INTERVIEW: Andy Neary - The Answer is NICHING DOWN

You are listening to the 10 Minute Entrepreneur podcast with host Sean Castrina.

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Today you're definitely going to learn something. This is a 10 minute entrepreneur podcast designed to equip, encourage and educate entrepreneurs in the least amount of time possible. I have Andy Neary with me here today. He's a former pro baseball player, two time participant in the Iron man, and he's a sales and marketing coach, specifically with the insurance industry. But we're going to learn something today anyway, Andy. We're going to learn something, right?

Yes, we are. That's the goal.

We're going to. We're going to, you know, help the people in insurance, but kind of expand this out.

Yes.

So let me ask you this. So what, what kind of brought you into the industry that you're in now? Obviously from extremely athletic background.

Yeah. I wish I had a better answer. Most of us don't get in insurance by design. You know, we find a way in because a friend or family says we should give this insurance thing a trishon. And honestly, that's how I found myself as shortly after I got released by the Milwaukee Brewers, I was looking for a career. I had a finance degree out of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and a family friend ran an agency here in Wisconsin. And he said, hey, man, you should give this a try. And that was 22 years ago.

Yeah, it was the first. You know, if you're a good communicator and fairly gregarious and all that, you get pitched to be an insurance guy at some point.

I agree.

You just do. So I got recruited, I remember, by one of my roommates in college. I think I was 24 at the time. And I. And I remember doing the interview, like, with him, and his regional person above him was like, they bought me away from him. They're like, okay. You know, because he would get an override for an extended. And they're like, no, somebody's going to get rich off of this guy. So they gave him like a $15,000 bonus to buy out the override. And it was the first time in my life that I'd ever been with ultra wealthy people. I always say insurance. First two people I met in insurance, other than my roommate were hyper, extraordinarily wealthy. One of them just sold one of his businesses for 151 million in the last two years. And it was selling insurance. And I did really well. But at that time, this is, you know, Jesus, 30 years ago, you typically sold. If you did, you know, you know, homeowners and people, just regular people, okay, how do I word this? You did it at night because people worked all day, so typically you'd go meet with them around 7 o' clock at night and then you do your pitch, you know, where there was a life and policy and some disability or whatever the case may be. And I hated driving at night because I don't see really well. I just absolutely hated it. And I was like, the only way I'm gonna be able to do this if I literally hire a driver. Because I hated it so much and I got out of it and oh my gosh, they, they were distraught and the rest is history.

Yes. Well, I can tell you I, I started my career in financial planning and selling life insurance. And one of the reasons I shifted to health insurance, commercial insurance for businesses, is I was watching peers of mine in the industry do this thing during business hours. And here I was having conversations at dinner tables at 6 o' clock at night, 22 years old, trying to convince us, 55 year old to give them my, you know, their money to have me invest it. And I just realized that's not my thing. And that's one of the reasons I gravitated towards the, the business insurance side of things, because I just wanted to work Monday, Friday and do it during business hours.

Yeah, no. And the guy who sold his business for 151 million, that was for a health insurance business. And so, you know, it's where the money was. And he did the same thing. I mean, he was, got into life insurance and he did key key man policies, basically buying out owners, buying each other out. He worked with professional athletes in the D.C. area and he just basically, if he sold a CEO, well then he'd go in and get all their health insurance. So he'd get him on a key man policy, which if you can, if you can get the main boss, you get all the fruit that follows. You know, he's like, oh, let me shop out your health insurance for your, you know, car dealership with 200 employees, 100%. And then he ends up selling for 150 plus.

So it's a very lucrative industry. When I started my coaching and training company that I have today, Sean Complete Game Consulting, I had a lot of peers look at me like, what are you doing? Like, do you realize how I want to say the word easy? Because it's not easy, but you build an agency to a certain level, a million, five million, whatever it is, do you realize the multiples you're going to sell that agency at? And so I had a lot of strange looks when I decided to start this company.

Yeah, no, it's, it's like I said, it's the first business where I was ever around ultra wealthy people at like a totally different level of like I've been around people that made a nice living, but this was silly wealth. Like the one guy sold his bowls for 150 million. I will funniest interview I ever had because he, he tried to lure me away from the one that I did take a job with. And so I go into this is in D.C. and I go in for an interview at 6am in the morning and every ounce of the story is true. I want. Because my audience is going, there's no way possible I could trust every little nugget of this is true. So I go in there at six o' clock in the morning and he's little guy wrestled in college. But really little guy a Rolex probably weighed literally as much as he did. Cufflinks on big cufflinks, you know, you know, start shirt. You could stand the shirt up. He used to have his rabbi come to the office on Thursdays to go through his religious responsibilities. The rabbi went to him and he was going through everybody's phone in the old days where you hit the button and you can like leave a message and he was going down the phone and cursing out every single car that wasn't in the parking lot. It was like, Bill, this is why you're a poor mother effort. Jimmy, this is why your ass is whatever. Johnny, this is why your wife's running around on you. You can't afford her. Boom. And he's going down every single button, leaving a message. Every ounce of what I just said is true. And I passed.

I, I'm kind of shocked.

Yeah, it's, you know, I'll tell you what you talked about the, the silly money I have up here who's part of an agency that just sold for. I want to say it's 230 million. Big. They were a big organization, they sold. And he, he used the phrase now he had a small share of that. But the, the gentleman who had the, the large majority, one of the founders, I think it was almost beyond his grasp how much they had just sold for because, you know, he called it funny money.

Yeah.

And I think when they started their agency 30, 40 years ago, they never, they never thought this kind of money would have been thrown around to acquire their agency.

The multiple, that's where you hit it. The multiples are silly on certain businesses right now. Just the ebitdas and all the rest is. It's a multiple of what? I mean, crazy number.

Sean. I've known, I know agencies that have sold for five, six times top line revenue, and a lot of it has to do with their brand. Who are these people? You know, who are these agencies in their specific markets? But yeah, the numbers are astronomical.

Now. It's a good business. That's what. If you're listening to the podcast today, insurance is not a bad business to get into. It's an easy business to get into. As an owner at an entry level, you can typically build an agency and, and all that. So it is great. So what, what are, what do you find is the secret to selling human beings face to face?

You know, when I started this business, the coaching training business in 2019, little did I know 2020 would happen. And what we're seeing, Sean, and, and this isn't just in the insurance industry. I think it's in sales in general. 2020 changed everything. And most of the sales back in the day, four or five years ago, was offline, but more of it today is online. And so to answer the question, the face to face. Well, a lot more face to face is done virtually than it used to.

Be, which is fine, I expect that. But where you're talking to another human.

Being, where you're, yeah, I would say.

Pitching, you know, you're speaking like I'm speaking to you.

I feel like buyers are more skeptical today, Sean, than they've ever been. And they're, they're also more savvy. So to me, it's teaching sales producers how to have more of a conversation. And one of the big shifts we help our clients make is, you know, in the insurance industry, it used to be go out, meet with the prospect face to face, give them the pitch. And that pitch was all about who you are, our agency, our capabilities, our resources. The game has changed. You got to flip that. The one who spends the majority of the time telling the prospect story, what is it they want? What are they going through? What's their problems? What's their struggles? That's the agency that's going to win. Because the more you tell the prospect story, the more they can put themselves in that story, and the more you and your team are going to resonate with them. So the biggest shift is stop telling your story, start telling the prospect story.

Yeah, the one thing in sales is, it's like, it's like almost like how you. The seesaw. Have you ever seen kids at the seesaw? And conversation is the weight of one side. If you are winning in that you're sitting down and your clients up means you're talking too much. Just kind of picture that once it flips and you're doing more of the talking than they are, then you've, you're, you're not the salesman you think you are.

That's a really good point because one of the things we have, one of the things we talk about a lot with our clients is when we're looking at a business to business sales. So the agencies we typically sell to are selling to businesses, not individuals. If you, if they break down their year and what a successful year would look like, they don't need that many wins. If I ask a typical commercial or health insurance producer, how many wins do you need this year to have a good year? I often hear five, six, eight new accounts. So what we tell them they need to be doing more of is go out and sell with a little bit of exclusivity. Talk about the fact you're only looking to work with five or six new groups this year because your prospect is so used to our industry producers coming out and for a lack of better words, puking on them. Why don't you go out with a little confidence and say, hey, we know we can't serve everybody. We're only looking to bring on five, six, eight new groups. We're meeting today to see if you might be one of them. I have yet to have a client of ours come back and say, wow, the prospect actually really took to that because it goes against how we were trained to sell. Sean. But if you remember, buyers are more skeptical than they've ever been. It works.

And I, because we, and I believe in that because I always tell person what you want to do is you want to have a great industry and then you want to niche and then you want to niche again. So you want to take that thing. You got to go two niches down. You know, it's this. So we, you know, we're in the insurance industry, okay, so we sell health care. There's your one niche. Well, what do you do within the healthcare that makes you unique? You've got to go one niche further and if you can go another niche further, even better.

You know, we specialize in health care. I mean, you know, health insurance policies to car dealerships. The reason why we work with car dealerships, as we find out that turnover is really high, blah, blah, blah, blah. The average, whatever the case may be, I'm obviously just kind of throwing things out. But it's can you. The further you can keep niching and there's still a pot there of target customers and you can get the six to eight that you're talking about. That's the secret is you just keep going lower and you keep niching further.

So I couldn't agree. I couldn't agree more with you to one of the. One of the agencies I know that sold for those numbers we just talked about. They are a health insurance agency that niched down to a specific geographical market, then niched down again and said, we only sell and focus on health insurance captive programs. So they went, we sell health insurance in a market and we only focus on captives. And at the end of the day, they still sold for a lot of money because of that focus and that process they had built around it.

It makes you look specialized. Niche, niche. It's definitely a, a great way to do it. All right, let's go one more. One great more piece of advice on how to sell.

Yeah, I love sharing. You know the. We call our five star prospect profile. I think just dovetailing off the conversation we had, Sean, most producers, most sales reps don't even have, don't have a good idea of who their ideal prospect is. And we look at marketing pretty simplistically. I think a good marketing strategy has to have a clear answer to the following questions. Who are you talking to? What are you saying? How are you saying it and where are you saying and when we break in or dive deep into the who are you talking to? We leverage an exercise we call the five star prospect profile, which is five questions. Number one, who's your favorite client today?

Tell me who your favorite client is today because your job is to go find more like them.

So.

So the second question is, why are they your favorite? And in that part of the exercise, the only answer you can't give is, because I make the most money on them. Break it down between demographics and psychographics. Are they in a specific industry? Are they a certain size? Psychographics is where the gold is, though. Who are these people? How do they think? What do they believe? What do they stand for? That's the reason you love working with them. And then now you know who that is. The next question we have to ask is, what is the problem you love solving? I know you can solve a lot of them, but I bet you there's one problem that lights you up, followed by what is your process to solve that problem? If you are going to have success today, you got to have a repeatable process and the last question is, when you walk a client through that process, what success do they have or will they have? So who's your favorite client? Why? What problem do you love solving? What's your process to solve it? And what does success look like when you solve it? If you are clear on that, those are the foundational elements of a successful marketing message. So if I could share one tip, it's start there, get really clear on who you're actually trying to go after and then leverage marketing to go out and find.

No, I love it. Because the target customer is so important. Everybody's other than Amazon, it's not everybody other than Walmart, it's not every. I mean there's a very few that can go that broad. So it's. And again, and I'll go even further on the target market. I'm going to take it to the exact same thing we were talking about on the sales pitch. Okay. Whatever you're selling, you know, you go niche, niche, niche to kind of find out that unique, you know what you're going to sell. Okay. Within the industry, it's the same thing with your target customer. You don't, you don't want to go from this. I sell to this, such a broad group, it's like this. And then it keeps going. And then it keeps going. You keep niching back. Remember, you know, getting into the home improvement business, which is crazy because to this day I still don't know the difference between two screwdrivers. I have a plastic toolbox I was given when I got married. I have never, I could not put together a three piece birdhouse. If you put two pieces together, this is, no, not another, not an ounce of, of hyperbole here. But with that said, I understand sales. And I remember when I first started with, we started a handyman company. I just started because I couldn't fix anything in my house and I couldn't get anybody to do anything. So I'm just starting handyman company. Four weeks into it, I had 55 phone calls in one week. Now I had a very good business model. You called, you spoke with an actual person. We only hired people with 10 years experience or more. When we started your job, we stayed until we were finished. We took a survey at the end and my TV commercial was of this very attractive news anchor holding her newborn baby walking around a handyman who looked like Santa. I understand marketing. So I banged on every symbol and it went crazy. And at the time I owned a magazine in 21 cities. But I'm like, okay, what's going to make us different? Oh, I'd like to say I put Mr. Handyman out of business and case Handyman out of business in my area. So, by the way, the market, we did it. But one thing we did is everybody said, you got to work with Realtors. First thing I did is not work with realtors. They're like, well, you got. You need Realtors. And no, I can't stand realtors. Because I'm going to tell you why. Number one is a realtor does not have the authority to say yes to any renovation. They're representing the person who's buying the house. So they're telling this homeowner, well, listen, you need to get your house painted. You need this, you need that to bring up the value. That sounds great, but they don't have the authority to say yes to that. Second, when they give this command to the person selling it, they're selling their house. They want to hire the cheapest person humanly possible to do those tasks.

So I eliminated that limited. Up next. They're like, well, you got to get in the commercial work. Oh, man. Once you get in the commercial work, it's the holy grail of you're going to make so much money. I go, the problem again is they require three bids.

So I got to be the lowest bid again. They're like, I'll get in the rental market. Okay, wait, wait. So I'm going to do work for a renter and then wait to get paid by the homeowner who's going to put me off as long as they humanly. Possibly. The point is, we, in the first six months, did nothing but eliminate everybody that you would think. And then we had a new motto. We only went and we only do estimates for people that own the property. Can say yes today and write us a check today.

Have to.

They have to be able to do all three. They have to have. They have to own it. They have to have the authority to make the decision and the ability to write a check today. We're not financing. We're not waiting for one of them government loans, Right? There's so many ways you can get money in this business. We're not interested in any of it.

And to say it made me really, really rich. I know I'm gonna get one of those reviews. He's an arrogant sob.

It's masterful, Sean, because it goes against the grain. What I kept hearing you say, as you said, that it's a post I just put out, audience, is go against the grain. You Know, everybody's going to want to give you advice if this is how we do it in the industry. And when they're telling you that it's what they're really saying is, this is how I did it. Well, just because they did it that way doesn't mean it's for everybody. And I believe today, the more you go against the grain, the more successful it's going to be. Everything I teach today started because when I moved from Wisconsin to Colorado in 2014, I found myself in a market where nobody knew me. I was trying to sell health insurance in a market where I was a complete unknown. And I said I could do it the way I was taught traditionally or I could go against the grain. And what I did is I went and looked at what other industries were doing when it came to marketing, and I just applied those principles to my business and it took off. And so I absolutely hear what you're saying when people tell you this is the way you do it. Oftentimes the best answer is going against the grain.

Yeah, I just, to me, it. I just, you know, just my, my brain was very simple. I go, why wouldn't we want to talk to people who have the authority.

To say yes and to pay us? Like, why am I going to. Three months for a check?

It's the biggest challenge the health insurance industry has. So for years and decades, the health insurance was all about talking to the human resource departments. Here's the challenge. Human resource department often doesn't have the ability to make the decision. So you're selling to the human resource team the whole time, and then at the end of the day, a CFO or CEO is going to make the decision, and you never got access to them. So now in the health insurance industry, the movement has been, how do we elevate to the C suite for the last five to seven years? Because we realized they're the ones making the decisions and cutting the checks.

Exactly. And I. And what you're learning audience, you know this design, you know this podcast designed to equip, encourage, and educate what you should be getting out of what we're talking about here. Because I think it's. It's really a game changer. I'm here with Andy Neary here. What we're talking about is, number one is, is that how do you find your target customer and then how do you keep niching and niche and to get the best target customer and then to get, you know, to be selling, you know, you want to just keep niching. Everything is to. To Take this massive pie and keep getting, getting it down to, okay, I'm going to sell this person, okay? Because this is my target customer and I'm, I'm selling this service this way. Just keep niching, you're niching in all directions in that what you're choosing to sell and then who you're choosing to sell it to. Instead of I'm selling every, you know the idea like I have a buffet, I can sell you 50 different things. No, I don't want to sell you 50 different things. Those, okay. Because number one is I, I can't explain 50 products and I can't sell to every human being because not every human being is interested in what I sell.

Constant niching down, that's, that's the secret.

And if you don't jump in here with some good advice here, I'm gonna just be staring at I, I, I.

I, I believe you know, the words you just spoke could not be more true. And I know I come at it from an angle, Sean, of the insurance industry. And it's, it's an angle where historically the industry has had a lack mindset. Therefore all prospects are good prospects, all revenues good revenue. If you got an appointment, chase it. And we want to tell everybody, we can help everyone with everything we have, but the answer to long term success is niching down. No, not everybody is a good fit for you. You are not a good fit for them. Let me go back one more time and say it again.

I have an agency that said we are going to specialize in health insurance. We are going to specialize in a specific geographic market and we are going to specialize in a specific product. That's it. Everything we do from marketing and sales and building our processes is around that niche. And they exploded. And so I think at a time when sales. It's so easy to get desperate, Sean, that I have to go sell something. The more you niche, the more you get rich.

Yeah, no.

I just keep learning that and it's just so absolutely true. Audience, I want to thank you so much for listening. Hopefully Andy's taught you something here. Andy, how can my audience connect with you?

Yeah, definitely on LinkedIn. First and foremost, Andy Neary at CompleteGame Consulting. Make sure we're connected there. If I could share this, Sean, we do have a free training@completegameplaybook.com if anybody wants to go download that. It's a 17 minute training on how to build a marketing strategy to attract your ideal prospect. But yeah, definitely those two channels, LinkedIn and go get the the training@completegameplaybook.com all.

Right, we'll have all that in the show. Notes, audience, thank you so much for listening and. And putting up with me. I get excited sometimes on the podcast. Like, I think Sean's interviewing himself. No, it might be it. Sometimes. Maybe. Maybe I do that. I'm not even quite sure. Podcast is brought to you by Gig Strategic, the best digital marketing company. They're incredible. And I keep bragging about them because they are, especially for small businesses under 500. They're great. They're turnkey. They handle everything. And they know how to manage your budget. And they don't just keep spending money foolishly. I know that because they handle my company. So, again, Gig Strategic, thank you again for listening. We'll talk soon.