Episode 187: TODAYAPP with Mansour Hasan

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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.

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Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode. Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hemby, your host. On today's episode, we have Mansoor Hassan. Mansoor is the founder of Today App Pro and runs a captive insurance agency in the Northeast Tennessee area. Mansoor is a fantastic guy. We cover all things 4DX. We talked about the value of scripting. And just really how to become a better business owner. I know you're going to get a ton out of this episode. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Mansoor Hassan.

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Mansoor Hassan, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Hey Bradley, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Excited to have you. So we always start with background and origin story. So why don't you take people back? How did you get to kind of where you are and a little bit around your journey?

Awesome. Well, I kind of started in pharmaceutical sales right out of college and moved into surgical sales and device sales. And then I kind of wanted to go work for myself, so I started as a captive insurance agent directly from Surgical Sales and kind of started in that field of building a business, the daily grind of, you know, building your book and meeting people and really kind of changing my entire sales style. Because from a Surgical Sales standpoint, you're meeting the same people over and over and over again. And with insurance, you meet them once and you might not see them again for 2 or 3 years. So kind of revamping my sales style, building the business through that. Me and another agent developed a system for independent agents or, you know, insurance agents to try to help them manage their, their days and their, their business a little bit better. So we, we founded the Today App. The Today app is, is an agency software system that kind of helps insurance agents manage the day-to-day of what they're doing in their office. Yeah, that's a little bit of background.

Well, you and I have the pharmaceutical background. I think I forgot about that. We'll have to have a talk as to afterwards. I won't put it on the podcast as to why I decided not to go into surgical sales. Maybe it had something to do with me being a little too I just couldn't do it.

A little queasy.

A little queasy. All right. So it's embarrassing to put on here.

I'm so glad I'm not still doing that though. I'll tell you what, I don't think I can handle the drug sales route.

No doubt. Well, there's a couple things I want to talk to you about. We had Jim Huling on about a year ago, one of the co-authors with Chris McChesney of The Four Disciplines of Execution. And many people have listened to this podcast, uh, have read that book and understand that concept, or at least have been exposed to it, I should say.

Yeah.

Can you just talk about maybe even going all the way back to the first time you were introduced to 40X, and then how ultimately 40X has really influenced your philosophy and how it's ultimately made its way into your software?

Yeah. So, so 40X kind of really changed the way we run our agency and the way we thought about our agency because I mean, basically, you know, 4DX says as leaders we can influence the strategy and execution within our offices. And we typically don't have a problem with strategy. It's normally that execution piece. And if you kind of look back at like what the company that I work for, if you look at what they teach and what they teach when you're starting, it's all strategy. Like there's no actual physical execution piece to it. It's all, here's the strategy, here's what to do. And you can go into any agent's office and ask them what they're doing. If they're like an agent who's killing it in their agency, you can go talk to them. That's one of the beauty— the things of beauty of this industry. They'll tell you exactly what they're doing, but it doesn't mean you can do it and doesn't mean you're going to execute on it. And so discovering those principles within the 4DX allowed me as an agent, as a leader of my office, to kind of reformulate what we track, what we focus on, how we display it, how I manage accountability within the office. And so we started doing all these things. Well, if you do all these things, you have a whiteboard, you have an Excel sheet, you have a tracker, you have a script book, you have all of these different things. And we were going from system to system to, from, you know, script book to you know, call log sheets and things like that. And so it kind of evolved into, you know, how can we— how can something be created to allow us to execute within our offices on a daily basis, make it as simple as possible for the agency, as well as for the people who are going to be using it day to day, and really kind of focus in on those four disciplines, you know, allowing the team to focus on what's important. And we're really big on vertical goal alignment. So I, everything has to be vertical goal alignment. So we have our yearly goal, the yearly goal is broken up into a monthly goal, the monthly goal into a weekly goal, and then the weekly goal is broken up into a daily goal per team member based on the role they're in. So if you're in a service role, you have a specific set of goals for that day based on the service role you're in. If you're a caller, you have a certain you know, daily amount of things you need to do as a caller. If I'm the agent, I have a certain number of things that I need to do daily as an agent. And so breaking it down into that. So if everybody does their job on a daily basis, you hit your week, you hit your month, you hit your year. So having that vertical goal alignment, that daily focus right there in front of you all the time, and have it come alive for the office is a really big deal. And then from there, you can kind of go into the, you know, the lead measures that you're tracking, what is on that dashboard, what is on that daily number that you're trying to hit? Is it a lead measure? Or is it a lag measure? What needs to be a lead measure because you can affect that every day. And then moving right into how is it displayed? And then creating that accountability, that cadence of accountability around it?

Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard vertical goal alignment, but I really like that. Do you believe that? Well, for me personally, this is my own experience. But I think also people that I work with is that even starting with the idea of, well, what do you want to get accomplished in the, in the year, it becomes generalized, it becomes kind of glossy, a little fuzzy. They don't really commit to this is what I want to do in the year, let alone then reverse engineer all the way back to, okay, well, what needs to happen this quarter? What needs to happen this month? What needs to happen this week? What needs to happen this day? Do you see that?

Yeah, I mean, you— I think with, with some of the agents and agencies that we work with, I think that a lot of them, some of them do it, and some of them don't, because it's a foreign idea to them. I think you've got to do it. But I think it goes beyond our yearly goal. I think it goes to, where do we want to see ourselves 5 years from now? And then vertically aligning your goals to that. Well, if your goals in 5 years to open up a bar, Well, why are you selling insurance? Because you need to go work in a bar and learn how to mix drinks. And so I do that with my team members too. Like if I, if I have a team member come in, and I want their, their goals to be in line with what they're doing here. Everybody has future goals and dreams and aspirations, it needs to line up, they're going to do, they're going to have more success here, if their future goals are aligned with the with the training they're going to get while they're here.

Yeah.

So I think it goes beyond just the— we do it for the year for our agency goals, but I also do it, you know, on a 5-year basis for myself and on a 5-year basis for my team.

I love that. I love it. Personally, I like 3 years. That's mine. I usually go off 3. I call it a 3-year vision. There's Vivid Vision by Cameron Herald, etc. I kind of got bought into the 3-year idea. But 5 years, I love that kind of leaning out further and basically saying, where do I really want to be versus looking at things just from a singular 1-year perspective? I love that. I think that's great. You know, one of the things about 40X I really loved was one word, and it's in the fourth discipline, which is create a cadence. I love the word cadence of accountability. And how do you see that again on a daily basis? And how does the way that it's built into— and we'll get into scripting in just a second— allow for that daily cadence of accountability?

So I think a cadence of accountability comes down to, are they bought into the goal? So is it a goal that's theirs? Are they tracking it? Is it, is it part of the conversation every single day? Are they seeing it every single day? Part of the way that the Today app is built is you have the daily dashboard. It's right there in front of you. They know exactly what they have to do every single day, right in front of them. And then when we have our team meetings, we're pulling up those reports and showing, okay, here was your goal, here's what you hit, why did you hit it, and give congratulations. If you didn't hit it, why did you not hit it, and how are you going to overcome that for the next part? But if they have that initial buy-in, like why are they doing it? Why are they tracking it? Then the cadence becomes really simple because it's something that they want. And I think that's where a lot of people fall down on some of these like lead trackers and things like that is that they never connect the why to the number for the team member. And so if you can, if you can sit with your team and say, here's the number you need to hit and here's the why, and it's something that they've come up with that you've coached them to come up with. It takes on a whole new meaning to them. It then becomes what that goal is, as opposed to you as a boss or a manager telling them what they need to do. So I think the cadence comes from, from their ownership of those numbers.

You know, it's interesting. I heard this— no lie— last night. There is an app that I love. It's replaced Evernote. It's called Notion. And a couple people that I have followed on YouTube, um, Thomas Frank, who has great YouTube videos about how to use Notion. And, and, and anyway, I won't get into that. Um, but the re— reason I'm bringing this up is he said when you're choosing a, a note-taking app, you wanna also consider the culture of the business. And he said, I know that sounds strange, but let me explain why. He said, ultimately, the culture and how they see things ultimately makes its way into the software that you're using. Okay.

Yeah.

Now think about that. That's what you just mentioned is that you said, hey, philosophically, these are the things that we believe. So we want to make sure we build those, those features into the software itself because it's what we believe in on a daily basis. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's where it takes on a new life too. And that's where you can actually see, you know, visible change within your office. Yeah, that's cool. I haven't heard of that, that, that software, that note-taking.

Oh, it's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. I should do a Notion solo episode at some point. Okay, so I want to talk about Believe it or not, I have not— we've not had many discussions or many people on the podcast talk about the value of scripting. Now, where do you see and draw the line between kind of a canned script? I mean, I'm Comcast. I remember at times calling Comcast, and sometimes you just want to like shake the phone because, oh yeah, just get off the script.

Just talk to me.

Talk to me normal.

Human being. Just be common sense. Just, hey, how's your day? It's like you don't have to read the script off of that. So where do you find the balance between roleplay, scripting, the value of scripting versus like it's gone too far and now we're just doing a canned presentation? Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. Nobody wants to to speak to a robot. Let me, let me kind of frame it this way. Like, where do you think differences lie within successful people in sales? You know, there's a lot of different things, a lot of different traits that people have. There's different levels of product knowledge. There's different levels of tenacity, different levels of experience, different networks that you're pulling from. All of those things add up to the level of success that somebody can have. But there's one commonality between those that do well and those that do awesome. And that commonality is that the people who do awesome, they know the power of words. They know that they have influence and they have a different level of impact if they say the right words at the right time. They know the difference between you know, people like them, knowing exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to make it count. So they're really kind of focusing in on, you know, the words that they say. And if you have the right words at the right time, you can actually influence somebody measurably more than if you don't, or if you're just winging it. When is the worst time to think about something you're going to say? It's in the moment you're saying it. And what do most of us do? We give these high-level strategies to our teams and say, just wing it. Like, here's the knowledge, now go wing it. And so, man, that doesn't work. And it might— it'll work sparingly, but it's not going to work. It's not going to make some— somebody awesome unless they're a natural-born salesperson. And those are hard to find. I mean, most agency owners are natural-born salespeople. They kind of know what to say. So getting back into that, what's that vision for, you know, year 2, year 3, year 5? If you want to be grinding the phones yourself for 3, 4, 5 years, 6 years, and you don't need scripts, but if you're trying to build a business where you want to replicate yourself then you need scripts.

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How long do you think it takes, Mansoor? So new, new sales team member comes in, has not had sales experience in the before, okay? So they're not maybe some gifted salesperson, okay? We're not talking about that. We're talking about someone, uh, that, that's kind of new into sales, and so we're wanting to train them. They understand how to begin to use the techie stuff. Okay, so now we're actually into conversations. How long do you think it— what's the kind of the arc you see typically of what it— how long does it take to get someone to where they've internalized the scripts? Not just memorized them, but internalized them, right? And then they can deliver them in a way that it feels compelling?

I think it depends on the individual, and that's how you— when you screen on the front end, like having them read through some of the scripts, they're not going to do it well on the front end, but you can see the promise in them. I'm looking for somebody who can, you know, study it for 2 weeks, 3 weeks, practice it, roleplay with, with another team member and have it ready. But by you know, within a month. I don't want them reading it because most of the time when you, when you hear the negative views of scripts, they normally fall into a couple of categories. One, people think they sound scripted, like you said, like you sound like a robot, get off the phone, I don't want to talk to you, you're wooden, you're inauthentic. People think that it makes them sound unintelligent, that, you know, that people will know they're reading from a script, so they sound stupid. People think it's fake. Hey, I want to, I want to do what comes natural. I don't want to just kind of say what's, what's on a sheet of paper. Um, or they think they're too good for it. Like, hey, I'm a consultant. Um, I don't want to be using a script.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so, you know, if you can get over those negative views, um, to pull off the script correctly, you got to do two things. You've got to become proficient at reading from a script without sounding like you're reading from a script. And you've got to write a script that's so natural that it sounds perfectly normal when you're reading it. And that's where, that's where things fall through most of the time. They don't actually have any strategic preparation. That's basically anticipating anything that can come up within the sale and have the best possible response prepared. They're going into it with, hey, here's some good words I'm going to put down on a paper, on the paper. I'm not going to read it well, and I'm not going to have it written in a way that somebody would talk. Um, so those two things, you have to have those two things to have a good script.

So somebody's hearing this and they say, well, that sounds great. But the one of the worst places for someone to be is they say, I'm standing in front of a blank Word document and I gotta type out my scripts. And so for the first time, you know, beginning of 2023, I'm gonna start out, I'm gonna write these things down. And then just like, I don't know. So where do you help? Where does someone even just begin to get started?

So I think the best thing to do is you're, you're probably the best salesperson that you've got in your office. Um, you might have one ringer that, that's better than you, but I think you take the best salesperson in your office and, you know, we might have some listeners now that say scripting is stupid. They're, they're tuning everything out, but I'll tell them this. They're using a script right now, whether they know it or not.

Sure.

They've got an internal script that they're following. And if you— if they recorded themselves for the next 10 to 12 sales presentations, and they went through and transcribed everything they said over those past— over those 12 sales calls, they're going to realize that 95% of what they say is exactly the same. It's a script. So I think the best place to start is record one of your sales conversations, one of your sales things, have it typed out. I mean, there's tons of dictation software now. Have it typed out and then look through that because you're probably, you know, 90% good and you probably need to work on about 10% of your verbiage. I mean, there's little words that you can change that have a phenomenal impact on kind of what the script is, how the script's going to be perceived. One of those is, you know, how open-minded would you be? So, you know, I could say, would you mind me giving you a quote? Or I could say, how open-minded would you be for me to provide you with an insurance quote? And just by saying how open-minded, the subconscious is saying, am I an open-minded person? Yeah. I mean, most people want to be open-minded, so you're going to have a higher percentage of them saying yes. Than if you just said, hey, can I provide you with a quote? Because they want to be open-minded. So you can insert little things like that within the script to increase your success rate. And when you look at it on paper, you can say, oh man, I can't believe I did this. This is totally out of order. Why did I go— why did I go into this at this point? This should be more towards the end. And so you do that 4 or 5 times, craft your best presentation. You've got your script.

I didn't think I was going to ask you this, but I had a situation yesterday. I was calling into a— I don't want to say the name of the business. It's a national franchise, but it's a fitness-related type business. Okay. And I called in to get to talk to someone about joining. Basically, I wanted to get some information on it. Do they do a free class? Can you come one time? That type of thing. I mean, I'm about as red hot of a lead as you can get, right? I'm—

yes. You're ready to sign on the dotted line.

Yeah. I mean, they probably could have actually sold me a package on the phone and I would have probably bought it. But she gets done. I said, well, tell me, tell me about it. So she tells me about the, about the programming, and then it was fine. It was an okay spiel, but it was definitely not structured right. Okay. And then she said, well, so I mean, yeah, you can call us back or, you know, we can call you back. And I was like, wait a minute, what? I almost wanted to coach her in the moment of like, yeah, no, no, no, no. Like, what are you doing? You're letting me off the hook here, you know? Like, let me help you. I was like, I think I need to— who's your manager? Who's your manager? You know, I don't think they want you saying this, but I say all that to say that one, one idea for people to have is really just pay attention to the, to the businesses that you interact with and see good sales scripting or sales processes and ones that aren't. Now, I'll tell you, a mentor of mine told me, he said, you know, Bradley, one of the things I'll do twice a year is I'll pull up the fastest growing companies in the US. You know, you can just search that by Forbes. And he said, I will book in a sales call with one of their sales reps just to go through their sales process. And he said, it is without a doubt the reason why they're some of the fastest growing companies is because their sales process is so tight. You get text messages, you get emails, you get reminders. They have it scripted.

Flow is on point.

Their flow is on point. They did not get to one of the fastest growing companies in the US by winging it, basically. Right, right.

Yeah. So, so I think a script has to have 3 things when you're crafting it too. I think it's got to be in an order. Like, for somebody to buy from you, they have to like your product. So you have to have within your script a means of saying, hey, they're either going to hate your product love your product, or be indifferent with your product. And so you've got to paint your product in the best light. But just them loving your product is not going to get them to buy from you. They've also got to have trust in you. So they've got to trust you completely. They're either— they're going to think you're, you know, you're a snake, or they're going to think they have complete trust in this person. And then lastly, I mean, you could have the trust and you could have the product, but if they don't believe in your company, then they're not going to buy from you. And so you're trying to increase their level of confidence in your product. You're trying to increase their level of confidence in your company and in you. And so you have to do those 3 things within the script. A lot of times people will leave one of those out because they're in a hurry or they're, they're not following a script. And so they'll talk about the product and the company, but they never build trust with themselves, or they build trust with themselves, but they don't ever talk the company up. Um, we had an example where like one of my salespeople, we talk about this all the time. He didn't sell himself. He sold the company and he sold the product. They took the quotes that we had given them, walked into a different agency. Handed them the quotes and said, hey, I want to get these started, because he didn't sell the trust in him. And so we missed that opportunity because he hit 2 of the 3. He didn't follow the script.

That's good. So what, what is a best practice of how to do that? Um, say just building trust in you as a person, because I think that's great. I've not heard that before and it makes so much sense. About, you know, the package, the policies, the product that we're offering to you, trust in that and belief in that, trust in you and trust in the company. How do you do that in building trust whenever in some cases, maybe within the last 15, 20 minutes, the first time I've actually ever talked to you?

Right, right. And that's the thing is like, if you're in front of somebody, you build trust through body language, you build trust through the way you, the way you appear, the level of, you know, professionalism that your office has, things like that. Well, think about what we do. We talk to a lot of people on the phone. When we talk to people on the phone, you have 4 seconds. So between the time that you say hello and the time they've made up their mind whether they're going to listen to you or not, it's 4 seconds. So do you think you can make them trust you in 4 seconds using words? No. You can't. And so one of the things that really falls short within scripting and that people don't do is with tonality. So you've got to come across sharp, as a sharp person, as a knowledgeable person, and as somebody that they want to listen to in 4 seconds. And you can't do that through just words alone. We all have this internal dialogue going on in our mind our subconscious. Our subconscious is doing our breathing, our heartbeat. It's such a powerful force and it's controlling 96% of what we do. There's only 4% in our conscious mind and we spend all of our time on that 4% when it's really the 96% that we need to be paying attention to too. So what kind of tones are you using? What are the inflections in your voice? How are you asking the question? So you've got to practice that tonality, that empathy, And again, it comes natural with a natural salesperson. So if you ever hear a natural salesperson on the phone, it's just natural. They have the empathy, they have the right inflections on the right words, they use the correct patterns in speech to build trust, and they can do it very, very quickly. And so it's got to feel natural to the person hearing it, but you've got to come across sharp, you got to come across knowledgeable, and you've got to come across as trustworthy in 4 seconds. And so you have to work on that tone. Now, there's different tonalities you can use and that you can practice. You know, that might be a different conversation that we could have, but I mean, there's, there's tons of ways you can practice that.

Yeah, I think that oftentimes, like you mentioned, the founder, business owner, entrepreneur typically has unconscious competence. They're just naturally good at what they do. I think about the story of Wayne Gretzky. You know, I'm not a hockey guy, but I mean, he's obviously by far the best hockey player of all time.

Yeah, I think Michael Scott quoted, or he quoted Michael Scott at one point, I think. Make, right? He did 100% of the shots you don't take.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, but he really did not do well as a coach, and you wonder how much of that was just, you know, maybe in, in, uh, practices, players not doing what that— what they need to do. And he'd say, look, just do it like this, you know, just, just, just do this. And they're like, well, we're just not you, you know. And so he he struggled to be able to kind of get it out of him, how to be able to, you know, transfer that down to, to his team. I don't know that for sure, but it's just an example of where he had unconscious competence. He was just really good at what he was able to do. But the point is that you're making is that in sales, yes, some people may have a natural privilegiation to be able to be really good at this. I mean, they just naturally gifted with it. Yes. But at the end of the day, these are skills that you can learn. You can learn these skills if you just practice them enough, right?

Absolutely. Like, think about, like, so with every word you say through tonality, there's a whole nother dialogue going on. So if I said Bradley, like, you hear your name, but you know, like, somebody's mad at you. If you hear like Bradley, Hey Bradley, like you, you can hear the different tones. And with all of those, I'm saying the same word, but you're hearing different things. And so when we do this, when we present things to our clients, we might use the correct word, but they're hearing a whole different story in their mind through the tones and the way we communicate those words.

Yeah. Yeah. So true. It is. Uh, I was trying to think of this sentence, but depending on what word you emphasize, it can change the complexion with the exact same words.

And— Totally something totally different. Yep.

Said something totally different.

So, okay.

So a couple things that you mentioned. One is the words themselves really matter. So taking the time to be intentional with the scripting that you have for your team, but then it doesn't just stop there. It starts with it goes from that to then the tonality, the inflections in the voice, the conviction, the empathy that are expressed in those words too. So it's really got to be both.

Right, right. And like, so again, like some people say, don't use a script because it makes you sound robotic. Well, have there been any movies that they've watched that they've liked, or have they— has any kind of movie inspired them? Braveheart's a good example. Al Pacino in Friday Night— what's, what's the, what's the movie with Al Pacino? Every— Any Given Sunday. Like, these are great movie moments that move people. You know, we play these clips for our team. This— they're all scripts, but they've moved you emotionally because they have delivered it in a way that moves people. So we have to deliver the words that we're saying in a way to move people. And that's kind of like we have in the Today app, we have all these scripts built in. So the scripting is a big part of, of, you know, creating an office where systems are replicable, days are replicable, um, and all this can be managed and tracked. Well, in there you have the words to say, but it's not going to say them for you. You still have to practice and work on the tones and know how to deliver it. But we're trying, you know, within our office, we're trying to make it as easy as possible. But it still requires work. Nothing's going to do it for you.

Well, Mansoor, OpenAI is out there now. We just need you to install OpenAI into it and then just say like, hold on one second, let me put you on the phone and put them on the phone with an OpenAI.

Okay, here we go.

That's, that's, that's the next level. Okay, we get there in 2024, maybe. Okay.

Absolutely.

That's great. Whenever I'm curious to just kind of give it like a general business conversation now. So obviously we talked a little bit of touched on kind of 4DX and around scripting. When you begin to kind of think about, you've been very successful across, you know, different businesses yourself. What are some of the things, best practices around just being able to really scale a business that you find are there in addition to the things that we've talked about versus maybe what some other people who are just, man, they're putting in the effort, they are putting in the effort, they're checking all the right boxes, they're doing all the right things, they don't waste their time, they show up every day, they're working their tails off, but man, they seem to just be spinning in mud versus really beginning to accelerate. What, what are some of the differences you see?

So the differences in people who are gaining traction and those who aren't in, in, um, scalability.

Yeah.

So I think with scalability, you've got to look at it's a machine. So if you build the machine a certain way, it's going to output a certain thing. So if you're building widgets, you put the machine in, you should put in raw materials, it should spit out a widget. It's no different with the systems that we're creating within a business. You're putting something in and you should get something out. If, if you're putting in raw material and you're getting an umbrella and you're supposed to be getting a wrench, then your, your system is— your, your machine is messed up. So I would look at what, what you're putting in, how the system is performing, and what you're getting out. And if you are just spinning your wheels, well, then your machine is broken. It's either something within your system, there's a cog somewhere that you need to fix, because if If it is truly something that you're scaling, then when you put it in, it should come out. And so if you're spinning your wheels, something's broken. You're either not executing on the plan, you know, correctly, or something within the plan is wrong. So I think it's a continual refinement because, I mean, especially with what's going on in the market and the environment today, something that scaled a year ago is not scaling anymore. So it could be that, that you're just not improving upon it. And that, that lack of improvement is causing the output to be different and to not take you where you want it to go.

Who's had the biggest influence on your leadership and growth as a business owner?

So I have some mentors locally. So what What I always try to do, and I did this in college, I did this in high school, is I would find one or two people that are in a different life stage than me that I look up to or aspire to be. And then I approach them not from a, from a mentor-mentee standpoint, but I don't call it that. I just say, hey, can I have lunch with you? And in those lunches or in those talks, You know, most of them have been, you know, spiritual leaders at my church. I look at them, I look at their kids, I look at their families, and I think, man, they did a great job raising their kids. They're successful in the community, but they're also successful with their family. I want to meet with them and walk with them and learn from them. And so at every stage of life, I'm looking for that, that person in that next stage. To where I can get good advice from. So I would say it's not, you know, it's not been one person or one influence. It's been a multitude of people throughout the years that I've reached out to, to have a mentor-mentee relationship with and to do life with them. And, you know, most of the time people are very free to give you advice on things that worked and things that didn't work. So I'm always looking for you know, what path do I need to be on and where's it going to take me? And through, through others' experience. Um, and I'm always reading, I'm always, um, trying to improve myself. And, and so, um, there's, there's so many— there's so much information out there now. That, that's the problem is there's, there's so much now that, um, it's hard to, to determine where to, where to focus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a lot of information. It can begin to be a little content overwhelmed, really. It can be at times. So many books and podcasts even like this one, you know. But, uh, Montserrat, this has been great. Hey, we're gonna go into E9 rapid-fire questions. Before we do that, uh, people want to reach out to you, learn more about Today app, uh, where would you point them to?

Um, they can go to the website. Uh, website is you know, www, obviously, todayapp.com. That's todayapp.com. Could always email me directly if they needed something one-off. That's mhassan@todayapp.com. And yeah, anything directed towards there, we'd be glad to help them or answer any questions they might have.

Awesome. All right, ready to go into E9 rapid fire?

I don't know, we'll see. We'll see.

Last book that you read?

So the last book that I read, um, was— it's an older book, it's called The Dream Manager, um, by Matthew Kelly. I can't remember who recommended it to me. Um, it's about a book about, uh, you know, employee retention It's a parable book that kind of walks through— everybody has dreams. As leaders, we need to help them tap into those dreams. So it was right in my wheelhouse of, you know, making sure that we have that vertical goal alignment based on what their dreams are. It was a really good book, I thought, from a, from a parable standpoint, a lot of transferables, and especially what's going on, you know, in the, in the job market. Today.

What's the book you'd recommend the most to other leaders and business owners?

Man, I have every single one of my team members read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It's a, it's, it's the classic. It's the one that I've probably read the most. I read it every 2 or 3 years. Because it just, it's timeless to me.

Yeah, love that. What's your favorite travel destination?

So we, we go, we love traveling as a family and all that. We try to go to different places all the time. But we always end up down in Destin, Sandestin area, 30A area every year. So if we don't go one year, like we feel like we've missed out on a family vacation. So we just go every year. So that's probably our most frequent and most comfortable is down there on the Panhandle in Florida.

You're on a 10-hour flight, you can sit next to anyone. Can't say your family, can't say your family, I have to get that disclaimer.

Yeah.

Okay, anybody outside your family who you sit next to?

Besides the religious answers, would, uh, would probably, uh, it'd probably be like a Warren Buffett from the standpoint of like, he's been very successful, but he's not, like, trying to be overly materialistic. So I'd say Warren Buffett, because I think that after that plane ride, I would probably have enough knowledge to go make a lot of money.

But, you know, When you're not working, what do you love to do?

So right now with my kids, I've got a 14-year-old, a 13-year-old, and a 9-year-old. I'm literally a taxi, so you— I'm an Uber. Um, if I'm not Ubering, we're as a family, we're out on the lake. There's a lot of lakes around where we live. Um, or we're, you know, I'm playing basketball with my son. So it's, uh, it's a lot of family time. But right now we're just in such a busy stage, it's work and shuttling.

10 years ago, I never knew this would be so hard. Fill in the blank.

Um, you know, I probably knew, but I still didn't know. Um, just, just, uh, staff management. Like, I was told it was hard, and it is hard, but it's still always hard. I mean, even when, when we have the systems in place to make it easy It's still hard. So that would, that would probably be on there forever.

Yes or no, Hendon Hooker should be in New York for the Heisman?

Absolutely, yes. I mean, that's the biggest snub. I think he needed to be invited.

Yeah. Best thing— very difficult time for a lot of people, but the best thing that came out of COVID for you personally?

So I think with COVID it was a renewed focus on family and on what's really important. Um, so I think that it gave a time to pause and to reflect on the busyness. I don't think it changed the busyness or anything, but it, but it was a time where you can look back and say, man, we were— it was just us And we were good.

Last question. What's the best piece of leadership advice you've ever received?

That's a good one. That's a tough one. I think the best piece is to, to be authentic in everything that you do. So be your real self. Be genuine, and treat people with respect. And I think if you do that, then, you know, good things will happen. And if, if it doesn't happen and you're doing that, you probably don't need to interact with the people that, that get upset with, with you being authentic.

Awesome. Mansoor, enjoyed having you on. Hope to have you back on in the future.

Yeah, thank you, Bradley. I appreciate it.

All right guys, this is the intro and the outro to the Mansoor Hassan podcast. Um, I think the, um, uh, I have to come up with what I think the title might be actually on this, um, Ellie, and I'll put that in, uh, in Notion as my recommended, um, recommended, uh title, possibly. So welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Mansoor Hassan. He is the founder and creator of Today App Pro, a wonderful software to be able to help you run your agency on a day-to-day basis. We dive into all things, not only just software, but really, honestly, not just software, but in fact, I don't like this guy. Sorry. I'm going to change that. Well, there's a lot of real great takeaways from that episode. I think one of the things that's obviously interesting is the, the thing that I will definitely remember the most is whenever he talked about vertical goal alignment. Now, personally, I don't use the term goal very much. I've mentioned that, um, but the vertical alignment for sure of goals, targets, outcomes, whatever you want to use, objectives, I think is fantastic. And then how they've integrated that into the software with 40X. And many of you have read that book and understand that concept. I think number 2 is whenever we just took a lot of time around the value of scripting. And what I think he did is he did a really fantastic job of breaking down, not just saying, hey, you need to have a script. It's like, oh, well, duh, you know, tell me something I don't know. But then to go through, and I thought the 3 things particularly were fantastic, is, is the product and painting your product in the best light. Number 2, having trust in you. And then number 3, belief in the company. And gotta have all 3. And he gave a great example of, you know, someone having just 2 of the 3 and then they kind of went somewhere else. I thought that was great. Those are 2 of the biggest things I took away. I thought also at the very end, whenever he was talking about his beliefs of scalability and kind of what to look at, and then even the value of mentors and leadership. And, you know, being willing to raise your hand and ask people to be able to help you goes a long way and says a lot about his humility. And it's just a good reminder for all of us to be able to find those people in our life that are, you know, steps ahead of where we are and be able to ask them to kind of guide you along the way. A big shout out to our podcast sponsors. If you are ready to get off to a great start in 2023, you know, you need to be able to make really good decisions, and that's what having really tight financials can help you to do. Go to club.capital, book a no-obligation demo, and talk to them about their CFO services as well that they launched just this past year. You know, you want to have, as Mansoor was talking about, quality people, but you never know whether some people are going to be naturally gifted or not naturally gifted, but you do understand the value of recruiting on a regular basis. But maybe you just have your— you just have to wear so many hats. You're just pulled in so many different directions. It's hard for you to find the time to be able to do that. Well, that's exactly what Autopilot Recruiting can help you to be able to do. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code CLUBCAPITAL to get started. Alex and his team have done a fantastic job, work with well over 1,000 insurance agency owners now to be able to outsource their recruiting, really be able to have a pipeline for their recruiting. And so they can put really quality candidates in front of you on a regular basis. And ultimately you get to do what you do best, which is really choosing who is going to be the right fit for your culture. And it's going to be those A-players. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com and use the code CLUBCAPITAL to get started. Once you get them on board, you know, you want to begin to train and develop them. Obviously you saw, you know, sometimes it's just one word or one sentence or one thing that's, oh, you know, I can position it this way, as Mansoor was saying. And if you want to know somebody who's getting it done at the absolute highest level and has for the last several years and want to kind of peek behind the curtains. You want to be able to train and develop your team on a regular basis. It's exactly where Coach P Consulting— many of you have heard about it. You've reached out, talked to David, and the success and the just testimonials that David sends me all the time are fantastic of people that have said, this is the best investment I've ever made in my agency, in my own development, and in my team's development. Let David know you heard about him on the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, and he'll give you your entire first month off for free. You can test drive, see 8 different sessions for free, and then you can decide if you want to stay on and join. And I think you'll be like almost everybody else. It has like 100% retention rate, uh, of people that have said this is the best investment I've made in my agency. Go to coachpconsulting.com. All right, everyone, we got big plans for 2023, some amazing guests, and Mansoor, uh, was one of the best, and so great to have him on. Until next episode, everyone, lead well.