Episode 320: Consistent Success & Remote Culture with Alex Shattuck

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hemme, your host. On today's episode, we have repeat guest, one of our more popular ones, and one of our podcast partners, Alex Chatok. Every time I have Alex on, I'm not going to give his background. You can go back and listen to many of the episodes I've done with Alex, but he does an exceptional job of taking things that are kind of theoretical and philosophical at a high level and bring them down into tangible takeaways that you can implement right away. And this episode does just that. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Alex Shatta. 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. It's time to build your business by design. Alex, welcome back to the podcast.

It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Always great to have you. Excited to kick off 2024 with you. So we've got a number of really great kind of high-level topics for us to discuss. I always try to cover 3 or 4 big things with you. Here's kind of where I really want to start. Since this podcast is dropping the very first part of the year, people listening to this probably fall on one of two spectrums, and we'll start with one and then we'll go to the other one. Some people listening to this had an absolute banner year in 2023. They had a great year. You and I were chatting before we hit record, kind of about our years. You had obviously a really great year. And so one of the challenges with having a really great year is then building upon that success. And there's a lot of college football teams that can follow that. I mean, Alabama— I'm an Auburn person, but Alabama's been able to build upon that success year over year over year, which has probably been the most impressive, to be consistent. But in business, how do we do that? How have you been able to find for yourself to fight that complacency? And then at the same time, some people walk into it off of a banner year, and then there's a little bit of a depressed state because they think, oh my goodness, now I got to go do it all over Again, what's been your journey with that?

My journey, it's evolved, but I would say my first 5, 5 years, 5 or 6 years, my least favorite day of the year was January 2nd. You know, we always seem to have a good year, but man, I always had that, that mindset of, can I repeat? Can I do it again? Was that a fluke? Like the first time I hit Chairman's, the first time I hit Level 3. I thought like, okay, I got there and my stock was high. And I thought that's actually why I took my second office at the time. It was a scratch opportunity. I'm like, I'm not sure if I'm going to be at this level forever. So I'm going to take this second opportunity while my stock's high. But that was my mindset at the time. I hadn't yet proven, in my opinion, to myself or anybody that what I had was sustainable. And What I found though, over the course of the next 5 years, is I started doing a much better job building the systems and processes along with the team. Obviously, the recruiting that led to the team that gave me those results. And, you know, now the last 5 years I look back and when January 2nd rolls around, I don't feel any different than I did on December 2nd or November 2nd. And I just think about the consistency piece. We used to get really excited around the promotions. The first quarter promotions that the companies roll out and making sure we're getting off to a fast start and everything. And I still care about that. But at the end of the day, I know through the size of the teams that I've built and the individuals that I have in each seat, I know just by showing up Monday through Friday, putting in the work, doing what we're supposed to be doing, we're going to accomplish those little missions along the way by just doing our job. And so we don't have a ton of focus on any one promotion. I'd rather just be really consistent throughout the year. And then when you wake up on January 2nd, there's not this freak out of, well, where is that first life policy going to come from? Who's on my hot list? Who needs it? It just happens because we're doing our jobs at the high level we're supposed to be doing our jobs. And so it took me some time to get there, but it came down to the consistency with my team and the systems and processes. Built into that. I watched something that Nick Saban put out recently, and he talks about that. You know, he talks about his time up at Michigan, here at Michigan State, where the process started for him, and he talks about really dialing it in down to the team member level, understanding what their job is every single play and focusing on that one play, knowing that if they focus on that one play and then the next play and then the next play, it turns into a W in many cases, and it has for him. That's the way I've ran my agency for years, is we focus on the daily goals, what's going to win today, and then we're going to do something different tomorrow, keep it fresh. And we don't spend a lot of time looking at the, the, the whole quarter or the annual goals. We really focus on what we're going to do today to win.

Yeah, I think that— how have you— well, I, I'll say this and then I'll ask the question— is getting too obsessed with results and not falling in love with the process to be able to produce those results. When do you think that that light bulb went off for you, uh, personally? And then what are the specific steps that you started to take that if somebody is wanting to get to that place of being able to establish structure and routine into their organization, what are the tangible things that you did back then?

Probably the biggest change for me was when I made it crystal clear in my mind of what I needed on my team as far as personnel. You know, if you know the math of what you need to do to get there, so what kind of activity yields what results, what marketing allocation needs to go to these things that's going to drive that activity, how many butts in chairs, what, you know, what roles. Then it's really fairly easy if you're committed to recruiting and building and retaining team. And so, that was for me, it was probably at that 5-year mark, you know, where I started to focus more effort on recruiting and team and building those systems and processes. As far as the focus on the results, I think if anything, for me, even though I was focused on the results, I never took the time to appreciate or recognize the results for myself. Maybe I did for my team. And I remember one year I was actually at a territory meeting. Greg Lemanski, agent next to me, he mentions, hey, congratulations on your year. You had a great year. And my response was— this is the end of the year— my response was, yeah, but now it's, you know, it's a new year. Time to go. Time to reset. Time to do it again. And he kind of like put a hand on my shoulder and said, hey, just slow down for a minute and enjoy and appreciate what you've done and the success that you and your team have had. Celebrate that. And that was the first time I ever considered like slowing down and giving myself a pat on the back. So I try to do that as hard as that is to actually to focus on and remember the things that we have done well throughout the year. I'm hard on myself. I think about the things that I could have done differently as a leader. And as a team what we could have done differently. But I think it's important to also not just highlight what you've done as a team, but also what you've done as a leader yourself and what you fought through. So that actually, I think, has helped. So when you do reset and regroup and launch on January 2nd, you've had some type of reward internally that makes you want to push for that again. But if you never take the time to reward yourself or your team, what are we doing it for?

Man, I agree with that so much. I hope that I appreciate you sharing that because I can definitely tell you, I think I've put it on the podcast before too, that there's been so many times in the past where you set out this target, you achieve it. And then people would say like, what are we going to do to celebrate? And I would say, we're, it's just another day. You just move on. And I really regret that. I really regret that because business, let's be real, business is difficult. Business is really hard. And it would be like, I don't know, the Lakers winning the champion— a championship or something like that, and the team not celebrating. I mean, you, you've got to be able to celebrate the wins. But at the same time, of course, as an entrepreneur, our, um, fulfillment really comes through progress and growth that we're having. And so of course, sitting at the table of success too long is is not the right thing either. But I think that's really important what you said about actually being able to capture what was the wins that you actually had this year, celebrate the wins, not just gloss over them and moving on down the road. Because, um, don't you think too, it's one thing for us to— I mean, I don't think it's healthy for us as the owner or the entrepreneur to have that mindset, but our team wants to celebrate that, right? I mean, they want to be able to feel that too. And oftentimes we can go like just gloss over that, be like, oh, it's just another day. But the team really wants to celebrate that. I mean, you even share with me like kind of what your team is doing even, uh, the today, the day that we're recording this.

Yeah, you know, one thing you mentioned was the Lakers, and I do think about that also because we're not the Lakers and we don't have an offseason. And so I think it's, it's critical that we not only celebrate but also when we do fight and compete, we have to keep in mind that we don't have 3 months off before we turn this thing back on, like the Lakers or whatever sports team analogy we're going to use. And that's why I think it's even more important to have that consistency piece so the team doesn't burn out. If you decide you want to kick this thing in gear on January 2nd and then just beat everybody down for the first quarter, uh, you're going to lose some people along the way. Because again, we don't, we don't have an offseason. Because what happens after the first quarter? What's next? Another promotion. And then we're gonna, you know, run them into the ground again. And then there's the third quarter, then there's the finishing strong piece where we're trying to get the, you know, the carryover life premium and all this stuff. And so when can we breathe? And the breathing comes every single business day because we're not going so hard that it's not sustainable. And that's also a beautiful thing when it comes to business because you're never leaving it to chance. It's just naturally happening every single day.

Yeah, it makes sense. Well, let's give the counter to that. All right. So let's give the counter to someone listening did not have a good year. If you've been in business any amount of time, you've gotten to this point, first part of the year, the end of December, and boy, you just can't wait till January 1st. You're like, thank goodness that year is done. Get me to the next year. What have you done in some of the years or maybe even for yourself or other people that you've um, spoke with, worked with that have not had a great year. So the end of 2023, uh, mediocre or, or poor results for whatever kind of reasons. Um, and they're wanting to try to find momentum. They're wanting to try to regroup. They want to try to find— there's so many things to do, they don't even know really kind of where to be able to focus. What are some specific things that you feel like that you've been able to do and that you feel that works to be able to bounce back?

I think the biggest thing that I recommend anybody does is first make a list of everything, um, that you think impacted your year in a negative way, right? Because if we just go into the new year and say, well, that one didn't work out, let's, let's hope for the, the best in 2024, um, that's a, that's a bad business plan for 2024. So let's write out everything that we thought got in our way of being successful. And then from there, after you make that list, then start crossing off the things you can't control, right? If it's rate increases, well, unless you're way up top and an agent too, I don't think that anything to do with you. So let's cross that one off the list. Let's cross off inflation. Let's cross off labor costs. Let's cross off supply chain issues. Let's cross off anything that we can't control. And then let's see what's left. Do we struggle with team? Do we struggle with recruiting? Do we struggle with the marketing sources that we were leaning into? Uh, did quality go down there? Uh, did we struggle in our personal life that then rolled into our business and negatively impacted us there? Um, whatever those things are, then from there I would take the, the list of things that impacted our business in a negative way that we can control and then list them in order of the severity and the impact, right? If it just was a slight impact, okay, let's put it down here. If it— say if you ran with no team members and you really need two to hit your goal, that's a pretty significant problem. So let's put that one up at the top. And so then you make that list of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and you attack, in my opinion, probably the one that's gonna have the most impact on your business immediately. And then number 2, and then number 3, and then number 4. But to just go into the new year and hope for the best in 2024, I don't think the market's going to have any type of shift that's going to completely overhaul our situation in a positive or negative way necessarily. There's been years like that where all of a sudden the winds are to our back and you could just show up in the new year and things start to go your way. I don't think 2024 is going to be that year. I think we have to take control of it and do something about it. Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah. I, you know, I think what I really love about that is the intentionality and focus. My, my word for 2024 is actually focus. I don't know if you, if you do that, pick out kind of a one word. I've done that, I think maybe 5 years, 5 or 6 years. Or so. And, um, uh, that just— that theme had been coming up for the last 6 weeks of 2023, is that I really wanted to go into 2024 to be really laser-focused, whether it's in my personal life, in the businesses. I wanted to be able to focus. And I think that's kind of what you're saying right there, is to be able to identify what do you think is the actual obstacle that was standing in the way? What do you think was kind of holding you back? And then putting all of your focus, effort, energy resources into solving that problem versus thinking that it's 27 different things? Probably not. It's usually 1, 2, or 3 big things that were kind of holding us back. Fair to say? Fair. Yeah. Um, all right, so going into, uh, every year we always love to discuss with you team-related things, whether it's team, uh, recruiting, developing, um, uh, retaining A-players. Here's one, uh, angle that I wanted to come at that I think would be really helpful for people. And that is the timing of which to kind of start to approach bringing people on. In other words, as the business is growing, how to look at from a business perspective, not my emotions, not my gut or my gland, or, you know, I listen to this podcast and I get fired up about my team in 2024 and I just go randomly pull the trigger on hiring someone. So I am wanting to grow. And I know that as the business is growing and we're doing the right things, we've got our systems together of how we sell, et cetera. I work with Autopilot. I start to kind of get this idea of bringing on someone. How can someone approach— and maybe you want to share with this if you're at, you know, a team of 15+ people, if you want to, or maybe there's people listening to this that have a team of 2 to 5, maybe something like that— when is the right time to make the trigger, both financially, looking at financials, but then also to know when's the right time to say, okay, You've got these people that you've interviewed. Now you can go ahead and pull the trigger. So I think it's helping people to understand timing and how you've approached it in your own business and what you recommend to others.

Sure. Um, I'll give you a few scenarios. Like you said, I'll talk about insurance in particular because I know it's a lot of the audience, but I'll talk about just business in general too. Um, and I'll start with that. I had a conversation with the gentleman that owned a cleaning business yesterday. And he was referred to me for Autopilot Recruiting. And he said he hasn't had a team really since before COVID hit, and I— and he would like to have 3 or 4. I asked him, what would that do financially for you if you had 3 or 4? What kind of business would you be able to take on? Because he said he had a long waiting list of clients, but he didn't have a team. He said he could 3x his business immediately with a team of 3 or 4. And so we talked about the, the financial benefit to that. But one thing that he, he said— he gave me like the And he talked to my spouse objection. I'm like, holy smokes, this is actually in this industry too. I didn't realize this. But one thing I asked, I said, well, what do you guys need to talk about? And he said, well, you know, my wife wants us to replenish our savings over the next 6 months before we bring on another team member or employee. And I said, well, what about this? You said you had a lengthy list of clients that you could pull in. Could you cherry-pick 10 or 15 and get them lined up, ready to go, committed, and then let us recruit you somebody? And then day one, you have 10 or 15 clients to assign, and then there's no going in the red when it comes to payroll into that investment. And then you can start to build your team up faster. And then over the course of 6 months, maybe at the 6-month mark, you didn't just save a bunch of money, but you made a bunch of money because it sounds like it's going to 3x your business relatively quickly. And so the dollars and cents made sense to him once I explained that to them. So my first thing for you as an insurance agent or business owner is understand the money behind it, right? Don't not do something because you don't know how you get paid. And that's sometimes a real problem, I think. And I've been there before, right, where it's like, you know, that December paycheck's gonna be a little bit late and you're worried about that, and you're worried about bringing on another person and investing that few extra thousand dollars in the salary before you see the return as far as the production goes. And our insurance industry is different. Like, it— there is a ramp-up time before they start making some money. I know there's some things you can have them do to offset some of that payroll, but I get it. Uh, with that said though, if you understand exactly how you get paid, you got to think about, uh, depending on the carrier, depending on the company, the residual benefits of the P&C. Does that impact any type of retirement bonus for you? Is there an annual bonus that that impacts? Is there any variable to that at all and how you get paid residually. And when you start adding all this stuff up, um, yeah, you might go in the red for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, but if it's, if it's a successful hire, not even a rock star, but a successful hire in that sales seat, he or she will not lose you money over the course of a rolling 12 to 18 months. You just have to be able to bridge that gap and have that, that's, uh, that long game in mind. And then once you get that person on board and you've— you have a proven model for being able to recruit and retain and spin up somebody into selling some stuff for you in a reasonable amount of time, then you can see in a simple math, if this continues with this person, it's going to yield this much as far as revenue results. Okay, I can afford to go out and do that again. And then you add another one, and then you add another one. Yeah, but, um, I don't think you have to necessarily look at someone like myself that might have you know, 20+ team members in the insurance side and say, I'm going to go, I'm going to go do that this year, or Coach P, or, you know, anybody that has large teams, typically that's done over the course of years. And even, even like I'll say that some of us that have other sources of income, right, we can be a little more aggressive with how fast we scale our teams because the insurance thing might not be the only source of income for us. And it could be the same for other people too, with spouses and other side hustles and things. And so you can't compare yourself in year 1 or 2 or whatever year you're in to somebody that's in year 10 or 15 that has a spouse making 6 figures or a side hustle making multi-6 figures. Um, it's not fair to yourself or your business. And if you try to copy and paste what somebody's done before you because you like that and that, that sounds really cool and sexy, you're going to set yourself up for failure in a financial way. And that's, that's a devastating thing to do. So it's got to be a slow and steady build.

Oh man, that's so good. Yeah, I, I totally agree with that, is that looking at where someone else is and trying to replicate what Alex is doing, as opposed to— now there's some principles that you or David or somebody else is, is doing, and we can pull some of those, but looking back on what are the things that you did along the way— you added one person, then added another person, You didn't go, you didn't just onboard 15 people in, in 3 months. I mean, it's like, well, even if you did, that is a huge cash out. Like, let's cut down to brass tacks. Do you believe that sometimes that the business owner, he or she, um, doubts their ability to spin somebody up, up, uh, to get somebody up to speed in a reasonable amount of time because In the past, they've hired someone, paid them $3,000 a month for 3 months, plus taxes, everything else. 90 days later, they just shelled out $10,000. The person leaves. They had no production. They did it again. $10,000. The person left and they just keep doing it. And then they start to doubt and lose their confidence about, yeah, I hear that, but every single time I do this, The person's not getting up to speed. They're flaking out. I'm just, I'm just throwing cash away. And so they start to lose their confidence about their ability to be able to get somebody up to speed. Thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, short answer, yes, you're spot on. That's, that's unfortunately a large segment of the business owners that we work with is folks that are in that situation. I see it every single day. Um, a couple of things there, you know, there, there's two real issues that I think drive that result. The first one is lack of consistency within recruiting. And obviously, this is, you know, this is the hill that I will die on, is consistent recruiting. But where I'm going with this is we find our best people, myself included, when we're not having to desperately look for people. That's where we find someone that's so damn good that you can't not say yes to them. That's a phenomenal problem to have where you have to give up your desk give up some of your own salary, but you get this A-player in here. And I told a story just the other day about an agent that hired this one player. The agency was pretty darn good before. They had, I think it was like, I don't know, I think 5 salespeople already, all pretty decent, nobody that's just crushing it. He hires this one player that turns into this phenomenal, phenomenal team member, and this guy quickly started selling I'll just use simple math here. 100 apps a month, right? That's a, that's a rock star. 100 apps a month. Everybody else was in that, say, 40 to 50 range at the time. And then they start to see that A-player and they say, holy smokes, like, this is possible. And what do you think everybody else did? They all started doing a little bit more. On average, they average about additional 10 policies sold per month each. So what you did with that one hire is you brought that one person on, which brought in the production of two people But then everybody else got a little bit better. If you add up the 10 by 5, there's an additional 50 apps. So that one hire brought in production as if there were 3.

Yeah.

And that's how you can get to that next level without having to hire 10 people. It's more or less you got to find some really good people along the way through the consistency with recruiting. But the next thing is the onboarding piece. You know, that's like, you know, you get somebody Maybe someone has the potential and you don't have anything in place to give them what they need to be successful. So, looking back in that question around 2024 and, you know, what happens if you didn't have a good 2023? And I said, well, identify your biggest obstacles that you can control. Recruiting is one of them. Onboarding your team successfully and intentionally is another one. And for me, if it's something that you're not comfortable with, first off, you got to get a little more comfortable with it, right? Like, we— I hear a lot about, well, I want insurance licensed sales experience, State Farm experience. Okay, that really narrows the candidate pool, right? And not to mention, a lot of those people that might check that box failed somewhere else, and that might not be a good fit for you. But so we have to be willing and able to put in a little work ourselves. But then from there, If you're not going to, you need to outsource as much of that as you can. There's multiple coaches. You mentioned Coach P. There's a handful of others, and it might not be just one, you know. It might be P, might be Randy, it might be, uh, Scott, might be Ignite. It might be like— there, it could be— you might hire a few of them because not any one of them might not be able to take them from start to finish. But if, if you can invest into them, get your team to invest into them, outsource some of that too. You're putting them in a position to win when you had it in the past. So, but I still feel if you have a really great team member and an average team member that's new, the great team member will take— it will need less onboarding and sales and whatever training you're going to give them, because really good people tend to figure it out. And what you can control in addition to that is just the culture piece. Like, are you treating them in a way that makes them want to show up the next day?

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think what one of the things that you're sharing— this actually was come up as a discussion within the last couple months— is what an A-player truly looks like. And what we think, sometimes what people think is an A-player, and then you see someone else and you go, no, no, no, that's an A-player. There's a massive difference between what a true A-player actually looks like. And the only way, like, Again, to your point, like the hill you're going to die on is being— is consistent recruiting, not intermittent quality of like, oh my goodness, we just lost someone, or it's time to ramp up. I got to get someone. You're too late. You're just too late at that point. And you're trying to find an A-player, a great team member at the perfect moment. It's just almost not going to ever kind of lay out that way to where the 2-week period of time that you're looking to find someone, that person happens to be, you know, on the market that you're able to be able to find. So I think that's so true. I got a question around onboarding and training. For you personally, where does onboarding stop and ongoing training and development begin? Specifically, do you look at onboarding as 2 weeks, 30 days, 90 days, like this is onboarding, you're past onboarding now, and this is ongoing training. What does that look like for you?

Yeah, we have a, we have a 10-day, so 2-week onboarding process for new hires. That's kind of like an aggressive shot in the arm, but you know, there's no like buzzer that goes off after that 10 days. It says that they're ready to go. It's, it's, uh, it's, it's ongoing and continuous training from there. And obviously if you're coming out of that 10 days, you're going to have more training, more expectations from us when it comes to time put in there than someone that's been around for 3 months or 3 years, of course. But the training never stops. I mean, we do it daily. I outsource a lot of it. I have some— I do some of it myself. And then, of course, like I have key team members that do a lot of it also. So, yeah, all the above. But so for me, it's 10 days and then there's probably another, you know, first 3 months of like you're still kind of onboarding slash doing some stuff in a successful way. And then hopefully after that 3-month mark, like, you're one of the crew.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

So after that first 2 weeks of onboarding, we're getting someone up to speed. Do you feel like that month 4 for you is like, hey, you're up to speed, you may not be You may not be number one in the company right now on month 4, but you're really where you need to be. Is that kind of where your target is to get? Just take a salesperson as an example to get them up to.

Yeah, I mean, they should be giving us wins before then. They should be competing and selling well before then. But I would say month 4, if they're not in line with the majority of our team, there's probably something a little bit off. But everybody's different. I've had people that have taken a little bit longer that went on to just do great things. I've had people that just figured it out immediately that did great things. I've had people that figured out immediately and fizzled out. And so, you know, I couldn't tell you there's one set date where it's like, this is the expectation. And I don't have— believe it or not, I don't just like fire somebody because they're not selling X amount by day whatever. I look at the person. I look at how involved they are in the culture. Are they putting in the work? Are they putting in the extra work? Are they coachable? Are they grateful for the opportunity? You know, are they a positive energy in the office? Like, those are all things that will buy you a lot of time with me. If you're not those things and you're not selling insurance, you, you won't have a spot in my team very long.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, you don't have to be Uh, you don't have to be, you know, you're effectively a rookie on the team. You don't have to be scoring the most points. If you're that person that's diving on the floor, to use a basketball analogy, diving on the floor, taking charges, playing pressure defense, that coach is going to put you on the floor even though you may not be where you need to be offensive production-wise. And I think that that's true, but I think also what I hear you're saying there is You're looking at all the other intangibles that they're bringing to the team. Are they doing the work? Are they, are they running the plays the right way? Do they show up with the right attitude? Are they a good culture fit? Now, of course, I'm assuming at some point, if they're just literally not producing, they're not doing all the right things, then you have to obviously make a change with that. But generally speaking, you can kind of get an idea of whether or not this person's going to figure it out at some point. So. All right, so how do you, uh, I got one last topic. We touched on this last time, but I think it's important for us to touch on it again because this train is not slowing down, and that is remote, uh, workers. And I know you get a lot of questions, uh, about that. And if people want to go, we did a much bigger deep dive session. We'll make sure we link in the show notes, the last episode you and I did. Talking about that, but I think it's worth us hitting on it again because I think more and more people are being more willing to look at remote workers. But the biggest challenge with remote workers is then how do I integrate them into my team? Basically culture. I've just never— I'm accustomed to having everybody in front of me face to face. Now I'm doing things on Zoom and Teams and like all these, like, how do you do that? So what are some of the best practices you found to be able to, uh, create and sustain a really great culture even if you have remote workers?

Yeah, I'll start with that. Uh, excuse me, I'll start with the culture piece on, on the remote team, and I'll, I'll first reference Autopilot Recruiting just because of the scale and the size of the business and the number of remote employees or team members that we have. Um, we have a team of about 150, and everybody's remote. Um, there are some local to me But so I have met some in person, but I would say 90% or more I have never met, and a good portion of them I will probably never meet. And we have this amazing culture, like, in a culture that I— it's hard to describe how awesome this group really is. And some things we've done to, to make that happen, um, first off, the organizational structure is what we've mirrored, or we've mirrored what I experienced in the military, right? Like, we had we have fire teams, so we have teams, we have squads. So there's a team of 6 with a team leader within that. And then from there, there's a squad with 6 teams, squad leader, you know. So what you have is everybody's got a leader, and then that leader's got a leader, and then that leader's got a leader. And so there's that small group element where there's like, they know each other. Like, I can't know everybody's kid's name or their birthdays or whatever, but their team leaders can. The squad leaders can know the team leaders' kids' names and what's going on in their world. So everybody feels like they're part of something special at that level. From there, we also do like big group Zoom meetings. We communicate on Slack, which is a great tool. It's a great app where it's kind of like this— instead of having a group chat with 150 people, it's all in an app and there's different categories and channels. And so you can share success stories, you can share pictures of your kids, you can just share Funny stories, you can all types of different things, right? Ask questions. And so that's super awesome. We do, like, they did a Secret Santa virtually, you know, we had that happening. And then we would share the pictures on Slack of, you know, the gifts and whatever. And today they're doing a Christmas party at 2 o'clock on Zoom. I don't even know what that is going to look like, but they organized it. There's a Christmas party today on Zoom. And I think part of what makes that culture so awesome and also maybe why it's developed as fast as it has into what it is today and what I think we can replicate even at an agency level is they're very, they're cut from a very comparable cloth. And so I think they naturally have some things in common more so than if you were working somewhere where everybody was cut from different cloth. And I think it's important to have differences of opinions and differences in personalities and obviously diversity, of course. But there's something to be said about having like a common theme and anthem and just mindset when it comes to what's important to them in life. Right. So 90%, if not more, probably 95% of our team are female. A good portion of them are moms, a lot of military spouses, ex-military. Also. And so they have a lot of common ground, which I think has made it easier for them to kind of just connect, embrace each other, love each other. Um, and then we can do that to a certain extent with an agency. Now, I always preach to agents, don't not hire large segments of the population. So don't hear this and say, okay, I guess I'm only going to hire females, moms, military spouses, because now you just eliminated the other 99% of the population, you're going to struggle, right? But having some common ground as far as values, I think that goes a long way. So starting with that, making sure there's some common ground within that culture piece. And then when you're trying to incorporate your remote team on the insurance side into your world, I think it's important that you leverage the technology, obviously, and you maintain contact, making sure they have that— who is their leader, who is that person every single day that they can check in with? Or that will check in with them. So there's not days that goes by without having some human back and forth, because that can really wear on, on somebody if we're not intentional with that. And so that's important when it comes to training remote people. The first question I ask agents is, well, what's your onboarding training looking like for the people that are in your office? And a lot of times what you'll find is that there's not much there either. And so, well, let's start there. Let's start to build out what is that onboarding sales training look like for someone if you're going to hire someone in your office? Once you have that established, and again, you don't have to reinvent the wheel or reach out to myself or multiple coaches that go on this podcast, and they can hold your hand through that. But let's assume you're going to build it out yourself and you create this agenda for onboarding them over the course of 10 days, 20 days, whatever you're into. Look at that and say, what can't be done virtually? And what you'll probably find is there's very little that you can't do through the technology that's at our fingertips. And then from there, you have to execute that plan. You have to be very intentional with the time blocking. You can't leave things to chance. You have to have crystal clear expectations. Um, one thing that I think you need to understand as a business owner, you need to ask yourself the question, am I a good candidate to lead a remote team? Or even a remote team member. I had an agent ask me one time, she said, do you think I should hire a remote person? Typically I say yes, right? Because it takes the candidate pool from local like this size to, to massive, right? Across the country, you can pick from anybody, right? Huge pool. But I told her, no, no, you shouldn't hire a remote person. And she's like, why? I'm like, because you're a micromanager and you will drive yourself and your remote team member crazy. Because every time that you look on Teams or Skype or whatever the technology is where you can see if they're like on their computer and actively doing stuff. And you're gonna freak out when it's orange and not green or whatever, right? And that's a bad place for you to be focusing on that, looking at that all day, wondering what is she doing now, what is he doing now, is he calling, is he quoting, is he— just, you got to take a step back and have clear expectations on the activity and results, coach to that, and then hold them accountable to that. But if they have an extended lunch, whatever. Like, our, our remote salespeople don't have a goal or obligation to answer the phones. I think it's just, it gets in the way of trying to figure out who's at their desk, who's not, who's— so we just say, your job is to sell. Now, when we have had service people in that remote role, your job is to service. You grab the phone as fast as you can. We can track that. We can see how many calls that he or she is taking in. We can track how many she's then forwarding on to somebody else so we can see, is she actually completing that transaction? Is he completing that transaction or just passing the phone to somebody else? And so you can track those things for service remote team members. You can track the calls, the quotes, the sales for sales remote team members. But I think when you try to blend that and create that hybrid role remotely, um, it's a harder thing to, to track, right? Because if it's like, hey, you didn't make the sales calls, get the quotes, or sell— well, I was answering the phone and I was doing this and it's gotten away. When you can separate those two things remotely and focus on the main thing, it's a very doable thing. And it's also a much easier thing to train for, opposed to worrying about if their job is to sell auto and fire and hopefully some life too. Does it matter that they can't do a vehicle exchange? Does it matter that they can't explain the way the billing is or the cycle, the whatever? And I would submit to you that it is not. That is something that they don't have to deal with. Focus on like the one or two or three things that's most important to their role. Make them really good at it fast, and then again, hold their hand, hold them accountable, and watch out for the results. And if they can't get you the results, at some point you got to make a tough decision. Just like if, if I said, hey Bradley, come on my team, I'm going to pay you $4,000 a month, and I started giving you $2,000 a month over the course of time, eventually you would probably not be on my team. Your choice, right? Not mine, because I didn't fulfill my end of the bargain. So if you have a team member that over time said, yeah, I think I can do this. I can give you the 50 apps a month. And over time they're giving you 25. At what point is that not the same darn thing as the first example that I gave you?

I, I, I, there's so much within that that was absolutely gold. I want to hit on a couple of things. One is what I hear around the remote side is, look, there may be some tech that you're just going to have to learn how to be able to use. Which is part of what you're saying, like becoming the person that can actually have a remote team. Part of it is tech. Well, you know what? You can learn the tech side. It's not as hard as what you think. It's just whether you lean into it and it opens up the pool of candidates immensely. If you live in Wichita, Kansas, and you think, well, there's just not a lot of people here, guess what? The United States is a big pool. There's a lot of people out there that would love to work in your organization. And then you just have to lean in and do intentionally about creating and cultivating that culture. And you never know, you may find out that you even love having kind of a split hybrid type model in your organization. Then I think the last part where you were saying is so critical because at the end of the day, I mean, you know, when When we've not done something before, we don't have proof that we can do it, but the only way to learn how to do it is just to do it effectively, right? So like, well, I've never hired anybody remote, so I don't know if it'll work. Well, the only way to know is until you actually do it. And then the last part that I want to say is the clear outcomes piece. Outcomes, transparency, and accountability. And I was just talking to somebody the other day, very successful business owner, insurance agency owner, has been in business for 20-something years. And we were having the discussion around their team. And I said, what, what is your team held accountable for? What's the outcomes that you want? No clue. She was like, I— they don't, they don't have targets. I was like, so they'll have none? Zero? She was like, no, not really. None. And at, you know, at first I want to say that that was mind-boggling, but I've done it long. I've been talking to enough people at this point is that it has to start with you being very clear on what it is you expect out of your team and then having transparency, some sort of scoreboard, scorecard that's in place. For you to see whether or not they are doing what it is that you say you want them to do and then holding them accountable to that. And to your point, if it's a salesperson, as an example, have the salespeople learn and know and understand at depth what a salesperson is supposed to do. But if they're not doing service-related tasks, they don't need to know those type of things. As an example, I mean, there's a time and a place for cross-training for sure, but generally speaking, they don't need to know that. So I think that some of those things that you said at the very end, were absolutely gold. Um, Alex, people love to connect with you. Um, obviously we appreciate your partnership with the Above the Business podcast. Um, I think what you guys do at Autopilot is absolutely just world-class. Uh, people want to connect with you. What do you— how would you have them connect with you personally and then also, uh, connect with Autopilot Recruiting for them to to begin to kind of develop and onboard some really great people in 2024?

Yeah, personally, social media, Facebook, Instagram, primarily Alex Shattuck. If you search that, find me. If you ever shoot me a DM or a message or whatever, I'll gladly respond. Professionally on the Autopilot Recruiting side, just autopilotrecruiting.com. There's a demo video, there's a signup option. If you need to have a one-on-one conversation with a human, we can do that too. But that's how you find us.

Awesome. Alex, appreciate you, my man.

Appreciate you.

Well, I really enjoyed that podcast with Alex. You know, he always comes with high-level to eye-level concepts, big picture things, but then being able to bring it down to some tactics and tangible things that we can implement into the business. A couple of things that stood out to me, I think number one. Is how do you build upon success year over year? And one of the things that really stood out to me is whenever he said, look, we, we do things to be consistent on a, on a daily basis, as opposed to trying to have these like big sprints throughout the year. No matter what industry, whether you're pushing to be able to get something done, what do we need to do on a daily, weekly basis to be able to keep the consistency and be able to keep the standards where they need to be. And I think that becomes both a mindset, but then also becomes a skill set to make sure that, okay, do we have clear outcomes of actually what winning the day specifically looks like? I think the secondly, the conversation around, uh, remote culture. And for those of you that have never hired someone remote, I certainly until just a few years ago had not done that either. And so it can become initially a little intimidating But I will tell you, you can absolutely create a culture. There's no question about it. You can do it remotely. It's becoming more and more common. Everybody's getting more familiar with being able to do things, uh, over Zoom and being able to do things globally, let alone, uh, across the United States. So I would encourage you to lean into that, whether it's technology that is something that maybe is something that's holding you back. You can lean into it. You can learn it. I'm sure you have either children or you have people on your team that, uh, are way more, you know, it's one thing that whenever I watch my kids, whenever they're learning, uh, whether technology or how to use a phone or something, they just do it. They just don't care about making a mistake at all and they learn. And I think that sometimes we can get a little afraid of, I just don't want to mess something up. Versus like just doing it. But if that's not your personality, find somebody who can be able to help you if the tech is a challenge or a struggle for you. But I think at the end of the day, it comes down to once you get the tech solved, it comes down to the intentionality. And then lastly, whenever he was discussing, it really stood out to me the importance of clear outcomes and then being able to hold people accountable and kind of the last part. where he and I were discussing about, uh, you know, you got to hold people accountable, can't micromanage them. But to do that, they got to know what they're being held accountable for. Our team is not us. They want you to tell them exactly what you want them to do because they don't want to let you down. But if we're not clear, if we're generalized, or we, the, we don't have clear outcomes specifically what it is that we're looking for. How are they going to know what they're held accountable for? So I think it's such a good reminder for us is to give our team clear outcomes. If you want to learn more, go to autopilotrecruiting.com, click on the learn how we can help or get started button. You can get an, uh, see an onboarding video there. They've got an incredible onboarding hospitality management, which we didn't discuss. Um, on this podcast. We've discussed that in some other ones, but really, if you're looking for an affordable recruiting solution for your small business, they do an absolutely exceptional job. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. Autopilotrecruiting.com. Once you've got them on board and you get them through that, as Alex was saying, that first 2 weeks onboarding, well, then at that point, we've got continue to train them and develop them. And if you've not developed what that training program looks like, you don't even know where to start, Coach P can really help you with that. Go to coachpconsulting.com, coachpconsulting.com. And the thing about that with what he does is it's not just for you, but it's also for your team, is that they're going to be able to jump on twice a week and hear from David and his team specifically on the things that they are doing to be able to help not only grow their businesses, but what is working across the country. And then your team is going to be able to develop and learn from other people that are doing exactly what it is that they are doing. And that peer-to-peer learning experience, that environment is absolutely critical to get them up to speed, to feel like that, hey, I'm not alone if I'm struggling, if I'm having some early success, and then, uh, you know, go into a dip? Like, what does it actually look like to be consistent? Putting your team in that environment, you don't have— you don't have to be the one that has all the answers. You're sitting in the entrepreneur's seat, which means you don't have to be the one that does it all. You just have to set the stage to be able to allow that to happen. And that includes in making the investment with Autopilot, making the investment with David. So that they can— you can put your team and they can help to train and develop your attention. Now, can you outsource all of that? Well, of course you can't outsource everything. No, they're still going to want you. But there's so many different skills that you may have. There's so many different skills you have to bring to the table as a small business owner. Some of the ones you may be really, really strong in, and other ones you may not be as strong in. And that's where you can get the support of people like Autopilot, like Coach P and also like Club Capital. I was just talking to a business owner the other day, managing his financials. Financials, cash flow is a strong skill set for him. His background in the corporate world is something that he's done before. So this is something he enjoys and he's good at. He's in his second year of business. And so, but then there's some other areas around leadership and development and with his team that he's having a little bit harder of a time with. And I think that's the same for all of us, is that I have skills. I believe myself. If I look at it honestly, there are some things that I think I do okay. And then there's some areas that I can objectively look at it and say, I don't do that very well. And that's not beating myself up or woe is me. That's just honest. And so with that, How can I fill in some of the gaps? Is there a vendor, a program out there, a coach, a consultant that can help me with that? Is there somebody I can partner with that helps me with those sort of things? And so if you're one where you struggle with the financial side of it, if you struggle with just not knowing how to manage the cash and what are the good numbers and where to even start, Club Capital can help you with that. If you're struggling with, you know, what is even a good recruiting process, consistent process look like? Well, you don't have to have all the answers. You're just asking yourself better questions. Go to Autopilot Recruiting. If you want to know what it looks like to develop your team on a consistent basis, give them access to the tools and the resources and the talent that they need to be able to develop, go to Coach Pete. But if you also want some of the very best software that's out there to help your team on the day-to-day basis where you can put customized word traps, have a beautiful user experience, and be able to have a compensation, a bonus, planning and tracking tool that's absolutely second to none, our partners at TodayAppPro can help you there. Go to todayapppro.com, todayapppro.com. We appreciate all of our sponsors, our partners of the Above the Business podcast. Till next episode, lead well. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]