Episode 340: Scaling Made Simple with Andrew Filar

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Andrew Phylar. This is his second appearance on the podcast and one of our more requested repeat guests. In this episode, we talk about compensation, we talk about scaling, and we talk about simplicity. I think this is going to be an excellent episode if you really want to grow and scale, which I know many of you do. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Andrew Phylar. Andrew, welcome back by popular demand to the Above the Business podcast.

Thanks for having me back, Bradley. It's, uh, it was, it was awesome talking with you last, last time we were on recording, and then we got to connect offline, which was amazing. Got to learn a little bit more about you, so happy to be back.

Yeah, great to have you. Yeah, I think we had not actually rebranded the pod, uh, by that point last time you were on, so Yeah, that's, that's cool. All right. So we're going to, we've got some time here. We're going to cover 3 or 4 major kind of bigger topics. I think it would be really good for people to go over. All right. First thing we're going to talk about, I want to talk about this idea of growth and scale. Okay. And the difficulty of trying to make things simple in business to scale. People have heard the quip of, you know, simple scales, complex fails. And people hear that and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. But then actually doing the thing, making it, uh, easy— compensation plan simple, we're talk about that a little bit. Some other things we tend to devolve to complexity, which we wish that it was the other way. We actually wish that we defaulted to simplicity. We just don't How have you approached trying to work to make, make things simple so you can scale?

You know, I think it's a, it's a great question that, you know, before you asked me, I think that I had never really asked myself. And I can answer the question, and I will, but it's— I think sometimes, to your point, we don't stop and think about those two things and, and to delineate a little bit between growth versus scale. And the way I try to think about it is You know, anybody can grow, not anybody can scale. And scale means different things, uh, in different industries or different business types, right? So you could say that my insurance agency has scale relative to the average insurance agency. My insurance agency does not have scale relative to GEICO, right? Or relative to Allstate Corporate, these national machines that can go direct to consumer and do all these types of things. So the way that I try to think about scale, just, you know, just zoom out a little bit, right, is to think about growth can be something that you— maybe you double or triple in size, and maybe in order to do that, you have to double or triple your inputs as well. And so maybe you have to— to double in size, you have to double your marketing spend or double your sales team or double, you know, whatever input that you need to get the result that you want. And when you scale, I think a big difference there is I start to think about 5x, 10x. How can we 5x or 10x our output by only increasing our inputs by maybe double or triple, right? Can we get this multiplier effect or this leverage effect to think about, hey, I've doubled my inputs but I've 10x my output? That is what scale gets you. And so in order to do that, you have to have simplicity, because to your point about simplicity is if it's not simple, it doesn't scale. And so how do we actually get to simplicity? I think a big part of it is getting out of our own heads and, and understanding that certain things are critical and a lot of things are just nice to have. And, you know, I think about my own compensation plan that, that I created, and, and we did it for this year. And, and I shouldn't even say I created— like, really, my business partner did most of the work on it. You know, he is in charge of the sales team But the main aspect of that comp plan is that, one, it's designed to scale, AKA if somebody blows the roof off with production, it doesn't break our business. It actually gets cheaper for the business the more somebody writes. And that's a win for them, that's a win for us. The other thing is that we haven't changed the comp plan in a meaningful way in over 5 years. And so we opened 5 and a half years ago. We've scaled all the way up to $37 million in premium, and the core 80% of that comp plan has stayed exactly the same. Yes, we've raised some minimums. Yes, we've changed some things, you know, as our premiums have gone up, we have changed some entry points, etc. But the main structure is exactly the same. And so when you're thinking about scaling, how do you create an infrastructure or a kind of guardrail that allows you to go faster and faster and taller and taller without having to change things too much. And a lot of that takes planning and a lot of that takes having a vision for the long term. And I think the most applicable place to think about that really is in data infrastructure. If you're building a CRM or you're building a comp plan or you're building a process out, you can think about what are the most critical things that I need today but what will also be critical 2 or 3 years from now. Understanding that, hey, if I can just get this right today, when I need that data in 2 years, I'll have 2 years worth of data and able to have a sample that I can work with. So that's a really long-winded way of saying, you know, simple is not necessarily easy. And I always go back to this, you know, Steve Jobs quote that says, simplicity is take— you know, you have a product that's simple when you can't take anything else away and it still is functional. People want to just like kill you with features or this or that. What is the main goal that you're trying to achieve for the customer with your product? And then how do you focus on that specific thing?

Yeah, you have to really learn to flex the no muscle.

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a lot of noise.

Yeah. Donald Miller, who I hope to have on the podcast one day, he wrote the book Business Made Simple, and I tell a lot of people It's business made simple, not business is easy. Okay. Okay. So yeah, it can be simple, but it takes a lot of hard work to be able to get there. I love that. I got— all right, sure. We're going to dive a little bit into kind of what's working around your comp plan, and you've got a great asset to be able to give our listeners. But before we get into that, Why do you think— and listen, I was this way, okay? So you can speak, you can say this is probably why you did it, Bradley, okay? This is the— you could rip on me. You can rip on the old me. I was the guy that I changed comp plans 5 times in a year, okay? Because I was looking for the silver bullet that, you know, oh, that one's better. "Oh, that one's better. That one's better. Oh, yep, that's right. That's what I need." Constantly changing, looking for something. Because when you said, "Hey, this thing hasn't changed fundamentally in 5 years," I bet a lot of people would hear that and say, "Oh man, you know, I just changed mine yet again." I was that person. Why do we do that? I mean, we're clearly not changing because it's just like, you know what, I have nothing else to do. I'm just going to go be an arsonist in my business and start a fire. Um, but we're, we're clearly looking for something to take us to the next, to the next place. But why do we change something like that so much?

You know, my opinion is that there's two main reasons, and I'm sure there's, there's a lot more reasons, but the two most common that I see— the first one is that, hey, the company that I represent, whether that's State Farm, Allstate, Farmers, or you're an independent agent, and they say, well, the company changed my commission, so I need to change my salespeople's commission too, right? And there's— and that's actually not necessarily a bad thing, you know, on, on the surface level, right? We should align our incentives and our goals to that of our salespeople, right? Because if our goals as an agency owner or a business leader is in conflict with the incentives of our salespeople, well, then you have a big problem. So you do want them to be aligned. However, the issue with that is how do we feel when our compensation gets changed? We feel like it's unfair. We feel like it's frustrating. We feel like it's confusing. And what do we do? We turn around and we do the same thing to our salespeople, and we justify it by saying, well, mine changed, so theirs has to change too. And a lot of that comes from this idea is that a lot of times, you know, especially in the insurance industry, We might have a scorecard or a bonus plan or all these types of games that the companies that we represent basically incentivize us to play. And that game seemingly changes every 3, 6, 12 months. And so as their game changes, we change our game too. So I think that's the first reason. And what I would encourage people to think about is what is your actual— what is your actual goal as a business owner? For 90+% of them, I would guess that it's to make, to make money, right? It's to, to, to post a profit and ideally grow in a sustainable way over the long term so you can build an asset that hopefully you can sell or take money out of to, to just continue to buy assets. So this idea is, if we get back to this idea of how do we post a profit, well, how do we set up a compensation plan that regardless of what happens in the external environment is structured in a way that when our salespeople produce new business, they're doing it in a profitable way. So I think that would be the first piece, right? Is our goals change, so we change our goals. I think the second reason, and more common reason, is that maybe we're not getting the results that we want out of our sales team, and we go back and we think, okay, yep, you know, uh, Economics 101, people respond to incentives. So if we're not getting the type of movement that we need on the production side or the sales side, let's change the incentive, you know, let's, let's dangle a carrot, or let's make this really good, or actually really hard. And that's just a lot of stick and carrot, and all that motivation is going to be short-lived. So say you, say you really nail it and people are super excited, well, it's only probably 2 or 3 months before that becomes their new normal and all that motivation is gone. And so I think sometimes we look at the comp plan and say, well, this is the reason that we're not getting the results that we want and the actual root cause might be different. Maybe the culture is suffering, maybe the training is lackluster, maybe the marketing is so off base that you can't get a qualified or, or interested prospect on the line. Maybe you can't even get somebody that isn't interested, but even if you could get them interested, they wouldn't be a fit for your product or service anyways. There's a lot of root causes, and I think the comp plan is the quickest and easiest thing to change. You know, because I think a lot of business owners, a lot of leaders have this really strong internal need for control. I'm the same way. It's really hard for me to not want to grab on to things and start changing things when I'm stressed out or tired or not getting the results that I want. And the comp plan is just an easy lever to pull. And so I think those are the two main reasons. The only real reason you should change your comp plan is if it's not aligned with your financial goals. Other than that, if it's working for the, for the business, don't change it. Because some of the best feedback we've gotten over the years has been salespeople saying, I love that your comp plan just doesn't change. Everywhere I've been, I do too good and they make it harder the next year, and it just feels like a slap in the face. And it should actually be the opposite, right? If you structure your comp plan in a way that your top producers are the most profitable, where they're making a lot of money and you're making a lot of money, everybody wins, right? And I, and I believe that my comp plan for, for the agency does that, right? Which, you know, I think you're going to throw it in the show notes, but if you are curious about it, you can go to the website www.nextcallclub.com/2024-compplan, and you can download it. I've got a video of me walking through it. You can see the PDF. But if you're an insurance agent It might make sense to go look at that and see, you know, what it's like. Because I pay— I start everybody at a $45,000 base salary. Some people have $85,000, $95,000 salaries, and it's done in a way that's profitable. So that's the way that I, I approach it, and that's why I think people want to tinker with it so much.

The reason I started the podcast talking about scale and growth and then also simplicity is really to lead us to this conversation because I knew we were going to really talk around compensation plans. And as you were talking, I had not walked into this conversation actually thinking about this, but it threw me back. So prior to me starting in small business, I was in pharmaceuticals in my very first year. After I left Auburn, I went into Yellow Page sales. Okay, that's actually how long ago it was. I know I'm dating myself there, Andrew. But anyway, that was actually a legitimate business back in 2004. Okay. And then after that, I got into pharma, pharmaceuticals. And so my very first year, and I'm saying this not at all to I hope nobody takes it this way. I won rep of the year for the company. It was Astellas Pharmaceuticals, Japanese-based company. The, the point in telling you this story is not at all for that. It's for what happened in year 2. Year 1, I made more in bonus than I made base salary. And back then, I think my base was $50,000 or $60,000, roughly something like that, which as a 20 It's great. 24-year-old was in company car and benefits and 401k and like the whole nine yards. Like I was rolling in cash, you know. Um, anyway, and then my, my quarterly bonuses and the bonuses I got were more than that. The next year, because of the way things were set up, I literally went to the bottom, like in one month swing, one from one year to the next, one month swing. Well, the rankings did not matter as much because clearly I had not changed. But the way the compensation plan had changed, the way that that was structured, that was a massive change and impact. I mean, it was a 75 to 80%, if I remember, uh, swing in my compensation. That's very demotivating to me. What changed? Who— what changed? Nothing changed. Nothing changed about the way I was doing it. It was just the way it was, it was structured. It was very demotivating. It went from I'm on a high, this is amazing, to what, what the crap is this?

You know, I think what happens a lot in those cases is that, you know, and I'm not demonizing, uh, CFOs or finance by any means, but you— this is where you really need somebody who is sales-minded and then somebody who's finance-minded. And those two people have to work together because your CFO or your finance leader or whoever's in charge of the finances in your business, maybe that's the business owner directly, can say, look, if we can get 20% more production out of this person. You know, we, we have a leverage effect where we get so much more profitable, or we do, or this or that, and we're going to do that by changing the goals over here.

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The problem is if that's the decision maker and they go down to the sales leaders and the sales leaders have to implement that, well, one, it doesn't necessarily always mean it's realistic. Second, the sales leader might not even be on board with it. And I think we see that a lot in big corporate, is somebody super far away from the actual sales reps or the, you know, the franchise owners or whatever it is, will change the goals. The sales leaders are not on board. The goals go up, the end salespeople are upset, demotivated. The sales leaders are also like, I don't even agree with this, I think this is stupid too. And before you know it, you've got a completely, uh, you've got a vicious cycle of salespeople who are just kind of packing it in. And now these finance leaders look back and they say, man, I can't believe these projections, you know, it's, oh man. And the reality is, is that I talk about this all— I will rail on this topic until the end of times. You do not cut expenses that lead to revenue. You cut the non-revenue-generating expenses, and, and you touch the revenue-generating expenses last, AKA payroll, salespeople, bonus comp, right? And that's what it is. And I think so often people look at marketing or they look at sales and they say, man, there's some huge payroll here, man, there's some huge bonuses here, man, there's some huge costs here. They start cutting. Not realizing or forecasting the drop in revenue that they're going to incur.

Yeah.

And it's a huge problem. And then not only does that, you alienate your— all of your best talent and they leave.

Yeah. So how do you balance though in a comp plan? And, and, and again, you people need to go and get that asset, especially if it's got the video with it. You walk people through it.

For sure.

How do you balance being complete and at the same time not kind of overcomplicating something? Like, I remember it used to take me, I mean, like an hour. This Excel spreadsheet I had was badass. Okay. It was badass for me and you. Okay. Only the nerds.

It was awesome.

But it took me an hour to explain to you how the thing worked because it was like, okay. You do this, it triggers this. Then, Andrew, it triggers these 7 things, right? And then you also have to do these activities, and then you also have to hit these results, and you need— does this all make sense? And of course, what are they going to tell you? No. Of course they're going to tell me yes. They said, oh yeah, makes sense. Awesome. Great. What an amazing spreadsheet. And it's like, yes, thank you. And then they get to try to use the daggum thing, and it doesn't, doesn't work. All right. So that said, though, it is nice to— like, I'm looking at this, this little notepad that I've got. Like, it's nice for me to think about it being on a, like, a bar napkin. And maybe, maybe it can.

Yeah.

But at the same time, maybe that's a little too like, yeah, but it's not going to be complete. So how do we, how do we balance both of those?

So, you know, I'll talk a little bit about mine and it's like a little bit of a spoiler, right? You obviously go out there, look at it. And you might look at it and say, man, this actually— there's a lot of things going on. But as I walk through the comp plan and explain it again, the core is really simple. We say you need to hit, you know, a certain amount of production and that pays for your seat. And then we share 5% all the way up. That's simple. That's 80% of the comp plan. You cover your seat. That's at this production level. Anything over that, we share 5%. You get 5% on it. Super simple. And then what we did, right, is we added in some what we call like extras or spiffs. And so this year, you know, I'm in Georgia for my insurance agency. Last year was incredibly hot. The year before was incredibly hot. I think we wrote like 10,000 policies last year, you know, at Allstate, you know, we use items. So it's like it was like 9,800 items and It was an awesome year, but towards the end of the year, they started tightening underwriting guidelines. They started taking rates. They started making it a lot harder to write new business, and rightfully so, because, you know, losses are out of control. Georgia's one of the worst tort states in the country. And so we had to take a look at our— the way that we get paid. And I said, hey, okay, well, home and auto is getting a lot harder to write, but you know what, we sell a lot more than home and auto insurance. And so last year, you know, I'm going to use this analogy that, that I heard somewhere. It's not an Andrew original, but they say you can build strip malls or you can build skyscrapers. And what that means— a skyscraper is like, think about selling one or two products and selling it to as many customers as you can. You're going really tall, you're trying to go as high as you can. So last year our goal was get as many customers as we can. Let's get that home and auto every single time. Well, this year, writing those home and auto policies are a lot tougher. And so to continue to go as tall at the same rate and make the same amount of money, it will just cost us way too much money in marketing, way too much money in payroll, and we're just not in an environment where we have to do that. So we had to get leaner. And so we decided we were going to shift our strategy to that of the strip mall, right? We're going to go wide rather than tall. And so the idea is, can we get similar production with 30 or 40% less customers? So what that means is we have to just get more products and more spend per customer, more per household. And so what we did is we went into, you know, basically our compensation plan, you know, from, from the mothership, and said, what is everything that we can write and what do we get paid on it? What is the commission rate? How long does this person stick around? And we did a lifetime value number and a cash flow number and ranked these products from 1 to 10, right? We had some big surprises. Like, one of ours was commercial auto insurance. You know, it's We have a very tight niche, but the premiums are high and the commission rate is great. We have a high-value home program that's not on, you know, our main company's paper. I'm an Allstate agent, it's not on Allstate paper, and even though we get paid a lower commission rate, the premiums are so high because it's such a high-value product. And so we started to incentivize these things, and what we tell people is, look, here is the main core part of your comp plan. It's got to pay for your seat and you're going to share the upside, but If you do these other little things that again are going to add more production to your overall or part of your comp plan, we're also going to give you spiffs and you're going to get paid out quarterly. So why do we do it quarterly? Well, because if somebody writes, you know, a, a better quality product, say it's 10% more expensive, right, because it gives accident protection or claim protection or something like that, we'll give them $5 or $10. And is $5 or $10 enough to motivate them? Not really. But if you have 10 different things like this that get paid out quarterly, that could be a couple thousand dollars and it becomes a nice hit. And so we started incentivizing these other products because we know that if we write them, it's a very profitable business for us. It helps them hit their goals and we give them some extra incentives to do that. And it's been a, you know, it's been a boon for us, right? We've created this mindset where we say let's get 3 to 4 types of products every time. And of course, there's not going to be the opportunity every time. But what we had to do was equip our team with the knowledge and awareness of what are our products, why are they important, and how do we sell them. And I think for us, we won't sell something if we don't think it's valuable, right? We'll just say, just don't even worry about it. But, you know, we started thinking about, hey, they don't have a third line. And they said, well, what's the third line? It's like, oh, they don't have a motorcycle or a toy. Everyone thinks, oh, a third line is a toy or an umbrella. Well, not everybody has the, you know, the funds to have the limits for an umbrella, and not everybody has a toy. But you know what, most people have a watch or an engagement ring, so let's get a jewelry policy. A lot of people need a life insurance policy or disability policy, or maybe they have a business vehicle they can insure. So we've tried to create this, this comp plan that gives them extra but doesn't get away from the core, and then give them awareness and training on how to push these things. And What's really been great is that we, you know, we built our business on internet leads. A lot of people will rail on them. I agree that getting a referral is better, getting a, you know, layup from a loan officer is better, but it does not scale, right? How much extra work do you have to do to go from, you know, 100 customers a month to 300 customers a month on those types of processes? Not very easy. Internet leads, you can hit a button and get that many more. The work required to triple your your internet leads is, is minimal, right? They are scalable. You can 3x your output without putting 3x the work in to get them. Maybe you have to spend 3 times as much, but you don't have to spend as much time or effort. And internet leads are just— you can target so well. You can target geography, ages, year built, square footage. And people say, oh, they don't retain, or they're shoppers. Well, In this market, everyone's a shopper. Whether you, you are an internet lead or not, you're shopping around. It's the amount of movement between companies has been crazy. And, you know, we've done direct mail, we've done, uh, Google Click-to-Call, we've done a lot of these other things, and we have a full analyst team. And what we found is that the internet leads retain pretty much the same or better than a lot of other things that people think retain at a better rate. And so You know, I only say that because I know there's a lot of misconceptions out there about leads, but I think whether you're in a hard market or, or not, internet leads can be great. And in a hard market, especially if you're an independent agent, you know, it, it has never been easier to target, you know, high-value homes or target, you know, um, the, the 4 counties that you can actually write business in.

So, you know, I, I, this is not a Bradley original thought. I actually saw this in the email today, ironically, play, and I certainly didn't think I'd be using it in a podcast. But I heard this thing, gurus versus practitioners. Gurus tell you what did work, practitioners tell you what's working now.

I love that.

The reason I, I, I love it too, right? Like, that's not Bradley at all, okay? It was from an email. Um, so, but the reason I bring that up in the context of what you just mentioned at the backside, and then we're going to go back to the first part, because I've got a couple of things I want to say around that is people may have some preconceived notions from 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years ago that, you know, online leads churned more. But the game has changed a whole lot now in the last 5 to 8 years. Right. And so that's an old— people holding an old thought process that's not necessarily true. today unless they do the research on it. So I just want to say that. Okay.

Absolutely.

I love the skyscraper and strip mall analogy. One of the things that has really simplified business for me personally is this idea of acquisition, ascension, retention. In any business, I don't care if it's a coffee shop, bakery, insurance agency, window and door company, whatever, you got to get more customers, get the customers to be worth more. And then keep them longer. And that's how you can grow any business. And so what you're saying is, yeah, last year it was real easy for us to get customers. We were able just to acquire new customers.

It was easy.

Now it's harder. So therefore you've shifted the strategy to say, okay, well, we're still going to make sales. We're just going to look at it a little bit different and we're going to go at it from How do we get each customer to be worth more? Even if that means your current customers, you're going back to the current customers and ascending them. I like the ascending. They're buying more products, so therefore they're worth more, which, by the way, everybody knows in any business, they buy more products, they're going to be a stickier customer for sure. I really like what you mentioned there. It makes me go back to the Ascension Model.

Yeah, I'm in full agreement, right? And, you know, one of the things to your point about the preconceived notions from 6, 7, 8 years ago, right, is like I have my own. And when I started in insurance, I always just ignored retention completely. And I said, whatever, man, we can always write more than the people who leave. And that's true until it's not, right? So 5 and a half years in, I'm pushing up on $40 million in premium. And we have, I don't know, like 10,000 households now. And again, you start to hit this wall where you have to change something dramatically to scale. And could we do it? We could. Do we want to do it right now? I don't— in this market, I don't, I don't think that we do. And so one of my preconceived notions was that retention, we can't really control it, it doesn't really matter. And, and that's just not true. And, you know, I've got Next Call Club, and I know I talked about it last time, but I help people with outbound calling. You know, it's something that we're very, very good at. And if you buy internet leads, one of the big concerns is that they're not getting called by your salespeople, or you don't want to burn them out, right? We use outbound callers to do that, and we offer it as a service. But we've even used it for retention. So we have a caller who calls all of our renewals, gets them on the line, says, hey, your renewal's coming up, would you like to review your policy? You know, we'll take 5-10 minutes to go through it, make sure there's no gaps, make sure you're not paying for something you don't need or that you're not underinsured? Most people say yes. We transfer that over to a service agent who does a review, and then like 70% of the time they're getting an upsell, a cross-sell, a referral, or a life insurance appointment with the specialist. And the reality is, is that can we impact retention? You know, TBD. I think that we can. We have some preliminary data. Uh, it's not complete, but it showed the people that we talked to pre-renewal were renewing at 93%, and the people that would never talk to us were at like 78%. That's a hell of a swing, and we need a bigger sample, and we need to look in, right, make sure it's causal. However, at a minimum, that ascension or that new acquisition to get them to pay more or get more makes it worth it alone. And having an outbound caller to take the lift of making the outbound calls off the service team It's huge. And so there's a lot of ways to win and there's a lot of ways to scale, but it's hard to, to do reviews with every customer if your service team has to pick up the phone and call and they're getting voicemails all day, right? But if you have a specialist or you have email drips, like we have email drips where people can schedule appointments, right? How can we meet people where they are, whether that's text, email, phone call, social media, and give them the ability to say, hey, I want to talk about my policy. I want to review my policy and here's how and when I want to do it. Really great things happen.

Oh, yeah, that's great. Two things. One, you mentioned, hey, we've got some data, we're running some numbers on there. Sure. See, you have gut feelings, but you're verifying it with data. That is always critical. We're not just flying by the seat of your pants, whimsical. There's two— these decisions you're making have to be based on— yeah, you get gut gut over experience, through experience. But that comes from you actually then having hard data. You go out and find it. You say, look, we got some good data, but we need some more data. I hope everybody sees, sees that or hears that. I think that's, that's really great. The other thing is, and I'm not smart enough to think this or to have this saying, it came from Keith Cunningham, who wrote the book The Road Less Stupid. It's my favorite business book of all time. He says, how big would your business be if you never if you had every customer you'd ever had? So in other words, you never lost a customer. How big would your business be? And everybody, I don't care what industry you go, oh my gosh, I mean, I'd be massive. So therefore it goes into keeping customers is so valuable. So, uh, Andrew, this is good stuff, dude. This is great stuff. People are two things. People want to connect with you personally. Where would you point them to? I know we said that last time. Secondly, they want to know about where the comp plan is. Give them that URL just to get— again, we'll make sure we put it in our show notes and obviously in our email that we send out.

So I'm super active on LinkedIn. If you— I think it's www.linkedin.com/andrewfyler. I think it's, it's that simple. But you can also just search me, I'll pop up. I post every single day and have for over 400 days now, so I'm going to keep the streak alive and I work really hard to try and add value, not pitch a service, not pitch a product or anything like that, but how can I add value, usually from my experiences or thoughts, uh, just in my day-to-day life, uh, and, and in business. And so that's the first thing if you want to connect with me. You can also shoot me an email, andrew@nextcallclub.com. If you email me, I will answer. I might not answer quickly, but I promise I will answer. Uh, I, I am not the best person with email. I should probably let go of that and have somebody else manage that for me, but But like I said, a lot of business owners like to have control, and that's one of my last areas that I haven't given up yet. So the comp plan itself, um, we'll put it in the show notes, uh, like Bradley said, but www.nextcallclub.com/2024-compplan. So C-O-M-P-P-L-A-N. And you know, If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. You know, I do have my outbound call service with Next Call Club. And if you are interested in, you know, getting started with internet leads, I've got— I always tell people I have over well over 10,000 hours of experience doing it. We help people buy them. We help people analyze them. And so if you are doing leads today and want to up your, up your game with some analysis or try to get a better price or better quality lead, we can help. If you are thinking about getting into internet leads and you want some advice, happy to help in any way that I can. So please reach out. I would love to hear from you.

I'm gonna get, uh, Andrew an EA. He is going to get me more active on LinkedIn.

And so there we go.

That's what we're going to talk about. I love it. Recording. All right, Andrew, appreciate you, my man.

Thanks so much, Bradley.

Well, I really enjoyed that conversation with Andrew. I think he does an excellent job of of just communicating clearly, both from a philosophical kind of high level but also down to an eye level. In other words, being able to take a concept like how do you scale, how do you make— try, attempt to make business simple— and he gives really clean answers to that. So I really enjoy that conversation with Andrew. You know, I think that even just some of my specific takeaways from that conversation You know, in any business that you're in, he gave the example, um, in insurance where they basically made a strategic move in strategy because what was working because of the rate environment is no longer working. So they've made a shift to continue to be able to grow. But again, using my language here around ascension as opposed to really working on just acquisition, and I thought his analogy of the skyscraper, of how it was, now it's going, moving to a strip mall, is a good just visual analogy. And I really love those things because it, I don't know, it makes it seem approachable. It's like everybody can kind of understand the difference in the skyscraper versus the strip mall. And seeing that, hey, the, the environment shifted. And because the environment shifted, he's not going to sit here for 2 or 3 years and then wait for it to move back. He's going to be proactive, lean into it. And then also the, the part where data, using data and actually seeing what is actually working, not just relying on his intuition, although that's important, but actually also looking at data. Obviously, we want to check out his compensation plan. You can follow the link, we'll put it in our show notes. And also, if you want to make sure that you're always getting our emails, because we put links like this or like his in the show notes and also in our emails, make sure you can go and follow up with our newsletter. That we're going to be launching. In fact, maybe even the time this is dropped, that we're going to be dropping that newsletter. We're going to be releasing it in April, May of 2024, the Above the Business newsletter. If you want to know about our newsletter or about some of the events we do, uh, spotlight events— we're really in 2024, we're doing 7 events, and we would love to have you come to it. We're running the quarterly in March. I think it's Tuesday, March the 26th. Then we also have The 2-day intensive, it's where we're going to spend 2 days over Zoom. Look, it's free to register for that event. Go to abovethebusiness.co, abovethebusiness.co, and you can attend both the quarterly, the 2-day intensive, and then we have other events throughout the year. And if you want to be on the, you know, know when those events are coming, Then again, you can get our email newsletter that's coming out as well as what podcasts are being dropped along with the links that we share in all of our episodes from our guests that we have. Go to above the business.co. Love to be able to have you jump on one of the events that I'm going to be running. We appreciate you. Above the business.co. Big shout out to our podcast partners, Club Capital. Autopilot Recruiting, Coach Pete Consulting, and TodayApp Pro. You know, with Andrew, he loves tech. Before we hit record, we're always just talking about just different tech things. And, and, you know, it's not just to have cool tech, but it's the whether or not the tech helps to solve a problem. And so if you're using kind of old outdated Excel spreadsheets, it's hard to keep up with, you know, and you know, your team is like, where is that file? And does it, is it, does it have a lot of manual calculations? There's just honestly a better way. And if even if you're using one of the older softwares out there to track your compensation and your bonus plans, there really is better software. Go to todayapppro.com. You're able to put in custom word tracks. For your team, both your sales and your service team. It connects to your corporate-approved CRM, so you know that the information that they're putting in there is safe and it's going to work seamlessly both backwards and forwards. So that is really important for many of you, I know. But also, today app just has a beautiful user interface and the price point is incredibly worth it. I mean, honestly, what they charge, uh, for a monthly subscription to the software is unbelievable for the bang for the buck that you get. So go to todayapppro.com. One of the things that I really dismissed or really just didn't pay much attention to for a long time is true training and development for any of my teams. Well, I know many of you are that way. You're wearing a lot of hats. You're the chief CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, CSO, CRO. Like, there's so many. Different hats that you wear as a small business owner. And my guess is that you probably want to train and develop your team. It's not like you don't understand that it's important, but you just don't know where to begin and how you build a whole training program. But also, if you know, it doesn't mean that you have to do all the training. In fact, a lot of times your team wants to be around other team members. I know my son, like Cooper, he loves basketball. He knows that I played, but he takes coaching from other coaches better. Your team may be the same way, and that is actually okay. They know that you don't always have to have the skill sets of everything in entrepreneurship. So go to coachpconsulting.com, coachpconsulting.com. Let him know that you've been listening to me, heard him come on the Above the Business podcast. Will give you your entire first month totally for free. CoachPConsulting.com. One of the parts of recruiting that is critical, but man, it is the biggest pain in the butt, is the front side of the funnel for your team members, you know, your team member prospect funnel, so to speak. Well, you can get a lot of, I will say, not maybe bad resumes, although there certainly are some bad resumes out there. Maybe just not right fits for you and your organization. Well, you got to filter through all of those. But also there's the part, not just filtering through them, but some of those initial screening, first resume review or screening conversations. Wouldn't it be nice if somebody just was able to take that off of your plate and then they handed to you some much better qualified candidates. They've already had the conversations and they're— you're confident because that's what they do on a day-to-day basis. It's exactly what you can get with Autopilot Recruiting. Autopilotrecruiting.com. Autopilotrecruiting.com. The problem that Autopilot Recruiting is solving for businesses out there is one that everybody faces. You need to do recruiting. We know we need to do it on a consistent basis, but man, how am I going to find the time to do that? They do an exceptional job. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. At the time of this drop, it's around tax season. And for some of you, I know for me for years, it was kind of a shot in the dark. I don't know what this is going to be. You know, is this going to be good? Is this going to be bad? I really don't know. Well, it doesn't have to be that way if you work with Club Capital. Go to club.capital. They can help you get on top of your financials and even start to work above the business because you're able to see really good financials or have insight into your financials. Even if those financials aren't good, that's okay. They can help you to be able to use those financials to make better decisions in the business. Go to club.capital.

Capital.

All right, everyone, this was a good one. Till next time, lead well.