Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Rob Rickard, VP Senior Advisor Development Consultant with Simplicity InsurMark Discussing- Is It Time to Outgrow Your IMO?

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Rob have over four decades in sales and marketing within the securities, real estate and insurance industries. As a senior executive with a Fortune 500 company, managing partner of his own investment firm, past school board president and member of multiple boards, his track record and affiliations demonstrate a high level of professionalism, as well as providing advisors with unique viewpoints to every situation that might arise in the growth of your practice.His years in senior management with a national independent marketing organization gives Robe firsthand knowledge of the obstacles a producer encounters, as well as the steps to take in moving beyond them. His dedication to service is what sets him apart from other marketers. Accessibility, enthusiasm, and personalized service are my trademarks. In 2018, a hand-picked group of advisors were chosen to develop Advisor Mentorship Program (AMP) to link themselves to a network of successful advisors across the country and share best practices. This program helped our advisors double their production collectively as a group. In 2019, this same group of advisors grew their business an additional 25%., 2020, up 23%, 2021 up 24% and 2022 up 34%.If you are an independent advisor establishing a practice based on integrity, leadership, and growth, then a relationship with Simplicity InsurMark and his team should be on your immediate “to do” list. They are dedicated to you, the independent advisor, and everything they do is committed to making sure you have the resources and support necessary to provide the very best solutions to their clients, and their practice. Are you ready to catapult the business to the next level—and beyond? Then they invite to meet their team and customize a growth plan suited especially to you. At Simplicity InsurMark, it’s about people, it’s about relationships and it’s about the long-term. Give them a call, let’s learn more about each other and see if there.Learn more: http://insurmark.net/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-rob-rickard-vp-senior-advisor-development-consultant-with-simplicity-insurmark-discussing-is-it-time-to-outgrow-your-imo

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Rob Rickard, who's a VP senior advisor development consultant with Simplicity and Shermark. Rob, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. I'm looking forward to chatting with you. I know you've got many, many years of experience,

and I want to dive right into this hot topic here of, is it time to outgrow your IMO? But before we do that, give us a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into the industry in the first place? I got into the industry, basically in the financial industry, basically about 40 some years ago, as a broker with Morgan Stanley. At that time, it was Dean Witter, and now it's Morgan Stanley. And through my evolution,

I was there about 25 years, took a break between that and moving into the insurance side of the industry. But yes, I've been in the IMO, or now I would call the ADO, advisor development organization side, for going on right now 11 years. So, yes.

Nice transition. Yeah, it really is. And, you know, it's neat just to see, I'm sure you could tell, stories on how has the industry changed? And it's like, let's just turn the computer on and see what's changed this day, this week, because the only thing constant, it seems like in life is change. So there's always something new to kind of keep your finger on the pulse of. But let's just kind of dive into this concept here. Is it time to outgrow your IMO? What would you say

has to be true before an agent even considers changing? I think there needs to be a point in the I would say the agent's viewpoint of its business, maybe it's not growing. Maybe it's become more task, more job-oriented, meaning he's actually feel like, boy, I got to go to work. Just things aren't moving along as they used to move. And again, and I want to bring up one point here. The concept of changing IMOs is not necessarily that you should change everything, but maybe you need to add something to what you're doing.

And again, I kind of put it this way. You know, I use the example that, let's say you're at a dinner party and somebody walks up to you and says, you know, Rob, what do you do for a living? Oh, I'm a financial advisor. The first thing that goes off in his mind is he goes, click, I got one of those. Oh, I'm an insurance agent. Click. I've got one of those.

So you need to find something that makes you different than evidence. anybody else so they can add you to the team. And I want to emphasize that more in this concept that I'm not really recommending or promoting the idea, I need to leave this IMO and go to that IMO. But maybe I need to add another IMO or something, there's something missing in my current relationship. I don't necessarily want to give that up, but I do need to add something. So be open to that concept. You know, it reminds me the way you described that, it reminds me of the word innovation, meaning sometimes an innovation is not let's clear the decks, let's start from scratch, let's create something brand new. Sometimes it's let's iterate on what we already have and just

put a little polish here and a little polish there and make it better than what it was. Oh, I totally agree. You know, and I give the example that, you know, I talk to advisors that, you know, maybe it's time for you to do a seminar. Oh, you know, I used to do those. Yeah. And why'd you stop? Well, I think you got tired of doing them, but the public didn't get tired of hearing them. So again, it's just re-evaluate what you're doing and find some way to ignite that, that growth idea or that, that thrill that you had about going to work without necessarily jettisoning everything to try something new. No, no. Just start by adding. Yeah. And I think that also what you just described there is really at the core, a mindset shift, meaning be open to some new things and be open to some things you might have, air quotes, tried before that didn't quite work the way you wanted because maybe possibly you tried it before for 10 minutes and it didn't work, but you need to give it a little bit of time.

And I'll add another point. You know, Archie said it's correct. but a successful advisor is getting called by all the IMOs in the industry today. I have business developers in my group, my pod, that work for me to find other successful advisors that I can maybe communicate something unique to bring them into the fold of simplicity and Shermart. When you get those calls, first thing is, yes, you're very successful, so that's kind of a compliment as to why you got tagged. but this is an opportunity if you're sitting in your desk and you're feeling like things just aren't going the way they used to go this is your time to interview that IMO it should not be the other way around you know if you said what do you got to offer Rob

I end up with the concept of you know the terminology throwing up on you I just I've got so much but it's not necessarily a value to you this is your chance to say this is what I'm looking for How can your firm provide that? Utilize it that way versus a selling a position to you. Yeah. Yeah, really good points. You know, and a lot of agents assume switching means starting over. Talk a little bit more about that.

You touched on it, but how can the right organization really enhance what they're doing instead of disrupting? And, you know, part of disrupting, I would even add is the feeling that an agent is like, just this internal angst. Like, things are going fine now. and it's not totally broken, but we want to enhance what we're doing, not disrupt it. The way I would look at is exactly that when you're talking with the new IMO, giving him that exact same thing.

But it might be maybe your organization isn't as complete as it should be. All of a sudden you find that you've outgrown your current organization, meaning maybe even just the people that are working directly for you, and that you've now been taking on some of their work, taking you away from what you normally do. I put it this way. When we bring an agent into the simplicity organization, our concept is we should be doing just about everything we possibly can for you because there's only one thing we cannot do.

And that's meet people. That's you. You're the director of this entire organization behind you. And when you bring an IMO on, They have now brought their office into your office. And instead of you sitting at your office, you know, I've got a question here and I'm going to go try and find the answer to that. If I was sitting in your office, you would turn around in your chair and you'd be asking me that question and say, Rob, you need to find the answer to that. And that's the way you should treat your IMO.

Call them. Talk to them. They should be working for you. because let's let's really peel the layers of the onion back because when you produce they win so it should be a win win so when you as an agent wins you make more money the iMO makes money so everyone's on the same team we are tied to the agent's hip you know and that's why i say everybody on my team and there's about six of us that work under my pod organization that overnight become your team We all carry our office in our pocket. We all will. If you call anybody on our team, including myself, Sunday evening, we answer the phone.

Why? Because there's something that needs to happen because you probably have an appointment Monday and that you need to prepare for that maybe is lacking in your preparation so you reach out. It's my benefit to do what you need done because if you're successful, we both make money. If you're not, we both starve. So, yes, we work 24-7 for the advisors that we have. And those advisors that utilize us on that, never abuse that.

But it's always there. It's always there. Well, you know, let's even think about something without getting into detail of, you know, products and features and specifics and into the weeds. Maybe we can do that another time. but let's look at what typically agents look for, which is show me the money. So beyond compensation or the next glitzy product access,

what tends to be the biggest differences that agents should evaluate? And I emphasize the word should because maybe I want to hear some of the things you think of that. Well, typically they evaluate one, two, and three, but they really should go deeper and consider these. I think it goes way back to the beginning. You know, when we talked about the insurance industry 25 years ago, you know, you were with prudential, you were with New York Life, you were with Mutual of Omaha. And whenever you signed on with those organizations, you went through an extensive training program to do what you're doing, learning how to discover, you know, the discovery process, learning how to pull information from people, how to create the research. how to create the relationship and the trust and the empathy that occurs in these relationships.

When we entered the world of the independent agent, they lost that training opportunity. Many people entered the industry, got their license, and then thought, oh, now I'm going to go make money. So we have brought that back within the simplicity organization to a very, very deep training, agent sales training, that we do on a regular basis to take them back to that beginning of how do I really do what I need to do in this industry. So I think the training is the number one piece. The second piece I think you need to look at is it's not necessarily the IMO in some instances. It's the advisor consultant that's under that IMO.

Are you getting out of my position that you need? that's going to help you do what you do. And that's, I think, the strength that I bring to this position, 40-some years in the financial services industry. No one is a producing agent in the field, but also I've been in the advisor consulting side for about 20 years total. So I've kind of seen what happens in your day-to-day world, and I can help you get through some of those roadblocks to get in your way.

how do I and now that we've gone to the virtual world with a lot of our business how can I create a trusting strong relationship over the phone well that's a different skill set than we had when we were standing in front of people so yes it's not only the the agent sales training but let's bring it back to the advisor consultant to help ingrain that training and I always put it this way I'm going to share a lot of great ideas with you they're not always all mine because I work with 120 to 150 advisors that do something unique and great in their world. Guess what? I share that with you. So you get the benefit of other strong producers if your consultant is willing to share that information with you. And so that becomes almost like a mastermind. You know, not like a mastermind which you would normally think of like a bunch of people getting eat together. on a Zoom call, which that could be the case. But with Rob having tapping into the best practices or the mistakes of other people that, ooh, let's fix this, correct that.

That becomes a master mind where you're tapping into. And like you said, if you ever see a situation or get asked a question, you can go, you know what, let me reach out to my network and you're going to come back within a day or two with some powerful content. We've actually taken it one step further. And in fact, we just had ours yesterday. Within my pod, within my group, we have what's called the advisor mentoring program, AMP, A-MP. We meet on a monthly basis as a team.

We have a certain group of topics that we cover. But we always have in that meeting that opportunity to pull information from the other advisors. We have advisors mentoring advisors. Oh, this guy does virtual appointments incredibly well. How do you do that? It's a sharing. The idea is, you know, we want to raise everybody's production as a team. And we track that as a team.

So everybody becomes involved in sharing and giving and mentoring others in this practice. So yes. Yeah. And, you know, let's even get back to the word mindset that I brought up because what you just mentioned there really comes down to a specific mindset of abundance. more than enough business for everybody because you as an internal advisor development consultant role could be gone, I'm going to keep this best practice to myself from my people or the agents you work with could be thinking, well, I don't want to share my best practices because it might leak out to other people. Talk a little bit about that kind of like a mindset of abundance. There's plenty to go around for everybody. Yeah, there is. And we, I think we just saw through

Limerra or other agency as such, you know, within the insurance industry, the fixed index annuities have just set another record. We are entering what many people 10 years or 15 years from now will look back and say, wow, 2025, 2026, that was at the beginning of the golden age in this industry. There is so much money that will be in transition over the next 10 years. We will not have to tread on anybody else's practice. But it comes down to another thing that we find in this meeting that we have with our other advisors. You've got a great idea.

And I took that idea. I ran down the street with it. I started using it. And I made a few changes. So because you shared with me, I took it one step bigger and I brought it back to you to share with a few the changes I made. It helps these programs evolve because. you've now got other minds sharing and developing and making them successful. So yeah, you can't

keep this stuff to yourself. You know, and I've heard a lot of industry guru influencers out there over the years saying, I don't mind sharing my best practices because you know why? In a room full of a thousand people, probably two are going to actually implement it. So be in if you're hearing some of these things, if you are experiencing some of these, you know, best practices, be the part of the small, small subset that goes out there and actually hears and then implements. That's a big, big special characteristic, right? Well, one of the characteristics that's really important to in Schermbark. Again, we are one of roughly 120 plus. I don't know how many IMOs we have acquired over the last 10 years, but we're one of the many, many IMOs. What makes us, what we feel

kind of unique is we operate our business as a family business. If you need to speak with the president of our company, he will be on the phone in 30 seconds. Our platform is flat. If you need something, we will do everything we can to get that done. But everybody in this organization, we've just been very fortunate to have this type of team, let's say, of agents, they share on a regular basis. They travel together. We see each of these individuals at multiple events throughout the year.

Every time everybody grabs a hold of everybody and shares and embraces everybody's unique position in this market. So yes. I love it. You know, I've been in the sales and marketing industry for 30 years myself and I can reflect back on some of the things that, you know,

little notables that you hear. And maybe you've heard this, little analogy before too. So I'll use it as the intro into our final point here. Do you have 10 years of experience or do you have one year of experience 10 times over? Meaning if you don't learn and better yourself and improve and go to classes and trainings and and stretch yourself, you've got one year of experience that you're just going cookie cutter, stamp, stamp, stamp, doing the same thing over and over. Or if you are iterating and innovating and improving and being transparent and being submitting yourself to accountability

with external people and coaches. Now you might be growing, growing, growing to have that full, yeah, I've got this many years of experience. So looking over your 40 plus years in the industry, what are some of the characteristics that separate agents that continue to grow from the ones that just kind of punch the clock and plateau? Those that are open to learning, this constant process of learning, learning. This is not at all a stagnant industry.

We are, you look at the technology today that we're utilizing in our software and our marketing through AI. AI is becoming an incredible, valuable tool in this industry. You have to continue to stay in front of it, sharpening that saw on a regular basis. Again, I go back to our age and sales training. our top, top advisors in our organization have attended that same training program five or six or seven times because they're innovating the training program at the same time. But we can only pick up so much each time we go. And each time these guys continue to take the time to learn something new,

it's amazing what happens to their practice when they go back. And it's not necessarily in some cases that we're always trying to. trying to grow our numbers, but we're seeing a lot because our industry is an older industry, meaning the advisors are in their late 50s, early 60s, even 70s, that the work life balance is becoming important. So if I'm a $10 million producer working six days a week, I'd love to figure a way to be a 10 million dollar producer working four days a week. So that's the trend that we're seeing also within our industry, that the technology is allowing that. to take place.

I just love that statement and I would like to pair it with that, you know, that M word. We keep talking about mindset because the mindset of some demographics, you know, 50, 60 year olds are, you know, I'm just going to do it the way though I've always done it and oh, that new tech, newfangled technology. But if you can be open to new things and go, what is that outcome that I want? I want to do that $10 million production in four days or maybe even gasp three days, you know, get me there well trust the process trust that there is a proven playbook and with rob and your team behind the scenes with that you know 40 years experience as well as all the the people you work with

you can guide that process so if someone is interested in saying hey you know maybe let me give it a second look here in improving my firm and my growth maybe it's time to outgrow the iMO i'm with or at least to innovate what i'm currently doing what's the best way that the they can reach out and connect with you, Rob. I would look at, number one, just look at Insuremark on the website, www.insuremark, and that's I-N-S-U-R-M-A-R-K dot net. And just that's a good place to start. My numbers, 800-752-0-207.

I just ask for Rob. We'd be more than happy to have a discussion with you at any time. Awesome. Rob, thank you. so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Same with you, Mike. Thank you very much. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.com.