Episode 17 : Team Technology

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This podcast will give you all the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Millionaire agents and entrepreneurs think and act differently than others. This podcast will give you a simple, proven three step blueprint to grow your business. Over the past 31 years of research in your industry, Mike Stromso has created a unique philosophy called the three people process and promotion. This outside the box thinking and guidance provides agency entrepreneurs just like you the knowledge and tools you can quickly implement to explode your agency business. He has been there, done that, and he's still doing it. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or are well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromso.

Hey, greetings everybody. This is Mike Stromco coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. We are here for episode 17 of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast and today we're going to be talking about technology. When I think of technology and the evolution of technology in my journey in the insurance industry of 31 plus years, I can't think of one thing other than processes and systems and excellent people and lots of other cool stuff that is giving me more freedom than technology. That's exactly what technology is. And I want to give you an update on the state of the art of technology tools in the insurance agency business based on our experience from our Living Agency Laboratory and what we've done to date. And keep a very open mind today because, friends, there is absolutely zero limit on what you can do to put yourself in a position to be at the top of the pinnacle of the efficiency evolution. And it will never stop. It's going to continue to evolve. Now my other.

Thought for you today is as I look at my buddy sos, who's my squirrel, sitting on my desk, and he's looking at me with his eye and saying, don't go there. I'm going to go there for just a moment. Don't squirrel too much on technology because you can get really, really sideways and you can think that you're going to, you know, just cut hours and hours and hours off of your day by investing in all this extra technology. Sometimes it's too much. So, you know, the case in point, if you want an example of something like that, you know, monitoring employees, online activities.

And that kind of software, I can't remember the name of it, I looked at it a number of Years ago. And I thought to myself after thinking about it for a day or two, I thought, you know, if I go into monitoring people's, you know, website activity and what they're doing all day long, I'll flipping never get anything done because I'm going to be consumed by, you know, the fact that they, oh my God, they went on Amazon during the middle of the day. All right, you know what that really boils down to? It boils down to trust. And you know where that is developed and learned about in the hiring process. My buddy SOS is looking at me, don't go there. I'm not going to go there. But that's ultimately at the end of the day. So you know, don't let technology overwhelm you or consume you. Just get the right technology in place so that you and more importantly your team members can operate at peak efficiency all day, every single day to get that bottom line expense in the right place so that your ultimate profits are where you want them to be. So.

Again, having the right people in place, excellent people, world class processes and systems and then just promoting the heck out of it. And this technology helps with all that. So it all falls right in line with the three Ps. So technology is critically important. Number one, it can change completely the way that your business runs almost overnight if you allow it to. And more importantly, you put the right people in place managing your technology. And ladies and gentlemen, I can't tell you if I added it up, it would be probably years that I have wasted, Yes, I said wasted in doing my own technology. I mean, there was a day when I had nothing. I started from scratch in 98. I was doing my own janitorial, I was doing my own phones, I was under the desks hooking up wires. I was doing a lot of my IT that I could handle simply. Then I would hire out what I couldn't handle. But that's the way it was back then. I mean, I didn't have any money and I didn't have anybody else to do it, so I had to do it myself. But you know, looking back, I might have invested sooner in IT professionals who knew a heck of a lot more than I did about something and so they could run with it, so I could do what I do. And my job is to protect people and everything they work so hard for. And I should be doing only that. So that's what technology lends for you as well. So allow it, allow it to change the way that you do business and invest in people who can handle that for you as your budget allows and just run forward. Okay. It really started for me back in the early change, right past the turn of the century. I was at a conference. Becoming more. That's right. If you want to have more, you've got to become more. I consistently invest in becoming more. Just this year I can think of 1, 2, 3, at least 3 or 4 big.

New items that I have invested in to become more. My director doesn't even know about some of those yet and she's looking at me like, what did you do? Well, I'm not going to show that yet, but anyway, because I want to consistently become more. Alright, so there was a speaker at this event who was giving away a bonus software and it began to change the way we do business. It was called Paperport way back then. Nowadays it's owned by Nuance and it's still part of our operation today. But what it did, it took away paper files from our organization. We haven't made a paper file since 2001. And this consultant also told me one thing that I will never forget and I still share this story. You know, the agency is only going to be paperless as long as the bathroom is paperless. And ladies and gentlemen, you know that's never going to happen. So it's never going to be completely paperless. But what it has done, it's completely eliminated mounds of paper and files and everything from our desks. And it allows us to just be at the peak of our efficiency with just what we need to do our daily operations. So, you know, back then we had these little tiny scanners on our desk. They were like a tube. I don't have anything comparable on my desk. It's like if you roll up an 8 1/2 11 piece of paper and make a tube out of it. It was a tube like that. That was some of the very first scanners. And they were sitting on the desk. They were extremely difficult. I remember that. And I had this piece of. I don't even know what they called it. It was a like a piece of paper that I'd stick in there like every couple of days to clean all the crap out of the inside of the scanner to make it, you know, work so I could read the documents. It was crazy. But you know, the other thing that I thinking back on all that is every new piece of technology that I introduce, we'll take a webcam as something that you might introduce to your team to do video proposals. Okay. So before I ever introduce a webcam to My own team, I would always buy one for myself. Anything I did, the scanner, the new scanners, the headsets, all that kind of stuff. And I'm going to talk about that in a minute. I always bought it myself and I used it myself for a week or two so I could work out all the kinks, so I could learn how to properly train them and enlighten them on how it works. Because remember, you cannot teach and you cannot train on anything that you don't know how to do yourself. And if that's not your place in your particular organization, that's not your seat. That's fantastic. Well then make sure the person who's going to be teaching and training the people within your organization do that same thing. You know, get used to it for a week or two so they know exactly what to expect during that training process. So, you know, I would buy the webcam first and I would use it for a week or two myself. And I'll get used to it. That way I could better teach and train people within my organization exactly how to do that. So that was the beginning of the technology evolution in our business.

Again, we've been paperless since 2001. We've been on the super highway of technology efficiency and evolution since then. It's a fantastic, incredible place to be. And again, what's in it for you? Freedom. What's in it for you? Repeat that? Freedom.

And the question is, according to our good friend Jeb Blunt, how bad do you want it? Okay, let me give you a little tip that I just thought of that's not on my sheet here, but you know, if it's not within the budget, I've got a great resource for leasing of this kind of technology and computer information, that kind of stuff. They do a fabulous. Because my accountant's always telling me, because our profit is now at a level that I'm extremely proud of, she's always going buy something, buy something so I can, you know, have more write off for you. Grateful for it. Right. So, you know, as we continue to upgrade in technology, we're continually leasing new stuff and they do a term lease, whether it be two years, three years, four years, whatever, and then it's just like a dollar buyout at the end and it's ours. So if you need a referral of that kind of company, let me know. And he was just fantastic. Awesome. There's no qualification of any kind. I guess as long as you're not been BK recently, you're good. So good stuff. Anyway, so what about your Team's technology. Have you gone up to your team's desk lately and got an idea what they have available at their fingertips to make their day more efficient and better? I've got a short list and I'm sure some of you have longer lists and if you have more information on this, we'd certainly love to know about it. There might be on this email. Just reply to this email or go to a link on this email down towards the bottom and let us know, let us know what you've got that maybe we didn't mention. So the first thing we have is we have a voiceover Internet protocol phone system with headsets at every desk and even our people who work remotely. And yes, we people have work remotely, by the way. Let's talk about why people work remotely because they've, first of all, they've earned the right. Secondly, the people that work remotely, trust is there and it's all about the trust. Okay, we are entering into new telecommuting agreements with the people that work remotely. We've yet to have that meeting because we haven't been able to collect everybody yet, but it's coming up very soon, so that's a part of it. But back to the VoIP phone system. So back to freedom. You know, I've got a voip phone system at my desk here in the office. I've got, I've got a voip phone system at my desk in my home office. I just give somebody my direct line. They don't know where I'm at, they don't care where I'm at as long as I pick up the phone and appropriately handle them when they call. And it's the same thing for everybody on our team. So critically important stuff. Let's talk about headsets for a minute. Because most people have them, but I still talk to people that don't have headsets.

When you have both hands free, it's absolutely freeing, okay, to be able to type with both hands, to point to, click to, whatever, and you're just sitting there dialoguing with people and it allows you to be conversational at the same time while you're getting work done as far as input and that kind of thing. So headsets were an absolute game changer for us. Alright? So voip phone systems that run over the Internet, it gives you the freedom to redirect and record and do all kinds of awesome stuff that maybe a regular phone system cannot do. So if you don't have have that, please investigate that and I will give you this bit of A warning, right. If you're not in the VoIP phone environment and you enter into it, there will be a three month or so learning curve. There's just something about entering into that environment. There's some bumps in the road with call quality and this kind of stuff as you get started. Everybody that I've ever talked to experiences that. So don't let it bother you. Just keep moving forward. AM ff. You will be fine. Okay, so just know that something about just getting in sync, that's all I got. Okay. At least a minimum of dual monitors at every desk. The size of the monitors is absolutely awesome. So the bigger the monitors you can get, the better. There's so many different options as far as monitors out there, but. And you don't want to overwhelm yourself with that either. I mean, you know, technically I still only have two monitors at my desk. I tried three. I just squirreled way too much. You know, I need to be laser focused on exactly what I'm doing. I don't want social media open all day or any of that other time wasting nonsense. And that's just me talking, not an opinion. That's just me talking. Right. I want to be dialed into exactly what I'm doing. We've got scanners at every desk. We want people not running around interrupting somebody else. If you have a central scanning service, fantastic, that works too. But you got to have scanning ability available for everybody without interruption of somebody else's day. We have currently our world. We have our own servers. We're not at the.

Control of anybody else. We completely control our own destiny. That's the way it's been for years.

We had all of our servers removed from our organization a number of years ago. They went to a central location. As I understand it. They're no longer there. But all of our data's within an environment and we own our own cloud platform. It's absolutely phenomenal. Everybody's on the same page, everybody's on the same software. They're all updating the same thing. And you know, we had an issue happen just last week and I frankly don't know what happened. It was last Friday, I know that. And everybody was kind of up in arms. And the tech people said, hey, just sit tight for 15 minutes. Get out of everything, we'll fix it. They fixed it. We went right back to work. I mean, it was all right, great, no problems, you know. And there was a day back in the world of technology. You know, our IT people were encouraging us strongly to get onto another platform. It Was not d. It was.

I don't know, is some kind of Internet connection. They wanted to double the size of my pipe. And I remember the conversation we would have hiccups and I was get frustrated. I said, how come we kind of go down from time to time? And he says, you need to upgrade your pipe. And I said, how much is that going to cost? And he goes, it's going to cost you like 150 to $200 more a month. And I said, that's not the budget. He said, your life will be so much better if you'll just trust me. After it happened again and happened again and it happened again, I finally said, just do it. I'll have to find a way. I'll just take a leap of faith. And friends, I will tell you, have not looked back since. And you know, that was kind of my turning point. And this was a number of years ago, I don't remember how many, but you know, that was the point where I said, you know what, I'm not going to question technology. I'm going to continue to invest in it with people who know more than I do and have not looked back since. So you really got to trust and you got to trust your technology person completely. And the more I put that trust in that person, the more I just let go. I let the fishing, I throw the bait out in the water, meaning the IT person, and just let the line go out in the water. The more I let go, the better it gets. So you got to have that trust there. We have our own online proposal platforms for both personal and commercial. We are building newer platforms that are going to be what we consider to be state of the art. It takes training. We have so much new stuff going on that many of my team members don't even know about yet. I'm training on that again tomorrow. Just exciting, exciting, exciting stuff. We're going to be delivering state of the art new proposal and renewal information to our marketplace that will be just live length that they're not going to have to print out any paper. It's just going to be answering questions on a live link, clicking go. It'll come right back to us, dump into the platform and we're doing our stuff. So it's exciting stuff and we couldn't be more excited about that. Webcams at every desk that's doing any kind of proposals, you know, people. And you need to also have the ability to do online meetings. So we use GoToMeeting. We have a couple people that are on webex. As well. So that kind of format where people can see you and you can do that, I mean, people use Skype and a lot of other things too. That's fantastic. Whatever works for you, right? But it's that face to face. I mean, if you can't get the live face to face, where it's human interaction, a face to face via a video conferencing situation is really, really close. I mean, you're looking at each other and here's the most important thing you've got. You've got each other's attention.

Because think about it like on a webinar and they weren't looking at you. What were you doing? Now come on. All progress starts by telling the truth. You were dealing with email or you're looking at your phone. You weren't completely engaged with that person doing the webinar. You were what I call half learning, you know? And you know how I know that? I do the same thing. Alright, so when you've got video conferencing going on or something similar to that, you are engaged, okay? So you know, many, many, many times that I've got a complicated insurance situation, I will dial somebody up, I'll bring them into my computer via GoToMeeting or WebEx and I'll have my paper port up there. I will be prepared. Remember Ben Franklin said, if you're failing to prepare, if you're planning to. If you're not planning. Let me jump back on this, okay? If you're failing to plan, you're planning to fail, okay? So you got to plan ahead. I plan for the meetings, I get them up on my paper port, I dial people in and I've got the entire platform of what I want to talk about right there, okay? I bring it up and they're seeing. So when people hear, they learn. But when they hear and they see, they understand. And ultimately, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about. You want that complete understanding. Because keep in mind, confused people don't act or buy. Okay, so you want to bring that. So that's where the online meetings are so powerful. So that's where the webcam and a lot of that other technology comes into play and there's a lot more. So let me give you a little what's in it for you on the technology side as well? It is an investment, okay? We're not spending money on technology, we are investing in technology. Right? You've got to do your research. In our world, technology is the fourth largest line item on Our P and L in the expense category, after payroll and benefits, after taxes and, and after advertising, marketing and advertising, those three things have a higher line item than technology. But technology is number four. So we invest heavily in technology, we believe in technology, we believe in investing in technology, we believe in getting better. We've got a video room right next door to my office that we invest in. We invest in these things. Do your research, ask for live referrals. And most of these people, a lot of people out there in the technology world, there's no long term commitment. You are in the driver's seat.

Again. What's in it for you? By investing in technology and consistently getting better with technology, it creates freedom, it creates remote access, it allows you to go to your kids baseball game in the afternoon and it allows you to go home and finish up the stuff that you would have stayed at the office missing the baseball game doing. It's a.

Different world out there socially.

From a work standpoint, from an income standpoint, people understand that. And here's the bottom line. If you said you're going to do something, then just do it, okay? And don't make that commitment. We have this little pet peeve in our office concerning phone calls. When we say, hey, we're gonna get back to you, we always religiously say, and we train on this all the time. We never say, I'll get back to you today. We always, always, always say, we will get back to you as soon as possible. We will get back to you as soon as possible. Never promise same day. Because the minute we don't call them back the same day, we, we're a liar and we don't want that for anybody. So. And if somebody calls us on the carpet says how long is as soon as possible? Well, we're going to do everything that we can to get back to you immediately or same day. Can't guarantee it. We tell people that, okay, same thing with, you know, if you've got to leave the office for a kid's performance or a game or whatever, that technology will be there and you will have the freedom to just do what you do. It's an awesome, awesome thing. How great would it feel if you could not just save minutes but hours in your day? Technology allows me all of those things to time block, to plan, to do the high priority work that I need to do on my time and nobody else's. How would you feel? You would feel like I feel most of the time when I get to completely direct my path. I would feel you will feel And I do feel on top of the world. Yes, again, it's an investment, but it will increase your team efficiency. It will increase your team productivity. It will give you the freedom to work whenever you want to. It will give you the freedom to work whenever you choose. What does this mean for you? You're going to be able to live the life that you want to live. We can help you get there. If there's ever anything more that we said that we can do for you, please let us know what that is. We want to help you get down that path. Remember, get out there and implement, execute and take action. Thinking about it's not going to do it. Talking about it's not going to do it. Only implementing, executing, taking action is going to get you where you want to go. Yes, there's going to be wins. Yes, there's going to be lessons. But you got this right. Until next time, make a difference. Be unstoppable. Leave no regrets. Thanks friends. Have a great day. Thank you for listening. If you would like to listen to more episodes or share this podcast with someone you care about, please visit www.unstoppableprofitpodcast.com. now go out and make a difference. Be unstoppable and leave no regrets.