The Ryan Hanley Show - RHS 130 - John Fohr on Making Compliance Sexy with TrustLayer

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comIn this episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, John Fohr, Co-Founder of TrustLayer, the digital platform helping agencies and business owners alike better track licensing, certificates, and insurance, joins the podcast for an EPIC conversation.This is one you don't want to miss...Episode Highlights: John sits down with Ryan and talks about when he started his business. (9:16) John shares how they started the accelerator broker tech ventures during the pandemic. (14:01) John shares more about his company, what they do, and how they operate with their clients. (23:05) John shares some of the challenges they had to face as a start-up company. (29:10) John tells us that their company and their clients are not brokers instead they work with brokers. (34:22) Johns explains that their main goal for the broker is to make them earn more revenue because of their services. (39:41) John shares that the way brokers adapt is by thinking that the value is for the customer and not just for you. (42:22) John tells us that we should want to focus on building ground truth to build a proof of coverage. (49:41) John talks about managing integrations in an efficient way. (54:43) Key Quotes: "So for us, like, we're the trust layer, right? We're happy to be that middle layer. And if people don't even know that we exist, that's fine, because we can work on just building infrastructure for the insurance industry." - John Fohr "We are either revenue-neutral, or we are revenue positive. For the broker, We're trying to help you guys make more revenue." - John Fohr "Remember, this isn't a value just for you. It's a value for your customer." - John Fohr Resources Mentioned: John Fohr LinkedIn TrustLayer 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. And it is with John Ford, the CEO of TrustLayer. Now you may have heard TrustLayer's name starting to be tossed around. Definitely one of the players in the insurtech space from the value add segment, right? The real like value added services segment.

They're doing compliance, they're doing certificate tracking, all kinds of really good stuff. I'm not going to do the platform justice by fully rolling out all the list of features that they do. But what I will say is John is a great guy. This is an awesome, awesome conversation. And I am very excited to expose you guys if you haven't been already to TrustLayer. Now, in full disclosure, they're not a sponsor and we don't use them yet. It's one of those things that is on our 2022 roadmap as we dive deeper into how we're going to add value to all our small business customers. TrustLayer is on that roadmap. We're growing and we're young and rogue, so just not quite ready to roll TrustLayer out, but I'll tell you, completely blown away by

this tool. I've gotten the demo. After talking to John, it's just something that I'm like, I can see it. And I can see the companies or the agencies, sorry, that take the time to put a tool like TrustLayer in place, I can see it. I can absolutely see where that value is going to come from. So just excited to expose this tool for you, but I just wanted to let you know that I am not using it, nor are they a sponsor. So just so you guys knew kind of where I was coming from.

I just think John's a good guy. I had heard him speak before and had wanted to have him on and finally got the chance and happy I did because this is awesome. So that all being said, I want to give a quick shout out to the sponsors that make this show possible. And that is Tarmica. Don't call me Tarmica. Tarmica is changing the game in the way we quote and compare commercial insurance. Guys, I've been talking about Tarmaca for almost three years now, and there's a reason for that. It is a best in breed commercial comparison rating platform. Just the connection quality, the quality of the quotes, the speed, the questions, how they handle it. I absolutely love Tarmaca. They're an enormous part of Rogue Risk. They have been

since almost day one of our agency. I haven't even considered leaving. Tarmaca is just, it's a best in breed, in my opinion. And when you can use and have access to a best in breed tool, you do it. And Tarmaca is just, it's that for me. So if you're trying to get into commercial, if you want to rate more commercial, if small business is part of your mix, if you want to be able to deliver better service, quicker service, quicker renewals, quicker turnaround, more accurate pricing comparisons to your customers, if any of those things are of value to you, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com today. Go there. Check it out. Sign up. Get the demo. Just get the demo. I'm going to say sign up. Get the demo. See what it's all about. And if it fits

for you, sign up. That's what you got to do. Make it happen. 2022 is the year you take small commercial to the next level. And obviously, we're big in small commercial. We got Pathpoint. We got Coderoo. We got Propeller Bonds as sponsors. Tarmac is a big part of that. The other sponsor I want to give a quick shout out to is Aries Analytics, who is taking the data game to a whole nother level, sucking all the data in from your different platforms that you have, and then finding out where are their gaps, who's happy, who's not happy, where are their opportunities to upsell, cross-sell your business? Again, Aries is one of those platforms that maybe you're not ready for

today, but get the demo today. Go get the demo. Understand what the platform is so that in 2022, you can build towards being ready to add a tool like this to your mix so you can take your game to the next level. It's Donna by Aries Analytics. Donna for Agents. Go to donnaforagents.com. Just Google Donna for Agents today and check it out. All right. On to John 4.

Here we go. John. Ryan. How are you? I'm good. What's going on? How's life? Just, you know, trying to keep the startup afloat you know you know the game you know yeah strikes and gutters man that's uh the startup life that's that

is the deal uh that constant tension of someone was someone asked me a question the other day and i was like well kind of feel like i'm in a biplane uh and i'm flying through like the rocky mountains and at certain times i'm like well above the peaks and life is good and other times i feel like i can just yeah at any point yeah i don't know you're not exactly sure where you are you're kind of hoping there's not a big mountain coming but you just don't know. That is a very accurate and very, that's a very accurate way of describing it. Yeah. Describing it. How long have you been on your entrepreneurial journey? I start, I officially started the agency on March 9th, but I guess technically March 9th of 2020, but I guess technically March 9th of 2020,

but I guess technically I'd say from about 30 seconds after I was fired from my last job, which would be October 6th of 2019. Oh man. Yeah. So you started, you started in the pandemic. I started seven days before it hit New York, before New York state shut down. Holy shit. Yeah. So we, we, we, we, so basically from the, from the moment I got fired from my last job, which is a whole story, which I won't go into, but you know,

8 36 AM on a Monday, I think I'm walking. I'm, I was just, you probably don't. I was a CEO of a fitness frame. I left the insurance industry basically because I had a family member who was sick and I couldn't travel anymore. And at the time I was a CMO for Bold Penguin and that required me to be on the road every single week. So I had this family member get sick. I had to be home. My wife basically basically said i need you home we got little kids whatever um they would not allow me to continue my current position and not travel there just wasn't it wasn't part of the job so um kind of separated from them which whatever and and there's just not a lot of insurance work in the insurance and uh in the uh in the albany. I live in upstate New York. And at the time, you know,

now I could have found, I think a great position post COVID, but pre COVID, you know, everyone was still, you gotta be able to show up here. You gotta be here. You gotta be here. So I've tried, I've tried to figure out like what's the next best thing I can find. And I like to work out a lot. And this gym that I've been working out at, the founder came to me and said, hey, we've kind of stagnated a little bit. We're stuck at 2000 members. They had six locations.

They're like, we really want to grow, but I'm a gym guy, not a business guy. So he actually brought me in as the CEO, which is great. Oh, really? Yeah, it was great. You know, I loved it. You know, he kind of kept

working on the routines and the gym stuff. And I grew the business and we grew, I doubled the size of the business in nine months. And which is awesome. And at that point, he realized the business was profitable again and growing didn't need me and showed up at 830 in the morning to a I'm in like, blue lemon workout clothes, because as a CEO of a fitness, I mean, now everyone's in, you know, back in 2018, being able to wake up every day and put like sweats on to go to work. It was pretty cool. And was, was, was this like a box? Was this like a, yeah, so it was a really, it was actually a pretty cool concept. It was this, uh, it was strength-based metabolic training. So you were doing strength-based exercise, but at a pace. So you were constantly, you were out of breath and getting that cardiovascular workout that was, that you really need, but you were doing strength-based exercises and man,

it was, it was changing. I was really bought in it. I'd seen some people have ridiculous transformations and just overall people being happy and healthy. It was great. But yeah, I'm sitting there in my sweats, 830 AM meeting. We have every Monday, just kind of like state of the union. And he showed up in a, in a suit with his attorney. I knew something was wrong. That's not good. So it was basically from that moment, I figured the universe was telling me it's time to start

your own thing so i did cool man wow that's incredible and then and then you launched in the middle of the pandemic we launched as well yeah yeah no i know i think you launched february or was it april well well technically we launched like we started the year before but when we went to the pandemic we had i think we had four people uh that were full-time yeah and and i think we just hit 50 uh yesterday it's awesome so like we like that you know when it was four people including my co-founder who's awesome yeah uh like you you're constantly like you know what everyone's doing like it's it's you're working like hand in glove right uh and i don't know you but like once we hit like once we hit like 15 20 people things are like especially in a remote environment

right yeah like i don't actually know what's happening to some of these teams anymore like it's like you're not you're not able to check in with everyone every day and uh or like you know in the same way you were before it was a tiny team uh and again everyone's remote right and so you know just like like a lot of the like a lot of the challenges a lot of the startups that really grew during the pandemic. But yeah, it was, it's, it's hell of a time. Yeah. Yeah. It, it, to me, what the, I think the, the, the pandemic, what it, it was kind of a proving ground for leadership. I don't necessarily know. I think, I think in general, I think most people, most white collar jobs basically stayed the same, right? You just work from home. Most companies,

I mean, that's a broad stroke, but I think for the most part, if you were a salesperson, you were still selling maybe a little different, but you were selling. I saw the pandemic as a real proving ground for leadership. Like, I think that there were a lot of lazy leaders that out in the marketplace who, when you're seeing people every day, when you can walk the floor, it's really easy to kind of keep that level of control and, and, and, you know, kind of, kind of thumb on what's going on. And when the pandemic hit, and now all a sudden, you're in a remote environment successful today you need a much more thoughtful engaged leadership than you did pre-pandemic and um i you know i could be completely wrong but that has been my take no of course you do yeah i'm sure there's a lot of crappy like middle managers out there

that are like terrified that like yeah they're they're like their teams could like don't need them anymore and we're like they're like yeah just with like some good structure you can now like manage a bigger team or you or the team can work remote um and they don't need you like butting their like butting your head in their office every like 30 minutes just to make it seem like you're busy uh yeah i know a lot of times like i'll go to like when we run into like hiccups or we're running to you know we run into challenges like every startup it's like it's just like a reminding like i just remind myself i remind the team that like there are a lot of companies that were like like the last couple like last year and a half was a huge like road bump for a lot of come for

every company really but like the vast majority of those companies existed before the pandemic. There are very few companies that have grown up entirely during the pandemic, especially dealing with all the complexities. Because if you were a salesperson before, or a customer success person, or whatever, before, your job your job was to your point pretty similar like during that it's just like well it's like the office i do at home and like there's some changes i mean i travel as much more zoom or whatever but like more or less like you were trained like the training the infrastructure you had everything was like kind of this can be similar

but if everything grew up like like from scratch during the during the pandemic it's like we didn't have any of that momentum going into this thing it was like completely starting from just starting from scratch yeah like uh really and it's almost like a double scratch i've described it to people as like a double scratch environment where you not only had the fact that you didn't have the momentum as you said you also were starting during a time when no one wanted to pick up the phone and everyone had all these personal emotional and psychological stresses outside of work that they were dealing with you're trying to build partnerships and connections and higher well i i will i will say though i going to disagree with you a little bit on that

because I will say, I feel like some people were more willing to pick up the phone. So we did this and this is just coincidental. So we did this accelerator, Broker Tech Ventures. These guys, I just realized I'm wearing their shirt. These guys are awesome.

And so we went through the pandemic. We did the accelerator. It was supposed to be in person. And these guys like pivoted on a dime made it made it on virtual uh and uh it was run by these guys and there's like 14 brokers that got together and then they somehow couldn't like m3 and homes murphy and a few others like got together and convinced all these like competitors function to like work together and uh they did this really good thing but we were able to meet with the like the people whose like names are on the side of the

building in a lot of in a lot of cases because like the ceos weren't moving or weren't traveling yep and so so in that way we would have never had as much facetime grant was wasn't real facetime it was like virtual FaceTime, right? But like it was still way better to actually build like direct relationships with like, you know, 10 plus like C-level people at like some of the most innovative brokerages in the country. So I thought that part was pretty slick. But all that said, it's also nice to get back on the road a little bit. Did you go to InsureTech Connect? I didn't.

I would like to go next year. We've been hiring like crazy for us, for where we're at. We're kind of in a growth phase I didn't want to be away from. And I've been to InsureTech Connect before, and I think they do a tremendous job. I also know that it can, if mismanaged, be a tremendous boondoggle. Oh, 100%. I was not prepared to navigate that. I just wanted to keep my head in the game.

So I skipped that. I skipped a couple broker events to IAOA. Again, not that I didn't want to be there. You just, I don't know know you kind of have to pick you know right now where we're at um you know i kind of have to be around and um trust me man i get it yeah so we i didn't i you always have that FOMO though because i love you know this is why i is, I just thought it was interesting from like, it was like the first time where I was like actually around people again at scale. And it was just, it's funny how,

like how quickly people like swing back into it. Hey, what's, what's behind you. What's that? Yeah. Declaration of independence. Oh, get out of here. So you're the, you're the guy who bought it from those crypto guys. Yes, that's true. Yep, that is. Because there's a lot of Bitcoin and ETH invested in that right now.

No, I've had the Declaration of Independence up in every... I've had the Declaration and the American flag, not always that particular one, although a version of the American flag in every office that I've ever worked in since 2006. So it just kind of travels with me wherever I go. Kind of reminds me of, you know, that you have to sometimes you got to do crazy shit in order to get things done. You know, so. So, yeah, it's just a good reminder. So how are you spending your time right now? What are you, what, like, what's like the biggest

like pain point you're dealing with? Yeah. So our just selling insurance really is, is what it is. You know, we, we, um, so we started, I launched this to be a digitized middle market brokerage. Um, and you know, unlike many of the CEOs that fortunately you were able to talk to none of the CEOs that I was trying to prospect, you know, in March of 2020, we're picking up the phone. Well, I think, you know, that's a very good point. We were, we were engaging brokers then. And to your point, I bet the CEOs, like the reason they were available was because their customers probably weren't, were not picking up the phone in the same way. Yeah. Yeah. No. And, and, you know, I completely get what you're saying.

So it was, so for, for that particular, for trying to prospect middle market from scratch, it was, there was, there was nothing. I mean, literally voicemails that said, Hey, we have no idea when we're going to be back. Right. So that lasted, well, it, for the first three months that rogue existed, I didn't sell one policy. I had invested all my own money. I'd bootstrapped the agency on purpose. Um, cause I didn't want to do a raise until I had hit a place that I actually had something to raise against. Um, since, you know, we're not like a high tech play, uh, all the VCs don't, they don't really get

turned on by that. So, um, so, so I had to pivot and that pivot was from middle market into small business. Cause while middle market businesses had oftentimes had the bank roll and whatever, you know, kind of accounts receivable out far enough that they could weather this storm. Small business had to keep operating and they had to be around as much as they could, depending geographically on where they were located. So we pivoted into small business and built a fairly substantial inbound engine for small business, which is what we see today, which is cool. The next phase of our business is coming, is swinging back around to, you know, making that, that middle market, kind of vertical based digital agency realized.

So now essentially, you know, again, I think you could either let the pandemic beat you or you can beat the pandemic. What it was allowed, what it allowed us to do or what it forced us to do was basically build this really cool base layer of income and prospects, right? So we have 250 to 300 inbound small businesses calling us, you know, contacting us, calling us, whatever, every month. And that kind of acts as the base layer for our business. And now what, and we've gotten very good process driven at kind of working them through. And that's awesome. And the next phase is now starting to build out the middle market verticals that attack that next tier up kind of sitting

below where like a Brown and Brown or Gallagher would play, but above kind of your standard local personal lines focused independent agency. So we call that rogue premier, like 25,000 to 250,000. And building out that is where we're at right now. So it's, you know, it's a different sales process. There's a little more outbound. You have to get a certain type of producer who can do that. There's a certain type of person who can do outbound and work, work that. So there's some hiring things and, you know, all the, all the stuff. I mean, we're, we're doing very good. Just, it's kind of classic, classic issues of we're in a scaled process yeah how did you end

up at uh how did you end up at bull penguin i'm just about a rocket ship yeah so i had known um ilia for geez three years i knew mark for four years um you know we i had known them when it bull penguin didn't even exist when mark was still running whatever the company was before that. And, um, it just, you know, I had been at trusted choice.com. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Um, and I built agency nation, which is a, was a digital media platform for them. And I didn't, I didn't work really well inside of national association politics. I'm not a real good politician, I found. I don't think that I would make it on the national political scene. So I kind of, after four years, I kind of worn out my welcome with the, with the national big eye and it was,

it was time to move on and they were looking for a CMO and it seems like a good fit. How much of that? Yeah. How much of that did you get? No i think i got most of it okay cool yeah yeah yeah um so dude i uh tell me tell me a little bit about trust layer i mean i've i've heard a lot i've heard uh you know i've seen a lot of the press yeah i've seen the press releases i follow you know i follow along i've heard some people i think you talked to uh a buddy of mine david carothers the other day or at least maybe maybe you talked to him, somebody that I know who was saying some good stuff. So, you know, I'm, that's awesome. Yeah. You know, we've spent the first 20 minutes here kind of bullshit in, in general, which is great, but I'd love to let everyone kind of listening in at home, just to get a better feel for,

for what you guys are up to, you know, and what problem you're solving. Yeah. So again, like I'm John, I'm one of the two co-founders of a company called TrustLayer. And so the pain point we're trying to solve is that, right, when two companies are working together, there could be a fair amount of friction. It could be like identity information. You got to do like, I don't know't know kyc stuff you might have to track licenses you got a plumber coming on like onto the job site or you've got like like uh like for if you're a broker you need to have you know coverage or whatever like type of license stuff uh or excuse me you have to have like you have to be licensed um you also need to track insurance so

that plumber that's going to go onto a job site, you have to validate that they actually have insurance. If you're a bank and you have borrowers, you need to track that. Those guys, whether it's like auto loans, mortgages, like every piece of equipment in the global equipment leasing industry, like time and time again, companies have to like track and validate this. And it's like all done through paper. And so companies don't want to deal with this. Companies are like, I want to focus on my actual business. I don't want to focus on like tracking insurance

of my subcontractors or my vendors or my suppliers or my tenants. I just want to like focus on like the actual business. And so we have a tool that automates that whole process with like the collection and like use some fancy OCR and AI tools to be able to extract data from it and really have like a like automated robotic process, what's called robotic process automation, RPA, to just simply like automate that workflow. But instead of me pushing around hundreds of millions of pieces of paper, I'd much rather actually solve this pain point. Because when you get this proof of coverage, you don't actually know if the information is authentic. Like, unfortunately for our first customer, but good, good for the story.

Uh, we learned that our first customer out of his 40 vendors, one of his, one of his vendors was just committing insurance fraud, just straight up like lying about coverage. And unfortunately for our customer, there was a big problem. And our customer, you know, like before they came to us, like they had to write a big check. And so if we could create a way to have a digital proof of coverage, that would be game changing because now you actually could allow for real ground truth, not just within the insurance industry, but within like the insurance industry, but within like the construction industry, right? Which within like the property management industry

with banking. And so you can actually validate this information in a more real-time basis. And then you as their broker can one, like provide like additional consulting services to them if you want, or really be like kind of assist with this like risk management piece if you want. And the nice thing is the robots do the vast majority of the work. So you can actually focus on the complex things rather than like the admin pushing papers around, which again, no one really wants to do, especially you as a broker don't want to do. Cause you want to, you want to be bringing in new customers and you want to help us. You want to retain your,

your customers and provide like a really good service to them. And so that's what we're up to. It's a pretty big challenge. The platform that's in market today, like I said, automates all the paper-based workflows. And then we're got a number of pilots and this digital proof of coverage is a very ambitious thing. But thankfully, we don't have to do it alone. Yeah. So we're working with a number of really large carriers and brokers.

And actually, in the last funding round, as of now, I think we have 24 of the top 100 brokers that actually invested in TrustLayer as well as a handful of carriers. So they've actually invested in TrustLayer. So now we have like real buy-in from the industry because tracking coverage or like just proof of coverage has just been a big pain in the ass for everyone in this space for too long. And it's exciting to have the industry get behind you

and say, we think you are the ones that are going to be able to solve this. Yeah, that's tremendous. I've seen a bunch of cert tools and different stuff like that. And I think it's interesting to me, but the digital proof of coverage that you're discussing is a, is a much,

it's a much more dynamic and sustainable way to do it. And, you know, that to me, you know, so our, um, the concept behind our agency to give you some context to this, is a term we call human optimized. What that means is, you know, through all the work that I've done in my career, 16 years in the industry now, I probably had 50,000 conversations with everyone from, you know, single person startup, local agencies in Western Iowa to the 42nd floor of travelers in Hartford and all these guys. And, you know, what I did, you know, in launching Rogue was kind of take a derivation of what worked and what didn't in all those places and where I saw it go. And essentially what you just described is, is in essence, what we call human optimized, which is give your people more time

to be what they really are, which is value providers and less time being transactors of nonsensical zero value add activities. And the more of these zero value add activities that you can remove from your people's day or the reduction in time that you can put what that, what, you know, what I think happens,

what unfortunately a lot of independent agents look at that as, Oh my God, I'm losing my value. This is my value. And the way we look at it as all we're going to be able to do is touch more customers, spend more time with each customer and, and build deeper connections and relationships with our customers, which is ultimately where more revenue comes from. So I absolutely positively love this concept. What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode. But as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And in exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're

watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, et cetera. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you i need your

help share the show subscribe if you're not subscribed and i'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because i read all the comments or if you're on apple or spotify leave a rating review of this show i love you for listening to this show and i hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. Yeah. Thanks, man. Yeah. It's, there's, you know, I think I will say we went and we came out of, we came out of San Francisco and we, I think we, when I was first, I came at this, not from the insurance side, but from like, I felt the pain. So we were investing in a handful of real estate projects and I would see some of these real estate construction projects

get delayed. And I would say, well, why, why, why did the plumber not start today? They're like, well, the plumber couldn't get access to the job site because he didn't have the right insurance. And you're like, okay, like, well, he can't simply prove that he has insurance and then it's like well don't worry it'll come yes it'll come tomorrow or the next day well it's all a day away well the problem is like if the plumber can't come today and the carpenter's coming tomorrow he can't like put drywall up if if the pipes aren't in the walls today so and the carpenter might not be able to come back for like a week from now so you have these like cascading delays that are just bananas that like this is happening that like

2022 for god's sakes and like we can't people are paying for their insurance and they're unable to easily share it with someone else that they like that they want to control the data and they can't easily share like that's crazy and as a result it would cause like a lot more cascading delays so you know from as a broker's perspective they don't want to focus on like admin they want to focus on like the complex tax where they're really creating value that's the same thing for that plumber it's the same thing for like every other company that that that has to buy insurance that uses insurance on a day-to-day and pretty much i mean every one of your customers so like that i want to avoid i will

say when we when we first started on this journey and i was like oh like all right we'll solve that pain point and then i think like every ins tech, you go through this like brief moment where you're like, the broker does what? Like, that seems so manual. Like we can totally automate that. And then once you learn like a monochrome, just like this, once you like, once you like actually like realize what a broker does and the complexity and all of the stuff that a broker has to deal with you're like holy cow like there's no way that like we're going to be able to automate the broker you need a super smart switched on professional who knows what the heck they're doing we just want to like automate all the crap away and allow for like ground truth for proof of coverage but like then let the broker

be just focused on the complex task and as well as like the plumber focuses on the complex task that they have to focus on yeah like whomever the bank focus on their their thing um yeah so that's that's what we're working on thankfully we got uh really good feedback also from like like i was saying before like the industry, like the industry. So like the industry was able to buy, you know, really buy into this early on and, and, and, and we wouldn't be able to do it without the support from our broker partners. And so, yeah, that's good. It's a good time.

You know, that, that is the thing that crushes so many insurance technology startups that hit our space is they come in, they have what is a beautiful vision. And then they realize that every single carrier does business differently. Every single agency does business differently. Every single agency management system captures data and pushes data differently. There's this wacky thing called download, which uses AL3 technology from 1979 and controlled by a monopolistic oligarch who plays favorites openly. It's like this wacky, wacky system. And you're like, this is the undercurrent of our entire economy, right?

So if it wasn't for insurance, Empire State Building doesn't stand. New York City doesn't exist, right? Like these entire, it is the underpinning of the entire economy, yet it is still operated essentially by horse and buggy. And it's done fairly well, which is the crazy part, right? Like things happen, buildings do get built, new businesses do start, buyers are financially recouped. And that is like the hardest thing. How do you manage this? I don't want to say broken, but it obviously is in need of drastic innovation with it is also currently incredibly financially successful. So how do you make that business case of,

yes, your job is tough. And yes, you probably have more people doing things that they shouldn't be doing from all these manual processes. But at the same time, you're basically printing cash. So I can't really tell you, you know, it's hard for me to tell you, you're going to make X more if you use this process. That is like the weird tightrope that you have to walk to get to a place where you really are implemented. And it sounds like you're on the right path, but it is a very tough thing to do. Well, also there's a clear difference for us. We're an insurtech, but our customers aren't insurtech. Excuse me, aren't brokers.

Like we work with brokers. Yeah. But like we think about the customer as the end user of the platform. So that's the home builder. That's the property manager. That's the financial institution. That's the franchise that has to like track

his franchise her franchisees like so that's the that's the um uh that's the end the end customer for us the brokers and the carriers we want to make them money so we've somewhat flipped this on that on its head we're like we want to be a profit center for them uh we're not talking about just saving costs for them we want to we want to make a profit center for them. We're not talking about just saving costs for them. We want to, we want to make revenue for them. And which is what, which is what we're doing with all of our broker partners. Then at the same time,

what's challenging when you have like a multi-party workflow, we have different stakeholders, right? Carriers, brokers, requesters like your certificate holders. And then like, and insureds, every one of those parties has like their own objectives. It's not the same. So when we first launched, for example, we brought a bunch of home builders. They're like, this is great. Like you can, I've got like 50 subcontractors. I've got five different subdivisions. Like, this is a nightmare for me to track. I'm getting

audited every year. What a pain in the ass. They liked it, but initially they then said, if you're already going to reach out to my subs and ask them for information, can you get the W-9? I really need that article of corporation, passports, driver's license. Then it became COVID forms, OSHA documents, surety bonds. So now we can handle any of these additional documents or workflows as well, because it's important that we provide value for carriers, brokers, risk managers or certificate holders, or what I call them, inquesters, as well as that individual plumber.

And so you have to make sure that you can add value to each one, or else I don't want to use like the platform, it needs to be super streamlined. They're already working inside. I don't know. Let's say for example, construction companies might work inside Procore or you're already inside QuickBooks or what have you. And so that's why we want to make sure that we have the best integration possible with Procore,

where you can actually have as much of your process work within Procore. You're already in QuickBooks, like a seamless relationship with QuickBooks where you can stay in the platform as long as possible. And you don't need to bounce out occasionally when setting up Trust Slayer. But people don't want to do like,

they don't want to have context switching with all the different tools that are out there. So really making sure we meet the user where they are is vital. And I think that's another thing that a lot of people don't do that. They try to like think that they're, like everyone's going to come to them

and they're going to be like the epicenter of everything. And so for us, like we're trust layer, right? It's, it's just a layer where we would love to, we're happy to be that middle layer. And if people don't even know that we exist, that's fine. Cause we can work in the, just building infrastructure for the insurance industry. Yeah. So what is the, uh, talk me through the broker use case. Like if I were, oh yeah, I were going to use trust layer as a, as a, as a broker. Um, and I was going to like, what am I doing? Am I getting my clients to sign up for it? Like, how do I use it? What am I, what am I doing? Think about it like you're, uh, the same way an accountant might use QuickBooks. So I never, we didn't actually

pay for QuickBooks originally. I signed up for a bookkeeper. I found a bookkeeper and she was like, okay, well, we'll put you on QuickBooks. So I just paid her and then she pays for QuickBooks. And she also charges a whole bunch of additional money for providing services for us. And that's the same way a lot of brokers are using TrustSlayer, where they will offer TrustSlayer to their customers. And it's substantially discounted for insurance brokers. And then they will have insight into what TrustSlayer is, or excuse me, the workflow of their customer tracking all of their subs or suppliers or whoever, ride share drivers, whoever they're working with. But now you have clarity into what your customer is doing. So now you have a much deeper relationship with them. It's a super sticky relationship also. And so at the same time, you also get a whole bunch of leads too,

because you just imagine that home builder that has that sub that has to get access to the job site today. He would love for you to reach out to that subcontractor and fix the glitch. And so we see that a lot of our brokers that, one, they can make additional revenue, they can get a better relationship with their customer and make it stickier. But two, they can get a whole bunch of leads generated for them. Anyway, so that's how

they're used. It's super flexible. We are either revenue neutral or we are revenue positive for the broker. We're trying to help you guys make more revenue, and then we'll take a percentage of that, but that's it. Yeah. Yeah, the cool part, this is one of the aspects of where I think we have to go as an industry. I think some people will listen to this and like you said, no one wants to bounce in and out of a million systems, right?

Right now, that is the life of an independent agent or broker. Independent, yes. There is literally no singular system that you can use that will allow you to do most of the stuff that you even want to do. And I don't want to go down the hate spiral of, of our technologists, our, our legacy technologists in this industry. But you know, that being said, if,

if it's a low touch system that allows you to add additional value to your customers, then it's well worth it. Like we use, um, a similar, a similar concept would be, uh, the client portal that Zywave has. So we use Zywave client portal to offer HR solutions. They have all kinds of safety training, safety, manual creations. If you need to get one of those posters up in your, you can go in and do kind of like a, a, a, a Mad Libs

version of that poster, then, and print it out and hang it in your office. And there's all kinds of cool. There's all kinds of cool stuff. The struggle that we have, and this, this is kind of where the question comes from the struggle that we have is it this is kind of where the question comes from, the struggle that we have is it's another system that our clients have to log in and out of. So how are you training brokers? How are you recommending brokers get that adoption from their customers? Because everything you've described seems like a home run to me and i i can i literally wrote down reach out to trust layer to get a demo as we were talking here um so that's a good thing 37 minutes in you sold me um but we talked about bullshit for the first like yeah yeah yeah so it

only took you like 16 minutes uh yeah so no which is, which is great. But I guess my point is like, okay, so I can see it. I'm bought in, but I got a lot of tools that people use or don't use. How are you seeing brokers get that adoption that really is meaningful and adds the value that you're discussing? Well, remember like this isn't value just for you. It's value for your customer. Yeah. So your customer has to deal with this. So when you're going up for renewal also, and one thing I think brokers kind of get this sense of like when you're going up for renewal,

you're going to market and you're trying to put your customer in the best light, especially in a hard market, right? Trust Slayer is one of those tools that we can easily position your customer so that when you're talking to carriers that that like this is not just a run-of-the-mill customer this is a customer that's actually taking like a proactive stance with their risk transfer uh and so in that way like it's just it's a value add it's good for the value add we don't need the broker to do a lot of work like most i would say i would say the majority of our brokers like they bring on the customer they're there if their customer has a problem but it's not just like they're not they're not really offered they're not really doing that much um because one it's just like a lot of the admins like automated. And then their customers kind of handling some of the things, but again,

like the can automate a lot of it, but the broker is there if their customer has a problem. And so for that, it's like a really slick, like, I don't know, like this guy doesn't have the right coverage. Should I waive this requirement? I got a broken pipe, right? Like, do I really care if the guy's got a worker's comp? Like how big, like what is my liability risk here? And so that's something where like the broker can hop and provide like value add and then like pop out

where they don't have to do any sort of like admin or pushing papers around. Yeah, cool. The other challenge is like those are all tools that are like nothing against any of the insure techs but like those are all tools that are insurance focused your customer is not focused just on insurance yeah insurance is one of the 10 things that they got to deal with today that's that's you know making them get like lose their hair like they want something that that can do things other than insurance and so that's where

like even something as small as like tracking w-9s or like doing surety bonds or like all this other kind of stuff like we have one customer that's coming on they've got uh 30,000 vendors they work with and they need all 30,000 vendors to like sign some document and to prove they have been covered where it's like, okay, great. Now, like in our platform, you can just like upload it and get 30. And that has nothing to do with insurance, by the way. And so if you don't provide value beyond just that,

you may be focused on insurance. The carrier's focused on insurance. That home builder, that franchisor is not just focused on insurance. Yeah. It's funny. And they run into the same thing too. We can get a bounce around all this stuff.

So that's why like the open API structures, like the integrations with all these different platforms is really key. Yeah, this is going to sound, this may sound out of left field or whatever, but it was yesterday I was talking to a buddy of mine and we are convinced that the blockchain technology will have a major impact on our industry, but just way longer than we would probably than it will in other industries in this. Yeah.

But we were doing some brainstorming over mostly because we're nerdy losers who just think about insurance all the time, but we're brainstorming over, like, where do we think, where do we think a blockchain could or the technology I'm broad stroking the tech, but, but where do we think that type of technology could, or the technology, I'm broad stroking the tech, but where do we think that type of technology could drastically improve efficiencies in our industry? And one of the places that we kind of thought of was COIs, right? Like to your point, why in the world does a vendor have to request a CI from a contractor who then sends a request to us?

Then unless it's perfectly aligned with his current coverage, we then have to send a request to the carrier, wait for the carrier to approve, deny, change, endorse, whatever, then come back, make sure it matches what the customer actually needs, then produce a CUI who we give to the contractor who then gives that to the vendor, right? So that's like the standard process that you kind of- Oh my God. Is it just, it's almost laughable just listening to-

Yeah, that's right. So what we were brainstorming is, imagine if there was just a place that held in real time at all times, the current situation, right? In force, not in force. Coverage level, whatever. But just that block holds that at all time

and people can just ping that block to say, this is my insurance block, right? This block is ABC contracting. And if we need to make changes to this, we have a mechanism to do that. And that block gets changed. But ultimately, this block is ABC construction. And what's in this block is proof. And we don't need to have 16 emails and 47 PDFs to get it. It's what's in this block is proof, and we don't need to have 16 emails and 47 PDFs to get it.

It's what's in this block. And there's so many things inside our industry that, again, whether it's blockchain or whatever, but that concept of how is there not at this point databases that are anonymized they need to be whatever maybe chubb doesn't want harford knowing that they're the one on this policy or whatever but the contractor doesn't care and nor does the vendor the vendor just wants a green check mark or a red x right is it are we good or are we not good? And that, you know, to a certain extent, that's kind of what I hear you describing is this is that kind of green check mark, red X type system where, you know, based on what's in there, your, your customer can ping their sub and go, is it a green check or a red X? And if it's a green check, rock and roll,

let's go to town. If it's not, you know, then we need to solve this problem. And these are those type of, um, so, so because we're fully digital, I, I, I track, uh, not in a draconian or micromanaging way, but I do track the time spent fairly closely on different tasks. And to me, understanding the time cost of certain tasks and working to either reduce the cost or just remove that cost is a huge win, even if it's small, because as you scale those, those small increments add up. And to me, what I hear you describing is,

you know, it's not a be-all end-all solution to every shitty non-value-add task that exists, but it's a really nice reduction in what's probably a heavy time cost in just about every brokerage that exists in the country. You talked to almost every broker. Honestly, I'm smiling. I just like, yeah, you're like,

this whole broker thing, like you want to roll it up into trust layer let me know because like yeah you're way better than i am than uh than uh synthesizing and pitching this um this is bananas if this is and it just but your point it touches so many other things yeah so again art we're dealing with proof of coverage, but like really what we're talking about is ground truth. Yeah. Yes. You're that plumber. You walk onto the job site.

There's something that's off, right? You need to make this guy an additional insured or whatever it is. Like if you have ground truth, then in real time, you can then have some kickoff some workflow for i don't know making someone additional insured now we're not doing that but like i mean we can see we could in the future but like that'll be some other startup like that's what we want like the we want to focus on building that ground truth for the industry yeah uh and and and you you also identify another thing which was travelers doesn't want Chubb to know

in the business. Of course not. Like you don't want your competitor down the street to know your customer list. So the North Star of everything that we've done so far has been users control their own data. And so from that point, like with, with, for the next time I'll, I'll, I'll,

we can geek out on this a little bit more, but like the way we were building this infrastructure users actually will retain their data privately siloed behind their firewall. And in a lot of cases, when data is shared, it'll actually be less data than it is now so we have we have companies that that that we know of companies that they they have such little faith in uh certificates of insurance so ask for the entire policy yes which is which is a major which is a major issue right it's like that a tremendous amount, but why are they asking for that?

They're asking for that because they know that this, like the COI has such little value with like, don't even know if it's authentic. Like, like again, our very first customer learned that the hard way and they don't know if it's still current, right? Just because you had insurance six months ago, it doesn't mean you haven't just because you had insurance two days ago, it doesn't mean you have insurance today. So, and then third, it's like, it's a pain in the ass to like track all this information when you have to

like, I just had a buddy who caught one of his contracting clients, just basically Adobe acrobatting COI forms. That's funny. And it came to him because one of his clients did business with another one of his clients who said, hey, can you just check this cert? And then he's like, you know, now the good news was the guy did have insurance,

but he was budging his cert so we didn't have to ping my agency. We've run into that a lot. In fact, before we even beat, excuse me, before we launched TrustLayer, like when we were still in development like ideation right um i i interviewed someone and he was like i don't understand the value i'm like well it's isn't it a pain in the ass to like get all these documents he's like well no because i don't know if you're familiar with this program it's called adobe acrobat and uh it's incredible so i can i'm like oh tell me more about this program and he's like yeah it's incredible i could just go there and change the date and if the guy needs to be an additional insured i could add it down here i'm like stop hold on i'm gonna press i'm

gonna press record i want you to repeat everything you just said you've just broken about 17 financial regulators. Yeah, you're going to go on our homepage. That's funny. Yeah. So anyway, we're just trying to do our bit, right? We want to build this infrastructure layer. We're not competing. We're not a carrier. We're not a broker.

We're not competing with our partners. We want to drive as much business as we can back to our broker and our carrier partners as possible. And then have some fun in the meantime. Yeah, that's awesome. I think it's cool. Now, are you doing anything with blockchain? So sort of, I don't usually say the B word. Make my day. I just want, I just love it. I'm so bought in. I, I just want something in insurance to be blockchain. So, so to your point, so actually when we first, when we first launched, we, it was like during the last Mayhem, when we were first like thinking about this, right. Into, into like 2018. And so when we first came up with this and part of

like we we thought this part of our infrastructure is built on a part of part of our infrastructure can be leveraged using using dlt it's like a distributed ledger type of technology yeah yeah the challenge though is we found that when we had the double spend problem with the, or excuse me, the double buy problem, where when we would approach somebody and say, here's this, like this is what we're doing. And it was like, okay, great. We're in like, we want to like, this is a big pain point for me too. So we said, great.

So the carriers and brokers became like, wanted to get in pretty quickly. But then they would say, I would say, oh, we're going to use this like dlt solution they're like okay wait a second what is that like we don't even have apis or web hooks like so it just it just became like this like yeah this sidetrack of a conversation and then like again it's it's a very cool technology there's a lot of really interesting things going on and and so we are in a i think we're i to your point i think it's possibly one of the best use cases i've ever heard for web3 and so to that point i i think there's this is gonna evolve in the future and this probably will be the solution that over time evolves into it. But for the time being, we don't necessarily need it.

Yeah. And part of that is because the use case for, like, if AIG says you have insurance, it's unlikely that AIG is going to lie about that, where you then have to go back to it. And the more likely scenario is that AIG has seen some service systems that don't talk to each other. And getting data out to actually confirm ever that you have coverage is going to be a bigger problem yep and so whether it's like we don't have api so we're just going to like export data and like put it somewhere uh so that's like you don't need blockchain for that that's the bigger issue is like just how do you have like integrations in a more like efficient way yeah uh and and so to that point it's like the connecting the digital proof of coverage with the

legacy workflow is going to be the most important yeah it's too early it's i i i joke about this and my buddy and i do all the time we are uh we're um we're like man let's just let's form an llc we're gonna call it a insurance blockchain exploratory fund. And we'll just go, we'll put blockchain on the first page of the deck. We'll go raise a shit ton of money and we'll figure out how to make a business in 10 years off of it. Because, you know, the coolest thing about being part of the insurance industry is all you need to know is about this much about tech and you're officially a technologist

where, where this wouldn't get you in the front door, like in, you know, in many other industries here, you're, you know, you're changing the world. So it's just, it's just interesting. I, I think that I, I think there's so much opportunity in our space to, for, for micro and, and, and, and maybe larger than that innovations right like you know nothing against what you're doing but making the coi process is not a revolutionary to the entire industry but it's a drastic improvement in a major pain point and there are and it sounds like

you're starting to address some of these as well. And probably the CUI process, again, it's like, to your point, the CUI process is just one part. Like that's not, that's not TrustLayer. TrustLayer is creating ground truth for the industry. Yeah. And that, that to me is stacking up all these different processes in this, in this layer of, of, and I love that kind of term ground truth.

I think that's a really important concept for people to grab out of this conversation that we're having is there is, like if you were to ask a broker today, and I know we're running out of time and I want to be respectful of that, but if you were to ask most brokers today, is the carrier, your agency management system, your CRM, your, your email, an Excel spreadsheet. Like what is the system of record for where, for what that client currently has in place? I think if you asked five people, you'd get five different answers. If you asked 50, you'd get 50 different answers because there is no, like if the broker says you have coverage,

you have coverage because that goes back. That's essentially goes back to their E&O. So is that the point of truth is what comes out of your agency management system or is your agency management system really just a capture for you and it's the carrier. And then, you know what I mean? So there's all, and then which system inside the carrier is actually the system of record? Is it what the underwriter tells you? Is it what's actually produced that? So for me, this singular concept of getting to a place that we'll all agree, this is the ground truth, right?

That is an incredibly important project. And I'm super glad that you're taking it on, man. Thanks, man. Well, I will say we're not doing it alone. Like we have a whole bunch of really great brokers, great carriers, risk managers that are helping us. And so if I can make like the one plug, like if anyone's interested in getting involved,

would love for you to reach out to me directly. This is a big pain point. We need as many brokers supporting us. It doesn't mean customers. That means like we need folks that are just passionate about this. And because we've got, we're having like conversations with carriers

of like, what are the right way to do it? We're talking to the AMSs. We're saying like, what are the policy, like in the policy administration systems, like what is the right way for us to really like solve this pain point for carriers and brokers? and also like your customer. Just build a Salesforce integration and let's go around those dirty bastards

at the policy management system. They're just going to hose you up. I bet they're like, yeah, we love your solution $50,000 a year and we'll love it even more. I know how that extortion game is no they're all great people we love them oh yeah i love them um no dude i think i think this is great so okay so to that plug so some you know you got 12 000 people listening to the show right now where where do they go where they go to trustlayer.io areing someone specific? I want them to email me personally. Okay.

And we'll get in touch with them and put them in touch with whoever the right person is. John, J-O-H-N, at TrustSlayer.io. Let's build something really big, guys. Yeah, guys. Forever you listen at home, you know, I... John and TrustS trust layer are not a sponsor of the show or anything. I don't want you to think that this is a paid plug. These guys, I just, they've come highly recommended me by a bunch of people. I've done my own research. I

think you heard from the, from the call, um, you know, this, this kind of stuff. And you've heard me for a year now, plus talking about the, the concept of, uh, building a human optimized agency. And while that will be different for every agency, I think this idea of removing valueless transactions from our day to day so our people can hone in on where they really add value, solving problems, building relationships, that kind of stuff. This is one of those tools that's going to be part of our tool belt moving forward. And it's worth a look. So I highly recommend reaching out to John and getting involved if COIs and having this is, you know, just if it's about COIs for you, if you're working with contractors, working with manufacturers, habitational, home builders, you know, this is

going to be a major solve for you. So I highly recommend what they're doing. Please reach out. John, it's been great, man. Thanks, man. Yeah. Good seeing you. Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not. With the OneCall Close 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 in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle-tested, the one-call closed system eliminates excuses

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