Episode 216: The Keys to the Vault-PPP

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.

Greetings and welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit podcast. I have lots of people asking me lots of questions all the time, but one that's been very common lately is I hear a lot about the three P's. What is the three P's? And I'm going to take you back to the beginning of the development of the philosophy of the three Ps. It's quite simple. It's excellent people, world class processes and systems. And then you simply promote the heck out of it. People, processes and promotions, like right behind me. And so how did this happen? Where did it come from? Great question. Go back to roughly 2014, the agency business. We were rolling, we were growing, we were developing new strategies. Best year in the history of the agency so far. But we knew there was more and we had to find a way. And we learned about branding, we learned about systems that we need to build in the agency. We learned to think about higher level thinking in the agency business. Key strategy. I hope you got that takeaway. And so in our study, through investing in ourselves from people who have been there and done that and have achieved at a higher level, we invested, we continue to invest in learning more and I recommend you do the same thing. So through this thinking and development and learning more came the development of the 3Ps. Because we knew at that point we ran into a bit of a roadblock in the agency. In 2015, we had reached that semi wall, if you will, like a half wall, not a full wall. But we knew if we were going to grow to a much higher level that we had to reinvent ourselves in a couple of different ways. And one of the ways that we needed to do that was to develop this philosophy and we needed to reinvent our agency business, where we separated our sales team and our service team created a processing unit. We have this separate marketing department. We took that to another level and we decided strategically and intentionally that simply get excellent people. You can be satisfied with nothing less than excellent people. And you're only as good as your weakest slank. I learned that a couple of different times in my journey over the last 35 years in the agency business, from multiple very high level successful people, one inside the industry, one outside the industry, who grew a company to 1.3 billion in revenue, one of our clients, zero to 1.3 billion. How would that work out for you? He said the same thing. You're only as good as your weakest link. Excellent people and higher, slower, fire, fast. It's a business decision, nothing else. There's two kinds of decisions out there. There's personal decisions and professional decisions. Personal business, Personal business. It's as simple as that. If they're not a good business fit, you have a duty and a responsibility to your entire organization to move them on. Excellent people. You're only as good as your weakest slink. It is the representation of not only your business, but your reputation in the business communities that you operate from within. Excellent people. And then once you have the excellent people who are coachable, who have the right avatar for everything you believe in in your business, who are willing to operate within your core values, who are willing to support your core purpose, the causes that you represent and stand for, you simply design and create world class processes and systems. Let me give you a takeaway from my learning and development journey. When you develop a process, you want to create a process at a time and you want to go deep on it. Deep meaning delivering excellence. Every process, go deep on it. Make sure that it's fully developed and trained and tested and works, provides the desired outcome that you want. So go deep and then once that process is done, simply move on to the next one. I've learned from some of our business colleagues that are doing phenomenal things within our industry that really from a service standpoint, there's only 22 to 24 basic tasks that are done within the service sector and the agency business. And on the sales side, it's only five. So you build your entire organization around those 22 to 24 in service and those five in sales and build it from there down. Reverse engineer it to an extent if you will, and you will build a phenomenal organization. And when you're building those processes out, don't forget you must assign a person to own it, to own the consistent updates and collaboration with your team to make sure that your world class processes and systems continually operate at world class level. You can only be satisfied with excellence, excellent people, world class processes and systems. That is why people will continue to do business with you. That is why people will continue to refer you. And that is the only way that you're going to at the Core, continue to grow your business. We've got, I'm thinking of a couple of agents in our UP programs who learned all of this and they intentionally and smartly, I might add, decided I'm going to get my people right, I'm going to get my processes right before I start investing any dollars in the promotional side of the business. And in some of those case, couple of those cases, it took more than a year to get it right. But they did it smartly. Now they are thriving, they are growing, they are continually exploding and growing their enterprise because they have the excellent people and the world class processes and systems in place in their agency business. Super proud of them. That's what we teach in the unstoppable profit producer program, how to have excellent people, world class processes and systems. And many people, because they're impatient or they think, well, I'm good where I'm at and believe me, I have a way to find out if they're good at where they're at, but if they think they're good at where they're at, they want to run right to the promotions because they think I'm just going to keep marketing, marketing, marketing, and I will grow if I keep marketing. But what we find, sometimes there's people going out the back door and they don't have their finger on the pulse and they're running on the hamster wheel a little bit, okay, excellent people, world class processes and systems, and then you simply get to promote the heck out of it. And that's where that's one of my absolute loves is marketing. I've studied it, I've tested it for more than 30 years in the agency business and have developed a ton. And that's where the rubber hits the road. Any agency that I connect with that has excellent people, world class processes and systems in place, but is not growing at the level that they want to.

After some observation and asking questions, if everything's generally good, I will determine they simply need to double or triple down on their promotions and marketing. It's really that simple. Invest. And when you're investing in marketing, you're thinking, well, I don't have the extra cash flow to invest in marketing, et cetera, et cetera. Think about this. Do you know the average premium for your customers in your agency? Simple, right? Do you know your average commission for your customers in your agency? If you don't, shame on you. You should simply determine what that is and then multiply it by the number of years that you're going to keep people in your agency. Normally a good solid agency is anywhere from five to eight years. That is called the lifetime value of a customer in your agency. That is what you should be willing to gamble on because at the end of the day, that's how you create true wealth in the agency business. And now the simple three step blueprint. A simple philosophy called the 3Ps. Excellent people, world class processes and systems and you simply get to promote the heck out of it. Your result is going to be, and this is what we experienced in our agency business, you will grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom to live life on on your own terms. Our core purpose at UPP is to impact people's lives personally and professionally. Our goal is why we get out of bed every single day and we have stories of agents who have been impacted greatly because they've done the work, they've done the right work and what it takes to grow their business. And they've had the impact, the impact to leave their business because of things happening in their personal lives. And the agency continues to grow. It can and will happen for you when you do the right work. If you'd like to find out more about doing the right work, I encourage you to set up an agency growth session. There might there's a link somewhere around this video to connect with me to schedule an agency growth session so we can discuss more to make sure that you have excellent people, world class processes and systems so you can promote the heck out of it. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret. People in our program, in our unstoppable profit producer program for agencies have access. They have a key to the vault. So I'm going to do a quick screen share. So if you're only listening to this podcast when you get in front of a computer or I know you have a computer in your pocket called your mobile device, I get it. But if you're driving, don't do it now. Once you stop and get to a place where you can look at it, go to YouTube and go to YouTube and in YouTube search unstoppable profit producer and then click on videos on our channel and you will find all of our money making strategy series and all of our podcasts in that portal as well. And so you can go watch this and get to this point in this podcast called the 3Ps the keys to your vault. Okay, the 3Ps, the keys to your vault. You can get the visual of what I'm going to show you next because what we have done for every agency that we work with we have created a vault. It's an online portal there for you 24, 7, 365 so you have complete access. I mean, I'm thinking of one of our newer members, Sam, who's in his first year in our program, in our masterminding sessions a couple of months ago, he was doing phenomenal things in his agency business. And everybody in his coaching group says, sam, how did you do this? Sam simply said, I'm living in the vault. I'm living in the vault. We have designed the vault intentionally like that for agents. So 24, 7, 365. Everything that they want to learn is in the vault. It's got a video, training, it's got all of the documents that we've developed in our agency business in over 30 years since we had a computer on the desk. My first three plus years in the agency there were no such things as computers. Imagine that, right? A pencil, a piece of paper, a calculator and a manual is how I did quotes. But once I got the computer, I started storing everything that we ever created. And we've got that all for you today. And a lot of that is contributory to what's in the vault for agents to work with within our programs. Everything around excellent people, world class processes and systems so you too can simply promote the heck out of it is available to our members in the vault. I'm going to give you a quick snapshot of what the vault looks like and the framework that we have developed for agents in the vault. And this is it right here. People, processes and promotions forever evolving. These tiles are the training squares inside the vault. It's all right there for you 24, 7, 365. Every time you click on a tile, every time you need something, it's right there in the vault and everything. If you want to talk about the sexy fun stuff like promotions, look, cancel, pause. I got off track there. Let's talk about the most important thing, your number one customer, which is your team. All right. As far as the recruiting, the interviewing, the hiring, the onboarding, the training, the motivation to building up leaders around you within your business. A key point, you got to have 100% leadership capability, people in your business and ultimately moving people to own their chair in your business. Excellent people to world class processes and systems, to goal setting, to setting your vision, to having ongoing training to get super clear on what are the best choices with your time, your agency task organizer, everything surrounding the processes to intranet, everything that we've developed over the years is available under the processes and then you get to simply promote the heck out of it. Everything from cross selling client nurturing to welcome kits, to social proof of all kinds including your ironclad written guarantee, to referral programs to niche marketing and so much more. Everything's available for you. And the good news about the Vault is it's living, breathing, forever, ongoing, forever being updated as the marketplace changes. It continues to get updated because our high achieving, forward thinking, aggressive and progressive UPP tribe continues to share with us everything that's happening in their agency business. So we continue to develop new tools and strategies for them so we can continue to lead them and keep them at the top. I hope this has helped you think about the philosophy in your agency business. What is it that you want to achieve? My great encouragement is there is absolutely no limits to anything that you want to achieve. It does all start with you and it does all start with you and our affectionate mirror of truth. There's only one person that stands between you and success. Everything you would ever want is right there for you. Right there in the mirror of truth. My encouragement Only action is going to get there. Thinking about it's not going to do it. Talking about it's not going to do it. Only action is going to get you to your next win or your next lesson. Yes, sometimes you learn, but that's what makes you better every single day. And like I said, if you want to learn more about our philosophy, the 3Ps and everything that we teach surrounding the 3Ps and our unstoppable Profit Producer program, let's schedule an Agency Growth session. There's a link around this podcast. Click on it. You can get onto my calendar. We will schedule an agency growth session and let's find out if our program is right for you and if it's not, I'm going to give you some strategies and thought processes. Any way to help you and I just all we want is to impact people's lives personally and professionally. That's why we exist in the Unstoppable Profit Producer Program. I hope this podcast has helped you to think bigger, to expand your thinking. And remember, like the late great Jim Rohn said, if you want to have more, you have to become more. Because you attract exactly what you are and who you've become. It is on you. You need to accept that responsibility. But we have a duty and responsibility to help you and that's why we exist. Thanks so much for watching or listening and if this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. My name is Mike Stromsol I'm widely recognized as a leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can learn more about me and everything that we do at upp@unstoppable profit producer.com if you're interested in learning more through one of our live events, please visit be unstoppable boot camp.com and if you want to learn more via one of our virtual events, please go to upfaststart.com all of our trainings, everything that we do is design designed around the philosophy of the 3Ps to help you grow your business, create wealth so you too can have more freedom. All of our greatest money making strategies developed over 35 years available for you in all of our trainings. And please make sure that you go to unstoppable profit podcast.com go up to the top and click subscribe. If you got great value out of this podcast, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss one valuable episode. We bring it. We bring it every single week. World renowned industry people, world renowned high achieving agencies is what we share with you. It just takes that one idea that can change everything. So. And if you got great value out of the podcast today, please make sure you share that link with a friend, another agent or somebody that you care about. Remember unstoppable profit podcast.com just send that link to them, encourage them to subscribe as well so you don't miss one valuable piece, that big gold nugget from the podcast that we publish for you every single week. All we want is your next achievement and ultimately your greatest success. And whatever that is. Thank you for joining us and until next time, you got this. I believe in you. You can do it. I'll see you in the next episode.

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