Episode 201: Implementer of the Year Shares Her Secrets with Erin Neill

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit podcast. This podcast will give independent insurance agents all of the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or 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 Stromsol.

Foreign.

Welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This is a very special podcast because finally, finally we were able to corral our reigning UPP Implementer of the year, the unstoppable Aaron Neal. And we'll get into why it took so long in just a couple minutes. Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me on.

Oh, you're welcome. I'm honored to have you here and I think part of the reason, and I'll let Erin share whatever she feels like sharing. It took so long to get her here because immediately after she left boot camp, she went right back to implementing, which is why she's the implementer of the year and has had massive achievement in her agency business. Super proud of her on that record. Months back to back and great stuff is happening. So great job, Aaron.

Thank you.

Fantastic. So if you've heard of Aaron Neal, then you understand why. And if you haven't heard of Aaron Neal, Aaron, can you just share a couple minutes? Who you are, where you're from, city, state, anything you want to share about your family and how you got in the insurance industry?

Sure. So I am from Rockwall or I currently live in Rockwall, Texas. I've been in the insurance industry. This is going to be my 24th year. I grew up, was born here in Texas, so I'm a native Texan, but I grew up in a small town called Arkadelphia, Arkansas and spent most of my childhood there until high school. And then we came back to the great state of Texas where I graduated from North Mesquite. We had a really good football team back then and we were the Stallion. So that was kind of a fun mascot there. But went to UTD and when I was in college I decided that it was time to get.

A job that was going to lean more to a career. I originally wanted to be a school teacher, but I kind of wanted some business experience and I went to the career center at school and there was a local insurance agency that was looking for a front desk person slash receptionist. And so I applied for that position and kind of the rest is history. As they say. I graduated from school, decided our program probably wasn't going to make a great teacher because, I mean, I love my kids, but not. Not.

Classroom setting probably wasn't for me in the insurance world. I could educate people all day long on insurance and why they need it and how they can best protect themselves and their families and their businesses. And so just kind of along went along with that. Worked in that agency for about 10 years and then started my very first agency from scratch in 2009.

Had some success there and ended up buying Hamby in 2011. I am married, so most of my insurance friends know my husband, Jeremy Neal. I joke that he's a lot more popular than I am. He's a really. He's a really fun guy and he's in the banking world and loves to play golf. So most of the time he'll tag along with me to insurance events and go golfing while I'm doing my insur. Stuff. Two daughters, Charlie and Georgia, they are four, and Georgia turns three next week. So between insurance and kiddos, we. We stay pretty busy. But I. I love insurance and I will talk about it all day long, so it's my passion.

Fantastic. Let's get into talking about it. And. And poor Jeremy had to suffer through playing Aviara when you're recently here getting your bonus sessions because of your win, right?

Yes.

Fantastic. Congratulations. You guys are awesome. We got to enjoy dinner at Mr. A's as well, which is a fantastic venue in San Diego, overlooking the city. Just had a great time breaking bread and getting to know each other better there as well. So congratulations.

Thank you.

Yeah. So your dad is a football coach?

Yes, my dad was a football coach.

And you told me a story when you were here, which I thought was fascinating, and I sent your dad's best buddy, right?

Yeah.

Your dad's best buddy's video story to our son, who's the football coach. And he was so captured by that, he was spreading it all over Twitter. I saw it, so.

Oh, really? Outlaw?

Yeah. Yeah. So tell just, you know, 30 seconds about that if you're open to it.

Yeah. So my dad was a football coach in small 3A school in Arkansas, and his best friend was Coach John Outlaw, and they've since unfortunately both passed away. But Coach Outlaw was the one of the winningest coaches, but I think I loved my grammar a little bit. But in Texas State history, he's in the Texas High School hall of Fame, but he was also the youngest coach to win a state championship, and he actually won two of them in Arkansas. And one of them was with my dad as an assistant coach to him. And so it's a pretty cool documentary. And I think it's a lot of the reason why I'm constantly implementing and pushing myself and something I didn't realize until I got older, but having a coach for a dad, you know, it's kind of hard to give up.

So you believe in coaching?

I do, yeah. So fantastic why we're here.

Grateful for it. And what a privilege and an honor it's been to walk by your side over the years. And you know I know that George is the youngest, right?

Correct.

Yeah. And I remember we were sitting together at dinner at Papados. I don't know if you remember that or not. I believe you were pregnant with Georgia at the time and we were talking about the future and that kind of stuff. And you had a specific plan. And I said, that doesn't surprise me. Aaron. Meals. Aaron. Neal's got it all planned out. So way to go. That was fantastic. So when did we first meet though? Do you remember?

I believe the first time that we. I'd heard of you before, but I think the first time we met in person was at IAWA 2016 down in San Antonio.

Awesome.

And it was shortly after that I got a copy of your book and then I decided to attend upp.

Awesome. And so you came to boot camp and you know, you hung around, you jumped into gold coaching for a while because the family dynamics and all that, which got to know each other a lot better. And you started implementing some things which really leads to you jumping into platinum coaching. After Georgia was born and had grown up a little bit, you were ready time wise for that commitment, and so you did. And then we announced the implementer of the year contest, which we have every year at boot camp, and you were ready and you made the decision to apply and you became one of the three finalists. And it was phenomenal. All three of the finalists were fantastic. Amazing. So. But Aaron, because what we do at boot camp, everybody, the audience has 100% of the vote. 100. The leadership of UPP, myself. Nobody has any say in it. A hundred percent. Audience vote. And you won the audience vote. So congratulations on that.

How did that make you feel when you found out that it they had voted on you?

I was pretty blown away. I had been kind of nervous about it. I was really proud to be part of an all female finalist panel. So I was up with two other great ladies that have done amazing things in their agencies and, and I. I I just. Yeah, I. I was really honored and blown away, so.

Yeah. Yeah, so. And we'll give some public praise and recognition for the unstoppable Kim Donahue, another Texan, and her teammate Kathy Cooley, who competed. And then, of course, the unstoppable Connie Bauman, AKA Rocky, and all phenomenal in their own right. But you were the one that they chose that had implemented the three Ps, the people, the processes, and the promotion in the best ways to continue to grow your agency, create wealth, and have more freedom. So congratulations on that. So let's just share with everybody and dig in and grab a few highlights from the presentation. I know there's one or two things that you've really taken away from your time in UPP so far that has made a great impact in your agency.

Yeah. So one of the things I've gotten the most feedback on is actually the very first thing that I implemented in my UPP journey, and that was our client segmentation. So I had a goal in the agency to write a million dollars a year in new business premium. And I kind of touched on this in my presentation, and I kept getting really close to it, you know, within a couple hundred thousand dollars, but I just couldn't seem to jump over that mark or that leap. And so when Mike, during bootcamp was talking about the segmentation, I really. It just kind of clicked with me at that time, and I thought, this is. This is awesome. And it's based on the Pareto principle, where your top 20% of your clients are responsible for 80% of your agency's revenue, and your bottom 20% of your clients are eating up 80% of your time and your team's time. And just right then when he said it, I kind of did, like, a quick, you know, audit or whatever in my head, and the people that I talked to the most were people that only had one policy with me. Chris Paradiso has also touched on this, that your. Your monoline clients are the least happiest, again, through rocket referrals. I went down, down, down that rabbit hole. And most of our detractors are silver clients, or that's why I call them my agency monoline clients. And so. But yeah, I. I segmented my book, and. And so I did three segments, and in my agency, we call them Gold, Silver, and vip, and I kind of said that out of order. But our. Our silver clients are monoline clients. They're. They're the people that only have one policy with our agency. And then our gold clients are customers that have two or more policies with our agency and then the VIP customers are customers or three or more policies. It can be a mix of commercial and personal business. And so we just segmented them and then we were like, you know, several agencies, once we segment them, we were like, okay, how, how do we differentiate? Right. So we've got them segmented. We know who is who, but how do we focus on that top 20% and how do we kind of weed out these silver customers that are eating up a lot of our time or turn them into the clients that we actually want to have in our agency? And so from that the process really grew. We started allowing our team, you know, we put time expectations, kind of like if a VIP customer calls and they want something, we want to make sure that they get a single phone call resolution. You know, we're not saying, oh yeah, I'll get that ID card to you in 30 minutes or whatever. If they call in and it's urgent enough for a VIP customer to call the office for an ID card, I want them to have that ID card in their possession before we hang up the phone. Same thing with a car change or anything else that they want done on their policy. If it's a gold customer, it's kind of the same thing. Right. Like we want to make sure we're providing excellent service. But if we have a VIP customer in front of them, we're going to take care of that VIP customer and then the silver custom or the gold customer and then silver customers, they get same day service. So if they call and they need something, sure. Again, I'm not trying to single anybody out or make anybody wait just to make them wait. But we have permission now to. We're going to take care of those gold and VIP customers ahead of the silver customers. But before the end of the day, we will get them the things that they need when they call the agency. Our nurture campaign is a little different. So we had already kind of structured.

But that's based on the segmentation, right?

Correct.

Yeah.

And you know, it's Bob Berg says in his book that, you know, VIP customers are going to refer VIP customers a few gold customers and you know, maybe some silvers. Gold customers are going to refer gold customers and maybe some silvers and then silver customers are only going to refer silver customers. So we really started pushing our VIP customers kind of a nurture campaign, really hyping up our referral program and letting them know that we want their referrals. We started sending a monthly email like newsletter, E Blast the eHub. And then we have a quarterly paper newsletter that goes out called the Handy Hub. And then for our VIP customers actually get four gifts in the mail per year. They're going to get one actually next week. And this year it's the $1 lotto ticket went off, like, amazing. So they're all going to get a $1 lottery ticket with a little card that just says thanks a lotto for being a VIP client. It's. It's just a cute thing. But we, we send them, you know, four gifts per year and just really nurture that relationship. And then our gold customers, we kind of do the same thing. They get the E newsletter, they get, you know, the hard copy newsletter, but they get two gifts per meal for in the mail per year, a Christmas gift and then something in the summer. And then our silver customers, they get the E stuff, the newsletter, but then we don't really send the gifts to them as much. They get Christmas cards and birthday cards and that kind of stuff, but not the. Not the gifts and that kind of stuff, because we're encouraging more of our VIP and gold customers to refer us business.

Yeah, fantastic. And we were talking about that before we went on this morning. A major account that you were able to bring in last month was a referral from another existing major account.

Right.

VIP customer, if you will.

Yep. We had a VIP customer refer us another VIP customer with premiums double theirs. So we were very happy to write.

In excess of six figures.

Yes.

We were very, very happy to write that account.

Yeah. Yeah, great job. And, but, you know, the bottom line is it's because you made a decision and took action to do something that, and, and continually taking action that it's all evolved. And a couple of things that I wanted to also touch on. And unless you have anything else you had in mind.

No, go ahead.

Yeah, so I'll throw it out there because, you know, your presentation was awesome, as was all of them. But, you know, you've also implemented the three Ps, the people, the processes, and the promotion. And we had a conversation. I remember where I was at when we had this conversation. You called me on an emergency call basis and says, hey, you know, I've got this situation. I'm thinking about doing this. And I said, just do it. And you got a result as far as attracting new people to your team because you built the hand B culture. Right?

Right.

And you do business the handy way. And so you decided to do a direct mail, handwritten note to try to find new team members because you Had a tight list that you had built and you know, we designed it together and you sent it out and you got a new team member from that, right?

I did. And I actually had another great candidate call last week off of it. And that's been nearly six months ago. They had kept it.

Wow. So let's, let's not leave them hanging. So the bottom line is Aaron Neal decided that I want to write a handwritten note, a kind of a personalized handwritten note to people who have an insurance license in a geographic area that you decided to, you know, entice them to apply at hand be because you are award winning and recognized. In fact, you also told me right before you went on congratulations that you're up for a major award in your local chamber. So congratulations on that.

Thank you.

Yeah. So you've got all this going on and, and you're attracting the people to you and you had another big one fall in your lap after that. So tell me more. I didn't know about that. That somebody else raised their hand.

Yeah. So back in October, you know, like most of the industry and all industries, I think for that matter, we were having a hard time getting, you know, great candidates to apply that, you know, and we, we really were kind of in a place where we needed someone that was almost plug and play. And so Mike and I talked about it and we went and pulled a list from the tdi Texas Department of Insurance, insurance agents kind of in our area. And we crafted a mailer and a really nice flyer that our marketing person came up with. And we sent out, I think we sent out about 200 if I'm not mistaken. It wasn't a lot. We actually had a lot more on our list. But we kind of stopped there at 200 just because we got busy. And I actually think I was leaving for upp. And one of the candidates was an amazing lady. We're so happy to have her on our team. She's got 15 years of experience in the industry, 14 of those with USAA and just a great background. She's been a member of the team now for just over 60 days and she's doing amazing. And then the candidate that called last week is. Got about four years in the industry but is licensed in Texas and had kept the flyer. And you know, she's local. So both of them are within 10 miles of our agency. And it was really nice to have experienced qualified candidates apply off of that.

Mailer, direct mail, handwritten piece to a pre planned tight list. I'll slow down and Say that and think about it like this, everybody. So Erin took that step. The person came in the 16 year experience one and she had back to back record months. Digest that for just a minute. And is it not a huge blessing and a beauty of being an independent insurance agent that that's first year. Right. And based on the way that Hanby has set themselves up, that client is going to stay for at least eight to 10 years or more because they take excellent care of their customers through their care and their nurturing and their segmentation. I hope this is all making sense to them because I can see it in your eyes, Aaron. You see it?

Yeah.

This is great stuff and that's an encouragement for you. So let's drop something on the second P real quick. Ready? So one of the other things that Aaron picked up, I believe it was in her UPP journey was the power and the value. And I saw it with my own eyes when Aaron was here for one on one coaching session and she pulled it up and I'm looking at it. I'm going to excuse the term everybody, I said, thought to myself, that's badass. Anyway, so you built your own custom intranet, right?

We did, yeah.

So what was the thought process going into that as to why you did it and what's been the result of doing it?

Well, I have to give a shout out to Bill Butler because I got the idea from the Internet, actually from his implementer of the Year presentation back in 2018. And I knew I was about to. Well, I just had my first baby that year and I knew I wanted to grow my team. But you know, back then we just had a binder that had all the handy way in it and I don't think anybody really looked it up. And it was a little harder to update and that kind of thing. And I saw Bill's Butler hub and thought, okay, I'm gonna do this. And so then I got pregnant with my second kiddo shortly thereafter. But I spent the whole next year really working on building out our intranet. And I say a year and that might sound like a really long time, but it really wasn't because I was able to take a lot of that stuff from our binder that had saved in Word documents and really just kind of copy and paste it. What took longer than that was I got all of these other great ideas to add to the intranet. And so then I had to work on building those out a little bit. And I did keep my time just an hour a day. Like I would only work on the Internet for one hour a day so I could focus on my other stuff. But it's been amazing. Every. Every new person I've brought on absolutely loves it because we show them how to do things, but then anytime they want to go back and reference that they can.

There's video up on their own, right?

Yes.

Without your time or anybody else's. Go ahead.

Yeah, it's searchable, like Google, so they can just type in whatever process they're wanting to do. It pulls up the Hamby way. And they actually now give me ideas like, hey, can you put this in the Hambi hub so I can, you know, research it later or it'll be there if we need it. And. And yeah, it frees up a lot of my time because then I can also say, you know, if somebody has a question, I can't remember how to do something like, hey, I think that's in the hub. Will you go check? And then if it's not, I know I need to add it. But it has been a game changer.

Game changer. Well, you keep. You keep dropping game changers into the equation consistently, and that's why we have the explosion of the game change. So fantastic stuff. Way to take action. But let me just add something that I heard Aaron say to reiterate it. An hour a day. It took her an hour of day. She made a con. And it's back to the conscious decision. The conscious, intentional decision. She made a conscious, intentional decision to invest an hour of the hour of her time every day to build out the Internet, and now it's there. It's permanent, it's providing great value. And I also heard you just say it's not taking her time for her team to use it so she can be on to doing only the things that only Aaron can do to continue to grow and explode the agency. So congratulations on making the conscious, intentional decision to invest an hour a day, and now you're reaping the benefits. And I saw it with my own eyes. To reiterate is badass. So good job on that. And the other thing. And I'm going to step into one other thing that we hadn't planned on stepping into with your permission, because it's along those same lines of the fact that, you know, planning for the future, it's a living, breathing piece of the puzzle within the handy hub. And so the Internet is never done, right?

No, it's continuing to evolve.

It's living, it's breathing right along with the growth of the business. But the cool thing is. I heard you say this multiple times. It's built to reflect the hand b way of doing things.

And I hope everybody from an envision standpoint sees that because that's why she's attracting these people, because they see the hand be way. Wow, that's special. Wow. I can't get that anywhere else. I'm talking from teammates, you know, standpoint as well. Right?

Yeah. And that's.

Aaron, you've built. You built it all and you've envisioned it all and you made it reality. Go ahead.

Well, say. And we've, you know, so we had one person come that came from the mailer that's already started. Then we had another person. It's actually somebody I've known for a long time in the industry, but they're bilingual. So I'm really excited about that. To go and grow the Spanish speaking, you know, side of our book and to have somebody here with all that experience that can help them. But she called us, even though she knew me personally was on our Google reviews and I thought that was a really interesting take. And, and the same thing with the first lady. She actually looked at our reviews before she called. She didn't just call off the mailer. She researched us. And I thought that was pretty neat. And then we talk about the hub and the interview process and all of the things that are there. So.

Yeah. So we've only got one thing to sell everybody, whether it be to a prospect or client or somebody in our community or to a future teammate. It's who we are and who we've become. And they're looking at everything about us online. So we've got to protect that and we've got to grow it and we've got to have that awareness of it. Great job there. So. And I know that you, you are a pretty advanced techie, if you will. And so I, I know you're able to update your website whenever you feel like it and get the idea, the next idea. So way to go there. So, Aaron, as we begin to move to wrap up, because I know you're chomping at the bit to go dominate something else, what's the future hold for Hamby? I mean, you have positioned yourself to really do whatever you want to do, but what's in your vision? Oh, I know the other thing. Ice too squirreled. And I won't forget that. I'm going to come back to that question. We'll just touch on this very quickly. So the intranet, we were looking at it because we were. When? During your session. Here, your coaching session, your platinum coaching session. We worked on your vo, which is your vision organizer. Right. And it was no surprise. That's something that's unique to platinum coaching everybody. But we worked on your vision organizer, and it's no surprise to me that you completely filled it out and you now have the vision set for the future of Hamby. We got another living, breathing blueprint. Right. For the future. Now, now that I set that up, what does the future hold based on that? You got the blueprint, where are you going and what do you want to do?

So I have a premium goal in mind that's kind of our next step that I want to achieve, and I plan to get there in the next couple of years.

Awesome.

And so just continuing to grow. But I think the. The biggest thing is growing with. This may not be the right word, but with intent, like being intentional on what you know. And. And we're intentional all the time in our agency. We know how much premium we want to write per month. We know how many leads we want to get per a month. We know how many customer referrals, and we go through those as a team on a weekly basis in our team meeting. And so having the vision organizer helps me, as you know, I call it in my office the. The driver of the ship know where the ship is going. And so I don't necessarily have to share all of that information with everybody that' the ship, but it helps give clarity to where we're going and the things that we need to do to get there. So I really think for Hamby, the sky's the limit. And, you know, I know where we're going in the next three years, next five years, and the next 10, but it. It, you know, we're just going to keep moving the ship forward.

And as we've also launched within our UPB circles, everybody's rowing in the same direction.

There you go.

And if we had time, I would have love to gone off on another squirrel about team meetings, because that's another critical key. Maybe we can revisit that at a later date. So, Aaron, I can't commend you enough. Has. Has your UPP journey been helpful to all of this evolution? Has it, you know, helped be a part of the game changing and if so, why?

It's been instrumental. I mean, it's been so I have a goal of every year. I want to find one game changer for my agency. And I believe platinum coaching has been a game changer. Not only are there just ideas that I can go and, and make them my own. Right. Like I don't have to do them exactly the way that you do them, but I can take them and make them the handy way. I get a wealth of information from my Mastermind members and we all just kind of work together to make things our own. And yeah, I, I, I don't know where we would be if we didn't have the coaching because it, it really helps, you know, just kind of give some clarity. And you know, I love this business, but there's things that only other insurance agent can, can understand. And so sometimes when I have those type of situations arise, you know, obviously I reach out to you directly, but I also have, you know, Mastermind members and friends that I'm able to call and rely on. So definitely a game changer.

Awesome. Well, thank you, thank you for your kind words. I say this with all the humbleness in my heart or in complete humility to the best of my ability. But hopefully game changers attract game changers. Right?

Right.

So anyway, Aaron, Neil, congratulations. Congratulations on what you built so far. You also reached another pinnacle of achievement from a revenue standpoint and things just keep happening in a positive way. Back to back record months as far as production is concerned. Recognized in the communities for all of their achievements and giving back as well. And you've got it going on. So we are privileged and honored to see what happens next at the Handy Hub in the Handy Agency and with Aaron. Neal. Aaron, thank you, thank you for sharing just some of the things that have caused all of this to happen. And congratulations again on your recognition as the reigning current UPP Implementer of the year.

Thank you, Mike.

You're welcome. Anything else to add before we wrap today?

No.

All right, fantastic everybody. Hey, if this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. My name is Mike Stromso. I'm widely recognized as a leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can learn more about us at Unstoppable Profit Producer. If you're interested in attending a virtual or a live event, our virtual event portal is@upfast start.com and our live events are at be unstoppablebootcamp.com all of our events are designed with some of our best money making strategies developed over 36 years of research as a 100 of the time proud independent insurance agent. All designed to help you grow your business, create wealth so you too can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. And if you got great value from today's podcast, and if you were paying attention, I know you did. Please share this podcast with somebody else that you care about. Another agent, another entrepreneur. I know if Jeremy took this back to his banking buddies, they would find some value if they're paying attention, right? And just share the link with them. Unstoppable Profit podcast.com and make sure you and they go up to the top, click subscribe so they don't miss one valuable episode of the podcast. We are grateful and thankful to put that out there on all the channels. Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, our YouTube channel. Just search Unstoppable profit producer Click videos. You will find it all. Because all we want is to help you continue to learn and grow. Thank you so much for joining us again. Aaron, Neal, congratulations and thank you again. All right, everybody, until the next episode, get out there, make a difference, be unstoppable, leave no regrets and remember, you got this. We believe in you. I'll see you on the next episode.

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