Episode 258: Leadership and Team Development with David Peterson

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.

Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation. Check them out at club.capital.

Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host.

On today's episode, we bring back the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. David Peterson himself. He has always been one of our more popular guests. I know that you, uh, have learned so much from him, and I learned so much from David every time I talked to him. But I have to tell you, I think this is by far the best episode that we've had with him. Maybe it was just the topic was interesting to me itself, but I think he drops some absolute gems in there, especially whenever he is talking around his managers in his office and how he approaches that. And then the planning process that they go through and the detail or the attention to detail, I think is something you're going to get a ton out of. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Mr. David Peterson.

What's up, Facebook? We are live streaming this sucker into our Leadership Podcast community. So if you're in our community, I'll, uh, have it pulled up on my iPad. So if you've got some questions for Mr. David, you'll be able to pull that up and I'll, uh, be able to answer them. So, Dave, before we get rolling, how you doing, man?

I'm doing fantastic, Bradley. How are you, man?

I'm good. What's, uh, what's this week been like for you?

Well, you know, this is my first day in the office. I have been working from home all week. Um, we are going through some big changes at the agency right now. We are onboarding like crazy. I ran a little promo in the office for some team members to bring in referrals. We specifically needed a bilingual person, um, and when I did that, everybody just started sending everybody. Uh, we got a ton of people in the pipeline, more than normal, and we ended up hiring, um, 8. So in the past, yeah, so as, uh, we've got 3 more that are starting Monday And so as of 3 weeks ago, from 3 weeks ago until Monday, a few days from now, we're gonna onboard 8 new individuals. So as you can imagine, it's been a bit of a whirlwind with new bodies running around. Where do we put people? Making sure the training calendar is on point, 'cause we've got essentially 2 onboardings happening at the same time. So Wave 2 is gonna run into the back half of Wave 1. Uh, putting puzzles together, man. That's what I've been doing.

I, I mean, we're just going to jump into it because I'm actually really curious about this genuinely. What are the things that you have to do to be able to onboard? I mean, onboarding one person is, is one thing. You want to make it a great experience day one, etc.

And I've—

I know a lot of people recently, I was talking to a couple of different people that have really had a lot of success, especially with sales acquisition folks hiring or onboarding two people at once. But what is that like? What are some of the learnings that you've had of— I see that Roll Tide in the background. I see that. You see the color of my hat too, right? Okay. All right. Anyway. We won't— we'll stay on topic. Uh, but seriously, what are the— what are the things that you've learned in onboarding that many people at once so that if anybody else is going through something similar, you've already, you know, had the learnings and the lessons along the way that can help someone else?

Sure. So we've had to get really regimented and structured on what we're doing, because if you're bringing on that many people. Heck, even if you're bringing on 3 people, it's a lot and it gets crazy. So there's got to be a schedule, and that's something I've fought against my entire career. I am not a very scheduled, structured person. I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of guy, um, like this podcast, right? I don't even know what we're going to talk about today, but I'm here for the fun, um, and that's what I thrive off of. And I can't really do that in this type of environment when we're bringing on multiple people. So I had a pretty much all-day session with my managers on having a very clear schedule of what every day looks like, what every hour of those days look like, so these people know exactly where they're going after each session is over. And then once we did that, it was realizing that, holy cow, we're putting a lot on ourselves and on our management team. They've got their normal duties to perform. How much are we putting on those people right now? How stressed out are they? Can they manage the workload? How are they feeling? So then it's all right, how can we, how can we help each other out? Right. And this is a great example. So I send, I've got a promotion for my team members and, um, I send them on a trip. My manager, my, um, one of my sales managers, she's flying to Cabo right now as we speak. She is on a plane headed to Cabo, and we got 3 people starting on Monday, right? So no matter how structured you are, there's going to be some curveballs thrown at you, right? And, um, and this is a big one. So, you know, we spent this week planning for that. Hey, where, where am I, myself and the other manager, going to step into the positions that you were usually in charge of and have that planned out for next week. Um, another thing that we've gotten a little more regimented on— my, this, my chief of staff is the one that's really been pushing hard against me, and that's what we need, right? We need people to, to put some pressure on us. She got on to me a few weeks ago. She's like, you cannot start people whenever you want to. We need a minimum of 2 weeks before they can start. Right. We need to have it on this date or this date. Cause sometimes we get into interviews and we're talking to somebody and we love them, but they got another job offer on the table or they're needing to start ASAP. And we've got to make an executive decision. And all they see is the repercussions. Like, all right, we got someone coming in and I need y'all to figure it out. And they're like, hold up. No, I have a say in this. And this is how you need to make it easier for us. So. Being a little more structured about when we're bringing people on, where we're putting them, do we have time to get them equipment, all of that. We've really cleaned up most of it. I'm not going to say it's perfect. There are still things we have to deal with, but it's a lot.

Is it, is it fair to say on a couple of things I want to kind of get nitty-gritty with this? Are you creating and updating playbooks along the way? So you're saying, okay, hey, we got to iterate on that. And immediately somebody is going in and putting that onto a onto a document to say, all right, next time, next time we got to make sure we're 2 weeks ahead. And oh, you know what, it takes this long to be able to order equipment. So we got to be— you got to kind of reverse engineer that. So, you know, your entrepreneurial push, push, push is like, David, we can't get 8 people to start Monday. We don't even have computers for them and we don't have a desk for them. It's like, oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. But, you know, is that fair to say?

100%. There's still a lot of changing in the moment, and where we are improving is we're then taking that moment and we're putting it into the playbook. We're putting it into the process manual and saying, all right, next time we've got this checklist. We know it's gonna take, once again, 2 weeks to get them equipment, right? If we got a remote person starting, when can they have a laptop? When can they sign on? Uh, and sometimes, as I said, curveballs are thrown at you. I literally, before we opened up this call, I got an email. One of the guys that's starting Monday has had the longest background check in history for me. It has been over 3 weeks. I have had 4 people come and go since I even hired this guy. Background checks came back, no problem. State Farm alias came back, no problem. I'm still waiting for background check. Thank God it finally came in and we're gonna get him Monday. But there are still variables that you can't control. However, with learning from all of these things and, and creating a process for it, it's making us much more prepared and structured. Um, and one of the things we've done is we've looked, you know, outside of just kind of what we do on these computers day to day and lean in on some professional resources, some like actual training materials that are software-oriented where we can go on and put videos and playbooks and processes and have it ready to go for these people. And that's been a, that's been a huge, huge improvement.

So how far out? I want to— I'll be remiss if I didn't ask this question. I think that previously you had told— you'd shared on a podcast, I think that you're pretty— you've been pretty structured around 60 days, 60 to 90 days, something something like that. What is that like for these? You said, hey, I've got every day and every hour mapped out. How far out are you going with that? I mean, obviously probably the first couple weeks or so, but what does that really look like for the— when you're onboarding that many people at once?

So that was actually a really interesting moment for us, and you've got a great memory there. It is 60 days. We've had a 60-day onboarding. When we had that all-day planning meeting, we said, all right, we've got to put pen to paper and have this completely structured out. It was 30 days. And when I say 30 days, it was 1 month, which in reality is 21 working days.

Yeah.

We filled up 21 working days with, you know, 8 to 5 training and we were done. And I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, hold up, we just shaved off a month. What are we doing? Right. And it, it made us so much more efficient and it's getting our people up to speed a lot faster. I have now got— I've never tried to rush anyone to a position, but I've now got people, once they're coming out of their 30 days, they're, they're actually ready to go and be a contributor to the team. Um, you know, I've shared some of this on our Coach P calls recently, but since this structure— and obviously we're in a pretty good rate environment, as, as everyone knows, this past 18 months or so, but, um, we have had people come out and just crush records in their first month. We had a guy at $70,000 last month. There was a brand new guy at $43,000. There was a girl at $65,000 in P&C premium. And typically people have built up to that, and now they're coming out of the gate swinging, um, because of the structure. They're getting what they need. They're getting it quickly. They're understanding it. They're being held to skill checks, uh, and then we're putting it into practice and it's working and we're getting big results.

All right. There's a couple of things you mentioned there that I want to make sure I call out to people. One is the fact that you started with training. Is it fair to say if somebody who has never had a regimented, structured onboarding training process, like a world-class training system, that it's maybe going to take you 90 to 120 days. But over time, and my goodness, how long have you been at this? I mean, not, not, not owned your business. I'm just talking about really having a discipline and it's just getting squeezed down tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, right? I mean, you're probably not going to be able to get it down to a week, but the fact is you've been able to get it down to roughly about 4 full, you know, working, working days or so. I think, is that fair to say for other people they'll have the same experience if they just document it out, and then over time it's going to be able to shorten that training cycle.

100%, Bradley. One of the first things we did that was a big change for us is, you know, we've been running this 60-day thing for probably 8 years and it's worked very well for us. One of the reasons we had to make an adjustment was at the end of last year, we brought on remote employees for the first time. In a big way. We've had remote employees, but they typically start an agency and then branch out. But for the first time, we recruited individuals that were in other states, and I knew we had to change because I could not onboard them for 60 days because we weren't there. Like, I couldn't say, hey Bradley, come over here and shadow this guy and see what he does, right? It had to be more structured. So the first thing we did was we created a 1-week boot camp.

Mm-hmm.

I flew everybody in, I put them up in a hotel and said, for one week you are getting hands-on intense training. And we were able to see those people come out of our office after a one-week bootcamp where they did a deep dive into the sales process. They still have to learn systems and things like, so there's still additional training, but as far as the sales process goes, we gave them a full week. And every single one of those people were unbelievable. Um, they were the ones I was referring to earlier. One guy, absolutely no experience, hit $77,000 in premium. The girl, no experience, she had $65,000 or $67,000 last month. And the other guy, he had experience. He's an absolutely incredible story. He was with another agent. For 2 years. He knew the system, he understood it. He had been moved into a sales role and I hired him. And I don't think— I don't know if anybody would have. The last year of sales data when he was in a sales job, his biggest month was $15,000 in premium. Was as big as my— his other months were $6,000, $7,000, $8,000, $9,000, and $10,000. His average was, I think, $8,200 of premium. Um, and he's fully remote. We brought him on, and last month he had $47,000 of premium. And it's, it's because he had never been trained. And he told me that, and the reason I hired him was his agent backed that up. His agent straight up told me he was remote. I brought him on and just said, go get it. And I never gave him structured training. And then he was given structured training and he went from an $8,200 a month producer to now being close to a $50,000 producer. And I was so, so proud for that guy. And it made me so happy because he, he loves insurance and he's passionate about helping people. And now he's getting to do it successfully, and it's pretty cool to see.

Well, all right, there's a few things with that. I think it's the training program, number one, clearly, which is kind of what our conversation been focused on. And number two, it's expectations, and environment dictates performance. He's in an environment that just is absolutely— he, he knows it. I mean, it's both spoken, I'm sure, And then it's unspoken. He just kind of sees it, David. I mean, you know, kudos to you for creating that environment. I mean, if you go and you're gonna, you know, try to— I don't know, let's do an extreme example— go, uh, try to be with the Navy SEALs, I mean, the environment itself is going to shape you, period. I mean, you, you know that. And so, um, I mean, I, I'm a huge believer in environment dictates performance one way or the other. One way or the other. And that's not knocking that other person. I mean, yes, I think it's, it's training and lack of training or whatever that may be. And you clearly have a world-class training program. But I think it's not just that. I think if you take that person and go pluck them into a different environment that does not have the same level of encouragement, expectations, reward, accountability, I don't think it's just the training. Does that make sense? I mean, that, you know, I think it's got to, it's got to be both. And, and I think that when I'm saying environment dictates performance, it's another way of saying culture.

100%. They've got to be in a place where they have peers that support them, help cheer them on, help call them out, help give them a good example of how things should be, right? I can get all the training in the world, but if I'm doing it by myself, what kind of awareness do I have if I'm winning or losing?

Yeah, yeah. I, I, uh, I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway.

Yeah, come on, talk about Nick Saban. Let me hear it. Come on.

There's an environment that dictates performance at Alabama, okay? It is, it is. There's a, there's a standard. I mean, you know, even if it's cheating, even if it's cheating, whatever that is, I mean, there's still, there's still a lot of—

you can't edit this.

Speaking of, I'm kicking your butt in the whoop, by the way, in strain this week. Like, I mean, you're just— you know what David's been doing this all week? He's been like working on training programs because his strain numbers are like terrible. You're like way down here. We're way down at the bottom.

Sitting at my desk and, you know, I go on a nightly walk with the wife to unwind. There has been no sweat. This week at all. And thank God I've got the best management team in the world because even the work stuff, it's not that crazy. So yeah, take it, Bradley. Take it while you can get it.

All right. I want to ask you around something also. I want to pull the thread on something else you mentioned because it was a casual passing comment, but I really want you to speak to the value of this. Because I picked up on it and you said, I had an all-day planning meeting. Hmm. How many people with their leaders in their office, or if it's just currently you, totally fine, are taking the time to step out of the office and have an all-day planning meeting about whatever that may be? Can you just speak to the value of that and how long have you been doing that? Sure.

So it's, it's crucial. First of all, I actually— it's funny, last week I did a Coach P call on this, right, on managing our time and making sure that we're efficient. And one of the biggest points that I brought up is that you have to build in planning time, whether it's weekly or monthly. It has to be part of your routine or you're going to miss things. Uh, so what we did, we knew we had a, a big hill to climb And, uh, to give you some context, we are busier than we've ever been at the office. I've been out a lot studying for my 65. There's a ton of stuff going on, right, where I don't feel like I have extra time, but my managers needed it and they had to have it. And, um, we felt that it was important enough to take an entire day It was a Friday, um, and we removed distractions. So I had them come over to my house and I, I brought lunch in and we got rid of everything else off our plate. We said, all right, here's our, here's our big thing that's coming up. This is extremely important. We're about to, we're about to onboard a lot of people. What are we going to do about it? And our goal was to leave that meeting with all of our questions answered. And to have a timeline. And we did. And it was tough to get it done, right, to get everyone out of the office for a full day. Um, but we walked away from it and it made everything moving forward so much easier. Because if we did not have that plan right now and we were trying to onboard 8 employees, we would be losing our minds on a daily basis. And not only that, I guarantee we would have lost some of these employees. I promise it would have been such a circus over here that that would have been the first impression for some of these people, and we would have lost a few of them, guaranteed.

Yeah. Um, a couple things. Number one, I didn't want to— I didn't know this for sure. I said get out of the office, and you did. You did. I, I think that that's huge. I mean, there's something— again, going back to environment dictates performance. Hey, I'm gonna get them out of the house and take them to get them out of the office, excuse me, take them to the house, bring them in lunch. I'm going to curate the environment and we're going to work on this specific thing. To me, this is the thing we're working on and we've got to get this outcome in that session. And if it took— how long did it take? Like, what was it, 4 hours or was it all day?

Uh, it was probably closer to 6. It was 10 to 4, actually. It was 10 to 4 and then one person left and we ran a little bit long with the other two, but With all 4 of us, it was 10 to 4.

Okay. So if you think about— and I'm not asking for a number here, but I just want people to think about this. He took his managers out of the office, so they have all of their hourly rates. And then you have Dave, your hourly rate to do that. That is an investment. That is an investment financially and more importantly, time and attention to do it. So if you're going to do it, make dang sure that there's going to be intentionality about we're working on this and we're going to get this specific outcome. I think that that's, that's the big thing versus we'll just get everybody together. What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about 12 different things. You're not going to get that done. You're not going to get anything done talking, trying to talk about 12 different things versus this is the big thing that's going to move the needle forward. We've got to be able to onboard these 8 people. I think it's really critical.

All right.

I have a question I've been wanting to ask you for a while. So you have elevated a number of people to, we'll call, a manager level. You, you might disagree, but I, I think that one of the more challenging positions in an insurance agency or any business is to elevate someone who is in some sort of a producing role, and then they get added a layer of leadership. So they're still producing in some capacity, and then they have to add in leadership. Okay, how do you— let's just— I'm going to use a complete hypothetical number here. Maybe you can even add in some specifics. You've got a producer doing really, really well, maybe one of the people that you just onboarded, right? They do well, they take off, they're doing $50,000 a month in premium, and they're just clicking through. Okay. And in a couple of years, you're going to elevate them to some level of, of, of management. Is your expectations that their production has to stay the same, or do you account for now the time that they have and the responsibilities of other people and I don't want to call— I want to say lower the bar, but they— you adjust what it is that they need to personally produce because now they have, uh, responsibility for other people. Does my question make sense?

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It does.

And I'm going to rock the boat a little bit with your answer because I know how the average office is being run and mine's different and I'm not going to take credit for it. This is something my business coach forced on me. When we went to a third agency, um, I hired a new business coach when we took on the third agency a couple years ago, and the very first call we had, he said, you are making the exact same mistake that every small business makes when they move to a medium-sized business, which is you're taking your best people and you're putting them into a management role, but they're still doing their old job too. So now they're average at 2 jobs. You got to take everything else off their plate. They're either a manager or a salesperson. Which one are they going to be? And, you know, I had never really thought about it, but that's what we've done as agents, is that I have— or my agency has never performed better other than the times when I start to remove my old jobs. Like, I don't run the IFRs anymore, right? And when I did that, I put people in place to do it, and I was able to grow and manage the team. I stopped writing P&C in the first year, and when I did that, I was able to do IFRs and bring in a lot more financial services, right? So like, every time you move up, something comes off your plate. Yep. And with most managers, that's not happening. They're still being held to these expectations that, well, you're the, you're the alpha, you're the big dog, you still need to be writing the business. And he forced me to change that. And, you know, fortunately for me, I listened to his advice. And after that first call, I took them out of their jobs and I said, you're a manager now. You don't sell, you don't service, you don't do insurance. Your role is talent. You've got to coach this team. You've got to hold them accountable. You got to do one-on-ones. You got to spot check. You're manager now. And here's the crazy part. We're 2 years into this now, not even, and I just brought on a second sales manager because my first sales manager, she doesn't have the capacity to do her job anymore because this— the way that we've grown the team and she doesn't do any insurance anymore. And, and here's the kicker, we've only been able to scale and grow the team because she was just a manager. We could not have continued to scale this fast if she was still writing insurance. Yep, right. So now we're in a point where there's a, there's a co-sales manager, and she doesn't do insurance either. So I truly believe that because I've made the mistakes myself, is that we are, we're limiting our growth if we keep those people in that seat where they are still required to sell or to service or to do the insurance jobs because they cannot go out and lead people if they have all that other stuff on their plate.

I—

you didn't rock the boat with my answer. I think that's great. That's why I said I think that trying to do both is one of the hardest jobs to be able to do. My very first job I had, um, I was selling, uh, Yellow Pages for Yellow Book. That was my very first job out of college. And, uh, yeah, some people don't even know what a phone book is that are listening to this. But, um, and I thought that the one of the harder jobs was the— was a sales manager, and it was somebody that had responsibility for their own you know, accounts that they had, and then they had to lead people. And we, like, as a brand new sales rep coming in, I wanted to have more time to be able to learn and develop from, you know, the person, um, that I was, you know, that was my manager. But he was tied up with his own accounts. I mean, he made more money with his own accounts, and so he would, you know, give us a little bit of time here and there. But I was like, crowd, you know, he's focused on that. I mean, he showed me what was more important to him because he made more money doing that versus actually helping us to be able to be better. And so that was my first, um, you know, early on exposure to that. So I think it's absolutely next level and really the right thing. So kudos to you, um, for, you know, listening to your, to your coach, uh, to be able to hear that. By the way, this is where I think it's really important. Dave and I both do this and we're students of the game. I have coaches, David has coaches. Don't ever trust a coach who doesn't have a coach. That's super important. Like, if you, if you're listening to this, like, I, I don't know, David, if you got thoughts on this, but like, truly, I think that if you're not learning, you know, and the coach I have has a coach too that he pays a lot of money to every year, and so he's learning from that guy, passes it down to me, and then I try to be able to share it with other people, you know. So anyway, I, I I think it's just incredibly important to, to, to be able to learn from other people because you can't read the label from inside the jar.

I get this question all the time about Coach P. It's something I probably answer all the time, and people are asking about, you know, being a part of something. And what I've always explained to them is that I think one of the biggest problems we have as business owners is that there's not a culture of learning is that people are not holding consistent educational meetings and practicing and learning inside their businesses. And I always tell them, yes, like, I obviously, I am a coach now for thousands of people, but before that started, I signed up for every class possible. If there was something coming to Dallas or something that I could get to, I was there. I was on it. I have always been involved in groups, um, whether it's outside activities or study groups or seminars. Go to them, learn from them, because people have knowledge. And if you ever stop learning, like you said, if you stop getting coached, you're shutting off your brain to becoming a better individual. Um, So you should, you should never ever get to a point in your career where you turn that off. Should always be learning.

Uh, we won't necessarily share some of the specifics, but I think the people that this impacts are going to, um, are gonna know what we're referring to. There were some pretty seismic shifts. Ironic that I used that word given, um, the state I'm referring to.

You're good.

That, that totally— I did not mean that. I did not plan that one. As much as you may think I would plan, I did not plan that one. Um, but man, some, some, some people are really impacted, you know. Um, and it's happened before. Um, it doesn't matter the industry, there's some, there's some things, unknown unknowns. COVID was one of them. Right. Um, but specifically what has been on your walks, um, or your own quiet time, I'm sure that you've taken a little bit of time to reflect on, man, you know what, that is something that's totally out of my control. I can control a lot of things. I can control my managers and accountability and planning sessions and hiring 8 people and creating playbooks. I mean, those are some, some stuff that's out of my control. What is your best piece of advice to some of those small business owners out there and, and, and some of the real challenges that, that, that they're facing? And, um, not that you have all the answers, uh, by no means, but I mean, I, I do think that this is when community and learning from other people to say, man, I, this, this is, this is a really challenging place to be. What are your thoughts? Where, where should, uh, they begin to kind of look and maybe make some pivots?

Well, I think the biggest mistake that can be made that unfortunately happens a lot is that you start to pull away and you seclude yourself. And what happens there is that you, you don't have the positivity coming in, right? You start to, start to sit in the negativity and you think about all the problems that are going on when you need to do the exact opposite. You need to reach out talk to other people outside your area. So you are a part of the positivity. And I think when that happens, you can start to focus on, all right, there are things that I can control. Even though I've lost a lot of control here, there are still things I can focus on. And I think about, um, I think about, you know, the famous Joe Wynn, uh, his, his story when he started. They were restricted. And I don't remember his story specifically, but I think that they like couldn't write auto or something, couldn't write it. So what did he do? He immediately built an agency around financial services, and look how it has served him in the long term. And I don't mean to, you know, belittle anyone's situation. It's a very tough situation and there are some real struggles that are happening. All I'm saying is do what you can to reach out to others, surround yourself with other people so that you don't disengage and you don't soak in the negativity because there are things you can control out there. And that's all, that's all we have in life is we either become a victim of our circumstances or We, or we attack, right? And look what happened to Florida a long time ago. The people that stayed ended up in a great situation because a lot of people left and the people that stayed started to absorb those books. Over time, they got to start to write for other companies. They got, they got to do a lot of things and then ultimately open back up. And I would, I would assume after talking to many of them, they would tell you that it was the greatest decision they ever made, which was to stick around and fight through it. So that's my advice there, is to don't disengage, reach out to others, and realize that there are things that you can control, and that's where you need to focus your mind.

On that, I think that looking back on it, I just want to— I think I've shared this before, um, but the hardest thing for me to have ever done in my, my journey is to raise my hand and say, can you help me, or will you help me, um, to anybody. Because it's much easier to just go, I'm good, I'm good, I'm fine, everything's fine, everything's fine, when the reality is no, it's not fine. Yeah, you can't go to your team, you don't want to go to your family, you don't want to go to your spouse because you're going to stress them out. So then you would just internalize everything versus being able to say and I'm really struggling. I don't really know exactly what to do here, and I'm having a lot of insecurities and doubts. That has been really hard for me to be willing to do that. I actually— I won't say the person's name, but I got a text message, uh, from a guy the other day I hadn't talked to in a while. Um, David, I'll tell you offline who it was. Um, but, uh, I said, how are you doing? He said, to be honest with you, I'm struggling. And this guy has killed it for years. He said, for the first time, I'm really struggling. My very first response to him was, I appreciate that honesty so much, man. That makes me connect with you, like, in a way, because you're, you're being honest versus texting back, I'm good. Everything's great. Everything's fine. Everything I'm doing awesome. Everything's great. You know, all that sort of thing. So I think it's really, uh, I hope people hear what David is saying there to be able to be willing to reach out to some other people. And, um, and, and, and, and, uh, come together versus isolate. I think it's so important.

So, well, here, hey, I'll jump on the boat. You know, everyone looks at the outside, right? The, the Instagram version of life. And you can look at our picture and think everything's perfect, right? Business is good, growing. Um, hey, Y'all, I'm freaking tired. I'm worn out, right? But you've got to take advantage of your situation while you have it. And this is my message to anybody. You could be stressed out, you could be tired, you'd be facing uphill battles with underwriting and things you can and cannot do. Take advantage of whatever you have available to you. Something is working. Whether you're surrounded by good people, whether you're in a competitive market, at some point you're going to miss an opportunity and you're going to look back and say, why did I not take advantage of that while I had it? And I'm here to tell you, no matter what your situation is right now, there is something that you can focus on and something you can capitalize on, and you need to do it. You need to do it right now.

Mm-hmm. Um, I want to go back to something you mentioned, um, earlier that I didn't have a chance to, to kind of think around. Is when, for somebody that's listening to this and kind of sees the level specifically around training, what was I, I don't even know. Somebody would look at you and go, that's MBA level, right? Um, and, and it probably is. But if somebody really has the ambition, the desire to start a world-class training program, what are the absolute specific steps, like the no BS, like the actual things to do to begin to start a training program? So like, say that guy that the team member now works for you, said, hey, I want to start to create that. I know I don't have that and I've made that mistake, but I'm now making the commitment. David, what are the like 3 to 5 steps that they can take? Like after this, they listen to this, that they can actually begin to build that.

Sure. Number one, you gotta, you gotta make a decision on what you want because you can go listen to me and then go listen to another agent and we'll all have different processes, but we're all having success. And you're just like, well, what? What the hell do I do, right? You make a decision. You figure out what the play or the process is in your office and say, this is how we're running it, right? And then your job is to get that in front of your team. And in order to do that, you also have to tell them the why. So day one for me is an insurance— I call it Insurance 101, where I am giving them everything about my agency and kind of the general ideas of insurance and how we view it. Because I had a team member tell me— I did an exit interview, and I may have shared this on a prior podcast, but I did an exit interview one day and the girl told me that she is looking to find something she loves and is passionate about the way that it I'm passionate about insurance. And I told her this that day, and now I share it in my Insurance 101, which is I'm not passionate about insurance at all. Like, now I really like some of the benefits of permanent life insurance, and I can geek out on that for hours, but like insurance in general, like, it's not sexy to me. I didn't grow up thinking I'm gonna go be an insurance agent. And that's okay, right? Because we're taking the opportunities we have and we're making the best out of them. So I'll explain to them like, hey, if you can self-insure up to a certain limit, do it. Like, you don't need to get every single coverage out there just because it's available. And helping my team understand the why and the thought process of what is important and what's not important and how we should be protecting clients and sharing stories of real-life examples of how people were impacted That stuff's important. So starting out with that and giving them a firm, solid ground and getting them emotionally involved in what you do, and then helping them realize that you are a human being and that you care about them, and then they in turn start to care about you. I think that's the foundation. And then from there, it's so much easier to build on how we're doing it. This is the play we run for auto. These are the steps that you do. Learn them, practice them, come back to me and show me that you understand it. Let's move to fire. Let's move to life. Let's move to health. Break it down into sections that they could absorb and then spit back to you. And then if that's regimented, We can do that for a few weeks, and I truly believe no matter what your position is, you can take off a little bit of time to do this. You can spend 2 weeks on onboarding and boot camps and then come back and put out fires. Like, do I need to— do I need to call back some escalated clients and do it at 6 o'clock at night when everyone goes home? Fine. Do I need to— like, if you're the service person in the office, like You can go handle those things later. Your main priority has got to be developing your team. So take the sacrifice of knocking it out in a few weeks, do some pre-planning, and come back and do the other stuff later.

Mm-hmm. All right. Are you, when you do, when you're doing, let, let's just say these people that are about to be onboarded, will you, will they have documents, um, like onboarding, um, like an onboarding playbook that they'll go through on the, on those days? One. Number two, when you're actually in your training room, and I know that you're not doing all of the training, you have managers that are doing that, but I'm sure you're sprinkled in at points. Maybe you're doing a kickoff call or something like that to introduce. Are you recording all of that and putting that into a, into a library? Library?

Yep, we are. So they do have a big binder. Um, the binder includes everything we're going to go over. So it'll have, you know, where, where they go to get certain documents. It'll have word tracks. It'll, it'll have all of it. Um, and then we've also got a video library where they can go back and watch specific conversations. That way they can hear our tone of voice or inflection on things. You know, when are they making this pivot? When are they trying to close? Um, so yes, we are, we're trying to create, we're trying to automate this as much as possible where if we want to bring on, who knows, like what if we get to a point where I can just say, all right, we're going to bring on 10 people in July and bring on this class. Like I want to be able to automate as much as possible because I might— we're getting into a world where I'm gonna have people all over the place. You know, this group that just came in, I've got 2 people in California, one in Austin, and one in Tennessee out of just this new group. So I can't go, I can't go grab you and say, hey, let's go role play. It's just not that easy. So I've got to have these resources available where I can say, all right, I need you to watch this video at 11 o'clock. And then you're gonna go to tab 2 in your booklet and run through this role play. Like, it's gotta be—

yeah, I, I think that this is why I shot a video on this, um, that'll come out in a couple weeks called Income Follows Assets. And the thing is, is that, that binder and that library of videos are assets to that business. Like, people right now listening to that to go, I'll just pay, I'll pay for that. I'll give me that right there. Give me that binder. I'll pay you $10,000 for that binder. Okay. Or whatever.

Here's the thing.

That's not the point to go send David $10,000 for that binder. The thing about it is you can do the exact same thing regardless if David can sell those businesses or not. The point is, is that those are assets to the business. The same things that would make that business attractive to a potential acquirer. Is they not just buying the customers, they would buy the assets, the training programs, the binders, the digital assets, the library of training. All of that goes with it. The same thing that would do that for a business that can be bought or sold is the same thing that allows the business to be able to scale. That's my belief. And so therefore you've got assets. So David is sitting on a 5,000-square-foot Manhattan apartment that overlooks Central Park. He could rent that out or sell it for X many millions of dollars or sell it for, you know, rent it out for $25,000 a month. If I have some assets, but it's a 5,000-square-foot house in Huntsville, Alabama, it's just not as valuable as the one that's in Manhattan. Okay, so that makes sense. Like, that's the analogy that, that, that to me helps is that people are saying, man, I just want access to that training thing. Go build your own. Go build your own. I mean, obviously hop on the Coach B calls. You go through it, you go through those things and then begin to build your own assets. Thoughts on that?

Well, yeah. So the assets are completely necessary because if they're not there, it's in here and it all has to be driven through us. And my chief of staff, she put it as clear as day a couple of months ago. She said, David, you're the bottleneck. You are 100% the bottleneck in this agency, and we've got to clear that up. And she was totally right, is that I slowed things down because if it goes through me, there's too much on my desk to be able to get back to it quickly. So getting it out of here and into this computer makes it so much easier.

No doubt.

And then the other thing about the, you know, assets that you speak of This is one of the main drivers behind Coach P was that it's not just the asset, it's the action behind it, right? That's why we meet twice a week for training and we do it live and it's bringing everybody together because I could have a book and do nothing with it. And I've been down that road. I can't tell you how many manuals I've bought, how many Like, I've got, you know, I've got Al Clark's book, I've got Kirk Fuqua's plays, I've got, like, I could name 15 of them. But do you know what I did with them? They sat on my desk and collected dust because I didn't build them out the way that I wanted to, right? They were someone else's, and I thought, oh, I'll buy that and it'll be magic. Well, no, like, it's got to be you because you've then got to Turn it into action. You got to do something with it. I can't go and say, all right team, go, go turn this into results. Like, no, you got to break it down. You got to create a plan and say, all right, next week we're going over chapter 1 together, and after that we're going over chapter 2. It— the asset is extremely vital and important, but you have also got to be involved. You cannot buy a book and just absorb information from it.

Oh man, it's so good. This is like— kudos to Dave, who will listen to this. He called it one day. I was talking about this exact thing. This is why I like talking to David, because he and I just think about things so similarly. But it's a binder on a bookshelf. It's just another binder. It's a three-ring binder. So somebody sends you $10,000 and says, you know, I want to buy that. You're not going to use it. It's going to go right back on the bookshelf. You're going to get fired up about it for about 2 weeks, and then it's just going to sit there unless you actually engage with the thing. Awesome.

Dude, I've got, I've got a great story for this. I met Randy Thompson on an exotic trip in 2017. We were in Bora Bora. First time I really met the guy. I had heard about his processes and I'm like, dude, break this down for me. Explain it. He's literally writing crap on a cocktail napkin. I'm like, oh my God, this is game changing. This is insane. I'm gonna do this immediately. I go home, I buy Stairs and Buckets, I sign up. I'm like, well, yeah, just pay it for the year. Obviously I'm gonna use this. I did not use it. Spoiler alert. Like, it came in, right? I got, I got my subscription, I got busy, we were doing all kinds of stuff. Totally forgot about it.

Okay.

Well, of course I put it on recurring like anything else in my life. So anyway, fast forward 3 years later maybe, and I'm like, all right, we got to get back on Sayers and Buckets. I've got, I've got IFR managers that run this. I've got life and health specialists that are doing annual reviews. Like, now it's not something I need to do. They can do it. So anyway, I try and sign up. I can't do it. I call up Brandon, I'm like, dude, I'm getting, I'm getting blocked. Um, I don't know why it's giving me an error. He's like, dude, you've had a subscription for 3 years. You've already got one. The thing had been on— I had been paying him for 3 years. I didn't even know I had an account. But at some point I was fired up about buying something that was gonna change my agency, but I did not put action behind it. And then I, I re-bought it and I put it into action, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in premium has flown through because of it, when I could have done that 6 years prior.

Dude, that's such a good story. That's such a good illustration. All right, brother, people know where to find you. Where can they connect if they want to learn, uh, about Coach B? It's been a good pod.

I'm always glad to come on here. It's fun talking to you, Bradley. Um, if anybody wants to reach out to me, they can get me at coachp@coachpconsulting.com, or you can just go to our website, which is coachpconsulting.com, and find us there. We're also headed to your neck of the woods. We're going to be in Birmingham on June 14th, so, uh, 2 weeks from now, Alex Shattuck and I are coming to do a Scale with Profitability workshop. It's gonna be a 1-day class on June 14th, and we're talking about building out teams in a smart way so that you're not taking on a lot of debt to build out your agencies. So looking forward to doing that.

I can't wait to see you and give you a big hug, man. All right. Appreciate you, brother.

Good to see you, man. Have a great day.

That was an awesome episode. I mentioned this in the intro, but I think The things that really stood out to me is being able to take everybody out of the office environment dictates performance and have the planning process to be able to whiteboard exactly what it is.

And if you think about it, like what they created in that planning process are assets to the business.

And I believe assets or income follows assets. And, you know, I mean, how many of you would love to get your hands on that asset that, that, that he had coming out of that? I think that's an example, but you can do that for yourself. I think the big learning there, really reminder, is when you're doing your planning process, get out of your office.

I mean, you just—

there's something about that environment, or being out of that environment, that is so important. I think the other thing is, is a recognition that managers need to manage, and having people that are going to try to manage, then also to be able to do sales acquisition, or even customer service, customer care, account management is difficult. Um, and the investment in actual leaders to lead people and drive results to those hopefully resonated with you as much as it did me. Obviously, David is one of our podcast partners. You know where to find David and Coach P. But also, you want to be able to find really great talent, A players. And I think A players and talent is something that we're all looking for. I mean, there's a lot of problems that can be solved if everybody on your team is an A-player, but you've got to go through a lot of people to be able to find that. And that's oftentimes the thing that we just don't really want to do. Well, Autopilot Recruiting can take that off of you. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com, autopilotrecruiting.com. Ultimately, you bring on A-players, you bring on talent, you develop them, you train them, And eventually your sales are going to go up and you start being able to make more money and you start seeing, uh, better cash flow. But you want to have control of your numbers too, and Club Capital is there to be able to help you to do it. It really is, uh, like, uh, just finished interview, uh, with a guy and he was talking about just financial projections being a heat-seeking missile, meaning it makes adjustments along the way. Versus just on a straight trajectory. And I think that that's such a good analogy— not analogy, but more like an imagery to be able to think about is like your financials are going to be a heat-seeking missile, meaning they're going to kind of go up and down and they're not going to be perfect. You're not going to nail it perfectly. But because of that, you can make adjustments and little pivots along the way if you're actually getting really good, tight financials and having perspective to be able to make those decisions. Go to Club clubcapital.com.

All right, everyone, this is a great episode. Till next time, lead well.

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.

Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation? Check them out at club.capital.