Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Redefining AI: Boosting Your Business and Navigating Potential Blind Spots

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyPrepare to redefine your perception of AI as we delve into its influence in the industry and expose the potential blind spots you never saw coming.** Connect **▸ Website: https://findingpeak.com▸ Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley▸ Subscribe to the Podcast: https://findingpeak.com/podcast*** More About the Episode ***Get ready to utilize AI to elevate your human touch in your agency rather than allowing it to replace you.On this journey of discovery, we share our personal experiences using AI-enhancing tools, such as Wonderchat, and provide insights on how it's changing the face of our agency. An important conversation is on the cards about the impact of groundbreaking companies like Lemonade and Snapsheet on the industry.Our mission is to encourage you to experiment with AI and highlight the importance of setting aside a “mess around” budget for testing new tools, technologies, and techniques.You'll hear the success story of our guest, who dared to test a new tool and won big, emphasizing the need to keep an open mind to excel. We conclude by dissecting how to use AI as a lever for success in the industry, offering valuable insights for those looking to harness the power of AI in their businesses.This episode is packed with thought-provoking discussions, from implementing AI as an amplification tool to introducing you to the concept of a human-optimized insurance agency.We reveal how AI can revolutionize customer experiences, expedite claims, and make policy and underwriting decisions faster.Our chat about the use of AI tools in automating tasks, saving time, and providing invaluable insights is not to be missed. It's time for you to learn, experiment, and thrive in the AI revolution. So, buckle up and join us on this AI adventure!#ai #leadership--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

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. Crude Laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you.

This is a brand new keynote that I did for Indie Tech 2023. Now, I have shared previous keynotes that I've done on the podcast, and this is one you've never heard before. And the reason for that is I was asked by Jason Cass when he had kind of brought me in to be the keynote. And he had said, you know, I want you to do something on technology and something that you've never done before. And I was up for the challenge. I was excited. I hadn't created a brand new keynote in a while. And I was very happy with the way that this came out.

because it outlines what I see as a potential blind spot for our industry and really anybody. So if you are not part of the insurance industry and you're listening to this podcast, understand that take out insurance agency and input your business. This is not necessarily specific to the insurance industry, although I was speaking to a insurance-specific audience, so it's tailored for them. there is a blind spot that I see in the use of AI. I love AI. I use it in my personal work.

I use it at rogue risk. We, you know, big fan of AI. There's no debate on whether it's coming or not. AI is here. It is going to be part of our lives. It's going to be part of our business lives. And I think to avoid it is to move forward in kind of intentional ignorance. And that's not a place that I ever want to operate.

and nor do I think you should. So I think we should know what AI is. How you implement it, where you implement it. That's your choice. But I think you should at least know what's going on. That being said, there are some blind spots, and we highlight a huge one. And I was really happy with the way that it came off. I'm going to make you listen to the podcast so you actually get what that blind spot is.

But, guys, I think you're going to like that. Now, big change here. You may be seeing new artwork, new name of the podcast, Finding Peak. The artwork has changed. The name is changed. And the reason is I kind of wanted to get away from this being like the Ryan Hanley show like all about me. I want it to be about you. All my work, I want to be about you, the audience.

And with finding peak really, you know, this is kind of, I don't want to say documenting, but it's a derivative of the things that I do in my own life to find peak performance in all aspects of my life. I want to be the best dad I can be. And if I'm in a relationship, I want to be the best partner I can be. If I'm as a leader, I want to be the best leader I can. If I'm speaking, I want to be the best speaker I can. These core things to who I am, I want to be the absolute best version of them that I can be, that I am possible of being.

And that journey has taken me to a bunch of different places, met a bunch of incredibly interesting people. And I want to start to share that journey with you, and it's going to take two forms. One is going to be the Monday mindset. Been a little sporadic with that. That's on purpose. I wanted to kind of tease out that idea. but every Monday moving forward we're going to have a short form a video that's going to come out on YouTube and through the podcast. All of it will always be free.

A kind of breaking down one of these concepts, just tight, punchy, bam, this is get your mind right kind of thing. And then on Thursdays we're going to have interviews with thought leaders from all over the world, all over the country, every different industry. These are people who are dominating what they do and have something that they can share with you guys that will help you find. the best version of yourself. I'm very excited about this transition. Also, guys, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, the newsletter is completely unique content. You will not see this content in other places. This is content that I am delivering to people who've kind of invested in Finding Peak. Now, it's free, absolutely 100% free. You just go, you plug in your email, but guys, when other people have hobbies that they do and things that they do, what I do is I write.

and I write. That's like my hobby. So, you know, at 5 a.m., when I'm up, getting my, my reading in, and then I have some thoughts. I mean, the next thing I do is I take those, I kind of get whatever the derivative ideas are, and then I share them. I share them on Instagram. So if you're not following me on Instagram, you know, really short form, punchy stuff on Instagram, putting in a lot of work there. I've been picked up by a couple big channels. We're now we're close to 70,000 followers on Instagram, which is really cool. That's been a fun experience. And then the newsletter. So it's going to be the podcast, the newsletter, and Instagram, those are going to be the three places. I'm going to spend the most time with this type of content, right? Obviously, our strategy for rogue risk is completely different and platforms are different and messaging is different. But for this kind of peak performance stuff, those are the places. If you enjoy it, we'll love it, tell a friend. Guys, if you haven't, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of you listen to this show. But we only have 45 reviews on iTunes. And I know this seems like kind of a trite ask, but if you listen on iTunes or you listen on Spotify,

leaving us a rating and review, leaving us, I keep saying us, leaving me a rating and review of this show helps me get bigger guests. Like literally some of these guests, they look at your ratings and reviews and they're like, ah, you know? So it would be an enormous solid for me if you listen on Spotify or you listen on iTunes to just jump over there, leave a rating and review of the show. It helps me tremendously bring in new guests. I don't need it for my ego, frankly. If I had zero ratings and reviews, I would still do the show. But it does help me get some. some bigger and badder kind of guess because, you know, they have limited time and they want to spend their time with people who they know are legit. And it just helps show that.

So I appreciate the hell out of you guys for listening to us. I hope you enjoy this keynote on artificial intelligence, growth, and building margin in your business. And as always, this is the way. When Cass asked me to talk about tech, I was actually surprised. It's not in my core. I use it. I understand it.

When I speak to you today, it is solely because the things that we do are at rogue risk and the things that I've done in my career, they work for us. Right. I have no intrinsic love for technology. Truth, I was born in the woods. I'm a country kid by heart. I would rather not use tech. Much to probably your surprise, considering how much I post on social media. I actually hate the fact that I carry around this phone in my pocket. I would rather people didn't call me, didn't text me, and that I was unavailable. So what we're talking about here, the things that we're going to talk about, the tools. the technology. We'll see, it seems to work. This is all from my own beats. These are things that I've tested, that I've put into my agency, or have worked with companies that I've seen actually work in mind. So when I titled this presentation, growth margin and world domination, that's all that I really care about,

is growing my business, separating myself from my competitors, and making all my own wildest dreams come true. So if these work for you, I hope that you'll try them. If they don't, They don't, but we're going to find out how I got to these solutions at the end. Is that fair? And if you have any questions, and I know Big E down here in the front, will most likely have some questions. Raise your hand, right? It's a lot more fun when I get to answer the things that you actually are interested in

and not just the things that I want to blather about. Is that cool? Is that a good agreement? We feel good about that? You guys seem super jacked, right? Super jacked so far. Okay. So let's get into this.

I focused most of my time on AI mostly because I think there are plenty of technologists out here, some of which are doing things with AI, some aren't, that can give you a lot better feel for kind of the tried and true technology that we've dealt with. What I am the most interested in currently is AI tools, tools implementing AI or whatever we want to call AI. I'm sure there's some nerd out there who's like, Ryan, it's not really AI, it's machine, learning and you don't understand. It's all just decision trees. Yeah, I get it. But again, not a technologist. I just use it and it's really fun that I can now say AI without you thinking I'm crazy. Because 10 years ago, when Cass and I would talk about AI, literally we'd have articles

written about us in the insurance journal and IA magazine telling us that we were jerks and that we were setting you all on the wrong path. So it is fun that we finally, we were right the whole time and they were actually the jerks, not us. So when I think about this technology and how implementing it, I don't think of it as replacing humans. I think of it as amplifying humans. I think that this is how we think about it in our own agency. I do a lot of testing in my own personal sidework with my own clients. These are amplification tools, not tools to replace our people. And we're going to get to why I think that is so important in a second. But if we start thinking about the technology that is available, particularly artificial intelligence, and ways in which we

replace the people in our agency, I think that's how we lose. That's how we fail. Because what artificial intelligence is trying to do, what everyone who is involved in this industry is trying to do is become more human. And if we make the mistake of becoming less human to try to add technology, that's where we fail.

Does that make sense? This is, when I see people who are struggling with this, when I see people who are having a hard time implementing, when I see technology that is implemented, into our space and doesn't work. It's because it is taking a step away from what makes us so special, what makes us so unique, why we have thrived in local communities across this country for so long has been us.

It's been the little idiosyncrasies, the fact that Mitch decided to show up with sparkly vans today, right? There is someone who does business with him that appreciates about him. That makes him special, and that is something that triggers a thought in their mind. It makes him human. That that is, you know, that he would wear, I think they're beautiful. Some of you may think they're disgusting. Who knows?

It doesn't matter. It makes him him. And what we do not want to do with any technology that we implement into our business, be it our AMS system, our phone system, how we text, our marketing automation systems, or the new AI tools that have come down the pipe, we never want to take a step back away from the human aspect of our business. Now, at Rogue Risk, so again, we're going to have to change our things. At Rogue Risk, we think of it as human optimized.

When I first started my agency, so I'm the CEO and founder of an agency called Rogue Risk. We founded March 9th of 2020, seven days before the zombie apocalypse hit upstate New York. I'm not allowed to say the C word or YouTube will not cast down a couple points if this ever gets posted. So we'll just call it to zombie apocalypse. and I'm seven days into my business and about $50,000 in the hole and my business got shut down right in front of me. We work only with small businesses. That's what we were founded on.

And every single small business in the country was now had its doors shut, its phones off, and everyone was at home. That was a dark, dark day. And while I probably kept the bourbon business going during that time in order to mentally cope with the depression that I was feeling, I also got to spend a large amount of time thinking about who we wanted to be, really. And the first thing I wrote down was the term that you see on the screen currently human optimized. What I wanted to do was build an agency that allowed our people to be at their best as often as they could be.

Because when I think about the struggles that we have, the stuff that Keith just talked about, right, the stuff Keith just talked about using your AMS. When we make mistakes, when we diminish our agency, it's because we have. have our people doing transactional tasks that add no value to our customers. Right. Collecting data is not a value proposition for our agency. Transacting a car change is not a value to our agency. Taking payment information is not a value to our customers place zero value on that activity. They don't go, you know what?

Mitch, he takes credit card payments like no other agent in the country. You should hear the way he repeats my credit card number back to me on the phone. It's amazing. I love it. It's why I do business with him. No one says that. They can't wait to get through that part of the process. Yet we'll take, in the way that I wrote this down, this is how my brain worked through this process.

So you understand. I thought of a 20-minute time block that we have, say every employee is a 20-minute time block to spend with a customer. And free automation, pre-you know, I'm. AI wasn't a thing then really. What we would do in a traditional process is we would take 15 of those minutes and we would struggle through the first five with the customers fast as we possibly could because we knew we needed 15 of those minutes to actually do the transaction that they needed us to do. So now we're not building rapport, we're not building relationships,

we're not asking them questions about their favorite color or who they think is going to win the Super Bowl. we're just gathering information, ripping through that communication, and getting them off the phone as fast as possible, because then we've got to log into some archaic crazy system, figure out how to navigate the spider web of clicks and forms that we have to get to just to input their credit card number in. What I wanted to do was build a system, and we're going to walk through the exact system that,

and so you know, Rogan is only three years old, something we're doing today is still aspirational in its completion, but we'll talk about that. What I wanted to do is flip that on its head. I wanted my team members, and at the time it was just me, so myself, I wanted to be able to spend 15 minutes on the phone with that person, getting to know them, what they're interested in, what other things could I possibly insure from them,

what other business problems did they have? I wanted to be able to spend 15 minutes on the phone with them and create systems, processes, automations, outsourcing, so that I only need to spend five minutes on the transaction. And to me, what I called that was a human optimized agency where the humans got to do what they do best, which is be human. Because we do business with people that we like and trust and know. And if we're only spending five minutes on the phone with somebody,

we have to have multiple interactions in order to build that trust, in order to like them, in order to get to know them. Where I wanted to have one call, one singular call, one singular call, you liked me, you trusted me, and you knew me. And the only way that was possible is if I didn't have to spend all that time on the back end. And when I think about what's coming down the pipe in terms of technology, that becomes a reality. We can use some of the systems that are out here. We can use some of the systems that are, that you can SaaS tools that you can just purchase online.

We're going to talk about a few of those that we use in our agency. And we can create an agency where our humans are. actually on display. Now, you may be going, I don't, Tommy's a little nuts. I actually don't want him talking to people. You know, I get that. But we can get our humans in a position where they can really do what they do best, which is build relationships. And that's why people stay. That's why people refer to us. That's why people buy more stuff from us. Is that a value proposition we can buy? Some of you are nodding. Some of you are still hung over. I can't tell which it is. Mitch looks home over.

All right. So here is just a, you know, kind of when I think about margin and I think about growth, I drew this. I'm not a drawer, but I wanted to add a little bit of humanity to my presentation, a little counterculture against this tech stuff cast. This is what I see. When we look at best practices and we look at, you know,

I'm not a big fan of best practices because if you operate a best practices agency, I know how to beat you, right? I know your battle plan, right? You follow the best practices that everyone else follows. One, you're just following along. You're not unique. And two, I know exactly what you're doing and how to beat you.

That's just my take. That's a little sidebar. That's a little bonus on the talk. That one wasn't in the slides. But two, I know that you probably grow at a fixed rate, somewhere between 3 to 10% and if it's a good year or it's a hard market like it is now and rates go up, maybe you grow a little more.

But when you talk in actual account size growth, like account number growth, you know, you just have a nice linear, incremental growth because you are spending 15 minutes transacting and five minutes relationship building. And when you flip that number on its head, when you build a true human optimized agency, what you start to see is geometric or even exponential growth.

And you start to build that space between, you in the competition because now, now, you might feel like you're spending more time with someone, right, like that 15 minutes. But out of that 15 minutes, you're rounding out a whole account. You're asking for referrals. You're locking that person in for three, five, seven years of renewals because they know you. They know you wear sparkly vans and they love that about you. And why would they go to an agency who's unwilling to wear sparkly vans? And that gap starts to grow and build. now, now you can start to put a gap between yourself and your competition

because you know they're growing linearly or not growing at all. Most of our, most, you know, not the people in this room because we are spending this time and growing, so I'm kind of preaching to the choir, but most of our peers, I don't want to call them competitors, they're not even growing. So we are putting real space between

not just ourselves and most of our peers, but ourselves and the age of our peers, and the agencies that are actually held up in the traditional community as best practices agencies. We're outgrowing them. We are putting in place humans and putting them in positions where they can do what they do best. Round out accounts, build relationships, retain business, ask for referrals, go after larger target accounts, right? Not just take what comes in the door, but actually do strategic outbound prospecting. These are all things that we can build into our day if we're not spending time, transacting,

And to do that, we have to think through this process of building a human optimized agency. So just a little history lesson. You know, and I know Keith went into further back, but Keith was selling insurance when I wasn't even born. So I don't understand. I don't know. I don't even remember all that time. But for me, when this started, was 2013 and McKinsey came out with this report that we're all screwed. It's over for us.

Pack it up. Our model was toast. Have a nice day. Thank you. Please hand us your hat on the way out the door. right? And it didn't really happen. And then in 2016, all the NBA dicks came into town, all these coastal elitists from Silicon Valley and Harvard came in and said, hey, you bumpkins, you're not doing business the right way. We're going to show you. We did a regression analysis

in our in our 201 finance class, and it says that you guys aren't optimizing your model, and we're going to show you how it's done. And then for some reason in 2021, Coverger, who I love the people have coverage here, Sheffey is awesome. They announced that the insuretrak revolution is dead and now it was agent enablement. And once again, we had survived the storm and come through it. And that's great. Never once that I believe that we were going anywhere.

Did anyone ever hear say themselves, we're screwed, it's all over, time to find a new job? No, right? But it was never about surviving. You guys didn't come to Indianapolis. and aren't sitting in this room for survival, it's about kicking ass. And what we're where we're at today,

why these guys are here and what AI can do for us is not just survive. It's about growing our businesses and packing it full of margin so that we don't just have one seven series in the driveway. We have a fleet of seven series in the driveway. That's what it's about.

Are we doing this for the love of the game? Are we doing it to provide our families with everything they need to build the lives that we wanted. This is the original lifestyle business. When all these internet kids that would sat on the beach with umbrellas in their drinks were taking pictures of them, we've been doing that shit for 400 years. So I don't think in terms of survival, that nothing about this presentation, nothing about what I want to teach you here is about survival.

It is about growing your business and packing it full of margin so that we can make real money. And in order to do that, we do have. have to step away from the traditional model of spending too much time transacting business and move towards a model which utilizes tools from the other half of this room and some of the things that I'm going to talk about, thinking, changing our mindset to a human optimized model. How do we do 3x, 5x, 10x, what we're doing today with the same number of people? How do we do that?

That's where our goal should be. not getting rid of people, not dehumanizing our business, if anything, making it more human through the use of artificial intelligence, technology, automation, etc. Can we buy that? You can give me a hell yeah. Mitch wanted to say hell yeah, but then he held it in. Hell yeah, come on. Give me something here.

All right, so I'm going to walk you through this. I have a couple different ways that I visualize it. I'm also going to talk about this chart in terms of like a waterfall as well. it looked a lot better on my iPad thing when I was drawing it, then I'm looking at it right now. It looks like a child. But I want you to think through the idea. So the vertical access is the difficulty of the task

and the horizontal access is how much money it costs us to transact at. So when we think through our model, we think in terms of passing a series of filters. Filter number one is can they do it self-service? right can they do with self-service you know there's there's the glove box app which is tremendous you know there's also some of the amss have self-service tools you have to find a self-service tool pick the one that works for you but if they can do it self-service that is the cheapest way to have someone transact business now there's there's the cost of you have to teach them how to do that right

you can't just be like hey we have an app now that doesn't work we have to build it into the culture of your onboarding, your communication process. You have to explain to them why you use it, not because you're trying to pass off the work, right? When we get pushed to an app, think about your own experiences. When you get pushed to an app, don't you immediately go, ah, they just don't want to talk to us anymore. That's why they just don't want to talk to us. But that's not the case, right? In our mind, we're like, I want to give you availability. I want you to be able to do this on your time. We have to communicate these things to them. We have to onboard them. We have to make it part of our culture saying, look, we don't want you to use the app for everything, but there

are three, five, seven, whatever things that you can use this app for on your time and get it done quick and easy. And it's a value to you and explain that to them. And if they can do that for us and our human optimized model, right, the more functions that we can both physically and culturally build into using the app, that is the least amount of cost to our business. Right. So that's number one. And it's removing those transactions from our people because the most expensive thing, as you can see on this list, the most expensive is in the upper right-hand corner, that big box, that account managers are expensive as hell. They are for good reason. They're licensed American humans that live in the community most likely or live in a community

and understand what that person is going through. They're the most expensive part of our business. So as much of we can take this off. So we start with our self-service feature, whatever that is. Next is going to be automations and artificial intelligence, maybe things like RPAs, right? We're going to talk about RPAs in a second. If you can have a transactional task, you know, like... 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. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales. The things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business, but they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you,

I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show.

And I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do, creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. episode. So, so we're working with, Allivant is the RPA company that we're working with. There's a bunch of them out there. Fusco referred us to Allivant. Not saying better or worse, any of them, just that's who we're

talking to. But like simple things like finding all the errors, duplicates, missing information on a constant basis in your database and pulling that information out and delivering it to you. Right. That's something that could take a VA. Even a VA could take them days, hours. There's cost of that, right? setting up your renewal process, onboarding your self-service stuff. These are all things that bots automation and potentially artificial intelligence tools could do for you that we would have to do as humans in the past.

And that time eats at our ability to interact with our customers. Right. So the next phase is a little more expensive. There's a little more cost to setting up some of these automations, some of these tools. If you are using something like an RPA or a bot to do some of these tasks, a little more cost, but they can do slightly more difficult tasks. So that's a positive, right?

The next phase is going to be our virtual assistance. Outsourced health. I use the term virtual assistant here. Cass uses, what do you use? Virtual employee. Our actual, the people that we have, we have five. We call them processors. That's what they like to.

We ask them, what do you want us to call you? They like to be called processors. So that's what we call them internally. I just used VA so that we're all speaking the same language. But our processors are a little more expensive. But they can do even more sophisticated tasks. I still haven't gotten to our account managers yet, right? Between self-service, automations, AI, and RPAs, and VAs,

we can remove something like 75% of the tasks that our account managers are doing, not to replace our account managers, but so that our account managers can start doing things like midterm calls. Hey, how you doing? What's going on? You know, we had talked back in the fall about you potentially buying a truck for your business. Do you ever do that? You did?

Great. how can you didn't call us? Well, I just went, let's look that taken care of, right? And you told me you had a buddy who did similar work who you thought might be, can we do? These are the calls that are not happening today. And some of you're going, no, Ryan, I run the, you know, we all run this perfect agency, right? When we sit here in these rooms, all of us, all our agencies are amazing when we sit here. Ryan, you don't understand.

We already do that kind of stuff today. These are the kind of things that we can start to do. We can do, we can actually, actually hold people's hand through a claim. How many of us have actually hold people. someone to a call. Just because you know the claim happened, that's not what I'm talking about. Right. I'm talking about walking the person through the claims process, following up with them, making the extra call, right? Making sure they got paid, maybe sending them flowers or something to say, hey, we're sorry or if we can help. These are things that we do lip service to, but we don't

actually invest in. And if we're removing the transactions through self-service, through automations, AI and bots and through VAs, if we're removing those transactions, it doesn't free up time for us to replace our account managers. It frees up our account managers to actually do the jobs that we know they can do and to be the humans. And they are our most expensive thing. So if we're thinking about the cost of service in our business, how many of you track cost of service as a metric in your finance? Keith was talking, you're going to keep talking about finances and stuff like that. How many of you track cost of service. Next time you do, no one is raising their hand. I'm hoping that's, I'm assuming that

none of us are actually doing it and you're not just not responding. But cost of service is a really interesting number to track because you want to be down under 10%. That's where you want to be. Right now, we're at 37%. It's bad. We're not there yet. But we've dropped it every month for the last 12 months. We've dropped that number. And part of that is we're just young. We're just young. We don't have the revenue on the top side and we kind of over indexed on people on the front end because we're a startup. So some of that is just, you know, where we are in the evolution of our business. So you take all the costs. Question was, how do you calculate it?

We take all the costs associated with service, cutting out sales and cutting out operational costs. And we apply them to top line revenue. Right? So it's basically just a percentage. You're going to see how much you spend on service versus how much revenue you have. and to be in the elite, you're down in 5 to 7% range. If you're under 10, you're kicking ass.

If you're under 20, you're doing good. So under 20 is good. 10 is kicking ass. 5 to 7%, you're elite. Very, very difficult to get down in that range. But if you start looking at that and you start thinking through this model, right, you can make some major, major cuts in that number

by starting by implementing a human optimized model that I just described here. Does anyone have any questions about this, about what we've gone through so far, about the human optimized model? It makes complete sense. You're 100% on board. You're all implementing it tomorrow. Beautiful. I love that. Told you this was going to be brilliant, Cass. All right. What do we have next? So this stuff is not new. There's some, there's some companies up here. We all, you know, probably hate lemonade or I made the mistake if you were dumb enough to invest in them. but lemonade was on to something.

I hate the way they implemented it, and I think that their CEO is a dumpster fire in terms of the way that he refers to us and deserves everything that he gets, but outside the fact that he got majorly paid and then hosed up all his investors by dropping after the IPO, right? I mean, that was a classic kind of bait-and-switch play there, good for him.

But they were onto something. What they were trying to do was implement a human character to people and deliver processes that takes us weeks in seconds, right? We all laughed when they paid a claim in three seconds for like an $800 umbrella or something that was like a whole story that came out. And we laughed at them.

We said, oh, you can't play claims in three seconds. But what they were building and what they have now is the ability to handle certain size claims based on pictures using AI in a way that does allow them to play claims very, very quickly. And to their customers, that is a huge value add for them. Right. Now, we can not like some of the things they did and some of the things they said, but you can't knock the hustle when it comes to thinking about what is important to their customers and implementing a process. In this case, building out a visual AI model. I mean, obviously, I have

no idea how that works, but that you take a picture from like four sides of whatever happened and their AI can rip through and figure out, was it on purpose, what's the value, and actually put that money back into their account in seconds. It's brilliant, right? Now, we're not going to be able to do that necessarily in our agencies yet, but we do have a partner that Snapsheet, which actually works with a lot of the carriers that we do business with that is implementing that stuff. So Snapsheet's the second one on here, so yes, there is a kind of D to C company that does

it, but Snapsheet is actually doing the exact same thing, and they work with a lot of the carriers that we write. And small claims are getting closed faster, right? The claims process is not perfect. know that. It's a very difficult thing, but it is starting to happen. And these things have been going on for years. Snapsheet has been doing this for almost a decade now. So even though we weren't allowed to use the word AI because everyone thought it was crazy, you know, today we can. And this stuff has been in market for a while. So even though it might feel new in this moment, it isn't

actually. And a lot of people have been working on this stuff for a while. Another really interesting one. These guys sold to Bold Penguin, Risk Genius. Chris Cheatham had a really interesting AI-driven tool which would examine policy forms and allow carriers to make policy decisions or underwriting decisions faster by digesting and reading the policy forms. So even though a human may have a feel for what policy forms are, what this tool was doing was taking and can real time see changes in policy forms and deliver those that knowledge set to underwriters and I was always trying to pitch him that this should be a sales tool. There are sales tools that are coming out with this,

but this was seven years ago that he started building this. So this stuff has been in market for a while. What are we actually using at Rogue Risk? So I want to talk about three types of artificial intelligence that we're using at Rogue that I think are easily implementable for you guys. And if you guys have any questions about these specifically, raise your hand, shout them out, or you have other things that you want to ask about or other types of tools.

These aren't the only three, but just to be cognizant of time and to not overwhelm you, I wanted to give you three specific ways that we're currently using artificial intelligence in our agency in this moment. The first and the most exciting to me is a tool called, there's a bunch of these, so take this tool for what it is.

What we actually use, a tool called wonderchat.io, it's a chat bot. It uses chat GPT4 technology. That's open AI's tool, but it uses the more advanced version, although 3.5 turbo, I guess, is supposed to be better I read the other day. I haven't tested it. We'll see. Chat TPT4 technology, but it only indexes what you feed it. So here's what we've done. We've fed it every article on our website and a bunch of PDFs that we've created for different niches.

And it serves answers to people who come to our website, but only our voice, only our information. So as we feed the chat bot articles, PDFs, etc, it's only indexing and feeding and responding based on information that we give it. So we can give it PDFs that the public never sees. We can give it, we can also feed it and have it index our website and just feed articles on our website. I obviously do a lot of content creation, so we have like 500 plus articles, right? And then on the back end, you can actually script out its personality. So I named it Martha the Quantum Concierge, just to be super douchey. And Martha has a playful yet bold personality.

And if she doesn't know an answer, she gives you a Marcus Aurelius quote, which is also super douchey, but, you know, whatever. That kind of fits my personality. I have pants that don't go all the way down to my ankles. And, you know, so what's cool about Martha is I can in real time adjust the rules. Like I told Martha, never guarantee coverage. Never ever say something is absolutely covered or not covered. Because, one, we know we've all done insurance before.

We know that that's not the case. Even if the policy says it's covered, sometimes they will try to not cover it. And two, it's just not a best practice to ever in any marketing material ever guarantee that any is covered. That's, you're setting yourself up for an N&O. So she does it. Don't ever give exact pricing. Give if an article gives ranges, give ranges. Ranges are okay. It is okay to say, in general, you know, similar bakeries in Indiana

tend to be between $1,500 and $2,500 in general liability. That is okay to say, what you don't want to say is it's going to be $1,700. That would be a mistake. So we can actually give for rules. And then what I'll, what I, what I've programmed her to do. And again, it's just, you know, you're playing around and we're going to get to my methodology on how to figure this stuff out in a second. But what I programmed her to do is at times where it feels appropriate, tell her to just reach out to us or give a quote. And if it feels like the person is more geared towards a phone number,

show our phone number. If it feels like the person is more geared towards filling out of form, send them to our quote.orgas.com page, which is our get started a quote page. And if you feel like it should be both, right? I'm literally, this is what I'm telling her. And that's what she does. Now, it's not perfect.

I go in, I check the chat logs. And if something is off, I'll change it. But again, I'm not a coder, right? So I'm not going to create a custom chatbot app. And that is very possible. And I'm sure for those of you who are highly technical, that's absolutely something you can do. But for those neophytes out there like me,

this is a really easy tool. It's $99. I think if you have like 100 articles and if you have more, it's $250 a month. But here's the stats. We've had it up for, well, this would be the end of the third week. we've had 268 chats started and 33 people have clicked over to get a quote

and 25 of those is actually filled out the form. Would you pay $250 for 25 form fills? I would. That value proposition is worth it to me. I don't know yet because I'm not tracking the phone number how many people have called. So we could have gotten phone calls too because we get inbound phone calls as well.

again, not everything I'm talking about here is fully implemented in rogue. It's aspirational. So we're going to get to the point where we have trackable phone number in there as well. So I can literally see, right now I haven't set up so I can track how many people click through to the form and then how many fill out the form. So I can see that funnel. I don't yet have the phone number, the trackable phone number yet. We're going to get there. So that is really interesting. Here's the super interesting part about it. You can create as many chatbots as you want. So what we now have is an internal chat bot. We're building our second internal chat bot.

And this is where this shit gets sexy. Because how many of you sitting out there are the leader of the agency or the principal or whatever you call yourself, right? When you want them to do something, the people that work for you, you got to like go, hey, do this thing, right? And most of the time they don't listen to you. You're like, what the, does he or she know? I do it my way. I know. Eric doesn't know what he's doing.

and he never sold a homeowner's policy in five years. He has no idea. I'm not going to listen to him, right? I know this workaround and I know. That's what they do, because humans are crazy, just like us. So what we've done in an effort to better distill our processes, the way we want our business done is we've created an internal chatbot that actually is our SOPs.

It's actually our how to do rogue, how to do your position at rogue, how we want it done, what carriers to go to, you know, all this kind of stuff. So what we have now is a chat bot they can go to. And if it's like, how does this tool work? Or where am I supposed to go for this information? And it's all, it just comes up in the chat bot. She's now acting as an internal, we call her Regina. I don't know why.

One of my employees named her, we haven't given her a cool name like Quantum Concierge yet, though. but Regina and Regina is now serving our people with our SOPs and answering their questions about our business that they forget. It also really helps our new employees because now not only are they getting our training process, but they also have this chat bot over here that if they forget something or they need to go back to something, they don't need to have papers on their desk, they don't need to have Google Docs tags or SharePoint up or whatever. They just go to Regina and they go, how do we do this or why do we use this? And it pops right up. that is an incredibly useful tool to us and a huge part of human optimization.

And the last thing we're actually doing, the last one is going to be an appetite engine. So when a new quote comes in, our producers just type in bakery, Indiana, and they know where we want that business to go. So I'll say, like, go to Hartford first, go to Traveler, second, go to Chubb third. And, you know, they'll just do that.

That one we're still working on. That one's a work in progress. We're testing it. Yes, ma'am. Yes, everything is out of wonder chat.iop. Yes. Yep. You're putting that information in manually.

Right now. Then having to go in and update that as the carrier's appetites checks. Right now. It does have an API connection that we just haven't gotten there yet. So step one is I wanted to see would they use it and would it be valuable to them before I made the investment to try to make that information more real time? But I'd say, you know, for the most part, you know, so. So we, being that we work in the lower 48 states, it is impossible. The carriers don't even know what their appetite is on a day-to-day basis.

Right. And again, that's not a knock on them. They're huge organizations and stuff changes. And, you know, Southern Indiana has one appetite in the middle of the middle of state as another. And how would you know, right? So all I want is for it to be close. If it's close, that's good.

That's going to take a significant amount of time and thought out of their process. So I don't necessarily today need it to be 100% accurate. I just need to be close. Because what we're doing now is trying to guess up here because, you know, I don't want to kind of bury the lead here, though. I really struggle with raiders, commercial raiders. I have not found them to be a value ad yet. Now, I haven't actually worked with Gaia.

That's a brand new thing for me. I've seen the name, but I just haven't talked to them. I just met Carl last night with Biggie. And so I'm going to do some research on them. but the standard raiders that are in the market right now, I have found to not necessarily improve the process. It's way more efficient to just know the carrier, and we only present one quote.

We don't do a good best whatever, because we're licensed experts, and when you present three options, you're essentially saying, I don't know what I'm doing. So, yeah, hey, that's a good question. So we use Tarmica 15% of the time. So that is the one that we use. We use them 15% of the time.

and what we do is we actually send, again, and I'm not playing favorites to carriers, this is what we do. We actually send them the Hartford's business school, commercial insurance business school, as part of our onboarding process. So they do about a month with us, and then they go do Hartford,

and then they come back, because if I could place every piece of business that I had with the Hartford, I would. Yeah, challenge that because the problem is is the appetite sometimes. You don't know. And you may not know generally across your agency if you get some crazy risk.

Yeah. You know. So we can debate. this all day. No, no, look, I want to believe in them what I have found, and I don't think it's a text fault. It's the problem is when you do the bridge, all the carriers are different. I mean, this is what you know, right? Like, for a while, Liberty was applying a discount and then we had our, you know, that was showing, and we were going to Liberty, and then we'd get in and they go, well, we just standardized that discount. That risk doesn't actually get the discount. I'm like,

well, then I'm clicking through to you because you're telling Tarmicaa that they needed to have an embedded discount, but then when I click over, that discount action actually applied because when the moon is in the sign of the Aquarius, you don't allow that discount for bakeries in Indiana. Fair enough. So are you saying then that you'll see real value? And this, we're talking about simple risks. Yeah, small commercial. Yeah, yeah, simple, small commercial stuff.

But you see the real value then when you can bind in the platform. Yes. So that's when you see the in platform binding. I'm going small, to be clear. Yes. Mid and all that, because mid is going towards that too. Yes. in platform binding is when that value proposition will change for me

because to me they're bait in switching us and it's not again it's not the raiders fault it's you know i i spent a lot of time with tarmacra rag's a good friend of mine and you know i was there i was like their fifth customer so like i saw how this goes and he'd be like travelers will randomly apply a discount on some things and then not apply on others and it's all on their side and we don't even know we're finding out from you guys so long story short being in 50 states with 12 producers, I tell them if you know the market, go right to the market, get it, return it,

because price doesn't matter. And we all know that. So like, I don't, if Hartford's $150 more, but you know they'll give you a quote and a proposal back, propose it. If you like working with travelers,

go to travelers, get a quote. Who cares if it's $75 more? They, the person wants to know that you know what you're doing, the covers you're getting is good and that they can trust you. If those three things happen, they don't care who the carrier

is what the price is for the most part. They may tell you that they do, but then you just have to be a salesperson and get past that, because that's the job. So to just give all of your carriers at bats here and there? Because you get pressure from the carriers, the market traps coming here.

I have a love-hate relationship with carriers because they lie, and so do I. So they tell me that they'll write things and I tell them that I'll write things with them. And so we both lie. So that's kind of how that works. It's like a bad marriage. So, yeah, so, okay, so chatbots.

We go on chatbots again. I don't want to oversell WonderChat.i. That's just the tool we're using. There are tons of them out there, but that's just the one that we're using. More I wanted to show you the functionality. Okay, RPAs, I want to get to, and we got a hard stop at 9.45.

I hate to look at my watch, but I want to make sure I'm on time for Cass. So, oh, this number actually looks right. I have a clock on the floor. It is right. Okay, I'll stop doing that. RPAs. RPAs, think of them as bots.

This is actually something that we are in the process of building right now, so we have not launched them. But Fusco uses them, Paradiso, use them, Jeff Roy use them. Some of you in this room probably use these guys. This to me is, I don't know that these things will be the future forever in our industry. To me, they kind of seem like a placeholder until a lot of the agency management systems catch up. This feels like something the agency management systems could catch up on and pass.

You know, did they get out? This technology could be just built inside an agency management system. But like in the example, the two, the first two that we're building, we use better agency for our CRM and we are currently moving from Nexture to applied Epic for our agency management system. Some of that is because just we're owned by SIA and for accounting and information distribution purposes, that's that it works better for them. but I really like the CRM functionality of better agency

and we've been on it for a while and it works for us. But those two systems don't talk to each other. So what the RPA is going to do is at midnight every night, it's going to take everything that happened in better agency, update and change things in Applied Epic, and then whatever changes in Applied Epic, say a renewal or a claim or whatever, it's going to take and update that information in better agency and instead of having VA's passing that information back and forth

or having to build an API, which are expensive and they break, right? The bots are just going to do it all, you know, every night at the end of the night. That's one. That's fairly simple. There's a bunch of things that they can do. I would reach out to some of these companies. Talk to all of them. Don't just talk to them what I'm talking to.

I chose this one because they have an expertise in Epic and that's, and we're moving to that platform. But we're, you know, talk to all of them. Here's the really sexy bot that we're creating. So we do a lot of outbound calling. And what this bot is going to do is actually go out to various information repositories, build leadless. I hope I'm going to use this word right. Concatenate?

Is that when you put things together or when you separate them? Steep. Concatinate, right? Concatenate? That's an Excel word, I think. Right, Excel? Yeah, there we go. the information to the various system.

So say I get 90% of what I need from one database, it'll then go look in another database and pull the rest of the information or if it's still incomplete, it'll go to a third database and pull, put that together into a new lead, drop it into our better agency, start firing off to,

we do like two emails to like warm up the lead and we kind of do like an assumed call. So like the second email will be like, hey, I'm really looking forward to our call tomorrow because then people assume that they just didn't put it on their calendar and you have a call that's kind of sneaky. Jenkins, I can see you doing that shit. So, so, so, so those two emails go off.

And then the third day, our producer gets a notification, you have a new lead waiting to be outbound called. And then it's right in our system with the X date, you know, this is experienced rated workers' comp stuff. This is, you know, crothers, Mick Hunt, all those guys. they're X-Mod and any other pertinent information in it and now they're calling out. The bot did all of that up to the phone call. And now that thing is just looking 120 days out.

And I'm giving you my shit here. You understand this? This is the good stuff. This is the really good stuff. This is how you make power money, right? You're just, you know, hire freaking Nick to teach you out of sell and then put this bot in place. And now you're just making paper. This is how we do it, right?

not spending time going out and futzing around in my edge or insurance xstates.com trying to, you know, pull a list together. You've given it to parameters, manufacturers, and these seven states with this much revenue, these many employees, and these industries. And when one of their ex-states comes up 120 days out, run it through this process, gather all the information, pop it into your system, and have your people start calling. That's probably worth the price of coming to this conference. Do that shit. All right, cool. So last one is content creation. This is like a no-brainer for AI. There are a million of these tools. I'm happy to walk you through the tools that I use. If you're looking to dominate a LinkedIn, there's a cool called tab.

Frank, actually, Cass, just remind me after and I'll email everybody, the tools that I use for content creation because I want to get to this last bit here. And, but there's a ton of these. And if you are creating content today without using some form of AI, you're just wasting time. And that doesn't mean having the AI create it for you. It could mean like distribute. Like, so what I do is I'll create a video and then I'll run it through the, this tool called Descript, which then allows me to pull off all these clips and add transcribes. And now one, say, seven-minute video describing a process can become one big video and eight

smaller videos. And then I can rip it all. You know, then you can run it through another tool. Again, I'll send you the list of tools and I'll send you the process that I use. But then it can become a Twitter feed or a LinkedIn post and then you can schedule it all out. And this stuff is happening. You can do this on Sunday night when you're having your like weekend cocktail.

Like you're just sitting there, whatever. And now you have 10, 15, 20 pieces of content on one, one seven minute record. You know, spend a little time on a script, one seven minute record. And now you have all this content that you can schedule out. And it looks different. It feels different. And it's coming at people at different platforms. You spent, you know, besides the seven minutes to record it, you might spend another 20 minutes to do all that.

And you can do it with multiple videos at one time. So like the content creation stuff. And really, I think there's going to be a saturation point. I don't know when that's going to be. It's not now. So do this now. Now is when you start to extend, right? This is that time period before Google or the social media platforms or just human behavior

starts to not want so much content. That day will most likely come at some point. That day is not today. If you do this now, this is where you start to separate it. Getting back to that original slide on where you see the human optimized agency is up here and there's a spread between the two, this is the time that you do that. This is when you start to pull away

because when everything starts to level out, that's not when you go, oh, you know, I should have done that, right? Here is where you start to separate yourself if you engage in these things now. And it's going to take time. I've been working on these things for nine months, you know, in addition to everything else that I do at the agency.

So these things are going to take time to implement. You want to think through them. But here's the key. This is the key to, figuring all this out, right? If you don't fuck around, you're not going to find out what works, guys. You have to do the work. You got to get out there and figure it out. You want to know how AI works? Use AI tools. You want to know what an RPA can do for your agency. Use RPAs. You want to know what the content creates? Do you how many freaking AI content creation tools I have

signed up for? My email is everywhere. It is like a thousand of these tools because I just sign up for them. I use them. Like this one sucks. This is too complicated. This one's too expensive. I'll never use this, but it's cool. Oh, this one's really interesting. I'm going to set this one aside. I might use this one again, right? That's the only reason I know. And then there's a couple of newsletters you can subscribe to that are really cool.

And again, I can send you all this stuff that I subscribe to where I find some of these and I'm constantly mining. But my friends, I think you wouldn't be here if you didn't believe in this to some extent, but we have to get out there and try this stuff. There is no best practice for AI. implementation into your agency yet. There will be someday. Steve will probably figure it out.

But there isn't today. And it's going to be specific to your agency. So you've got to get out there and start messing around with this stuff and think about it and try it and test it. And some of it isn't going to work. You may spend $100 on a tool and three days later realize it's garbage. It doesn't work for you. So what?

Build it into your budget. Build a $1,000 fuck around, $1,000 fuck around AI, fuck around. budget into your monthly expense and just understand you're just going to have to eat that cost because that's how you figure out what works and what doesn't work and if you haven't actually watched the real version of this video you should it's hilarious but i draw on it to end on kind of a funny note but but i'm being very serious guys this is a time when we can separate ourselves from our competition that is absolutely real we are in a window of opportunity in which if we if we test some things, if we try some things, if we extend ourselves just a little bit, right?

Instead of watching shitty TV at the end of night, take that last hour and mess around with AI a little bit. That's what I do. You probably know I'm a maniac, right? Someone referred to me as a mad scientist the other day, which I don't necessarily like, because science isn't real, right? We all learned that in 2019. But in 2020, but it, you know, my point is like, this is what? I do at night. My kids are popping around doing what they're doing and I'm testing wonderchat.I.O.

And I'm like, ah, this looks really cool. I implemented this drunk on a Sunday night because I was alone. I'm, you know, probably since last time I've been up here. I've gotten divorced, so I'm alone a lot. And I'm alone on a Sunday drinking bourbon, putting WonderChat in. The next day, we had 17 people use it and got three quote requests. Now, I wouldn't recommend being home alone drinking bourbon by yourself because wacky shit happens when you. you do that. But what I do recommend is that you guys, you engage in this. I absolutely and firmly believe we are in a window of opportunity in which if we start to play around, find the things that work for us, we can extend our lead against the people who would come and take our lunch. It is absolutely the moment that window will close, right? CJ will probably close it because he

figures all this stuff out, rocking and rolling, but that window was wide open for us and I hope that you're engaged. If you enjoy this, you can check out my agency, rogueris.com. That's where you'll see all this stuff that I put into practice. I also have a podcast, the Ryan Hanley Show. You can go to Ryan Hanley.com and check that out. And I pretty much only actually communicate as a human on Instagram. All my other social platforms mostly are just distributed content. So if you want to connect with there, I would love that. Otherwise, guys, you can always reach out to me, Ryan at atrogris.com. If you have questions, I'm always around. I'm always happy to help. And it has been my Thank you.

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