Episode 20 : Special Guest Bill Butler

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.

Greetings, everybody. This is Mike Stromcoe coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. And we are, believe it or not, already on podcast number 20. And because it is podcast number 20, we thought we would really go into the golden arsenal and pull out an absolute golden nugget for you as the 20th Unstoppable Profit podcast. And this time, it's going to be an interview. And it took us a long time, I mean, 19 weeks to get this guy, but we finally corralled him. This guy has been absolutely on fire, ladies and gentlemen.

In the words.

And I think I was talking to one of our recent podcast interviews with the amazing Jesse Parenti, and we said the same thing. And we. And I'm sure our guest today will attest to this. But if you do what is easy, your life will be hard. But if you do what is hard, your life will be easy. And that was the unstoppable, amazing Les Brown that said that. And that's one of the things that I think about when I ponder what this guest has done and what he continues to do, because he's done the hard stuff. And I'm going to let him tell you a little bit more about his story. It's my pleasure, my absolute pleasure, to introduce the unstoppable Bill Butler to today's podcast. Bill, how are you doing, sir?

I'm doing great today, Mike. Thanks for having me on.

Hey, you're welcome. Thanks for making time, carving time out of your.

I know.

Mounting busy schedule right now. Bill is from Apple Valley, Minnesota, so. Bill, Minnesota. Excuse me. Bill.

Correct.

Thank you.

A song.

Tell everybody a little bit about your journey in the insurance industry. Who you are, where you're from and anything else you want to add?

Sure. Well, first, again, thanks for having me on today, Mike.

As most insurance professionals, I didn't plan on being in the insurance industry in a prior life. I was a military recruiter and my parents had an insurance agency like you'd mentioned, in Apple Valley, Minnesota at about close to a 12 year military career going and was ready for a change in transition. And in 2004 transitioned away from recruiting and things that I had been doing in the military before that into the insurance industry. And when people look at Butler and Associates and they see a father, son or parents and a son in the insurance industry, they think legacy agency. But this is a second career for my dad and my mom and they started the agency in 2002. So my parents started an insurance agency out of a partnership that my dad had been in as a second career. So I really came into the insurance industry without a lot of stability. My parents were just working on keeping the business going and had really a five or six year rocky start just trying to figure out what and how to be an insurance agent working with my parents. And it was just the three of us and had a few different evolutions. I think we're probably on evolution number three, maybe four, and.

Had to really self teach on personal insurance, commercial insurance.

And so it's been like I said, we're on probably our fourth evolution and it's just been a real journey to get to where we are today with me being in the industry for 14 years and the agency being around for 16.

Fantastic. Thank you for sharing. And I know that you're a proud independent insurance agent and your story is extremely admirable. But now you put in the 10,000 hours. Is that accurate?

That actually came up in some learning I was doing earlier this year. And one of the consistent things that was coming up, not that these are benchmarks that you have to hit, but.

Napoleon Hill thinking, go rich, 40 years old, 10,000 hours. And you hear those messages over and over where you're 35, 40 years old, 10,000 hours in a profession or avocation, and that's where you really start to hit your stride. And two or three years ago is when that really occurred for me.

And so yeah, the 10,000 hour mark.

Has been, you hear it spoken about, but I think there's something really to that, where you're comfortable in your own skin being that person, whether it's an independent insurance agent or whatever it is, having that expertise and knowledge to rely on as a base to move forward and be able to Grow your business.

Absolutely. So we see that an awful lot that people out of the gate, maybe a newer agent who might be listening to this, that maybe has been in business for less than a year, they are struggling to understand that. But ultimately, at the end of the day, Bill, you have to get your feet wet and you have to learn some lessons, as we say. Is that accurate? Because we're always looking for wins, but.

There'S going to be lessons that's 100% accurate. We had some lessons today at the agency.

Oh, yeah.

As far as having the experience, whether you have one year in the industry or less than a year, up to you're just starting your own agency or you've got.

20 years of experience, you have to be able to know when to say no and not be afraid to make a mistake. And, you know, mistakes are going to happen to everyone, but it's what you do with those mistakes. Like you said, the lessons that you learn.

And be able to move forward from that and, you know, turn into a teachable moment in the agency, whether that's for a team member or for yourself.

And be able to move forward from that and not have, you know, hear about fear and worry, not have the fear, worry that I'm going to make a mistake. You're going to make them. Just make them and move forward, Learn your lesson and turn it into something positive. Yeah.

And not to insert a negative into anything, but, you know, one of the greatest things that I learned and think about this, been about 10 years, I'm going to say I was learning from somebody when something goes wrong. He said, look, think about it like this. Nobody died, you can recover and you can move on.

Correct? I agree 100%. Yeah.

And so, Bill, I've got a couple things that I want to talk to you about today because they're unique to you, things that we so much admire about who you are and what you're doing. And I've positioned a couple of questions and I'm going to let you kind of take it and run with it. But one of the things that you.

Do.

So well and is so admirable, and we run into a lot of people who don't do this. And so it's an extremely strong encouragement for anybody who might be listening to this to please do more of this. And it's implementation. Bill, what would you say to somebody who might be listening to this right now who's on the fence about implementing their next great idea? I mean, Bill, why are you such a strong implementer? Where did that come from and somebody who wants to think about it some more and talk about it some more, who's not willing to implement, how can they get out of that habit?

Well, implementation is like exercising a muscle. And the more you implement and the more you take action with things, you say that all the time, Implement, take action. The more you do it, the easier it gets. And part of it is focus and drive.

It's actually a little bit to my detriment sometimes, but I run into it in my personal life, I run into it in my business life where I see something that needs to happen and I do it. Shannon's my wife. Shannon and her family have a saying. Where there's a bill, there's a way. Instead of where there's a will, there's a way.

If you see something that you want to do, don't set it aside. Think, okay, I need to get this done. Whether it's creating a checklist, whether it's starting a hiring process, implementing a sales process.

Whatever that is.

If you recognize something that needs to happen, just do it. It's as simple as it sounds. Simple. But you see the piece of trash sitting on the ground and there's a trash can right there. Just pick it up and throw it in the trash. It's the same process. Just take the extra time to do it. And it is going to take extra time. Because small, not even small independent insurance agencies have a level of care and technical knowledge that other insurance professionals don't have. If you are a direct writer with one of the big carriers, you don't have to learn all the carriers, you don't have to learn all the billing, you don't have to learn all the claims. Teach your people how to do all these things. We're free agents, and that creates more work, but it also creates more freedom. And so because of that, we have more on our plate as an independent insurance agency than I think most other insurance professionals do. And so it is going to take extra time on your part. It's going to take long hours. Very early on, I attended one of your boot camps and saw that you had an agency intranet. And that was a goal that I wanted to have for Butler and Associates, was to have our own agency intranet. And we started the process of building that one task organizer at a time, one checklist at a time, and seeing something that you know is going to be a force multiplier for your agency or your business. If you recognize that that's something that you have to do, you have to make it A top priority. And the 3 times 5 by 50 equals 750. The magic formula really holds true. And, you know, I don't do three things every day, but the days that I do three things, I've really accomplished a lot because those three things down the road, whether it's a month, six months, a year, are going to pay off. And perfect example, Mike. I had a client call today. He said, hey, I just bought a boat, I need to get it insured. I'm picking it up on the 23rd. Well, I had taken action a month ago with a new team member who was learning how to quote boat insurance and created a checklist with all the questions and information on a fillable PDF to be able to send to a client for them to fill out. And instead of me having to ask all the questions in an email right before our call, as a matter of fact, I was able to say, hey, Jerry, thanks for the call today. Here's the checklist. Get it filled out. We'll be able to get your proposal to you as soon as we get the information back. 30 second email, attaching a document versus oh yeah, what do I need? I need the hull number, I need the horsepower, I need the length. Who's going to drive it? All these things by taking that extra time, implementing, taking action and having that on our intranet. I've got the form ready to go. And that again, is a force multiplier to allow your team members to be able to process insurance faster, provide a higher level of customer service and expertise to our clients.

Fantastic.

So you took the steps and it's.

Made your life easier. Correct? And just like you were saying about doing what's hard to make life easy.

A couple years ago, my dad walked into my office and he said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm making a checklist. He goes, that looks boring and it is boring. Making a checklist is not fun. There's a great book out there that another UPP agent had sent to me called the Checklist Manifesto. And it is a great book about creating checklists, how to create checklists that will streamline an organization. I recommend that book for anyone out there who is looking to add some streamlined processes into your business.

But doing something that isn't fun. Creating a checklist is hard because you are going to have to make one. Then you are going to have to do a second version. Then you are going to realize that I forgot to put pontoon boat on the checklist and go back and do it again. And doing those Hard things. But.

I was able to send an easy email instead of having to take the time and find all those underwriting questions. So the implementation part, back to that component of it. You just have to have the dedication to your business and to yourself to say, this is an important thing that I know I have to do to be successful. And it boils down to having your goals written down. What are the goals? I want to have an intranet. I had that goal written down. I still have it written down. It's one of the things that we're working on at the agency this year and looking at your goals and then implementing and taking action. Because what gets written down gets done. If you look at it, you're going to see it.

What do I want to get out of this business? And the why and how those things wind up making themselves simpler. But you have to be willing to, like you said, take action. And it's like a muscle. The more you do it, the easier it gets. You do one task, then you do another task, then you do another task. You create one checklist. Once you get in that role, you might create three checklists at once versus just one. Because you have that momentum going. Big mo. You have momentum going, and you're able to implement more because you have that. That muscle built up. Start small.

What is that going to mean for you, Bill, and what would that mean to anybody who might be listening to this.

Down the line in the future as you're developing your business, already having that done?

Well, what it's done for. Speaking about Butler and Associates, what it's done for us is it's been able to streamline the onboarding process for new team members. I don't have to teach everything because we have an intranet, Bill, that's not complete, but we have a lot of stuff there. So I don't have to teach every task to someone because we have a process and procedure written down about how to do a billing change, how to process a cancellation, how to issue a certificate of insurance. And it's unique and custom to Butler and Associates based on how we do business. And if there's a question, I say, well, why don't you go take a look at the task organizer or take a look at the process and procedure, and if you have questions, come talk to me after that, I don't have to sit there because I've done my due diligence on the front end and hired a superstar. Hopefully they're able to follow a set of instructions, go through that, and I can backfill the information, give some additional training and guidance. But I don't have to take as much time out of my busy schedule to handhold someone through the process of doing a quote. I have a 40 minute video on our intranet on how to do a quote through EZ Lynx, which is our comparative rating software we use from start to finish. So take a look at that video, walk yourself through it and then they have that resource there if they have a question to go back to. So I don't have my door knocked on 20 times a day asking a question, hey, what coverage level should I pick for this homeowner's policy in this quota in EZ Lynx? The answer is out there.

So what has that meant for you, Bill?

Well, it's freed up my time. What it's done for me, Mike, is.

It'S freed up my time to focus on high level things that only I can do. There's parts of the business as an agency owner or as a high level sales producer that only you can do. Only I can meet with carrier representatives and talk about plans we have for the future and asking for co op advertising. Developing a niche commercial program that I'm working on that a lot of UPP members know about. Niches to riches. Only I can develop that niche commercial program that I want to work in. Personally, no one's going to be able to do that for me. But if I'm spending my time quoting home and auto insurance or helping my team members quote home and auto insurance, I don't have time to work on the high level tasks that only the agency, principal or high level sales producer can do.

Fantastic. Friends, I hope you're taking copious notes about what Bill is saying because he just keeps dropping gold nugget after gold nugget. One thing I wrote down, Bill, in support of your intranet efforts. Fantastic job, by the way, in being a massive implementer and getting things done that are going to create the agency to support what you want to do. The Internet is never complete, is it?

No, never.

Yeah, it's always going to be a work in progress and there will always be something that needs to be updated or something that will change, right?

Yeah. If you're waiting for something to change, you're too late because it already changed. That's right.

That's absolutely right. I wrote this one down. Where there's a bill, there's a way. I absolutely love that. So we'll be using that in a fun way, I'm sure in the future. That's a fantastic butlerism I guess, if you will.

So Bill, you've created this amazing infrastructure to allow you to do these high level things. Let's talk about a high level thing that you found the time to work on and you have developed the beginning of a niche which is part of your 20 mile march.

Correct.

And I don't expect you to spill too many beans unless you want to. But your goals.

Are laid out well into the future.

Correct.

Share with everybody. We're going to do two steps on this. Since you love to dance.

First of all, the first step is you developed a niche. As somebody who might be thinking about developing a niche. Basic stuff. What are a few of the steps? Tell them what your niche is in a second and then tell them, the people listening, exactly what your mindset was and some of the steps that you took to begin to develop that and everything that you're now doing in the development of that niche.

Sure. Well, with the niche, the thing that I'll talk to people about the most is know that you have.

This is actually the third niche that I've worked on that I've developed.

The first one, I realized that.

I needed to hire a different salesperson to work in that niche based on.

The owners and managers in that niche. It was daycare centers. I don't have children and I'm not a woman. And the majority of daycare center managers, operators, directors and owners are all professional women. So I don't have that in common with them and I don't have children. And those two things, I didn't have enough in common with those business owners and decision makers to create a lasting relationship. I have a couple day care centers insured, thought it was a great niche to get into, but.

Spent 18 months working on that niche realizing I'm not going to get anywhere because of some things I don't have any control over. And if I wanted to play in that niche, I would have to hire a marketing person for that. Very lucrative. But I have to do some more legwork to make that happen. So that's a back burner. Second niche I went after was chiropractors and I didn't do my due diligence. And look at how much premium volume, what the lifetime revenue of a client was, what their spending habits were. Business owners, I mean those things are key components to developing a niche. Number one is, is there the premium volume and revenue to support what you want to do? I have a commercial producer in the agency who specifically focuses on bike shops. Well, that's a great niche to have, but There aren't as many bike shops as there are, say, fitness centers, which is another niche that he targets because he's a personal trainer. So he's got yoga studios, fitness centers, crossfits to backfill another niche that he's passionate about, which is bike shops. So you have to look at how many, what your market is either regionally in your county, metro state or region. And.

The niche that I'm targeting specifically is veterinarians. There's 27,000 small animal vet clinics in the United States.

How many?

That's a pretty 27,000.

27,000. So you did your homework there, correct?

Average premium volume on those is somewhere between 4 and 6,000 apiece for the property, casually. I'm sorry, for the business owner's policy. And then you have anywhere between four and six thousand dollars for the workers compensation insurance. So if you're not doing the math on the business that you want to target as a niche class, you're going to wind up spending a bunch of time on the front end saying, hey, I want to target this class of business, and then write a couple of them and go, oh man, I'm never going to make any money on this. And you've invested a year, 18 months, two years getting into that niche because that's how long it takes to build yourself, create a brand, get in, join the associations, do what you need to do. But if you don't do your research on the front end, I spent, like I said, Mike, this is my third niche that I've targeted with veterinarians. The other two, I probably spent four or five years collectively between the two of them working on building into those niches. So when I started veterinarians, I thought I need to do. I insured a few and thought, hey, this is a pretty good deal, but I need to do some more research on this first. So that would be the first thing I would say is do research on the niche that you want to target. Be passionate about it. If you've had Jesse Perennial, he's going to tell you, be passionate. Have it be something that you want to target, that you have a liking for and have an affinity for, because that may makes it easier to play in that marketplace. And then.

What'S going to differentiate you against any and all other options in the marketplace? Is it your insurance products? Is it your knowledge? Is it the offerings that you have from a service perspective? Are you giving things? And so for me, I've learned some things about the veterinarian class of business that other agents miss on A level that is quite honestly doing a disservice to those veterinarians.

How did you learn that they're going.

To find those reading policies, doing the hard work.

Taking a veterinarian out to lunch and saying, hey, I've got some questions for you. What keeps you up at night.

From an insurance perspective? How can I make this easier for you? What are you looking for out of your insurance program? And I have a seven question. I created seven questions to ask veterinarians. And the last veterinarian that I sold, I asked the question, how could I make this process easier for you? And they said nothing. This process was great. You did a great job. You couldn't make it easier for us. That tells me I'm on the right track with my questionnaires, with my application process, proposal process.

And then after the sale, getting them integrated into the agency, delivering a policy, putting it together, making it easy for them to buy insurance from me. Because that was one of the key components that I discovered was time is a critical element for veterinarians. Maybe not premium so much, but they don't have time. And anything I can do to give them back time or not, take time away from them is actually a win for them. So making the process easy, and that's going to differ from class of business to class of business.

Making it easy for people to buy insurance from me. I just wrote that down. I hope that anybody who's listening also wrote that down. And I'll repeat it. He's making it easy for people to buy insurance from him.

Friends, that's what the world is looking for.

We don't want to make it hard for them. And Bill talked about that earlier because he's got his processes down so well. He just sends them a fillable form and they quickly fill it out and send it back to him. Everybody's in. So that's fantastic, Bill, as we begin to wrap this up, and I know that we could probably talk about this for hours and thank you for your time. By the way, the keys to beginning to develop a niche, and you have learned many lessons through your niche development. I think about one of our other UPP niche experts, the unstoppable Russ Castle. A lot of people want to replicate his habitational niche and they said, well, I'm just going to do this, this and this when Russ shares it. Well, what they don't get is they don't know what Russ knows. And what I mean by that is.

He'S done the work, he's put in the 10,000 hours he's got eight or.

Nine years under his belt now. He's able to bing, bing, bing and just close like nobody else. And you are approaching the same pinnacle. Congratulations. But for somebody who's thinking about niches, to recap what you just said, most importantly, you've got to do the research.

Yep.

You got to find something you're passionate about.

You got to understand what separates you from the rest of the marketplace.

You've got to dial down to seven questions to ask vets and that's it, making it so easy for them to give you money. You've identified the list. You've got plenty of prospects at 27,000. And if my math is correct, there's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 in revenue, account minimum.

For each of those prospects. Right.

And if you're talking lifetime revenue, you're talking about $6,000 per client over five years. Aha.

So why don't you give the listeners just a 30, 60 second lifetime value lesson?

So I look at lifetime value at our agency at five years, whether that's personal or commercial. Some clients we keep longer, some clients we keep shorter. But if you're not looking at your return on investment, your lifetime revenue per client, what your revenue per policy is and what your revenue per client is, I don't care what your premium volume is. As an agency owner, it really matters what your revenues are. And so figuring out your revenue per client on a policy level and a per client level and then what that lifetime revenue is key to making your business more streamlined. Because if I can insure 20 clients at $10,000 instead of 50 clients at $1,000, I'm going to be way more profitable because I don't have to give as much service to all those clients who aren't generating the revenue.

And how did you figure all this out?

Track your numbers. You got to know your numbers. Pull a monthly report on your book of business.

Again, it takes time. It's a report I've got to pull every month and compile and track our production. I'm very excited about.

We segment our prospects as well as our clients. And so tracking our production on segmenting prospects, it takes work. You have to work with your team members. But again, it's one of those things where if you do what's hard, life is easy, and then you can quantify your numbers to your carrier partner and say, this is what we're actually doing. How about a little help from a marketing perspective? How about an override? How about these things? You can't ask for those if you don't know your numbers. And very few agency owners can tell you what their revenue per client with that carrier is.

It will impress people.

Fantastic. Well, congratulations. What a great place to be, huh?

It is a great place to be.

But you got to put in the work to do it.

You do have to put in the work. That four letter word.

That sometimes is dressed like overalls, right?

Correct. One of my favorite quotes, Mike, is Henry Ford says. Henry Ford says if you chop your own firewood, it will warm you twice.

Isn't that the truth? Because then you're in the position that nobody knows what you know. Exactly.

Well, Bill, it's certainly been a treat today and thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for carving out time for our listeners today to share what you've learned so far. And we can't wait to see what happens for Butler and Associates. And you know, we have a new catchphrase. Where there's a bill, there's a way.

That's correct.

That is awesome, Bill. One last nugget for everybody as we wrap this up. So somebody out there who's listening that hasn't been introduced to a lot of these thought processes being the people, the processes and the promotion.

Mentality or philosophy, if you will, what would you say to them?

The thing that I would say to them is just write down your goals and figure out some easy steps and wins that you can get under your belt to get the momentum moving forward. Be a learn it all and don't be afraid to learn from your lessons and make mistakes and that would be it. Just write down your goals, make a to do list and start ticking some stuff off. That's how I've gotten where I am over the last three or four years.

Fantastic. And congratulations again on your success. You've got a very bright future in front of you and please let us know what more we can do for you.

Will do, Mike. Thanks for having me on today.

Give our best to Shannon and the unstoppable Bill Butler from Apple Valley, Minnesota. Thank you.

Thanks, Mike.

All right, everybody, we'll see you on Unstoppable Profit podcast number 21 coming up. And remember that you can subscribe and listen to all of the profit podcasts that are out there by simply going to unstoppableprofitpodcast.com that's unstoppableprofitpodcast.com this is Mike Somso coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. We'll see you next time around, friends. Bill, thank you have a great day or wherever you're listening to this evening, whatever it is, make a difference, be unstoppable, and leave no regrets.

Thanks everybody.

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.

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