So those are kind of the only blips. The odd time, something will happen weird. Like, you know, let's be honest. Like things can go, usually maybe a night utility thing didn't work properly. And the bought couldn't operate because a file was locked. We build a process and make sure we cleared everything. We have, you know, some things will pop up. So you got, you get, you can't set it and forget it. But after a while, gets more and more consistent. And there's some great benefits for your agencies and your brokerages.

Are we going to see, um, either Jeff or Jeff and Una or Una down in the States at any conferences or anything in the next, in the next bit, uh, any, any fun appearances, um, down here in the States? Yeah, I'm down at, I'm heading down to Nashville. I'm at the conference down there and just have to applied in October. Yeah. So that should be good, Dave, Dave and the guys haven't been down there since, to IA, 0A since 2018.

I did the keynote down in, I guess it was in Arizona. And I haven't been able to go. COVID has kind of kept me away. So I'm going to head down there. And then I'm trying to get an article together for Chris Paradiszo's magazine. I'm a little behind schedule. So I need to get going on that. But so we're heading down, I haven't heading down.

to there and then we haven't planned a ton of stuff i've kind of do two or three things a year in una we've kind of limited our speaking just to make sure we stay focused on our business but love to you know if anybody wants to learn about robotic process automation i'm doing a 30 minute presentation where we can talk about how robots can make your agency more human which most people are going to go what more human but once once you hear you know even listening today like you can you see how you can free up your people to connect and build that loyalty and and build relationships with clients, it's way better than trying to, you know, than having them type stuff over again, like, you know,

mindless work that people dread to do, right? Let's let them do stuff they love to do. You can come into work and do what you like to do and you're good at. Wouldn't that, wouldn't, isn't work a lot better for you? It's certain. Yeah. With no doubt. Where can, um, that webinar or presentation or whatever, where, where can they get at that?

Is there someplace they can sign up to watch that or listen to it anywhere? Well, it's at the I. Unfortunately, is that the I. Oh, you're doing it at IEOA. Gotcha. I know, I'm sure, like I said, if there's some group that want, like I did one for Jason Cassis group, uh, agents intelligence, which we came on there and we talked about that. And I think Jason had scheduled us for five minutes and I'm like five minutes.

And so once we go, once we got into it, I had Jason's, Cass's mind spinning afterwards too. Like the more you think about it of the art of the potential, really the sky's the limit what you can do with it. But you have to look at, hey, is this worth doing? And can I say, you know, is there a business case? And believe me, I like technology, but it's got to have a good ROI, return on investment. It's got to save my people time.

It's got to make them more efficient. Or it's got to allow them to do stuff that's higher value activity or I'm not interested. So I've had enough shiny objects where, you know, I was sold one thing and I found out quickly it wasn't there. So I'm a little more seasoned down when I look at tech. And this tech has been great. Like this is one of those things that, you know, our agency loves and it's made a big difference. And, you know, I'm excited to see what this portal entry bought, how it works. We're building out a prototype right now with five or six other brokers that are in one of my insurance groups here in Canada.

And if I can actually do portal entry, wow, that would be huge. Because unfortunately, it's called single entry or STP. And where I press the button and automatically goes into the portal and no double entry, we don't have a ton of companies that offer that. straight through process in a better way to explain it. But we've got three or four companies now in the guidewire system that are integrated with applied that we get a code. We put the code in bingo. We don't have to retype everything. So that's where things are going.

We are a long way from ever getting there a mass in the industry. Like there's a lot of companies that don't get it. They haven't built the APIs. And, you know, I've been saying the word API for probably eight years before most people knew what it is. But I want to see that when I leave by the time I retire from the industry, I want to make sure that connectivity is there and agents and brokers can connect and they don't have all this friction. They're not trying to figure stuff out. They don't make five phone calls and waste time looking for stuff.

It should be two clicks away in seconds, not minutes and hours, right? I couldn't agree more. My man, Jeff, thank you so much. It is just always a pleasure. It's always a whirlwind. And, dude, there are a few people as pushing hard into the space and making decisions. And not just, like you said, not just chasing shiny objects, making decisions for the right reasons and testing stuff and being willing to share it. And I just always appreciate your time. And I know you're busy and it means a lot to me. And it means a lot to the audience that that you are willing to share so much. So thank you. Great to talk to you again. It was great seeing you in Cleveland at Rockcon. Yeah. It's been like almost two and a half years. I know. I feel bad because like we honestly for two and a half years, you and I could not get down to the US. And I felt kind of like left out. And I felt like I was missing the party and all the cool kids were. hanging out. And again, let's be honest, you can go to all the Zoom calls you want,

but it's actually talking to people after the conference, having that beer. I know somebody that had a beer with a certain somebody that ended up selling their agency by having a beer after a conference, right? So it's making collisions and getting off your ass and going out meeting people and having that conversation. And that's where the magic happens. It doesn't happen sitting in your back in your office, never reading or listening to anything, doing the same thing over and over again. So it's, I really appreciate being on the show, bud. It's been good to see you and hopefully we'll see you sometime at some event sometime soon. You're the man, Bob. Be good. Take care.

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