Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - Ron Glozman on a Practical Use for AI in Insurance

Episode Date: September 13, 2020

Spartan philosophy, built in the black-ops lab of business: https://www.findingpeak.comFinding Peak podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanleyRon Glozman, founder and CEO of Chisel AI, joins the podcast for a look into how independent insurance agencies and carriers can use artificial intelligence in a practical way to reduce errors and omissions claims. Get more: https://ryanhanley.com/--Recommended Tools for GrowthOpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opusRiverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riversideWhisperFlow: Never waste time typing on your keyboard again: https://link.ryanhanley.com/whisperflowCaptionsApp: One app for all your social media video creation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/captionsappGoHighLevel: It's time to take your business workflow to the Next Level: https://link.ryanhanley.com/gohighlevelPerspective.co: The #1 funnel builder for lead generation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/perspective--Episodes You Might Enjoy:From $2 Million Loss to World-Class Entrepreneur: https://lnk.to/delkFrom One Man Shop to $200M in Revenue: https://lnk.to/tommymelloIs Psilocybin the Gateway to Self-Mastery? https://lnk.to/80upZ9This show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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All over one and welcome back to the show. Before we get to today's guest, I want to do something different. I want to support a good friend and a good cause. And that is Chris Paradiso. his last agent standing magazine that he creates. This is the fifth edition of the magazine. All the proceeds go to charity. If you know Chris, you know he's someone who supports our industry as much or more than

anyone else. He stands among the giants of the individuals who support our space. He's doing incredible things. He gets people together. He gets conversations happening. I've known Chris for almost a decade now. and I just consider it an honor to be kind of in the conversations that he's brought me into and I want to do my part to support both the individuals who contributed their expertise to this magazine

and, and here is the kicker, all the individuals who have ever contributed to any of the magazines. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to paradisopresents.com. Paradisopresents.com. and Chris doesn't know that I'm doing this. He has no idea. Go to paradisopresents.com and share that link. Share it on social media.

Share it on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, with the hashtag last agent standing. Hashtag last agent standing. Okay, so this has nothing to do with the podcast. This is everything about this magazine, the people who contributed, and just getting the word out. Share that link and just put in there, purchase a copy I did put some peer pressure put some social pressure on your peers to go buy a copy

I bought six copies of the latest episode which I did contribute to but that's not why I bought them I bought six copies and I have copies of every so so basically I have I have six copies of every of each of the five editions and what I'm going to do is for everyone who goes out and shares the link to ParodyisoPresents.com where you can purchase, you know, your copy of the magazine and hashtags at Last Agent Standing, I'm going to start randomly picking people and sending them, mailing them, all five copies of the magazine. So share the link, put some pressure on people, hashtag Last Agent Standing, you can tag Chris, you can tag Parody So Presents, you can tag me, tag anyone who contributed, Bob McCool, Daniel Sung, Bob.

Klinger, Joe Hollier, Jeff and Una, Roy, Frank Settner, you know, Ron Glozman, who's our, our interviewee today. Do this, share it, get the message out. There's, you know, Bradley Flowers contributed, Susan Shaw contributed. There's amazing contributors. Carrie Wallace contributed. There's amazing contributors just in this latest episode. I'm going to send you all five episodes randomly, six people, if you do this.

So it's about getting people to purchase more copies because then more money goes to charity. More people see these stories that everyone is sharing, the thoughts that they're sharing. It's about spreading ideas throughout the community. And I just hope you'll do this. I don't do a lot of this kind of stuff on the show, but I want to be supportive of Chris. And like I said, he has no idea that I'm doing this. So, okay, so that's a long intro to get to Ron Glozman. Ron is a technologist, and he's a thoughtful guy. I love the way he's coming at the industry. He is the founder and CEO of Chisell AI. Chisle is a provider of AI powered solutions for commercial insurance brokers. Basically, guys, he's come up with some machine learning and

natural language processing software, which allows you to track differences between maybe how a policy was bound and how it was issued, how renewals are issued versus what was quoted. He's basically created a software that helps drastically reduce the chance of errors and omissions claims because of differences in bound, quoted, signed policy docs and what's actually issued by a company. Also helps with endorsements, helps with all that kind of stuff. It's really interesting. He talks a lot about what AI is and how it can be used in a fundamental way in our industry

in a very practical way in our industry. And I think you're going to love this episode. So share Parodies so presents, listen to this episode. Hashtag last agent standing. and I'm going to pick six of you over the next couple weeks randomly to send all five editions of the magazine. All right, let's get to Ron. Hey, Ryan.

What's going on, man? Good. How are you doing? I'm good. I appreciate you letting me push 15 minutes. Yeah, no worries. I, uh, today has been, today has been a day. There's no doubt.

A good or a bad day. Good, good. I would say good and bad. Like the full. spectrum of day. I've had both, I've, I've written business today, which always makes a day a good day. And I've had some conversations I wish that I hadn't had today. So, okay. The full, spectrum, which brings us to you and our conversation, which I am excited about. And, um, you know, I, uh, I like to get right into it with these. You know, I think, um, you know, I'm just

interested, man. Like, I'm interested in what you guys are doing. And I, and I've looked at the website. I know a little bit. You know what I mean? Tracy email me. We talked a little bit. Like, just, I maybe just start to break it down from me. Like, you know, I think one thing I will say, and this is one of the things I love about the insurance industry is anytime you throw anything that, like, like the URL is chissel.a.i. And as much as I would love to believe that I am this like, forward thinking, tech guy. As soon as I see the letters AI next to each other, I immediately like two thoughts.

I'm like, wow, I bet this is super cool or it's complete bullshit. So which one is it? No, for sure. I think, I mean, I think it's important to define what artificial intelligence may be is because it's really been around for a long time. A lot of people have misconceptions and there's many types of AI. Maybe I'll start there. So there's machine learning, which is probably the most academic aspect.

There's a lot of really good research there. A lot of people study machine learning or study a branch of machine learning as an area of expertise. Then there's things like, you know, text to speech and speech to text, which is like Siri. I think everybody's used to Siri and like, hey Alexa and hey Google. And nobody finds it scary, I don't think. but it's all artificial intelligence because it can understand you,

it can translate it into text effectively, you can then take that text, do a question, answer, search, generate an answer, and then take that answer from text and generate speech to read it back to you. So that's like four types of machine learning right there, just to accomplish what might seem like a really simple task.

And so, you know, when we talk about what we do, which is like policy checking and the intake of submissions for the insurance industry, that's again maybe people think it's scarier it's complex but when you break it down there's a lot of small problems that together add up into maybe a complex yeah it's funny when you're breaking down like and when you really think about when you stop and you really think about how much technology goes into hey Siri where's the closest pizza joint you know what I mean like and Siri's like

ready to rock I just have her on mute um you know you say that And then literally you get an answer back, like down the road on the left is the best, you know, 400, five star reviews, you know, Johnny's pizza. Like the amount of technology that goes into that. And we, you know, to us, it's like, oh, Siri, like, you know, we don't even think twice about it. And it's just crazy that, you know, then we think, now mapping this to the insurance industry, right? So, so this, Siri, I'm pointing at this, even though we don't do video, everyone knows I do things with my hands. and then they can't actually see me.

So we have this incredibly powerful, built-out technology delivering real-time responses in what would have to be considered a fairly accurate manner. And then we contrast that against the things that we deal with today in the insurance industry. And like, I had a 45-minute bitch session with a buddy of mine about agency technology today. And, like, it's insane.

It feels almost like we're, like, why not just go out with an actual club and actually club the client and then actually drag them back to the office, like physically do that? Like, that might be more efficient than how we operate. For sure. I mean, I think there's a lot of opportunity for efficiency. I hope it doesn't have to come to clubbing them over the head. I would hope we can have other solutions.

But for sure, I think it starts with being able to intake digital. I know one of the great things that I personally like is PDFs, especially because everybody's working from home and like docuSign seems to be getting more accepted and all of these e-signature solutions. And so I think it's really a great step forward. And so looking at that, I'm hopeful that that is a catalyst of the beginning of a transition into a more digital way to deliver insurance and to buy insurance. Yeah. To your point, if we have to club them over the head and drag him to our office, it doesn't scale. And it's not a pleasant experience. Not for them, not for us. And I think that's where I can help. It would be pretty badass, though, if you did that. You literally just like had someone by the collar and you drag him to the door and they're like, who's that? And you're like, that's our new client. He's got a, he's got a fleet of vehicles in a nice plumbing business. You know, like, okay. So getting back to reality. here. So you talked a lot about PDFs. I mean, it feels like to me this this world, um, COVID world is not going away. Right. I think, I think that's, that's probably been beat up that idea quite a bit. I'm sure we will, we will adjust. The pendulum will swing back. I mean,

I can't wait until I can actually meet at least some people in person, but I have a lot of, I haven't, I've sold. So my agency has existed since March 9th. And I'm not going to say that I've sold like a thousand clients. But I've only had two of. of them. One asked for an in-person meeting and we just didn't do it. And the other was an in-person meeting that I sold. Every other client I had has happened through the phone, text message, email, and e-sign. I haven't even sold anybody through Zoom. I haven't even needed to. They haven't even needed that. Phone, email, text. What comes next? I'm going to send you an e-sign document. You sign it. You send it back. Done. So that part, you know, I think we'll have more human experiences

to build trust into our process because that's always going to be important. But the delivery, the exchange of information, the capture of information, that part being 99% digital, it doesn't feel like that's going away. It doesn't feel like we're going back to handwriting on the chord forms and stuff. Right. And I'm personally excited for that. I think that allows us to then do a lot of cool things. I mean, one interesting thing that,

it's just an interesting statistic is that 50% of people in the United States specifically are underinsured at least when it comes to the commercial space and so my favorite is like a farmer who you know bought a property let's say in California and so he bought a farm with like a plot of land with a farm half a million dollars and then obviously due to appreciation in California that land is not worth a lot more and so because he's just getting his policy renewed year over year. It's been at the same limit and nobody ever catches that they shouldn't increase it. And that's 50% of people in the United States actually. And so I think when the information comes in digitally and we can start looking at things like, well, what is the

property value in that, you know, zip code or postal code look like? You know, is it in a flood zone or hurricane zone? Like there's lots of cool information that we can then do. But it all has to start with getting that information into some type of digital format. Yeah. And then cool things can happen. Yeah. Then you can pull in, I mean, there's so many data. I don't want to see.

I mean, you're going to, you're going to, maybe some of the stuff I say is silly and kind of the more technical vernacular, but there's so many lakes or whatever of data that stored in different places that you can suck in and ping against what you actually have. I mean, this is, I was talking to a carrier one time. and they asked me like if you could have one thing, anything, what would it be? And I'd say when I have an account, I would like to be able to push a button and have all the nonsensical information that I have to ask them about sucked in so I don't have to ask them about that. Like when was the last time that your roof was done? 2015. That's what I put. 2015. It was done in 2015. Unless I know it's super old,

2015 or if I did 2015 for the electrical then I put 2017 for the roof you know and that's every because what are you going to do you're going to waste all your time the valuable time that you get of your client's attention on when was the electrical last done now I get it if there's you know you need to know if there's like circuit breakers or fuses or whatever I mean that that kind of does make a difference but some of this and then we're talking about building code information and ISO information and how far is it from a from a fire hydrant and I'm not saying that stuff isn't important but it is certainly not important to talk to your client about right that is not information that we should be wasting our client's time on and this to me feels like one of the magic pills to moving forward

a hundred percent I mean my one of my favorite statistics is you know we do I talk to a lot of carriers and on average, like the average questionnaire can have like 100 plus questions. And they're typically only using 15 to 50 of those. And like a lot of those are just throw away. And so to your point, like you're probably beating your client over the head saying when was the electrical last done? And unfortunately, they actually don't even capture that information because we're back to point A.

That information today needs to be manually typed into some type of database on their end. Sorry about that. That's the lovely powers of work from home internet. Yeah. All good. How many times have you tried to sell? And they have the internet done. I thankfully, my internet has not been a problem here. I have had my AC unit at the house go during the middle of summer. So I've worked out of the house and it was about 100 degrees in here. I have had to deal with that. but thankfully the internet has not been an issue. Great to hear. So you were saying that companies have apps that have 100 plus fields,

but they're only taking in 15 to 50 of them. And then even some of those they're not using because in the end, we all have to, all that information has to be plugged in manually into the system. And that's where we lost you. Yeah, 100%. And so I was going even further to say, as you're probably familiar with, many carriers have their own portals or their own forms that they ask you to fill in when you're sending in submissions or applications. And so it can be very time-consuming. And so on the flip side, they receive a variety of formats because they work with so many agencies and brokerages. And so, again, artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing, which is the ability for a computer to read and understand text, just like a human, is the application or the artificial intelligence that can really help bear.

And I've personally seen a lot of success in that area. So before we go too much further, I'd like to discuss natural language processing because, you know, like you kind of started, when people think about anything that has to do with artificial intelligence, I think machine learning is what they're really, that's what they're really thinking about a computer, you know, taking certain number of iterations in and each one of those iterations teaches them something. And over time, they develop an optimization to that process in a very broad strokes way of defining it. But this idea of processing, language, like, and turning it into data or being able to take data and turning it into language.

Just talk to me a little bit about that process because, you know, I know it's one of the, or at least I've read, it's one of the faster growing areas, you know, where artificial intelligence is being used. And at the same time, I don't know that I know that much about it or probably anyone who's listening knows a tremendous amount about it or its power, you know, when actually used? Sure. So natural language processing, as mentioned, is really

just a way to say teaching computers how to read. And there's more branches of natural language processing. For example, we talked a little bit earlier about question answer systems. That's an example. Another example is like translation. So back

in the day, the way translations like Google Translate used to work was it was literally like a dictionary and it went English to French, English to Spanish, English to Chinese and it ended up being a huge like 100 plus gigabyte. Hopefully I'm not losing you. That was very, very large because it was just a mapping of each language. Yeah. Nowadays, Google, for example, uses what's called an auto encoder.

So it takes English, translates it into a bunch of numbers and then those numbers can be translated into any other language. It's like having a cipher kind of. that's exactly it. That's a great word. It's a cipher. That's a great word. And so that's another example, machine translation, right?

And we're all used to, like, you go to Google Translate, you're lost or you're traveling around the world. You take a picture of a menu, and boom, escargo. That means snail in French, for example. Yep. So that's another cool one. And so other examples specifically of natural language processing where they can apply to insurance include entity extraction and classification. So that's the ability, for example,

to extract name, date, financial information, and then classify them because it's good to know, for example, that this is a number, like 1,000, 10,000, 1 million are in here. But it's also important to know, is it a limit, is it deductible, is it a premium? And if so, like, what is it related to, right? Is this the limit for,

for the properties, is the limit for the shrubbery, for the flood, like is it a sublimits, so on and so forth. And so that's where machine learning can come in is the ability to take this contact. Basically, you give it a body of text, in this case, imagine a PDF and email and application form. Because you hear all the names, here are all the dates, here are all the numbers, here are all the relationships between them,

and here's like what type of data it is. It's an expiry data, an effect of data, retroactivity date, et cetera. And so it really comes down to math and statistics and sort of just like you can teach English to anybody effectively. You can teach a machine English. So how does this relate to the, like you use the idea of getting. So, okay. So talk to me, I guess.

Talk to me. Let's transfer this over to Chisel. So talk to me a little bit about what Chisel does. What is this tool? I mean, I've read through most of the site. I've heard you guys need and tossed around a little bit, but if I'm being completely honest, I don't have a real firm grasp on exactly what problems you're solving

and how you're solving them, but it sounds sexy as hell. Thank you. Sure. So, I mean, we are at the core natural language processing company, and that's our specialty. We have two solutions today that will focus on helping the industry solve. One is focused around the problem of errors in our mission. Specifically, we call it policy checking.

It allows you to take a policy and compare it against some type of source of truth documents. For example, it can be an expiring policy if this is an existing client. Or it can be a binder or a quote depending on what you have. And the goal there being, as you know, Arizona emissions is costly. and an unfortunate reality of the industry. And so we can help not only reduce the time it takes to do policy checks to catch E&O, but also help you catch more E&O mistakes. That's one of them.

The other one on the flip side is focused on helping carriers be more efficient on responding to submissions. And so as we talked about, they can receive a thousand plus submissions a day from a variety of agents brokers all coming in in different formats and they're manually typing that information into their clearance and registration system into their rating engine and into their whatever systems they might have and so we allow them to intake this email all of the attachments for example a statement of values a schedule of vehicles a list of properties the jewelry list the contractors equipment list whatever it might be extract all of the information how old is it

is it who's the manufacturer of the tractor when was the last service all of those fun questions we were just talking about if it's if it's present put it into the rating engine to help them basically kickstart the process saving them typically two weeks of time not two weeks obviously of effort but two weeks of a lapse time as you've probably experienced it takes time for an agent to respond or an underwriter to respond to you and we want to help them be faster about And what are you seeing from an adot? Like when agents hear this pitch, like who's using? Is it bigger brokers today?

Is it networks of agents? Like from an agent perspective, what is the, what's the persona? What's the breakdown of someone who digs into this tool and starts to put it to practice? Yeah. So I don't think size. is necessarily the right way to look at it. But really, the people that are using this are, it depends. So typically some companies don't actually do policy check,

which is an unfortunate reality. And it's not something I love to see. But some companies, for example, have a decentralized system. So what that means is it can be like they have seven offices with 100 agents spread out across those offices. And each agent has access to the app. And they're just, you know, checking one, two, three, four, five, whatever policies a day.

Or on the flip side, you can also have a centralized system. In that case, they have somebody whose full-time job is to check policies. And so somebody will go in and they'll check typically 10-20 policies a day rather than two, three, four policies. And so, yeah, as far as size, I mean, typically we do see the big brokers are the ones who are typically purchasing the but I think it just comes down to budget and not because it's cost prohibitive, but simply because they have a procurement process that is a little bit more formal and more standardized, where sometimes when we go to a smaller agency, it's somebody who does, you know, everything and they might not have the time to see the value in this. And so all that to say, anybody who wants to reduce their errors in emissions is the right size. And really, the person who ends up using it is the broker themselves or a dedicated full-time policy checker within the brokerage if you have such a person. Yeah, I know a lot of agencies do it.

A lot of agencies do it on the back end too. they wait till the policy is actually issued and comes in and they check what's downloaded versus what was actually initially bound and it feels like that part of the process could be automated with a tool like this very you know I want to say easily but it definitely creates the opportunity versus having a human being like eyeballing downloads versus bound bound policy. You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly it.

And on the flip side. Go ahead. Yeah, and so just on the flip side, typically when we do a lot of work with our carrier partners, the person who's using it there is actually the underwriter. So they're receiving the email, for example, from an agent, and they're forwarding that email to some type of centralized inbox or, you know, could be an API just depends how the carrier has it set up.

And then five, 10, 20 minutes later, all of that information gets pre-populated automatically into all of the applicable systems and they can just pick it up from there, saving them typically two to four hours. And so it's with the underwriter runs up using it on the flip side. Yeah, you know, it is one of the things that slows down the process. immensely is the fact that every, this idea that every carrier has their own intake form, right? Like, you know, and every carrier's intake form is highly optimized for their agents and, you know, is this thing and they get to update it every six months and do a big release of the

new updated agent portal. And, you know, everyone is exactly the same. It's a bunch of boxes that you plug information into. And, you know, there are some tools like Tarmica, which I'm not sure if you've heard of them that I'm a big fan of because it starts to reduce that. You know, I think any tool that, you know, again, thinking about what would make, if there was like a Chrome extension that it would allow me to suck in all the

information I needed from people, you know, emailing me their policies or just emailing me answers, to questions I had and then like, you know, like then I would go to a carrier's back end and then just hit a button and it would just push all that information in and then I could log into the next portal and push all that information in because, you know, this multiple entry like destroys, destroys your profitability and your time. I mean, it's why small commercial I've said for a while now that I think Tarmica as a tool is one. of the tools that is going to make small commercial profitable.

And I said that because it's a single point entry to multiple quotes, right? And that idea, just the fact that I don't have to go into, like I'll give you an example. I have a commercial auto account that just came in. Their general liability is pretty small, but their commercial auto risk is a little bigger. So I have three carriers that I'm going to go to. I have to hand type in all the information for a four,

vehicle fleet for three carriers. That's two hours worth of work. That's two hours worth of work, at least at a minimum. That's not to mention if any of them are competitive. I still have to sell it. Like the pricing still has to be good. They can't, you know, hopefully I don't get 45 minutes into one of the, into one of the systems. And then they just kick me out because I've triggered some declination thing that, you know, I didn't realize was coming. And it's like, think about that process and then what ends up happening is you just go to the one or two carriers that you know how to use fast whether they're the best or not becomes less important it's how fast can I get the information in and get a quote back and that's not in the best interest of the client

it's not in the best interest of your agency and it's certainly not in the best interest of of the carriers when that's what ends up happening exactly it so the non-mogyna world where instead of having a portal you can just email submissions at carrier.com and 20 minutes later you get a quote back. Yeah. And, you know, I think that,

you know, and the thing I like about what you're talking about and the reason that I'm, you know, I've talked to some people and, you know, there are people who are skeptical and there's people that obviously don't trust,

they trust a human eyeballing something more than they trust technology. And there's part of me that I understand where that's coming from. I don't know that I necessarily agree with it, but I understand the philosophy. But, you know, all of these, and some of the pushback you get is, like, I think people are worried that tools like what you're describing, or, you know, what you're describing when you describe Chissel,

that, you know, it's a replacement for humans. And what I see is, you know, Johnny or Sally or, or Tammy or whoever is whose job it is to eyeball, you know, these two things all day. Instead of them spending their time on that job, you don't have to get rid of them. Put them into a job where they actually are helping people. Have them be a second set of hands answering phone calls or packaging up, you know, make them into the person who sends your onboarding welcome package or any number of things that you never get to because you don't have time.

you know, I feel like this new age of technology, now that we're past the like disruption phase, I feel like we've gotten into a phase where tools are starting to emerge that allow us to optimize the humans, not replace the humans. And that to me seems like what the ultimate goal should be. That's exactly it.

And I think another interesting piece is, you know, looking at you, you're quite young man, and I'm also a rather young man. And the statistics still say that we are, by all accounts, like a statistical anomaly. So statistics show that in the next 10 to 15 years, I believe it's something like 50 something percent of the people in the industry are going to retire

because they're above the age of 50, which means they're going to be eligible for retirement, assuming 65 or 67. And so the amount of college grads, grads that are entering the industry are only 4% of the graduating class. And so long, short, if you work out all the math, there will actually be a crunch. And so that also means that unless we find ways to be more efficient, everybody's book of business is going to shrink.

We're just not going to be able to keep up. And so to your point, I don't believe at all that's about taking people's jobs away. There's people retiring. and there's anyway people who are coming in to the industry who aren't interested in just doing data entry. They're trained actuaries or their licensed brokers or agents. And so they want to be doing the actual upselling or maybe not the upselling, but the value add,

the coverage suggestion, all of those things that they come to you looking for that advice. And so I 100% agree. I don't think AI or any type of technology is an enemy. If anything, I think it's, you know, a benefit to the business. It's the only way forward. So as you look at the industry and you just mentioned one of the things that I think creates incredible opportunity, where, you know, when you're using your brain, you know, with your, and I mean that from this,

using your, obviously using your brain, using the type of, you know, the way that you view it, right? Like, I view everything pretty much as a salesman or a marketing person, right? Like, everything comes to that context. I know I have other friends every day, think of everything like an accountant would think of it. You know what I mean? Like being more of a technologist and you're looking at our industry and you're saying, okay, there is going to be a major generational transition in terms of leadership in the in the space. As the baby boomers roll off, we have an incredibly small number of Gen Xers and then a larger number of millennials that are going to be rolling into these leadership positions and they're going to be the ones that are driving the ship

and making decisions. Looking at that world, where are you seeing opportunity? Like, where are the places where you're like, man, this trigger and this trigger fall into place and we can go, you know, we can go 100 miles an hour to the promised land right here. Like what gets you excited? Yeah, so it's interesting. There's so many thoughts I'm just trying to think. So one of the ones that comes to mind, the foremost, is a couple more studies that really speak to some of what you shared. So one study KPMG did in October of last year said that 97, 97% of insurance companies or

CEOs know that artificial intelligence is going to change. their business and 87% are willing to are going to take change today. They're basically not waiting for the next person. And so that to me is really, really inspiring because it means that, you know, change is going to happen today. It's not the next necessary generation, but it is going to happen today. And that really is showing that people are open to change because change can only happen from within. I think I'm not the first person to say that for sure. I can't take credit for that.

But change has to happen from within. And I think it's a testament that the companies are willing to and the time is right. And so, yeah. So what can go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, so what can, so a lot of the agencies that listen, or a lot of the listeners to the show are agency, I'd say middle market to, you know, kind of even single location, single person shops like me, startup agencies. So, so you have a wide spectrum. A lot of people are in the agency space or in carriers or vendors that specifically serve, I'd say that market. Not the, not the big broker market, but that market. So someone's listening and they're saying themselves, geez, you know, I really see this. You know, maybe today my agency's not set up properly, but, you know, moving into

the future, I see this. I see that these, there are a lot of processes that need to be automated so that my people can be better. Okay, let's say they're, they're having that thought as they're listening to this episode of the show. What are some of the things that they, how do they start to prepare their business? What do they, what do they, what are some of the first steps they can take, things they should read, resources they should engage with? Like, from your perspective, How do they start down this path to taking this on, to setting their business up for what I think we all feel is the future? Great question.

So I think I'll stop by saying it's easier than you think. And it should not be anything that you don't necessarily already have today. and obviously there's varying levels of complexity. So I'll start with what I would call the MVP or the minimal viable product. So with that mindset, all you need is your documents in some type of digital format and you talked about a lake earlier, like that's perfect.

So all that means is it could be a Dropbox, it could be a Google Drive, could literally be a USB stick. Like honestly, like, as long as it lives on a computer, it's digital. And so have a repository of them. Now, one step further, and I think most people have this, is a breakdown of their policies enforced, ideally by line of business and carrier.

So for example, I write 1,000 small commercial fleet a year, like 200 with Chubb, 200 with AIG, 200 with travelers, 100 with Liberty, so on and so forth. And that's really all you need. As soon as you have that, you can identify the biggest one, the most important ones for your business. Most of the time we find that it follows an 80-20 rule. So 20% of those lines of business and carriers intersections or what we call coverage. So for example, Chubb, you know, small fleet or AIG small fleet, each one of those being one coverage.

20% of those coverages will be 80% of the voluble. volume on average for any brokerage, whether it's one location or multi-location, doesn't really make a difference. And so once you've identified the 20% that are the highest volume, you start with automating those. Because if you get those out of the way, that's the most bang for your buck and it's the best proof point. And then you can decide how far you want to turn the lever. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah, it does. I think, you know, I was talking to a good, good friend of mine who's building his own technology product. And we talk every couple weeks just about the business. And we were talking about, you know, I was bitching at him about being busy all the time and how I hate being busy because when I'm busy, I'm not doing the things that grow my agency. I'm doing things that don't grow my agency. because when I'm doing things that grow my agency, I don't feel busy.

I feel like I'm, you know, does that make sense what I'm saying to? I, you know, I can. There's shit where you just feel like you're just, you're just doing it. And you get to the end of the day and you're like, oh, what did I even do today? And then there's days where like, especially for me, if I'm leading into sales and marketing and selling and, you know, I get at the end of the day. And my wife's like, what's wrong with you? Like, I'm still full of energy like I was at 8 a.m. You know, and, you know, we were taught, I was bitching at him like that and then he was asking

me some questions and I just said to him, you know, I think, I think one of the things that, a trap that it's very easy to fall into, specifically for agency owners in the spectrum that I described is it's very easy to find yourself busy all the time. And what happens when you're busy all. the time is you don't start to make, you don't have time to consider what I would consider smart decisions. So smart decisions would be things like, like we had a, I had a guest on here. His name is John Mason. He runs a wholesaler. And one of the things that he said during his episode was some of the smarter agency owners. And by smart, I don't mean intelligence. I just mean,

you know, men and women who are willing, who make decisions that ultimately are in the best interest of rapid growth of their business is, if you were to define smart in that way. They, they, they, they will put some of their commercial auto through his wholesale shop, even if they have an available market to help reduce the potential for major losses and ultimately boost their, uh, their loss. ratio so that they can maximize their contingencies with a particular carrier. That to me is a very smart decision, but it takes time. Like you actually have to be willing to think a little deeper about your business. A lot of what you are describing here feels to me like something. It would be very difficult for someone to listen to this episode, to come to your website, to read the article that you wrote in Chris Paradisos, Be the Last Agent Standing magazine.

It would be very difficult for, I think, for someone to spend time. with your content, with your ideas and not go, this feels like the right, this feels like a, like a positive move for my agency. I think the issue that people are going to have, and this isn't your issue, I'm kind of speaking to the audience at this point. I think the things that we have to determine as agency owners in general is, are we willing to take a step back to think through the positive impact that AI, you know, be it a tool like Chissel or some other tool, do, we give ourselves the time away from busy work to make these decisions? Because I feel like the agency owners that do are going to be the winners 10 years from now.

And you won't necessarily be able to see a specific point in the next 10 years where they, you know, but these are the decisions that get you there. And I'm just, I'm just super appreciative that you took this time with us, man. Thank you. I really appreciate that I was smiling. as you were saying those things and yeah Chris and the last man standing love that

love what they do over there and I'm with you I think small steps as you said like in 10 years it's not necessarily like flipping on a light switch it's more like just life

it's like learning to like crawl and then walk and then run and really you can can't start running. It's not like in 10 years, you suddenly say, oh, wow, I see what that guy over there is doing and I want to do it too because the problem is he's invested, you know, years into building foundations into having the data in a digital format so that he can do, for example, predictive analytics and say these are the right customers for me. And then boom, you see his

business is growing 200% year over year. You're like, I want that too. How can I buy it? And no money in the world's going to get you that because it comes down to just time. The person who made the investment first. And so I could not agree. I don't mean to cut you off and I apologize that I just did that, but I just, I wanted to jump on that point. I will tell you a lot of my business plan for this agency was built on the belief that because I knew the tools that we were supposed to use and I had some of the background

and I knew the right people that could help me learn the tools, that somehow I was going to be able to. to jump the line. And if there's anything I've learned over my first seven months as an agency owner, that is impossible. You have to take the lumps. You have to spend the time. You have to learn the processes. You have to do it. You have to go through that thing. Even if you know exactly what to do. So I agree with you. Those who are, you can wait and see in a prudent way, but at some point you have to make the move because there will not, there is no, if I put this system in place, everything changes. That is absolutely not what happens. Exactly. Yeah. Well, Ron, I want to be appreciative

of your time. Um, I, I just, uh, you know, I, I, I appreciate you coming on here and talking to us about this. You know, I think I love that you support agents. I love that you were and be the last man standing or the last agent stand. Be a last agent standing. Be a last agent standing. Um, I want to be respectful of all our female and I guess non-binary listeners of the show. You know, I want to be respectful, but, you know, be the last agent standing. You know, I think it's incredibly important for agents who do not have a technical background to mix with individuals like yourself who are pushing into the space with a technical background just to expose, you know, for everyone to be exposed to for you to learn more about what it means to be a grinding old school agency and for them

to learn what it means to be digital and fast and connected and using the intelligence and abilities of different um of different computer systems to drive them forward that mixing i think is incredibly positive and uh it's why i love having people like yourself on so where can people learn more about chisel where can they learn more about you awesome well Thank you for having me. Yeah, if people want to learn more, they can check out our website. It's www.

Chisell spelled C-H-I-S-C-L.A-I. You can find, as mentioned, a bunch of thought leadership there. We published weekly blog, talking about how you can improve your agency, how you can be forward thinking. And I think that's really a great place to start if you want to learn more. And we're available on LinkedIn,

And then if you want to find me, you can find me as well. Ron Glosman on LinkedIn. Awesome. I appreciate it, man. You have a tremendous day. Best of luck on Chisel. I'm looking forward to the next time we can connect. And thanks for everyone for coming.

Thank you for having me. Cheers. This as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible. It's not. With the one call closed system, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients under three years during the pandemic.

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