Episode 287: Get Your Clients Front Door Open with Austin Moorhead

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit podcast. This podcast will give independent insurance agents all of the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromso.

When you hear the word automation.

What'S the first thing that comes to your mind? You know, I think way back when, when I learned from one of my greatest marketing mentors, if you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you've got to use a hundred percent of the ways. And then I learned about technology, then I learned about automation, and then I started learning lessons and I started saying four letter words because stuff wasn't working right with the automation. But then I started meeting the right people and it all came together. We were firing on all cylinders. We were reaching 100% of the marketplace in ways that we wanted to reach them with the right messaging that caused them to contact us. That exercise the definition of marketing, which, you know, is.

You want to convert the attraction and conversion of your ideal client definition of marketing, the attraction and conversion of your ideal client.

And the agency started to grow like nobody else's business, and it never stopped. Today, it is my honor privilege to have one of our greatest supporters of the automation effort, four independent insurance agents, on the podcast, Mr. Austin Moorhead from Lava Automation. Austin, how you doing?

You're right. I don't know if I deserve that designation, but you. Fantastic.

All right, dude, what's up, man?

No, doing good. I. That was, that was a really nice introduction. Thank you.

Right. How could we, you know, impact something so great? You know, it's tough, but, you know, you were talking something about like, four letter lure, you know, words and lessons and, you know, a bit of a story there and, you know, this transition into, you know, how it goes and, you know, the cool thing about, you know, most of the process, if you're getting into it, is, you know, it's trackable. It's, you know, black and white. It's ones and zeros. And if you can create a really good experience and, you know, at the end of it, everybody understands it, you know, how awesome is automation, how abstract. Can we make this conversation for a minute, you know?

Yeah, I hear you.

Yeah. And so I'm not sure, you know, what we could talk about specifically because the spectrum is so large. Right. You know, but for the listeners, maybe like on the fence. It's, you know, how do you, how do you see yourself with automation potentially in the future? And I think it's, you know, your team understands the playbooks, the campaigns, the workflows, and to the point that, you know, customers and prospects are responding to the automation in real time and you're able to make changes to the automation in real time. You know, like, hey, you know, we've been running this word track and the users kind of like on the front line, your producers, your CSRs, your account managers, like they have a relationship with the CTO or the CMO or the CRM administrator in such a, you know, integral way that they can be calling out subtle adjustments to some of the game plans, the workflows, the campaigns, the, the agency constantly kind of feels like it's breathing and it's alive with automation cranking out millions of emails and texts in real time. You know, like, how do we get that relationship and that like symbiosis going is kind of the magic, I think.

So let's dive into that.

How do we get that going? And you know, our philosophy is very simple, excellent people, world class processes and systems and then simply promote the heck out of it. And that's why you are such a prime fit for everything about that for an agency business and many of our members work with you for that exact reason. But doesn't it all start with the people?

It does all start with the people, right? And so with the end of the day, there's a ton of legwork getting, you know, these engines, the CRM is kind of an engine built out and fine tuned and you know, getting the gauges in the right spot to produce the reports that you need. And it's not something that you could do like from scratch without being shown in a year. It could take several potentially. You know, we're just in the fortunate position to be looking at, you know, $1.52 billion in premium across a couple hundred accounts. And we're seeing processes, you know, from, you know, state to state and they vary, you know, depending on carriers, et cetera. And look at, you know, the challenges with the hard market and how we're rolling and moving stuff and make prescriptions that work for a variety of scenarios and then be able to deploy them in a short amount of time. That's the really the critical parts. Like, hey, you know, we want to get into this, we want to get into the deep zone, we want to do it tomorrow. We're ready. Like, okay, well, without a company like ours, you could potentially go down that, you know, two year, you know, escapade where we try and put in sequential marketing plans into the process and have some success and some failures and learn a lot and you know, go other two years and learn a lot more, but then come meet me, you know, two years into it and realize there's a lot more still to be learned. And you could have learned all of it in two weeks. And it just kind of depends like what plat, you know, plan a path you're looking to go down. You know, the one that has had the lens on, you know, almost look at him for the last five years or, you know, alone. Sometimes you can find little support groups that'll give you good, you know, tidbits and sometimes you can make a system very simple, don't need to automate too much and you're very effective. It just kind of depends on people's, you know, relationships sometimes with technology. Those that like live on it versus those that like despise it, you know.

Yeah, yeah, the agency geographics, demographics and psychographics are, are absolutely critical. But you know, back to the people for just a minute. So I also learned from the leadership standpoint, a business period, that people should only be doing the things that only they can do, especially from the leadership chair. So I mean, if figuring out tech systems and building tech systems and managing and leading them are not a person's area of strength, AKA weakness or not highest priority, then you should empower and delegate somebody else. So automation is done for the independent insurance agent, you bring both to the table. How long ago did you start your VA arm of your company?

Or was that started In September of 2019, a few months after we started the automation company? And it was kind of by accident. The first automation customer says, hey, I like your team and could you get me one or two? And now they've got like 17 with us and they've been with us for, you know, five and a half years and they went from like 8 million to like 53 million in premium at that time. And.

Just crazy stuff and you know, they were kind of the model that a lot of this got kind of built after. And we've had successes all over the country and but yeah, people, definitely the VA, I think we have 326 as of Monday that, you know, help move the needle for these agencies and you know, anyway, so we have our blueprints, we empower the virtual assistants overseas. We've got big modules and training camps they like run through and so they can be Stood up and be effective and help your organization not only in setting up the technology, but participating in like the day to day.

Right.

And so like if you're looking for, you know, running like the most efficient agency, like we try and solve everything with tech first, then with staff second, you know, overseas staff, and then US staff last, where we have the licenses at. And if you can take those three things and kind of create the reshape the puzzle thinking technology first, overseas staff, you know, U.S. licensed staff, and in that order, and then try and rearrange the pieces, you'd end up making a more efficient organization. So we kind of help people go through that experience. Like, hey, we want to do some of these more advanced business operations such as offshore staff. I need someone to hold my hand to that experience. You know, we're looking to take on technology maybe in the process. Like it's a big endeavor. It's like, you know, there's checklists to know across eyes to dot type of thing, so.

Well, I wasn't aware of it. You just said something that caught my ear. So I did also hear you say, well, two things. First you said, start with the automation.

And then add the people, if you will, figure out which automation you want.

To, you know, integrate, usually at the same time, go at the same time.

Got it? Yeah, that's what I've learned. I mean, we're here today because a number of our members started working with you. And I said, tell me more about that, how's it going? And they started telling me what you were doing for them. And it was that simultaneous integration, if you will. We selected this piece of technology. Now we need somebody to help us install it. And then once it gets installed the way we want it installed, they're going to help run it so I don't have to, so I can do the other things that I need to be doing to fuel the business forward. And so that's what you've done. So. But the other thing that I learned was you can help with multiple CRMs as an example. And when we got together recently, you said, yeah, we do them all.

Yeah, seven or eight different CRMs I think we're into now.

That's fantastic. So you can bring the people to the table, you can bring the knowledge and experience getting the CRM set up, which leads to that marketing conversion, which is the definition of marketing, the attraction and conversion of your ideal client with.

That front door open is what we always say. Make sure that you've got the lead system and the sales machine running, period. No exception. Right. And then, you know, we'll always have funds to solve the service need. So never let the. The sales engine is the most important part of any business. You know, get it off the ground. You always have money then.

Right.

To go solve your service needs. And then, you know, you'll realize how much attention you put into service once you've got a big portfolio. It's like we put a lot of resources into even automating that part of the relationship and backstaffing it with offshore staff to make it efficient.

Right.

100% agree. But, you know, one of my big mantras, I guess, if you will, is yes, sales are important.

But the wealth of the insurance agency business.

The diamond, the shiny diamond, is the existing clients. Right. So we want to make sure we build that in as well to keep as many of them as we can in today's marketplace with the moving part, shall we say, that are going on in today's marketplace, that can be a big challenge sometimes and stuff.

Yeah. So using people to remarket the accounts at renewal, you know, if you're going to spend one to two hours looking at these accounts or I guess the alternative is ignore them.

You know, so most people spend the time to look at them and it's like, are you going to put, you know, US staff and US wages on that or, you know, overseas staff and wages? Yeah, license activity. It's like, how do you divide the work up? How do you create the marathon, the, you know, the, the relays and pass that baton back and forth? And we found that the CRM kind of organizes that relationship to kind of prioritize and everybody, all of your clients, a little bit of attention at renewal versus like, hey, we just don't have enough time and we had to make hard decisions and we're just going to ignore like looking at their renewals. Well, one, with VAs, you can look at the renewals and you can go out and go out to market and actually find homes, you know, and, you know, essentially save your customers, you know, potentially from leaving you.

100% agree. So I remember a study a couple of years ago where we evaluated cost per transaction of any process in the insurance agency business. And the number that sticks in my head that I just wrote down is $24.50 across the spectrum.

Sure.

Okay. So when evaluating which one. Which person is going to be doing that. And that's the other thing I wanted to get to. I wasn't aware of that until you just said it. You also have access to us based on team Member, we call them team member, staff, Same thing. Right.

So anyway, awesome. Tell us more about that. I mean, what do you got?

Well, you know, so beyond the CRM, like, I think the goal really, let's say you had one deployed, is to get the analytics and the reports out of the tool. Like, how do we build this engine and not have those gauges that are giving us, you know, the data long term and, you know, maybe how do we not also have a relationship with Austin and his team long term? Because we need someone to be our accountability, you know, kind of coach quarterly, annually, so to speak. And, and so we've come up with a couple of products. One, we we're making these custom dashboards that are integrated with agency Zoom currently, and we're looking at other CRMs to associate them with in the future. But the reports allow you to, you know, kind of play with the data, you know, see what's important to you. We've got some like, eos modeled, you know, scoreboards that are in there looking at like, you know, your weekly tallies of some of the things that we felt were important, such as like, you know, quoted premium and quote counts and KPI and like leading the indicators of activity and things like that. And so, and we value, you know, tallying them, summarizing them weekly, keeping that number and then running a weekly count so we can see the trend over time. And so we're pulling this data out in a way that we could hopefully give agencies perspective into like, what's happening over time. And if they're in the cockpit, so to speak, of like the agency living and breathing day to day, this data speaks back to them and says, oh, it's a leads for team member number two. We can see that there's an opening there. And you know, the leads have come down and it looks like we're trending. Oh, what does that need to tell me farther up the pipeline? Oh, we need to get out with our marketing rep. We need to get our Google Ads turned on. And these are the conversations I'm learning from reading the data in my scoreboard. That of the reports that are built into the agency Zoom integration and so just little things like that, it's like, what could we do with, with gauges? So we've got this really cool CRM. It's sending out thousands of emails and texts. We're growing our new business revenue better than we've ever done before. But like, where are we allocating, you know, our time, attention and resources to like, where are the cracks? Where are The Fishers. And so, anyways, yeah, so the, the, the dashboards are something that I think is going to be pretty exciting that most people are going to enjoy. Where the plan to release them right now is in the next couple of weeks, we're going to be inviting current members, you know, current lava. We've got, you know, whatever, a couple hundred customers, and we're going to just internally, I think, just give it out to everybody for free for maybe see if we can get the bait set a bit. And then eventually, once we get through beta on that, we'll be, you know, opening it up to the market. But one of the things that we learned early on from the core group was that when we share data between agencies, between the agencies, there was a little bit of competition that started among the team members that, you know, kind of jokingly and joyfully wanted to beat, you know, other agencies that were associated with us. And so we would pull these reports manually and share, like, lead counts and, you know, call counts and things that producers do on a broader spectrum. So they weren't just looking inside their agencies. And the people that wanted to win could play in a bigger league, essentially, is what we did. And we, all of a sudden, we saw people going from like writing 30,000amonth to 120,000amonth. And personal lines premium.

Right. Not commercial premium, where, you know, you know, one account's a quarter million. It's personalized premium where the average account size is like 3 to 4, 4K or something like that.

Right.

And they're doing 100K and, you know, new business premium. Like, who does that? And so the idea is that these dashboards will try and create some of that for the people that want to win. Like, how do they compare themselves to the other people in the, in our user group? So anyways, yeah, so that's one of the ways that we're trying to continue to kind of like bend the agency a bit here for other people to kind of enjoy.

That is absolutely fantastic. That's something else new that you have going on, and I don't know how much you want to talk about it, but I know you've got other beta opportunities going on to further support the independent insurance agent and what they're trying to accomplish. So you want to touch on that?

Yeah, I mean, if you don't mind. Yeah, we've got another, another tool we've been working on for a few years. It's called Turbo dial. It's a VoIP solution. It currently connects with Keep. It's the CRM that, you know, I kind of got my start with, I guess if you would say, like, you know, also when you first got into the space, like, what were you building your organizations on top of? It was keep. And one of the reasons that we went there was because it had a native integration with this phone called Turbo Dial. And I at the time, you couldn't get integrations with your AMS and your CRM. So let's integrate something else, you know, because we find that that's a winning strategy. And so as we integrate with turbo dial, Turbodile today has something like 400 customers, I think 1500 users exclusive to keep. We're like, well, and. And I'm not a, you know, when I first reached out to these guys, I'm just a user of the thing. But over the years, you know, we've ended up kind of partnering a bit and, you know, I was a big reseller of it, and now I'm a part owner of it. And the ideas that. And I've been SW the development team for a few years. And so we've been silently working on an agency Zoom integration.

And We've got about 50 users on the platform right now that are just in beta. And we're going through the bugs. You know, there's bugs, and we're going through the bugs and just kind of working those out. But hopefully here pretty soon we'll have an agency's integrated dialer that rivals what we did on Keep. KEEP was rad, and we still use it today in my current organization.

That's right.

You know, it's got 500 deep, unique little integrations to the CRM. Every little, you know, thing that you want to it to do, it does, you know.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so that's coming out here pretty soon. Looking forward to that. You know, just having another thing that we can offer agencies that. And, you know, I think the deep integration kind of shows, you know, what we. How we value the industry. Like, you know, it's not just a phone, you know, it will talk to your technology. It will do things that other integrated tech isn't doing. It already is doing things. Things.

Right.

Integrated tech isn't doing. So, like, you know, I listen to the pain point of the insurance agencies and it's like, how can we bring that back to them and, and make. And, you know, the goal really always is make the end user, the agent, the CSR's life easier. Right. They can do more of an activity or if it's not as intrusive or if there's less clicks involved. Like that experience is going to be delightful and then that usually trickles up. You know, they're the ones that are using the equipment, like make it fun for them.

Yeah. And that was one of many, many reasons that we recently connected was the keep aspect because frankly, that's who we use and we wanted to get up to date on that and some other things. And we've been chasing each other for a while and we jumped on a session and I found out how much you're currently doing and I said, oh, I need to make sure we get him on the podcast so he can share what he's up to. And kudos to you, man, for all the.

Yeah, it's all hands on deck around here kind of all the time. And you know, we've got to think that it's me, it's not me anymore, it's my team or I've got this massive team that, you know, sales and service and administration that are communicating around the clock to keep this operation kind of like going. And, you know, we're 100% remote. And so I think either we've got this really beautiful community in my company because of like how well we relate to each other in this complete independence and time and time again we show it for each other and it's kind of fun to watch. So I'm honored to be in that position.

Independence for the independence. I love that. And autonomy and transparency and all that is what I'm hearing. But I bet when you get out of bed in the morning, you never know what you're going to encounter sometimes or whenever you decide to get out of bed, period.

Yeah. With 326 staff in the Philippines, you know, everyone's got a different personality and everyone's going through different life experiences and yeah, you know, you're going to hear something every single day and then, you know, on the other side, having 200 customers in this day, it's. It's like. And then how do you blend it all together and I'm somehow in the middle when it trickles up.

My, my outside opinion is leadership and training. And it's something that I sing from the mountaintops all the time. I observe it in business, period. Across the spectrum, leadership and training is something we've got to continue to work on. Leadership and training all of the time. And obviously you've done that well because you wouldn't have what you have. I couldn't agree with you more. It is all about the team together. Everybody achieves more. So you are a key team player for many agents out there. I heard you mention a couple hundred, which is fantastic. But you know, for everybody out there, we got going so fast out of this podcast. I'm here with Austin Moorhead from Lava Automation. So anyway, he's sharing the goods about independent insurance agency operations. Whether it be people, meaning VAs, or US based team members, he can help with that. Whether it's a CRM, he's got knowledge about all the CRMs. He can help with that. Whether it's about phone systems and turbo dials and all that, in conjunction with everything going on, he can help with that. I'm sure he's got integration knowledge on all the agency management systems. They can help with that. And they support your operation so that you can continue to do exactly what we teach. Grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom. And I learned about it as some of our members are doing great things because of the work of the Lava Automation team. Austin, before I forget, so we can repeat this at least twice. So if somebody's hearing something and they want to learn more, how can they contact your team?

Well, the best way is to go onto the website and book a demo to meet with one of my sales reps. The website is www.lavaautomation.com.

Right.

And somewhere on there there's a, there's a calendar.

It's down towards the bottom. I'm looking at it right now. So it's labautomation.com there's a calendar. There's a big red button in the top, right. Says book now. So.

Yeah, get on there. And then what you're going to get is an email inviting you to the event. Plus an email asking you to fill out a pre demo intake form. Helps us kind of get ready for, for your meeting.

Right, Right. So you'll jump on and have a conversation and see if it might be a good idea to further that or not, and we'll all go on from there.

Awesome. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the best way. We're coming at a conference hopefully this year. You know, we're going to be at most of them.

Fantastic. Yeah, I know that was big on your calendar this year and we're excited to have you as well later on this year. But let's talk more about helping agents. And you know, I love get the front door open. I love that statement. So whether it be sales which is getting clients or service which is keeping clients, you can help with that. Where's the future? I mean, let's forecast into the future. What's the future in the next in. Based on everything you're working on, I'm sure you have a vision for your company that you've built to an incredible level so far. What does the next one, two, three years hold for the industry based on the things that you're playing in right now?

I think we're going to see still like quite a bit of reshaping with the technology, communicating better. I mean, AI is coming and so it's like, is it going to be doing some maybe of the VA's work and VA's going to be managing the AI? I mean, this is some of the stuff that we're forecasting, you know, five, 10 years into the future.

I think that's too far. That's not realistic, right?

Yeah, it's hard to tell, you know, but what does look like really, you know, like the inevitable next one to two years is like agencies are. If you're not in the offshore staff game, like you're falling behind because of the margins at this point, and agencies are probably outgrowing you at a rapid rate because they're shifting their money from one spot to the next. You know, you have a big payroll line item on your P Ls and they've got a big marketing budget and it's like, what do you want? You know? Yeah, so it's like, look at your P Ls and get them in line. You know, you'll say, hey, go out and do like best practices based off of, I don't know, there's some insurance ones. And I'm like, shift a couple points down to marketing. And I always say, if your agency is growing, build a growth model. The agency, you know, reinvest or double invest or triple invest or quadruple invest into your leads. And if you do that right now, for the next, you know, two to five years, you'll have a bigger agency than anybody else. And everyone's always like, hey, what's the, what's the secret about your big agency? The secret about the big agencies is they, they spend money on marketing, a lot of money on marketing. You know, they've got a. They've got a sales engine, a big sales engine, and it's got reports and they can measure it and they can calculate whether or not it's profitable. And once you can build an engine that's profitable on, you know, lead acquisition, the question you have to ask yourself is, why wouldn't you, you know, like, why turn it off? It's working and it's Generating a profit. And so teaching agencies to see this is something that we do. It's like, hey, how quickly can we get you outside of the referral game? Because that's refer are great. But the problem is your goals often exceed your referrals every month. And it's like, you know, how do you get to your first quarter million dollar month? You know, you just started five years ago and you're struggling to get past 100k. How do you get to 300k a month? And we always recommend getting leads. Any agency that does that and figures out the lead game puts their agency in control of their growth.

100% agree.

That.

And you know, the other ways I think we can help agencies out is, you know, from the service perspective.

You know, I think I see CSR sometimes. You know, they love to be consistent in how they're documenting stuff. They don't like learning new systems. I think they're the ones kind of going through a lot of change right now across the industry. You know, we're seeing them kind of impacted the most. You know, it's like disruption after disruption. So it's like, how do you love on your team if you're about to go into one of these disruptions? Like, how do you prep them, hold their hands and like, what type of service do you provide your team? Like in the moment when things are getting chaotic during this transition period, you know, are you there for them and do you have a plan? You know, is there someone that you can reach out to? Are you kind of winging it? I think, you know, do you show up for your team is pretty important. And we're seeing a lot of agencies make transition in their Software and their AMSs and their CRMs, or they're adding these things maybe for the first time. And some agency owners are more kind of available than others, or maybe looking forward to doing some of the extracurricular work than others. And you can see how that trickles into the team.

Yeah, you just said so many things that I want to just quickly unpack. And thank you for that by the way. I mean, I happen to know that there are agency entrepreneurs listening to this or watching this who have fallen behind in the automation game. And they just can't seem to get their minds around taking those steps forward, maybe bringing on a va, maybe doubling or tripling down on the marketing to combine all of those into one statement. What would you say to those? You said it to those people. But what might help them with that mind shift other than the fact that they know they're falling behind anything.

You know, you. I think you have to have a bigger dream, I think sometimes, like, and it has to be really, really vivid, you know, Keep dreaming. I think I remember when I first got started in the insurance space. You know, the guy who was going to become my sales leader used to come down and ask us about our dreams. And, you know, of course, that was a long time ago and the dream has changed and hopefully most people do a little bit, but I remember kind of thinking about that thought a lot over.

You know, the last, whatever, eight years or so, and how important it is. At least have a dream. I meet some people sometimes and they're not really clear about, like, what their goals are and what's important to them. It's like, could you get clear on that? And then are we. I guess maybe are you willing to do the things others aren't to achieve them? But maybe it's just because your dream isn't clear. I don't know. How do you motivate to do someone to do something they don't want to do? You know, it's obvious. Just do it. Just do more of it, you know, do unlimited.

I couldn't be happier that that was your answer. That was fantastic. And I've got. I'm looking at my. I have two dreams, and I'm looking at them right here.

Okay.

I have a personal and a professional dream, and I. I know what they are and I look at them all the time and I repeat them all the time and I read them all the time just to reset them in my mind. But, you know, I'm thinking about one of our members who previously was in that boat. But to commend her, she stepped up and did it. And to your point, that was part of it because I said to her, I said, let's dream a little bit. Let's talk about where you want to be in the future. If you want to put some. A time frame on it, like three years from now.

Great.

Where do you want to be? And she went back into all of us.

We're going to be there, right? With tomorrow's coming.

100%.

Yeah. Where do you want to be when we're there?

That's right. And she sent me an email with exactly where she wanted to be. And I said, boom, now we can go get it. Because knowing your destination is all you need to get there, right?

Yeah. Tomorrow's coming, you know, and if you don't have a little bit of a plan, you might not get tomorrow. You know, looking the way you are, it might be a little more banged up, you know, you might be in a little more of a financial problem. You might have some weird, you know, relationship drama. Like have a plan, be organized, be in front of it and you'll get there. But you gotta paint it first. Gotta paint that dream.

So I did also hear you clearly. I learned to read my P and L and to review my P and L on a monthly basis and to spend a quiet five or ten minutes with it just to understand where my business was at. But percentage invested in marketing, percentage reinvested in marketing.

Better said, you have a number, can we get it to 15%? Right.

I, I know agencies who are north of 20.

Yeah. So my loose rule when it comes to marketing is especially in insurance, if you'd like pull up a spreadsheet and do like a little bit of a formula, let's say you spent 90 cents and, and, or sorry, you spend a buck and you made 90 cents back on a lead, would you do it, yes or no? I would. Especially in the insurance game, knowing that we're going to potentially have this customer for five years. Right. And so you start doing, you know, the math on it. You know, spend a buck, make 90 cents back times a thousand, so. And then put a retention rate on it of whatever, 85%, you know, that dollar turns into, you know, 30 bucks in a few years and before you know it. And one of the untangibles about this model is all the referrals that you don't see that come out of it. So this is worst case scenario, you spend a buck, you make 90 cents back. But we've got lead sources out there. You spend a buck, you make a dollar fifty back, you spend a buck and make two bucks back. And so it's like people just aren't turning on the lead source part of their agency, the lead game and that engine that literally drives revenue, that you can watch the money go in and watch it come out bigger.

Sorry, I don't know where I was going with that, but you need to be there.

No particular direction, but I could not agree with you more. You need to be there. And I know in our agency we knew that it took us 1.4 years.

To get a return on that investment. But we also knew that in the longer game we would do an 8 to 1 return on some of our investments or more. And that doesn't including the leverage that we've got. You know, my law of 100, if you've got 800 customers and they all know, a hundred other people, that's 80,000 opportunities.

Remember where I was going? So, you know, spend. You know, I was like 15% of your P and L as a marketing budget. The loose rule goal is, is spend until you don't get back the return on investment that you're happy with. And if you have another dollar and you've got a team member with a free hour and you can get a lead to put in their lap, do it right, like spend 50% of your budget. If you can work it, there shouldn't be an upper limit. It should be breathable. Right. And so every penny goes into marketing when the ROI is satisfactory.

In my opinion, 100% agree. So that is why Austin Moorhead from Lava Automation is who he is. He is on it. He understands what he's helping independent insurance agents deliver and installing their agencies. And he's got the people, he's got the automation knowledge and the automation tools, whether it be CRM, phone systems and so much more that he's developing that we probably didn't get to today. But you know Austin that works in Portland, Oregon or Miami, Florida, right?

Yeah, anywhere. It's all over.

Yeah, it's all over. And so it is a worldwide, global market nowadays and we are super pumped and excited and workplace as well. And you talked about your team, that's a global team as well. So thank you. Thank you for all that you're doing. It is a privilege and an honor to spend some time with you today just to learn how to help agents and if I may take the lead. Do you mind?

Yeah. Thank you, Mike, for having me. Yeah.

Just to. To reiterate, if you didn't catch it earlier, just go to. And then you want to learn more about what Austin and the team are doing and maybe do a demo and just learn more about how they may or may not be able to help you. Just go to lava automation.com l a v a automation.com scroll down to the bottom. There's a calendar. There's a big red button. It says book. Now you can book a free demo, no obligation. Just have a conversation about what they have knowledge about. He's working on new products, dashboards for automation tools that will help you keep your finger on the pulse. Numbers don't lie. Right?

You don't lie. What gets measured gets improved.

And we didn't get to this before we started today. I just got off with an agent who also told me this. He said he picked it up out of a book and he's got numbers. Don't lie in his head, which is one of our KPI tools that we bang into their heads. Man, you gotta know your numbers. He said, words talk, but numbers scream.

And he goes, when I read that in the book, I thought of you because you beat into our heads. The numbers don't lie. I said, yeah, but words talk and numbers scream.

That's right.

Kudos to him and that's why he has achieved what he's achieved. So, Austin Moorhead, thank you, man. I can't wait to catch up more soon. Thanks for all you're doing and good luck and just keep fighting the good fight. And I never answered your comment earlier. What helps you fight through that suck?

Yeah, yeah.

Why, Right?

Yeah, it's the why. It's gotta be the dream.

When your why becomes big enough, your how it becomes. It's.

Yeah.

So I know you've got a big why and I know you got big dreams and you are doing it. Thank you for all you're doing.

Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it. Hope everybody has a great day. And I always tell everyone, you know, let's dig in, let's get to work.

So let's dig in. Let's get to work. I love that. All right, before you get to work, I just wanted to say, if this is your first time on the podcast, thank you. And if this is not your first time, thank you. If you are the first time on the podcast. 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 what we do@upplife.com that's up, Paul. Paul lifikefranky upplife.com that's what our agents are living. Once they get all this installed, they get to live the UPP life. Over 35 years, we built independent insurance agency business and we now teach everything that we did in the agency business so that agencies can grow their business, create wealth and have more freedom. And if you got great information off this podcast episode today, we would super appreciate you sharing our podcast link with anybody you know. Just share unstoppable profit podcast with anybody you know so you can help them also learn all the great things that are happening and bigger than the opportunities they have before them as an independent insurance agent in today's world. So we're super pumped and excited about the future. Please share that and when you do, encourage them to go up to the top. Unstoppableprofitpodcast.com, click subscribe so they don't miss one valuable episode of everything that we can bring to the table to help them grow their business, create wealth and have more freedom. Austin, again, thank you, sir.

Thank you, Mike.

All right, what's that other thing you said about the work at the very end?

Let's get to work.

Let's get to work.

Let's get to work.

Let's get to work. I agree. As we wrapped up today. That's a great ending statement. Let's get to work and get that front door open.

Love it.

Love those two mic drops. Thank you, Austin. All right, everybody, let's get to work and get that front door open. I'll see you in the next episode.

Do you love the podcast but don't know where or how to get started? Visit www.upplife.com that's u p p 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.