The Ryan Hanley Show - RHS 151 - Mark McClure Explains How to Use CommercialInsurance.net

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comIn this episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, Mark McClure, CEO, and founder of CommercialInsurance.net joins the podcast to talk about how warm phone call transfer commercial insurance leads can be a game-changer for growing independent agencies.Episode Highlights: Mark discusses his background and how he got started in commercial insurance. (6:38) Mark mentions that having lead generations in their DNA made them unique, as well as running a Virtual Insurance Agency for eight years and realizing that not all leads are excellent leads for everyone. (15:44) Ryan believes that there is always a great opportunity in trucking; the industry attracts a lot of drivers because they see what folks do with Commercial Auto, but the industry lacks the in-house knowledge to be a trucking firm. (20:48) Mark discusses the difficulties they had trying to get their original appointments while they were still an insurance firm. (22:46) Mark mentions that what keeps him awake at night is dreaming about selling insurance online without speaking with a customer and managing loss ratios, and ensuring that they are accurately classified. (24:23) Mark discusses his predictions for what will happen next in the digital space. (31:14) Mark mentions that one of the things he disliked about being an entrepreneur was when he first started and everyone encouraged him not to be a generalist. (39:01) Key Quotes: “Throughout the journey, we developed a skill at generating online leads and introducing them to companies no matter what industry they were in.” - Mark McClure “We will see commercial insurance online explode into more of you know, the hockey stick that I was hoping we would see in 2012. It’s taking a lot longer and it's because it's a difficult product.” - Mark McClure “What the future looks like, you know, my hope is eventually we get to a point where we can ask the customer do they want to talk to an agent that I think that's not going away, not during my working career. Or do they want to purchase online? If they want to purchase online, most likely to protect customer experience will take them down that route for those that have that ability and others we might obviously steer through the call of change. That's a network that we built today” - Mark McClure Resources Mentioned: Mark McClure LinkedIn CommercialInsurance.net 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 a tremendous conversation with Mark McClure, the founder and CEO of CommercialInsurance.net, a tremendous resource for agencies looking to supplement their lead generation with high quality kind of live phone call transfer leads. And again, full disclosure, I'm not an investor, not an advisor, not a sponsor of the show, just a company that we use a lot. I really like Mark and the way that he approaches his business. We've had a tremendous experience with commercialinsurance.net as far as using it to, exactly as I stated, supplement our standard inbound lead referral, all the stuff that we do day to day. We use commercialinsurance.net

to supplement that activity and get some live phone call transfers in targeted industries, in targeted states, et cetera. And we found it to be an incredibly useful tool in creating consistency in our revenue and premium production. So wanted to get Mark on. I've been trying to get him on for a long time. You'll hear us kind of chat about that. Just both of our schedules have been so busy and I just wanted to put this tool in front of you guys. That's why I do the show. I like to get high quality tools, resources in front of you and commercialinsurance.net is definitely one of those tools that I highly recommend.

So hopefully you will enjoy this conversation. Guys, before we get there real quick, just want to kind of go through my standard shout out as far as I love you guys for listening to this show. It means so much to me. These days with rogue risk, I have been incredibly busy. There's more things to do day to day than i could ever possibly get done however uh this show and sharing these conversations is really important to me and in that way i love growing the show i love building our audience because

more people get exposed to these ideas these concepts concepts. It helps, I think, move our industry forward, these conversations. I think this show is part of, one small piece of, the larger movement of moving our industry to just its full potential. Let's put it that way. I think that all the conversations that are happening today are continuing to move our industry to its full potential, which is not just the bedrock of kind of the business and really our day-to-day lives, but ultimately a mechanism for growth, for career development, for satisfaction and purpose in people's lives, creating sustainability and profitability in small businesses and businesses throughout our country, as well as protecting our people's

personal assets. I mean, that's what we do. And these conversations help do that. So my ask to you is that if you enjoy this show, if you enjoy this podcast, whether it's this episode or others, share the show, text it to somebody. Share it on Facebook, social media. Email your friends. Share it in a newsletter if you have one. That's how we grow the show is people subscribe and listen. And if you ever want to give feedback, I'd say right now LinkedIn is the best place. You go to LinkedIn, DM me, whatever.

Check the DMs a lot. Instagram is another good one. For those of you that follow me on Instagram I got hacked recently that was terrible but since fixed that issue now back in business and Instagram's another great place to connect with me as well

so love if you share the show love if you leave a rating and review on iTunes that helps a lot too and just guys I appreciate you I love you for listening to this show and let's get on to Mark how you doing? what's going on man how are you. I love you for listening to this show. And let's get on to Mark. How you doing?

What's going on, man? How are you? I'm well. I'm well. Just back in Oklahoma. Nice. Well, is it a good change from the ocean and the sun? Or happy to be back?

I love Oklahoma. It's a great, great state. Nice people. My kids were happy to see their friends. So when they're happy, I'm happy, I suppose. I like the ocean virtually, but, you know, they're both good spots. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

It's nice that you can get away like that, you know, and make it kind of a work thing, too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Cool. Well, dude, I'm excited to connect with you. I know it's been a long time coming. We had that chat the other day, but just in general, happy to connect. Yeah, same here. Same here. Cool. Well, we'll kind of get into it here. I think I've mentioned you guys a bunch of times on the show. We've been using uh commercialinsurance.net off and on since 2020 um awesome only ever off because of um staffing issues not ever because we weren't

happy with the service mostly just uh at different times if at different times i've been the only producer and just wasn't able to take the calls you You know what I mean? And that was a problem I was running into. And then I had at one time a producer too. And for some reason, well, they're not with us anymore. So that's really why there were larger issues there. But, you know, now, and just, you know, not that I want this to be an advertisement, I don't mean it to be, I just, I have a bunch of things I want to talk to you about, but just to give everyone listening at home, kind of some, some background, you know, how we use the tool today is, is really as a part of the onboarding of new producers to get them up and running, to get them opportunities right away, you know, get them on the phone, see what they can do, prove their metal kind of thing. Like, Hey, you know, we're going to get you some calls.

We're going to get you some in front of some business owners. We're going to get them to you right away. And, and let's see, uh, let's see what you can do. And that, um, that's worked pretty well for us. And so that's, that's kind of what we're doing today. Um, uh, but I I'd love maybe just, just to kind of give everyone background. I'd love to hear a little bit more, just your kind of your origin story, you know? So you're the superhero of commercial phone lead transfers. There's a lot of good people out there, but thank you. At what point did you get bit by the radioactive spider?

How did all this happen? So I started my first company, Traffic Strategies, back in 2000. And I had just graduated University of Oklahoma. And my dad was running a company by the name of Flowers Direct. It was just when the flower industry was taking off, and so I started studying SEO, became really good at SEO, and built a search engine optimization company, but I frankly couldn't sell my way out of a paper bag, so fortunately, my dad recognized that and ended up introducing me to a guy by the name of Chad Jakeways, who became my partner probably back in 2001.

And we grew an SEO company in South Florida, built a lot of solutions for Office Depot, Thompson Cigar, a lot of South Florida companies. Throughout that journey, we recognized that we could make more money becoming an affiliate. And so we discovered affiliate marketing. This is about the time Commission Junction takes off, 2002, 2003, LinkShare Corporation. We were also a super affiliate and just started building proprietary websites and got really good at search marketing, affiliate marketing, frankly, just introducing customers to businesses,

whether they're in the retail space or the dating space. And by 2004, that's when the mortgage bubble really started to take off. And so we got into financial services and sort of rode that wave. And by 2007, we were selling about 75,000 leads a month to American Express, Chase Credit Cards, LendingTree, Countrywide Mortgage. And we met a group by the name of Rocketin. At the time, they had just acquired LinkShare Corporation, I guess, a year prior to that for, I believe, $452 million, which was a significant premium over what the Convention Junction sold just a year prior to that.

So we recognized that, wow, this would be the company we want to sell our business to, Traffic Strategies. We only had nine people and we were having a lot of fun and fortunately had the opportunity to sell our business in May of 2007 to Rockiton, which became the lead generation platform for Rockiton, our company, Traffic Strategies. Joined those guys in, I guess, May of 2007. And then everybody knows what happened in 2008, the mortgage fallout and the whole world, you know, financial world kind of collapsed. And, you know, throughout that journey, we developed a skill at generating online leads and introducing them to companies, whether no matter what industry they were in. And so from there, we, during our earn out process, you know, I'm an entrepreneur.

I'd never worked for anybody in my life other than maybe picking up range balls when I was in high school at the local golf range municipal. But anyways, I threw up the earn-out at about 18 months to think about what I wanted to do next. And a couple of our customers at Traffic Strategies at the time were e-surance, personal lines insurance space, as well as insurance.com. And when we were generating leads and traffic for that group, Chad and I, and also Kim Reed, who's with us again today, when we were generating the personal lines leads, we would stumble upon these commercial insurance leads. And we never picked anybody to buy them. We couldn't figure out why. Part of the problem was e-insurance was a personalized insurance company. So that was a challenge. But insurance.com, we felt, should have been able to take some of those

leads and introduce them to whether they sold the policy or introduce them to maybe a traveler's hardwood CNA of the world, but that was, we were not successful. And so as I finished that journey, I, you know, I had some cash and was in my late twenties, definitely plenty of arrogance. I thought, well, how hard could it be to sell commercial insurance? You know, we just did this massive deal with Rockington, one of the biggest internet companies in the world. Maybe I should start a commercial insurance agency because I had a non-compete. I couldn't sell leads anymore for a period of time. So this was probably,

I finished my earn out at the end of 2009. That's after the mortgage crisis fallout and started back over in January of 2010. And since it was a crossroads, I was from Oklahoma and my wife and I had a baby and we wanted to be closer to family. So we relocated back to Oklahoma and hung our shingle. We brought in a partner and he and I started a commercial insurance agency. We got licensed in 50 states 2010 and we were generating all of these leads. We went to get our first appointment and we told the whole Rockington story, which nobody

had heard of in the insurance world at the time. And they weren't really impressed with Rockington, that experience, or small business insurance, frankly, specifically online. So imagine knocking on doors, whether it's Hartford, Travelers travelers, whomever in 2010 said, Hey, we're really good at doing digital marketing. We have all these customers coming in. They want to buy insurance. You guys have policies for them. We're going to sell these policies online without talking to the customer. That just was, I mean, it would have been maybe easier to bang our head against the concrete curb, but nonetheless, we we started selling some policies through some wholesalers.

And we went ahead and got licensed in 50 states. And the first couple of years were rough. We put in about maybe 700, a little over 750 grand in the first year and generated 64,000 in top line revenue. So that was not quite the college stride. The next year, we put in another 800 grand,000 and generated $200,000 in revenue. So after two years, we were just completely taken out of the woodshed and starting to understand how hard it is to build a commercial insurance agency, staff with insurance agents. Generating leads is in our DNA, so that came naturally. But the first couple of years were pretty tough.

And throughout the journey, there was a guy by the name of Brian Lippel over a traveler to introduce us to Mark Schmetline, who was running travelers at the time. And they flew. I was just about ready to quit. And so they flew and do something different. They flew nine executives out to Norman, Oklahoma, and we didn't even have a conference room. There were just like four insurance agents in an office on Campus Corner. And we told our story. And, you know, Mark and Brian, just they gave us the confidence just to keep going. Don't give up. You're on to something.

This is 2012. So by 13, we were cash flow positive. And by 2015, we had returned all of our investment and built a small commercial insurance agency. Continued to build our book over the next few years, probably sold way too many contractors and learned some lessons on how important renewals are and cross-selling. And again, we were really good at generating leads, not so good at service. So customers were coming in the front door and going out the back door just as fast. By 2018, I had a few partners who loved the insurance business. I had spent eight years building this agency with 50 salespeople, service people. It just wasn't to the size of a company that I had dreamt that it might be and wanted to get back into the leads business. So I had the opportunity to divest all of the insurance assets and sold the insurance book along with all of the insurance producers and service team members and even some accounting members over to a middle market brokerage who needed a small business insurance unit and retained all of the digital assets. Started back over in, I guess this is the fall of 2018, with about maybe $190,000 a

month in revenue, so a couple million dollars annually from just selling the leads that we were not selling insurance with. So we were essentially cherry picking the leads when we had the insurance agency and then selling all of the overflow, the bounce houses, excess and surplus policies that either we didn't have expertise or maybe would not renew. Started back over 2018, we had about 15 people on the digital marketing side and reached out to my buddy, Chad Jake. He had a number of startups and was back at rocket and had built out their search marketing uh team and convinced him to uh get the band back together so chad and i going back up in january 2019 and like i said we were doing just

under a couple hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue first year we finished at five million in revenue selling leads um you know we built out a real-time bidding platform for an elite exchange we had about 5 000 leads a month that we started with and ended that year again at about five million in revenue and we were cash flow positive and the next year we did 10 million and of course you know uh covid hit in march of 2020 so that was a bit of a challenge and then last year it just it just uh took off for us again and finished year at 24 million revenue and are on track to do about 43 million this year our business today bread and butter is

introducing small businesses to insurance agents brokers carriers throughout the country i think probably what makes us unique is lead generations in our DNA, but also running a commercial insurance agency for eight years and understanding that all leads are not good leads for everybody, especially if you don't have a market, even if the lead is free. That experience, I think, gives us a competitive advantage in space and understanding how important it is to make sure just from a customer experience standpoint, you're introducing customers to somebody that can help them. But secondly, you know, our customer is also the agent or broker that's purchasing or carrier that's purchasing the call.

And we want to make sure that they have a market for this risk. If not, we allow them to return it and we try to place them elsewhere. That's essentially what our business is today. We also offer inbound, outbound telemarketing services, which a lot of insurance companies use for capacity challenges. As you know, whether you have a smaller insurance agency with a couple agents or even these large carriers

that have a couple of hundred agents, staffing licensed insurance agents to work the amount of traffic that we can generate, it's a challenge. We even struggled with it when we were running our agency. And so through that, we built these capacity solutions that allow us to be on the front lines of many insurance carriers. So the customer will call in, we might answer the phone on behalf of the carrier. We try to make sure that they have a market before we put the caller in the hands of the insurance agent.

If they don't have a market, then we will match them with one of our other 200, a little over 200 agents or brokers that can help them. And it's beneficial for everybody, right? It's a better customer experience. Why send them to a carrier that doesn't even have a market for them? They may be told, we don't have a market. You're not big enough. You have too many claims. Nobody wants to hear this. So we try to match in with somebody that can help them. It's also a bad agent experience to, you know, as you know, to spend even 10 minutes explaining

why you can't help somebody. It's a waste of everybody's time and it's just negative energy. And so we remove that friction. And then of course it generates incremental income for the care and frees them up to spend more time with the, with the customers that they actually have a market for. Yeah. You know, that's, that's lead triage is such a important part of the equation. And what's funny is, you know, we, we, we don't generate anything near the volume that you do, but on our own, you know, we do a decent amount and you know, lead triage is the hardest part of it. You get these, you know, you can, you can be as targeted and keyword optimized and SEM optimized. You can, you know, as much as you want, you're going to get

stuff that doesn't fit what you're looking for. You just simply can't help. And every minute that you spend on the phone or even dealing with an account that you just know you can't help as much as you want to be good to people and you don't want to just blow them off because that's you know negativity that you don't need in the world for a whole bunch of reasons it crushes it crushes not just not just the um your bottom line obviously which it does it also crushes the morality of people like literally you know when you're when you're sending leads to somebody and they get excited and they see a lead come in and they call that person and they find out it's dynamite manufacturer, you know, on the coast. And, um, you know, they're in a, a stick built building that, that also gets,

uh, has forest fires next door. It's like, you know, that just crushes their soul, you know, and then that starts to happen over and over and over again. And now all of a sudden they feel defeated. They don't want to pick up the phone. They don't want to make these calls. And that's how you burn out a sales force or a service forces is that kind of stuff. So, you know, I really like your point around kind of making sure that only the leads that you want to write or can write get to you because that, that is a huge part of the equation. You can have 500 leads,

but if you got to sift through them to get to the hundred that you can actually write, those 400 leads are going to kill you. They're going to destroy your business. Yeah. That's why we lost so much money in the beginning. We were able to make it through it, but we had some really good friends to just, you know, kind of give us the, um you know pat on the back to keep going but yeah it's it's challenging it's expensive and it is negative energy yeah i know we um we currently um you know i'm for sure not your biggest seller but we uh we sell we sell we, we've started the bacon process in our system where we're

pushing leads back to you guys. And, and, and then you can push them out to wherever, you know, the, to the markets and the agents and the carriers that actually can write, you know, certain lines that we just either, like you said, don't have the in-house expertise for, or don't have the markets for, or just for whatever reason I've decided it's not a place that we want to be like trucking, you know, trucking is a good example. I think there's a huge, there's always a huge opportunity in trucking. We get a lot of truckers, you know, cause they see the stuff that we do around commercial auto. So they'll reach out and, you know, we just don't have the in-house expertise to be a trucking firm. So, you know, you guys have exposure there for sure. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys provide us

with a good, a good outlet to say, Hey, unfortunately we're not a good fit, but we're going to send you over here, call this phone number, you know, go to this website, whatever. And, um, and they'll get you all squared and the people are happy. Right. I mean, that's all they, they're just looking for a solution. You know, I think, I think a lot of agents get hung up on the idea, like, um, because I can't help you, you're going to be mad at me. And it's like, no, these people called you because they're looking for a solution. And if you're willing to say to them, I'm not the solution, but I'm going to send you to the person that is, that makes them way more happier than you trying to fumble around and fart around and figure out

some program. And it's taken 10 weeks to get them insurance because you're not really an expert in it. That's the worst case scenario. Not the, hey, I'm just going to, hey, I really appreciate the call. Would love to do business with you, but can't. I'm going to send you over here. That's a way better process. That's good to hear. Thank you. Yeah. 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, etc. 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. So, you know, I guess, you know, I'm interested a lot in not necessarily the secret sauce because I know it exists. But, you know, the idea of generating inbound leads in insurance, I mean, obviously, you dealt with it full frontal when you were trying to go out to the carriers. I think today,

the disposition is a little different, still not what it is in other industries, but a little different. You know, for a long time, you know, we've been dealing with this concept that like any consumer that would go out to the Internet and search for an insurance agent that way is a bad lead. And I would love for you to talk through that, the evolution of that, and maybe put to bed that concept just based on your experience? You know, that is certainly a challenge that we had early on when we were trying to seek our original appointments when we were an insurance agency. I'll tell you the sizes of the businesses that we saw in those days. Many people referred to them as micro because they were really small. We're starting to see, you know, larger, they're still small businesses,

but they're businesses that have been in business for significantly many more years than they were in the beginning. It seemed like we had a lot of startups in the beginning. We still have some today. But the quality of the leads that we're seeing come across today, even somewhere in the middle market range, it's just significantly better, which tells me that it's very similar to the shop that my father built with flowers direct me flowers.com. And, you know, that was back in the late nineties and, you know, selling flowers online was, was, you were a pioneer if you were doing that in the late nineties. And, you know, it took about six, seven, eight years for the public to be aware that you can go online, you can search for flowers, you can put your credit card in.

And I think we are just still in the very beginning stages, very similar concept to how flowers were in the late 90s. Customers are just now figuring out that they can go online and at least search for quotes and try to start to find an agency, carrier, or broker that can, you know, that can help them. And as they become more and more comfortable, I think that we will see commercial insurance online explode into more of a, you know, the hockey stick that I was hoping we would see in 2012. It's just taking a lot longer and it's because it's a difficult product. I mean, you know, I think the, what keeps me up at night is, you know,

is dreaming about selling these policies online without speaking with the customer someday and managing loss ratios and making sure that, uh, you know, they, they, they classify themselves correctly. Like we're, for me, we're still at significant, pretty far off on being able to do that in mass. Yeah, there are certain classes you could probably do it with, but to be able to scale that at a much larger range, it's just going to take some more time. Yeah, I think getting people to buy online initially, I agree, we're far off from mass adoption,

but you can definitely grow a business rapidly getting them to buy. The problem is retaining. If you don't, if, if, if you do not have the service model, you know, so what, what I've seen a lot of our competitors do in the, that are digital commercial brokers are they get, you know, they get a channel partner or two they buy a shit ton of leads they run a shit ton of ads um they get the leads in the door and they can write them right either whether it's a human or or or um direct binds they're writing business and putting business

on books i mean just look at new front and renegade and some of these others what they've done yeah the problem is they can't break 40 retention retention. And it's because, you know, for my opinion, the CFOs take over and they make the decision to outsource. I mean, I know I'm pretty sure at least one of those two, and just in case I'm wrong, I'm not going to name which one I think it is, but at least one of them just outsourced their entire service department to India. Now, that sounds like a great idea from a financial perspective and nothing against the people of India or people of Indian descent. But when you're in a different time zone

in a different country with a different accent in a non-native speaking English person who is trying to service your policy, and it is obvious that they are not the agency that you originally worked with, you don't get retention. And that is the part that kills people. So it's, can you scale this business using American cert? I think the sales process can be much more automated, really light human touches or direct binds initially, especially for certain markets and certain size accounts. I don't know that you can completely, that you can do that on the service side yet. I just think. I don't think we're there either. Yeah.

And we may never be there. The customer, you know, we, we saw the retention for standard lines business in the 80% range with Ion McSanta's lower than you'd see with a really good firm, like a Gallagher or most likely a Hub or some of these large brokerages. We, you know, the, that, that was for the standard lines customers. The non-standard customers were the ones who were the groups specifically if they were

brand new that you saw retention rates just be significantly less. Yeah. So, you know, I think being able to focus on the right classes that you know are going to most likely renew, whether it's your fielding in my years in business or payroll or number of employees, is a much smarter way to attack this concept than trying to be a generalist, which is what I tried to do at my agency. And we built up a nice book. We had maybe 15, 16,000 customers active, but, um, we didn't do a good job keeping them because we were way too many contractors and got really addicted to clean

new business on the books and not focusing on that service aspect that you're talking about. So, you know, over time, I would expect that the quality of the customer continues to improve. Do you ever get to a level that you might see offline? No, but can you scale offline at the same rate with, you know, the same economic? Probably not. Well, no, that's the big lie that I think is still being perpetuated today is I give all due respect to everyone that built standard, local, super regional, even up to national agencies in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s based on what I'd call very tried and true best practice traditional methods. They did it the way they had to do it. They did it well,

and it worked. And I give them all due respect. You cannot build that agency today. And I look at agencies that are starting up. I'm going to join the golfing thing and I'm going to join a networking group and I'm going to ask for referrals and I'm just going to cold call my local market. Doesn't work. Now, if your local market is the entire Northeast,

maybe, maybe, but then now you're starting to expand into what would be considered a digital agency anyways. So I think that, yes, if you have an established book and you're getting referrals from agents, can you incrementally grow with traditional method? Yes. It's not dead, but if you want to scale your business, you want to grow and you don't want it to take 25 or 30 years to get to the point where you actually have a team and back end support and all this kind of stuff, you have to go digital or digital has to be a large part of what you're doing. And, and then all these realities that we're discussing come into play. It's not, I feel like I used to get this all the time because, you know, I've been talking about this stuff, you know, especially content marketing, less ads and stuff, more content.

And that's how we, you know, we have a very high close ratio on our inbound stuff because of all the video work that I do. So people watch a lot of videos and whatever. But, you know, they used to um, um, you know, they used to say, well, you know, I, you know, that that's, you're trying to take it. You're trying to do it the easy way. You just don't want to do the work. You just don't want to do the hard work. And it's like, this is not, this is just different obstacles. This isn't, there's nothing easy about what we're doing. There's nothing easy about what you explained and all the trials that you went through. And you're one of the best lead generators in our, in our industry. So it's like, you know,

there's nothing easy about it. It's just different. It's just a different set of obstacles. And I don't like that mentality, or at least I think that's a very narrow mentality to think that way. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. So, you know, as far as like, so as far as in general, the lead generation space, digital space in general, digital consumers, like what kind of stuff do you see coming down the pipes? um are there any like major shifts in and how people are buying how they're shopping anything like that that you see that that you're you're willing to share i know i know some of this is kind of your sauce and i don't i don't want you to not ask me to share anything i think um every year that you know goes by you start to see more and more customers gravitating online i shouldn't know these percentages in the back of my head but i don't it's but it is certainly growing and i think we're at the very beginning. The quality of the customers I mentioned earlier is starting

to improve as well. We're seeing that in the retention and loss ratios with some of the carriers we work with that report their data back to us. So we can make sure we're feeding them the right calls. As far as what the future looks like, my hope is eventually we get to a point where we can ask the customer, do they want to talk to an agent? I think that's not going away, at least not during my working career. Or do they want to purchase online? If they want to purchase online, most likely to protect the customer experience, we'll take them down that route for those that have that ability. And others, we might obviously steer through the call exchange that's a network that have that ability and you know others we might you know obviously steer through the call exchange that's a network that that we've built today but i think that's

what the future looks like and you know that's what we're working towards is just keeping it you know not it's not rocket science you know focusing on the customer experience and making sure that that you know you're making that small business happy because you're introducing them to somebody that can sell them a policy in the way in which they wish to purchase it. Yeah, I agree with you. I will say that a large portion of the inbound leads that we get,

or I shouldn't say large, a significant portion, a significant enough portion to mention of the inbound leads that we get are actually customers who bought DTC that realized that they now needed help. And that happens a lot. So I, I think about, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. You know, I mean, we get a lot of business from next, you know, Hey, I bought a next policy and I, you know, I can't get ahold of anybody, right. Or whatever. And nothing against next. Cause we actually write some next, you know, Hey, I bought a next policy and I, you know, I can't get ahold of anybody,

right. Or whatever. And nothing against next. Cause we actually write some next, you know, as an agent, but it's just that, you know, you click a couple of buttons, you buy an insurance policy and then all of a sudden you start to go, Oh, you know, is this actually what I need? How does this work? How do I get a COI? There's all these things. Yeah. I do do i'm with you in that i i i am interested in and hope to someday be able to facilitate the customers who can who can purchase policies direct and have it done in a way that that they're purchasing the right thing that they feel confident in it i think that always needs to be backed up with a phone call or a place that someone could call a human, right? I have this philosophy that if you don't feel like, you know, if you don't feel like if something goes wrong, there's somebody you can punch in the face.

You're not comfortable being, you're not comfortable working with that business, right? It doesn't matter where they are. But if you're like, if you think to yourself, you know, if something really goes wrong, I got nobody that I can like fight, you know, I think that, you know, people just, they struggle with that. So it's, it's a, it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting problem, but I, I think that there, there has to be a way, there has to be a way to, to, to educate people throughout that purchase process. And there's some companies that are doing some interesting things. What I, what I, you know, and again,

maybe I'm interested in your feedback on this, but what, what it looks like to me a lot of times is people have good ideas, but those ideas, every new, every new question, every piece of explainer content or explainer video that you, that you insert into the form process, it reduces overall conversion rate, right? Because it's super easy. If it's four questions to buy a policy, you're going to get, you know, max number of people. But if it's eight questions, but those eight questions get them a better policy, your conversion rate is

going to be lower. And it feels like what happens is a lot of people come out with these good ideas with these processes that work people to where they need to be. And then they look at their conversion rate numbers and the conversion optimization starts to eat into those questions. And now all of a sudden you're back down to four questions again in this very like remedial process, but maybe the book's not as profitable. It's a really interesting dilemma. Yeah.

I've been dealing with that since we started. Our original business plan was to be more of a lending trio of commercial insurance. And we figured out pretty quickly that even though we could generate the traffic and we could get the customer started down the funnel of the questions, the underwriting questions, we never could get them to press the buy button. I mean, yes, a few of them checked out bought the policy uh others checked out about the policy misclassified and yeah we which forced us down the the route of uh building out the contact center because that's how the customers today are wanting to buy and so we're not in the contact center

business because we love contact centers i mean we like we like our contact center, but, you know, it's at the end of the day, that's where the buyers are. And I would expect it to be like that for the near future. So, you know, eventually somebody is going to be able to figure out how to underwrite these policies online correctly. But it's going to take both strategies to make that work. Yeah, I completely agree. I, I think the point that you made to, um, we've seen, uh, just in the last two years, but I've seen throughout my career in general, the size of businesses that are going online

is increasing as well. You know, a lot of people will say, ah, wow, you just got all those consultants and main street, small businesses. Like, yeah, I mean, we get a lot of those and sure we get a lot of contractors and stuff too, but you know, we wrote, we wrote like a $40,000 manufacturer the other day. We wrote, it wasn't from you guys. No, but we, we did, we get, we do have a nice one that my guy is working right now. It's shoot. What is it? It's a manufacturer actually in California. And I'm going to butcher what it is. It doesn't matter. One of

my guys is working in, but he just gave me the feedback, but you know, I mean, and then we had, we had the other week, we had a $15,000 premium account, 25,000, you know, and so these aren't like $250,000 middle market accounts, but they're media accounts with real risk and a couple of policies. And these are business owners that have been around for a while. And basically what happens is, you know, again, this goes back to, that's the heartbeat of America right there, you know, and that's, you know, we have this no customer. So I am currently making the mistake that you described, you know, again, this goes back to the heartbeat of America right there, you know, and that's, you know, we have this no customer. So I am currently making the mistake that you described.

You know, we are, we have, we have what we call a no customer left behind policy, which means that outside of nine classes of business that we just simply do not have a market for. Um, and that would include like mining and all the things that go along with that. Um, uh, transportation was one of them. We don't do home health care stuff. We don't do human transportation. We don't do there's a couple others that I'm going to butcher. Doesn't matter. Right. So we have nine kind of larger classes that we just we just don't want to deal with today. We'll write anything else that comes through or try to as long as the person we look more for. We try to disqualify people the person we look more for, we try to

disqualify people who are not serious about purchasing now. That's what we look for less than what type of business they are. So if they're, if they're kicking the tires or they're, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a business in 2024 and I'm getting some numbers or whatever. Sorry, we can't help you. But if you're like, look, like I opened up this, you know, I don't know, mobile food truck business and I need insurance and, and Hey, to get into this, to get into this farmer's market, I got to have a COI and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's the next step. And what's for you as an entrepreneur,

that's what I hated about this business when I first got into it is, you know, everybody told me not to be a generalist. And you really want to help these entrepreneurs, whether it's a little food truck person or even a handyman. The fact that I went very wide very quickly has caused me immense amounts of stress and caused all kinds of things to break because it's a very big problem to solve versus just one niche that you can build towards. But at the same time, it has allowed us to consistently put revenue on the books. It has given us experience, scope, scale that I think not a lot of people have. And as we start to work the things, the problems out, you know, we're still, we're at 86% retention. You know, we're still retaining business and, you know, it's been,

it's been a very interesting process. It's, you know, I'm positive that as we grow and grow with more pace, that, that, that number is going to come down a little bit for a while. Um, but these are, these just feel like solvable problems to me. Um, and, and I I'm yet to, I know that there's going to be some tough decisions and that no customer left behind isn't always going to be a hundred percent, no customer left behind,'t always going to be 100% no customer left behind. But I feel like it's an aspirational goal worth trying to go after only because everyone tells me it's not possible. So for that reason alone.

Well, maybe with your transaction with SIAA, it possibly is. Maybe you're not the one writing it. It might not be Rogris, but it could be another agency that has that mining specialty in that, you know, in that large. So, so that's, that's a really, you've kind of hit it right. Is what, what SAA gave us was the breadth and the experience and the scope to now

start to build out pockets of expertise that we can, we can start to write that stuff. So I just, I think that generalist question is so into, I think everyone who says you can't be a generalist is right, which is why I want to figure out how to do it. Because if we can, then I was right there with you. Yeah. We were semi-successful. I mean, we were barely profitable, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a mountain of a task, but you know, whoever figures that out is, is, I mean, there's a lot of money at the end of that rainbow. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome.

Well, Mark, dude, I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate you spending some time with us. I wanted to get just your company in front of our audience. I wanted to talk a little bit about leads and stuff just because we've been so successful with it. And I love sharing tools that we're successful with on the podcast here. So if someone's listening to this and they're going, geez, you know, I've seen their name, but you know, where do they go? Where do they get signed up? Where do they find out if a CI.net is a good fit for them? Where, where, where should people go? I would just have them go to commercialinsurance.net and they can call in the contact center and we'll put them in touch with one of our team members who can,

you know, identify what their appetite is and, appetite is and see if they're a fit for our organization. And then we usually can get a customer up and running within a few hours. So just go to commercialinsurance.net and place a call. Or there's also a web form that you can fill out if you're interested in purchasing leads. And we can take it from there, we really focus on trying to sell the best leads in the business. And, you know, our dreams are to become the largest aggregator of commercial insurance, new business opportunities. And, you know, so we need, we need all the customers we can. So thank you for the,

the time today and for, you know, for, for sharing our company with your audience and your experience. I'm glad it was. Thank you so much. All right, man. I appreciate it and wish you guys nothing but the best. Yes, sir. You too.

Good night. 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 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Thank you.