How To Plan A Record-Breaking Quarter

Before you start planning the third quarter, here's what I want you to do. And I want you to review your vision. And when I say review your vision, I want you to ask yourself, why do you do what you do? Have you sat down and actually spent time thinking about why you do what you do? What's your North Star? What's your vision? Hey. Hey. Welcome back to the accelerate your insurance sales podcast. Andy Neary here. How are you? This episode is being aired on the 4th of July, so happy Independence Day, everybody. This is the 250th birthday of our great country. I thought about doing an episode around the country right now or on our country, but we're going to hold off. You know what? I want to keep this to business. I want to keep it applicable to you. But I love our country, and I hope you do, too. I think with as much tension as there is right now in this country, we got to be remember how blessed we are to live in this country, the freedoms we have. So take a moment and recognize that. I know there are days where you probably don't feel that way, but, man, we are lucky to live here. So let's dive in today. I want to do some halftime planning with you. You know, it is July 4th, and if you're tuning in today, first. Thank you. Thank you for being a dedicated listener. But you're probably taking some time off, right? Deservedly so. But what I want to help. You want to help prevent you from doing today is taking the foot off the gas for too long. Because this is the time of the year where I see a lot of insurance advisors take their foot off the pedal. And I think they like to use the excuse that their prospects are also on vacation and doing the things they do in the summer. So, a, I'm just not going to work as hard in the summer because it's just not as effective get in front of prospects. But I. I disagree. I like to do things when I like to go the opposite direction that most don't. So you can sit there and think that your prospects just aren't as eng engaged right now as they may at other times of the year. But guess what? Your competition's also taking their foot off the gas. So now's the time to put the foot on the gas, if I'm being honest with you. But what I want to help you to do today is plan an effective third quarter. You know, the quarter started on Tuesday, and by the time this quarter ends, for my insurance professionals tuning in, we are going to be knocking on the door of the fourth quarter. And we know exactly what happens in Q4, especially if you're a benefit advisor. So what I want to do today is just go through an exercise that we actually do here at Complete Game Consulting. And it has been profound in helping us sustain continued growth throughout the last four years. And when I look back at the four years we've been in business, you know, I really went all in on complete game consulting January 1st of 2021. That was the day that I no longer was a health insurance advisor. I was only the founder and CEO of Complete Game Consulting. IT I think what has driven our success over the last four and a half years is doing the small things right. You know, small wins stack up to huge wins. And one of those small things that we have done right is we plan and we plan and we plan. And, you know, one of the best things I did for the business, this was even pre2021, I had a friend of mine, a mentor, give me a suggestion to read the book Traction, which I have out with me here right now, if you're watching the video. And at the time, Complete Game Consulting was still a side hustle for the most part. I had an executive assistant and it was just Elizabeth and I. And I sat down reading this book and I started leveraging the planning concept that it teaches in the book called the Entrepreneurial Operating System eos. If you're tuning in, maybe your agency also leverages eos. I think everybody should be doing eos, if nothing more than for themselves. In fact, when I coach a lot of my individual clients, I use EOS to help them stay focused on their biggest goals. And I sat down and I did the exercise. Now it's meant to be done for organizations that have teams, five to 10 plus employees, at least five, you know, a million, five million, 10 million in revenue. But I did it anyways when it was just an EA in me and nothing else. And I will tell you, it was the best decision I ever made because it kept me focused. It kept me focused on the right priorities. And that's what I want to do today, is sit down here, it's halftime of the 2025, and want to help you plan an effective second half of the year, but more importantly, plan an effective Q3, because you have to stay focused 90 days at a time. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through the exercises that come through a lot of the quarterly planning VOs and just kind of talk you through What I hope you're doing right now just to set yourself up for the second half of the year. You know, I, I, I think of us term sports terms when it comes to the second half. You was doing Ironman training. One of the things we always talked about in Ironman training was the, the theory of negative splitting. Whether you're biking, swimming, running, any other sport, I guess that that involves cardio and time. Negative splitting means you run or bike the second half of that race faster than you did the first half. And that's kind of what I want to help you do here with your business planning is let's negative split 2025, let's better, faster, more effective than the first half. Whether you're sitting here sitting on a record year so far or you're sitting here at halftime feeling like 2025 has been one punch in the nuts after another, I want to help you because if you're having a record breaking year, do not take your foot off the gas. Now is not the time to coast into the end of the year and if you're struggling, now is the time to get your act together and get back on track. And so I want to help you do that. This episode is brought to you by True Captive Insur what if you could take full control of your healthcare strategy without the financial burdens of traditional insurance? At True Captive Insurance they make that possible. As the only captive in the nation that puts up the majority of collateral on your behalf, they provide financial flexibility from day one, making them an advocating partner for their customer success. True Captives fully customizable plans and cost saving strategies ensure you never have to choose between affordability and quality care. It's time to break free from the limitations of conventional insurance. Take the next step today. Visit trucaptive.com and discover a smarter way to manage healthcare that is truecaptive.com so when it comes to planning, there's a couple things that are involved in quarterly planning that I find to be very effective and it again aligns very well with what they preach and teach in the book Traction. But before you can plan ahead, you need to reflect back. And when I look at our success here at Complete Game Consulting, and I'm blessed to say we've grown at a 20% plus clip every year since January 1, 2021. It is in this planning, but not only in planning ahead, but reflecting on the past. Because I think taking time to reflect on the past is what allows you to learn from failure, leverage what went well so that you can get even better the next 90 days. And so when you think about sitting down right now and planning out your third quarter, here's the first thing I want you to consider. I want you to look back and I'm even going to go beyond the last 90 days. I want you to look back and I want you to look at the last six months. So the first six months of 20, 25, and here's what I want you to do. I want you to make a list of your top professional and personal wins. So while you look back the first six months of the year and I want you to think about some of your best professional personal wins, think of three for each one. Top three wins in each category. When I look at ours, you know, professionally, number one, I think one of the best moves I made the first half of the year was bringing AJ On. AJ Is also affectionately known as Amy, also affectionately known as my fiance. She joined the business full time March 1, roughly this year after spending 22, 23 years as a dental hygienist. She just has a very unique gift in operations, seeing things tactically and knowing exactly what we need to do from a step by step process. So one of the best decisions I made was to bring her on the team March 1st. And for those who don't know, we have two Amy's on the team. And in order to keep things straight, we have given my Amy the designation of AJ Just so it's easy to when we're on a teams meeting or a zoom meeting to call one person out, AJ or Amy Essig. It's just easier to get it done that way. So that's one of the best moves I made. A second big win here in the first year is just the first half of the year is the growth we have seen in our expert programs. For if you're tuning in and not quite sure what that is, we actually have a team that helps individual producers, agencies, industry partners create their social media content. Grab attention. You know, we have a lot of people who want to grab that attention from their prospects, but they just don't have time. We actually have a team who does it for you. And it's been astonishing to see the growth in that program. The comments are some of our clients are getting from their peers and prospects about the content has been just fun to watch. Amy Essig runs that program for us and I've been blessed with the ownership, the sense of ownership she has taken on with that program and it continues to grow very fast and we are very excited about how we're Going to continue evolving that program for our clients. And I'd say a third win, business win in the first six months of the year is how we're leveraging artificial intelligence. One of the big moves we made, two big moves we made just in the last 90 days, is we built out my clone, Andy AI, which is something we're releasing to our clients as an added perk starting here in Q3. And it's an opportunity for people to text or chat with me 24 7. And it's really exciting to see that thing build out. There's over 3.3 million of my words in that clone. We, we dumped five years of my social media and coaching content into this clone. And it's astonishing what it, what it's doing right now. It's actually become our internal chief marketing officer as well. And then what we're doing with artificial intelligence in our Essentials membership. Along with one of our outside partners, Corey Frazier, he has helped me build AI coaching exercises into our Essentials membership. So as we coach people through our 12 month program, they can work with AI coaches to get the exercises done. It' really fascinating how cool that is. So those are the big wins professionally for me. Take time to sit down and, and think about your big three professional wins the first half of the year. Now personally, because you can't, can't negate the personal wins. Right? We're trying to achieve work life integration here. For me, three big wins. This first half is number one, spending a month in Palm Springs. AJ And I made a big decision at the beginning of the late last year that we were going to spend a month in Palm Springs, get out of the cold weather here in Wisconsin. And we did. We spent the month of February there. And number one, it was a big win from a weather perspective. I think we had sunshine 27 of the 30 days we were there. But we also had a great month as a business. It was just really interesting getting away and being in a different vibe, a very positive vibe. If I get vitamin D, I'm a happy man. And so that was a big win for us early in the year. Second win was family camp. Every year in late June, we go up to Monoca, Wisconsin, which is a touristy town here in north central Wisconsin, way up north in the, in the, in the deep woods. And I think we had 91 family members at the camp this year. If I, if I heard the number right, between immediate family, cousins, second cousins, it was really cool to see everybody come together. We get to see everybody once a year. And it's just cool to spend that quality time together. And then I would say for me, a third personal win. And I don't like to talk about this a whole lot, but it was something I just decided to do this year was stop drinking. And I don't do that. I don't say that because I had to. It was actually more of a health choice than anything. Because what was really interesting, if you didn't hear the story four years ago, I dealt with a pretty bad leg infection. And as part of the rebuild recovery from that, I had to basically rebuild my stomach because the antibiotics just destroyed my stomach. And one of the things I had to do was go NA for quite a while as we rebuilt and repopulated my stomach with good probiotics. And when I started drinking alcohol again, reintroducing alcohol into my system, my stomach just didn't feel right. It just didn't take to the alcohol. And so at the beginning of the year, I made a decision. In fact, Q4, I made a decision not to drink alcohol. But then starting in Q1, I had a couple cocktails around New Year's and just didn't feel right. So I made a decision. Hey, no more. Athletic brew. Makes a great NA beer. It tastes good. So that is my, my beer of choice now. And I, I'm very happy that I, I made that choice again. Not because I had to, probably more from a health perspective, but I good every day. So those are my big wins professionally and personally. I would urge you to sit down and do the same again. Sit down, look back at the last six months and ask yourself, what were my three big wins professionally? What were my three big wins personally? See, if you're going to do effective planning, you got to look back at the last 90 days or six months and you have to learn from the failures. But you also have to leverage the wins and say, how do we get better? How do we leverage the wins to have an even more effective 90 days looking ahead. So that's the first thing I want you to do. The second thing is I want you to review the previous quarter. So look back at your last 90 days and look back at what worked and what didn't, what went well and what didn't, and hold yourself accountable. Because what didn't work well may have been you. Did you work hard enough? Were you consistent enough? Were you focused enough? Did you take your foot off the gas? Self accountability is a huge piece of planning. And so I urge you to look back at quarter two and ask yourself a Grade and evaluate yourself, how you performed again, what worked and what didn't, so you can learn from what didn't and leverage what did. Then as we look ahead, before you start planning the third quarter, here's what I want you to do. And this is a big piece of EOs. I want you to review your vision. And when I say review your vision, I want you to ask yourself, why do you do what you do? Have you sat down and actually spent time thinking about why you do what you do? What's your North Star? What's your vision? When we sat down as a team and we created our core values for Complete Game Consulting, here are the five core values we live by every day as a business. Number one, we always leave people in a better place than we found them. That is a big. A big priority in our business. If we work with you, we want to make sure you come out the backside. A better organization, a better insurance professional, but most important, a better person. That's number one. Our second core value is we are consistent as hell. If you followed me enough, you know how often I talk about consistency. So we better preach it or believe it and do it too. So our second core values were consistent as hell. Third core values. We do what we're saying. We do what we say we're going to do. I know that sounds obvious. Yeah, duh, that should be. But God, can't tell you how many people in our industry right now are not living by that credo. Number four, we go first. This is a big one. What do I mean by we go first? There's nothing we teach you that we don't do today or haven't done before. There's a lot of coaches, a lot of training out there that preach certain things and they're not actually doing them. We will never teach our clients anything we have not done or are still doing right now. And number five, we're high energy and we love to have fun. That's the one we probably got to check ourselves the most. And I know I'm maybe the most guilty of that is, is are we high energy and are we having fun with what we're doing? So I urge you to sit down and create your own set of core values. Why do you do what you do? What are the values you're going to live by? I know your agency or organization might have some, but what about you? What are your core values? Because that's how you got to show up every day. And it's your gut check when things aren't going the way you want them to, or you don't feel like you're having fun, or sometimes you might be even questioning you're doing what you're doing. Come back to the core values. The next thing I want you to do is to check in on your focus. What is your focus going into Q3? What do I mean by focus? What are you known for? What are your guardrails? We at Complete Game Consulting help insurance professionals turn brand awareness into business growth. That's what we do. Why is that important? Because we're going to get presented with a lot of opportunity in Q3, but if it does not align with that focus, it's a no. I see so many insurance professionals right now have good intentions and then they get distracted and fall off the rails because of some opportunity they got presented with that took them so far away from their actual goals because they were chasing a quick win or whatever it is. Don't do that. What's your focus? Because that focus becomes your guardrails for what you say yes to and what you say no to. And it also the focus of the type of prospects you're going to go after. Our niche is insurance. We get presented with opportunities all the time to work with companies outside of insurance. And it's a no because insurance is our niche. And then the last thing before you get into the planning is what makes you unique? What are your three uniques that make you different from the competition? Ours is we are insurance training built by insurance people. Two, everything we teach we still do today. And number three, insurance is all we do. So if somebody ever looks at me and says, andy, why should we hire your team? I go right back to this. We're insurance training built by insurance people. Everything we teach we still do today. And insurance is all we do. What's yours? If. If a prospect looks at you and says, why should I hire you? What's going to be your answer? Sit down and create your three uniques. What makes you different than the competition? Now, with all of that in writing, all of that down on paper, now it's time to do your quarterly planning to sit down and figure out what your biggest priorities are in the book. Traction, they call it, rocks, you might call them priorities. I want you to look ahead at the next 90 days and I want you to write down your three or four biggest priorities for the quarter. Now, these priorities should be aligned in some way, shape or form with the goals you set at the beginning of the year. And I hope you set goals at the beginning of the year. But the rocks that you set for you and your team every quarter should be aligned with your annual goals. Because every quarter you should be getting one step closer to achieving your annual goals. Now we could go even farther out as they do in the book eos. What's your one year vision? Three year vision, five year vision, ten year vision? But I'm not even going to go there. I just want you to plan one year at a time. Focus 90 days at a time. What are your three or four biggest priorities this quarter that are going to get you and your team closer to achieving your annual goals? When I look at ours, we're actually doing our third quarter planning today after I record this podcast. A couple things that come to mind. Big priorities in Q3. Number one, how we're using artificial intelligence. I already talked about how we built out my clone, how we're incorporating the coaching AI coaching into our our group, our Essentials course. But we're going to continue to look for ways to leverage AI to streamline our operations, our marketing, our sales. Now that we have Andy AI, I am excited because we basically have our internal Chief Marketing officer now. That's what I am so excited about. So now we got to figure out how we're going to leverage it to streamline our marketing. Same thing for sales, same things for operation, customer service, you name it. That's a big rock. Another big rock for us is what we're going to be doing with our Essentials and Elite program. Our Essentials is our 12 month group coaching program and our Elite is our one on one coaching program. We realized we're missing the boat right now in how we are positioning those programs. At the end of the day, those are a recruiting and retention tool for agencies. If you're a big agency that brings in producers every year, you got to have a good training for program for them to help them succeed. And you've got to have coaching for your top producers to help them get to the next level. That's what our Essentials in our Elite program is. We are the go to training for your new producers as well as your studs that are looking to take it to the next level. So that's how we're going to position our Essentials and Expert program in Q3 and beyond. That's a big priority for us and we're going to come up with a bunch more here in today's planning. So my advice for you is sit down and look ahead at the next 90 days and ask yourself what are my biggest rocks this quarter? So That I get one step closer to achieving my annual goals. Now, three or four, I think is a good number. You can't have seven, eight, or nine. Too many rocks and you're. And you lack focus. You gotta be hyper focused. But the most important thing you can do is once you have these rocks on paper, you need to look at the next 90 days at your calendar and you need to find space on your calendar to work on those priorities. So if sales is a big rock of yours, look ahead at the next 90 days. The farther out you go, the more white space there should be on your calendar. You have to start blocking the time now in your calendar for prospecting. Maybe a big rock in your agency is we need to implement our new CRM system. Cool. What does that have to look like come September 30th, the end of the quarter? What are the steps you need to take the action, Items you need to take to get to completion, Full implementation. And then block the time in the calendar for the next 90 days to focus one step at a time. You see, when you block the time now you can chew off your big rocks one bite at a time. What most people do is they don't put it on the calendar. They don't think about it. And September 1st, they look up and go, oh, crap, we got 30 days to go. And then it's too late. This is why quarterly planning is so effective, is because it stacks the small wins one task at a time that lead to the massive wins one year at a time. And that's what I'm encouraging you to do. I hope today's episode helps you regain a little focus because you might be sitting here right now tuning into this on a little break. It's a long weekend. Maybe you've been taking your foot off the gas for the last few weeks, but now it's go time. July 7th is really the start of the second half of the year, and you need to turn it on. Whether you're already having an amazing year, I want you to keep going. But if you are stuck and you need to turn it around, Monday is the day you start turning it around. Don't do what your peers are doing, which is take the foot off the gas for the summer, because nobody's really doing anything. Don't be that person. You're going to differentiate yourself by getting focused, by setting big rocks that help you achieve your big annual goals, and then bite off those rocks one bite at a time. This has led to our growth here at Complete game consulting. The 20% growth we've experienced every single year has nothing to do with our skill, nothing to do with our products. I truly believe that it has has everything to do with how focused our planning is and how focused our priorities are. And we say no to everything else. I challenge you to do the same. So hope this episode helped today. Sit down, take some time over the weekend. Get yourself planned for an amazing second half of the year. Like I said, I want to help you negative split the back half of 2025. And please do me a favor again, if these episodes are bringing you a ton of value, please share them with your peers. Others who you think would find these useful. Like I said, I am always grateful that you tune Let me know what you think of this this episode. Shoot me a note on LinkedIn, a DM, an email, whatever it is. Just let me know how these episodes are helping you impact your business. All right, Be good. That's all we got for this episode of the Accelerate youe 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 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.