How to Guarantee Your Insurance Agency Scales, with Dan Meylan

If you have somebody that goes from 0 to 100 million in three years, it can go from 100 million to 0 just as fast. Shift your mindset.

Hey. Hey.

Welcome back to the Accelerate your insurance sales podcast. I'm excited. Today I've got Mr. Dan Malan joining us from the Path. Dan, you and I have known each other for quite some time. Some time. When did, when did we first meet? Was it at a mastermind event? Maybe with.

It might have been a mastermind. It could have also been any number of other events. I mean, you guys, you and I have crossed paths numbers of times. I think I was part of the Allied national when we first met and then I went to Parent Compass and then, you know, we, we have crossed paths on. At various different events over the last eight to 10 years. I mean, it's. I've watched you kind of grow out of where you were into where you are today, which has been an interesting journey to say the least.

I hope that, I hope you said that in a good way.

That's what the path is all about. The path is about a journey, right?

Oh, absolutely, man.

This business is not an event, you know, it's a journey and we are all moving in some direction, hopefully better, you know, and trying to improve ourselves.

I still have. It's funny you bring that up. I still have some peers, potential clients who will ask me, they're kind of surprised I still don't sell insurance. And I told them, I said, you know, when I had two masters selling insurance and coaching others, I realized I can't serve both of them. And eventually I made a choice and I chose the coaching path. And I'm pretty happy I did. I think it's been a good path for me, for sure.

Well, and in the sunset of my career, I have chosen coaching and helping people connect. And that's kind of really what I'm known for now is connecting people and connecting opportunities. And sometimes that involves helping somebody sell or learning how to sell. But as far as, you know, actually getting in and doing a case myself. No, I'm, I'm past that. I'm past that.

Well, and that's what we're going to talk about today. That's why I wanted to have you on is, you know, running an agency isn't easy. And sitting in the chair I sit in today, working with a lot of sales leaders, agency owners, you definitely learn that there's a big difference between selling insurance and running an agency.

Well, I learned very early in my career, like in 1978, selling insurance or running a business that sells insurance. Two entirely different skill sets and I had to learn both.

Well, and that's what we're going to talk about because I fully admit to people I've never run an agency, I've never owned one. So I'm not the one to speak about it, but you are. And let's talk about that. You know, share, if you don't mind, for the folks listening who may not know who Dan Malan is, share your journey into the insurance industry because you have a lot of experience both running agencies, exiting agencies and starting agencies. So if you don't mind, share that journey a little bit.

So sure. And it take a little bit of time, but bottom line is that I'm a first generation American. My parents immigrated from Switzerland, so I'm the first male and born in the United States. I grew up in New Jersey and by a whole set of circumstances where the Lord basically guided me. I ended up in Kansas to play soccer in 1969. I went to a little school called Auduba University and my professor of economics was a guy by the name of Dr. Wayne angel who ended up on the Federal Reserve Board. He was the chief economist for Bear Stearns for many years, but he also ran for US senator against Nancy Castlevan. But Dr. Angel was my partner, was my professor. He and his brothers owned a bank and I wanted to be in the banking business. So I did my internship in banking, 1971 in Ottawa, Kansas and they invited me to come work in their bank, which was fine. I was, I was excited. So I was supposed to start Labor Day and I had, I was going on a trip, going back to Switzerland to see my family over the summer. Right before I left, he called me to his house and he said, come on over here. I want, I got something I want to talk to you about. And I said fine. So I walk over to his house or I go drive over his house and he sits me down, he says, dan, we have a client in our, our bank that owns an insurance agency and he has cancer. We're going to buy that insurance agency and you're going to run it just like that. That's how I got the insurance business.

Welcome to the insurance industry.

One man, one sentence, one day. I'm in the insurance business. Now let's.

Can we fill in the real quick because I love filling in the details for people. A guy from New Jersey end up in Kansas.

So that's interesting too. So I, I've played soccer all my life. I grew up with a Soccer ball at my feet. And the coach from Ottawa University came to the New York metro area in 1968 and 69, and he recruited about 30 first generation Americans, Germany, England, Colombia, Yugoslavia, Poland, everybody that had played soccer. And he brought us to Kansas to play soccer. That's how I got to Kansas. And I, I played with some guys that were really, really good. And we finished second in the nation. NAIA Two years in a row, 1969 and 1970. And then the coach lost his job because he overspent his budget. That's a whole other conversation. But bottom line is I went to school for four years there, and then I married a Kansas farm girl and I never looked back. So you know it. That's how I got to Kansas. And sometimes God's got his hand on us in ways that we don't understand until we look back and we go. I understand it perfectly now.

Well, that's kind of the topic of today's conversation, right? The journey, the path, and just enjoying that journey. So let's bring it back. Okay, so here you are, you find yourself in the insurance industry. One agency, one comment, one guy saying, here you go. What was that like for you?

So I didn't know anything. I was zero. And I got coached and trained by many, many people over the years. One of the first encounters I had was with an old field rep, guy by the name of Hale McMillan smoked. He walked around with a cigar in his mouth and a bowler hat and drank like a fish. And he walked into my office the first day I was there, and he said, dan, I'm really happy to have you. We need young blood in this business. Every Monday morning, four for the next year and a half, he walked through my front door and checked in on me. And he also rolled out the red carpet at the company he represented, which was the Western Insurance Company at Fort Scott. I got trained on general liability insurance, on property insurance, on auto insurance, on policies, on claims literally by those people at the Western Insurance Company. And I was 30 miles away. So I would drive down there in the morning, they would take me out to lunch. They treated me like royalty because I'm a young kid starting, and I knew nothing. I could tell story after story about that. But the bottom line was my daughter was born. And we decided we did not want to live in that small community and raise our daughter there. And I won't get into why. But the end of the day, I went to an employment agency in Kansas City and it said, I want a bank insurance agency in Kansas. And so they found me a position in. In a bank agency in Goodland, Kansas. Now, Goodland, Kansas, is in western Kansas, 16 miles from Colorado. If everybody knows who Paul Harvey was, Paul Harvey's classic line about Goodland, Kansas, is not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there.

So anyway, I worked for the bank for two years. And suffice it to say, there was a lot of shenanigans going on that today would throw people in jail. And they were doing stuff that I went, whoa, wait a minute. This is not right. So 1977, with $5,000, my wife and I broke off and we started our own agency from scratch. And we were profitable in 18 months. I had really good community support. Interestingly enough, I was a scout master for the local Boy Scout troop. And a number of my clients were the fathers of the parents of the boys in my troop. So there's something to be said for how you start agencies. You build relationships. And so we built that agency. And ultimately I acquired another. I started another agency from scratch in Ottawa, Kansas, with a. With a partner. And then we bought some agencies, one in Colby, Kansas, bought some box of business. And eventually, in 1983, we were around $400,000 in annualized revenues. And I had three employees.

And I actually more than had five employees. But.

One of the things that happens in your path and in your journey is there's things that you do not control that ultimately impact what happens to your agency. I have been rendered irrelevant by the stroke of a pen four times. And politics, national politics, entered into three of those situations. Okay, this one happened to be in 1983. Jimmy Carter was the president at the time, and he did something called the Russian, Russian grain embargo. And we were rendered irrelevant because interest, the price of wheat, went from $4 a bushel to a dollar a bushel, and interest rates were at 17 and 18%. And what was happening was my clients, the people who paid me premium, were going out of business. And I had to respond to that. And the local bank, that, not the one I work for, but another one came to me and said, we want to buy your agency. Idiot. Me, at the ripe age of 30, said no. And then a year later, I said yes for a whole variety of reasons. And I ended up selling the agency. And we. We basically walked off with enough money to start over again in Topeka, Kansas. So I basically had started an agency from scratch, bought several agencies, and then sold the whole thing within a period of about eight years or nine years.

Then I went to work for a regional shop. And then we went through a series of acquisitions and mergers. The one thing the regional shop told me is it doesn't generate 10,000 in commission income. It's not a prospect. So basically I didn't deal personal lines. It was strictly commercial. They taught me a risk audit process and that organization merged with a larger organization, was eventually acquired by.

An international organization. And they took all the producers off. Off a comp. They basically it was flat salaries and said it's a privilege to work for this company. And 18 months later everybody was gone. Basically the producers just left. All of these constitute lessons on how you run an insurance agency and how you don't run an insurance agency. And so ultimately an insurance agency is a business and you run a business. And I spent three years as a wholesaler on the property and casualty side and then I went to Colorado and became the regional sales director for Accordion. I think some of the people on the call will know who Accordia was. I did that for five years, four years. At one point, the territory that I covered as sales and Marks senior VP of sales and marketing included 200 producers, 800 employees, 29 offices in nine states and $100 million in commission income. And that was 1996 through 2000. And so again, I got a chance to operate in multiple agencies. We had 29 offices from California to Colorado and Texas, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Texas.

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Well, the reason is it's kind of the apple. In other words, you think about a meal, you're going to eat an apple, right? And this is how the vision came to me. And that is we're eating the apple, and there's a guy picking apples in the middle of an orchard, and he's basically throwing them in his basket. And. And he's hauling the basket out of the orchard to process them and sell them in the marketplace. The problem is the basket's got holes in it. And as he walks out of the orchard, the half of the apples are gone by the time he gets to the marketplace. So the problem is not the core deliverable. Usually somebody's pretty good at the core deliverable, but the core deliverable has to be clearly identified. You know, it's a specific skill, product, or service. Okay. There's a specific value proposition. There's a way you differentiate yourself in the marketplace. And then there's a quality to the competence you deliver. Technical knowledge, industry knowledge, and then distribution, vendors and suppliers. That thing is in the center. And. And for example, let's use chick fil A. What's the core deliverable? Chick fil A? It's a chicken sandwich. Can you May and I make a chicken sandwich? Yes, we can. Okay. They have a very distinct value proposition. They have a very specific.

Differentiation in the marketplace. They. They spend a lot of time and money. Now, the basket, which is everything around it, is common to every business, whether you're an insurance agency or a car dealership or a farmer. It doesn't matter. Well, a farmer's a little different, but at the end of the day, a restaurant. So you have eight other competencies, and they include the following. Planning, sales, marketing, leadership, finance, administration, human resources, and systems. Now, the way that I look at this is what are your competencies relative to the skill sets that you have to Execute those things. And in a small business, the thing that's crazy is that if you're a one or two man shop, do you have to wear all those hats all day, every day? As the business grows, what happens is you adapt to certain aspects of those nine competencies, keeping in mind the core all the time. But you're going to get good at two or three of them and the rest of them you're going to delegate to other people. If you look at a company like Chick Fil A, that's seven half billion dollars in revenue, whatever the number is, and how many thousand of locations. The problem is their core deliverable doesn't change any any day. It is the chicken sandwich. That's just it. Okay? But there's a senior vice president in every one of those disciplines that's responsible for the execution of that discipline and it focuses itself directly onto that core deliverable. And if they're not effective in their role in that responsibility, they're gone. They don't exist.

Let's talk about a couple of them that, you know, the first, first two that I think of, cause I think a lot of agency owners and sales leaders would go to is marketing and sales. Right? Cause they know that's an important component of growing an agency. However, what are some of the common misconceptions or failures you see when it comes to establishing sound principles around marketing and sales within an agency?

Well, let's put it this way. One of the things that's prevalent in your world is that you have a lot of rainmakers. You got guys, men and women, that are talented, talented salespeople. Problem is, and this is how I characterize it, and interestingly enough, I've been asked to do something, but I'll go into that in a minute. Rainmakers have to have a bucket. In other words, if you can make it rain, if your bucket doesn't catch all the rain you're making, then you are failing as a business owner. So if I want to make it rain and I want to have a hundred, I want to grow to $10 million worth of revenue. And now I'm at $2 million. I now have to build an infrastructure to support 10 million and not 2 million because it's a different conversation, right? It's one thing to make it rain, it's another thing to build the bucket. So what they do is they focus on sales and marketing, but they don't focus on leadership and human resources and systems. Great businesses are built on great systems. Okay? When somebody leaves a small insurance agency, they Leave a vacuum instantly that causes a problem. Okay. When you have a large organization, it doesn't matter if somebody leaves or goes, because you have ways to back it up. And the systems and processes prevail.

In an adversity situation. But you have to spend more time on the systems and processes than you do on sales and marketing. So businesses go from survivor to successful to significant. Survivors are begging for customers. Successful selects customers. Significant creates customers. Survivors waste time. Successful uses time. Significant creates time. Survivors play defense. Successful plays offense. Significant coaches the team. The hardest thing for somebody to do is not to go from survivor to successful. It's to go from successful to significant. Why? Because if you're a successful salesperson and you want to become a significant business leader, you have to abandon sales as your methodology. It's now a leadership question, not a sales question.

I love how you said that, because I. I think we see a lot of agencies that are probably at that successful stage, and they're there because of pure grit and hard work. Right? They can sell insurance. They've done it enough. They're working their tail off. Now they hit this point that if they're going to go from successful to significant.

Two things have to come into play, which I think they struggle with. Becoming a better leader and creating better business planning principles. How can somebody who's at that success. I'd love to hear from you. Somebody at that successful piece, at that successful phase wanting to go to significant. What do they need to do in both of those roles of leadership and business planning to make sure they can take that leap?

So let me tell you a story that points exactly to that fact. One of the smartest broker producers I ever worked with was a young lady in Colorado Springs. And for the lack of better, I'm just. We're going to call her Andrea. And Andrea had about a $450,000 block of business, and I'm the sales director, sales manager. She comes to me and says, dan, I have these two deals I need, I can do, and they're going to generate a million dollars worth of revenue. But I need to basically hire this person, Jan, to be my account manager. And you got to keep in mind, this is in 1996. I want to pay her $120,000, go to corporate and get me a. Get me approval on her salary. Well, guess what? Corporate said, nope, we ain't doing that. Okay. Now, this is where leadership is different than salesmanship. She comes to me and she says, okay, I'll tell you what. I want you to go back to Corporate find out how much they'll pay $60,000. I'll put the other 60,000 and we'll pay her 120. Take it out of my salary, okay? Take it out of my comp. We're going to pay her 120. But here's the caveat. When I get to. And she gave me a number, when I get to this number of revenue that I want my $60,000 back. I took the proposal to corporate. They said yes. So what she does is she puts together two very specific vertical market programs. Within 24 months, her block of business goes from 450,000 to $1,600,000. And she adds three staff people. The deals were easy. Building the infrastructure took way more time. And she had to train those people to do it exactly the way she wanted to do it and create the processes and systems. Okay? And now she's making 40% of $1,600,000.

Okay? So the point is salesmanship versus leadership. Salesmanship talks, leadership listens. Salesmanship sees the opportunities. But, but leadership actually builds out the opportunity. You, you have to make sacrifices when you go to leadership. And you have to give things up to get things. The biggest challenge for people who want to build an agency is giving up selling. I had a client in California. He was sitting at 2 million in revenues and it took me 18 months for him to figure out he cannot have the same set of expectations for his sales capacity for everybody else in the office. He was an A player. Guy was amazing and still is. He's a phenomenal sales guy. But he had to take off his sales hat and put on his leader hat and treat people where they were and build a team and, and we had to eliminate some people, add some people, change some processes. He just sold his agency for nine times EBITDA three years ago.

Well, you bring up something too that I think you know. It's one of the best pieces of advice I got when I made the decision to start scaling Complete Game Consulting. And it was from a mentor of mine and he said, hey man, if you're going to go vertical, you got to go horizontal first. Which means you've got to find the people who are going to help you scale. It's not about maximizing profit today.

Let go of some short term profit to put the right people in place so you can go vertical. And I will tell you that was probably one of the best pieces of advice I have been given in growing this business. And I'd love to hear from you because what I see a Lot in insurance, in the insurance world is people who own these agencies, probably the smaller ones, their goal from day one is to optimize profit. It's a lifestyle business. So they're not putting the right product processes or people in place to help them scale, which probably aligns with your core bucket of finance. What are some of the challenges you see maybe on that realm of things? Or what advice would you give agency owners who are in that position? Like, I need to scale, but man, I don't want to kill my bottom line to do it. What would be your advice?

Well, so first of all, I can tell you, having looked at many, many, many agency financials, nobody spends enough time looking at their numbers and the financials and the productivity levels. That was one of the things in the project they had in California for the guy that we, that I talked about a few minutes ago, he did not have the right set of metrics. And when you, when you're going to grow an agency, you have to have metrics including finances. But it's not just finances, okay? It's man hours. It's revenue per transaction. It's, it's things that are meaningful in the overall scheme of things in the employee benefits world. Today, when I have an agency client, we look at what we call the velocity report. What's the velocity report? We look at the number of enrolled members and then we look at the revenues and then we equate that to a pepm. And we can take the entire block of business and it says the entire block of business. The average revenue PEPM is $49.71. I have 71 accounts, my average revenue. But I've got some in there that I'm getting $20 and I got others where I'm getting $50 pepm. Okay, now what's wrong with that picture? Well, I shouldn't have the 20s. I got rid of them. Or I got to increase my value. The point is I have to manage not only the dollars, but what generates the dollars. And in order to do that, I have to pay attention to the metrics. I built an agency from scratch from a bank holding company. They gave me a clean sheet of paper and a blank check. And every month I had to sit in front of the board of directors and do a budget variance report. I had to create a budget for the year. And then on a line by line item, I had to go through and tell the bank board why I had missed a particular number by whatever percentage I missed it now.

Because I had really good bookkeeping systems and People behind me that were helping me tremendously. I still had to spend three days at the beginning of the month, every month to prepare that report because the bankers and the bank auditors were going to be looking right down my nose on every aspect of the dollars that went through there. Now, I had complete authority to run the agency. That wasn't a problem. But I was accountable at a level that required me to be very, very particular about the metrics and the numbers.

Yeah, that's. That's really good advice because, you know, I. I've worked with agencies that are in probably more of that startup phase, not even at success yet. And I see them try to skip.

Leveraging some of these sound principles to grow the agency. I know agencies that are already trying to buy other books of agencies in their first two years of business to scale versus how do we scale organically? And I feel like everybody's trying to find the cheat code right now of growing their agency. And what it's causing them to do is ignore a lot of the principles you talk about in your core competencies matrix. I'm curious, actually. You use the analogy, which I love, which is the basket with holes in it. Right. When you look at a lot of agencies today out there, are there certain areas of the nine core competencies where you see agencies tend to fail at or where those holes tend to exist?

Pretty simple. Planning, leadership, and human resources. Okay. Those are the three weaknesses. Leadership is not a title. Leadership is an activity and an action that requires a lot of thought, brain power, and it requires sacrifice. And what happens when you're in leadership is you have to make hard decisions about things, and you have to. The thing that's missing is discipline. Okay? You have to be disciplined. You have to do a lot of critical thinking. You have to be it. You have to think in advance. You have to have vision and a mission. And then what happens is you're in leadership and all of a sudden you're back into sales, and sales consumes you. You can't. You can't spend enough time in the leadership box because you're over here beating yourself up, trying to get a case done, okay? And you do. Making that transition from salesmanship to leadership is hard because it's a different mindset, a different process. You have to think globally and not. You're solving a singular problem here with salesmanship. You're attacking an entire process over here with leadership. Okay? The other thing is planning, and that is we don't do enough. Great. So. So back to the planning process. Survivors do Minimal planning. Successful does adequate planning. Significant does constant planning? It's never, it's never over. The planning process is never over. It's constantly, where do I need to go? Where do I need to go? Where do I need to go? And, and leadership has to drive the planning. Salesmanship cannot drive the planning. Leadership has to drive the planning.

Yeah. I love that you said that.

So now you see how these things integrate. All nine of these things are present.

Yep.

Whether or not you execute them will determine how successful your business is. And to the extent you sit you, you execute them well, your business will thrive. But if you miss a piece and you don't get it right, ultimately everything hinges on leadership. But leadership is responsible for all nine of those things.

Yeah. I mean, I'm going through it right now. I probably label us as a business successful trying to become significant. And I know the areas I'm working on the hardest right now are leadership and planning and trying to stay focused on our biggest priorities. Cause it's so easy as an operator to get caught in the doing. Because I'm creative, I like the work we do. But trying to put yourself in that position to be the leader and then focus on the big priorities, which is where the planning comes in.

Yeah. The challenge I see in most of these guys that are agency principals that are also salespeople is that sales and leadership are two different skill sets and they have to be separated. Problem is time. Okay. Because you're, you're the breadwinner, you're making the rain. That's your primary responsibility. And all of a sudden you have all these great visions and ideas about the things you want to do, but you don't have time to do them.

Yep. You know, I, I, a story, a story I often share, which really opened my eyes. I spoke at a one digital event a couple years ago, and just by pure happenstance afterwards at the dinner, I found myself sitting next to Adam Bruckman, the CEO, and he just started sharing the story with me on how he grew, grew on digital. And I didn't realize at the time it was basically he and one other guy. Right. Two partners who came together and thought bigger and thought bigger and eventually built what was an agency into this company with four or five thousand employees doing billions of dollars in business. Right. And that was just amazing to me. Eye opening to me to think about what separates one from another. And oftentimes it is thinking bigger. And I wanted to get your perspective on that because you've worked with a lot of agency owners, leadership planning, sales Marketing. Where does that mindset come in of people who you've worked with that you can say they just think bigger?

So there think thinking bigger is relevant, irrelative. And that is bigger compared to what? Because at the end of the day, there are companies like Amazon and Google and.

You name it, they're multi billion dollar companies. When we say bigger, what we're looking at is an employer that's got 100, 150 to 200 employees and generating 20, 30, 40, $50 million worth of revenue in our world. Those are big agencies. I think most of the, most of the agencies, over 50 million in revenues would be considered significant. In other words, in terms of our industry and how that plays out. Now what, what's different about those is they all seem to have their own culture and their own kind of way of doing things. And a lot of it has to do with the region of the country that they're in.

How they're organized, what the leadership looks like, where the money came from to build them. You know, there's so many variables, it's very difficult to basically put a, a singular solution on it. But I will say this, that leadership sets the tone, leadership sets the direction. And leadership has the responsibility to sustain, to build and sustain the growth of the organization. And sometimes you have to change the leadership.

Yeah, fair. Last question. I'm really curious on this because you talk about the path from survivorship to successful to significant.

Typically, how long does that, like how long does it take for an agency to go down that path? If they do that successfully, when they just start up to surviving to becoming that significant agency? In your experience, is there a certain kind of time frame or timeline that it takes?

Think about it like raising a child. Okay, Raising a child. You have an infant and it's got poopy diapers and it needs 24,7 existence. When you start a business from, from the ground up, basically it's a 24, 7 adventure. And you're, you're basically trying to do that. And then it becomes a toddler and then it becomes a child and then it becomes, you know, a young, an adolescent and then a young adult and then a teenager. And then it goes, and it really, to go from survivor successful significant effectively is a 20 year process minimum. Okay? And here's what happens if you have somebody that goes from 0 to 100 million in three years, it can go from 100 million to 0 just as fast. Okay? And we've seen that in the technology space. I mean literally stuff comes and goes like that. You know, you blink an eye and technology in our world, and this is. I don't think this is going to change, but our world is still about relationships. It takes a long time to build a trusted relationship. And that's not only external to the client, it's internal to the employees. I'm working with an agency right now that I've had lots of history with. 20 years plus. I know them very, very well. They're owned by an esop. And those people will lay down on the tracks for them, for that organization. It's a phenomenal organization. They got great young leadership. And that thing is going to be a rocket ship. It'll be $100 million agency very shortly and eventually, probably not in my lifetime, but 20 years from now, come back and look, it'll be $250 million. Wow. Okay. But you know that the. If you go out and sell $1 million account, put $1 million worth of revenue on your books and you think you're significant, look out now, because that million dollar account could end up going away. I mean, largest account I ever wrote my life was $160,000. I lost it by the stroke of a pen.

Yep, Yep. Couldn't agree more. Well, Dan, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I'm sure there are plenty of agency leaders tuning into this one that I hope took a lot of notes and had their eyes open a bit. So if somebody wanted to reach out, there is an agency owner leader tuning in that wants to reach out to you. What is the easiest way to get a hold of you?

You know, d mail in at the Path Biz. I have a website, ThePath Biz. You can find me there.

And then also on LinkedIn.

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Absolutely. On LinkedIn and Facebook as well. My Facebook's predominantly my family, but, you know, my. Why is that? I have eight grandchildren and I'm here and I'm in the sunset of my career, but my, my legacy and my objective is to find as many young producers and people who are growing their business and help them get to the next step, whatever that looks like.

I love hearing that, man. That's, that's why I'm, you're, you're, you're a guy alike. I appreciate that.

I'm happy to help anybody. And I, you know, I've actually been approached about a couple of different people about coaching and teaching on subjects. One of the things is account managers. How do you build an account manager? And I've got a national organization that asked me to write a curriculum for building account managers. Because that's the bucket. And that's what's missing in the world right now is there aren't enough buckets. There's lots of producers, but the buckets are short.

Yeah, well, I'm sure there's going to be people.

Thank you very much.

It's been people reaching out to you after this conversation. So that was awesome. Dan. Everybody else tuning in, take notes on this one. Yeah, Dan, just give you a little masterclass on how to grow a successful agency. It's not how quickly you can get to scale, it's doing it the right way and building it with the right people and processes. Be good. That's all we got for this episode of the Accelerate your insurance sales podcast. One of the most valuable things you can do to help us and other new potential listeners find our show is for you to rate the show and leave a review. So as a special bonus for you, if you leave us a review, take a screenshot of your review and and send it to me as a DM to my LinkedIn profile. I will send you a free copy of our LinkedIn Diamond Playbook, our proven four step strategy to grow your business on LinkedIn. So go right now, leave us a review, screenshot it and send me a DM on LinkedIn. Also, please share this podcast with anyone you think would enjoy it. That's it for now.