Episode 303: The Bottom Line - Momentum

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 your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm. 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're taking to achieve Chairman Circle, Exotic Travel, and Multi-Line President's 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 everyone. So If you've listened to this—

this—

let me start over. Hey everyone, so if you've listened to this podcast for really any amount of time, you know that I am a college football, college sports person through and through. And since 2000— and no, no, excuse me, since 1998, I have only missed one Auburn, Alabama game, and it was the COVID year. I missed the COVID year. Actually, I think I missed one other year in 2016. Other than that, since 1998, I have been to every Auburn, Alabama game. Now look, I'm not going to go through all the things around the Iron Bowl and tell you how it's the greatest rivalry, etc., in, in sports. I know many of you— Ohio State, Michigan, Georgia, LSU, uh, uh, from Oregon, etc., NFL fans, just hang with me. The greatest game that I have seen, and I've, I was at the Kick 6, I was been at some amazing games, but the best environment that I've ever been at was in 2010 in Tuscaloosa for when Cam Newton was Auburn's quarterback. Now, many of you, uh, are familiar with Cam, remember Cam for his time, won the Heisman, Auburn went on to win the national title that game. But leading up to that game, well, let me kind of frame this for you, and again, I'm going to apply this to your business, just hang with me. In, uh, 2009, Alabama had won their first national championship game with Saban as the coach. And so, you know, even as an Auburn fan myself, everybody was kind of up in arms the fact that, oh my goodness, they, they've now turned the tide, so to speak. They're back on track. They've won another national title. And then the next year we get Cam Newton and we go all the way to making it to the Iron Bowl undefeated, with them trying to knock us off to not be able to continue on. Well, they jump out to a 24-0 lead. We end up scoring right for, um, late in the second quarter to make it somewhat, uh, a, you know, close game. But reality is they had all of the momentum, all of it. Coming out in the second half, you can go back and look at the highlights of this, we throw a pass on second down, score a long 70, 80-yard touchdown, and in that moment the momentum switched and it was 24 to 14. And then Auburn went on to, um, uh, went on to score more points and held Alabama, I think, to a field goal in, in the third quarter, uh, or into the second half, and ultimately won the game. But my point in telling you all of this is to say I've never been in a stadium, a sports stadium, where I could feel the momentum switch so vividly. When I was at halftime, that was one of the most over-the-top— I mean, I've shared with people, I've been to Tuscaloosa so many times, I've been to Baton Rouge 7 times, I've been to Georgia, I've been to Florida, I've been to all of them. I've never felt that feeling before where, oh my goodness, like, there's no way we're going to win this game. And then, then for the second half, for all of the momentum to be on Auburn's side You feel like you could cut it with a knife. And the reason I'm telling you this is because in business, you can feel when you have momentum and you can feel when you don't. And so the question is, is it can sometimes feel like momentum in business is fleeting. It's almost like water, like you can hold it, but for only so long. And if you went and you were to hold in your hands water, well, eventually the water would just start seeping out. And momentum can kind of feel like that. You begin to kind of have this sense of progress in the business that you're actually making. Maybe you make some good sales and you start to feel good about the new team member that you just brought on board. You work with Autopilot Recruiting, they bring you what you think is going to be a really great person, and you start to actually then develop them and you start to feel some progress. Yet sometimes it starts to go away. We start to doubt ourselves a little bit. We start to question, can we actually do this? So how do we capture momentum in business? Number one, and then how do we bottle it up? How do we actually take that idea of the water Instead of holding it, we could actually put it in a big— I'm holding this, you're probably not watching this, but this big 50-ounce Yeti water bottle. How do we bottle it up? What does that actually look like as entrepreneurs? I think that we were put on this earth to go into the future, create a new reality, come back to the present. And demand that it becomes real. Maybe you can relate to that. And so therefore, I want the feeling of momentum. And one of the ways that I have to do that is that I naturally will start seeking out all the things that are wrong. But one of the ways that I need to do that in the business is I have to be able to create a discipline to where I'm looking and capturing the wins from the previous week. I have to see that there's forward progress. In some other future episodes, I'm going to talk about this idea of our performance culture. How many of you want a good culture? Everybody listening to this would say, yeah, I want a good culture. But really, how many of you want a performance culture? What does a culture of performance actually look like? I'm going to share that with you. But this is just a reminder that as someone who as an entrepreneur, that you crave that feeling of momentum, that things are moving forward. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that you're capturing wins. We put that in the Sunday night planning. The very first thing you do in our, in our community with our business owners in Blueprint, what we do very first thing every week is to be able to share 3 minutes. What were some of the wins? That's all it takes is 3 minutes to be able to capture those wins, because if we look for them we will find them. There's a lot more around unpacking momentum. One of the ways is be able to make sure you plan quarterly and execute monthly, and then you look back on that and see all the things you get done. And even all of that has a lot more that I'll ultimately end up sharing with all of you. But hopefully this is a good reminder to you is that you can capture, bottle, and keep momentum in the business. It doesn't always have to be fleeting. Yes, there's going to be setbacks. Yes, there's going to be bumps in the road. But when you have momentum, you just kind of roll over them like a, you know, four-wheel drive vehicle or something. All right, everyone. Hope this helped serve you today. Get in the habit and the discipline, the routine of actually capturing the wins. Not just hearing, no, that's a good idea, but actually writing down whether it's on paper or in a digital place like Notion, writing down what were the wins from this past week? It can start to give you the sense of momentum that you actually are making progress, even sometimes when you don't feel like that you are. Hope this served all of you. Till next week, lead well.