Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Mark McClure Explains How to Use CommercialInsurance.net

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Starting point is 00:01:59 Crude laboratory in the basement of his home. All the morning and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous conversation with Mark McClure, the founder and CEO of Commercial Insurance.net, a tremendous resource for agencies looking to supplement their lead generation with high quality kind of live phone call transfer leads. And, you know, again, full disclosure, not an investor, not an advisor, not a sponsor of the show, just a company that we use a lot. I really like Mark in the way that he approaches his business. We've had a tremendous experience with Commercial Insurance.net as far as using it to, exactly as I stated, supplement our standard inbound lead, referral, you know,

Starting point is 00:03:03 all the stuff that we do day to day. We use a commercial. commercial insurance.net to supplement that activity and get some live phone call transfers and targeted industries and targeted states, et cetera. And we found it to be an incredible, incredibly useful tool in creating consistency in our revenue and premium production. So wanted to get Mark on. I've been trying to get them on for a long time. You'll hear us kind of chat about that. Just both of our schedules have been so busy. And I just wanted to put this tool in front of you guys. That's why I do the show. I like to like to get high quality tools, resources in front of you and commercial insurance.net is definitely one of those tools that I highly recommend. So hopefully

Starting point is 00:03:47 enjoy, hopefully you will enjoy this conversation. Guys, before we get there real quick, just want to kind of go through my standard shout at as far as I love you guys for listening to this show. It means so much to me. These days with Rogue Risk, I have been incredible. There's more things to do day to day than I could ever possibly get done. However, this show and sharing these conversations is really important to me. And in that way, I love growing the show. I love building our audience because more people get exposed to these ideas, these concepts. It helps, I think, move our industry forward, these conversations.

Starting point is 00:04:26 I think this show is part of one small piece of the larger movement of moving our industry to just its full potential. Let's put it that way. I think that all the conversations that are happening today are continuing to move our industry to its full potential, which is not just the bedrock of kind of the business and really our day-to-day lives, but ultimately a mechanism for growth,

Starting point is 00:04:57 for career development, for satisfaction and purpose in people's lives, create a sustainability and profitability in small businesses and businesses throughout our country, as well as protecting our people's personal assets. I mean, that's what we do. And these conversations help do that. So my ask to you is that if you enjoy this show, if you enjoy this podcast, whether it's this episode or others, share the show, text it to somebody, share it on Facebook, social media, email your friends, share it in a newsletter if you have one.

Starting point is 00:05:29 That's how we grow the show, is people subscribe and list. listen. And if you ever want to give feedback, I'd say right now, LinkedIn is the best place. You go to LinkedIn, you know, DM me, whatever, check the DMs a lot. Instagram's another good one. For those of you that follow me on Instagram, I got hacked recently. That was terrible. But since fixed that issue, now back in business. And Instagram's another great place to connect to me as well. So love if you share the show. Love if you lead a rating and review on iTunes. That helps a lot too. And just, guys, I appreciate you. I love you for listening. to the show and let's get out to Mark.

Starting point is 00:06:05 How you doing? What's going on, man? How are you? I'm well. I'm well. It's back in Oklahoma. Nice. Well, is it a good change from the, from the ocean in the sun or happy to be back? I love Oklahoma. It is a great, great state, nice people. My kids were happy to see their friends.

Starting point is 00:06:25 So when they're happy, I'm happy, I suppose. I like the ocean virtually, but you know, they're both good spots. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's nice that you can get away like that, you know, and make it kind of a work thing, too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Cool. Well, dude, I'm excited to connect with you.

Starting point is 00:06:43 I know it's been a long time coming with that chat the other day, but just in general, happy to connect. Yeah, same here. Same here. Cool. Well, you know, we'll kind of get into it here. So, so, you know, I think I've mentioned you guys a bunch of times on the show. we've been using commercial insurance.net off and on since 2020. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:07:09 Only ever off because of staffing issues, not ever because we weren't happy with the service, mostly just at different times. At different times, I've been the only producer and just wasn't able to take the calls, you know what I mean? And that was a problem I was running into. And then I had at one time a producer too. and for some reason, well, they're not with us anymore.

Starting point is 00:07:32 So that's really why there were larger issues there. But now, and just, you know, not that I want this to be an advertisement, I don't mean it to be. I just, I have a bunch of things I want to talk to you about, but just to give everyone listening at home kind of some background, you know, how we use the tool today is really as a part of the onboarding of new producers to get them up and running, to get them opportunities right away, you know, get them on the phone, see what they can do, prove their metal kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:08:02 Like, hey, you know, we're going to get you some calls. We're going to get you some in front of some business owners. We're going to get them to you right away. And let's see, let's see what you can do. And that's worked pretty well for us. And so that's kind of what we're doing today. But I'd love maybe just to kind of give everyone background. I'd love to hear a little bit more just your kind of your origin story, you know.

Starting point is 00:08:26 So you're the superhero of. commercial phone lead transfers. There's a lot of good people out there, but thank you. At what point did you get bit by the radioactive spider? How did all this happen? So I started my first company traffic strategies back in 2000, and I just graduated at the University of Oklahoma. And my dad was running a company by the name of Flowers Direct.

Starting point is 00:08:47 It was just when the flower industry was taken off. And so started studying SEO, became really good at SEO, and built a search engine optimization company. But I frankly couldn't sell my way out of paperback. So fortunately, my dad, I recognized that, and ended up introducing me to a guy by the name of Chad Jake Ways who became my partner. This was probably back in 2001. And we grew an SEO company in South Florida. I built a lot of the solutions for Office Depot, Thompson Cigar, a lot of South Florida companies.

Starting point is 00:09:17 Throughout that journey, we recognize that we can make more money becoming an affiliate. And so we discovered affiliate marketing. And this is about the time commission junction takes off in 2002, 2003, Linkshare. Corporation. We were also a super affiliate and just started building proprietary websites and we got really good at search marketing, affiliate marketing, frankly just introducing customers to businesses, whether they're in the retail space or the dating space. And by 2004, that's when the mortgage level really started to take off. And so we got into financial services and sort of rode that wave. And by 2007, we were selling about 75,000 leads a month.

Starting point is 00:09:58 to American Express, Chase credit cards, a lending tree, countrywide mortgage. And we met a group by the name of Rockettin. At the time, they had just acquired Linkshare Corporation, I guess, a year prior to that, for I believe $452 million, which was a significant premium over what the convention junction sold just a year prior to that. So we recognized that, wow, this would be the company. We want to sell our business to traffic strategies. We had nine people, and we were having a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:10:29 And fortunately, I had the opportunity to sell our business in May of 2007 to Rockington, which became the lead generation platform for Rockington, our company's graphic strategies. Joined those guys in, I guess, May of 2007, and then everybody knows what happened in 2008, the mortgage fallout, and the whole world, the financial world kind of collapsed. But, you know, throughout the journey, we developed a skill at generating online leads and introducing them to companies, whether no matter what industry they were in. And so from there, during our earn-out process,

Starting point is 00:11:03 you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I'd never work for anybody in my life other than maybe picking up range balls when I was in high school at the local golf range municipal. But anyways, I drove up the earn-out at about 18 months to think about what I wanted to do next. And a couple of our customers at traffic strategies

Starting point is 00:11:23 at the time were insurance, personal lines insurance space as well as insurance.com. And when we were generating leads and traffic for that group, Chad and I, and also Kim Reid, who's with us again today, when we were generating the personal lines leads, we would stumble upon these commercial insurance leads, and we never could get anybody to buy them and figure out why. Part of the problem was because of the insurance was a personal lines insurance company. So that was a challenge.

Starting point is 00:11:48 But insurance.com, you know, at we felt should have been able to take some of those leads and introduce them to, whether they sold the policy or introduce them to, you know, maybe a traveler's hard word CNA of the world. But that was, we were not successful. And so as I finished that journey, I, you know, I had some cash and was in my late 20s, definitely plenty of arrogance. I thought, well, how hard could it be to self-commercial insurance? You know, we just did this massive deal with Rockington, one of the biggest internet companies in the world.

Starting point is 00:12:21 maybe I should get a, you know, start a commercial insurance agency because I had a non-competa. I couldn't sell leads anymore for a period of time. So this was probably finished my earn out at the end of 2009. That's after the, you know, mortgage crisis fallout and started back over in January of 2010. And since it was a crossroads, I was from Oklahoma. My wife and I had a baby, and we wanted to be closer to family. So we relocated back to Oklahoma and hung our shingle. We brought in a partner, and he and I started a commercial insurance agency.

Starting point is 00:12:59 We got licensed at 50 states, 2010, and we were generating all of these leads. We went to get our first appointment and told the whole Rockington story, which nobody had heard of in the insurance world at the time. And they weren't really impressed with Rockington, that experience, or small business insurance, frankly, specifically online. So imagine knocking on doors, you know, whether it's a lot of. It's Hartford, Travelers, whomever, in 2010, said, hey, we're really good at doing digital marketing. We have all these customers coming in.

Starting point is 00:13:29 They want to buy insurance. You guys have policies for them. We're going to sell these policies online without talking to the customer. That just was, I mean, it would have been maybe easier to bang our head against the concrete curb. But nonetheless, we started selling some policies through some wholesalers. And we went ahead and got license in 50 states. And, you know, the first couple of years were rough. we put in about maybe 700, a little over 750 grand in the first year and generated 64,000 in top line revenue.

Starting point is 00:13:58 So that was not quite the college tried. The next year, put in another 800 grand and generated 200,000 in revenue. So after two years, we're just completely getting out from the woodshed. And starting to understand how hard it is to build a commercial insurance agency staff with insurance agents. generating leads, you know, is in our DNA, so that came naturally. But we, you know, first couple of years were pretty tough. And throughout the journey, there was a guy by the name of Brian Lippel over a traveler to introduce us to Mark Schmidtline, who was running travelers at the time.

Starting point is 00:14:33 And they flew, I was just about ready to quit. And so they flew and do something different. They flew nine executives out to Norman, Oklahoma. And we didn't even have a conference room. And there were just like four insurance agents in an office on campus corner. And we told our story. And, you know, Mark and Brian just they gave us the confidence just to keep going. Don't give up.

Starting point is 00:14:55 You're on the stuff. This is 2012. So by 13, we were cash flow positive. And by 2015, we had returned all of our investment and built a small commercial insurance agency. They need to build our book over the next few years, probably sold way too many contractors and learned some lessons on how important renewals are. cross-selling and again we were really good at generating leads not so good at service some customers were coming in the front door and went out to back door just this past by 2018 i had a few partners who love the insurance business i you know had spent eight years building

Starting point is 00:15:32 this agency we had 50 sales people service people it just wasn't to a size of a company that i had dreamt that it might be and wanted to get back into the leads business so i had the opportunity to divest all of the insurance assets and sold the insurance book, along with all of the insurance producers and service team members and even some accounting members over to a middle market brokerage who needed a small business insurance unit and retained all of the digital assets. Started back over in, I guess this is the fall of 2018, with about maybe $190,90,000 a month in revenues, so a million dollars annually, from just selling the leads that we were not selling insurance with. So we were essentially cherry-picking the leads when we had the insurance

Starting point is 00:16:22 agency and then selling all of the overflow, the bounce houses, access and surplus, policies that either we didn't have expertise or maybe would not renew. Started back over 2018, we had about 15 people on the digital marketing side and reached, to my buddy Chad Jayquacy. He had had a number of startups and was back at Rocketson and built out their search marketing team and convinced him to get the band back together. So Chad and I joined back up in January of 2019. And like I said, we were doing just under a couple hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. First year, we finished it $5 million in revenue selling leads. We built out a real-time bidding platform for an elite exchange. We had about 5,000 leads a month

Starting point is 00:17:10 that we started with and ended that year again at about $5 million in revenue and we were cash flow positive and the next year we did $10 million and, of course, you know, COVID hit in March of 2020. So that was a bit of a challenge. And then last year, it just took off works again and finished year at $24 million revenue and are on track to do about $43 million this year. Our business today, bread and butter, is introducing small businesses to insurance agents, brokers, carriers throughout the country. I think probably what makes us unique is, you know, lead generations in our DNA, but also running a commercial insurance agency for eight years and understanding that all leads are not good leads for everybody, especially if you don't have a market, even if the lead is free. that experience, I think, gives us a competitive advantage in space and understanding how important it is to make sure, just from a customer experience standpoint, you're introducing customers to somebody that can help them.

Starting point is 00:18:11 But secondly, you know, our customer is also the agent or broker that's purchasing or carrier that's purchasing the call. And we want to make sure that they have a market for this risk. If not, we allow them to return it and, you know, we try to place them elsewhere. That's essentially what our business is today. We also offer inbound, upbound telemarketing services, which a lot of insurance companies use for capacity challenges. As you know, whether you have a smaller insurance agency with a couple agents or even these, you know, large carriers that have a couple of hundred agents, you know, staff being licensed insurance agents to work the amount of traffic that we can generate. It's a challenge. We even struggled with it, you know, when we were running our agency.

Starting point is 00:18:53 And so through that, we've built these capacity solutions that allow us to be on the front lines of many insurance carriers. So the customer will call in. We might answer the phone on behalf of the carrier. We try to make sure that they have a market before we be caller in the hands of the insurance agent. If they don't have a market, then we will match them with one of our other 200, a little over 200 agents or brokers that can help them. And, you know, it's beneficial for everybody. It's a better customer experience. Why send them to a carrier that doesn't even have a market for them?

Starting point is 00:19:31 They may be told, we don't have a market. You're not big enough. You have too many claims. Nobody wants to hear this. So we try to match them with somebody that can help them. It's also a bad agent experience to, you know, as you know, to spend even 10 minutes explaining why you can't help somebody. It's a waste of everybody's time and it's just negative energy.

Starting point is 00:19:47 And so we remove that friction. And then, of course, it generates incremental income for the care. and freeze them up to spend more time with the customers that they actually have a market more. Yeah. You know, that's lead triage is such a important part of the equation. And what's funny is, you know, we don't generate anything near the volume that you do, but on our own, you know, we do a decent amount. And, you know, lead triage is the hardest part of it.

Starting point is 00:20:21 You get these, you know, you can, you can be as targeted and keyword optimized and SEM optimize, you know, as much as you want, you're going to get stuff that doesn't fit what you're looking for. You just simply can't help. And every minute that you spend on the phone or even dealing with an account that you just know you can't help, as much as you want to be good to people and you don't want to just blow them off because that's, you know, negativity that you don't need in the world for a bunch of reasons, it crushes.

Starting point is 00:20:50 it crushes not just not just the um your your bottom line obviously which it does it also crushes the morale of your people like literally you know when you're when you're sending leads to somebody and they get excited and they see a lead come in and they call that person and they find out it's dynamite manufacturer you know on on the coast and um you know they're in a a a stick built building that that also gets uh has force fires next door it's like you know, that just crushes their soul, you know, and then that starts to happen over and over and over again. And now all of a sudden they feel defeated.

Starting point is 00:21:27 They don't want to pick up the phone. They don't want to make these calls. And that's how you burn out a sales force or a service force is that kind of stuff. So, you know, I really like your point around kind of making sure that only the leads that you want to write or can write get to you because that is a huge part of the equation. You can have 500 leads. But if you got to sift through them to get to the 100, that you can actually write, those 400 leads are going to kill you.

Starting point is 00:21:54 They're going to destroy your business. Yeah, that's why we lost so much money in the beginning. Yeah. We were able to make it through it. And we had some really good friends to just, you know, kind of give us the, you know, pat on the back to keep going.

Starting point is 00:22:08 But yeah, it's challenging. It's expensive and it is negative energy. Yeah. I know we currently, you know, for sure not your biggest selling. but we sell we sell we've started to bake in process in our system where we're pushing leads back to you guys and and then you can push them out to wherever you know that to the markets and the agents and the carriers that

Starting point is 00:22:34 actually can write you know certain lines that we just either like you said don't have the in-house expertise for or don't have the markets for or just for whatever reason have decided it's not a place that we want to be like trucking you know trucking is a good example yeah I think there's huge there's always a huge opportunity in trucking we get a lot of truckers, you know, because they see the stuff that we do around commercial auto, so they'll reach out. And, you know, we just don't have the in-house expertise to be a trucking firm. So, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you guys provide us with a good, a good outlet to say, hey, unfortunately, we're not a good fit, but we're going to send you over here, call this phone number,

Starting point is 00:23:14 you know, go to this website, whatever, and they'll get you all squared. And the people are happy, right? I mean, that's all they're just looking for a solution. You know, I think a lot of agents get hung up on the idea like, because I can't help you, you're going to be mad at me. It's like, no, these people called you because they're looking for a solution. And if you're willing to say to them, I'm not the solution, but I'm going to send you to the person that is, that makes them way more happier than you trying to fumble around and fart around and figure out some program and it's taking 10 weeks to get them insurance because you're not really an expert in it. That's the worst case scenario.

Starting point is 00:23:49 out. Not the, hey, I'm just going to, hey, I really appreciate the call. I would love to do business with you. We can't. I'm going to send you over here. That's a way better process. That's good to hear. Thank you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:01 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, et cetera. This helps the show grow.

Starting point is 00:24:29 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,

Starting point is 00:25:06 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. So, you know, I guess, you know, I'm interested a lot in not necessarily the secret sauce because I know it exists. But, you know, the idea of generating inbound leads in insurance, I mean, obviously you dealt with it full frontal when you were trying to go out to the carriers. I think today the disposition is a little different. Still, still not what it is in other industries, but a little different. You know, for a long time, you know, we've been dealing with this concept.

Starting point is 00:25:48 that like any consumer that would go out to the internet and search for an insurance agent that way is a bad lead. And I would love for you to talk through that, the evolution of that, and maybe put to bed that concept just based on your experience. You know, that is certainly a challenge that we had early on when we were trying to seek our original appointments when we were an insurance agency.

Starting point is 00:26:12 I'll tell you the sizes of the businesses that we saw in those days, as many people referred to them as micro because they were really small. We're starting to see, you know, larger, they're still small businesses, but they're businesses that have been in business for significantly many more years than they were in the beginning. It seemed like we had a lot of startups in the beginning. We still have some today, but the quality of the leads that we're seeing come across today, even somewhere in the middle market range, are, it's just significantly better, which

Starting point is 00:26:41 tells me that it's very similar to the shop that my father built with fire, meflowers.com and that was back in the late 90s and you know selling flowers online was was you were a pioneer if you were doing that in the late 90s and you know it took about six, seven, eight years for the public to be aware that you can go online, you can search for flowers, you can credit card in and I think we are just still like in the very beginning stages. It's a very similar concept to how flowers were in the late 90s like customers are just now figuring out that they can go online and you know at least search for quotes and try to start to find a agency carrier broker that can you know that can help them and as they become more and more comfortable i think

Starting point is 00:27:28 we will see commercial insurance online explode uh into more of the you know the hockey stick that i was hoping we would see in 2012 it's just taking a lot longer and it's because it's a difficult product i mean you know i think the what keeps me up behind is you know it is dreaming about selling these policies online without speaking with the customer someday and managing loss ratios and making sure that they classify themselves correctly. Like for me, we're still pretty far off on being able to do that in mass. Yeah, there are certain classes you could probably do it with.

Starting point is 00:28:08 But to be able to scale that at a, you know, at a much larger range, it's, you know, it's just going to take some more time. Yeah, I think getting people to buy online initially, I agree. We're far off from mass adoption, but you can definitely grow a business rapidly, getting them to buy. The problem is retaining. If you don't, if you do not have the service model, you know, so what I've seen a lot of our competitors do in that are digital commercial brokers

Starting point is 00:28:40 are they get, you know, they get a channel partner or two. they buy a shit ton of leads they run a shit ton of ads um they get the leads in the door and they can write them right either whether it's a human or or or um direct binds they're writing business and putting business on books i mean just look at new front and renegade and some of these others what they've done yeah yeah problem is they can't break 40% retention and they're and and and it's because you know for my opinion um the CFOs take over and they make the decision to outsource i mean i know i'm pretty sure at least one of those two and just in case I'm wrong, I'm not going to name which one I think it is,

Starting point is 00:29:17 but at least one of them just outsourced their entire service department to India. Now, that sounds like a great idea from a financial perspective. And nothing against the people of India or people of Indian descent. But when you're in a different time zone in a different country with a different accent in a non-native speaking English person who is trying to service your policy and it is obvious that they are not the agency that you originally worked with, you don't get retention.

Starting point is 00:29:46 And that is the part that kills people. So it's can you scale this business using American cert? I think the sales process can be much more automated, really light human touches or direct binds initially, especially for certain markets and certain size accounts. I don't know that you can completely, that you can do that on the service side yet. I just think.

Starting point is 00:30:08 I don't think we're there either, yeah. And we may never be there. The customer, you know, we, we saw the retention for standard lines business in the, you know, 80% range, which I understand is lower than you see with a really good firm like a Gallagher or most likely a hub or some of these large brokerages. We, you know, the, that was for the standard lines customers. The non-standard customers were the ones who were the groups, specifically if they were brand new that you saw retention rates just be significantly less. Yeah. So, you know, I think being able to focus on the right classes that you know are going to, you know, most likely renew, whether it's, you're filled in my years in business or payroll or number of employees is a much smarter way to attack this concept than trying to be a generalist, which is what I tried to do in my agency. And, you know, we built up a nice, we built up a nice buck.

Starting point is 00:31:05 We had maybe 15, 16,000 customers active, but we didn't do a good job keeping them because we were way too many contracts. and got really addicted between new business on the books and not focusing on that service aspect that you're talking about. So, you know, over time, I would expect that the quality of the customer continues to improve. Do you ever get to a level that you might see offline? No, but can you scale offline at the same rate with, you know, the same economic? Probably not. Well, no, that's, that's the big lie that I think is still being perpetuated today is

Starting point is 00:31:41 I give all due respect to everyone that built standard, local, super regional, even up to national agencies in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s based on what I'd call very tried and true best practice traditional methods. They did it the way they had to do it. They did it well and it worked. And I give them all due respect. You cannot build that agency today. And I look at agencies that are starting up. I'm going to join the golfing thing and I'm going to join a networking group and I'm going to ask for referrals and I'm just going to cold call my local market. It doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:32:20 You know, now if your local market is the entire northeast, maybe, maybe. But then now you're now you're starting to expand into what would be considered a digital agency anyways. So like I think I think that yes, you know, if you have an established book and you're getting referrals from agents, can you incrementally grow with traditional method? Yes, it's not dead. But if you want to scale your business, you want to grow and you don't want it to take 25 or 30 years to get to the point where you actually have a team

Starting point is 00:32:52 and back in support and all this kind of stuff, you have to go digital. Or digital has to be a large part of what you're doing. And then all these realities that we're discussing come into play. It's not, I feel like I used to get this all the time because I've been talking about this stuff, you know, especially content marketing, less, less ads and stuff, more, more content. And that's how we, you know, we have a very high close ratio on our inbound stuff because of all

Starting point is 00:33:19 the video work that I do. So people watch a lot of videos and whatever. But, you know, they used to say, well, you know, I, you know, that's, you're trying to take it. You're trying to do it the easy way. You just don't want to do the work. You just don't want to do the hard work. And it's like, this is not, this is just different obstacles. This isn't, there's nothing easy about what we're doing. There's nothing easy about what you explained and all the trials that you went through. And you're one of the best lead generators in our in our industry. So it's like, you know, there's nothing easy about it. It's just different. It's just a different set of obstacles. And I don't like that mentality or at least I think that's a very narrow mentality to think that way.

Starting point is 00:33:58 Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah. So, you know, as far as like, so as far as in general, the lead generation space, digital space in general, digital consumers, like what kind of stuff do you see coming down the pipes? Are there any general trend changes that you see? Are there any like major shifts in how people are buying, how they're shopping, anything like that that you see that you're willing to share? I know some of this is kind of your sauce and I don't, I don't want you to not ask me to share anything like that. Every year that goes by, you start to see more and more customers gravitating online.

Starting point is 00:34:39 those percentages in the back of my head, but it is certainly growing, and I think we're at the very beginning. The quality of the customers I mentioned earlier is starting to improve as well. We're seeing that in the retention and loss ratios with some of the carriers we work with that report their data back to us, so we can make sure we're feeding them the right calls. As far as, you know, what the future looks like, you know, my hope is eventually we get to a point where we can ask the customer, do they want to talk to an agent? I think that's not going away, at least not during my working career, or do they want to purchase online? If they want to purchase online, most likely to protect that customer experience, we'll take them down that route for those that have that ability.

Starting point is 00:35:22 And, you know, others we might, you know, obviously stare through the call exchange that's a network that we've built today. But I think that's what the future looks like. And, you know, that's what we're working towards. Is it just keeping it, you know, it's not rocket science. You're focusing on the customer experience and making sure that, you know, you're making that small business happy because you're introducing them to somebody

Starting point is 00:35:44 that can sell them a policy in the way in which they wish to purchase it. Yeah. I agree with you. You know, I will say that a large portion of the inbound leads that we get, or I shouldn't say large, a significant portion, a significant enough portion to mention of the inbound leads that we get are actually customers who bought D to C that realized that they now needed help.

Starting point is 00:36:12 And that happens a lot. So I think about. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I mean, we get a lot of business from next, you know, hey, I bought a next policy and I, you know, I can't get a hold to anybody, right? Or, you know, whatever. And nothing against next because we actually write some next, you know, as an agent.

Starting point is 00:36:30 But it's just that, you know, you click a couple buttons, you buy an insurance policy, and then all of a sudden you start to go, oh, you know, is this actually what I need? How does this work? How do I get a C.O.I? There's all these things. Yeah. I do, I'm with you in that I, I am interested in and hope to someday be able to facilitate the customers who can, who can purchase policies direct and have it done in a way that

Starting point is 00:36:56 that they're purchasing the right thing, that they feel confident in it. I think that always needs to be backed up with a phone call or a place that someone could call a human, right? I have this philosophy that if you if you don't feel like, you know, if you don't feel like if something goes wrong, there's somebody you can punch in a face. You're not comfortable being, you're not comfortable working with that business, right? It doesn't matter where they are. Yeah. But if you're like, if you think to yourself, you know, if something really goes wrong, I got nobody that I can like fight, you know.

Starting point is 00:37:24 You know, I think that, you know, people just, they struggle with that. Better you than me. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting problem. But I think that there has to be a way. There has to be a way to educate people throughout that purchase process. And there's some companies that are doing some interesting things. What I, what I, you know, and again, maybe I'm interested in your feedback on this. But what it looks like to me a lot of times is people have good ideas. But those ideas, every new, Every new question, every piece of explainer content or explainer video that you insert into the form process, it reduces overall conversion rate, right? Because it's super easy. If it's four questions to buy a policy, you're going to get, you know, a max number of people. But if it's eight questions, but those eight questions get them a better policy, your conversion rate's going to be lower.

Starting point is 00:38:22 And it feels like what happens is a lot of people come out with these good ideas with these processes that work people to where they need to be. and then they look at their conversion rate numbers and the conversion optimization starts to eat into those questions and now all of a sudden you're back down to four questions again in this very remedial process but maybe the book's not as profitable. It's a really interesting dilemma. Yeah, I've been dealing with that since we started.

Starting point is 00:38:48 Our original business plan was to be more of a lending tree of commercial insurance and we figured out pretty quickly that even though we could generate the traffic and we could get the customer started down the funnel of the, you know, questions, the underwriting questions, we never could get them to press the buy button. I mean, yes, a few of them checked out and bought the policy. Others checked out and bought the policy misclassified. And we, which forced us down the route of building out the contact center because that's how the customer today are wanting to buy.

Starting point is 00:39:19 And so we're not in the contact center business because we love contact centers. I mean, we like our center, but, you know, it's at the end of the day, that's where the buyers are and I would expect it to be like that for you know for the near future so um you know eventually somebody's going to be able to figure out how to underwrite these policies online correctly and uh but it it's it's not it's not a it's not it's not it's it's going to take both strategies to make that one yeah I I completely agree I think the point that you made to um we've seen uh just in the last two years but I've seen throughout my career, in general, the size of businesses that are going online

Starting point is 00:40:02 is increasing as well. You know, a lot of people will say, ah, wow, you just got all those consultants and Main Street, small businesses. Like, yeah, I mean, we get a lot of those. And sure, we get a lot of contractors and stuff too. But, you know, we wrote, we wrote like a $40,000 manufacturer the other day. That's awesome. We wrote.

Starting point is 00:40:23 Was it for us? It wasn't from you guys, no. Yeah. But we did, we do have a nice one that my guy is working right now. Nice. It's, shoot, what is it? It's a manufacturer, actually, in California. And I'm going to butcher what it is.

Starting point is 00:40:38 It doesn't matter. One of my guys is working in, but he just gave me the feedback. But, you know, I mean, and then we had, we had the other week, we had a $15,000 premium account, $25,000. You know, and so these aren't like $250,000 middle market accounts, but they're media accounts with real risk and a couple policies. and these are business owners that have been around for a while. And basically what happens is, you know, again, this goes back to. That's a heartbeat of America right there. You know, and that's, you know, we have this no customer.

Starting point is 00:41:06 So I am currently making the mistake that you described. You know, we are, we have what we call a no customer left behind policy, which means that outside of nine classes of business that we just simply do not have a market for. And that would include like mining and all the things that go along with that. transportation was one of them. We don't do home health care stuff. We don't do human transportation. We don't do,

Starting point is 00:41:30 there's a couple others that I'm going to butcher. It doesn't matter. Right. So we have nine kind of larger classes that we just, we just don't want to deal with today. We'll write anything else that comes through or try to. As long as the person, we look more for,

Starting point is 00:41:45 we try to disqualify people who are not serious about purchasing now. That's what we look for less than what type of business they are. So if they're kicking the tires or they're, hey, I'm thinking about starting a business in 24 and I'm getting some numbers or whatever. Sorry, we can't help you. But if you're like, look, like I opened up this, you know, I don't know, mobile food truck business and I need insurance. And hey, to get into this, to get into this farmer's market, I got to have a COI and

Starting point is 00:42:17 blah, blah, blah. And that's the next step. And for you, as an entrepreneur, that's what I hated about this business when I first got into it is everybody told me not to be a generalist and it's just you really want to help these entrepreneurs whether it's a little food track person or you know even a handyman or yeah so you know I think I think what I found is the fact that I went very wide very quickly has caused me immense amounts of stress and caused all kinds of things to break because it's a very big problem to solve versus just one niche that you can build towards

Starting point is 00:42:52 but at the same time, it has allowed us to consistently put revenue on the books. It has given us experience, scope, scale that I think not a lot of people have. And as we start to work the thing, the problems out, you know, we're still, we're at 86% retention. You know, we're still retaining business. And, you know, it's been, it's been a very interesting process. It's, you know, I'm positive that as we grow and grow with more pace that that number is going to come down a little bit for a while. But these are, these just feel like solvable problems to me.

Starting point is 00:43:34 And I'm yet to, I know that there's going to be some tough decisions and that no customer left behind isn't always going to be 100% no customer left behind. But I feel like it's an aspirational goal worth trying to go after. only because everyone tells me it's not possible. So for that reason alone, maybe with your transaction with SIAA, it possibly is, you know, maybe you're not the one writing. It might not be road risk,

Starting point is 00:44:02 but it could be, you know, another agency that has that mining special. It'll be in that, you know, in that large. So, so that's a really, so you've kind of hit it, right? Is what, what SIA gave us was the breath and the experience and the scope to now start to build out pockets of, expertise that we can we can start to write that stuff so i i just i think that generalist question is

Starting point is 00:44:25 so into i think everyone who says you can't be a generalist is right which is why i want to figure out how to do it because if we can then i was right there with you yeah we were semi-s successful i mean we were barely profitable but yeah it's a it's a mountain of a task but you know whoever figures that out is is i mean there's a lot of money at the end of that rainbow yeah awesome awesome well mark dude i uh i uh i appreciate you coming coming on. I appreciate you spending some time with us. I wanted to get just your company in front of our audience. I wanted to talk a little bit about leads and stuff just because we've been so successful with. And I love sharing tools that we're successful with on the podcast here. So if someone's

Starting point is 00:45:06 listening to this and they're going, geez, you know, I've seen their name, but, you know, where do they go? Where do they get signed up? Where do they find out if CI.comnet is a good fit for them. Where should people go? I would just have them go to commercial insurance.net and they can call in to the contact center and we'll put them in touch with one of our team members who can, you know, identify what their appetite is and, you know, see if they're a fit for our organization. And then, you know, we usually can get a customer up and run in within a few hours. So just go to, you know, commercial insurance.net and place a call or there's also a web form that you can fill out to if you're, you know, interested in purchasing leads. And we can take it from there. We really

Starting point is 00:45:45 focus on trying to sell the best leads in the business and you know our dreams are to become the largest aggregator of commercial insurance new business opportunities and you know so we need we need all the customers we can so thank you for the uh the time today and for you know for for sharing our company with your audience yeah experience i'm glad thank you so much all right man i appreciate it and uh and wish you guys nothing but best yes sir you do good then close 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.

Starting point is 00:46:35 In one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the one-call closed system eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes, more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masterof theclothes.com. That's masterof theclose.com. Do it today. Happy holidays. Want to give your host a gift? Consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing the show this holiday season.

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Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Mark McClure Explains How to Use CommercialInsurance.net

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