Episode 277: People Come First

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. Welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. My name is Andrea Wyatt. I'm the program director of the Unstoppable Profit Producer program. And today I'm going to be your guest host. And in our ongoing mission at UPP to bring value to our listeners, we have decided on a series focusing on successful agents that have been recognized by our longest industry publication. So today we are featuring our very own Mike Stromso as our Rough Notes cover agent. And Mike, how are you doing today?

Fantastic. How are you?

I'm doing wonderful. So glad to see you.

Grateful to be seen. And I'm honored to be able to share just a little bit with independent insurance agencies everywhere across North America.

Now, today we just want to kind of go into a little bit of some of the successful things that you implemented in your agency, Stromso Insurance Agency, that caused you to be recognized by Rough Notes magazine back in April of 2016. However, business principles are business principles, so we want to share a little bit about that. But you know, just for our listeners today, some that might not know your story, why don't you give us a little background on that?

When I was 12, I asked my dad if I could work at his restaurant, Barnaby's. And he said, if you're going to work for me, you've got to work harder than everyone else. So I did. Making pizza dough from scratch, baking pizzas, making sandwiches, bussing tables, whatever needed to be done. By age 23, I was running a way bigger restaurant that was open 365 days a year.

Somebody called in sick, I filled in, somebody had to leave early. I stayed late. Most days. I was there before 5am and after 7pm.

After a couple years of this, I was like talking to my dad. And dad.

I'm, I'm missing the family.

Keith was four, Kevin was two.

I'm missing him growing up. In fact, I don't know if my marriage is going to survive because I'm never home.

My dad said, why not join me in the insurance business?

I thought, me an insurance agent.

I don't know about that. And then he said, we're closed on Saturdays and Sundays. Deal. So for the next 11 years, I worked in my dad's office.

I made all the birthday parties.

I went on family vacations.

And I was home for dinner. But I was hungry to start my own agency. So I ran an office in the next county.

And just like that.

Long days and long nights again.

Hiring.

Processes.

Marketing.

How am I going to do all this? I thought in 1999, I went to an insurance conference and all of the speakers there had the stuff figured off. They got it all figured out already. I thought, why recreate the wheel? I'm simply going to become a massive implementer. So back at the office, I started implementing all the recruiting and hiring strategies, their processes and systems, and the marketing. Omg, the marketing. It's like somebody gave me a key to the mint and I was able to print money.

The business took off like a rocket ship. A few years later, an industry veteran agent, a friend of mine, Bill, stopped by the office and he said, so, Mike, what was your revenue last year?

I said, yeah, we had a million.

He said, whoa, you've hit a million in less than nine years. You've got to share that. In fact, it would be unfair if you didn't.

That's when I started working with other agents and coaching other agents. And for the next 11 years, we've worked with hundreds of agents to help them grow their business a thousand percent or more in less than nine years. So that's just a little bit about my journey. It's been an awesome, incredible journey, just not only growing independent insurance agency businesses, but helping other agencies learn the same strategies and implement the same strategies in their business so they can grow, create wealth and have more freedom.

And I love that. And I have been honored to have been a part of your journey since 2009 within the agency and within UPP. So grateful for you and grateful to work with so many amazing independent insurance agency owners. So, going back to the Rough Notes article, so what made your agency special?

Well, it's team.

You know, to coin a phrase by Dave Anderson out of the great state of Texas and his business book, up youp Business. And keep in mind, Dave is a proud Texan and we love all our people down in the great state of Texas. He said it's the people stupid. And he was right not to classify people, but it's your people and together everybody achieves more. You know, thinking back and doing a quick review of how I answered that question back in 2016, my answer hasn't changed. We brought on a new team member in the insurance agency business. And after speaking with the team member during their 30 day sprint, which is a strategy that we employ and recommend, by the way.

She said, I'm just so impressed that everybody here puts other people on the team first and puts the needs of others first, first, whether it be our team, whether it be our clients, whether it be our communities, they put other people first. I love that about your culture. I think that's absolutely fantastic. So that's really to support our philosophy that we implemented in the independent insurance agency business a number of years before. We were interviewed by rough notes, excellent people, world class processes and systems, and simply you get to promote the heck out of it. So it's the three P's in full force and that feedback meant the world.

Well. And going back on that, you know, I remember in our conference room and the big sign that was across the wall said do unto others. And that was literally at the core of our team and just incredible stuff.

Yeah, and we saw that all the time. Right. I mean, as you walk down the hall, you couldn't miss it because I don't know what font that was in, but you know, it's probably 80 font or bigger.

Oh, at least. Yes, yes. Now, you also talked about a little bit in your article about the biggest part of developing the team was to actually have fun. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. I learned this years and years ago because I mean, keep in mind, I was in the trenches every single day for 11, 12, 13 years at least, you know, doing what we asked our team members to do. So I had a very keen understanding of what they were going through on a daily basis. And so I think that was unique as far as my leadership chair. And I'm grateful for that because know, you've always got to period and whatever you do, put yourself in the chair of others.

To be able to understand what they're going through. So as I learn more about leadership, as I learn more about culture, I learned that, hey, and I told them this transparently often, look, I know that you're coming here at least five days a week. If they're full time, five days a week, giving your very, very best effort, your best eight hours of the day and sometimes more. That's after. If they've got kids and other things going on in the morning, they got to deal with that and get them off to school or whatever, whatever. And then they come to the office and give their very best for eight hours, then they go home and whatever's Going on at home after they leave. That's a lot. Five days a week, and that's what we're asking. So I thought the environment, the culture has to be great, and it has to be a place that they want to come be a part of. In addition to that, when you insert fun and positivity into your culture, it is delivered to your clients, your prospects, and your communities as well. So we designed a fun program, and I did lots of research and came up with all kinds of fun, fun stuff, you know, silly sock day, silly hat day, silly string day. We were on the silly bandwagon for a little while. And I'll never forget, in the early days of this, on silly string day, I was on a Friday, and everybody on the team had a can of silly string. And I came into the office after I invested my best time of the morning, like I always do on myself and on the business first. Then I came into the office. So I came in about 9:30 in the morning, and there's a client. I walked around the corner, around a corner, and there's a client sitting at the desk of one of our teammates. And he was inquiring to the teammate, hey, what's going on with this silly string thing? And she saw me and she goes, it's his fault. And then she pulls out her silly string and starts spraying it at me. The clients in the middle of this, that was a memory forever. And the other fallout of that one is the janitor left me a note after the weekend cleanup. He goes, please don't do that silly string thing again. That was a pain in the butt to clean up, but it was a lot of fun.

That's awesome. And I know we did Wheel of Fortune, and I mean, we had so many fun games, and we played Cornhole for Christmas and all kinds of good. The hooks on the reindeer. So we had a great time. And that's probably part of why our branding ended up being inspiring happiness. I mean, that's what we went out.

To the community in, 100%. And we lived and breathed our brand. We did our core values, and our brand is what we evolved into. And that brand, along with our agency standards of excellence and our internal operating efficiencies, made us who we were. But that was the value. That was the value of our organization. And that attracted people to us in the first P realm. Excellent people.

Well, speaking of our internal operating systems and efficiencies, let's go into the second P, which is our processes. I know that, you know, a big, big thing That I feel we always were very high up in was our IT and our technology. We had everything at our fingertips. Do you want to go on a little bit more about that?

Yeah, Very, very fortunate that I was an early adapter of it, if you will, technology. I mean, we stopped making paper files and I know through working with independent insurance agencies across the nation, the paper files are still a real thing in some agencies, as crazy as that sounds. But we stopped making paper files in 2001 to do a throwback. So very early adapters building intranets starting in 2003, 2004. So yes, we wanted to use the efficiencies of technology and everything surrounding it, from headsets to everything to phone systems to being the most efficient that we could be. But what that also did, it gave our team members greater opportunity to serve our customers faster and better than anybody else. And that's how you earn the opportunity to do more business with a customer, how you earn introductions to other people, AKA referrals or connections and so forth and so on. And we may get into that a little bit when we get into the third P. But processes were everything we identified in the early days. What is the best way to do an account check in or an account review?

And never say annual review, account review. And so we designed, we fast forward a number of years, we designed account review roadmaps and we had a very specific process that we used to review people's insurance account. Proactivity versus reactivity, Proactivity versus reactivity. Very, very big in our independent insurance agency business. You must be proactive. You want to be in control of the account.

If you're operating on a reactive basis, you're always going to be running behind. So that's what we taught, that's what we learned, that's what we implemented.

And we've got the whole roadmap of processes that production logs and, and so much more. But another one big takeaway for everybody here that we Learned more than 20 years ago and implemented in the agency business was client segmentation or tiering. And it's really based on the Pareto principle, the 8020 rule. Okay? There's a solid chance that your top 20% of your clients may be generating up to 70 to 80% of the revenue in your agency. And how are you serving them? How are you communicating with them? How are you building deep, significant, meaningful relationships with them? We find in many agencies you're not because you're too busy answering the call of the bottom 20%, which with all the love in My heart sometimes are classified as ankle biters because they're constantly got a problem with everything. I don't know if anybody out there can resonate with that. So you have to. You get to implement systems to serve that top 20% and continue to build that deep, significant, meaningful relationship. Because guess what? They hang around with other top mindset people. I mean, like, like attracts like, right? So that, that changed so much when we segmented our clients, decided who we were going to give our priority time with, who we were going to jump for first when they needed something. And then we also learned to drive everything down to the lowest level, which is super, super big. And Andrea, you may not be aware of this. I learned this in just the last couple of days.

Well, tell me you heard me talk.

About bots right now. Yeah. Should we share it here?

Yes, yes, absolutely.

You've heard me talk about driving everything down to the lowest level. You know, nothing happens until somebody sells something after, you know, roughly 30, 60 days, it goes over to the service department. Okay. And then a CSR who should be investing 90% of their time or so talking with people about their insurance program. And everything else should be driven down to a processor level. And then the latest in the independent insurance agency world is RPAs, right? Correct. Well, what I learned in the last week, RPAs are already.

Becoming slightly outdated.

If you could believe that.

Technology.

So technology money.

Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. I was just saying think of how much our phones update and the technology, how much different it is than it was 10 years ago.

It's just crazy to me. I mean, the presentation that I saw, and this is very advanced technology bots as an example, and I'm not suggesting they're not a good idea, but just be aware of this for everybody out there. If you change a technology system, like a CRM or an agency management system or something like that, the bot has to be updated, right.

100.

It's like if you change cell phones, like I got to recently and I just identified something this morning that's a little hiccup that I wasn't aware of.

With this new advanced technology through AI and so forth, it automatically updates on the fly.

Crazy. It's just crazy how fast things are going. So process is absolutely critical. And the simple response for a business plan.

Get clients.

Keep clients. That's it. It's not complicated.

So talking about the keeping clients. And I'm glad that you brought up client segmentation because obviously our AAA's got our top priority in time. However, that also kind of transitioned over into the funnest P, which I had the privilege of being in that department for many years, was the promotions. So let's talk a little bit about some promotions.

Like somebody gave me a key to the man. I was able to print money. I too love promotions. But I'm also thinking about one of our members, Bill, who so smartly.

When he started working with upp, he said, I'm going to make sure I build out the first P, which is people first, and then I'm going to build out my processes. And he did everything that we teach, including a custom intranet for his agency.

And then he was going to start promoting the heck out of it. And he did it in that order. Now he has risen to a position of national dominance in his chosen niche.

And super, super proud of Bill for following the course. And it's different for everybody, you know, because everybody wants to start with a promotion. They want to start with promotion. They want to start with a promotion. But think about this for a minute. If you start investing money in promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and you don't have the properly trained, the right culture, fit a player on your team to handle all those incoming leads.

You'Re just throwing money down the drain.

Well, and how much is your reputation worth?

It's priceless. It's absolutely priceless. So those excellent people need to be there. The A players, the best, not the best available, should be there working within those world class processes and systems. Then when you start promoting it, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, they can convert. Because as you well know, the definition of marketing, right.

The attraction and conversion of your ideal client, it's not complicated.

Now another really fun thing that we like to do back in the day is we had a little bit of a marketing Persona.

Right, Doug?

Yeah, right. And rough notes picked up on that. And actually I'm looking at the article they asked me when they came out to the office, they wanted to do a photo shoot with me in the white coat. That marketing Persona was born in.

2009 when I went to a marketing conference and there was a guy at the conference just taking pictures and he was selling three pictures for 100 bucks and he had all these options at his booth. And so this was outside the industry, which, by the way.

There is so much knowledge, incredible knowledge, wisdom, and so much outside the industry as well. I'm not suggesting that inside the industry is a bad thing. It's not at all. There's a ton of wisdom inside our industry, but there's also a ton of wisdom outside. So be looking for those lessons, those teaching moments, and everything you do every single day. So I went to the guy's booth and I said, I'm going to invest. So I bought three different picture profiles. One was in a money jacket, okay, because money, money and success, Love, speed, money, success, never sleep, et cetera, et cetera. And I. And I learned from that. You don't want to be a. What do you want to be? Do you want to be a price driven agency or a protection driven agency? And I would go into a story, but just for the time, on this particular podcast, we'll save that for another day. So I got a picture and a money jacket. I got a picture in a straight jacket. You know, if your insurance program makes you feel like you're in a straight jacket and you can't move, call me. And then I got a picture in the white doctor's coat. And that was the one that resonated with me. So we created the Persona. I was the insurance doc, and I wrote prescriptions to cure people's. I wrote prescriptions for insurance coverage illnesses and to solve and cure rate pains. And I had little prescription pads that I used to carry around all the time. I would just start handing them out. I would just, you know, draw an arrow on there, say, call me to get the cure. And they would. We had big ones that we mailed out as an example. We used it in our monthly newsletters and our nurturing emails and so forth and so on. My car was wrapped up, and that was in the article as well. It was just awesome. Here's a fun story. When we first got the car wrapped.

My wife and I, it was like our first outing in the newly wrapped car. And I live in Southern California, and we drove down to the beach. And so we're kind of driving along the beachfront there, and Cindy turns to me and says, how come everybody's staring at us?

And I thought about it for a minute. I said, it's the car that's a good thing. She goes, oh, that's right.

We just got a wrap. We weren't used to it yet. It attracted people. It was absolutely unbelievable.

Well, and they're all prospects, right?

I'm going to. Yeah, that's a great point. I'll get to that one. Just a minute. But, you know, we had a client in our independent insurance agency business that went from zero to $1.3 billion in revenue. What an incredible journey that was to learn how to build. Build those kind of businesses. I walked into their Las Vegas headquarters one time and The CFO who was my guy, I didn't talk with the founder visionary too much. He was busy building businesses. This walked into this to the office and the CFO goes, hey, Doc, what's going on? I mean, he was paying attention. He was paying attention to the nurturing, caring communications, whether it be the voice broadcasts or the newsletter or the nurturing emails or the direct snail mail pieces to our top 20% because our clients were segmented or in the east, they call it tiering. Same thing in my mind.

So.

And to further something that you just touched on, Andrea.

I've created Mike's Law of 100.

And I originally learned it from Joe Gerard, but now it's my law of 100. Everybody knows 100 people that will either come to their wedding or come to their funeral. And you ladies and gentlemen today have an incredible gift before you.

Everything that you would ever want.

Is sitting beneath you and before you in your own acre of diamonds. It's all there. You don't need to look any further. So as an example, if you have 800 clients and they all know 100 other people, that's 80,000 opportunities.

What more is it that you want? And I'll suggest you may not want all 80,000. Just take the top 20%.

And go get it. And that's. That was, you know, the 10,000 to 50,000 foot level synopsis of everything that we did, Andrea. As you know, I mean, we touch people 27 times a year and we were top of mind and. Huh.

29.

Oh, 29. Excuse me. Thank you. And thank you for all you do and did appreciate that. So. Yeah, and we were always top of mind. And that, that culminated in the Robin and Howard Howland story, so. Which just, you know, supported the fact that.

They were paying attention.

Yeah.

So great stuff. Great, great privileged journey and you know, the branding and the operations.

And everything that we were the excellent people, world class processes and systems and then just promoting the heck out of it all the way to multiple books about the subject.

Just creates massive value.

Yeah, bringing that up, I mean that's kind of when we, when we were creating the inside, the up unstoppable profit Producer program. I mean, a lot of it goes back to what you said. I mean, you didn't want to reinvent the wheel. You wanted to just implement the heck out of it. So that's a lot of what we've created. We've taken all those things that we did so well in the agency and made it available to other independent insurance agency owners and their teams. To be able to grow and just they don't have to reinvent it. We got it for you.

No, you just got to take massive action. That's the key.

And it brings up too. We have a little bit of an opportunity coming up here in Arizona. You want to tell them a little bit more about that?

You mean the private invitation only event?

Yes.

So.

We, we want to share, we want to pay it forward everything that we've learned and you know, our core purpose is to impact people's lives personally and professionally. And so that's why we do what we do. We're just sharing everything that we've learned. In the independent insurance agency business, I'm out there in the trenches with agents every day.

Navigating the waters that are before us with the advancement of technology and, and everything that's going on in the agency business. But I've got a session right after this podcast with a group of high performing agents and one of the asks of those agents is back to the people. So it's all of that. So what we're going to do during that.

Two and a half day, two and three quarters day event in Arizona November 8th and 9th is just share all of this. And we have agencies, agent speakers, high performing members and a very special guest coming in to speak as well. And a private event is by invitation only, so there's probably a link somewhere around this podcast recording if that's of interest to you. We would be honored if you would apply to join us. We'll review the, the, your answers to the very short questionnaire to see if it's a good fit for both of us because we gotta, we need to and want to make sure that it's a good fit for you. So thank you for asking.

Yes. And just so you know, that's called the UP Grand Mastermind and it's going to be in Phoenix, Arizona and it's November 8th and 9th of 2024, so, so we would love to have the opportunity to meet you and you know, going on with this series of Rough Notes cover agents, I believe there's going to be quite a few more in the room as well. So if you want to hobnob and network and trade secrets and collaborate with top achieving agents that have been recognized on Rough Notes magazine, please come down because that's what it's all about. We want to collaborate with the top 3% of agency owners in the United States.

Yeah, 100%. And we've been privileged to attract progressive, aggressive agents who want to grow. So that's the kind of environment, it's different than most insurance conferences because that's just, you know, everybody and everything we're dialed in. We're dialed in to helping people grow their businesses, create wealth so they too can have more freedom to live life on their own terms. And I witness it day in and day out. There's many of our members who already do that. They live life on their terms and there's no better place to be. It's an incredible, wonderful way to live.

Well, as we wrap today, one I want to thank you Mike for sharing all the gold nuggets today and for the opportunity to have been able to work side by side with you for over 15 years now. Truly honored and grateful and thank you to our listeners for allowing me to be your guest host today. And we're looking forward to bringing on some more rough Notes Cover Agents for our series. So stay tuned and we look forward to seeing you next time.

Fantastic. Thank you Andrea and thank you for all you've done to serve our clients, our prospects, our communities, our team members and high performing UPP members across North America. So thank you.

So go out there today, be unstoppable.

Make a difference and leave no regrets.

I second or I agree with that.

Until next time. Do you love the podcast but don't know where or how to get started? Visit www.upplife.com that's up l I f e.com to learn more about our coaching and mastermind programs and how you can join our community of growth oriented agency owners today.