Episode 239: Bringing It All Together with ‘Implementer of the Year’ Finalist Vanessa Kimball

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, everybody. Welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit podcast. I am proud and I'm honored to have with us one of our implemented the year finalists from our most recent boot camp. This agency founder entrepreneur has done incredible things this year and she has agreed to join us for a session to recap a lot of that. Thank you to the unstoppable Vanessa Kimball for being with us. Hey, Vanessa. Hey.

Thank you for having me.

Hey, you're welcome. I am glad. I'm grateful and what I witness all the things you've accomplished, not only just this year, but in your career as an independent insurance agent. And the more I get to know you, the more I admire everything that you've done. So congratulations.

Thank you.

On all you've achieved so far. And I know our conversation as recently as yesterday, in one of our sessions, I saw a tenacity that I haven't seen. And I reflected back to the tenacity that you had when we first jumped onto a session. I think it was an early Sunday morning session. And I thought, I see where she's coming from and I love that. I love people who are after it all the time. And that's one of the many character attributes that you have. So let's jump in. And by the way, for anybody who doesn't know who Vanessa Kimball is, et cetera, et cetera. Vanessa, give us a just a short bit on who are you. First name, last name, city, state, anything you want about your agency, your family, etc.

So Vanessa Kimball, Kimball Insurance. And we started the agency in 2010 after being in the business some 30, 20 plus years. I have two children, one's at SMU, graduating in May. And I have a son who's playing baseball at Texas State and my husband, Dwayne Kimball, who helps in the agency. I've been doing this 34 plus years and seen a lot of started when you had to manually rate policies to everything automated now. So I've seen quite a bit of change in the insurance industry through my years.

Yeah, I remember those days.

Yes.

Oh, you have, you have three vehicles and two houses. It's Going to be at least tomorrow before I can get back to you.

Yes, but it was a whole lot easier to quote it manually than it is recorded today because you can at least explain what the rate is.

Right.

And how you got to the rate, you know, today. Like it, it is what it is. It's behind the scenes. I can't tell you.

Yeah. And then I remember having to manually make commercial lines and I actually understood what a GEO class code was and all of the makings of a rate. And you're right.

Yeah.

It made us a more consummate professional, I guess. And, you know, now we got to lean on analytics, predictive analytics and everything else. Let's get out of those weeds and get into something more fun, which is what you guys have accomplished. So.

Absolutely.

You taken everything that you've built so far, which is phenomenal, and you've taken the three Ps, the people, processes and promotion, and implemented certain things within that, from quarterly team meetings to state of the agency, to retention incentives, to guarantees to brand building, etc. So let's just start on the people. You, you have a good team and, and I admire how you built your team and you know exactly what you want to do, which is the first step in anything. But you had team meetings, but you've gone into specific quarterly team meetings to include the complete staff and you do other things as well as state of the agency and you close that to be quarterly as well. Tell us more about that.

So we've all.

Why more importantly.

Sure. So over the years, we probably last three years, we implemented the weekly meetings. Even during COVID we would have some meetings and then we have them separated sales and service. And Scarlet, who's operations manager, she leads those the service meeting and Dwayne leads the sales meeting. And then we have leadership meetings. So we have a lot of meetings, but we all stay on track. So basically on the account, managers will go through their numbers, we'll go through retention numbers and what they've sold so far, and that's every week. And then we have a, a sheet in teams where if someone wants to discuss something, they can go in the middle of the week and just type in there, put their name behind it. And that way we have an agenda set by our staff. So any concerns, carrier things, clarification on how people are handling things, that is just a sheet that sales and service both has their own and they can add to it. We were doing that pretty regularly. You know, we don't miss very many of them. And you know, through Coaching. You asked us do you have a quarterly all in staff meeting? I'm like no, we just do the state of the agency in November. So we went ahead and implemented that to where the week that we do the complete staff meeting. We don't have individual meetings and that's where we go in and we discuss where we've been this last quarter. We give them numbers, we talk about what our successes are, what we need to work on better for the next quarter as a team. If, if we're behind goal, what do we need to get to go? What are we looking to do with each carrier? Just a general update of where we are and if they have questions just to make sure everybody's on the same page. Because come November is when we actually go through what we're going to do the next year and then Duane will go through the numbers of the actual solid numbers of what we did for the year and retention and things like that. And out of that came retention bonuses, came sales bonuses from having those and communicating to them on a more frequent basis.

So how does that, how does that improve the team culture or has it? And how are they feeling about things? How are they feeling about their ability to contribute to the further progress, growth and success of the agency?

So the weekly meetings is. We, we've got it really narrowed in. So everyone participates in that and gives their feedback and is ready to discuss. They've gotten used to it. I go through any changes we've gotten in the last week from carriers. Did you guys see this email from this carrier? This is what's happening. So part of our 10 point agenda is carrier news. So that's where if anybody came across something like we found out with progressive that you have to add a 15 year old driver now to the policy even though they're not even permitted. And so that's something that everybody brings to the table to where we all talk about it and you'll remember it rather than an email going out. And so we, we purposely bring those things to where we can have conversations about the changes.

Very, very important. Right. Email is for information and we, we've learned to say this a lot because it happened earlier this year. Emails for information. The verbal is for communication. The phone or face to face or even via Zoom as an example. Right. And that's where the, the communication gets very, very good. So fantastic there.

Yeah. Not only that is, you know, you can forward the emails but who everybody gets so many emails. So we just decided that it was best that I have a folder for meeting and so anything that comes in from the carriers, I probably. I don't even read them in detail until it's time for the meeting, because I just slip them in a photo. Okay, this is going on. And then when we have the meeting, I'll make sure that everybody understands what I receive. And if somebody else receives something, they'll bring it up.

Fantastic. So you have a planned agenda for the meetings? Yes, and based on a podcast that I recently did with somebody who is very, very skilled and teaches leadership, he said something that made me think about this. Do you send your agenda out in advance to the team?

So the agenda is set and I'll pull one up. The agenda set, and it's in team. So everyone knows the order of the meeting. And then there's a part in the agenda that says issues to discuss. And so anyone can go into the agenda and add their issue to discuss as a team. And then you don't have a lot of. Did you know this? Did you know that? So everybody's gotten so used to that. Okay, I'm not going to spend time during the week talking about it. We'll talk about it when we have our weekly meeting.

Right, fantastic. So they're aware what the discussion is going to be. They can, you know, take a look at it in advance.

Yeah, and the one thing that we learned was that when you add something, you need to put your initials behind it. So we know who added it and what it was for, because at one point we're like, who added this? And nobody could remember what it was. You know, just a few things. But so that's been helpful is to make sure that you put your initials behind it. So we know who added it.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And as you were describing earlier, you've got the service, you've got the sales team, etc. Etc. Total team members, what is it, 12 to 14.

12 to 14? Yeah. We just hired another inside salesperson and we're hired another account manager. So we'll have five account managers and five salespeople. Three. Basically a commercial person, operations. And then Dwayne and I, and then.

To a couple offices.

We have two locations. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. So fantastic. Great platform. They're doing a great job with what they've got. But there's one thing that you did this past year as well. And, and I want to bring this up because it seems like such a small thing, but you use the word transformative. And so you identified that in certain markets, you know, you were known as Kimball Insurance Group, that it was Kimball Insurance.

And.

And you made a conscious, intentional decision, which is the encouragement to, you know, rebrand and just call yourself Kimball Insurance. Talk about that a little bit.

So we started out as the Kimball Group, in the Kimball Group LLC is our legal name. And then we added insurance services when we started putting together our outdoor sign and things like that, because everybody thought of it that we were a real estate agency. And so it's always been the Kimball Group Insurance Services. So thank you for calling Kimball Insurance, or, well, now it's Kimball Insurance, but they keep calling the Kimball Group. So there was a little bit of disconnect because in our referral, partners were saying, this is Vanessa from Kimball Insurance. And so they always referred to me as Kimball Insurance rather than the Kimball Group. Some did, some didn't. So probably about two and a half, three years ago, we started transforming to Kimball Insurance because it was just easier. And then we got a sign, and I knew we bought an office space, and so we put the sign up, Kimball Insurance. And then our emails were still saying the Kimball Group. Some were saying Kimball Insurance. Some were answering differently. Believe it or not, I transitioned very well to Kimball Insurance when I was answering the phone. So now everything's uniform. Our marketing materials is Kimball Insurance, our email signature. Everyone answers the phone Kimball Insurance. Um, we just bought a new tablecloth with Kimball Insurance. So we have transitioned. It was really pretty easy.

Fantastic. And. But that simplicity and the other thing I heard you say, for everybody out there either watching or listening, the marketplace said Kimball Insurance. And so sometimes we got to get out of our head. It's not about us, it's all about them. And if the marketplace says this is what works best for us, sometimes we need to follow.

Right, right.

And so especially as you guys continue to grow, because you. I know you want to continue to grow, and you will continue to grow because the way you have positioned your agency, Great job on that. So. And. And the other thing, on the team meetings, you've also, through your team meetings and your state of the agencies, on a quarterly basis, you've set the expectations for the team so they know where you guys are at and where you want to go from a vision standpoint.

Right, right.

So. And. And based on the branding and everything, you've got a new logo, and you're able to take everything that you built, and you've got that clean, simple uniform look out there in the marketplace. So.

Yeah.

And the result has been for you guys, what? It's easier, right?

It's much easier. And. And it's no when we hire new people, you know, they. They come in as Kimball Insurance. So basically we transitioned very well with it. I think there was just three of us that really didn't know it as Kimball Insurance. So we were outnumbered anyway. So we, the new hires, outnumbered the old ones.

Yeah. And you attract exactly what you are and who you become, so, you know, they can get their mind around and their heart around it and you're able to, you know, bring them in. Speaking of setting the vision, in the past and past time, you had become familiar with working within the vision organizer process, but you never really completed it. So the good news is this year, when we got together, you were able to complete it. How has that helped you set the vision for the future and really get your mind and your heart around your quarterly, your one year and beyond into the future.

So we cut. We followed somewhat the processes we had. The, the, the rocks or the things that you need to do quarterly was in our weekly meetings, our team leadership meeting. So this is going to help bring it, narrow it in, and kind of look at where we're going, what we want to do, and to stay on track. Okay, how far off are we from this goal? We generally would do at the end of the year. Okay, what do we want to write next year? What do we do this year? So this actually played out a plan to say, okay, in the next year we want to be here, which we've always done, but in three years it should look like this. In 10 years, it should look like this. So it's given us a roadmap to reach for.

Right. And the great, sometimes misunderstood aspect of the whole process is when you have set out, this is where we want to be in three years. And this is where we are now. And everybody has the perfect opportunity because we have the Future date of 1231, end of the year coming up. And so one year, two years, three years from now, we want to be here. You simply reverse engineer it from your desired destination, and these are the actions and the steps that we need to take to get there.

Yeah. And I don't know where, Dwayne, I will have to sit down and look at it pretty soon because, you know, this year didn't go as planned because of the marketplace. So where we will have to probably adjust that to be more realistic as to what has happened. And then we're adding more staff members and we're making a few changes from a sales side, so hopefully we can get as close to what we've planned. But we also need to be Realistic about it.

I get it. And everybody's different. There are some people out there that are bhag people, which is big, hairy, audacious goal people. And then there's a smart, there's a lot of smart goal people, which specific, measurable, attainable, realistic. And on a timeline, I get that too, so. Or somewhere in between. But I would encourage you to not discount yourself because you guys have a phenomenal ability.

And you've also done some acquisitions.

Right.

And you also have positioned yourself quite well in the marketplace. So maybe we can chat about that. So I know you guys have a big, big future out there and I believe you can get it. I'll just say that and guarantee. So you also created a written guarantee. Have you built that into your follow up automation as well?

Yes. So when we first rolled it out, when we started coaching with you, I was like, where do I start? Let me start with the simple things, you know, the social, social proof, the guarantee. Just the little things that can get me going. And so once I got started, I didn't stop. So the first thing was a guarantee. That was great, you know, that didn't take any time to get it done. The lesson from it was I rolled it out. Okay, we're going to be sending this out to the clients as I guarantee. And I wasn't as commutative about it as I should have been. So, you know, we're like, are these going out? Is it helping anybody say anything about it? And the team was like, well, if I remember, I send it out, that kind of stuff. And then I was like, has anybody read it? Well, not really. Okay, we need to talk about what this is so we can get it done. I was just so excited. I got one part done, I'm going to get it out. And then I forgot to explain it. So after we explained it, you know, so semi going out, semi not. We got agency zoom. So now it's guaranteed that it goes out. It's automated. So once they put someone over to collect it info in our agency, zoom and email automatically goes out. So there's no question whether it goes out or not.

Now that is fantastic. And I know when you were here, one of the things we did a bit of a deep dive on was social proof as well. Social proof being the testimonials, the reviews, the guarantee and all that work together.

Right.

Answer the question, why should somebody do business with Kimball Insurance over and above any other options available to them? And that's the beginning of the answer. It's what other people say You've already done for them and you have so much of it because of who you are, great job, but just position it. And you also went back and took action, which you always do. And you created a sheet. I don't you, what do you position it as in your agency? A call sheet or a sales sheet. I think you were calling it for your producers, you know why they should refer Kimball Insurance. And, and did you create those? It had the reviews on it and their picture and their contact.

Yeah. So, so what I did was I went to our Google reviews and I copied every review per person. So I took everything that was for Amanda, everything that was for Courtney that had their name specific in the review and I copied and pasted it into a document that had their photo, their contact information, their email. And it, it says this is what people are saying about Kimball Insurance and me or something like that. So. And we also automated that. So once they put it in delivered quote in agency zoom, we have it set up to where their specific.

Google.

Review sheet, their social proof goes out. So they have to tag their, their lead with their name in agency zoom and then that triggers that social proof to go out once they put it in a certain stage. So if the customer said, okay, I'm still looking at other quotes, I'll get back with you. Well, that goes over delivered quote and it's holding. But as soon as it goes over delivered quote, their social proof goes out with all the five star reviews. So it kind of solidifies that relationship a little bit deeper.

Yeah. And you did a phenomenal job. It's one of the best that I've seen. Just the way it looked and the positioning of it with the picture and up at the top. Right. You, I think you interchange either why people refer Kimball Insurance or why people trust Kimball Insurance, depending on how you're using it. Well done. You did a great job with that. And it's just part of the funnel which ultimately has supported the conversion rate of four year producers if they do the rest of the activities.

Yes.

And we've talked about that. But there's another facet that you built into that same sales arsenal, I guess, if you will. And I'm looking at the insured's response from your presentation at the boot camp on video proposals. Okay. And great job. And so talk about the fact you weren't doing video proposals until, until this year.

Correct, Correct. So it's always been something we've talked about. You go to all these conventions that everybody talks about doing video proposals. And.

So I had Gotten a referral from someone. It was pretty nice size account, and hadn't gotten a referral from the realtor in a while. And so I went ahead and handled it myself. And the guy was like, can you just email that over to me? I've got meetings. I'm getting ready to relocate back to the States. So I was like, I really just don't want to email this. I need to build rapport with him. You know, we hadn't been able to really connect other than emailing for information or spotty phone calls. So I was like, okay, here's the time to do it. I'm just gonna bite the bullet and I'm gonna do it. So I just logged into Loom and started the video. It took a couple of times, but I did it. And it wasn't perfect, but I did it. And so the next day he called and said, I really enjoyed the video proposal. It helped me connect with the product in you rather than just looking at a piece of paper. You explained it very well. And long story short, I want to move forward with you on the policies. So that empowered me to take the video along with his voice, his recording, and I sent it to my staff and said, we can do this. Just do it. And so, yeah, and then the newer people just went ahead and implemented that. They weren't scared of it. I've got two others have been with us for a while, and we literally just went through the training this week, and they see the importance of it. One of the producers, she actually works with a lot of expats, and so there's a time difference. All she can do is email the quote. So she's like, oh, this will be really good for when I just need to email them. I can just do the video proposal. So she's on board with it, and we'll just see how it goes. But all new hires will be trained to do video proposals.

Right? Fantastic. Great job. There's so many takeaways from what Vanessa just described, and I don't know if we'll get to all of them. But just another idea for you. You've got VAs, but if you got an existing book of business. Have you guys segmented your clients yet?

No, we're almost there because we're getting ready to onboard a new account manager and we're hiring one more. Then we're going to diversify the book a little bit, and then it's going to be segmented.

Fantastic. So if you do segment your clients, you know, start maybe with the triple A'S triple A's, double A's and single A's as the thought process or however you decide to call them. But maybe it might be an opportunity as well to do video account reviews for them letting them know, hey, you know, we've identified that you don't have this, this and this with us like an umbrella or maybe some other things just as a test. That's way outside the box and we weren't intending to talk about that, but great job.

We have some ideas. We're actually going to do some videos for the account managers that when we get a new customer, that all onboarding automation is going to be a video saying, hi, this is Vanessa with Kimball Insurance. I'm excited to have you as part of our family. I am your account manager, blah, blah. You know, we'll have a scripted part out, but that's our next step. Scarlett has a lot of her plate right now, but that's on her, her, her list of things to do.

That's awesome. That's awesome. One encouragement for you there.

You know. Hi, I'm Vanessa, your account manager. Myself and my team. Myself and my team. Myself and my team. And I just try to build that into organizational operations because of the fact that sooner or later Vanessa is going to be on vacation.

Yeah.

And that way you have the aura of myself and my team. Myself and my team. Yes. I'm going to be your primary, but if I'm out of the office for some reason, for whatever, my team is always here to help you. So it's just, you know, I learned early on in my insurance agency journey through a very experienced teammate that I had. She was awesome. She says, mike, we need to always be cross trained and talking like that. Boom. Great advice.

Great advice.

Great job on the video proposals. And the other thing that you did, kudos to you was you did it yourself first.

Yes.

Okay. We can't teach anybody else how to do something that we haven't already done ourselves first. And so you did that and you were able to share the audio with the team and tell the whole story because you had done it. So you're leading by example. Great leadership as well. And the guy said, I've got it right here in front of you and if you don't mind, I'm going to read it. I had a chance to review the video proposal and it was quick. Good job. You don't want to go on forever their time. Right?

Right.

That was an awesome delivery method, by the way. Confirming what you did was good. It was very clear, easy to understand. And the video really helped me understand stuff.

People fear what they don't understand. You made it understandable. And when they're not confused and they can understand, they can make a buying decision. Right. Your explanation was excellent. And it made me feel a lot more comfortable than just seeing the numbers on a piece of paper and trying to figure out what they mean.

Learned years ago, insurance is a mystery. You took away the mysterious part of it. Right. Hearing your explanation was so very helpful. Long story short, let's move forward.

Yeah.

So anybody can do that harm. Vanessa.

Yeah, I was a little geeked out about it. I was like, oh, my gosh, it's.

Worked so, great job, great job. And now, now you're thinking of the onboarding process, the cross sell process. Speaking of all of that, I want to jump into one more thing that you've done in a big, big way. You mentioned it just a couple of minutes ago. Agency Zoom, your companion CRM to your agency management system. You have embraced that and you took massive action right as soon as you started. Got somebody to work with to make sure that you got it down the line very quickly. Now you have sales automation, service automation. And in a recent conversation, you gave me a number of the fact that your service automation, I believe it is, has gotten so dialed in and refined, if you will, that that now people are calling in for their account reviews versus your team, having to pursue them, talk about the whole process and somebody out there who's watching or listening how that might encourage them.

Sure. So we had our renewal process. We went through some training and we had that down pat. Everyone was following the process. They were checking the boxes. Everything was being done. And we had a couple of people who were following up a little bit more than others, but they were all doing what the process was. And we were seeing some retention issues. And so we automated it in September, I believe, right after Labor Day. And they love it. The whole team loved it. They like the fact that it pulls out their to do list from Hoxoff and their renewals are separate, so it's not as overwhelming. And everything's automated. I can't take a lot of credit for it. Scarlett set it up. She actually took all of our written procedures and automated it. So there's no question about, you know, checklist things. All of that's automated into the renewal process.

If we don't make contact with the customer, it goes into a certain column. And for the whole life of the remainder of the policy to renewal, there's automation going out. There's text messages, there's emails. There's a reminder to the account manager, hey, if you haven't heard from them, you need to call them at certain time frame. And so she really has that dialed in. And one of the account managers said that she feels like she's getting about 70% more of clients contacting her because you don't know do they want emails or they want text messages. And so we're getting a lot more responses by text messages than we realize from the customers. So they're getting hit with email and text message at different times. Some days they're getting both. And we're getting more responses of people calling us back rather than we just left a message. And we follow the process, you know, but right now you have to do a little extra to reach the customers because I know I'm busy. And sometimes text messages get pushed down or emails or just you're bombarded with them. So that's really helped. We did a preliminary look. We actually track policy count every month. We have a VA who does that for us. Just looking at the preliminary numbers, we are up seven points, I believe this from September to October in retention policies.

Fantastic.

Yeah. So we just have those little struggles like flood or the agency bill things that we. But it's not going to move the curve that much. So we've already seen the difference in one month.

That is fantastic. And imagine, you know, 70% calling in versus somebody having to pursue them. But let's step back for just a minute. And I was looking for her last name and I can't find it. Forgive me, Scarlett, if you're watching this, but let's give her the. The credit where the credit is due. She's done a lot of work on this as well, so. Great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of your leadership team, Scarlett, who has done a lot of work on this and making it what it is, so great job to the entire team for getting their hearts and minds around this and. And moving it forward, stepping out into the future, which is where we need to step to if we're going to be, you know, relevant into the future with automation. So great.

And I'm pleasantly surprised at how well everyone embraced it and they're really appreciating it because, you know, the sales team, they're quoting and they're going through the leads that are coming in and things like that. And so you don't have time to really do a text message or an email because you're still working on the things that are coming in. So it's been really helpful because that's being done for them. And so when they get a text message back or an email said, yeah, I'm still, I do want to talk to you at an appointment. So while they're still trying to quote and take in new leads, the ones they've already talked to or delivered, it's. They're getting communication without us physically having to do it. And it's keeping us in the forefront and in the game per se, but. And they love it. It was like, I got this and I. And it took them a while because they got a response. I was like, I didn't send anything. Oh, that's automated. So. And everyone. I haven't had any pushback on the automation at all.

Yeah. And that's the question that's running through my mind because there may be some. Somebody out there watching or listening who has had a team that is resistant to change, is resistant to more automation, to do some of either the light lifting or medium lifting or even heavy lifting. So why do you think that is? Is it your culture? Is it your leadership? Is it the way you presented it, all of the above or something else?

So we got buy in. We actually came up with the processes and then we ran it through them, just, okay, this is what we're thinking. Is there anything you want to add, you want to take away? You know, some people were like, that's a whole lot of communicating. I don't communicate that much, but it's like, yeah, I know, but we still need to communicate more. And so, and now that we're seeing the, the residual of the efforts, it's the more and more they see that customers are contacting them back. It's. It's helping them be more comfortable with it and then turning off the automation too. Because sometimes they forget, oh, I already talked to them and forget to turn it off. But they're learning through that. But really no one's given us a hard time about it at all. The team has just really embraced it. But I think it has to do with that. We talked about it and we already had our processes in place. They were manual. So that didn't change. The processes didn't change. We just automated the processes.

Aha.

So they were already used to the processes and then it was like, you need a text message, email. But they didn't always get to them. So now we brought it full circle and it's doing it for you.

Aha. Pausing slightly to let that sink in with everybody. They already had the processes in place. They just Started delivering it in a different way. However, before they went full bore with that, they collaborated with the team, they created an engagement within the team, within their culture to make sure that they had talked about it adequately before launching it. Versus the mistake that I've made in my past because I, I am a fire ready, aim person. That's just my, well, my personality.

I am too. Scully keeps me grounded.

I remember the coaching session. I'm not going to go into detail when you said, oh, I need to slow down a little bit. Yeah, me too. So anyway, but it's important because, you know, back to people fear what they don't understand. Okay. So you, you made sure that your team understood what the not only the desired outcome was to make their lives easier, to take some stuff off their plate and the automation was going to do it for them. But how are you going to do it? Are we all on board? And you got to the point where they said, yeah, let's go. And now you've got the buy in because over time it's proving its results in case 70% of the people are calling in and they don't have to call out.

Right. And we also printed out every email and every text message. There was a document that everyone got a copy of and it was like step one, step two. So they saw it in writing as to what was actually going out. And then we asked them if there's any changes that we need to be made, bring it back to us if you want to reword something or not comfortable with this wording. And so we talked about that. But they had the whole packet of what happens in each stage of what actually happens. And now, of course, you know, when you open up the automation, you can see what's in there. But they got a copy of what was being sent out before we turned it on.

That is fantastic. And let me just restate what Vanessa just said and if I miss anything, correct me. Vanessa. They printed out the copies of all the messages that were going to be going out via the automation and they allowed the team to review them and make sure that they were in agreement with what they said before they put them into the automation system. And they actually started going out. Right, yeah, reiterating that because it's so critically important, you know, oh, I got this information, we're just going to start sending it out. Well, what does it say?

Right.

They need to be confident in responding to that when people call in and they want to have a conversation. So. Right, fantastic. We could go on all afternoon about this. I know, but I know you've got a lot to do because you plan for massive success. Let me just finish it up with this. Vanessa, you talked briefly about the fact that you're getting ready to plan for the coming year, which doesn't surprise me one bit. Why is planning in advance for your achievements so important?

Well, we want to make sure everybody knows what the goals are going into the next year, because you're wrapping up this year. If you hadn't done it, you hadn't done it. And so we were looking at the marketplace place, you know, what the rate increases have been and we're going to implement this year rather than just saying premium amount, policy amount. I mean, policy count, because, you know, the numbers are a little skewed right now from a premium standpoint because the rates are so up. And so that's something we want to set forth because it's going to be new for next year going in. You need to write so many policies and what that looks like, homeowners auto or whatnot. And so it just kind of gives us a fresh look into the new year. And we like to do it in November because you really need to be doing November and December for January. And so we've already started planning. I've already got my list of things I'm going to do for next year by month. I just need to get speakers or things like that together. And then each salesperson is coming up with their own list of things as well. So we're going to try to do individually things to where three of us are really getting out there, because.

We this year we did well, but we didn't do enough. And so we need to get out in the community more.

Fantastic. And as an encouragement for everybody. I mean, that's part of the reason that we have the boot camp every year when we do, so we can help agents begin to get prepared for the coming year. Because anybody that we're privileged to contact or be in connection with and work with, we want to make sure that by December 15th at the latest that they have their plan in place, that they know where they're going, they know what their destiny is, and they're ready to hit the ground running if they're not already running by December 15th. And so I. That's why I asked you that question, because I know you're going to be running.

Yeah.

And if nobody else is running, hey, you'll be ahead of the pack and you'll be all by yourself sometimes again. So congratulations on that mindset as well. The phenomenal things that you have done. Super excited about your future. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Anything else to add as we wrap it up today?

No, I think you've touched on a lot of what we've done. Next year is just to continue to fine tune the zoom. If we can automate, we're automating and.

Diving deeper into relationships next year. You know, our key to success is going to be relationships.

100 agree. And everybody knows 100 people or either come to their wedding or come to their future.

Come to their wedding or come to their funeral. Excuse me. I just thought of one thing. I'll tell you when we get done. What? That is an idea for you concerning automation. It was based on a conversation we recently had. So we will automate that too, maybe. Anyway, Vanessa Campbell, thank you. One of our Implementer of the Year finalists. It was the closest tally we've ever had. Neck and neck all the way. The feedback from everybody in attendance was that was phenomenal. Congratulations on your phenomenal success and for sharing so generously. Very, very grateful for that. Thank you. Thank you to you and your entire team. Exactly. So, hey, thank you. Thank you for being with us. And 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 and what we do atundoppableprofitproducer.com everything that we share. And we've been talking a lot about that here. We've developed over 35 plus years as a proud independent insurance agent 100% of the time. And simply, we encourage everybody to take all of this and whatever else you need to grow your business, create wealth so you too can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. And that's our goal for you. That's why we bring this to you every week. And if this is your first time, please go to unstoppable profit podcast.com or the link you're on Now. Go up to the top and click subscribe so you don't miss one valuable episode. And if you got great value out of this podcast, and there's no way you couldn't have, because Vanessa brought the gold nuggets galore. Please share this link with somebody else that you care about, whether it be another agent, another business leader, just so they can continue to learn and grow. And don't forget to subscribe at the top. And if you've got comments about today's podcast, maybe your big takeaways, please put them in the comments below and you can find our podcast out there on all of the channels. We're out there on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, our YouTube channel, Amazon Podcasts and more. So just look for Unstoppable Profit Podcast and we want to continue to help you grow and learn every single week. And so thank you for being with us, Vanessa. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for your generosity. You are very welcome and I can't wait to grow into the future together. And until next time, everybody, we are thankful and grateful for you. Get out there and take action. You got this. We believe in you. I'll see you in the next episode.

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