Episode 214: Automate This and Get 5-10x ROI

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 Stromso.

Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit podcast. And I'm excited about today because I met Jacob Simon recently in, for all of you Texans, the great state of Texas, and I got to learn about Jacob's company. There were some other independent insurance agents standing there who were singing the praises of what Jacob has built. And I said, I need to make sure that I introduce everything about this company to everybody out there so it can help your business become more efficient and more profitable. Jacob Simon, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate you having me on.

Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. And I'm excited to share everything that I've learned and I don't know a lot of details, so I'm going to see if I can pull it out of you to share with the independent agents out there and everybody who might be watching or listening to this so their business can again become more efficient and ultimately more profitable. So before we get into the weeds a little bit, share a little bit about who you are, your company, how did you get started, et cetera.

Yeah, happy to. So I actually grew up in Canada, was born and raised there, and. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I've always kind of had that engineer's heart and entrepreneurial spirit and so love to kind of like, pick things apart and put them back together again from a young age and also love to kind of start these, like, little neighborhood businesses kind of thing. And so it only was natural that, you know, as I kind of went on in life, I first pursued a degree in engineering and then kind of, you know, dove into the world of startups and insurance was kind of a happy accident where I found kind of, you know, one of the biggest, most complex puzzles that anyone could hope to solve. And. And that's. That's kind of how I got here. And what's know kept me here ever since.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, we're glad you're here, and thanks for doing what you're doing. And no wonder you've got the great attitude, because I. I know a lot of people From Canada. And it seems like all of you have a great attitude and we're happy to blend everybody across North America together. So great stuff. Let's get started. So how come. How did you come up with the idea for adapt?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I spent a ton of time just talking to agents, hanging out, insurance agencies. As I mentioned, my background's more on the tech side of things. And I guess when I said engineering, I should have said I studied computer engineering. So I can't build a bridge, but can definitely build software. And so.

I kind of brought that to the table and stumbled into insurance, had a friend who had been in the space and just kept telling me over and over, look, this is the space. I'm telling you, you know, you gotta go figure it out and learn how it works. But there are just so many opportunities there to help kind of bring more efficiency to the game and bring good technology to the table. And so I finally, after much urging, listened and spent on. I probably spent about a year just talking to agents, hanging out, insurance agencies, trying to really understand the business. Because while I knew that I understood technology, I knew nothing about insurance. And it was really important to me that I solved a real problem for, for. For the industry as opposed to, you know, something that I just wanted to go and build for the sake of a solution. And something I started to notice is, you know, you spend enough time with enough different agents, you start to see patterns, right? And things that you might not even see as an individual agent because you spend so much time in your own agency, right? And so you might think, hey, this is something that we have to do because that's just how it works. But you don't realize that, you know, the agency down the streets doing the exact same thing every day, not to mention, you know, every other agency across the country. And so that's one of the things that, that really kind of created that light bulb moment for me is I spent that time with all these different agencies and I could start to see, well, wait a second, you know, you're logging into these, whatever, 15 different systems every day and doing the exact same thing. And sure, you as your individual agency can't necessarily do much about that because it's not quite enough of a pain point to like, stop spend the money to solve. But if every other agency that I'm talking to has that same problem, well, that's actually an opportunity to build a product, right, and sell it across the industry. And so that's really where the idea came from. And that's how we kind of got to where we are today.

That is awesome. And so I want to find out a little bit more about how you can best support agencies based on what you learn. I love the story also. I mean, you spent an entire year getting to know the environment and understanding the environment instead of just throwing something out there that you know may or may not work. You, you found a need and you identified a need and got to understand it before you begin to build it out. And I love that. Fantastic. You did your marketplace research is what we call it. So workflows within an agency business, I mean, what kind of workflows or use cases do agencies get the most value out of when they partner with ADAPT API?

Yeah, so I think there are, there are two main, kind of broad groupings here. So the first one is around what we would call notifications. So those are things like pending cancellation notices, those are things like claims notices, these different notifications that, you know, usually an agency has either like an account manager or maybe a VA or somebody's going to all these different websites and just pulling reports and then trying to stick them together so that it's something like roughly consistent. And then go and, you know, send emails, send texts, make phone calls. And so what we're able to do is go and do, you know, the entire collection side of that automatically. So we go out to all the different websites, we grab all those reports, we standardize them so there's no more trying to like stick, you know, 15 different naming conventions into one standard format. We do all that for you and what you get is like a very nicely formatted. Here's all the things you need to be aware of today in the agency. Now we can take that a step further in some cases. And we have agents that are plugging that automatically into a CRM, so they're not even touching it. A late pay notice comes in from the carrier, we pull it from the website, we push it to the CRM. The CRM does a text, a call, an email, and they don't have to think about it. So that's kind of one of the broader groups of workflows we solve for. And the other one is just document management. So similar idea. You know, a lot of documents aren't downloading automatically into the management system. And so what that means is again, you know, someone on the servicing team, a VA somebody is actually going to websites and downloading every single document, you know, one at a time.

Mean a human being?

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, a human being. Exactly. A person is logging into 15, 20 different websites and clicking who knows how many links, trying to keep track of which ones they've clicked and which ones they haven't. And then the work, the funneling starts there because then they've downloaded 30 documents and they go to their downloads folder and oh, Now I have 30 documents called endorsement. Right. And so now I gotta open up every document, start copy and pasting, figuring out how to name it. And so what that means is, you know, this is a huge chunk of time and the outcome is not even that reliable. Right. You don't have the same format, sometimes there's copy paste mistakes. And so what we're able to do, similar to what we do with the reports, is we grab all those documents, we are able to standardize the format, get them to a single location so that the agency doesn't have to worry about that anymore. And with some of the management systems, we're actually going direct into the management system. So if you're a Hocksoft agency, if you're an AMS360 agency, they'll actually just show up straight in the management system, attach the right policy, labeled correctly, we can create a suspense. And so you really just don't have to think about it. The whole thing is pretty hands free.

And one of the agents that was there when I met you also said that you can program it so it automatically emails a person in the agency the Excel sheet or the report, if that's what you want to do.

Yeah, so we're pretty flexible about the way in which we send information to the agency because we know every agency is different and they, and they all have different processes that they want to either change completely or keep most of, or, you know, everything in between. And so, you know, we can do a spreadsheet, we can do to the CRM, we have a zapier app, we have these management system integrations. There's a ton of different ways and we want to make this as flexible as possible to be able to support as many of those different needs.

Right. And so just from an awareness standpoint, I mean, I would hope you're not going to, you know, spend a lot of time with a report, but just quick glance. All right, got it. Boom. There was 38 of them today, done. But the, the thing that, you know, I was like blown away by after I started thinking about it was you place this within the business, it automatically does the work in the background from all these workflows, etc, and it's not a human being. And the other thing about that human being that you were just talking about that. Because they're a human being, they make mistakes and sometimes they show up and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they're, shall we say, a little moody or whatever. Whatever, whatever. None of this comes into play anymore because it's just happening in the background automatically. And most importantly, the number one reason that people don't achieve the way they want to or businesses don't succeed to the level they want to is lack of consistency. That doesn't, that doesn't, that's not in play here anymore. You consistently do it all of the time.

Exactly, exactly. And, and to your point about, you know, having a human being do this, this is not. Nobody's excited about, you know, the first hour or more of their day where they go to websites and download reports. Right? This isn't motivating work. Everyone, you know, no one who's doing it thinks if I do the, you know, like 10,000 reports, then I'll be in the perfect place for my career. It's like where I want to be. Right. It's just, it's stuff that has to get done. It's stuff they're going to do, but it's something they're very happy to hand off. And not even just, you know, consistency from a day to day perspective. But if you think about what if someone goes on vacation, right. Or if they decide to change jobs, right. And we talked to some agencies, like, yeah, when, you know, the person who does this, part of our book of business goes on vacation, we just fly blind for a week. Right. Which, you know, if you have no other options, I guess that's what you have to do. But what we can do is now provide a more consistent way, to your point, consistency of, of being able to do that every day the same way without having to have a person think about doing it.

So you found that in your research, huh? You ask people, you know, what's the first thing when you roll over and your spouse is there in the morning when you guys wake up? What did you say? I can't wait to get to work and do the downloads.

Yeah, it's funny, I mean, because, you know, you kind of have to piece a couple of things together. And it didn't really hit home until I went and actually I would spend an entire day just sitting in an agency and just sit there with like a notepad and paper and just write down everything that was happening, right. And try and figure out where are people spending time, like where the producer is spending time where you know, is the servicing team spending time? And it's funny because this, this specific problem I think pops up in a few different ways because when you ask people, hey, like, what is, you know, what are the top challenges for the agency, sometimes they will say, oh yeah, it's just collecting information from all these places. But sometimes they'll say, oh, we have a staffing problem. Right. And if you just stop there, you might say, oh, I'm going to go build like a hiring solution for insurance agencies because they all have this staffing problem. Right. But if you dig a little bit deeper and ask a few more questions and can go spend some time with the agency, you start to realize, well, hold on. You already have a team of, you know, highly trained and motivated people who want to actually make this work, but they're wasting, you know, 10% of their day, 20% of the day on things that aren't adding value to the agency.

Right.

And so it's also interesting how you can't always take the first answer of if you ask them what their biggest problem is, you kind of got to dig a couple layers deeper. And even better, like I was able to do, go spend some time there in person and then you really start to see kind of where the sticking points are more so than just like that surface level problem.

Right, right. Great stuff. So did we miss anything as far as workflows are concerned with regard to agency management systems that might have an integrated CRM, VAS, etc. How does this fit into that existing situation and support it, not work against it, so to speak?

Yeah, and so, and I think this goes back to some of that flexibility we were talking about earlier where because we have so many different ways that you can plug into the agency we have. So for example, some, some agencies we work with have a VA who processes the report every day for them. Right, right. And that for them is the right solution because they, you know, don't have the technology or aren't interested in doing the technology kind of hunt and purchasing for like a fully automated CRM. Right. And that works for them. And that's, that's great. And so they'll have the report come in, the VA processes the report, they'll, you know, email anyone on the late pay report, they might email the people on the claim report, they'll process the documents manually. And so we see people doing that. We can also, as I mentioned, plug into management systems directly. And so we have people getting automatic, you know, Downloads into, into Hoxoft, into AMS360 and also now source actually. And then if you want to take it even a step further in terms of automation, you know, people also will say, hey, I just don't want to ever have to think about this. I won't have to touch it then, great, we'll go all the way and plug into like the, the CRM as well. And so then that's, hey, once it's set up, you don't have to look at it anymore. Right. You just know your late pays are getting emailed, your claims are getting emailed, documents are going into the management system. We can create a suspense so someone can do a policy check if need be. But the whole thing is completely automated and so we're able to fit into the workflows of a lot of different agency structures because of our flexibility.

I had an agent say a couple weeks ago that we've worked with for a couple of years, he finally identified, he goes, and you may have met him down at the same event that we were at. He said, it's finally hit me, I need to invest in automation for every possible thing that can be automated. That's how I'm going to move my agency forward into the future. And it's the future of our industry and many industries, right?

Yeah, oh, absolutely. I think the thing that you're going to see, you know, in the next five, ten years is right, the agents who are able to adapt to that world and who are able to leverage their strengths, which is often, you know, insurance expertise, relationship building, relationship management. Right. Like those are the things that will give you the biggest return. But if you're, you know, if you're wasting all your time on these dragging document, you know, around copy paste tasks, you're not doing those things that not only are you an expert at, but also add value to the agency. Right. And the ones who do are the ones who are going to grow at, you know, paces that I think we haven't even seen yet. Right. And if you don't, you're going to get left behind.

Exactly. And we don't want anybody that we have contact with get left behind. Another reason. Thank you for joining us today. So, so there might be other solutions that offer similar.

Ways of doing things to what you do. But why are you different? I mean, why adapt API over and above other options that might be out there?

Yeah, and I think, you know, there are lots of different, different solutions that people have built using especially the technology we use, which is called rpa, which is basically just a, you know, fancy way of saying have A computer use a browser for you. Right, right. And I think something that we do that's a little bit different is rather than doing custom builds and there, there are a bunch of companies that will do a custom RPA solution. So if you say, hey, I want you to do this specific task for me, that is, you know, I'm the only one who does this, and so someone else isn't going to be able to turn this into a product, then they'll do that for you. Now, the trade off, of course, is cost. Right. And so if you have someone build a custom, you know, a custom solution for you, you're usually looking at, you know, $10,000 as a starting point, not to mention the maintenance fees. I mean, it gets expensive very quickly. What we've done, which is a little bit different, is because, you know, I spent that time, was able to see these common problems, our solutions are more off the shelf. So there's certainly some configuration that's available and we try to enable that configuration where it makes sense for agencies. But a lot of this go to the website, pull the report, standardize it. That doesn't need to be different. Right. So what that allows us to do is come in at a much lower price point. So rather than paying us to build the solution, which would be very expensive, you only pay to use the product. And so we have agencies that we're working with that are quite a bit smaller, I think, than anyone who would be going to do like a completely custom build because it's just, it's cost prohibitive.

Yeah. And that's one of the things you bring to the table. We've identified there were a couple of other industry partners at that same event where I met you who are doing, you know, lists, you know, leads and that kind of thing. And there's another who helps people with their data, specific data items, who identified that really simply. The independent insurance agency business has about 22 specific service tasks that are done day after day after day, which is what you identified as well. And that's what you help people with, different than what they do and from the sales, and it's only five.

Wow.

So, yeah. And you make sure that all of that that's happening gets done automatically. And I couldn't agree with you more that the one thing that we will have 10 years from now, with the advancement of all the technology and, you know, AI and everything else, chat, gbt, if you want to go there, is relationships. That's the one thing that none of that can replace. And so we've got to make sure that we got it all working on the back end so we can continue to build those relationships and help people. So fantastic stuff. I'm excited about that. So I love the fact that it's working in the background automatically. So agencies. Oh, I know what I was going to say. One of the other vendors at that event that was doing lists, a lot of lists building and that kind of stuff, they went out and did some research and they found that 80% of independent insurance agencies across America are 10 people or less.

And I thought that was a fascinating piece of research. So the question for you is what kind of agencies do you generally work with and, or do you have any particular focus or who can you help?

Yeah, so we, we have a couple, you know, particular things that we focus on. First of all is we, you know, we exclusively do pnc, so we don't really do anything on the life and health side benefits, anything like that. We also focus more on admitted lines than on ens, so we don't have a ton of coverage in that space. So for, for agents that write a lot of ENs, we're not usually a great fit. We plan to expand to ENS later this year, early next, but it's going to take a little bit of time. It's just a different market, of course.

And then we have good coverage on national brands at large, regionals. So most agencies that we talk to, we have pretty good coverage. For the big exception of course being Florida and we would love to be in Florida. That's a whole different market that we have to figure out. Um, so we haven't quite gotten there yet. But for the, the, you know, does.

It have anything to do with the property market and maybe the main carrier there right now?

Um, you know, it might have something to do with the property market and I, I can't say much more than that, but I get it, I get it. But yeah, it's, it, it's just a little bit different than going to most other, most of the rest of the country. And so that's a little bit of a carve out. But outside of that, you know, for retail agents, especially if you're writing with, with national carriers or large regionals and usually, you know, the agents that we work with are not just starting out because we focus more on the servicing side or really exclusively on the servicing side. And so if you don't have a book to service yet, you're not really going to see the value. But once agencies are hitting around 500k of revenue they start seeing the ROI and then there's really no cap. We, you know, working with agencies of that size and you know, one's much, much larger. And so anyone who's in that kind of range is going to get a lot of value. I think you get even more so if you're a HawkSoft user, if you're Amaz360 user. But we have a ton of agencies we work with that are on many other systems and they're still able to get a ton of value just by virtue of us saving them all the time, collecting and standardizing that data.

Fantastic. And if you're wondering and hearing something that you like that's going to help you from an efficiency standpoint and help make your agency better, more profitable and, and allow you to do the things that you really do best, which is talking with people and understanding and helping them.

And you want to reach out to Jacob. We're going to give some information in just a couple of minutes. But the first question that I had when I met Jacob, I said, tell me how your program works. And this is always one of my questions. Am I going to be locked into a long term agreement of any kind or anything like that? I've got it written down what your answer was, but is it still month to month?

Yeah, it's month to month. Yeah.

My opinion on this is if you're not getting value, you shouldn't use it, you shouldn't pay for it. Right, right. And I'd rather focus our energy on.

Keeping our customers happy than on fighting contract.

Language disputes. And so it's month to month, it's pay as you go. We try and make it dead simple to get started. It's even easier to leave if you wanted to. That doesn't really happen. But it's as simple as a 30 minute setup call and you're up and running and then. Yeah, month to month. No, no, yeah. There's no, no, like hidden fees, no, you know, no, no other kinds of bamboozles or whatever. It's, it's pretty straightforward.

Yeah. So to help people envision what they offer and it's based on number of transactions.

Yeah.

So the best way to really figure out what the investment is. And by the way, I don't want to start throwing around numbers, but the investment is like really minimal. I was blown away by the couple of agents. I said, you know, what are you paying monthly? And they told me and I said, wow, that's a great value from an efficiency standpoint. And again, no human beings. It's doing the work consistently every single day, shows up every single day and gets the work done. And to give you a vision, all of the background work, all the downloads and all of the other data that is being pulled from carrier websites, etc. Etc. Is done by Adapt API, drops it into your systems, can be programmed to do other things automatically within your CRM and your agency management system. It's just a phenomenal opportunity to get super efficient. And the thing gets all the efforts get done consistently whether people show up or not. So I love that aspect as well. So, Jacob, anything else to add?

I don't think so. I think we, I think we, we, we cover most of it. But yeah, certainly if folks are interested in learning more, they can reach out and contact me directly and I'm happy to set up a call or spend some time walking through it with anyone who's interested.

Yeah. How would you prefer the people reach out to you if they want to learn more how it can help their agency get more efficient and become more profitable?

Yeah, so you can always reach out to me directly. So I'm@jacobdaptinsurance.com that's Jacob and also of course our website is adapt insurance.com so if you want to learn a little bit, learn a little bit more, you're welcome to go there and, and check it out. But I'm always happy to talk about adapt. So if anyone wants to reach out, I'll talk to them directly.

Yeah, yeah, I strongly recommend that you do so at least have a conversation and learn more. So that's adapt a d a p t insurance.com and it's adapt insurance.com. so, Jake and Simon, I love that what you're doing, I love what you're doing for the industry and more importantly, thank you for doing the research to understand the needs of the industry to better help all of us be more efficient, more profitable and to be able to help more people.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, I appreciate you again having me on.

Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. So again, if you have any questions, reach out to Jacob. It's JacobDaptInsurance.com that's Jacob@AdaptInsuranceur Insurance.com thank you again, sir.

Me.

Hey, you're welcome. Hey, and by the way, if this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. My name is Mike Stompso. I'm widely recognized as leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. If you'd like to find out more about what we do, please visit us atunstoppable profit producer.com and if you're interested in attending one of our virtual or live events to become more and to grow your agency business, you can reach us. Our virtual event portal is up fast start.com and of course our live event portal is be unstoppable boot camp.com all of our events are designed with some of our best money making strategies developed over 35 years of research as a 100% of the time proud independent insurance agent. All 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 things like adapt insurance, Adapt API working in the background you have more freedom. So please make sure that you also go to our podcast website which isunstoppable Profit podcast.com go up to the top and click subscribe so you don't miss one episode of these valuable game changing strategies that you'll learn every week on the podcast. And we're also available out there on all the channels. Channels such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, our YouTube channel and more. And we would love to hear what did you learn on today's podcast? Please share in the comments below what you got out of today's podcast. Your number one takeaway. Please share in the comments below. And if you got great value today, please share unstoppable profit podcast.com with somebody that you care about to help them continue to grow and flourish and thrive as an independent insurance agency business. Thank you for joining us today. Jacob Simon thanks for all the great work you're doing. Keep it up brother.

Thanks Mike. Appreciate you.

All right everybody, I will see you on the next podcast. And remember until then you got this. We we believe in you. Great job everybody. I'll see you in the next episode.

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