Episode 317: Above The Business 2023 Wrapped

What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective? Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. Get ready to build your business by design. Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. So in today's episode, it is our 2023 Above the Business podcast wrapped. Episode. Yes, I took that from Spotify, thought it was a good name, so thought we would use it as well. This is our top 10, some of the best episodes from 2023. You're going to hear from Damon West, Troy Korsgaarden, Jack Wiley, Cameron Herald, Coach P, Walker Deibel, Alan Dibb, Andrew Filar, Alex Shattuck, and Mike Makalowicz. And these are some of the best of the best clips that we got from this past year. I want to give all of you a big shout out. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for your time. And most importantly, for your attention. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for subscribing to the podcast. I hope that this has served all of you well in this past year, and we've got big plans for 2024. So without further ado, here is the 2023 Above the Business podcast wrapped. 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's 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.

You're sitting in the state of Alabama. We can start with what Nick Saban's done at Alabama. Saban has created a culture of winning there and an expectation that when you sign with Alabama, you go play for there, that there's an expectation to win and work hard and do whatever is necessary. And when you create cultures like that, you create this atmosphere that people that aren't on board with that don't feel like they're in the right spot. And then that's kind of what you want to do too. Not kind of, it is what you want to do. You want to create an atmosphere and a culture where if you're someone that goes against the culture, against the grain, you don't fit in, you want to leave. No one has to ask you to go. You're going to feel like you don't fit in so much that you're going to take off. You're going to hop in the portal, so to speak. Dabo— Dabo's done the same thing at Clemson. Dabo goes at it a different way. It's more of a culture of family. At Clemson. He's created this culture of belonging, of family, and I've never seen another culture like Dabo's that he's got at Clemson. I mean, the culture at Clemson is one of the best cultures of any sports team or corporation or anything I've ever been around. It's incredible what he's done there. By elevating them like that, he has gotten them to believe that they're over-believers, not overachievers. They're over-believers. And that's not an easy thing to do at the level he does it at. Just two of the coaches we can talk about right there, two of the best coaches in America. They, they go at it a different way. Saban's a little bit more hardcore than, than Dabo. And then Dabo's not a pushover. I mean, you don't want to cross Dabo, but they both have different styles and they get the same results. It's pretty neat to watch both of those guys go at it. And look, I've been to a lot of programs. I mean, there's programs all over the country. Lincoln Riley, Lincoln Riley's a friend of mine. I just texted Lincoln Riley on Sunday, man, and I was saying, hey man, look, I'm proud of what you're doing. You've just defied everybody in America of what you're able to do. And I told him that coming from a guy that came from the background I came from, no one would give me the odds to be where I am right now, 7 years out of prison, speaking on a global stage and being able to write books that are bestsellers and all that. But it's like I told Lincoln, you defied the odds. It's like you're in on a secret that nobody knows and the other people that have heard it don't want to believe.

Yeah.

But you were in on that secret the whole time and your whole team is too. And he was texting me back. He said, that's exactly how it is. We believe in this locker room that we deserve to be playing for the national championship. And now they just showed America that they've earned the spot to be there. You know what I mean? This is like— that's what I told him at the end of the conversation.

That's culture.

You've created a culture that allows you to do that. If you can pick up your culture from one place and take it to another, that's spectacular, man.

I think AI and what I call open platform product solutions are going to change the whole industry. Speed is happening right now all around us, but AI, the promise of being able to see who's going to need what before they need it, similar to you wanting a jacket or a pair of shoes or whatever. Instinctively, we all are using AI just from our gut and our head. These people need an umbrella. These people need blah, blah, blah. But it's going to affect rates. It's going to affect service. Everything's going to be just in time. And I'm working on a lot of stuff that has to do with blockchain that it's not billing, although billing will be affected by blockchain, but security and things that need to be delivered now in real time, limiting fraud, limiting the need to have 10 people putting one thing together. But artificial intelligence, it's currently changing everything right now. I think technology, we haven't even scratched the surface on insurance because it's not money, it's the time that companies have. They have all these huge legacy systems. They're still trying to either sunset or they're bringing in new stuff. And you're just starting to see the speed in which things are happening. And so I swear to you, my manager used to say this. He's up here right behind me. I wish I was younger, man. This is so exciting. And he was excited about a computer that wouldn't fit on my desk. It was so big, man. I mean, like, in the palm of your hand that we got technology now that just literally is life-changing. I think it's exciting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. What do you think about the technology in vehicles and how that's going to affect premiums over the next— look, I mean, let's not go out 50 years. I think that's too far. Let's just say the next decade.

So we're already having and have been having conversations on flying vehicles. How are you going to insure them? Who's going to be able to sell them? All those conversations are happening now. I think you'll see it happen a lot faster than UBI, right? Usage-based insurance has been going around for 15+ years, and I remember working on it back then, and now it's come to its own. I think you'll see that whether it's flying vehicles or driverless vehicles completely, all that's going to happen a lot faster than these other technologies. So I'm not prepared to put a stake in the ground on how they're going to rate these things, who's going to sell them, how the products are going to be delivered. But it's like anything. The fax machine changed business and it evolved that product. The first one I used, it was thermal paper, walk outside and it just all turned black. And now you look at, they're obsolete, basically. I mean, people still use them, but now you scan something. I think you're just going to see things continue to evolve. I'm going to answer this just a little different in the end. How are we going to be affected? Well, back to the economics, because I just, I've studied agent economics. If your whole model is just based on one product and now that product pays less commissions for new business or more or less commissions on service, if any, you need to look at your business and go, okay, how does this change how I deal with my customers? I've taken it to such a degree that I could make a case for giving people free advice on auto just so I get all their other products. And it's not going to go to that extreme for everybody, but you just got to keep looking at it. When I first started, and possibly when you first started, if you weren't the king of auto, you weren't in business, or the queen of auto, you weren't in business. I think auto is important. I think it's more important than it's ever been. It's just not the economic engine for a local small business than it was. Doesn't mean we should ignore auto. I think double down on auto.

First of all, let's just recognize that these 8 attributes were distilled from multiple years of data collection from a representative sample of employees in 27 countries around the world. We surveyed 80,000 employees, got their input in answer to this question: What is the most important thing I want from my immediate boss? So this wasn't really a theory. That I came up with on my own. I mean, we did the research, we did the work, but all of the data is based on what employees told us. So this is really the employee voice indicating what they want in a manager. So if we look at it that way, it boils down to these 8 attributes. Number 1, that my manager will show support and understanding. In other words, they're going to be accessible, they're going to be helpful, they're going to be considerate. And they're going to be good listeners. Number 2, that my boss will treat me with dignity and respect. And so, what that means is I want to work for a boss who presumes that I'm coming to the job in order to do good work and to make a contribution. They're a boss who's going to invite me to be involved in decision-making where possible, and they're going to be concerned about my welfare, both physically and psychologically. So if we think about those two behaviors, those are behaviors that really contribute to the quality of the relationship between the boss and the subordinate. Number three, though, we get into some different kinds of behaviors. The third behavior would really be communicating clear performance expectations. This is about defining what success looks like. It's really about making sure that priorities are established, and that the manager is providing the employee with useful feedback, helpful feedback on how they can do even a better job. That's followed by the behavior of providing recognition. Recognition is psychological appreciation—pat on the back, attaboy, attagirl, thank you for the contributions you're making. It's not about pocketbook. It's really about the heart and showing appreciation for what people bring to the job. And then finally, the fifth behavior is rewarding performance contributions. This is basically the reason people come to work, right? For most of us who aren't independently wealthy, we come to work for the purposes of getting a paycheck. But the idea here is that I want to be rewarded fairly for the contributions I'm making. That shows up in the paycheck, but it also shows up in training and development opportunities. Employees work equally emphatic that they wanted their boss to help them create a career path, help them develop new skills, support them in training and development opportunities. That is perceived as a form of reward. But those last 3 behaviors—communicating clear performance expectations, providing recognition, and rewarding performance contributions—are really about building employee performance. Now, the 6th attribute is problem-solving decision-making. And you, Bradley, you might say, well, that sounds like a behavior to me. And in fact, you would be right. But in the data, what employees said was, I don't merely want my boss to solve problems and make decisions. I want them to be good at it. I want them to kind of clear the deck, remove obstacles to the performance of work, make decisions in a timely way, think through the downstream consequences of the decision so that there's not a blowback to the decisions. And so, they really want their bosses to be good at problem-solving and decision-making and to invite them into that process when that's possible. Then, the last two attributes represent what I call values. Values are personal standards of conduct, and what employees said was that they want their boss to be fair and just. So, in other words, they're going to be consistent, they're going to be equitable, they're not going to play favorites, they're going to show the same flexibility to all. And so, there's a sense of being fair. And then the final attribute is similar to it. It's kind of the other side of the coin, so to speak, that they be honest and trustworthy, that they're forthright in their communication, they say what they mean, they mean what they say, They walk with a sense of integrity, basically would be defined as doing what you say you're going to do. And they're credible. They protect confidential information. They don't undermine others. They're honest and they're trustworthy. These are the 8 attributes of the employee-centric manager. So, this simply defines from the viewpoint of employees what they most want in their immediate boss.

So one distinct difference I'll give you with what they talk about in Traction and in Riding Shock or Rocket Fuel, they talk about the integrator or the second in command as being the tiebreaker in decision-making. I vehemently disagree with that. To truly scale a company, you can't have a tiebreaker. You need to have someone who's good at building consensus, someone who's getting the good at the team to argue and debate and discuss and throw ideas against the wall and then at the end of the day, come to a decision that they all agree with. That's a much stronger skillset than just saying, okay, 3 say this, 3 say that. I'm making the decision. This is the way we go. That's what you do when you have a very young team that can't go through the whole storming, norming, forming, performing model. But to truly scale a company past 50 employees, it's not about being the tiebreaker anymore. It's about getting the leadership team to have those good discussions, to get engaged in the good healthy debate, to really look at the data, to bring up the opinions and ideas and data, and then to actually say, all right, now that we've heard everybody, what's the best decision and are we all agreeing? And we all walk out of the room in consensus. That's a different skill set. So that's one example of where I think it's just different.

You got to 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. 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 I call it Insurance 101, where I am giving them everything about my agency and 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 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. I really like some of the benefits of permanent life insurance, and I can geek out on that for hours. But insurance in general, it's not sexy to me. I didn't grow up thinking I'm going to 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. 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. I need to call back some escalated clients and do it at 6 o'clock at night when everyone goes home. Fine. If you're the service person in the office, 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.

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The way that I define platform is different. I call it sort of like platform and acquisition entrepreneurship, right? Versus platform for what private equity would call a platform, which would be the first acquisition of a planned roll-up. Okay. I treat it differently. And the reason I treat it differently is what I just went through with you on the last question was the prep funnel. How do I identify the right business for me? Right? And I define a platform as a business where the buyer is going to be the right buyer for that business because they can lead the change that needs to happen, or they can extract the change, they can extract the growth. In other words, I wear a few hats. I help buyers at the Acquisition Lab. I work with sellers at Quiet Light where I help them exit their online-based businesses and other things. And the thing is, I started brokering because I wanted to understand deals more. And it's so interesting. I'll take a deal and I'll talk to 2 people about it. This happens every deal. One of them is like, "Oh my God, I can't believe this is it. Am I going to be able to get it?" And I'll talk to the other person and they'll be like, "It's better than a warm piece of crap, but not much." And it's the same business. Yeah. Yeah. Literally one person can't bring anything to the table where the other can. Yeah. So the thing is that when you are looking for a business, trust me, I've tried. There's not much you can do to actually bring that business to you closer in time other than education and preparation. I promise you that, okay? Because it's all here.

It's all here.

And understanding what you're looking at, right? You kind of have to do some reps. You need to understand the valuation. You understand what you're looking for. You need to look at some deals just academically and then get past that analysis paralysis and be comfortable taking that leap of faith that inevitably comes.

Probably the two most common is number one is target market. So a lot of people, if they're a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, an insurance person, an accountant, a lawyer, whatever, when we say, who's your target market? They're like, everyone, right? Everyone needs insurance. Everyone needs a lawyer. Everyone needs a doctor. And that's coming from a good place. It's like, you know, we're entrepreneurs. We want to help as many people as we possibly can. But it's a massive mistake because your target market is really the fundamental that everything is built on. And if that's shaky and if that's vague, you're gonna have a lot of problems with messaging. You're gonna have a lot of problems with media because if you say your target market is everyone, well, what's a message that's gonna attract everyone? And then what's a media that's gonna reach everyone? And then how do we lead nurture everyone, right? So if you say it's everyone, it's really no one. We want to be super specific. Who are your people? So a good way to think about it is this. So if we took all of your customers and exported them into an Excel spreadsheet and I said to you, look, sort your customer base from best to worst, who are the customers you love hearing from, who are super profitable, they're fun to work with, they really value what you do, just awesome customers. When you see them ringing, you're like, ah, great, it's good news. Then let's work down the list and let's look at that bottom 50% or bottom 20%. And who are the customers who are just painful? They just complain. They price shop you constantly. When you see a phone call from them, you like, you send it to voicemail or you cringe or, or whatever. And so there are customers who are more ideal for you than not. And so if we could spend more time, money, and effort on the ideal customers, because I bet you're spending most of your resources on your suboptimal clients, on appeasing them, on following them up, on getting them to pay on time, on all of those sorts of things. So they're taking up the vast majority of your resources. And the clients who are your best clients, who just pay their bill when they get it, who don't complain about price, who just are fun to work with, they actually get the least of your attention. And so, uh, rather than giving all your oil to the squeaky wheel, replace the squeaky wheel, right? So get rid of the clients who are causing you pain and focus more on your top 20% of clients. So in every business who tells me, hey, our clients are everyone, once we drill down, we actually find, hang on, no, there are much more ideal clients than others. Some are worth much more than others. I call this the principle of the unequal dollar, right? A lot of entrepreneurs think, hey, A dollar from a client is a dollar, right? It's a dollar in the bank account and your bank manager will say that too. Hey, a dollar is a dollar, right? We don't know the difference, but a dollar from an optimal client is worth way more than a dollar from a suboptimal client because the suboptimal client's gonna cost you a lot more on the back end, both in money but also in energy and in focus and in pain. So we wanna focus more on our ideal clients So that's really mistake number one is thinking that going far, far too wide on your target market, even when people think they've got it niched down, like sometimes someone will say, hey, my target market is women over 40. Okay, great. We've narrowed it down to a billion people. You can almost always niche down further and further because once you get specific, the other stuff really falls in place a lot better. We can get messaging that we can really nail, we can really get messaging that really lands with someone. We can find media that we can reach those people a lot cheaper and easier and more targeted. So that's super important. That's messaging. The other place where people really fall down, I feel, is lead nurturing. And that's where they'll basically do 1, 2, 3 phone calls and that's it. They kind of fizzle out. So having a system where you can follow up leads, where you can nurture leads over the long term. So let's assume a lead is not ready to buy today. A lot of people will treat those as tire kickers. They're like, oh, try, try, kick a look, come back when you're ready to buy. But the sophisticated marketer knows that there's two buckets of prospect. There's people who are ready to buy today, and that's awesome, but everybody's fighting for those people. Everyone's running ads for those people. Everyone's cold calling those people, but they make up only a very small percentage of your addressable target market. There's a much, much larger target market who are ready to buy sometime in the future. It could be 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, a year, 2 years' time. So a sophisticated marketer knows how to build a pipeline, a systematic way to keep people warm until they're ready to buy. And that could be a year in the future, 2 years in the future, but you're building an asset of future clients and future revenue.

I think that it's hard to justify if you are the employee to take a $1,000 salary or even like a $15 an hour salary doing something like insurance that requires a license or multiple licenses when you could go work at Target stocking shelves for $15. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? You could say, look, I could go work at Target, I could not get yelled at by customers, I could stock shelves, I don't need to get a license to do it. And I could probably not have to work a full 8-hour day. And there's a lot of benefits to that. So why would I take a job, get paying the same thing? Yeah, maybe there's upside. Maybe if they train me well and if they provide me with enough marketing and if the environment is good and conducive to growth, right? There's a lot of risk on that employee to take that job. I know somebody whose 17-year-old son has a job at $18 an hour working at Home Depot, and I don't— they I think he would take a job in insurance making $15 an hour. I think he'd want at least $18, right? It goes back to that idea of you always want to make more. And yes, you can make more with bonus, maybe. I think a lot of owners, at least in the insurance space, our perception is reality. And I'm guilty of this too. And you say, well, if you bust it, you're going to make $80,000 a year. But we have to ask ourselves as owners, founders, leaders, do we really have the environment where that is realistic? 'Cause if it's not realistic, we shouldn't be talking about it. If someone's not making $80,000 a year, you shouldn't say you can make $80,000 a year. Mm-hmm. Like I see people on Job Ads say, oh, unlimited earning potential. Well, that's not true because we have guardrails or there's only so many hours in a day. There's gonna be only so much marketing to work. There's only gonna be so much technology that we can have. And a person in an agency who has to manually dial a phone down a list of landlines, it's no support, no training. Is going to perform very differently than somebody who has the best CRM with AI-powered phone and high-quality leads who are actively shopping and the training to overcome objections and close those deals. It's going to be a very different type of journey for that employee. And so we as owners and founders and leaders have to ask ourselves, are we really putting those people in a position to succeed? That if they do bust their tail, that they're going to make that type of money? Or are are they going to bust their tail, spin their tires because we don't have the processes, systems, or infrastructure in place for them to get there?

Every military branch is a very comparable structure. For us, it's 4 in a fireteam, 4 teams in a squad, 3 squads in a platoon, and so on and so forth. But so yeah, so I think you have to— first off, 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, Nobody that just is crushing life wants to stay in the same spot for the rest of their life. We are always looking for what's next, and our team members are the same thing. 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. Even the folks that do want to retire with you, 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.

What we need to do is ask people what they want, but then give them opportunities to explore. Inevitably, most humans have a growth desire, meaning we want to learn and expand ourselves. The rule here to follow is stop matching people's talent to titles. Instead, match people's talents to tasks. And because many organizations are based upon titles, they do these dramatic shifts. You're customer service and bang, now you're sales and bang, you're customer service. Instead, what are the elements of customer service? Maybe the elements are Customer communication and follow-up. Maybe it's email responding, but maybe it's also data entry and other things. Then write down what you need for the salesperson. Maybe it's closing the hard deal. Maybe it's farming clients. Maybe it's other components. Maybe there's some data entry there too. Then look, where does your person, this A-player, naturally show their interest? That's often an expression of their talent. And if it's, say it's in the farming phase of sales, which is very similar to customer service, it's being in contact with customers. Put them in a farming kind of role and any task you have that's related to that, put 'em in that category and say, listen, your title is A-star or A-player. We're not gonna give you a sales title, but we want you doing things where you'll excel. Then find someone else in the organization who loves data entry and maybe they're filling up part of the sales role and part of that customer service. By blurring the title lines, you no longer have that pyramid structure of an organization. You start building a web-like structure, and webs are more flexible and far stronger. Match talent to task, not to title.

Well, I guess unintended, that's a wrap. I appreciate all of you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for listening. I hope this podcast has continued to serve you personally as well as your business. Until next episode and until 2024. Lead well.