Episode 299: The Bottom Line - The Time Will Never Come

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it.

Just get what you need and go.

So with that, let's get into today's episode. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, Create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee, or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agent agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital— way more than a CPA firm. Ambition is the first step towards success. It's time to level up your agency, and Coach P Consulting will help you do just that by using the same strategies he used to sell over 700 life insurance policies in 2021 alone. Now, this is not your regular one-and-done type coaching. You'll get personalized coaching 2 days a week, every week of the month, and you'll get a live look behind the scenes of his team training and an office that's performing at the highest level. There's a reason Coach P Consulting is the fastest growing coaching company for insurance agency owners in the country. Coach P will train your team alongside his own and show you the exact steps they are taking to achieve Chairman Circle, Exotic Travel, and Multi-Line Presidents Club and be one of the few agents to be selected to have a third office. So whether your goal is to be at the top of your local market or amongst the best in the country, this training will give you the strategies and the tactics to get there. For just $250 a month, you'll get high-level coaching each week from someone who is already getting it done at that level. And his strategies work, and it's time to put them to work for you. Sign up at coachpeakconsulting.com and get your first full month for free when you mention the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. Hey everybody.

So the other day I got a message from someone. They had reached out and said, hey, I heard on one of the podcast episodes you talk about playbooks, and I was wondering if you had a template about creating playbooks. And I said, well, yeah, actually we do. We have a playbook for, for creating playbooks. And so I said, send me your email address and I'll send it over to you. And so they send me their email address back, and they said, now this is great. They asked maybe a question or two. They said, now I just need to go try to find the time to go and start building out my OS and start creating these playbooks. And I said, hmm, how am I going to be able to communicate this over to him? Because I have some bad and also some good news. And so the thought— that's what I would share with all of you today. I shot it actually, this video, um, in my truck as I was driving, but wanted to give some better audio to it. So it's going to be a little bit of repeat of that message. The bad news is the time is never going to come. The good news is the time is never going to come. And so in other words, what he was trying to say was, and it makes sense because I used to tell myself this exact story, is that now I go to a meeting and hear somebody, you know, David Peterson or somebody like that, say, you know, systems and processes, really the backbone. We have these systems and processes. And I would say, yep, that's right. I need to go document these systems and processes. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to lock myself in my office and shut the doors, turn the lights off. I'm going to be in a dark room and I'm going to have nothing but water and food and caffeine for 7 straight days. I'm going to build out every single documentation of everything that we do. Or maybe I'm not going to do that extreme. Maybe I'll just do 2 days. Maybe I'll go in on a Saturday and spend all that, you know, 4 hours on a Saturday morning. Or maybe I'll do it Friday afternoon. And that time comes, you put it on your calendar. And you inevitably never do it. And so time after time after time, I would double down and triple down. This is the time I'm actually going to start the documentation. And the time never came and it never is going to come. You are too busy. You have too many other things going on. You are leading the team. You are coming up with new ideas. You are spending time thinking about the business and planning. The documentation of creating a playbook and documenting our systems and processes— and I'm not going to go into, you know, definition of terms in, in this episode, but the documentation of all of that, getting it all out of your head, the all of that IP that you've heard me discuss about before. You think that you're, no matter, maybe even hold, get yourself held accountable by somebody else, your spouse or an EA that you may have or not have, an office manager, et cetera. And you're going to say, we need to do this, but we, it never comes. And so I finally was getting so frustrated about where do people find the time to, to do all of this. And then my worry was— this actually happened— is that I was going to create a playbook. So I did eventually start to get some of the stuff documented, but it wasn't even documented very well. But I'm going to do that, and then it's just going to start collecting digital dust. And so I'm going to put all this effort into something that we're not going to use. And so then you're left with, how do you do it? What does it actually look like? And the thing about it is it's a daily thing. You may say, oh, well, you know, that really helps, Bradley. No, hear me out for a second. I— this past week on Monday when we ran our team meeting, I kept up with how many different playbooks did we either create or did we update just in that one call. Now, we actually didn't create any new playbooks from that call, but we updated 7. We touched 7 different assets in the business. 7. And every day— you've all heard me talk about the, the daily sync that I have with my EA, uh, Lauren, uh, that's 20 to 30 minutes, usually right at 30. Um, and every day a document is being touched and created. But here's the thing, she is the one either creating the asset or updating it. Just today, I'm recording this on a Friday. Today she is creating 2 new playbooks, 2 new playbooks. Now she has the standard of how I want those playbooks to look, feel, the way that we're going to lay those out, the way that they're structured, because that has been now established as the way we want things to be. And we have kind of a maxim: don't ever send me a document in Arial. Well, it's both joking and at the same time very serious that we have a standard way that we're going to do things and, and document our systems and processes. And we don't want the documents to all look different. It doesn't give a good feel. Now, I don't care if you actually use Arial or Times New Roman or whatever. It's not that, but it is about embedding a philosophy into the organization. And you start to see that it's not one big massive playbook that you're creating. It's an operating system for the business, or what we refer to as the OS. It's the operating system to be able to run the business. And inside that operating system are a series of different assets, including playbooks. And those playbooks are being updated and iterated off of on an ongoing basis. Do we touch every single playbook? No. But everything we're doing is to get it out of my head or collectively out of the team's head is this is how we do things in the organization. Because that becomes intellectual property. That next day on Tuesday morning, I was with our business owners and somebody mentioned about like a win is that they had created their office handbook, like with their policies and procedures, basically policies more so like, uh, PTO time, things of that nature. And so I had everybody in the chat, I said, how many people would love to have that, uh, that asset that he has? And like everybody in the chat was like, me. And I said, how many of you would like pay for that asset? Well, now he sees that that is an asset to the, to the business, and he actually got it out of his head and is something that's tangible And so the thing for him is that that's going to be something he'll be updating on a regular basis. So we make a change to our paid time off policy, we make a change to this, they'll go to that asset and update it. So the good news is it's something that you do regularly. I'm updating, touching documentations, playbooks myself on my phone on a regular basis. Then when you establish the way you want things done, the great thing is, is if you have an EA or an office manager or somebody else, or even your team, they know how you want things done. They know you have to establish the standard of how those are going to be initially. But once that's done, then your team can begin to unpack that intellectual property for you. So hope that helps. Till next time, lead well.