Episode 171: The Bottom Line - Smashing Rolexes

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it. Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode.

Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee. Or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.

Hey everyone, so one of the things that I really like is a nice watch, or a nice timepiece to use the accurate term. And I was fortunate enough to be able to buy the very first nice watch, timepiece that I have, in around 2005, 2006. There was a physician had a very slightly used pre-owned Rolex Submariner with the date, and I was able to buy it from him certified for around $3,500. Now, at the time, investing that kind of money when I was 25 years old roughly was a huge step and a huge leap. I still have this watch today. As a matter of fact, I have it on I wear it, you know, almost, you know, every single day. And one day I'm going to give this watch to my son. He probably won't listen to this podcast, so until a long time from now, but maybe when he gets married or when he gets out of college, I'm going to give him that watch. He's 12 now, so he doesn't care. Well, ultimately, this watch market value, if I needed to sell it, is probably worth somewhere around, uh, $10,000 to $15,000, something like that. Now, why am I telling you that? This ultimately has nothing to do with watches. I'm sharing this with you that it's an analogy that I had came up with a couple years ago, shared it with, uh, with one business owner. He loved it, ran with it, and it's now become kind of a thing that we say in, uh, in our community. And what it has to do with is turnover in your business. And so I did some really rough math. If you go and you just Google how much is a brand new Rolex, uh, Submariner, you're going to get somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. Well, let's think about this. You probably don't realize it, but you may be smashing some Rolexes in your business if you hired someone at a $50,000 salary or compensation plan, and they stayed with you for 3 months. You've invested $12,500 in their salary. You've paid another $1,875 roughly. I realize some of you live in some states that don't have income taxes, so just bear with me. Paid another $1,800 in taxes. You've probably spent some amount of money on recruiting them and onboarding costs. And so I just lump that into around $1,500 all in. So in the first 90 days you have invested, and rightfully so, in this hopefully A-player. You've invested $15,875. Well, for various different reasons, they came on board and maybe you were desperate, you needed to get somebody in your business quickly. And you realize after 90 days it's not going to work out. It's not going to work out, and you're going to have to let them go. Well, you might as well have gone down to a store, gotten a Rolex, and 90 days later taken it outside and smashed it, because that's how much cash you've just burned. And so it really hopefully gives you kind of an analogy of like, oh my gosh, I would never do that? Well, sadly, in my first 4 to 5 years of business, I don't even want to have to try to remember how many Rolexes I've smashed. Listen, we've had so many great guests on that have talked about, listen, you got to be able to, you know, um, fire fast and hire slow. And I get it. I mean, there's times that you definitely don't want to throw good cash after bad, or good money after bad money. I get it. There's no— nothing we can do that's going to be 100% ever. But there are some things we can do to kind of bend the odds in our favor. We can make sure that we don't skip steps. We can make sure, you know, maybe you work with Autopilot Recruiting, and to be able to make sure that I have a constant pipeline of really great A-players, people that we're talking to on a regular basis, that even if we don't have a position, we've got a bench. And so that way, if you get in a position, you're not making an emotional decision that you ultimately regret, and because then 90 days later you smashed a Rolex. And so it's funny, I've had some people that have come to me later and said, hey, I didn't smash a Rolex, but I did smash a Timex. And that's their way of being able to say, hey, I made, I made a poor decision. I didn't go through the steps, but I made the decision quick, uh, quickly to, you know, to move on from them. And, you know, I, I didn't just blow $15,000 in that first 90 days. Now look, at the end of the day, you're going to be able to, to grow your business. If you want to go far, you want to go fast, you got to be able to do it with the team. And so it's going to take the investment of the allocation of resources, money, cash in the business to be able to invest in your team, and they are your greatest leverage. There's no question about it. What I hope I'm just impressing on you and invite you to consider is when you're going through, uh, the process of, of bringing people on board, just having in the back of your mind, I am actually investing a lot of money. And when it's in your business, because of the way that you're actually spending the cash, you don't feel like that, oh my gosh, in 90 days I could have bought another, a nice watch. And of course, you're not logically going to do that. You're not going to say, oh, well, I'd rather not invest that money in a person and literally go buy a watch. I'm not suggesting that. And for some of you, nice watches is, you know, a waste of money. But it's my hope that at least this analogy will sit with you and that you'll be able to say, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Some of you, maybe, maybe you're a Jocko Willink guy, and he is, you know, a Timex that you can buy from Walmart. He would never He would never invest the money in a Rolex, but even he would get the idea of smashing Rolexes. And so, uh, I just invite you to consider, hey, when we're going through the process, we want to make sure that we've done everything we can to be able to bend the odds in our favor, that we're not making an emotional or a rash decision, but we actually have gone through all of the steps, which means we actually have steps that we're going through in our process to make sure, are we onboarding A-players. If you go back a couple weeks ago, I did the episode on who's on your team. Do you have A-players? And again, I didn't get into the nuts and bolts. That's, you know, for someone else to be able to share with you. Obviously, David Peterson's episode, if you go back and listen to that, he did an incredible job of kind of breaking down the things that he does to be able to bring people on. If you want to work with, again, a company that actually can provide you candidates on a regular basis, You still gotta have a process for how you're gonna manage those leads. By the way, just real quick, I didn't mean to kind of share this, but while it's on my mind, maybe it'll serve you. It's almost kind of parallel tracks. I was talking to someone about this and it was on my mind and I kind of started to realize that when you think about leads in your sales pipeline, so like marketing generates leads and then you take a lead and you nurture them through the pipeline. There really is a similar pipeline to whenever you have someone who is a potential candidate to come on your team. You bring them on board, you, you, this is what you do first, and then you kind of nurture them along through the process. With an actual lead in the business, of course, you're trying to convert them into a client, but when it's a prospect, somebody to, to possibly come on, um, recruiting candidate, you're kind of nurturing them along the process too. And so maybe at some point I'll kind of give my feelings on those parallel pipelines you have there. So anyway, back to this. I hope this serves you and getting you to think about, man, I am investing a lot of money. And that's at $50,000. I mean, if, if you've got a position you're paying $75,000 or $100,000, my goodness, you could be smashing a presidential Rolex in 90 days if you're not careful. So I think sometimes it's just kind of out of, out of mind. We don't realize because of the money's being spent through through payroll and taxes and other things that, that we don't feel it as much as we do if we actually were to go down to the store and, and lay down $10,000 to $15,000 for a watch. But again, effectively, that's what you're doing. So anyway, I hope this episode served you. Until next week, lead well. If you're listening to this podcast, I know you're someone who has a growth mindset. You probably want to be able to grow your book of business as well. What Direct Click specializes in helping insurance agency to leverage Google Ads and SEO to drive inbound phone calls, leads, online visibility, and even organic traffic. You can be confident in knowing exactly how well your ads are working and getting support in what really matters in your business. Get exclusive online marketing support today when you visit directclicksinc.com. You know how important it is to develop yourself and to develop your team. Well, if you're gonna do that, you wanna do it with the best. Work with Coach P Consulting to learn and implement the same strategies that he used to sell over 700 life policies in 2021 alone. You'll get personalized coaching 2 times a week and an in-depth look at how his office is run, and Coach P will train your team alongside his own. Get your first month free when you mention the Club Capital Leadership Podcast during signup. Visit coachpconsulting.com to get started. If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me say many times The best use of money is to be able to buy back your time, and one of the best ways to do that is by hiring a virtual assistant. Whether it's an executive assistant or creative marketing assistant, Rock Solid has a unique hiring process to net the very best talent, and they intentionally match you with a great fit for you and your team. They value your success as if it were their own, because it is. If you're looking to build a rock solid team for your business, reach out to Tracy and her team at at rocksolidassistance.com.