The Ryan Hanley Show - RHS 112 - Andrew Ryan & Jack Hertvik on Dominating the Insurance Game

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comIn this tremendous episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, Ryan Hanley is joined by Andrew Ryan and Jack Hertvik of Hertvik Insurance Group. Andrew and Jack are running a dynamic and growing agency that pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a traditional independent insurance agency, and in turn, dominating the insurance game.Episode Highlights: Jack shares one of the things he loves about working in the insurance industry. (9:27) How did Jack become an SIAA Master Agency? (10:06) Jack mentions one of the fascinating things happening in the industry. (11:34) Andrew shares how technology has changed the insurance industry. (13:16) Andrew mentions one of the huge factors that he and Jack have discussed. (16:42) When did Jack and Andrew decide that using more tech tools was for the benefit of their agency? (24:24) Jack shares the importance of building out your agency’s tech plan slowly. (36:04) Jack gives a few pieces of advice about the insurance industry. (42:36) Andrew tells listeners where he sees the agency five years from now. (51:35) Key Quotes: “If it was as easy as putting it in a box and just saying, hey, do this do that, we'd all be successful insurance agencies. So, watching them figure it out and kind of having that curiosity of figuring out what works for them is the best part of my job.” - Jack Hertvik “You always need to be thinking about how your replacement is going to handle it, not necessarily because you're going to be gone. But, because you might advance or you might have somebody else that needs to do that job. You have to be thinking about that stuff in the future.” - Jack Hertvik “I think that empowerment thing that Jack mentioned, is very important. And I think that's huge, especially in like, smaller agencies it’s probably even more important. Because if you have that embedded in your culture from the beginning, it's just, it's huge.” - Andrew Ryan Resources Mentioned: Andrew Ryan LinkedIn Jack Hertvik LinkedIn Hertvik Insurance Group Reach out to Ryan Hanley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. We have a conversation with Andrew Ryan and Jack Hurtvick from Hurtvick Insurance. And these guys just know what they're doing. Got to meet Andrew in person at one of Paradiso's events that he did in Boston. Met Jack for the first time on this call, but knew of him and knew of the reputation of his agency and was just super interested in everything they're doing. They're just a dynamic agency. They got joint venture going on with a mortgage company. They're an SIA master agency in addition to all the other stuff they do.

And just a lot to learn. Awesome conversation. If you are a insurance industry wonk, you're just going to love this one. And it's just fun to have these conversations because you never know where they're going to go. And you just get tremendous value. And Jack and Andrew are just great assets to our industry. And I encourage you to connect and follow things they're doing because you're going to learn a lot. All right, before we get to them, I want to give a quick shout out to Podium. Podium is one of the premier communication tools in our industry. And they have

lots of different functions and features to their tool. But the feature that I use, the feature I use the most, the feature I talk about the most, is their web chat feature. And what I like about it is it's simple, easy to use. It allows us to customize our messaging. And it pops this little message on our website that basically just asks, like, hey, is there something we can help with? Do you need a quote? Like, just leave us a message here and we'll get back to you. And the cool part is you get notifications on your cell phone. And then when we respond, even if we respond on our computer, it texts the person back.

So the person gets a text message back. So we're getting like 95% response rates on every Podium web chat form fill, which is awesome. I mean, anyone who's done any kind of digital marketing, inbound marketing, knows that 90-plus percent response rate is just bananas. And Podium has been a net gain to our agency and happy to have them both functioning as a tool in our tool belt at Rogue as well as a sponsor of this show. And go to Podium.com, go to Podium.com, that's P-O-D-I-U-M, Podium.com today, and check it out. Get the demo. Again, this is what I say with all these tools, with everything we use, you don't have to use them.

I'm not trying to say that if you don't use the tools that I use, that there's something wrong with you or anything like that. Just know what it does. Get the demo, have someone on your team, get the demo, have, know what the tool does so that if you need it, or you feel like it's something that could help you grow your agency now or in the future, you don't have to then start looking, right? You already know what it is. You can start to plan around it and you can get to work when you need it. So podium.com, P-O-D-I-U-M.com. All right, let's get on to Andrew and Jack. What's going on guys? What's up, Ryan? Not too much. Another day in the neighborhood here. Have you met Jack before? I don't know if you have. I don't think

I have. I don't think so. No. Well, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Jack. Thanks for coming on the show. You got it. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew texted me. Was it last night? You're like, hey, what are you going to talk about? And I was like, I don't know. You tell me.

I just invite people. I don't think it's my responsibility. I have to figure out what we're going to talk about. Brad, we did the same thing to me. Because I've never even done. this was the first thing that i ever done like that and so i was like freaking out i was like dude you gotta tell me what the heck i'm supposed to be talking about so i can like be semi-prepared and he didn't tell me anything but that's the beauty of of of these things in my opinion and that's why i do it you

know there's a lot of other guys and and women in the space that do podcasts and their shows are very structured. Right. And especially outside of our space, there's a ton of podcasts that are. Yes, these same five questions. Here's what they are. We go through them, you know, whatever. And, you know, it's like bio five questions and then they, you know, what book changed your life? And I shouldn't do that voice because it makes it sound derogatory. And I only mean it to be slightly derogatory, but I just, that's just not, it's not at all what I'm interested in. Like, you know, I think that's more of the, my podcast is a business model, right? Like you, you know, I need to have set questions and a flow and people know what to expect. And, and I think that's how you jack your numbers up and how you

are able to consistently produce high volume of content. Like, have you guys ever heard of John Lee Dumas? Yeah, no. So John Lee Dumas started what was entrepreneur on fire podcast for a while it was the most listened to podcast in the world um he did an episode a day he was one of the very first guys to do an episode a day and he just interviewed entrepreneurs and that and he had it was like give me your bio then here's five questions then tell me you know some like freudian question that's supposed to get you to answer in a weird way. That's surprise, you know, like all this like stuff, which, which again, it worked right. People listen to it like crazy. They thought he was brilliant. And I've actually interviewed him twice for different podcasts, not this actual,

technically this is like the fourth iteration of a podcast that i've had and and john's a good dude don't get me wrong i just don't think there's anything special about his show outside of the fact that he did the work and he's hard-working guy and he reached out and he made a business out of it which that part i have a tremendous amount of respect for but the actual episodes in my opinion were boring as shit yeah you know it's like nothing in my life is formulaic i don't need that you know in in podcasts and and people would just be like oh johnny dumas got this guy on and it would be some awesome guest awesome guest except i don't know i just felt like the formulaic nature of it you didn't really get i was never like shocked by what someone said or like wow i wasn't expecting that rabbit hole where if you listen to um joe rogan joe rogan tim ferris

james altucher some of these other people who do podcasts you literally have no idea where they're going like you're you feel like you're on this, you like walking into the forest and you have no idea where you're going to come out or how you're going to get to the other side. And, um, that to me just has always been more interesting. So I tend to under prepare. Yeah. There's that whole Howard Stern school of radio. It's just, you know, everybody's excited. What is he going gonna say next yes um and and this is terrible radio that everyone is listening to right now but um there is an episode of the james alpster podcast in which uh and i'm gonna man there's an episode and there's a guy at sal something it doesn't matter they're talking about um um not larry dav not Larry David, but the guy from CNN who did the show forever, Larry.

Larry King. Larry King, talking about Larry King. So this is one of Larry King's very good friends. And the guest, I think it's Sal Fussman. Sal Fussman. Sal Fussman on James Allister's podcast. I promise this story has a point. So Sal Fussman is on James Allister's podcast and he's talking about Larry King and, and, you know, Larry King, all time interviewer, right? Except there's a lot of people that don't King's style. And Sal is basically pitching James Altucher

on why he thinks Larry King's style is the best in as much as you could subjectively determine that. And basically what Larry King said was, his style was curiosity. That's all it was. He didn't care what you had done. He really didn't care what you had done you really didn't care you know some producer told him hey i should interview jack hurt vic he's an interesting dude

right and larry would show up with no idea why and he would just start asking questions yeah eventually he would figure out what you were interested in what made you unique and by the end it would be this completely engaging conversation. But he said he had oftentimes had no idea even who the person was. Like the audience would be like, oh, my God, look who Larry King's interviewing. And he'd say Larry King would like literally have no idea who this person was. Yeah, wow. And I just find that to be intriguing.

I don't know. Yeah, not to bring it back to insurance, And I just find that to be intriguing. I don't know. This is my- Yeah, not to bring it back to insurance, but it's one of the things that I love about what I get to do, because we're an SIA master agency. I don't know if you know that. I did, yeah.

You know, one of the cool things about that job is I walk into five agencies and each of those five agencies is completely different. You know, they're successful for doing completely different things. And it's that curiosity of, you know, figuring out why it doing completely different things. And it's that curiosity of, you know, figuring out why it works for you and why it might not work for somebody else. Cause if, if it was as easy as putting it in a box and just saying, Hey, do this, do that,

you know, we'd all be successful insurance agencies. So watching them figure it out and kind of having that curiosity of figuring out what works for them is the best part of my job. How did you become an SIA master agency? It's a really strange story. You know, back in the early 2000s, people would send you those faxes like, you know, hey, sign up for this. We responded to a fax. It was easily the best investment I've ever done off of a fax machine. So you got fax spammed by SIA, responded to the fax spam, and it turned into a whole business model for you. It's been good for me. That is amazing. So, you know, I know the relationship with the parentship is different for every master agency. And I've spoken at a bunch of master agencies and done different things for them. And I'm a fan of SIA.

Technically, I'm a member of Indium, the network, which I'm also a big fan of, but I got no beef for SIA. And I think very, very highly of Matt Masiello and was very happy that he is a larger player in, you know, in, in, in what in the future with all, with all the news that came out, I think, I think it's going to be good for the whole channel personally. You don't have to comment on that if you don't want to, but to me, and my understanding of Matt and what he wants to do,

I think it's going to be great for you guys. Oh yeah. No, Matt, I mean, Matt's vision of insurance and what it's going to be in the future, I think is spot on. And I'm really excited and couldn't be happier for somebody that's such a great, intelligent person. And it's going to be, you know, I think one of the fascinating things happening in the industry right now that SIA is going to start, you know, moving in this direction is with technology, you know, it used to be a thing where it wasn't as available to smaller agencies. And, you know, over the last couple of years, the tools that are now available to even small agencies to be able to do things with their agency that weren't even plausible,

you know, five years ago, it's amazing. And I think you're going to see Matt really kind of move in that direction and helping that move forward. Yeah. I think a great example of that is, so maybe like a decade ago when I was with the Murray group, we, we wanted to do some marketing automation and there were really like two options at the time that were accessible in any regard, which were, which was MailChimp, which couldn't be more basic, right? I mean, you look at MailChimp today, it does all these amazing things at the the time, it was literally just you put some names in through an uploaded CSV file and send an email. That was all there was. And then there was Infusionsoft, which essentially you had to have your PhD in rocket science to send an email out. And those were like it. And both of them were really difficult to use in different ways and or limited. And now you have, you know, every agency in our channel could have AgencyZoom and Tarmaca and, you know, these tools that just, man, they just amplify our ability.

It really is an exciting time. Yeah, when we look into, Andrew, you can comment on some of the AgencyZoom, Tarmaca, Aries, you know, combination that we're putting together. It's really powerful. Right. Yeah. I know, Ryan, you're working on some of the same stuff we are. And it's it's crazy because like Jack's saying, like the technology. I mean, obviously, we're slightly bigger than what you are, but the technology is still long you son of a no but it just it's crazy that the technology that helps a 35 person agency will also benefit yeah a three-person agency

you know what i mean and i think it's not it that will definitely help you scale i told ryan this jack i told ryan this last time like a couple times when I talked to him, I was like man even though I could never start a scratch agency, like I don't think I could possibly do it, I'm almost jealous because instead of taking like we have what like how many years old is this agency now? We've been in since 1946. Right, so you're taking 70, 80 years of which obviously successful history, but you're taking away all years of which obviously successful history but you're taking like all these things which have been in place for a very long time you have to kind of like try to make technology work in those ways whereas if you're like starting with technology you can do things completely differently you know yeah it's almost like like we do with our other

thing on the side you know what i mean we just kind of throw stuff at the wall and then adjust as need be. And then, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating from the standpoint, like, I mean, you know, HurtFix Insurance, you know, my grandfather started it, you know, my father, you know, took it over and you know, it's, it's a family run agency where we're in a small town and it's, you know, it's just like every other agency out there from the standpoint of the fact that, you know, we, we started as a local agency that worked locally, you know, it's just like every other agency out there from the standpoint of the fact that, you know, we started as a local agency that worked locally, you know, we didn't write

anybody outside of, you know, probably a 30-mile radius and, you know, there's still a lot of value in, you know, the relationships that we've built and, you know, the local, you know, establishment we've got but, you know, being able now to use that technology to expand out and kind of have, you know, one foot in the future have, you know, one foot in the future and, you know, one foot in the past that's really served us well, it's kind of fascinating. It's like running two different agencies at times, it feels like. I think you're, I think that's a great way to describe it. To me, it is wild that, say andrew and i can jump on a zoom and talk about automation setup and and we have three people and you guys have 30 plus and we can share notes right

i mean now everything's the same and and different but but but that to me is exciting because now it just broadens the spectrum of viewpoints that you can pull from, right? Like I was always been a baseball player, a big fan of baseball. And my dad at age 15 basically said to me, like, I can't teach you anymore. Like I have taught you everything that I can teach you about baseball. And now it's time for you to go learn from other people. And he said, everyone's going to have an opinion. Take what works for you, throw the rest out and keep moving forward. And before we had these

little tight windows that we could do that from, right? Like if you were a middle market agency, you could only, you only talk to middle market. And if you were local, you only talked to local. And now I feel like we're in this place where with technology and with the fact that it's scaled, you know, to, to bolt to all areas, you can kind of cherry pick a middle market can cherry pick an idea from a small three person local agency and apply it and vice versa. And I think it just makes us all so much better. Right? Yeah, the scale, right? I mean, if you have the technology in place, like you got, the big thing that you and I have talked about is trying

to get like we have all these processes right and nothing's written down you don't have like you know it happens but you don't know exactly how it happens once you get all those processes down and then try to figure out where technology fits in the ease of scaling like i showed you that kind of that um that library of videos we did for training, you know, just doing little dumb things like that. It barely takes any more time, but doing that once, you know, now, Hey, the next person we bring on, it's going to be super easy to train them. You know what I mean? That's just the stuff we haven't done before. Yeah. You always need to be thinking about what your, how your replacement's going to handle it. Not necessarily

because you're going to be gone, but because you might advance or, you know, you might have somebody else that needs to do that job. You know, you have to be thinking that step in the future. I do think that's important. I, so I'm interested, I'm interested in both your takes, but Jack, because I haven't spoken to you too much before, I'll, I'll, I'll let you go after, after I answer this question first. So I had a meeting with a carrier partner this morning and it's a good, very good partner. And, and my, my he's, he's our local rep, but he kind of, I don't know. He's very good. It's not your standard local marketing rep from a carrier. Like he,

he advocates up chain for me and is, is helped me get some opportunities that maybe cause he believes in what we're trying to grow. Okay. But so. But so he said something to me. He was asking me, you know, how are you managing growing the business and selling? And I looked at him and I was like, if I never sell another policy ever again in my entire life, I would not be upset.

Not even a little bit. To me, it means nothing. You know, for me personally to sell them, obviously I want my agency to sell policies, but for me personally. And he was like, holy shit. He's like, I've never, he's like, I haven't heard that maybe ever from anyone. Like it's always this very ego driven thing.

So I guess my question is maybe, I don't know if you still selling or if you're managing or how that works, but you know what, I guess my opinion has always been if, if I'm not training my replacement, that I'm actually not growing as an individual. I feel like you should always be training your replacement. Is that something – do you believe that? Do you imbibe it? Is it – like where does that fall in your structure? How do you guys view that kind of thing?

Yeah, I'm a huge believer in it. I think especially because as an agency owner, you need to know almost a little bit about everything that happens in your agency. And if you don't, it's very difficult to manage. So, you know, and it's funny. I mean, I don't think I've sold personally a policy in a while. I mean, I had somebody, a neighbor of mine came up to me the other day and said, hey, I want you to write my insurance. And it's almost an uncomfortable conversation where I say, look, I've got people that are awesome at that, you know, and they are going to take care of you. And if you've ever got a problem, call me, but these are the folks that are trained and will do

the, by far the best job to get you where you need to be. And, you know, by constantly training your replacement, you're kind of empowering everybody underneath you to do what they need to do. That to me feels like a big place when I'm at a conference or an association event or whatever, right? I'm sure you see it maybe in some of your events you do with other agents at SAA. When I find an agency owner who feels really stuck, not just like I'm struggling with this one particular thing or, hey, we just hit a little plateau, but like really stuck. I feel like that tends to be like, if you were to boil down the actual reason it's because they either out of fear of losing connection, which I think is real, um, or not feeling comfortable, they just, they refuse to get out of that place.

You can't go build JVs and partnerships and look for scaling technology and tools like Donna to better understand what's happening for cross-sell opportunities and upsell opportunities. Like you can't put that stuff in your agency if you're also writing the home and auto insurance for your neighbor. Like you just. You can't be good at everything. You just have so many brain cycles. And that's a really difficult thing, I think, for a lot of people to do. I believe I'm wired differently as an agency owner. I'm not a second generation. You know what I mean? I don't get any pleasure out of writing insurance. So I think that's different. But I think for a lot of people, that's a tough leap to make. Yeah. It's, it's important to know too, you know,

what kind of agency you want to build, what kind of, and how you're going to get there and always be thinking about that next step. Cause if you, if you don't, it's so easy to not get there. I mean, it's easy to say planning helps you get there, but it's amazing how many agencies lose focus of that. And you just end up, you live in the weeds your entire life. And if you, you know, you're never going to get out of there. If you keep thinking I can do 85 different things in one day, just you're not Superman. Don't try to be Superman. Yeah. There's only, there's a, there's a hard ceiling, right? Like if you're not, yeah. And I'll just, I'll just call it business in general. You know,

if you're the person who's at the top, who's still doing all that day-to-day nonsense, there's a very hard ceiling where unless you can clone yourself, you're not going to ever break. So you almost have to be planning ahead. And I think Jack and Scott here, they did a really really good job with that, like with everyone here. Like I think, from me, the rest of our staff, there's always kind of like, that buy in, you know, where you, your employees have say in what we're doing. And because they have say, there's responsibility on their end to enact whatever we, whatever direction we have, you know, so I think, I think that empowerment thing that Jack mentioned, you know? So I think, I think that that empowerment thing

that Jack mentioned is very important. And I think, I think that's huge, especially in like a small agency is probably even more important. Cause if you have that like embedded in your culture from the beginning, you know, it's just, it's huge. Yeah. I spend enough time in the weeds on the golf course. I don't need to spend time in my business. Not today. I shouldn't even say that because I can't even make it to the golf course. Matt Wood and Mike Crowley and I are trying to, like, we all kind of live in central eastern New York and we're trying to get a golf thing together and like, what day works for you? What, you know, we're all so busy doing all these different things

that it's like finding a day. And then, you know, when do you get away from your business? But, okay, so I want to kind of transition to when did you guys, so you've mentioned three tools that agents may or may not know about. They certainly should know about two of them, Donna by Aries Analytics. That's Donna

for agents, Google Donna for agents, Donna for agents, or Tarmaka, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. Not that either one are not sponsors of this show. So people should know about those two tools. But you also meant agency Zoom. I'm sure you other tools when did you was uh when was it a conscious decision what was the impetus like for you to go i mean those are some of the more most forward-leaning pieces of technology in our entire industry and we can talk about what they do and how they implement if we want but but just in general, those are kind of the cutting edge tech in our space. When did you as an agency decide that moving into tools like this was to the benefit of the agency? Was there a decision, hey, we're going to move this way? Or were you

always tech focused? How did that come about that you found yourself using these tools? Yeah, so it was really out of necessity. So we started a joint venture with a real estate group. And we found ourselves in a position where suddenly we were getting, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of leads every week. And being able to process them all in the way that we wanted to really led to us looking into AgencyZoom. And that's kind of where it started. And AgencyZoom really were the ones that kind of connected us. I would say it was our first system outside of our management system and our radar that we really got in-depth with. Would you agree, Andrew, that that was kind of the one that really we utilized fully to its potential? Yeah. To rewind back, like we had two years before that,

we had been on Salesforce, but Salesforce, like, like I didn't know what we were doing. You know, we didn't know when you need somebody who knows what they're doing in Salesforce or has something already built out in there to make that work. So we basically wasted a year of paying for Salesforce and did very little with it. Then we switched to HubSpot. I actually really liked HubSpot. Still a big fan of them. But we still had a little issue with like,

HubSpot's not insurance terminology. You know what I mean? So with the sales people, it was just, it was just hard to get them to like, get really into using it. The good thing about agency zoom is that, and part of it's almost that,

like there's a lot of stuff I can't do, but what I can do is like very insurance based. You know what I mean? You can tell it's definitely created by people with insurance backgrounds. You know what I asked about? So getting that billed out, Jack's right. Like we, we kind of had this process and we're Jack and Scott. I wasn't even involved at that point with this but like they had like this process laid out but then i think on the the numbers were even like bigger than they had presumed beforehand so like all right like this makes no sense how we plan on

doing this so agency zoom staff we've been big um i i think i mentioned to you before like we and then we walked out too we, we had Scott's son Griffin was working for us and he had just graduated during COVID. So he has a data analytics background. So he was able to do lots of stuff even outside of the system to kind of connect different pieces of technology, whether we're connecting to our real estate partners or whatever else you know to kind of make that flow of data very smooth and taking that manual like seeing this data in completely out of the picture and i think it's stupid because i think it should be a lot easier than it is like it's almost dumb that we

had to build something like that but doing that and then everything else we've gotten into obviously um i mean tarmica on the commercial rating side is fabulous i know you're using it now um personal lines with what we have going would be game changing once it's live so very excited about. And then actually Grange is the one, Grange insurance is the one that hooked us up with Don. So definitely shout out to them because they, they, Jack's very close to them. So I think we're one of their biggest partners.

So they reached out to jack and just said hey we got this thing and that's funny because i already knew ron from tarmica you know i was like i know ron it was like the weirdest little things i didn't even know who he worked for at the time so we went through all that with them we actually literally just got our login information yesterday oh nice have you jumped in and poked around a little bit yeah we we've been poking around um i'm really jack and i were talking about this last night we're trying to figure out whether we because we don't want another interface for our csrs to go into you know so part of us really wants to postpone until we can get this integration with

agency Zoom, like seamless, you know what I mean? Because I mean, I know you've talked to like Chris Paradis about how he uses it, but it's so funny how one tool can be used two completely different ways. You know what I mean? Like he uses it to, to basically educate his people are doing reviews on every single policy right he kind of has like all this information everybody um we are trying to use it to pick who you want to have conversations with does that make sense it does what it does we don't you kind of have this broken into like two separate sections right you have the people who love us who want to buy from us, or the people who want to leave us, then we need to figure out why they

want to leave us. And if they're worth saving or not, you know what I mean? So those are the two, the two pockets we're going to aim for. And I think Donna really helps us kind of dial in, figure out how to best aim our efforts, you know? Yeah, I see it and how I've been using it so far as more of a management tool. I don't know that I'll have my people, you know, I have Sarah on my team who currently is an account manager, but she may eventually morph into more

of like an operations position. And I'll probably have a limited, more leadership or managerial logins and use it as a management tool rather than a tool that I have our, our day-to-day operators using, uh, is the way that I've kind of viewed it so far. I mean, obviously that's, that's always, that's always open to change and Don is making a lot of improvements and, um, I'm on, I'm on the, you know, I don't think it's a, I'm not disclosing anything here, but I'm on an advisory board for Donna and I spend a lot of time giving them feedback and they have so many, you know, I don't want to say improvements, but upgrades and

feature enhancements and stuff like that that are coming that are just, to me, I see it as a place that I love the idea of it being integrated directly with agency Zoom from an operator perspective, because now we can do the trigger fires and all that kind of stuff, which to me is like, that's the next level when someone's sentiment. And for those that don't understand, the quick breakdown of Donna is agency book analytics. And there's so much more to it, but their defining characteristic, I think, as a utility is its ability to give you real-time feedback on the sentiment, the actual disposition of someone towards your agency based on email convos, text convos, phone convos, and then policy, policy administration.

So it's taking how many claims, how many call-ins for different things. And then, you know, they're, they're very close. It's in beta right now, but they're very close to being able to say, okay, based on the, the words used in emails to you, how often they're emailing, how often they're texting, the words used in text, what is their sentiment? And then, you know, I think about it like, like you guys, you know, you have all this high volume. There's no way for you to gut how people feel about your agency when you have that many people coming in. There's just no way. I mean, it's impossible for you to gut that. So what if, you know, client 59 in that week, you know, comes in and all of a sudden their sentiment for the first two months is an 80 and all of a sudden it drops to a 60, right? You'd have no idea. You can't catch that in net

promoter score. So that happens. Now, all of a sudden, Jack gets an email that says, hey, home auto umbrella client dropped 20 plus points sentiment, something's wrong. And now you as Jack, the leader, or Andrew, you know, whoever is this can come in and go, what something happened on this account, what's going on. And now you can actually find and solve a problem in real time. I, to me, I mean, one, this is the second largest expense in my agency. I, I pay for it. So no one can accuse me of, you know, I'm getting this for free or whatever. I don't. And I just, I invested in it early because I look at, I want to be a high volume shop like you, but in small commercial, and I look at it and I say, there's no other tool that gives me the ability to do that down the line. It just, it's a game changer from a customer experience standpoint. What's up guys. Sorry to take you away from the episode,

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Yeah. We just, it was funny when we kind of first started doing this, we said, Hey, look, I just want to be able to go to each one of my CSRs and say, look, these are the five people this week that are most likely to leave the agency. And these are the five people this week that are most likely to buy something for you. Because before we were just choosing 10 random names out of a hat and being like, all right, let's call these people this week and see what happens. So it really gives us some direction and empowers them to do what they need to do. Yeah. This is the kind of tech though that gets me so excited about what we're doing. And again, it's not about technology. It's about what you can deliver to your customers. And what I think is this stuff, especially something like Donna

coupled with something like an agency zoom or another CRM. I don't want to knock just plenty better agencies, a great CRM. I don't want to knock them, Nick and all those guys are friends. And I, and I wish them nothing but the best as well. So I don't want to just make this about agency zoom, but, but I look at that and I'm like, this is bringing us closer to delivering on the real value proposition that every independent agency actually has, right? Like we do a good job of it, but man, this is taking us even closer to that. You know, now your person, you could, you can actually get to the point where, you know, that for a middle-aged man, a 45 year old guy, Sally in your office is the, is the most, we'll have the most productive conversations versus Tammy or Johnny or Timmy, right? Like you just know. And then for, for younger millennials, or right now, I mean,

younger is now Xennials, or whatever you call them, right? Maybe, maybe Tim's the best person to reach out to that person. And you, you know, eventually, we'll get to that point where you can actually be that targeted and who reaches out when they reach out what they're asking about. I mean, man, it just, it just blows my mind what we're going to be able to do in the not too distant future. And it's funny because a lot of other industries, this is old news almost. You know what I mean? And like, we were just joking about

the stuff that we get excited about in insurance is like crap that like other industries have been doing forever, you know? So, and nothing against, I mean, looking at Tarmac, for example, right? Like how long has someone been trying to build a commercial lines rater, right? Like seriously, I remember even the first time

I told Jack about it, he just kind of shook his head and was like, yeah, I heard this story before. I was pretty sure the government was shutting all these things down. Like why else wouldn't it have happened by now yes yeah yeah so like but just i think we're finally at that point where like i mean things are still kind of happening slower than we like um like especially on the management system side you know but i think we're finally getting to that point where like people like you and I we're not we're not a tech company we don't even pretend to be tech

companies but we can cobble something together which does what we need to do you know and the fact that we're there I think will just kind of snowball and everything will just happen very fast from this point onwards I think that slowness though is really important because, you know, so many agencies, I mean, gosh, you know, when you walk into your average agency, you know, they're not using any of this stuff and they're almost afraid to use a lot of this stuff. And you're, you're never going to win those agencies over by saying, all right, well,

yeah, you got to implement these six systems and change everything about the way you do it. You need to be able to go in and say, hey, look, we're going to set up a timeline, and we're slowly going to build it. I know I've heard you on the podcast say, hey, look, there's systems I want to use and I love, I'm a big fan of, but I'm just not there yet. You got to take it step by step. And I think that's where so many agencies go wrong in technology. They try to do everything all at once, and then they wonder why they're confused and it's not working.

Yeah, I recently did. I had the pleasure and the honor of speaking live at the Kentucky Leadership Conference like a few weeks ago. It was one. It was freaking amazing to be back in person talking to a live audience. It just was so much fun. And it was like I had my whatever, my energy bucket was like refilled, right? Just having random conversations with people that ask questions.

It was awesome. But I was talking to Tara, their executive director, and we were talking about this tech stuff. And she said, you know, I brought up Tarmaco was one of the tools I brought up Don. I brought a couple other things that I use. And she goes, geez, some of these tools I've never even heard of. And she said, you know, and it wasn't, I don't mean that as a knock in any way, right? She's like, half our membership, if I go and walk into

their office, they're still using like, hard files. And it's, you know, these are dusty old offices. And they do, you know, they make money, they have clients. And she's like, how do you go in and tell that person that they're doing something wrong, right? I mean, their constituency, where they live, the type of people they want to write. Now, is that the future? Absolutely not, right? I mean, we know that that's not the future. But I think the point is I think that by having a plan, regardless of its speed, if it's a three-year plan,

a three-month plan, whatever it is, having that plan and slowly implementing this stuff gives you such a competitive advantage that, you know, in one snapshot, you'll never be able to really fully understand it. But if you look back, you'd be like, oh my gosh, look how much further away we are. Look how much further away we are from our competition. And I think it's noticeable. Dude, I do video proposals using neoteric agent, Grant Botma's thing. And I get these emails back. Oh my God, I've never seen anything like this before.

This is amazing. All it is, is me for three minutes talking about someone's policy in a video. And like, you would think this was like revolutionary technology to people. And it just speaks to like, you know, the opportunity because of in general, where we are as an industry. Yeah. And while it is slow and for the agents that aren't slowly implementing, it's going to change for them overnight. They're going to wake up one morning and realize that they're in a completely different industry than what their competition is.

Yeah. And, and, and truthfully, you know, you look at like next insurance and what they're trying to do. You look at Coterie, you look at a tune, you look at next, just bought AP Indigo. You have Coverhound, Milo. You know, I mean, these are the people that I compare, you know, that I compare Rogue to. I mean, we're not there yet. You know, they're not, they're not,

they don't have me in their list yet, but they will someday. And I don't know that, I don't know that many agents are awake to the, and maybe the people that listen to this show probably are. So I might be preaching to the choir just because if you're willing to listen to me pontificate for as often as people do, then they're obviously aware to some extent, but these guys are opportunities. Aren't even going to get to the local level pretty soon. That's

what's starting to happen is deals like your JV, right? Where every deal doesn't even hit the retail market. It's just a partnership that goes to you and you guys are servicing it and doing a great job, but those opportunities aren't even hitting the market. They're going right to you. And that is happening. That is the move. That's the move in our space is that it's not that your guy down the street who's using you today leaves you for next. That's probably not going to happen. What's going to happen is the next guy, he doesn't even get to you because next or Milo or Rogue or someone else picks that person off because they used this tool or they signed up for this service or they got this license and, and they're these deals. They're just not, there's going to be less and less people who make it to

the retail, the true retail market, both on personal commercial life. It's going to happen across the board and being able to have the tech that allows you to create those partnerships like you did with agency zoom and all that kind of stuff that that to me is uh it's something that needs to be considered uh moving into the future yeah we always joke about how when we would walk into like a mortgage person's office or a realtor office you know they'd look at us like oh crap here's another insurance agent you know you're the third guy that's walked in here this week. And, you know, fighting that ground war like that, picking it off realtor by realtor is a difficult game. I mean, I think every agent out there has great relationships like that, that have really helped them grow their agency. And they're good things to have, but man, those

can be difficult to strip away. But when you can get to the top and like you said, kind of choke that pipeline a little bit, it's a heck of an advantage. Yeah. So, you know, when you guys are taking on I want to go back to the essay master agency thing and you don't have to give me any intimate details. I'm just interested in general philosophy. When you look out over your agents and the things that they're struggling with and some of the places that you might see easy wins. So you walk into one of your member agencies and you're like, Hey, here's, here's an easy win for you. Here's something like, what's like one or two things that you see that, um, that, that maybe, you know, it's people listening at home could be, could be potential easy wins for, for, for something. I, you know, I mean, this is kind of a general question, so you can take it wherever you want.

It can be any part of the agency, but just, just some maybe easy wins that you've maybe started to advise or, or that you see just in the place that you sit. Yeah. So a few, I mean, technology is the first one, but I think we've kind of hit on that. So, you know, right now, I think that the biggest thing is everybody's complaining about people and everybody's kind of saying, man, I can't find anybody. And, you know, we're going through it right now. We've got a whole staff of people that have come back from COVID and are working in our office today. And

I guarantee you, there's a few of them out there that are like, man, I miss working at home. There is an entire marketplace of CSRs out there that are being told they have to come back to the office that aren't happy about it. And we're seeing some agents having a lot of success now hiring an agent, you know, CSR out in, you know, Missouri. Whereas before, your talent pool was kind of within 20 minutes of your office. And now what COVID has taught us is we can expand that. And the people that I know that are successfully hiring people are doing it that way. And they're finding those people because they're good, they're qualified.

And all they want to do is work from home. And if you're okay with that, man, I think you can find some really talented people right now. I think that's one of the easier wins that's out there. I love that. I mean, hey, my producer that I hired lives in Illinois. Yeah. Right.

He's in a different time zone. And it has had negligence. I wish I had better processes processes i think that's the key is if you're gonna i think you can um you can uh uh hide uh poor onboarding and processes if someone's in the office because you just be like you know hey jimmy you don't do this but um but so we've that's exposed in rogue some of the lack of documented processes you haven't know we were talking about and i'm actually starting to build out that like google sheets thing that you showed me which I you know is a simple solution to to a problem which I actually really like um

but man I agree with you he's I feel like I hit a home run with him he's in a different time zone and it has had zero effect on on our business Yeah, there's no need to be, you know, keeping everybody, you know, so close to you. You know, it's difficult, different to manage. You know, there's a different relationship that you have to have there, but it's certainly plausible. Yeah, yeah, I think I completely agree with you.

That's a great point. Anything else? Anything else you see hiring tech? Any other places? Yeah, you know, I mean, so within SIAA, you know, we're really pushing a lot more of the commercial aspect of that. And it goes back to exactly what we were talking about on the personal line side, where that market is changing so rapidly that, you know, making sure that you've got, you know, your

foot at least, you know, solidly in the commercial lines market is really important. So that's one thing that we're doing a lot of right now is going in and teaching about just that niche marketing. All right, look, we're going to choose two classes of business and we're going to go after them and we're going to learn as much as we can about them. And we're going to become that person for the state of Ohio that does that, you know, maybe even for other states as you kind of branch out, but that's kind of the big one right now is going in really niche marketing in that commercial lines to be, you know, to build that book of business.

How many states are you guys in? Gosh, 30. Have you, how have you managed that? Have you, do you have someone who specifically, like a compliance person? You know, that's a big, a big question that I get, because we, we technically are licensed, I shouldn't even say technically, we are licensed in 16 states. And then through our relationship with India, and we're basically able to write

in all 50 states. And I get people who ask, like, how do you, what if you sign the wrong document here, there, and it hasn't really been a struggle. I mean, we have a basic list of, you know, the documents that need to be signed in state. It hasn't been that much of a struggle. Have you found that? Oh yeah, no, it's, it's a, it's painful. I mean, it's one of those things where like, I always thought that, you know, if somebody could pass a law that allows us to get just like a national insurance license. Oh yeah. The licensing part is brutal. Yeah. Yeah. That person. Yeah. I would vote for that person to be president tomorrow. So that, I mean, but so we, we've got an office manager that handles all that. Yeah. And you know, it's, it's, it's almost impossible to not have somebody that specializes in it. And I know

there's a lot of companies out there that do it. Um, I'll give a big shout out to who we use. I mean, it's, it's an expense because you're, you're essentially paying someone to do this, but ILSA I L S a I N C I think is their website. But if you ILSA insurance licensing something essay, you know, I can't remember exactly what it is, but man, we, I send them an email and I say, Illinois, and a week later we're licensed in Illinois. And, and that has been a godsend. I mean, obviously I'm hoping that they don't mess anything up.

They don't seem to, they've been doing it for a while. They seem to do a great job. So that's why I'm recommending them. But, but, but the other side of it is it's not in house and you are, you know, you're paying an expense for it. It's not like youhouse and you are, you know, you're paying an expense for it. It's not like you're just going to, you know, NIPR and getting the license. I mean, someone is doing the work and there's a cost to it, but that's who we're using for it. Yeah. And I won't mention names, but I know an agency that went through a fee with the state because the, you know, he got his non-residence license and he was there, but he also had to go to the secretary of state and register his name there. And, you know, how would you know that? You know, it's like, I, you know, that's not something that I would know,

but he got a, he got a $500 fine because he didn't do it. I'll tell you that that is again, I'm again, why it sounds like this. I'm Ilsa is not a sponsor of the show. I just use them just so everyone is aware. But they taught me that. I was on the phone with them and they're like, hey, do you want to do the Secretary of State file with Secretary of State and have us send any tax documents? And I said, I was like, well, is that, you know, I'd never heard of that before. You know, I said, that sounds weird. Is that really necessary? And they're like, well, it's not necessary, but you could get a fine. And, you know, I basically just said, you know, whatever, whatever it takes, I want to, I don't ever want to get anything in

the mail that says I owe anyone money if, if I can avoid it. And if an extra, whatever, a couple hundred bucks helps me avoid it, I'm going to do it. So that, that was something that I was, there, there's also fingerprinting in a couple of States that, you know, is difficult. And a lot of States have like these ancillary documents that you may think you're licensed, but if you don't send the documents in, in a certain amount of time, then it's, it voids the license. And so you're sending your license to carriers saying you're licensed in a state, but really you're technically not. Sorry, Vermont, but we've, we have since fixed that problem. So if anyone from Vermont is listening, we're good now. So it is why I agree with the licensing part. I guess when I said it wasn't difficult, I meant the writing and managing of insurance policies in those states hasn't been as difficult as I thought it would be. But licensing is brutal yeah yeah you know i mean there's always that you know concern about you know hey geez you know is there something in that state that i don't know a

ton about and and we've always been a little bit you know hesitant about doing that one-off you know sometimes for policies yeah um but you know i i think on the on the whole i don't think it's that big of a risk and you know if you got business more often than not you're gonna try to find a way to write it yeah i agree so you know i want to be respectful of your guys' time. And this has been a tremendous conversation. I'm, I'm, I'm, thank you for taking the time with me. This has been great. You know, I'll leave you and I'm interested in both of your perspectives and you're not allowed to say ditto, but just the next, the next three to five years, I'm gonna give you just a little bit of context. I see this as a defining period for the next 10 to 20 years in our business.

I think we're in a transition moment. I think we're in a true transition moment from analog to digital. And actually, I just had a conversation with Nigel Walsh, the head of Google Insurance, which will be coming out. It'll have come out actually before this conversation, but so go, we got to last up to that guy, but we're much smarter than that guy.

No. Well, so he, he, basically what he said was there are two things happening. There's digitizing, which is a traditional agency becoming digital. And then there's digitalizing, which is basically the same word, but with an AL before the ING. And that is native digital businesses. And he said, what's happening is traditional are digitizing and more and more digital agencies are coming into existence and gaining share. So we're in this like tumultuous period. And that's why I think the next three to five years are defining. You're going to define where you fall in the next

20 in this period. So obviously to me, it seems like you guys are on the right path, but you know, do you see yourself positioning? You know, are you thinking about that? And is there any future move that we haven't talked about that you see coming that you can talk about that will set yourselves up sounds like a question for you andrew i think what's funny so like a hundred percent agree with you but i think at the same time it's gonna sound weird coming from one at the same time you gotta remember that like our current client base like we have an office that's like what an hour west of us. And it's funny because those people compared to like people here do business completely different, like completely different. The type of marketing you got to do to them is different.

Like everything is different out there. So I think there's definitely a future that we'll talk about in a second but i think currently you can't forget you can't just go digital and forget everybody else you know what i mean because i think i 90 of clients out there still do business the old way that's what they're used to you know what i mean so even if you're rolling in new things you can't just like pull a plug one day and plug it into a tech outlet expect all your clients to just want to do business like that you know what i mean so i think there does need to be some thoughts put into that and even when we roll out stuff internally right like so a lot of what

we're talking about with agency zoom like i don't even we're just beginning to kind of use that to manage current clients you know what i mean like we didn't even have a book uploaded because we don't, we've been doing business with like some of these people for 20 years. You know what I mean? We don't want to completely change our type of communication with these people without making sure that it's flawless. You know, like I'm, don't get me wrong. We're going to make mistakes, but like, I'm trying to eliminate this mistakes and have the mistakes be with like my

1% of new business clients and not like my entire book, you know. But as far as the future, I mean, I think there's so much crazy stuff. Like, I'm super interested, like someone's going to figure out a way to leverage a lot of what's going on with like, you know, like the Bitcoin, like, you know what I mean? I know, I listened to like Cesar Rambos thing the other day, but I i think it's like and i don't know that that's the answer but someone's going to figure out some way to kind of tokenize all these transactions and it's going to be really interesting when that happens i think that'll trigger a lot of of the a giant symbol effect like all the way down the chain so i think that's something we got to be ready for. And just just kind of like evolving with your clients, you know, like, I don't think

any of us sitting here can say like, hey, this is how we're going to do business in five years, because I guarantee if all three of us were sitting together five years ago, and look where we are now, like, none of us would be like, probably talking about anything that we're doing right now. But I just think you got to be nimble right you know you gotta there's a couple of things that jack and i always joke about that like we don't want to be the first thing to try like we're never going to be the first person to try a branding phone system and we're never going to be the first person to try a management system to be honest with you because those are two things that we just need to kind of make phone calls and

store our policy information, right? Yeah, the dummies like me try it and then see what breaks. Right, exactly, exactly. We're not going to be first adopters for those things, but lots of these like ancillary technologies that are able to connect. I think the big thing with the next step is that like, you notice that all these companies that we've talked about, literally every single one of them, even Better Agency, I think,

like they're able to integrate with these other third parties. i think there's a pipe dream for a long time about having one management system which does everything you need you know and i think that's like a bunch of nonsense the problem is that like even if you build that you're not going to be the best at anything you know what i mean like you're not going to be the best crm you're not going to be the best ams you know you're not going to be the best CRM. You're not going to be the best AMS. You know, you're not going to have the best technology in the back end with analytics. Like, you're just not going to have all of that. So in order for you to take that step,

either, like, I think eventually Jack and I, like, we had Griffin on staff. So like, we almost had like a tech person in the office. But I almost think that's something between that tech person and that marketing person in the office. Those are like the two biggest additions which we've made, I think, you know? And that's really between that tech person and that marketing person in the office those are like the two biggest additions which we've made i think you know and that's that's really kind of planning ahead because like we don't really have 40 hours of tech stuff for somebody to do in the

office you know what i mean but the hope is that we're going to have them you know and the hope is that we might get a couple of them you you know, that might be an extremely important position. So just trying to position yourself in a way to like, whatever comes out, you got to be ready to adopt and try to figure out how to work. Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah.

I mean, it's a big, you know, I guess I could say concern moving forward is what that's going to look like. And we think about it all the time. You know, when, when you talk about digitalizing agencies, I think that there's an aspect of a skill set there that most agents just don't have. And, you know, I always say this when I listen to podcasts like yours, there'll be people on there and they'll talk about, oh, we built this platform and, you know, it does this or it does that. I'm like, man, I can't do that. That's not who I am. That's not what my staff is capable of doing. If I'm going

to build an agency like that, I got to, you know, fire all these people and bring in a bunch of programmers, you know, it's, it's almost like a different world. So, you know, I think right now we're taking that digitizing route because I think that it's something that we can do and it's something that we can do well. And I, you know, and I, I am a big believer in, you know, the idea of, you know, community, you know, when, when I first started in the idea of community. When I first started in the industry, I mean, I never thought I'd end up in insurance. And I got good advice from a friend of mine that said, hey, look, good people that are going to change the world are going to work in every industry. You're going to have to do it wherever you're at.

You can do good things. And so from a community standpoint, we're really big in the community. and we want to make sure that we're a big part of that. And that's part of the joy in it for me. And I, so I think that there's always going to be that aspect of, you know, being an agency that can deliver a product that feels very digitized to my customer that feels the same as if they went directly with the Hartford, but is also a member of their community and, you know, or, or a member of a community where they look and say, Hey, look, man, that guy's doing some really good stuff for his community. Those are the type of people I want to work with.

And so that's what I think it is. I think you need to build a digitized, but it needs to still be a brand. It's still got to be somebody that people want to work with. I think that's the perfect way to end this. I couldn't agree with you more. I think you're right on it, man. Well, Hey guys, this has been tremendous. I appreciate you sharing time.

I mean, there's a lot of dollars per hour being blown right here. I mean, the brain trust of Herb Vic Insurance here on the podcast. No, and all jokes aside, I do appreciate it. I love you sharing your expertise. I think it's tremendous. And I think that,

you know, it's these kinds of conversations, I think help just incrementally, you know, give people little ideas, little nuanced concepts, little turns of phrases that help open their eyes to what's available to them if they want that. And I just appreciate it. Great talking to you. Thank you. Cheers. Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not. With the one-call-close system, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1200 clients under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the one call close system eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible.

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