The $11.5M Small Business Opportunity Most Insurance Agencies Overlook with Rebecca Menefee

What would your advice be? Who's thinking about just cutting bait? Yeah, they're a waste of our time. We're spending too much time on it.

Call me. We'll help you. I'm happy to take those off your hands. You have to really be passionate about it. You can't fake passion here at all or else it just falls flat. So I would say you're either in it or you're not and get out of it if you're not. Find a good buyer that will take on that book of business for you or commit in the space. And if it's not you, bring on somebody that it is and then bring sexy back.

Hey, hey, welcome back to the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast. Andy Neary here, CEO and founder of Complete Game Consulting. I am excited today as I am joined by Rebecca Menefee of M3 here in Madison, Wisconsin. Actually, you're in Wauwatosa?

Correct.

M3's in all 4 corners of the state now. So Rebecca, welcome to the show.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Now, what people don't know is you and I both also live in Oconomowoc.

We do.

Now, have you lived in Oconomowoc for a long time?

We moved in 2017.

Okay.

So it's been a few years.

Thoughts?

We love it there. Honestly, I didn't know if we would move out that far. I loved being close. We were down in closer to Milwaukee.

Okay.

We were in West Allis, West Allians. We loved it there because of the proximity to things to do downtown and all of that. And we weren't really sure how we felt about moving all the way out to Oconomowoc. At the time, there wasn't quite all of the great things that Oconomowoc has to offer today, but I'm so glad that we did.

We love it there. It's funny. So we lived in Colorado for 10 years. And when we made the decision 2022 to move back, I called. So whole irony here, Jeremy Cardenas was a former boss. His office is actually this floor above this. And I was like, hey man, what's going like? Where do you recommend? And he's like, dude, there's a lot of things going on between Highway 67 and Highway 83. He's like, Oconomowoc's really kicking ass right now. And I was like, hometown, right? I'm like, eh. I don't know if I want to go back, but I'll tell you, I've been back 3 years now. One, I rarely see people I know, which shocked me. But yes, it's almost become the next Lake Geneva.

It has. It's great. I love it. It's like it was a best-kept secret for a while, I feel like, and now it's blown up.

Well, it's because they never utilized the downtown.

No, but it is.

They have 2 lakes downtown and they never utilized it. And now I laugh, they're building $3 million condos downtown.

It's amazing. The downtown has changed so much and we have so much of Lake Country coming into our downtown now, which is amazing.

I love that. That's a plug, by the way, if you ever want to come up for the summer, Oconomowoc is an awesome town to be in. It's where to be. Yeah. So, let's talk Elevate.

Let's talk Elevate.

So, what we're going to talk about today is an area of insurance you oversee, and I would say it's an area of insurance most people either overlook or just flat out poo-poo. Small business.

Yeah.

Now, when you and I used to work together years ago, you were at UnitedHealthcare.

I was.

And you've transitioned. So talk quickly about the transition over what has led you to lead Elevate, which is M3's small business division. How, what, what was that path from UHC, we'll call it rep, to leading the small business division for M3?

Yeah, so I actually spent a few years at UnitedHealthcare. I ultimately left and went to a dental HMO to help get, you know, their footing out in the market. I was there for about 3 years. I got my leadership experience there. But when I was working at UnitedHealthcare and when I was working with you, I was working in larger accounts. I was 100% key account, over 100 lives, between 100 and 500 lives is really where I specialized. When I moved over to the dental side, I did all things. So we were calling on small businesses and large businesses alike. And when I left and ultimately made the decision to come agency side, one of the things that brought me to M3 primarily was culture. They were a fast up-and-coming company, been around for a long time. One of the agents I enjoyed very much working with, I actually sought them out without even knowing what their intentions were or what their desires were in the space. I wouldn't say that I came there to talk about running a small business or building a small business platform, but that was something that was on their radar and on their minds. And as I came in with my experience, it became one of the things that I was tasked with, was just Figuring out small business and how to do that.

And you've been running the small business division, which you call Elevate.

Correct.

For how long?

So Elevate, we launched 5 years ago, and I've been with the firm for 10.

Okay.

So it was about 5 years of committee discussions. What are we going to do with the space? How do we want to do it? And then going into full building mode about 5 years ago.

And what I'd be curious to know, because Elevate is not just benefits small business, Commercial.

Correct.

Personal lines?

Yep.

All things small business. What was that transition like for you? 'Cause you were historically starting large group benefits. Now you're running small business. What were some of the changes or differences you saw?

Oh, that was massive, right? So I feel like, I don't know, I feel like there was always this air of small business being transactional. It was never a sexy place to be.

Never.

It never was when I was at United. It wasn't, it's not a sexy place to be. And so, I felt like transitioning into this role and coming into this and even on the dental side of things and working with small businesses, I got so connected into the community and to the great work that these small businesses do in our communities, from employing people in our communities to supporting some of the larger organizations within our communities. to just doing really good work and not feeling like they had a really great place to go for these things. And so I think for me, I had a huge change between, you know, chasing the dollar and then just, I don't know, I call it chasing the feels. I want to feel really good about the work that I do at the end of the day.

That's a good point because you think about even like where you live now in Oconomowoc, right? Get more involved in the community. That tends to have more of an impact if you're in the small business space than it would be if you're dealing with large corporations.

Absolutely. And I would say most of our presence, our footprint is in communities where they're small business communities. Our 2 largest offices are Madison and Milwaukee. So sure, big geographies, GSA, same with Green Bay. But when you get into some of our more regional spaces, we have 10 offices, they're a little smaller. more small business community focused. And so that's intentional.

Yeah, I would agree. Outside of Milwaukee, Madison, and maybe Green Bay, Wisconsin by and large is a small business state.

We buy local.

Yep.

We love supporting small business.

Yeah.

To me, it was an area that no one was really spending a lot of time in.

You know what's interesting about that, Rebecca? I was just You got me thinking about our move back to Wisconsin from Colorado. One of the things I feel like you do lose when you're in a state like Colorado, because it was so many transplants, so many people from other places, I felt like it was harder to create a sense of community. Where here, we crave it. It's that proverbial walking into the bar and everybody's like, hey, you know what I mean? Or I can borrow butter from my neighbor.

Absolutely. Midwest nice for sure is a thing.

They love to call us Midwest naive, but they can't definitely fault us for being Midwest nice, that's for sure. Where do you think— okay, so let's— the thing I hear the most in the work we do in the age— in the industry is a lot of people just love to overlook, poo-poo small business. It's not worth my time. I just had the conversation with a client this morning. Where do you think a lot of the industry is overlooking opportunities that exist in small business?

I think the big misstep is that, you know, some of these small businesses grow into big businesses. Some of them get purchased by the larger businesses. Uh, some of them, again, fuel the community and the work that we do. I think where agencies kind of miss the mark and where it becomes really easy to not want to get out of bed in the morning for small business is just that it's incredibly hard to scale. So agency economics is very different, compensation looks different, and so in order for you to meaningfully scale a small business operations, you've got to have tight operations and processes in place, and I think that becomes a daunting task for many, especially when you can and maybe land a couple big deals in a year and feel really good about that revenue that comes in and the margin that might be associated with it. So you gotta be comfortable living in different margins, maybe making a little investment where it makes sense, but you have to be able to want to get up and do that at the end of the day.

Yeah, I gotta believe, and, and I will go into it as much as you're willing to go into it, but when you're dealing with volume, which is what small business is, you have gotta have systems in place.

It's, it's a must. It's table stakes at this point.

'Cause I see a lot of agencies, definitely not the size of N3, not have systems. And the natural thing that happens, 'cause now they gotta book a business of clients all ranging from small business to the large group, right? Or large commercial. Without a system, they naturally spend way too much time on the small business.

They naturally spend way too much time on the small business servicing at levels that are not meaningful even for the small business. So what we end up doing is we end up delivering a mid-market service model to a small business, and that is wasting your time and the small business's time.

And it's actually not effective to them.

Exactly. It's not what they need. It's not the proactive approach that they need, and they need a proactive approach, probably more than your mid-market. They're, you know, they're out doing all of the things for their business.

It's, it's a big That's a good point. You know, you brought up something too. I remember when we moved to Colorado, the agency I went to work for, Vogt Bell, uh, 2 offices, Fort Collins and Longmont, Colorado. And Fort Collins had written New Belgium Brewing when they had 4 employees.

Yeah, look at them now.

He still had the account when they had 1,000.

Look at that. That's so much growth. And I would also say, when you get that business that is Starting up, 4 employees, they're entrepreneurial, they're just getting started. The amount of loyalty that is garnished through that, they do not forget. That's a hard— that would be a hard account to pull away.

Let me ask you though on that, with that being said, M3's a good size, right? You guys are scaled to work with small business all the way up to Fortune 500.

You bet.

Do you think it helps that you have that kind of scale within the organization so that when insert small business in Wisconsin becomes that large entity, it can just be easily, I don't wanna use the word passed on, but up this, up the chain to your large group team or your large commercial team?

It is probably one of my most favorite things about what we do.

They graduate.

Right? They graduate. We actually call them elevations when they elevate into mid-market.

Ah, I was gonna ask you about the name. There you go.

So we call them elevations into mid-market. And what I like to say when we're out, because I used to sell and before we had a small business unit, I would be out telling businesses that you've outgrown your broker.

Yep, yep. Use it as a competitive wedge.

You know, so now I no longer feel like you need to say those words to me because now that you're growing and I can see that you're growing, I've helped you do some of this work as well. I now know that you need different resources. And so what I can do now is introduce you to my friends in mid-market and now give you the resources that you desire and require That's awesome.

On that note, because I want, I want to go back to something you said. I loved how you said that small business agencies tend to over-service. They service it like a mid-market, thinking they're going above and beyond, but they're actually ineffective. What are some of the mistakes you see or you think agencies make when it comes to servicing small business?

So I think what ends up happening is you kind of just live into it, right? So When you think about it, when you were a producer, right, you're growing your book of business, you go out and you try to write really anything that fogs a mirror, right?

General— you're a general producer.

You do, right? You're going out, you're trying to make a living, you're going out, you're building it. But what do you do? Because you got time while you're also prospecting, you're— you don't— you haven't built a huge book yet, you're giving that high-level white glove, like really giving them Probably too much support because once you start peeling that back, now you've taken something away from them and all of a sudden the service doesn't feel the same. So always kind of caution over-servicing in the beginning as they're, you know, young entrepreneurial, giving them what they need, answering questions, asking questions. They don't always know the questions to ask, but managing the right size service for that client. And each industry might also be slightly different in how they choose to interact and the level of service in which they need from us.

I was going to say, are you noticing that? Because again, Elevate encompasses commercial small business too, which means there's probably some industry niches. Do you notice that different industry niches kind of have a different kind of service model depending on what industry it is? Yeah, for sure.

It depends on, you know, I definitely, I notice a difference in how our senior living clients need to be serviced by us or what their expectations of us might be slightly different than a bar or restaurant. As an example, and we have lots of all of that in our book of business.

Yeah.

And so really being able to understand the client and their needs, I think that was a big piece for us as we built some of this too, is we have to remember 5 years ago we were going through a pandemic and our world changed. I think our game has changed significantly since, technology in all the ways, being virtual and how do we hire people? Maybe I don't need to have a brick-and-mortar building anymore to you know, employ people or, or work and, and provide a product. Um, and so I think that just all just became such foundational work for us that we just— yeah.

You know what's interesting about that? So I just had a conversation with a sales leader yesterday, good-sized firm in Chicago, and we were talking about just how this year has felt like a big year of transition. And because of the pan— you know, since 2020, we can do more business virtually. which means we can write business outside our typical, uh, geography. And they're running into the transition of losing an account or 2 because though that account is 4 states away, which we can write easier nowadays, that account's going, you know what, we still haven't seen you ever walk into our office.

There's still that.

You still have to have that face-to-face interaction.

You do.

And I think that's, that's going back to that community. At the end of the day, people want to see you. They want to shake your hand. And I think with small business, I, I go back to when I started in the industry. I started at Federated Insurance where our entire prospecting model was door-to-door. Yeah, you literally park in an industrial park, you go door-to-door. And I think how many times just a walk-in, if I wasn't getting chewed out and chased out It was with a small business owner who I just happened to catch at the right time, but it was a small business owner.

Yep. And no one was giving him that attention. Yeah, nobody was swinging by and doing that. Absolutely.

And I also think about, you know, you remember working with Berkwald and Associates. That's where we met. And we, we wanted— we believed we had the best service model ever. Whether that was true or not, we, we definitely believed it. And I think one of the traps we caught ourselves in is You also have to be careful with service because if you try to overdeliver too much too fast, you reset that client's expectation.

100%.

And if you can't match what you just created, Yep. they forget the lack of service they got a year or two ago.

100%.

How do you guys, how do you guys, because you've built a model for small business, is there ways you protect yourself against that where you're actually over— preventing yourself from overpromising, I guess is the question.

So I actually think because that's an interesting question and it's, I think the approach I might take with this is a little different for us because we had always had small business kind of intermixed in the firm.

Right.

Everybody had a little bit of in their book of business and then everyone was getting that bottleneck where we're servicing every one-size-fits-all service model and all of that. So I, what I would say is as we kind of built and elevate and moved around revenue from books of business to figure out what that model needed to look like, We asked a lot of questions. We sat with a lot of our clients. We learned a lot along the way about what their expectations were. And we asked good questions about what are you doing with that when we give that level of service to you? Not a trick question, but I'm curious because if it's something that we do this body of work, we have this saying in the agency, or we did when I started, that was we would let, we had franchise models for books of business and We would have the saying that we would let everyone color with their own crayons, right? So that's great because we're an entrepreneurial organization. And when you're working with entrepreneurs, like, that feels really good. But the problem is, is you create inconsistency in your service model across the board. So now Agent A isn't coloring with your crayons, and maybe your crayons are a little bit brighter and might give a perception that there's not the same level of service or the same expertise. And that can be disjointed. So when we moved things around and shifted things around to elevate, we had to do a lot of work with some of our over-serviced clients to level set the expectation, which kind of meant a step down. So what we would take is, okay, help us understand how you're servicing this client today. And then we'd go, okay, wow, we can't do all of those things. So what are some of the things that we could sit down with our client, do a table setting of, What are your goals and expectations? And really get back to, what do you need from us as agents that we should be providing for you? It's very real too that you'll have a business owner, you'll have somebody come into a small business that's coming from a very large company.

Yeah, yeah.

Into a small business. And so all of a sudden, level setting those expectations of even what you can provide. You know, in small business and benefits, as an example, you can't get data reporting. There's a lot of ACA, You're kind of strapped with what you can actually provide compared to what they're used to seeing in their larger employers.

Well, and to that point, I can still remember groups that I had that were probably in that under 50 for sure. And all of a sudden, you know, because they're fast growing, they go out and they hire this CFO from corporate 500, corporate 1,000 world. And you're like, oh crap.

Yep.

Because you know they're going to come down, one, to prove themselves, but two, They're coming with the expectations of what an advisor does here down to this 40Life group, and you're like, this is not how it works.

Yeah, nope. So you do a lot of reselling.

Yep.

In that situation to better understand their expectations and what you can actually meaningfully provide to them along the way. And I think that has been huge in the transparency piece as we transition, because we do have transition accounts Continually throughout the year. We do one big look at the end of the year for accounts that need to elevate or need to move to elevate. And then we talk about what a meaningful transition looks like in those cases.

So every year you guys sit down and look at the book and say, all right, going into their next renewal, which groups are ready, which companies are ready to take that elevation to the mid-level, mid-tier and things? That's awesome.

Yep.

I think that what you guys have built is really smart because Without that system for small group, I think what a lot of agencies do, and again, they're not at your size, they put one person in charge of the entire small group, and now you have one person running 130 accounts and they can't do a good job with it. Even if you have a good system in place, it's just hard to do a good job where you guys have built an entire team division and system around it. But with the goal, I love the fact the goal is we want you to graduate from us sometime because if we're doing our job and you're doing yours, that means you're growing.

Yep. But we also have to be mindful of, because I have also learned through our work, especially here, I don't know if it's a Wisconsin thing or what, but some small businesses want to always be a small business.

Ah, yes.

They don't desire to be a jumbo. They don't, you know, some, for some of them, that's a 4-letter word. They're not interested in any of that. They love being in their small community. Boutique shop or the local bar or whatever that is, and that's okay too. And we want to have a place for that too. So we actually call them small to growing businesses. So because some people take a lot of great pride in being a small business and don't want to be anything more than that, and that's okay.

Yes. And, and at the same time, I've come to learn it's the same, the same difference between— I'm, and I'm forgetting his name, so I'm going to be embarrassed on this show. CEO of M3.

Mike Victorsen.

Victorsen. The difference between a Mike Victorsen and an advisor, an agency owner who's had an agency for 20 years but still sits at $600,000 of revenue. There is a reality that maybe that's all they want. I have a peer, he has a $700,000, maybe $800,000 by now, book of business, runs it by himself, and it lets him do whatever he wants in life. That's great. But then you got others who wanna scale.

Yep.

But in between all that, you also have business owners who would like to scale.

Mm-hmm.

But they just, they just don't know where to go. They're their own bottlenecks.

Yep.

Absolutely. And I think you see that in our business and you see it in the small businesses you work with.

Absolutely. And sometimes you just don't even know where to start.

Yeah.

I think that was a big thing for us. Like, where do we even start?

What led you guys to go, we need to build a, a division, a team around this?

So I think what's really interesting about that is we talked a lot about, when I joined the firm, we were talking a lot about what are we doing with small business. We had a couple people, I would say, in both small commercial and in benefits that were dedicated to the space, but there was not a lot of accountability towards production. It was kind of, we still say this today, I hate it, but back in the day it was where accounts went to die.

Hmm.

Was literally kind of how we treated What we called at the time core, and I'm sure there's plenty of agencies that still use that word core. So you know it was kind of where we'd put stuff to die. So once we started looking at this and we started seeing the bottleneck and seeing some of our mid-market producers finding that it was incredibly hard to grow their books beyond the one million mark, the one and a half million mark, without a boatload of service people behind them, which kills on the margin, right? And again, you're because you're over servicing. How do we create a different model for this, right? And so we set out to set the division, but where we landed, and it was from our former CFO who retired, we were in a committee meeting and at one point he looked at all of us and said, when are we going to either get in or get out? And if we're in, we need people full-time dedicated to this. I'm talking leadership. Like right now we're saying we care about small business, But we ain't living it, and we weren't, and it was very factual. And so at the time, I raised my hand because it was something I was very entrenched in, in the benefits world. I didn't know P&C at all at the time, and so my counterpart, my EVP, uh, Matt Cranney, uh, carried some of the personal lines and, uh, P&C background knowledge for me while I could learn the vernacular and all that good stuff.

And how many people do you have that In the division today?

We have, uh, well, we're over 50. I think we're close to 60 employees in the division today. When we started, we had about a dozen dedicated to the team.

And to prove the system works, I think you said it's grown from what, $3.5 million to over $11 million? Yeah, we're about—

I just checked this morning, $11.5 million.

So it works. The model works.

The model works.

What would you say— I was curious, what would your advice be to an agency owner or whatever who's sitting there And 'cause you have a lot of agency owners actually at a point of saying, should we just sell off our small groups, small business? What would you say? What would your advice be to that executive who's thinking about just cutting bait? Yeah, they're a waste of our time. We're spending too much time on it.

Call me. We'll help you. I'm happy to take those off your hands. Um, honestly, I, I think there's a, there's a reality to that.

Yeah.

Because one of the things I have also found is you have to have a good motor And high energy to really focus and really want to put forth a good product in the space. You have to really be passionate about it. You can't fake passion here at all, or else it just falls flat. So I would say you're either in it or you're not, and get out of it if you're not. Find a good buyer that will take on that book of business for you, or commit in the space. And if it's not you, bring on somebody that it is. And then bring sexy back. That's all I gotta say.

I'm gonna ask you, you gotta define that a little bit.

You gotta bring sexy back to small business. It's a great place to be, right? It's a place where—

That might be the title. That might be the title of the episode.

Oh, the episode brings sexy back to small business. Yes, I love it. 'Cause, you know, I think, you know, and even then when you were out picking up talent, that'd be the other thing too, is you look at it, the space, if it is something you want to be in, you need to have people that want to get out of bed to service and work with small businesses.

Well, And you don't have to give away anything again that is proprietary, but I have to believe if I'm a producer at M3, goes back to the statement we were just talking about, about being a generalist, where you might, even if you're targeting large group, large business, if you're doing your job, you're getting referrals, you're connecting with centers of influence who might bring you something once in a while that's not in your target market, right? So all of a sudden now you got this referral to the small business. But with this division, if I'm a producer, I can go, all right, no sweat, I've got a team you're gonna love.

100%.

And that's got to help that producer be able to not just ignore, but know exactly where— and, and again, I don't know if M3 incentivizes that producer, but it's a great system now for any producer to know if I run into something that I really don't want to spend a lot of time on, I've got a team that'll be like, great, And they may graduate back to me.

Yep.

If they grow.

Yep. So we actually, we do incent referrals in the firm. I, in, in Elevate, specifically in the small business space, we will pay referral from our receptionist all the way up to our CEO. You bring it in, we will give you a little pop.

Everybody's in sales.

Everyone's in sales. Always be closing. Uh, so we very much, we, we don't want people to ignore the opportunities that are before them, right? So you are incentivized, but I will say we've been doing that for a long time. And I don't know that I can say with great certainty that it's 100% the compensation that is the reason. I think that is the sprinkle on the cupcake for the producer that brings it in. It's the trust and confidence that that producer still has to have with that small business team to do the job and get it done and keep the noise minimal, right? The last thing they want, and if there is an issue that happens, that you share that information back with the relationship owner. is what we call them. Because you never want to follow up or be at a barbecue over the weekend and hear that your friend that you brought into the agency isn't having a great experience. That's a very uncomfortable setting to be in.

Those are awkward referrals.

Absolutely. So the, the whatever 20%, 25%, 30% you end up paying in that referral is for naught, and it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, it's reputation. And I think the more you're in it, the reputation really matters. I think for us, my team wins bigly as well when we refer to mid-market because there's obviously some larger dollars at stake with that as well. But we have some really nice incentives to be sure that people are not tripping over those dollars.

What I like, what I really like about the system you've built, I look at our business and what we're trying to build is a system that can help a producer from the day they're hired, the day they start in the industry, to the day they become the leader. Who's running a team. That's, that's our goal. We want to build a system that literally, uh, grows with you. And that's what you guys have done is you've built a, you've built a system from the insurance perspective that is there to help a business from the day they start to the day they become a Fortune 500, if that's, if that's where they end up. And you've identified what different kind of service each of those tiers need. And that goes back to the whole point, I think, of this entire conversation is most agencies have not done that work. Therefore, they're applying one system to any kind of business, which naturally means they're overservicing small group.

Yep.

To your point, which is they don't even want it.

Don't even need it. They don't even know what to do with it.

And probably underserving the large ones.

Yes. Or then you get into the micro, Book has grown so big that all I do is I just send out a renewal to my small business. And then you forget about your small business. And that's where we win because more times than not where we win on business, it's because I only see my broker once a year, if that.

And you can do that with small business and feel confident we've got the system to hold your hand where other advisors would go, ugh.

Yes.

I don't know if I want to spend that much time on this. Yeah.

I would also say we don't force that upon our clients. So what makes that nice is that it's an opt-in situation. So we offer it mid-year check-ins, we do, and then they get to engage with us and say, no, I'm good. Maybe because some are truly transactional, they don't want any, they don't want that much from us, and that's okay. We want to be able to provide that for them too.

I think that's one of the takeaways from this conversation that I wasn't ready to, wasn't prepared for, but I think it's a great lesson is you might think you're really delivering and they don't even want it. We run into that with our clients. We— I am a people pleaser, so I'm guilty of probably trying to do too much. And, and my team is good at calling me out and being like, what if they don't even want that?

How do you know that's what they want?

Yeah.

Yeah, we did a lot of small group sessions. We survey our clients, uh, twice a year as well.

Let's shift for a second. I gotta believe in order to have a system to service small business effectively, technology has got to play a key role. Thoughts?

It's a must. It absolutely is a must. I would say how we launched off some of our work was in things like, you know, basic stuff I would call now compared to where we're at today, things like quote aggregators and tools that helped us pull down data from our systems in a more meaningful way for our clients in a faster way. Even some, we did some offshoring of some non-client-facing activities, cleaning up some of our backend operations, just cleaning up Epic and all of that good stuff for us, our CRM, nothing that touches a client at all except in some of our units that we can't, but kind of creating that nice mix where we can kind of deliver all those things. That was our, I would say, very remedial. Now we're in a very heavy AI environment.

I was just going to say, now let's talk about AI.

AI plays a huge role, not only, and you have to think about this too, not only for us as a firm, but your clients and If you think they're not using AI on you to negotiate their renewal or whatever, you're wrong. So I do find it an interesting space to be in that way, but it's like you can't not engage with AI. It's not gonna replace your job.

Yep.

It's going to enhance, but also get you to think differently about how you do your job. It's data-informed and it's not to be ignored.

But think about that. You're right. We just talked about, I think one of the pushbacks that is occurring is with the advent of AI, people are pushing back saying we want the human interaction. That's good news for us.

It is.

But don't think for a second that the, the minute you leave their office, they're checking your recommendations against what AI recommends.

Absolutely they are. And they're combating. You might want to ask about this. So if you start seeing them having a little more sophisticated questions or things like that, you most certainly know. That's funny you say that.

Yeah, 'cause I remember one, the thing we used to always talk about is how can we develop a list of banana peel questions, we call them, that you can give to a company to ask their broker so their broker slips up. Yeah, I can do that now. Yeah. They don't need another broker to give them the banana peel questions.

They do not. They do not. And they can take that right to the ChatGPT.

Or they could go to the chat and say, hey, how much, based on what you know about my company and my employees, the number of employees, what I'm paying, how much should my broker be making?

There's that as well.

They're making that. Yeah. Oh yeah. If you don't think— again, you may have the luxury of some of, of your clients being ignorant right now and not using AI, but if you don't think they're using AI right now to get a second opinion on you, you're sorely mistaken.

Yes.

Yeah. How about people? Given that, again, small business has always been this overlooked area of, um, our industry, What are you looking for when it comes to recruiting people to come be a part of Elevate?

So when we started, I would say, so answer's different today than it was when we started. When we started, the bench was relatively small. Uh, we didn't have enough players to effectively homegrow talent, if you will. We, we really enjoy homegrowing talent at our firm. Uh, but we were—

You guys do a phenomenal job, by the way, of absolutely destroying recruiting. Wisconsin athletes. UW athletes.

I don't know what that is. It's like all of a sudden, and it becomes like something we talk about during the process. Oh, but he played baseball. Oh my gosh, great.

Or even like the number of former football players at Wisconsin or hockey players. I'm like, oh, they're at M3 now.

We have an Olympic gold winner as well on the team, Casey FitzRandolph.

Oh, he's at M3?

He is.

I did not know that.

He's on our property and casualty team in mid-market. So yeah, we, all of the things.

Yeah.

But I do think they, you know, there's a quality there. I totally get where that comes from, but I appreciate it. But what I would say when we started this, I was really focused on finding, and this was hard, it was very hard to find producers that had experience because we knew we couldn't necessarily grow that in the firm. Producers that had experience but also really loved the space. Not somebody that was trying to join the firm to do this for 5 minutes to go move into something else. That is not great for your clients.

A launch from here.

Yeah. Correct. We also, what you'll see and what an inherently, I don't know what people inherently think to do when they're building something like this is to have it be your training ground for your people. We're going to train our new producers in small business. Your small businesses don't want to be your guinea pigs. They have real businesses with real big problems or things they need to solve for. Having your junior, junior, junior agent on it is not meaningful for them.

Don't underestimate your client's sophistication.

Absolutely. So for us, we wanted to be sure that we, and that was a, that was a delicate mix. I would literally shut down interviews when the question came up around how long do I have to do this before I can get into the big accounts? We're done here.

Good trigger question. You're out.

We've also found we do some, um, um, profile tests and things like that. Um, and we found that certain, Profiles match differently for the elevate producer than maybe our mid-market. You have to be able to; it's a very interesting mix. You have to be able to handle high volume, churn, churn, churn. You have to have a high level of empathy, but yet also a high level of resiliency as well. You move from one thing to the next, and many times when we're interacting with our clients, it's on a really tough day. They've had a workman's compensation claim. There's a bad disability situation going. on, you know, they don't know how to handle it. It's the first one they've ever had, a slip and fall on their property. What do I do? I'm going to get sued. You know, it's, it's real emotional things that we're dealing with, with these small business owners that don't have a lot of experience in these types of incidences. And so we have to really be able to bounce from one to the next and be able to handle that very quickly.

You know, it's funny you say that because Most people in our industry would view small business as transactional, right? The more I think about it, I absolutely agree with you. To be able to be effective in small business, you have to have a ton of empathy. Because if I'm being honest, the larger you go, I would say they look at insurance more as a business transaction. Not in a bad way, like shop us quotes and that's all we want, but like they keep it, it's just—

It's budgetary.

It's budgetary. We gotta make sure the numbers work. It's a transaction. We have to make sure we're in small business, business, to your point, you are definitely dealing with more human emotions.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And having to watch them go through that. Yeah.

And I love the fact you look at the fact if anybody tries to come into that division as a, I'll put my time in so I can gravitate, elevate, no pun intended, to the next level up, you're out.

Yeah. And I'm not saying that we haven't had folks that have done that, right? They've come into the firm and, you know, Ultimately, just felt like that was maybe a good fit for them. So I'm not saying we don't do that, but that's not our intention to keep this as a training space for anyone. Likewise, we've also brought in mid-market producers into the firm.

Have you ever had anybody start at mid and come down?

We have, and we've had some really great success stories. Helping people find the right seat on the bus is the best way I can describe it, right? If they come in and you know they're all they're producing or bringing in is referrals to elevate, well, maybe you should consider joining the team. And some of that's a little bit of an optic thing, right? You know it's. It's again, not sexy to support small business when you're a broker. And so when you're outside coming in, going into the small business unit doesn't really sound sexy to me, right? And so I want to go after big things, but it turns out all I'm connected to and all I'm really passionate about might be small business. And that's okay.

And the best part is there's no wrong answer.

Nope.

You live in a small town Wisconsin and that's what your network is. and you're part of the chamber and you're involved in the local community, that might actually be the best path for success for you in business.

Absolutely.

I think about it, you know, you think about the local, uh, personal lines, homeowners, auto agent in town, right? And the old— see the billboards of American Family? And I used to look at them like, why would anybody want to do that? But then the more you think about it is some people love— because it's— they, they have a love for their community.

They do. They absolutely do.

Great living doing They do. I'd be curious to know, with your journey, going back to I met you, large group rep at UnitedHealthcare, to Rebecca today running Elevate, a system, a division built for small business, what have been some of your biggest lessons learned in the last decade?

Wow. Biggest lessons learned for me, ask really good questions. I still say that today. I gotta ask better questions. You learn things—

Of your team, of your clients.

Of your team, of the client, of the situation. I've learned there are always multiple views to any situation that has happened. I've learned to have a lot of patience and grace and understanding with the team. So what I would say with that is, And what I'm trying to convey there is that sometimes we feel like we're delivering on a client's needs, but maybe we're completely missing the mark and we're not asking the right questions. And so somehow it bubbles up and sometimes it'll come to me. And so we've— typically what happens is I'll run to the producer and try to understand what happened, what's going on, how can I help? But inherently what happens is a defense mechanism comes up really quick. And so just like, I didn't know, I'm doing everything I can. And okay, but there's these 2 things that maybe could have changed the trajectory of your communication style. And so how do you kind of help address and also create a space where people can continue to learn and grow through that and not feel like they did anything wrong or anything like that? But maybe that's It's really good for us all to just really sit down and I say, I want to jump in the boat with you and get the water out.

Yeah.

I'm not trying to sink your boat. You're not losing your job. This is nothing bad, depending on the situation, right? But I'd like to figure out how we can help this together. So we've really worked towards creating a team environment where we're open and honest with each other. And so if something even feels like it's going to go south, let's just talk about it so we can get ahead of it. Where before it was always very reactionary. I'd find out, you know, find out things behind the scenes and that you're doing the cleanup on aisle 5. And I, what I think has been so great about all of this is just watching them do that and support each other. But it's just really being really engaged. I've had to be really engaged and I've just learned so much about small business and the things that they care about. And some of it I wasn't even Yeah, right on.

Well, and I think your point's well made. You may believe you're meeting expectations, but the only expectation that matters is your clients.

Absolutely.

And I think if there's one thing that is overlooked far too much in this industry, it's are you meeting your— are one, are you setting clear expectations, and then are you meeting them? Yeah, you can sell me any great idea you want, any cost containment But at the end of the day, if you don't meet my expectations, I don't care. I don't care how much money you can save me because you're not meeting my expectations.

Right. And how do you know if you haven't met their expectations if you don't ask?

Bingo.

Very rarely is it offered up.

I think the number one question to be asked by every client at renewal or just right after is, how are we doing?

How are we doing? Is there any more we can be doing for you?

And be okay with what you're about to hear.

Absolutely. That's the other thing. You have to be really okay with what you're about to hear, even if it doesn't feel great. And sometimes it doesn't feel great. Yep. But we learn, we move.

Well, this has been an awesome conversation, Rebecca. Thank you. Uh, like I said, uh, I think small business is an area of insurance that still gets overlooked too much because people just think not enough revenue, too much work. But I think you guys have proven, again, $3.5 million to $11.5 million in revenue, that if Build what's that in five years? It's four x pretty much in five years. That if you put a system around it and find the right people, not only becomes a revenue generator, it becomes the what's the incubator for future big clients because as those clients grow, you have the system to help them elevate and graduate to your next.

And they're so warm to us already.

And they love at that point. Yeah, they're not going anywhere else. Absolutely. Well, I like to finish every episode getting to know the person I interview. And I don't prepare you for these questions.

Uh oh.

So we're gonna get to know Rebecca a little bit. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Now they're pretty simple. Don't don't get don't get okay.

I won't overthink.

I am a man who loves rituals, habits, discipline. One of them is my morning routine. Ah. Now you have how many children?

I have two children.

Ages?

Nineteen and fourteen.

Okay. So there's there ones yeah one's in college and one's okay. What does your typical morning routine look like?

So my typical morning routine, I get up pretty early. I'll get up depending on the day. I typically get like to get in a nice workout session in the morning.

You work out at home?

I work out. No, I go to a hot studio in Oconomowoc. I go to Eighth State. Plug for them. Where's that? They're over by the Kilty.

Oh, okay.

So you can get a shake afterwards. I'm just kidding. I don't.

I never do that. Still eat you some after you're done.

It's a little good.

Two thousand dollar, two thousand calorie burger when you're. You're done. Yeah.

Uh, but yeah, so I, I tend to get in a, a 45-minute power heated room workout, uh, first thing in the morning. I don't even anymore, I stop checking my phone until after that. I don't even check my email. I also, I also have my do not disturb set after 10:00 PM. There's nothing that I need to get any notification on work-related. It probably could be earlier. Um, but I do create some nice boundaries.

Yeah.

For me and my family. I call it my marriage saver. So we do that. I get up, I do the workout, I come back. It takes me usually a couple minutes to cool off from that, but I have my coffee, I get ready, and then I go into the office and I usually have a gauntlet of meetings. I literally am back to back. I have to try to create some nice space to get some actual project work done. Otherwise, the work just doesn't get done, but there's no shortage of things to do as soon as I hit the office. And then usually it's, you know, I usually almost almost always end the day with some sort of client engagement or a carrier engagement or something like that that takes me to the end of the day.

Well, you gave us a little feel for the workout, but I'm going to ask you to go into a little more detail. So my question is going to be: If you had 60 minutes to work out, what's your go-to workout? So describe the workout you're doing. When you say it's a hot, what are we talking about here?

So it. It's two days of mat hot mat Pilates, okay? And then two days of sculpt, which is weightlifting.

The room is always hot.

A ninety-degree room.

Ninety-degree room.

Both classes ninety degrees.

Okay.

Buckets of sweat.

If you had an afternoon to yourself, no kids, no husband, afternoon to yourself, what are you doing?

Ooh, probably getting a massage or something. That'd be great. I haven't done that in a while, so that's probably not what I'm doing because I haven't done that in a while.

Just gave you an idea.

I guess I don't really get a lot of afternoons to myself.

Get that.

Get that. Uh, but in this time of year too, um, I get a nice Friday afternoon. I wouldn't say to myself, I try to grab somebody. I don't like to be by myself too much. I like to be around people.

Are you an extrovert?

I am very much an extrovert. I need to be around people. So if I can grab somebody to go hit 9 or go do links and drinks and go—

What's your favorite course around here? I live on Paganica, so I go to Paganica, which we locally like to call Paganica.

Paganica. Yep. Yep. I've heard that one a lot. So yeah. Yep, yep.

You're a reader, listener of podcasts? What's your, what's your go-to? I love to create a list for our listeners. If you had a book or a podcast you've read or listened to, any recommendations?

Well, podcasts, I have to recommend the Fast Break podcast by M3.

Oh, you guys have a— I didn't know you had. So it's called Fast Break?

It's called Fast Break. Okay. And it's actually—

What's behind the name?

Um, so it's meant to be short sessions.

Okay.

Geared towards small business.

Ah, nice work.

And things that small businesses care about. So actually my—

Are you hosts?

My EVP hosts. I will take over the session on occasion. Usually Women's Business Month is usually when I take over that session, but on occasion I'm a guest as well, depending on what we are talking about that month. So—

It's just another channel of marketing.

That's my favorite podcast. I don't, well, and I listen to SmartLess a lot as well, The which one? Smartless.

I don't even know what that one is.

Oh, it's Bateman, Jason Bateman. Oh yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay.

So it's great.

Well, awesome. This was great, Rebecca. Thank you for taking the time to do that.

I thank you for having me.

I think there's a lot of people who are going to take a lot from this episode because either a producer who may be struggling with managing a small business book or agencies trying to figure out what the heck to do with their small business. So I think there's a lot to be learned from here. So thank you.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

All right, be good, everybody.

Thanks.