Episode 273: Power of Three

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 want to bring you a very special message before we get started on this episode. We are so blessed and honored to be helping so many independent insurance agents across North America through our Unstoppable Profit Producer coaching program. We're getting valuable feedback from agents that they want more meat and a bi monthly podcast so they have more time to implement the gold nuggets and everything that they're learning on the podcast. We do listen to your feedback, so thank you for that. Effective August 2024, the unstoppable profit podcast will move to a bi monthly, or, excuse me, bi weekly, bi weekly format launching on the second and the fourth Saturday of each month. Bi weekly format launching on the second and the fourth Saturday of every month. Hashtag, let's grow and let's get into it for this episode of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. But you know, before I get into it, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to share with you from my heart, from the trenches, from everything that's going on in the independent insurance agency business right now. I realize that it's the toughest market that we've ever seen, lots of moving parts, but it's also been my observation that there's nothing but opportunity out there. So please make the choice to look for the opportunity. Not for the things that may not be going right, but look for the opportunity. And more importantly than that, envision. Envision your future. You know, prob and proverbs it talks about, where there is no vision, people perish.

Envision the future of your independent insurance agency business because people are silently waiting to be led. They're counting on you. They're counting on you. Their families are counting on you. So make sure you set the vision, share the vision. Train your team on the inner workings of your vision. Give them the tools and resources that they need and get the heck out of their way. Now, you want to inspect what you expect and you want to bring in accountability? Absolutely necessary. But that's what I'm observing right now. Everybody needs to invest time not Spending, invest. That's an abundance mindset. You need to invest time working on the future of your agency. Intentional, intentional, specific time during your week to look at your plan, think about your plan. Because we see it differently on every day. We see it differently in every single day. By the way, it's called encoding is part of it. Encoding is part of it. And, and I'm going to get into something in just a minute because I don't think that I've shared this publicly yet. If I have, not too much for sure. And I'm going to share with you. First time on the podcast here. I am in the process of writing a new book. The launch date is October 22, 2024. The name of the book is Power of Three. And if you want to make a note, powerof3book.com the site's not up yet, but this has been on my heart for a long, long time.

Not only do I love the Power of Three personally and professionally and in my personal life, my power of three are big. I'm a Christian. I believe in God, His Son and the Holy Spirit. So the power of three is prominent there. However, the power of three. Throughout my career in business, over 36 years as a proud independent insurance agent and over 50 years working in business.

The power of three is everywhere. It's just everywhere. So with that being said, the power of three and I'm going to share with you because everybody's got three. In my humble opinion, based on my observation, based on my own journey, everybody's got three.

Personal talents, gifts or superpowers. So in the book I cover, I encourage and I share based on my journey and how to, how to discover your power of three. And then once you begin to discover your own power of three, then I want to help you unleash your power of three out into the world.

And then we want to move into the area of becoming more profitable because everybody's working within their power of three. And, and here's the biggest benefit.

You'll be impacting the lives of other people personally and professionally. And that's what it's all about. That is what it's all about. Impacting others personally and professionally. Because I mean, think about this. If you've never thought about this, understood, I've talked about this a lot. I thought about it a lot in my own journey and I was leading a brand new.

Way of helping agents that we're doing nowadays. It's called a pop up mastermind and I was leading one in Indiana recently. And sitting there in the room at the end of the day, when I encouraged everybody to, all right, take some quiet time and bring together everything you learned on that particular day. Let's get a list, your dream list, the things that you want to dream of doing. Let's get your dream list together, or we call it our peak performance action plan. Let's get your PPA together, your dream list, so we can take action on it when you leave here. So I gave them 10, 15 minutes, classical music playing in the background so they can think through everything they just experienced that entire day. And as they were creating their list, I thought, I'm going to start working on my list what I got out of that day. And I'm working through what I got out of that day. And by the way, it's a huge privilege to teach people in the independent insurance agency business across North America, because I've learned. When I teach, I also learn. And I hope it's very, very helpful because we're all learning and growing together. So I'm going through my own list. And for the first time ever, as, as much as I've talked about this, my encouragement has always been, what do you want your eulogy to say? Right? Think about that. Because I got a message from one of our kids just this week.

And the words were from the end of Steve Jobs life.

And Steve Jobs, when he was nearing the end of his life, he, I believe he had cancer, a disease he died of in his 50s. He talked about the fact that, you know, with all the money and all the fame and all that, those weren't important at all.

It's the important things in life, his family and others and that type of thing. So I was, I, I, as much as I've talked about that, I was thinking about that at that particular moment in Indianapolis. And so I wrote down what I would hope the first sentence might be on my own eulogy. I'm going to share it with you here today. We hold nothing. I hold nothing back, and it's never my place to hold anything back. But I would hope the first sentence would be.

My life was better, because I knew Mike Stromso, and I hope that we're helping you in that way. We hope that we're making your life better. We're helping you in some way to further your business that should support your life. And remember this.

You want to live, you want to build a business that supports your life. And if you're on YouTube watching this, you're seeing my hands. This is your life, right? This is your life. Right here. You want to build a business that supports your life. You don't want to live a life that's supporting your business. And I had a communication with an agent today on this exact item. They had to move some things around because in my opinion, to an extent, they have a job, not a business. They couldn't make a commitment, in my opinion, a higher priority commitment because they had to go tackle something in the business. So they have a job, not a business. We want you to have a business. We want you to have a business that supports your life. And that's our goal. And that's why I'm writing this book, because I want you to be operating in your top three.

So I'm going to share with you a little bit from chapter one right out of the book. And I've been working on this and it's been.

Something has been on my heart for quite some time and there's a lot of my own journey in there. But it's how I got to the point of identifying, discovering, unleashing and using my top three personal talents, gifts and superpowers to become more profitable, to become financially free, to positioning myself and our teams to impact the lives of other people. And it's still a work in progress. And like my great friend Fred Kramer said, things are good, never perfect, but moving to impact our family and the future generations as well. So it's been an incredible journey. And so I just hope that all of this helps you in some way. So I'm going to get started, I'm going to share with you a little bit out of chapter one. And the journey begins with unearthing your incredible gifts, your unique gifts. Everybody's got their own unique gifts, so the journey begins with unearthing them again, like I said, your personal talents, gifts or superpowers. Throughout the book we refer to these special gifts as your top three. Who has the top three to access every day? You do. I do. And so does everybody else out in the world. It's my goal to help you discover, unleash and to increase your profit through maximizing these and the use of your power of three every day. The best part will be your impact on the lives of others once you reach the pinnacle of operating within your power of three. And let me if you've heard this before, I don't think I've talked about this for quite some time. So I'm going to share with you a little bit about my Eureka discovery and how it opened my eyes and my mind, most importantly to my own power of three. It was 1999. I received an invitation to an insurance conference where many other insurance superstars would be sharing all that they had learned so far. I just started my independent insurance agency from scratch. And I didn't know, I found, I found through operating that and launching it, there's a lot of things I didn't know what I was doing. There was so many things that I just couldn't figure out on my own. So I responded to the invitation that I was all in and I booked my travel, blocked my calendar. I was glued to my seat. My pen and paper never stopped. I couldn't take notes fast enough. Learning from all these successful independent insurance agents who had, quote, figured it out and were sharing their secrets so freely was like the heavens had opened up above me and showered blessings on me and the entire audience of maybe 50 people. These agents had figured out everything that I couldn't figure out on my own. And by watching and learning from them, my eureka moment came to my mind right before my eyes. I talked about vision. That was the early days of vision. Since these agents had it all figured out, I was going to simply take what they teach and I was going to become a massive implementer, which I did. And to make sure we're on this the same page.

You know, I want to remind you, it's my 100 belief that you never lose. You either win or you learn.

The greatest teachers of my career have been my failures, also known as my lessons. So I took all the information.

From that conference, went back home, and I became a massive implementer. I started implementing everything that I had learned, from recruiting, to processes and systems, to task organizers, to everything related to the insurance agency business, and then to marketing. Omg. Not only when I got home, when I started working within the marketing again, the heavens parted right above me and showered blessings upon me. It was phenomenal. It was like I had struck the richest pot of gold simply by showing up. I had found that treasure chest to everything I've been looking for. And as I continued the journey after my first Eureka discovery of my career, somebody introduced me to the thought process of the Power of Three. I just wasn't sure exactly what it was yet. So the learning journey continued. I invested time, resources, money and more to learn everything I could about the Power of three. And the more I learned, the more I was intrigued and the more hungry I was to learn more. As I continued to unearth the incredible knowledge of the Power of three, my mind and my vision continued to expand there before me every day. Were activities and strategies that I continued to identify and learn that I love to do. Key point. And the more I opened in these spaces in the insurance agency business, implementing everything that I learned initially at that first Eureka Moment conference, and then continually and consistently from the incredible vast world of resources and opportunities that I continued to encounter, I truly began to feel unstoppable. And I put that out publicly and I encouraged people to be unstoppable because I was, quote, feeling it. The pss on my emails back in the day at that, about that time I would say, p S Hashtag be unstoppable. That's all I said. And it caught on. And people said, Mr. Unstoppable, unstoppable, Mike, et cetera, et cetera. You may or may not be aware of that. That was the early days in the beginning of the name of the unstoppable profit producer program, the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. That's where it was born. If this happened for me, it can happen for you as well. So.

We continued on and I've been asked this question over many, many years, Mike, what should I do to start to identify my top three personal talents, gifts or superpowers? I don't know where to start. That's a great question. I've created a list and I'm going to cover it as we wrap up this podcast. You can start with. And the list is vast. This is what I have deemed to be the most popular personal talents, gifts or superpowers to start with. But you know, do your own research for sure. Go out there and do some research. There's look, there's g. You can gts Google that stuff or there's GPT. I mean, the world's at your fingertips. But don't use it as the final answer either. Just use it for research and idea purposes and then come back. Make sure you do your own study implementation to make sure it's your own. Okay. And I recommend that you start considering these things that you love to do, things that you're passionate about, things that bring you joy, things you're highly productive at, and things you can do quickly because of your knowledge in the particular subject. And that's how I ended up with my top three. And in writing the book, I was just working on it actually last night.

My third.

Of the three, which is coaching, one word coaching. It was 16 years after I started on this adventure, learning about the power of three and really getting clear and really unpacking everything and learning to delegate and empower other people. And throughout the book I share stories and other things to inspire and to encourage you and to lead you to identify, discover, unleash and identify and implement your own power of three. However, with that being said, I was writing last night that it was 16 years, 16 years before I got super, super, super clear. So I was operating within that very sweet spot and that's what I want for everybody. And based on my journey, I bet you I can cut 2/3 off that we've got. I had somebody ask me in 2014 when we're out on an early morning exercise adventure. They came to our very first boot camp and they were blown away and asked me a question on the second day on that early morning adventure. Said, you've been an agent how long? I said, 27 years. He goes, how long do you think it will take me to learn everything that you've learned so I can implement it in my own agency? I said, I bet you I can cut 2/3 off your journey. He said, deal. And he joined our coaching program, has now been in our coaching program. He's in his 10th year and we have had this conversation. He's been able to do it. So I believe based on my wins and bigger lessons, that I can help shorten the curve and that that's what I want to do. And we, we don't know how long we're going to be here, so I want to make sure that I pour out everything that I've got here and I'm holding my hand in my heart if you can't see it right now, my head in my heart, I want to pour out everything that I've got. And I, I am passionate about serving all of you in the independent insurance agency industry in every way possible. I was having a conversation with somebody earlier this week about the book and, you know, why we're doing it and why we even do what we do at upp and my teammate Andrea Wyatt and I, who we started up together 11 years ago, now.

We do it for one reason. And this agent that I was speaking with, one of our very high achieving members who.

Had an event in their life that caused them to be away from the agency for almost a month now. Good agency.

Good team. But this agent commented earlier this week after she got back to the office and we had a conversation that the agency did just fine without her.

And that was music to my ears because that's our goal. And we talked about her top three and how she operated within her top three while she was gone. Dealing with a very personal situation and things continued at the agency. She came back, she commented that her not all her team was there that day and everything seemed to be operating just fine. And she was very.

I don't know that content is the right word but you know, she was very happy in the fact that it just continued to flow. And that's what we want for everybody. That's why we do what we do. Andrea Wyatt and I want that for all of you for every single agency. We want your agency to be humming on all cylinders. Are things going to be perfect? No. Like Fred Kramer said, things are good. Never perfect. But you know, part of that is operating within your top three. Okay. So I want to get great clarity on your top three and.

It'S going to be part of the process to discover and unleash your top three. It's going to be effort on your part. It's going to take some time going through the day to day activities personally and professionally. You will begin to discover and identify your what I call V1 or version one of your or your starting point of your own top three personal talents, gifts or superpowers with your newly discovered V1 list now V like Victor1. That's just something that Andrea and I have been putting behind everything that we've been creating in the insurance agency business since we started working together in 2009. And by the way, if you have an opportunity to connect with Andrea anytime soon, please wish her a happy anniversary. Give her massive props for putting up with me. It's going to be 15 years. We've been working together in September, September 1st. So super grateful for her and all of her efforts but and support her. I mean I'm not the easiest guy to work with, trust me. So. But when we started creating things and creating marketing and everything we did and content, we would put a v1 behind the file or v2 or v like Victor3. And a lot of our presentations as an example, it gets all the way up to V8 or V9, the eighth or ninth version, because we're constantly tinkering to make it better. We want it to be the absolute best that it can be. So give her props that she deserves for putting up with me. But V1 is what that means. So you're going to set out to find your version one or your V1 or your starting point and list your top three personal talents, gifts or superpowers. And with your newly discovered V1 list, write them down on an index card. This is my just my recommendation. Write them down on an index card. I keep a Set of index cards here. These were gifted me, gifted to me by a very special agent that I know. But write them down on an index card and put them everywhere on your dashboard. Your bathroom mirror, your computer monitor, back of your cell phone, wherever. That way you can see them. Every time you see your top three, contemplate, how accurate are they? Am I, excuse me, on point or off point? Thinking I'm beginning to envision the things that I will do within that particular superpower and the things that I will delegate or empower somebody else to do over the coming days, weeks, months, or sometimes even a couple of years. But you'll begin to get greater clarity on your top three. Let's compare this entire process with an analogy of a baseball player. When a person starts playing baseball, say in little league, when they were a young child, they play a lot of different positions. I grew up playing catcher, third base, and I also played some outfield. But over time, I grew into being a catcher the majority of the time because that was the natural position that suited me. My talents and my physical frame at the time. You see, identifying your top three talents, gifts or superpowers is similar to. To that thought process. You will discover and unleash over time, your sweet spot. As you play a game, play another game, and play another game, do a business activity, do a business activity, do another business activity, or do a personal activity, do a personal activity, and do another personal activity. You'll begin to gain greater clarity on the things that you do well, where you're most efficient, the things that bring you greater joy, the things that you're really, really good at, and the activities that bring you, again, the most satisfaction. You begin to get feedback from people. And this happened to me. They say, man, you're so good at that, or your results in that particular product presentation were phenomenal, or your sales results knocked it out of the park this quarter. And you'll start thinking and reflecting. I remember doing that, and I was super happy when I was doing that, and I felt super productive. That's when you begin to know that you're on the brink of identifying one or more of your top three personal talents, gifts, or superpowers. Now, you might be thinking, okay, I want to start identifying my own top three. But how many total personal talents, gifts, or superpowers are there? Like I said, the list can be extremely extensive. And I encourage you to do your own research. So I'm going to drop a list.

On you for you and with you in just a minute. So if you don't have something to write with and write on. Go ahead and pause the podcast right now, grab that and come back and I will share with you the list that's actually going to be in the book. Now this is my V1 list. It may turn out to have a V2 or V3, but this is my beginning list. And this list by all means is not a complete list. However, based on my research and over 36 years as a proud independent insurance agent and over 50 years working in business, I created this list based on the most common top three personal gifts, talents or superpowers of most people that I work with and that I've encountered.

I encourage you to spend some time with the list and just start with a blank piece of paper and writing it down what you think your top three might be. Again, this is a journey and there will also be some profiles of real independent insurance agents in the book who have shared with me their top three how they came to that conclusion. Super grateful for them for investing some time to be in the book and to sharing their information, but that will encourage and inspire you as well. It's not something that's going to get done in one sitting. Not the same day, not the same week, or even the same month in most cases. Some cases it might take you a year or two to get total clarity. But my encouragement? It's just like any skill or talent. Don't give up. Please do not give up. You I think back to my conversation with the incredible Rudy Riger from the movie Rudy Rudy when he spoke at our boot camp. My biggest takeaway from Rudy over those couple days I've got it right here on my monitor. Never quitting lasts for the rest of your life. So please don't quit if you're all in for the long game or have an infinite mindset. And I hope you do.

Not only an infinite mindset, but an abundance mindset. I strongly encourage you to invest the time to learn more, to become more, to grow, and to understand the things that you do really, really well, topically and otherwise, and then begin to associate how you might fold these into your daily life, personally and professionally. Remember, we want to have a life that supports our business. We don't want to live our life supporting our business. We want to live. We want to have a business that supports our life. We don't have a business that supports our life. We don't want to live our life supporting our business.

We'll cover it in the coming chapters. Again, this is in the book how to Engage Other People to help you do the things you don't do well that are not part of your top three through delegation and empowerment so they can be happier. And ultimately if you're operating within your top three, you'll be happier, more productive, more profitable. And again, the biggest benefit will be that you'll impact the lives of others. Super excited about our future journey together. Here's the list. Ready? And again, if you didn't get something to write with and write on, pause right now and go get it and come on back. I'm going to share with you the list right now and it could be a form of the word or words and and feel free to make it your own as well. Okay, Number one Business Strategy and again, this is the list that you start with to begin to discover and identify your top three personal talents, gifts or superpowers.

Again 1. Business strategy 2. Coaching 3. Graphic design.

4. Idea generation.

5. Product design.

6. Process implementation or improvement.

7. Public speaking 8. Conflict resolution.

9. Team building.

10. Decision making.

11. Leadership.

12. Training.

13. Team collaboration 14. Data and statistical analysis 15. Research.

16. Web and software development.

17.

Strategic and event planning.

18. Time choices and efficiency 19. Task management 20. Sales.

21. Business development.

22. Problem solving and 23 planning an organization. I will suggest that that list will probably update a couple of times before the book goes final. And again, if you didn't catch it at the beginning of this podcast, just a couple of updates for you. This podcast titled Power of Three is officially sharing with you. If you haven't heard that, I'm writing my eighth book and called the Power of Three and the URL will be powerof3book.com the site's not live yet, but it's been on my heart for a number of years to write it and to share it and I'm gonna get it out there in every way possible. The projected launch date is October 22, 2024. So super privileged, super honored to share that with you. And the other announcement in case you missed it at the beginning, I will share that with you right now. By the way, I hope you enjoyed those snippets from chapter one of the book to help you to begin to discover, identify your top three personal talents, gifts or superpowers and most importantly so you can begin to unleash them into your life and it will make you it talks about this in part three of the book more profitable and most importantly, you will begin to impact the lives of other people and there's nothing better. Nothing better. So our goal for you and the other announcement that I had at the very beginning of the podcast that we are blessed and honored to be helping independent insurance agents across North America through our Unstoppable Profit Producer program. Our Unstoppable Profit Producer coaching program. We're getting valuable feedback from agents that they want more meat and a bi monthly podcast so they have time to implement what they're learning through all that we teach and we do listen to you. So effective August 2024, the unstoppable profit Podcast will move to a bi weekly format. Bi weekly format launching on the second and fourth Saturday of each month. Hashtag let's grow. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. And if this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. My name is Mike Strompsa. I'm widely recognized as the leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can learn more about everything that we do at unstoppable profit producer.com unstoppable profit producer.com and if you got great value out of this podcast, please help somebody else. You can just share the URL Unstoppable Profit Podcast with them and make sure if you haven't yet, make sure you go to Unstoppable Profit Podcast. Go up to the top, click subscribe so you don't miss one valuable episode and make sure they do the same thing. And of course the podcast is out there on all the channels. Stitcher, Spotify, our YouTube channel, Apple Podcast, Amazon, and so much more. So it is our privilege and honor to bring this to you, to help you grow your business, create wealth so you too can have more freedom to live life on your own terms. Like I mentioned at least twice in the podcast and I'm going to say it again as we wrap up today, we want to help you create a business that supports your life. We don't want you living your life supporting your business. We don't want you to have a job. We want you to have a business. You got this. We believe in you. We know you can do it. But it's a lot better and faster when we do it. Hashtag together, better together. We are bfg, blessed, fortunate and grateful to be here with you. I will see you in the next episode. Until then, you got this. Take action.

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