Episode 282: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Business with Alex Shattuck

Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have a repeat guest and one of our most popular guests, Mr. Alex Chatuch. He's the founder and CEO of Autopilot Recruiting and insurance agency owner. I've had Alex on a number of different times and we kind of come at it from a little bit different angle. In this episode, we really take more of an approach from a 301 level or MBA level. So if you're looking to actually see what does it take to really scale the business, especially on the people side, this episode is for you. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Alex Shatto.

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders.

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Alex Shattuck, my man, welcome back to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Happy to be here, thank you.

Happy to have you as always. All right, so we've had you on, I think it's like your, what is this, third time, fourth time or something like that coming on the podcast?

At least three.

3, for sure. Absolutely. And, uh, you have absolutely always been, uh, one of our more popular guests that we have, the highest downloads, and that's for good reason because the value that you bring. So the thing that I want to have you back on to talk about today is not something that I would consider is like one-on-one level. And so for some of you that are kind of getting started out, hopefully you'll learn some things in this discussion, but there's a lot of people that are really wanting to be able to scale. They're opening a second office, maybe in some cases a third office. And so now it's gone from adding, recruiting, attracting A-players one at a time to now they've gone and even they're past two, they're adding 3, 4, 5 people at a time. David recently spoke about that and, and, and for for his organization. But I really want to throw it over to you and allow you to start saying, like, what have you seen and what are the similarities and what are the differences when it comes to being able to scale your team at that level? What are your thoughts around that initially?

Sure. Well, as you know, and many might know, I'm, I'm an insurance agent with 3 offices, but I'm also the founder and CEO of Autopilot Recruiting. And so I'll speak to both because we've been able to do both or scale within both of those businesses and industries. And I'll start by actually talking about the recruiting company because the amount of growth in the timeline that we did it is something that should be noted. And, you know, we launched Autopilot back in September of '21. And, you know, right now we're recruiting for over 1,600 insurance agents across the country and a handful of other businesses and industries. As well. And we've built a team of approximately 150, so 150 humans that are, that are working every single business day, recruiting every single business day, um, during that less than 2-year window. And, um, that, that didn't happen accidentally. And, uh, it started to get a little sloppy on the— in the infancy of the business, um, but, you know, you hit that, you hit that point where things become a little painful and you start to you start to, uh, figure some stuff out and do some things differently. And we got into a rhythm of a monthly, um, training session essentially. And so every single month we would have a wave of recruiters that we would bring on. And so for the last at least year, pushing a year and a half, we've onboarded somewhere between 5 and 10 recruiters every single month. And so we've kind of designated a certain day of the week to kick it off, a certain week of the month to kick it off. And we keep the training the same every single time, which has allowed us to, to grow it and scale it. And oftentimes I've gotten a lot of feedback from others within my team that, that do help with the training and do help with the onboarding, all that. And sometimes the feedback is, hey, could we coach them and train them to do this thing over here also, like this would be really beneficial if we could also add this to their arsenal. And my answer is always no. And that's, I think, one thing that is super important to take away from this point of the conversation that we're having is make sure you're eliminating certain things from their training that you can't scale. So what I mean by that is every single one of my recruiters can do A, B, C, and D extremely well, extremely well. Now, a good portion of them could probably go on and do like E, F, and G really great as well, but not everybody could handle E, F, and G. And so I don't want any of them handling E or F or G. I want A, B, C, and D just done right every single time. And that's allowed me to recruit and grow the business as fast as I have to the size that I have. I would not have been able to do that if I were to add on those additional things that people were suggesting to me over the months and years.

Can I say a couple of things on that?

Yes.

Okay. This reminds me, and I don't know where I got this from, but this is an absolutely such a good example of where I heard when you scale a business, you scale it with scissors and what you cut out, not Post-it notes. So it's not about what you've added, it's what you've taken away and peeled back to say, no, no, these are the core elements. Maybe we can add some of that stuff later on down the road. But initially, especially in scaling the team, it's about you being able to figure out what those core elements are. Is it fair to say that you're even cutting around those real small edges every time to say, you know what, cut that out, we don't even need to put that into the training itself?

Yeah, the training is for just always continuously evolving and changing. I said it's the same way, or we do it the same way every single time. But yes, there's minor adjustments. Things change, technology changes, the way we do things as an organization changes, so the training has to change. But yes, we always try to simplify our training and make it as efficient as possible too, because we can't have it be an 8-week cycle, right? And the same thing goes on the insurance side too. We do things fairly similar on the insurance side. More recently, we just hired 5 remote team members on the insurance side. You know, like a fool, one thing I didn't do was pick an onboarding date. Like we had a goal, an idea of, hey, this is going to be the date that we would like to get them in and begin their onboarding process. But we allowed that not to happen. So some got through licensing early, some had licenses. And so for those reasons, we've kind of staggered them. But as I sat in Germany on a bus and listened to the Coach P call you did, and he's talking about onboarding his wave of people, and he just picked a date. He just said it. He just pushed out a little bit further and onboarded a wave of people at the same time. And I'm like, holy hell, why didn't I do that? I do that for my recruiting team. Why didn't I just pick a date and make them work around me and not vice versa? And so listening to Coach P, I'm like, okay, I should take a page out of his book, but also my recruiting book over here that I do for my other business. But, um, so in the future, that's exactly what I'll do, is try to do that all in one swoop. But, uh, yeah, one thing about the, the onboarding of multiple people on the insurance side, the same rules apply as far as I'm concerned when it comes to simplifying, you know, especially when you're looking at remote team members. You know, there's certain things that they just don't need to know how to do in a timely fashion, or ever in some cases. Uh, if you're hiring them to sell insurance for you, and we can just talk about just auto and fire, just the real core, uh, products for most listening to this call— auto, fire, maybe some life and health or whatever— you don't need to know how to answer billing questions in that first month, or maybe ever. You don't have to know how to exchange vehicles. You don't know how to— you You don't need to know how to change the lien holder on a vehicle or a mortgage on a home. Like, those are things you can pay somebody else to do. And if you try to cram the 100 to 200 things that they could learn in that first 30 to 60 to 90 days, you're never going to give them what they have to learn within those days to be wildly successful in that role. So you have to ask yourself, what is the most important thing within the role that I'm hiring them to do? And then let's focus all of our training energy just on those 1, 2, 3, or 4 things, and then over time add to their arsenal. But to me, anything more than that— our brains as humans don't work that way. And I see agents doing that all the time, you know, they try to teach them all 100 things in the first 30 days and then they know nothing, or they're just not good at any one thing, and then they get burned out and quit, or worse, we fire them because they're not catching on fast enough. Where I like to take out the biggest threat first. That's something that was taught to me in the military. Take out the biggest threat first. Nothing matters outside of that biggest threat. And for me, it's auto insurance. We're going to train that auto conversation. How do you get them on the phone? How do you keep them on the phone? What's the conversation sound like? And how do we do that enough times each day to, to guarantee success? That's all I care about in that first 30 days.

So what do you think? And I'm going to pull a 5-year number out, but you go back and tell me what, what you think is that may be accurate for you. So if you go back 5 years, what do you think the actual length of time was to get someone their day 1, right? They walk on day 1 up until the time that you felt like, okay, this person's really up to speed. I mean, was that at that point 6 months back then? And now what have you been able to get it down to, to where it's like, no, this person's actually profitable producing where they need to be? Where is that for you now?

You know, I was in my mind, I was thinking 4 to 6 months. You threw out 6 months. I was saying 4 to 6 months. And I say 4 to 6 because it's such a vast difference, because I think when you're training the old school way, which is let's teach them everything over the course of time, I think that you have to rely, rely on really, really good people. And we all know that when I say really good people, like people that just get it and get it quick. And you can't grow and scale your business and hire all A players and expect everybody to do that. And so for that reason, that's why you see some maybe figuring out after 90 days and some are 180 because of the difference in what their capacity is coming through the door to begin with. But as you focus on A, B, C, and D, either one of those folks, both of those hires can get A, B, C, and D down probably within the first 30 to 45 days. And so I feel very confident even remotely, and we're doing it right now, we can get— and I say we because my team does the vast majority of this. We can get someone spun up and selling at least P&C insurance at a fairly high level within 30 days.

That's amazing. That, that, that, that, that, that to me, for people listening to it, or that, that's a game changer because you have been able to get it down. He's calling it ABCD to say like, these are the core elements we want to get you here. This obscure— I don't know an example— P&C thing that you're going to encounter once a year. It's just not worth us even talking about in that first, you know, several months because you're not going to encounter it. We have to nail the fundamentals on it to begin with. You know, obviously we're coming up on football season, and so spring, uh, fall practice is about to start, etc. And they will drill so many of the basic fundamental things way before they go into drilling all of the other things that they actually put into the playbook first to make sure that they have those things down. Because they don't have those things down, it doesn't matter what this, you know, reverse halfback throw, whatever play is going to be there, right?

Correct, correct. And from a recruiting standpoint, if you think about— if your goal is to grow and scale a team, if you think about being able to hire— and I'll use a 10-point scale, which isn't really fair because I could tell you some folks will say this person's a 6 and I can, I can make them a 10, or I'll see a 10 in them. When someone else sees a 6. But just for the simple math, if you look at like those 9s and 10s that you have to rely on, if you're going to train the old school way and, and hope that they adapt quickly, you're really narrowing your pool of candidates. And so it's really hard to scale. So just being able to hire the 7s and 8s in addition to the 9s and 10s that we all want and need for our business allows you to go out and recruit and grow your team faster. Then when you open up the remote opportunity and not just look within a 20-minute radius or whatever of your physical location, but now you're saying, hey, anybody in the United States that is qualified, think about how big of a pool now that you have. So now you're down with the 7s, 8s, 9s, and 10s in any state across the whole country when everybody else is looking at a very, very small pond. Uh, it separates yourself from the pack. When it comes to being able to grow and scale. Okay.

So we mentioned that we were going to keep this, you know, 301-level or MBA-level discussion today. I really want to encourage people that in some of the past conversations that we've had Alex on, we discuss things like the importance of building a bench and how do you actually build a bench of talent, etc. That's not necessarily what we're going to focus on today. So you get the opportunity, you've got a third office. Or, or it doesn't really matter per se, but you got a third office, or you're saying, hey, it's time to push the gas pedal down here. We've got an opportunity, we're gonna, we're gonna grow to 5 people, I'm gonna onboard 5 people. I go to you and I say, hey, this is what we're doing, or I go to my recruiter, right? I go to my recruiter and I'm going to talk to them about it. Give me the nuts and bolts of what's going to happen and how far out do I need to be thinking Okay, you just gave kind of a personal example of saying, hey, let's kind of have them all onboarded at one time. It happens to be we're recording this on August 1st, but how far out do I need to go so that I can kind of begin to reverse engineer with my recruiter how all of this is going to play out? Does this make sense how we kind of map out the schedule?

Yeah, I mean, I think that you give her, her, him, whoever your recruiter is, a goal of what you're looking for, where you're looking for it. So the first thing I did is I said I want a team member in every adjacent state of Michigan. My agencies are in Michigan, so we hired one in Ohio, we hired one in Indiana, we hired one in Wisconsin, and then we went down and scooped up two from Alabama because I hear everybody in Alabama is pretty awesome. Is that fair to say? Is that—

I think so.

I mean, I think so. Yeah, so I went down and got a couple Bama folks. Pete, I knew you'd get a kick out of that, but, um, So I didn't really focus on Alabama. I focused on those 3 adjacent states. As I was working with California agents and what they're working through, I wanted to be able to kind of walk that journey with them a little bit as we kind of venture into that. So first, set a goal. Set a goal, set a timeline. I want this many team members by this time. These are the credentials. This is what I'm looking at. And then you keep encouraging that person to go get it. Um, as far as— repeat the second part of your question when you say like the roll-up part of this. Yeah.

So again, let's say it's August 1st and I say, hey, in, uh, 2 months, so let's say October 1st, right? Uh, so start of Q4, October, November, December, I want to be able to onboard. That's going to be my onboard date. That's going to be my start date for the 5 reps that I have. And I'm specifically pulling out remote because I want to talk to you about that in a second. Okay. I want to go to the remote in just a second. So I'm talking about just in general to say it's time for me to scale up 5 people. I've got 2 months to do that. I had the conversation. This is my goal. This is what I want to be able to do. This is what we're trying to accomplish. Okay. That sounds good. What are some of the things that you feel like to, to scale a sales organization at that level, that I need to make sure the elements I need to make sure I've got in place so that whenever they hit the ground running on day one, we're ready to go.

Gotcha. You got to make sure your team is on board, understands the mission, of course, because you're going to drive yourself crazy if you're the guy or gal that's just trying to onboard all these, all these people. You know, I think if you have a decent-sized team to begin with, which if you're going to onboard 5 at once, you probably have a decent-sized team already. You're probably not going from 1 to 6 or 7. Um, so, and probably the ones you have are probably pretty decent, right? So I would, I would be getting with every single one of them, and I would bring them in a room. I would sit them down and talk through, whether it's virtually or in person, what is this going to look like? Or challenge your office manager or team leader to build it out for you, then present. That's what I did. I went to my office manager. I said, what are we going to do? What's the 10-day cycle we're going to put these people through? Build it out, bring it to me. He brought it to me, I looked through it, and I said, it's not, it's not enough. That's not enough details. I want to know exactly what's going on every single hour. What are they doing? What are they coaching? Who's doing what? It doesn't all have to be you, doesn't all have to be me, but who is involved in that? And so making sure you have the right people taking part in that training process, because everybody's going to bring something different to the table. You might be really great at life insurance and you want to focus your energy on coaching life insurance, But you might not be the best person in your office or your, uh, business to go out and coach them on the auto insurance and the fire insurance side of things. That might be somebody else that's in that other seat that's doing that every single business day where you haven't done it in 6 or 7 years. And so lean into the different people and, and get their help and use their expertise. And so I would make sure day one going into it, if it's October 1st, when they show up, there's a plan. There's a plan and it's being executed every single business day. Because I know what a lot of agents do and what I've done in the past where someone walks through the door and not only did you not have a plan, you forgot they were starting that day, you know? And so not only is the training not what it's going to be or should be, but what is that experience like for that new hire when they walk through the door? It's very obvious when you were not prepared, when you just say, hey, you know what, go job shadow Johnny in the corner. For the next 6 to 8 hours. Um, you know, that's, that's where you get ghosted, you know, day 2 or day 3 or week 3, because it's just a, it's a poor experience. And so that planning needs to happen with your team immediately once those offers are accepted. But also there needs to be some encouragement and some coaching and some mentorship through whatever that timeline is from the offer being accepted to day 1 in in the office as well. We need to make sure we— what we call onboarding hospitality management in Autopilot Recruiting. So we got to make sure there's some connection going on to make sure they show up day one.

How far out, how far out do you consider onboarding?

How far out as far as like, is there an end date to someone shows up day one? What does that look like?

Yeah, I think when I'm thinking around onboarding, I was curious that somebody may say, well, is onboarding the first week? Is onboarding the first 30 days? So where does it kind of transition in your mind from onboarding to ongoing training? Right? So you're obviously like somebody who's been with you for a year. I think most people would say, hey, that, that, that person's out of the onboarding phase at this point, but we're still doing training and development, of course. Where do you think the onboarding stops? And now we're just in a regular cadence of training.

Got it. For us, we have right now, which is fairly recent, but it seems to be working. We have a 10-day onboarding process with new hires, sales team specifically. So it's 10 days that's unique to getting them onboarded, spun up to sell our core product lines. And then from there, for us, it shifts to more of an ongoing coaching, as, as what you said there. So now there might be a heavier emphasis with their ongoing coaching more so than somebody else. I think you need to make sure you're still able to tailor things to them. Everybody's got different, different neurological preferences and natural strengths. And so you're going to come out of that 10 days and realize somebody is really getting this, but they're struggling with that. And it could be just simply as simple as they haven't had enough life yet to really relate to that product line or whatever. And so you might have to have some additional mentor-type conversations around why we do what we do.

What are some of the— you have such a unique perspective having 3 offices, actually doing this literally yourself. You know what, actually I hadn't thought about this until this, this actual very moment, but you really coming at it from 3 different perspectives. You've done it yourself, scaled at that kind of level. You have a company that helps people to be able to recruit, and many of them are scaling their team at that type of level. And then number 3, just the speaking you've done around the country around it and, you know, like conversations you've had after you speak, etc. What are some of the common mistakes that you have seen that a business owner has made when they're trying to scale or onboard that many people at one time?

Well, first, I think it's fairly rare that we see that. You know, I don't think that a lot of folks are willing, in some cases able, to take that plunge. Um, I think just the fear of the additional added payroll and the time between when they get on payroll and when they actually start to produce and you start to see that return. So I don't see a lot of people doing that at scale. Um, so I think the first mistake is that people are afraid to do that. You know, they, uh, I think as business owners, insurance agents, sometimes we're looking at that next paycheck wondering how is this going to impact this, and we forget— sometimes we forget how we get paid in multiple ways. We're not factoring in the long-term residual benefits to growing our P&C book of business. We're not looking at how that could adjust some of the variable components of our compensation if that is something that we have. Bonus opportunities, anything that could trigger something for retirement. Like, there's so many different ways that we get paid as insurance agents, regardless of your carrier, that if you have somebody on your team for a full 12 months that's doing decent, even— and I'm not advocating for decent, but decent— you're not losing money on them long term, not when you factor in the multiple ways we get paid.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's the first mistake, is just not doing it.

Just not doing it. Yeah, yeah. They're just not willing to take that balance. But it— do you think it's just they, they— part of it, they haven't ran the math on it, one. Two, they're not confident in themselves to be able to have a good enough recruiting process, but also training and development process to get these people up to speed quick enough. And so while you're, you're able to get somebody up to speed in 30 days in some cases, and they're producing. It's going to take somebody else, that same person, it'd take them 6 months before they're ever even up to that. Well, they just burned a lot of cash in that. Is that fair to say?

They burned a lot of cash. So that's fair to say. That's a big mistake. Another big mistake is they'll oftentimes look for an easy way around having to do that. And so they'll say, I'm not comfortable with my onboarding process. I don't like training, I'm not good at training, whatever it is. And so they say, I'm going to go, I'm going to go hire a licensed salesperson to just plug in there and they're just going to start rocking out, right? But the reality is the folks that are good, they have their insurance licenses, they're doing a great job making a lot of money working for somebody else or for themselves. And there's exceptions to that rule, but that unicorn that everybody's holding out for unicorns don't exist. And so what they find themselves doing is just they remain understaffed for a very long time, which is a massive mistake because there's a huge opportunity cost with having a bunch of empty seats in your agency over the course of time. So that's a massive mistake, just holding out for that ideal person you think you can plug in there. And then the other thing I'll say about mistakes, if they find that ideal person— so say you find that licensed individual, it's just a, just a natural, gifted individual, what makes you think you're qualified to get them to say yes to your offer, right? We always talk about what do we want in a candidate, what are those ideal characteristics that we want in a candidate. What we don't ask ourselves as agents is what do they want in us as an employer? Would we want to come work for us? If we find that A-player, are we going to land that A-player? We're looking for 10s, 9s and 10s. Can we land a 9 and 10 if we're a 6? I don't think we can. So what can we do to make our opportunity, our offer, not a 6 but a 7, but an 8, maybe a 9, so that we can go out and find those 8s, 9s, and 10s?

Okay, so I'm glad you brought this up because a lot of times when you and I have chatted, we talk around the front side of the attraction piece of it in getting A-players on board, building a bench, etc. But the other thing, this is just like growing your business, that you have enough new customers coming in, but you're also not losing the same amount of people on the backside so that therefore you are actually growing, which I want to use that parallel to the things that you are doing, the levers that you pull in your organizations, both your agency and then Autopilot. To keep the A-players that you have so that you're not constantly having to refill? Obviously, everybody's going to have turnover, right? People have opportunities, they move jobs. I mean, there's so many different things, right? They get killer, you know, whatever, they go start their own business. And in some cases, you, you have that. Some of it's things that you've actually plugged in for people to be able to kind of actually churn through your organization. What are the things that you specifically have found that have been the biggest benefit to you to help keep some of the great team members that you have?

That's a great question. I think the first thing that comes to mind for me with retaining great people is great people don't like people that aren't great. They don't like putting up with people that are, that are doing far less than them. And so by putting up with bad team members, your great team members most likely won't stick around. And so you have to be willing to remove the bad team members the underperforming team members from your team because it just kills the culture. And so by putting up with that, that's a big, big miss. So you have to be careful with that. Other things too, I think that sometimes we, and I'm guilty of this myself, is we forget about the best because they don't, they're on autopilot, right? Like they're selling every single month, they're producing every single month and they don't need to hear from us. But reality that they do need to hear from us. If nothing else, words of encouragement, acknowledgement, recognition, those things are super important. Not to mention coaching. You know, it's easy to look at the worst performer and say, he needs me. I need to go coach him because he sucks. But the guy or gal that's killing it for you, it's most likely to stick around, man. That little bit of extra coaching and training that they'll actually retain and take action with, they're probably going to give you a better return on your time when it comes to coaching. So you can't neglect them. And then you also have to look at the environment that you're in, your market competitiveness. Whether you're in California and you're facing this, facing issues, or Michigan like myself, or Florida, or wherever, like, just about everybody's going through some type of adversity right now. Who's more susceptible to leave? The, the bottom feeder on your team that has nowhere to go. So if their production goes down, their compensation goes down 10%, are they going to leave? Are they going to linger around a little bit? They'll probably linger around a little bit. It's, it's the, the guys and gals at the top You know, if they take that 10% hit in production and sales and compensation, they're more likely to leave you because they have other opportunities in their inbox offering them jobs. So another reason to probably trim some of the fat and get rid of some of the underproducing people, or just make sure when you're allocating leads and resources, whatever, you take care of your best people first.

Yeah, I, I was just thinking about that you're so right that so much attention could get put into your bottom feeders or your even average. And you can be almost not by choice, but neglect the top performers because you think he or she is just good. They're good. They're good. I'm going to stay out of their way. Yet they got there because they wanted to continue to be developed as well. Have you— you may call it something else, growth track, career laddering, etc. How do you approach that? Because I think that some of these top performers also too want to see, well, how am I going to be able to grow in this organization? Okay, so initially I can do this and then I can go from onboarding to full-fledged and then keep going from there. But how have you thought about that both on sales and then even in a service or account manager positions?

Sure. Well, I think it's— first off, it's necessary if you're going to grow in scale to have room for advancement. You know, you can't do it all yourself. You're going to drive yourself crazy. You know, in the Marine Corps, I got out as a sergeant. I was a squad leader. I had 12 Marines underneath me, but I didn't have to go out and lead all 12 every single day and communicate to all 12 all day every day. What I would do is I would get with my 3 fireteam leaders tell them what was going on, and then they would get with their 3 within their fire teams and it would just roll down and I would get my message from above and they'd get their message from above. And so there's a certain change of command, decentralized organizational structure that allows this to happen. I apply the same thing to both of my businesses. So my recruiting business there, I have 6 recruiters in every single team. We have, I think, 17 or 18 different teams and team leaders. From there we have, I think, 6 or 7 squads. So every single team leader, they have a squad leader to turn to. So I can't, you know, I can't lead directly 150 people. I can't. I don't know the names of 150 team members' kids. I don't know what they're going through. I don't know who's all sick. I don't know who's all having babies at any one time. We have 150. So it's impossible. But I know that as long as everybody has somebody that can know those things about them, their headspace should be in a good, good place, right? And the same thing goes on the State Farm side of things, on the insurance side of things. So I have team leaders, service team leaders, sales team leaders, office manager that kind of heads up the whole show. And so everybody should have somebody, and no leader should have more than, in my opinion, 4 to 6 people underneath them, because outside of that, you're going to start to lose track of who your people are and what they're about.

Yeah, the number— I, I, um, again, I, I wish I could give credit to where I heard it from, but I'd heard 6 is the, is the most that somebody— is that not true, that Navy SEALs, the most they have in what they call a squadron is, or maybe they don't use the word squadron, is 6?

Is that correct? Couldn't tell you, man. I was in the Marine Corps, so I know, I know.

I think, I think, I think, I, but I, I think that that's where that kind of came from, is that they had done—

I think every, every military branch is a very comparable structure, you know, for us, 4 in a fire team, 4 teams in a squad, 3 squads in a platoon, and so on and so forth. But, um, so yeah, so I think you have to— first off, as a, as a leader, you need that to keep your sanity, to be able to grow and scale. But then for your people, to retain the best people, everybody— nobody that just is crushing life wants to stay in the same spot for the rest of life. You be same, right? We, we are always looking for what, what's next. And, and our team members are the same thing, right? You, you give them an opportunity, even a good opportunity, a fair opportunity, a safe opportunity, they're not sticking around in that role for the next 25 years. They're not going to retire with you in most cases. Um, and even the folks that do want to retire with you, they, they need and want something more in addition to what they're doing walking in the door. So I think it's important that there's room for advancement. I think if they want to go be agents and open their own doors one day and put their name on the door, I think you need to pour into them, be an open book and encourage that because if you don't do it, somebody else will and they're going to be gone real fast versus maybe having them for 2 or 3 years. I'd rather have a great team member for 2 or 3 years than a bunch of average team members for 10 or 15.

So I wanted to make sure I wrap back around to asking you around remote. Um, and this is becoming a lot more common, which I think is great. More people are, um, open to this type of work. Business owners are way more open to hiring these type of people. For some people, it's aspirational. They think, man, I don't know. I don't even know how that would even begin, what that would look like, how to do that, et cetera. So I'm not asking you specifically kind of a recruiting question yet around that, but how have you approached starting to look at? I mean, you just gave some great examples about adjacent states, peeking down here into, into the South for people. What is it? What does that look like? What, what, what's been the learning process for you of, uh, of scaling with remote people?

I think I'm, I'm shocked with the, the ease of finding them. First off, um, there's so many business owners and insurance agents that aren't comfortable with it where they're turning away top talent. Because that person needed a little bit more grace and flexibility or remote opportunity. So I've been shocked with the ease of finding them. Um, as far as, you know, takeaways that I found, I think that my biggest takeaway is it's not that different from hiring people and onboarding people locally. I think that's probably the biggest takeaway, is it's not any different. A lot of times agents will say, well, how do you onboard somebody remotely, that kind of freaks me out. And my first question is, what do you do to onboard your team that are not remote? Like, what do you— what is that process? And 9 times out of 10, they don't have an onboarding process at all. And so it wasn't the remote piece. It's just when they're physically in the office, there's a comfort level to it, right? Like, you can, you can go job shadow for 3 hours. There's, you can see them, you can like, there's just, but then also it's remote. Like it's just taboo thing still for some, but this is 2023 post-COVID. It's not right. It's not, we have to evolve and adapt, especially if you're going to grow and scale and be in the industry for the next 10 or 20 years. Um, it's not any different if you have an onboarding process that's just really, really good for in-office team members. Take that same thing, apply it to your remote people. With the technology that we have, there's very few things that you can't do. And that even involves job shadowing. You can job shadow virtually. So there's very few things that you can't do. It just might take a little bit more intentionality when it comes to the calendar, making sure there's not hours that go by where the person doesn't know what's going on.

Don't you think that in a way that for some people it could be the best thing because it becomes a forcing function that you actually have to get it together? You have to put this down because you've been able to rely or kind of fall back on, well, I don't really know, here, just go watch somebody else. Well, now I actually have to get this down. I have to put it into a playbook. Actually have to have some systems. We actually, actually have to unpack the things that are in my head and get it down. Don't you think? That's what I was thinking about as you were saying that.

Yeah, I mean, that was, that was it for me. I mean, our onboarding process— I just said that we have a 10-day onboarding process. We didn't have that until we had to, right? So we didn't have that until we went out and hired 5 remote team members and we thought, well, okay, we should probably figure this thing out. And so we took what we were already doing and just made it much better, much more efficient. So yeah, a lot of times that pain will create a little sense of urgency, which will yield some pretty cool things. So yeah, and then going back again, going back to the ABC and D, just sticking to the things that matter the most. I think that when you think about what can be possible, if you can take a team of 5 and say, I'm going to make you guys and gals really good at this one thing, And maybe it's just simply that's like, that's, that's going to be your ILP, your internet lead team. You know, the question I've asked myself and the office manager in recent weeks is, is it better to, to give everybody internet leads, every sales team member that sells Auto Fire, give them all internet leads and assume that everybody's going to take the coaching and our process behind it and execute? Or is it better to go really hard with ILPs directly with this core group where you can literally send them on a mission to one book of business and say, go crazy in this code, right? Go crazy in office number 1. We need to get auto and fire up. We're going to focus August, September in this office. And then, you know what? If we're where we want to be, then we'll shift gears and we'll send them on a mission. You mentioned SEAL Team Six. We'll send them on a mission to this office. And then we'll say, you know, so like that's what you can do. If you're really focusing on the things that matter the most for them and not every little thing. And regardless of the carrier, you know, I still feel that auto and fire still keeps the lights on for a good majority of us listening to this stuff. So if they don't help you get to that next level or incentive when it comes to financial services, are you okay with that? And the answer should be, if your team was already doing those things or you were doing those things already, Man, if you know how you get paid, like, why on earth wouldn't— why, why wouldn't you just want to blow up your P&C book and grow that SOB as big and fast as possible?

No doubt, no doubt. Well, if they want to do that, they're going to have to— they're going to have to be able to have an outsourced part of the recruiting process to be able to contact you guys. Listen, you people that listen to the podcast, you know that Alex and his company are have been partners of ours with the podcast for a long time, and I'm grateful for his friendship and his partnership. But look, they have 1,600 people that they're helping, and there's a reason why— is because they're really doggone good at what they do, and they continue to help people, and people stay and they stick because it's working. And, um, I, I think that when you think about the trade-off I heard this recently. I don't think you've heard me say this, actually, um, but we spend what we value the least, okay? And so you're either going to trade your time or your money, and at the end of the day, your time is so much more valuable than the money. You can make more money. And so what you and your team have been able to do so that the business owner, the founder, even the office managers in some cases can focus on being able to actually work on the things that are going to grow the business. And they take— you take that part of them out. I think you guys do an exceptional job. Alex, where do you want people— just tell people, I'm going to let you do the— do your own ad here now that I've shared that for people to connect with, connect with you personally. Also find your book, find your book Small Business, Big Recruiting, which that's been about a year since you wrote that, right?

Yeah, it'll be, uh, 2 years actually in September.

2 years. Okay.

Yeah, so go ahead. Best way to find me, um, Alex Shattuck on most social media platforms. If you want access to the book or Autopilot Recruiting, if you go to autopilotrecruiting.com, you can watch a demo video, see what it's all about, sign up or don't. There's the books on there, there's some free resources on there. So there's a little bit of something for everybody on that website. It's probably the best place to go is autopilotrecruiting.com.

Awesome. All right, my friend, appreciate you, brother.

Appreciate you. I have to see the question up in a way that makes sense, but, uh, no, it's good.

It's good. Hey, so, uh, Alex and I were chatting afterwards. We had hit stop, uh, on the recording, and then we were just having a conversation. With each other talking about kind of some of our own experiences about like our mind being expanded. And once it's expanded, it kind of never goes, never goes back. And so we were having this discussion around scale and specifically kind of around like, hey, the first million is really the hardest to be able to get to. And then ultimately when you can go from 1 to 5 is easier. It's not without challenges, but it's different. And Alex, you brought something I really felt like that would just be an absolute gem to be able to put on the podcast. And you came up with a new word, but just share with people about that because I think that's actually like really, really good stuff.

Yeah, I think the new word was masterful empowerer. You know, I think like I— the one thing that— maybe there's more than one thing, but one thing that I'm decent at is I'm perfectly okay with empowering people around me to do the things that I once did things that I'm not good at, but also things that I am good at, things that I don't like to do, but also things that I do like to do. And that's what's allowed me to, to grow and scale not just one but multiple businesses while at the same time not hating waking up in the morning, right? I, in fact, I probably work less now than I did as a new agent because of my ability to say, you know what, I'll pay you to do this. And If you're gonna grow and scale and you have a problem with that, you're not gonna grow and scale. You know, I think that when it comes to control and growth, they work inversely.

Yeah.

I think that's a huge, huge thing that you need to understand, that growth and control work inversely. The more you grow, the more you scale, the less you're probably going to control. You're gonna have to put people behind the wheel And sometimes that means they're going to make a mistake behind the wheel, and you have to be okay with that. But the reality is we also make mistakes behind the wheel, and so you got to check yourself when you approach them on that topic and how to coach them in that situation. I always say, if you can get someone that can do what you do, like 100% of what you do in any one thing, and hire and train somebody to do 85% of what you could have done yourself, go hire it out. Yeah, right, go hire it out. If it's selling whatever product, and you can get someone to do it 85% as good as you, go hire 3 or 4 people doing 85% of it in comparison to your 100. 3, 4, or 5 people doing 85% is better than you at 100%. Every single time, every single day, I'll take 5 Scottie Pippens, right, over 1 Michael Jordan. So I think that's critical if you're going to grow and scale. If you can't do that, if you're not willing to do that, you cannot grow, you cannot scale successfully. It just won't happen. And it becomes a ton of fun. I mean, when you give someone a job, I mean, what's more patriotic and fulfilling than that? Giving someone an opportunity that it was not an opportunity, didn't have that before. And you can change lives and I see it every single day. And that motivates me to continue to grow and scale. So that's a whole nother part of it that I have a ton of fun with is seeing the lives that I've impacted through creating opportunities. For them. And, um, maybe my favorite part of it, you know, not the money, not the freedom, but probably watching others succeed through, through what we've been able to do as a team. So yeah, yeah, the fulfillment that comes through that is, is hard to—

it's hard to quantify. It's not quantifiable in a P&L, and it's not to, to even the trips and the experiences, but it's deeply meaningful and, and fulfilling And I think that what he mentioned right there is just so important. I hope people really— and that's why I wanted to put it back on the podcast, because I think that in kind of— we'll call this overtime. That's what we'll do. It's like Dude Perfect. We'll call it overtime. But I do think that that's why if you look at Alex, I mean, you look relaxed, yet you're running 2 companies, one with multiple offices, 1,600 clients, etc. I mean, you should. If you compare that to Alex when you first started and were doing a couple hundred thousand in revenue in one business, you know, and you now you've whatever, 20x that, you're not working 20 times harder because you've been able to empower people and trust those people and give up control so that you can have the growth. And for somebody out there, if you're not willing to give up control, then just Don't set that as your goal that you actually want to scale. Just, just say I'm good with being where I am. And by the way, nobody's going to judge you for that. It's okay. But don't say that you want to scale the company and be able to get to $2 million if you're not willing to actually be able to do some of those things that Alex just mentioned.

All right.

Glad we put this on podcast, my friend.

Same.

There is so many takeaways that I have every time I talk to him. And I didn't— we didn't put this on the podcast, but I shared it with him afterwards. I said, you know, I get messages, text messages and emails from our listeners. And one of the things that always stands out with you specifically, and David and some other people, is that the way that you approach the business, that you think bigger than what you did, makes people think bigger. It makes our, our listening audience think differently. It's almost like playing chess, and then somebody puts a move on the chessboard and you say, I didn't even know that that move existed. That play was not even possible. To me. And I think that those are pivotal moments. And so hopefully while there were some tactics around, we discussed, okay, how long is an onboarding? It's, you know, 10 days and then it transitions, et cetera. I mean, those, those are really good things to be able to start approaching the business in, in a certain way. But my hope is more than anything that you take away the way that he thinks. And I'd mentioned to him, I, I think around skills, beliefs, and traits. What are the skills that you need to acquire if you want to scale? What are the beliefs that I need to adopt? And what are the traits or the habits that I need to have so that I can actually do what it is that I say that I want to do? Otherwise, if I don't want to do that, I don't want to acquire the skills, I don't want to put in the work on the, on the habits, I don't want to put in the work on the, on, on adopting a different belief, then it's better for me just to let that go. So my hope is more than anything that you pick up, obviously, what Alex shared there, the way that he approaches the business, is probably expanding your mind. Because once it does, once your mind does expand, you can never honestly go back. Obviously, reach out to he and his team. They are truly exceptional at what they do. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. Also, you can get a copy of his book there. If you've heard Alex talk, then you also are pretty familiar with Coach P and David Peterson. David does an exceptional job in his Coach P Consulting program that twice a week, twice a week, you and your team— this is not just for you, but this is also for your team members— are going to be able to kind of see a peek behind the curtains to see what are they actually doing? What are the word tracks they're using? How do I need to train these people? Well, that is exactly what you're going to be able to get whenever you work with David. Go to coachpconsulting.com, coachpconsulting.com, and let them know that you heard about them on the Club Capital podcast. You know what? You know, while we didn't talk about this on the podcast specifically, it's, you know, you got to be able to know the numbers for you and your team and have the data. Well, if you're going to set goals, you want to track the progress, you want to see actually the results that you and your business are doing, and you want to have that in a centralized location, a centralized system that is absolutely corporate approved, it's going to work within your corporate approved CRM. That's exactly where TodayApp Pro— they are our newest podcast partner. We've been talking to their founders for a really long time. Excited to have them to be able to come on. Go to todayapppro.com. TodayAppPro.com. You can sign up for a demo and then you'll be able to speak with someone on the team and they'll be able to share with you exactly how and why they are different, how to be able to transition from the, maybe the old system, or maybe you didn't have a system, maybe you're on Excel spreadsheets and you want to be able to move. Maybe you're wanting to actually start having remote sales team members. Well, having a system that's going to be able to work wherever you are so they're not relying upon old Excel spreadsheets, et cetera, old outdated systems, and you want to take some of the training, maybe the, the WordTracks that you've picked up from David, and you want to be able to plug that right into where it's right where the work happens. It's exactly where TodayAppPro comes in. Go to todayapppro.com, todayapppro.com. And as you grow and scale, maybe you're wanting to know, wait a minute, should, can I afford to onboard 3 people, 4 people, or 5 people? What is that going to light, knowing how to read the financials is crucial to your ability to be able to do that. Go to club.capital, book a no-obligation demo, and somebody at Club Capital will be able to reach out to you, talk to you about how they can help you to really go in from being the operator to becoming the owner of your business. club.capital. All right, everyone, this was a great one. Till next time.

Lead well.