Episode 31 : Special Guest Chris Paradiso

Welcome to episode 31 of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This is Mike Stromco coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. And today we are honored, just absolutely honored, to be joined by the amazing Mr. Chris Paradiso.

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This podcast will give you all the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Millionaire agents and entrepreneurs think and act differently than others. This podcast will give you a simple, proven three step blueprint to grow your business. Over the past 31 years of research in your industry, Mike Stromso has created a unique philosophy called the three people process and promotion. This outside the box thinking and guidance provides agency entrepreneurs just like you the knowledge and tools you can quickly implement to explode your agency business. He has been there, done that, and he's still doing it. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or are 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.

We could not be more fired up and excited this morning. We have what we feel is a top agent, not only nationally but from an influence base is doing amazing things for agents, his community and and everything that he seems to walk into. It changes people's lives and we are honored to have Mr. Chris Paradiso with us this morning. Chris has things for you that you've likely never heard before. You're going to want to make sure you pay close attention. And please, if you've got a door, close it. If you've got email open, close it. Put your phone on DND, turn off all your other distractions. A little over 59 minutes from now, it's still going to be there. But you're not going to want to miss one minute of what Chris Paradiso has for you this morning and find something to write with and write on. Thank you so much for being on the call. How are you doing, sir?

I'm doing wonderful. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

You are welcome. Thank you for your generosity and your time and being with our unstoppable audience today. But the other thing is we titled this Too Busy for More Money because I saw something a couple of weeks ago that you had generously put out to all the other agents that are connected to you that was talking about the fact that there's so many people out there that are too busy to accept any more money. Perfect segue to what you have for everybody this morning. So thank you for helping us put this together and for sharing this morning. And I wanted to encourage everybody with this. This is something that is on the walls of our agency as we sit here today. And I continue to encourage my agency team. Keep in mind that I'm just, I'm one of you. I've not been there and done that. I've been there, done that, still doing it. Just like Chris Paradiso. And we've got our own agency teams that we continue to lead. And part of my leading right now, I keep saying this all of the time. You've got to out think and you've got to out anticipate everything that's going on around you every single day in every single way. And if you're not trying to out think everything and if you're not out anticipating proactively everything that's going on around you, you are going to get left behind. We don't want anybody left behind. We want you guys all in the top 3%. The fact that you're on this call, you're already in the top 20%. So congratulations for that. Let's get you the top three as quickly we can. And without further ado, I know Chris is going to help you get there as well. Chris, thank you again for being on the call today.

Thank you. Thanks again for having me.

You're welcome. Just a little bit about who Chris is first and foremost. A husband and a father. He talked about family. I believe he ripped it off six times in a row when he's talking about the Globetrotter slide. He's the owner of Paradiso Insurance. He's a community leader. He's a digital marketing authority. He speaks all over the country to various insurance industry groups about his authority and digital marketing and just leading and running just world class independent insurance agency. He's an educator, he's an author, just a great guy. And the more I get to know Chris, the more I'm in awe of who he is as an individual. Chris, thank you so much. That's Chris's family there. Just awesome stuff and thanks for continuing to share. You didn't anticipate this photo, Chris, but I couldn't resist throwing it up because I could not agree with you more. Success is not a talent, it's not a skill, It's a choice. And if you want to have more, you've got to become more. Each and every person is listening to this. You have that choice and you can become anything you want to be. One of my favorite comments on that is, you know, I don't know if you've heard of McDonald's.

Of course you have.

It's worldwide.

Sure.

Ray Kroc was 52 years old when he started McDonald's. None of us, if you think age is your excuse, I call BS because you can have anything you want. You can do anything you want if you simply make the choice. Chris, thanks for that visual, man. That's powerful.

Absolutely. Thanks.

Hey, no problem. So I'm going to take you through a series of slides, Chris, and then we've got some questions that have come in and we want to extract everything you've got in your just incredible knowledge bank for us. But some of these, when I put them up, why don't you go ahead and share with the audience what you see and how it came about and how it can help them.

Well, first and foremost, when we look at this slide, there's a couple things. Right in the center you see basically an outline. It's a celebration, part of getting to know you. This is all about visual content marketing. And our agency really finds that it's one of the backbones to helping push out content to be able to get it to be read. And I know a lot of people say content is king. I would argue that point. I say content is queen. Visual content marketing is king. Because if you don't have the right visual, your content will never be read. You could have the greatest content in the world. If nobody ever reads it, what good does it do, right? So what this is really hosting and what I'm trying to portray here is the ability that we all come up with our outline and create content and content in the senses of visual content. For each and every piece of.

Written content we're putting out there, what we use is one tool that you can use is something called PicMonkey. PicMonkey is a free tool that you can help create visuals. I would highly recommend that a lot of the visuals that you use for your agency that you're taking because there's a lot of people out there. And I know in Massachusetts recently there's five or six agencies that have been not fined, but they were going after, got letters from local attorneys. You can't just take pictures from the Internet and use them and then slap your logo on there. We go after and we do a lot of our own. We hire a photographer to create a lot of our visual content. Obviously, down in the left hand corner is our logo. We make sure that that's everywhere when we're creating visuals. And we're putting them out there in the Internet world.

Crystal.

Fantastic.

Yeah, fantastic. So visual content marketing is king is what you said. You mentioned that PicMonkey is a great tool to use and use your own pictures. Yeah, yeah. Free tool and use your own pics. I could not agree with you more. I've paid, I can't remember the law firm up in the Northwest. I paid him once and I'll pay them again. And that was my lesson. Wins and lessons happen in life. So yeah, use your own picks because people want to do business with people that they know, love and trust.

Michael Use pictures of your staff members. They're the ones you know. Fortunately, I'm working on large, large, large accounts. The everyday person who's calling walking into my agency is not dealing with Chris Purity. So it's not about me sticking my face out there on everything.

Right.

You need to include your staff. And the thing that I get is agency owners say, well my staff don't want to take pictures and they don't want to be included in pictures. Well, it's a part of our contract when we hire people and it's also a part of our outline every three months when we sit down and do your job description. A big part of ours is you are going to have your pictures taken with staff, with other teammates within the agency. And it's just something we do here at Paradiso Insurance. It's not an option.

Non optional behavior that's powerful. And for those of you who have hiring systems and you ask questions up front, that's one of your questions up front as well. Explain to people that you're going to do staff photos. Are you opposed to that? Ask the great pointed questions and go silent or shut up and let them answer. And if they say no, then they're.

Not a good fit.

Doesn't mean they're a bad person or anything. They're just not a good fit for your particular situation.

Fantastic.

Chris, talk about this one.

This is our staff helping out our staff, which is what we love.

Basically what was taking place here is our office manager doesn't know how to sew. So what ended up happening is there was another teammate of hers that said, hey, I have no problem. And Stephanie is always smiling and she's always, she's got this kind of giggle and we just love to be able. One of our 12 promises to our customers is that we want to put a smile on your face. We want to make sure you hear that smile when we answer the phone. I think this really resonates you can see this is our office. We did not stage this. This was just something that was taking place, and our marketing team decided to take a picture. And life is better when you're laughing. And it's a part of who we are here at Paradiso Insurance. And I'm a big believer visually to putting that out, taking pictures of our staff and internally inside of our office and just, you know, kind of spreading that positive vibe that we're trying to portray. There is nothing exciting or fun about buying insurance, but we can make it convenient and at least painful and hopefully enjoyable as possible. So that's basically what we're saying here in this picture.

That is fantastic. And the thing that I just wrote down, by the way, I'm almost on my second page of notes. Chris, thank you. Stephanie is always laughing. So everybody in their office should find a laughing leader who is the leader of laughing. I mean, isn't it so much better to have a fun environment? You know, we were just honored to win the 2016 Happiness Award, and I love coming into the office because it's such an awesome, happy place to be. And you also talked about the 12 promises. We're going to talk about one of those in just a minute. But Kris has 12 promises that he's put out to his marketplace, and one of them is to put a smile on your face. That's fantastic, Kris. And the thing I meant forgot to remind everybody again, Kris puts his logo on everything that goes out, and that's part of his brand. And we're going to talk about that also in just a minute. Great shot. And the other thing that I meant to write down on this, Kris, is his real. There's nothing fake about this. This is a real photo in a real place with real business people doing.

Real business in the real environment.

It's just a real environment. Yeah. And that's what people want. They don't want this fake facade.

I would. Sure.

This is our calendar. And what I love about this is we try to blend three things in with our. With our calendar every single year. And every year, we change, but we include some of the same things. The first thing is I'm a big classic car collector. We do a lot of business with classic car collectors. So what are we trying to do? I buy American cars, old American cars. I think it's a piece of Americana, and I'm very passionate about that. So what do we do? We push out cars. We put it on a format that's a little different. It's more of a flat format. So It's a little bit.

The look is very cool, even if you don't enjoy cars. So that's the first thing that we have on there. The second thing that we have on there, we'll always have our logo on there. And we also have a message. And our message this year is we help keep you moving forward, and we don't want to look back. And another one of our promises is when and if we make a mistake on your policy, we're going to own it, bring a solution and fix it, and move forward. So that's really what the message was on the calendar. And every page has, we help keep you moving forward because we know that we're going to make mistakes. Every agency makes mistakes, but does every agency own them? Does every agency call.

With a solution to fix it? That is the key message here. The third thing that we have on here is, you'll see there's photos of myself and the office manager. But every page, there's something different.

We have the promises that are built in on our calendar.

Along with that, we also put in key dates that we have. For example, we are big on Flag Day and Flag Week. We have a big celebration. So we include that in on our calendar and we put them out to every customer. We have. We put out thousands of them. Is it costly? It is, but I don't want to tell you it's ridiculous in cost because what we do is.

We have a graphic designer put it together for us. She actually purchased the pictures this year because we did not have enough of the car pictures that were professionally done in order to make the calendar. So roughly, to put the calendar together was $350. Then we just go out. I do business with a local printer. I gave them to them for me to spend four or five thousand dollars. I don't think that that's crazy. To get, you know, 3,500 calendars made, the biggest expense is mailing them. But I don't just mail them. I also go around in the local community. I got them hanging them up in the post office. It's great. Every person that walks in there, there's my calendar on each side hanging up in the post office. So I just think calendars are great. I just don't think. And it's nothing against Ives or nothing against all the old calendars that are branded with Traveler, these other companies. What we don't want to do is. We don't. What we should want to do is brand our agency, brand it to us. We're all unique. That's what that's about.

Don't be like anybody else. If you want to be like everybody else, you're going to get the same thing that everybody else is getting. Or you can completely separate yourself and do the opposite and be paradiso. That's fantastic stuff. The other thing that I wrote down, Kris, so you do a new calendar every year with the new theme and it looks a little bit different. This classic Americana which supports who you are, the brand and your, your team owns what they do. And I think that most of the top agents, they have that same message in line. And you know, lastly, you're not like anybody else. You're unique and that's the encouragement for everybody. Be yourself, be who you are.

I think it's key. But it's also have that brand because I don't know if you noticed, but it's all red, white and blue. You know, you'll see that in almost all of our, all of our visual. Very rare that you don't see red, white and blue. That's some combination in there. Yep.

Don't be like anybody else. Be unique. So talk about this one real quick, Chris.

Well, this was a visual of our staff. If you could have one thing for Christmas, I would definitely take a. What we really wanted to do is socially we want to get people involved. We like to hear from people because one thing that we're trying to do on the social media side is we're trying to connect with our clients. We're also trying to connect with our prospects.

One thing that's, that's interesting is, is what we try to focus here is we don't want to insure everybody. That's not our goal. Our goal is try to ensure as many people that align with who we are and what we stand for. And that is very strong. And what I mean by that is if you look at my agency and you look at the average age, you're not going to find a 22 year old, 24 year old, 26 year old average of anything. That's not what we're focused on. We're focused on ensuring families. That's what we focus on. We focus husband and wife with kids. That's just, that's our real focus. So why do we put this out? For two reasons. First and foremost, it helps us connect with prospects. I would like to definitely take advantage of being with my family across the country. I would take advantage, would definitely take advantage of having my husband home on this holiday season. I mean, it's amazing when you put a question out there like this, what you get for answers are tremendously different. You can see if somebody's selfish, you can see how caring somebody is. You can see how family orientated. This question is really a question to get to know and understand who's out there and what are people really wanting for Christmas. So we really use this to promote socially, to get people interacting, to get people talking.

Fantastic. So you're socially getting people involved. It resonates with the family dynamic, which is what your core value is. Not only you, but I'm sure it permeates throughout your office. In addition to that, it attracts your marketplace. And back to the classic cars for just a minute. I mean, people that have classic cars, are they generally maybe a little bit better off financially than others?

Absolutely. They're more financially off. You'll be shocked. Most of them are family people. They've gotten their kids involved. Their kids, second and third generations are involved. Very, very, very pro America, pro ve.

Just strong belief in standing up for what we, what our country stands for.

Right, right. Fantastic stuff. And ultimately, the last thing that I just wrote down about this is know your marketplace. You've got to know the marketplace that you're in and around and what you want to attract. Great job, Chris. So talk about this.

Denim in December. Every month. Every December, the whole month. We. I'm a big believer and it's just my personal belief. Everybody has a different belie on this. I've seen it all over the Internet. We dress up here at the agency. I'm passionate about believing that we dress to impress. We're professionals, we're licensed. We don't wear jeans, but we do wear jeans in December for a cause. Most people that know me know my sister is intellectually disabled. To be politically correct, she's mentally handicapped, never to leave the first grade level for her mindset. So Journey found down at the bottom is where we get our staff to donate. So every week they pay a fee for the month and they can wear jeans every day for the month. And we promote it and we try to get people to come in wearing jeans to help back us and support us in the journey that we're trying to take. And helping Journey Found, which is really bringing awareness to group homes for the intellectually disabled and getting involved. They are human being just like. And they do have feelings just like we do. So it's amazing to think on how many people get behind us and get involved. And it's just a way that our agency wants to give back. It's what we believe in. It's what we stand for. You know, we also do a lot with the homeless. And we do denim for December for the homeless and for the children's hospital. Every year we try to pick a different cause. Journey found is my father founded it. Unfortunately, our local government had decided that they're going to start defunding a lot of these group homes, which caused my father to panic and fund and help put this organization together, which it is a nonprofit and no, none of the family members. It's not like the basketball players where we get paid. We 100. The only thing we do is donate money and time into this. There is no family members getting paid. And it's just. It's absolutely giving back to those who don't have a voice. And I'm very strong about saying that my sister does not have a voice. Unfortunately, people don't listen to the intellectually disabled. So it's very, very, very strong to me to be able to help this organization and help these individuals have a voice so that they can be heard.

That's a little bit about that visual.

I'm sorry, I'm writing notes. Hang on.

No worries.

I hope you are, too, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, this is just incredible stuff. So, Chris, what you just said, you dress to impress, and I hope you guys didn't miss that. Dress to impress dress to impact everything that's going on around you. Jeans in December for a cause, your team takes the lead in the move for awareness. That's powerful. Have your team learn to become storytellers and engage people as to why they're doing things. And you've got the homeless included. That's fantastic. And the thing that I was just writing down is you're giving back to people who don't have a voice and the things that are going on. That's just absolutely amazing, Chris. Thank you. Thank you.

Very important to me. So very important to my family.

So we talked about the 12 Paradiso promises. We've got number four here up in front of us. Tell us more.

Sure. The Paradiso promise. This is number four. It's our job to alert you to your insurance products that you need. What I mean by that is we are not going to be dollars and cents pushers. We are not going to be order takers. We are licensed to educate you properly, protect you, and hopefully protect what you worked hard. What I mean by that is it is in my belief, we will not take an order. We will educate. We will not back down from that education. We will not write state minimum limits I would highly recommend how many people out there really are okay at state minimum limits. Now, there are going to be a rare occasion, but state minimum limits, it's just. It's not what's best for our customer. If that's what they're looking for, they should be going to the GEICO's and the progressives buying direct because they want lower coverages. Absolutely. And if you really think about this, and I educate and what we do is we call GEICO on a conference call so my team can learn. And recently when I did a call, what the GEICO rep said to me is she took all my coverages, all my cars. She says, oh, you have a $5 million Braille? I said, yes. Have you ever used it? I said, no, I have never used it, but I've had it. And she says, how much have you paid in the last five years? I said, well, I can tell you it's well over $1,000. So maybe it's five, maybe it' six, maybe it's seven. She says, so in the last five years, you spent five to $7,000 and never used it? What we find in cases, Mr. Paradiso, is that.

We recommend 100, 300, because that is usually adequate. And I was. My staff members draws literally dropped. Well, can you guarantee me I'm not going to use it? It's not about us being better than them. It's about making sure that we educate people why they need an umbrella and how we live in a litigious society, and that someday that umbrella could save your hiney. And I believe that. So our promise is really to educate you. We are not going to be order taker. We're going to educate you as a licensed agent. We're going to tell you that. We're also going to tell you how we're proud to be an independent agent and that we have options and choices. Direct writers don't have options and choices. They. They don't. They don't have as many carriers and as different products as we carry. So that's really what that promise is saying. Obviously, it's one of our licensed agents. Obviously, we have the flag in the back, which is a very strong, I think independent agents in the American flag go hand in hand. It stands for everything that that flag stands for. Options and choices. The freedom of choice. Freedom of options.

Fantastic. Thank you, Chris. So visual content marketing is king. You said earlier, that's what we've got. You've got an agent in the visual, you've got your brand and everything around it with your promise and you're leading into what you want people to understand and options and choices. I agree with that. You also, that's fantastic. The fact that you get your people on the phone and the conference call in and listen to the call, and I'm assuming your calls are probably recorded, so you got a teaching tool there that you can take back to the rest of your team and further educate them on really what's going on out there in the world. And the other thing I wrote down was secret shopping. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're not secret shopping, and if your team is not secret shopping from time to time, you're missing a huge opportunity. I've got to go get her on my team. She is the queen of secret shopping. She's doing it all the time. And what she does, she uses that in conversations with people where she can say, you know, I call the marketplace all the time on my own insurance just to see what's going on out there. Let me explain to you why. And she goes on from there. I mean, just having the ability to say that because you've already done it is absolutely powerful, Kris. It is awesome.

But I also would say the other powerful thing to this is we need to as agency owners, and if you're not an agency owner on this call, you need to demand this with the agency owners. We need to invest in the sales and the betterment of our sales staff. We cannot yell. I have no right to say, hey, your closing ratio. I'm a huge tracker. I'm a tracker junkie. We track everything. We track your closing ratio. We track your retention rate versus your the premium retention rate, which is a huge difference in a lot of cases. So how can we track this and say, okay, your closing ratio is 50%, but what are you doing wrong? Well, we can't say anything if we're not investing in a sales coach. Our agency has a sales coach. We believe in a sales coach. It's twice a month. It's eight hours twice a month. And we believe in absolutely bettering and investing in our staff. So I just want to make sure. I stress that. Point is, if you're an agency owner and you have only one salesperson or just one service person, you need to invest in yourself. You need to become a better salesperson. You and I, Michael, I don't care how good, I don't care how bad, we can always improve. So I would challenge you to invest in yourself and invest in your staff.

Success is a choice.

Absolutely.

I saw visual content marketing about that. A few minutes ago. Chris, thank you.

Thank you. That's a good thing.

Absolutely, it is. So, Chris, I've got some questions for you.

Sure. Love them.

So, based on all that we've seen, and by the way, for those of you who don't know, I intentionally put up this visual that you see now in honor of Chris. Because if you don't know this about Chris, Chris, is a. Is the term sock junkie appropriate?

Absolutely.

Part of who Chris is.

I'm a socks guy. I got my American flags on today.

Fantastic. That is absolutely. I have a new pair for you, Chris. I picked it up this weekend for you. So it's not coming in a bubble envelope, by the way. It'll be something different. So, anyway, you're welcome, buddy. Anyway, again, thanks for being here today. Giving back to our industry. I hear passion in your voice.

Absolutely.

What drives that passion?

I think what drives is I believe in what I do every single day for two reasons. I say this, and I almost cry when I say this. There is no better freaking industry and better agents than independent agents for what they do for the community. When I think of America and I think about my grandfather, some of the last words he said to me, who fought in World War I, who never spoke a link of English when he. He was in war less than nine months than he was in this country. When he died, he says, you promised me one thing. He even spoke very broken English, very little English. But he always taught me about, you will die an American. You are American first, you are an Italian descent second. And you need to stay in this country, the greatest country. And just the power of those words are just. You know, when I think of independent agent, I think of community. I think of just absolutely giving. Michael, how many communities have you ever been in that you don't see the independent agent feeding the homeless, working in the church soccer league or the basketball league or the Sunday basketball league or the Saturday soccer league. I don't care what it is. I refuse not to either get involved or write a check for everybody that comes in for the local. Whatever it is, community. I don't care what church event. I don't care what religion is. It doesn't make a difference. It's better in our community. And it's not about me. It's about independent agents. Agents do make a difference in every single community in this country. And I have a real passion that I feel that I need to give back. Because every day that I can give back to agents, I feel I'm making America better. It Might sound foolish. I believe that. My wife laughs at me. I believe that. So I am not going to stop. I am going to continue pushing the envelope when it comes to marketing because I think that is where I can really make the difference and hopefully make a difference in getting agents to stop working in their business and start working on their business. Because I am a strong component of that. I was fortunate enough to learn that in 2009 in a breakers hotel that I was speaking at. And I met this guy, an amazing guy who said to me, kris, you will grow and you will not be able to be stopped when you just do one thing. Get the heck out of the business. You need to stop working in the business. You need to get out. And I will never forget that. I put a plan together and I've stuck to that plan. And six years later, I mean, I can't. We've had massive growth and we've been very fortunate.

So that's where the passion comes from. I love what I do. I love to help people. I love to help. I love to work with my staff. I mean, my staff is like my family. You know, our clients are like family. I always say our clients are the people who sign our checks. The only difference is I print them, but I don't sign that check. Your pay is coming from the customer and that's, that's where the passion comes from. I believe in serving other people. It's what my father raised me me to be.

Again, I'm writing notes. Hang on.

I hope everybody's listening to what he just said and I'll recap just a bullet points of what Kris just said. Thank you, Kris. He believes in what he does and he's got to let it show. Don't be afraid to tell people why you believe something. Agents make a difference back to success if they choose. Choose to make a difference. And I will support what Chris just said the minute I started giving more, the minute things started to happen on a much bigger level.

Give more the bottom line. Give more. Get up every day with the mindset that today I'm going to give more and things will happen that you've never even begun to dream about. He said work on your business, not necessarily in it. I believe the 8020 rule is always in.

One or two person shop and you've got to be there to work in your business for a period of time. We get that, that's understood. But try to schedule that 20% out of your daily business stuff to work on your business and you will begin to move Away. And lastly, the clients are the people who sign our paychecks. Don't be afraid to say that. Don't be afraid to have the confidence in letting people know why you're doing what you're doing. And just to him, hey, we know without you, we wouldn't have any business. What more can we do to serve you? Absolutely, Kris, that's one of the things that resonates about you. Every time that I see you, every time I think about you, you're such a giver, and you worked with agents all over North America and Paradiso presents. So, Kris, why does the top agents do well? Because I think everybody on this call wants to be a top agent. But what is it about the top.

Age they get in their own way? And let me explain that, for example.

When I say work on your business, I mean spend money on improving yourself. I believe in leadership conference. I believe in leadership coaching. I believe in investing myself. If I make myself better, I can make my team better. I believe I'm the team captain here, just like my office manager. I have to invest in her if I want to get her to be a better manager. There needs to be an investment. And I really think that most people get in their own way. For example, I belong to a CEO's group. Some people are called other things. You know, they're mastermind groups. I invest in that I go two times a year. It's about six days a year. And the whole goal is it's. It's CEOs of much larger agencies than mine. And there's one focus. It's to make deposits. That's the focus of the group. You can't be a part of the Greenwich group, what I belong to, and not make deposits. Deposits. They won't accept you in the group. The group is made up of about 21 agencies. Four from Canada, 16, 17 from America. And it's all about making deposits. So if we can stop with ourselves, I think that's what we stop ourselves. And I hear different things, like, well, you know, I don't have time for this. I hear that often. Or I don't. I don't have a marketing budget. I, you know, I don't have the money. Well, the last time I met, a lot of agency owners are making a lot of money. If you really want to have success, first you have to define your success. Success is different. Success is not about money for me. My father's always said you die with one thing, your reputation. So, you know, make sure you choose and write your own Story because you choose and write your own story. So you're not taking anything with you other than your reputation, which is, which is a key concept. So define success. Success may not be about money. It may be about helping people, maybe about getting your agency to be more involved, whatever it may be, and then invest in that success. Invest in what you. What your vision is. You're the agency owner. You've got to have a vision for your agency. How do you define your agency and define success to your employees, to your teammates? Why? Because success could be different to all of them. You need to have a common core. You need to get them to believe in your. Your vision. And it's all going to be centered. Your vision is going to be centered on how you define success. If it's growing by a million dollars in premium, which our goal is to grow by six and a half million of new premium this year. Now that's not going to define us in success, but it's going to be a part of the recipe. It's one section. We also want to raise X amount. We would. I'd like to raise $100,000 for Journey found this year. That, that is another recipe to our success. And the agency staff gets involved and they're a part of it. These are all ingredients to what I have to define for success for my staff. So I really feel that it's really you. You have to look yourself in the mirror and you're infamous. You hand a mirror, the only person stopping you is you. I wholeheartedly believe that.

Wow.

Most people get in their own way. Way. You've got to make deposits all the time. You got to define success. You die with one thing, your reputation. You've got to understand the it factor. And your targets for growth are off the charts. Chris, that's hardcore. We're going to talk about brand in just a second, but I was talking to you recently and you mentioned vanilla and chocolate ice cream. What did that mean?

Well, I guess it means everybody has a choice and everybody has a flavor, right? So when we were discussing that, I think we were talking about branding and we were just talking about whatever topic you want to take. Everybody doesn't have to agree. You might like vanilla and I might like chocolate. We can agree to disagree. But just think about how many people I want to market to with my brand. Just if I market to everybody who likes chocolate ice cream now, you know, there's hundreds types of ice cream out there. Do you think I could ever possibly stop writing business if I said, okay, my brand is chocolate ice cream. And some people would say, well, you're limiting yourself. Not really because there's still massive amounts of people who like chocolate ice cream. So when we were talking about that, I just, I really, my focus on was explaining that, hey, we're all a little bit different. We all have a little different taste bud and we just need the, we need to adjust and really focus in. And being laser focused is really focusing in on what you like and what you want to write in business and in life.

Being laser focused. Chris, you just touched on branding. Thank you for those comments of wisdom. So you have probably more depth on branding in an insurance agency environment than almost anybody that I've ever met. Why is branding so important, Chris?

Exactly what I was just explaining with the vanilla and chocolate. All I'm looking to do is to connect with people and communicate with people who are like minded. I said this at a recent conference and it was funny on how many emails I got. My father always says, and I keep going back to my father because he's my mentor. My grandfather played in a very big part of my life. Also, he always says, you're the average of the five people you hang around with. Most choose wisely. And if you really think about how strong that is, that is strong. Because if you're hanging around with a druggie, even if you're not a druggie, you're still associated with people. Look at, he's probably doing drugs, right? So why brand is so important is I'm really looking for like minded, positive people, people who want to make a difference, you know, positive people. I want like minded people. I want to ensure like minded people. Why we have something in common. I just feel that it's so, so vitally important that your brand is your everything. And if we don't think brand is important, think everybody write down what type of car you drive and then write the reason. Why did you choose that car? That car says something about you. Even if you don't think about that. If you have a red sports car, it might say, hey, I like to be noticed or I like fast. You know, I'm a rule breaker a little bit, right? I like to go fast. But your car says a lot about you. It's the same thing with the way you dress. Does it not say a lot about you? So when I say your brand is your everything, just think with visual content marketing, I go on the Internet just like millions of people go on the Internet. Your first impression is what's on the Internet? What's the average Agency spending on a website. Oh, I spent $800. I spent thousand dollars, I spent $2,000. Is your brand only worth $2,000 for a website? Really? I would challenge you. I would tell you, first of all, are you getting the right website? Probably not. A $2,000 website today, what is it saying about your brand? And I'm not saying just on the dollars and cents. The dollars and cents absolutely matters to a website today. Because when you're dealing with SEO, SEO is going to be expensive. You can't get a good website made for a thousand, two or three thousand dollars if you're really looking to generate leads. But your brand is everything in that website. So you should really be willing to invest in that.

Make sense?

Oh, yeah.

So I would highly recommend, if you're going to really, really, really focus on the Internet, you should really focus on your website. You should focus on search engine optimization. Make sure you're hiring the right person. You can have the nicest website in the world, but nobody could find it. Secondly, your brand's got to be screaming all over your website. And third of all, I'm hoping people are spending the money to have an updated website and not just looking to spend a few hundred dollars or $1,000 or $2,000 because it's just like a car. Are you getting the best car at $10,000? Probably not. But most people in the insurance space, hopefully they have a website, but there's a lot that don't. But if you do have a website, a lot of the websites I see my. And I'm not knocking them. They're very good people. I have two agencies. There's five agencies on one road. We're all within a mile. And there's less than 12,000 people where I live. And two agencies have the same exact website with the same stock people made by the same company. And it was an association that had made their. That sponsored it or got behind it. My only point is, if you go to their website.

It'S terrible. And that image is not what in that brand. There's nothing there. You really need to portray yourself as a professional. That's why I would highly recommend everybody should own their name. Own your domain. Create a website. I would challenge you. Go to Chris Paradiso.com that says everything about me. It says what I believe in. It believe in my community, talks about the charitable stuff that I believe in so that when people do research on you, Michael, they get to know you just by spending five minutes on your website. Have your own personal website. And if you don't want to invest the money in your website, own your domain and have it go back to your agency website as a landing page. That is extremely powerful.

Wow.

Like people. Yeah, go ahead.

I would also recommend that you should absolutely buy your kids names because what happens if my kids grow up in the insurance space and then now someone else has their name? I know people laugh when I say this. I am so staunch on this. Mike Stromzon. You should own your name. You should own Stromson agency. You should own dot com. You should for the least and little bit, little bits of money. I can't tell you how many people I recently had an agency call me and say hey, an agency across the street bought my name and they're redirecting it with my phone number to their comp to my competition. How do I get that back? Well I said first of all it's very difficult if they won't sell it to you otherwise. And they're saying hey, they're driving a lot of phone calls. People are like oh I'm calling. Your website's popping up and it has a number that's to your competition. Well that's because somebody bought their name and is redirecting that traffic away from them. What happens if your competition does that? So invest and take the time to protect your brand, to protect who you are by buying your domain. Whether it's.agency Paradiso Insurance.agency ParadisoInsurance.com. i own all that. I own all that because of one reason. I want to protect my name. I want to protect my brand.

You also mentioned me when I saw you a few months ago about just go ahead and buying your team members names as well.

Powerful stuff.

I hope you heard what I just said. Powerful.

Absolutely. Chris, we got to keep especially, especially if they're producers. If they're outside producers, you know and you're investing money in them, you could you out. You have a lot to lose.

Not only monetarily. Think about the loss of focus and I could tell you something. Stories you talked about just hanging around with like minded people. You're the average of the five people you hang around with the most. How much is your brand worth? Think about that and invest in it like no other item that you invest in. Make sure you're hiring the right person. I'm not sure where I came up with that. Your online presence is a reflection of who you are.

And your agency. So make sure that when people are seeing your online presence they're seeing you, not pictures of somebody else. And you've got to protect your brand and your name. Powerful stuff, Chris. The last thing is, and I'd like to go on for this for half an hour, but we're short on time and I know people have commitments. As I got to know you more, I've learned that the people investment that you've made and that you currently employ in your marketing and social media departments and beyond are like nothing that I've seen as far as maybe percentage of compensation or number of people or both. Share with us for just a couple minutes about that mindset and how you did it.

Now, let me, let me just back up, make sure I'm understanding the question. You're talking about the amount of money and the percentage of money that I'm investing back in marketing and how I found the people.

Well, you have a full, you have at least one full time person, if I'm not mistaken. Social media.

Yeah. I have a male, his name is Joe. He does a lot of the video content, which we didn't even get into video marketing and he does also a lot of content writing. He's very good, very good writer. We have Julia. Julia, being a female, I'm not trying to be sexist, but great with visuals. Females are great with visuals. And where we found Julia was at a community college, which was huge. And community college, you're going to find a lot of these kids, they put themselves and they pay for themselves to put themselves through college and they work and I just think it's a great place to go. Investment. This year I will spend 28%. Last year we were just about 28% of our gross revenue is what we're spending on marketing. I know people are probably jaw dropping and saying you're crazy. In order to grow to where I want to grow and what we feel we can do, I need to spend 28% of gross revenues. So that money is being spent a lot of different things. We do buy different type of technology tools for creating videos. That's also including our marketing budget, which that's two full time staff members and we usually have also a part time staff member that's including their salaries. It's including our Facebook, our LinkedIn, all the stuff we're sponsoring out there. But it's also including. And anybody, I would challenge anybody that does not have a marketing budget. I would ask you one question. How did you buy business cards last year if you didn't have a marketing budget? We all have a marketing budget, but we have to be conscientious of what it Is I'm not saying you have to spend 28% like me. You don't. But you need to sit down and create. What am I going to spend on marketing and what, what, what is my message that or my it that I want to put out there? But you need to start with, with a budget. And that budget needs to be thought about and processed. And I'm telling you, you need to invest in it if you want to grow. You can't grow without investing in your marketing. It's very difficult.

And in yourself and in your team and in everything going around your business. What you have to understand is.

One of the greatest things about this business, among many, many, many things, is our investment. And everything is just first year. Beyond that is nothing but opportunity and residuals.

We got the greatest thing in the world, residuals.

Oh, I hope you know how fortunate we are, ladies and gentlemen. We are just fortunate. So invest in it and don't be afraid to invest in it. Kris, do you add any other verbal content to explain each photograph? So we have the visuals up, you know, the laughing one and whatnot. We do had your logo in the bottom left and just a little bit of verbiage. Do you add anything else to that?

Yes. So, for example, we'll take that if you're not blogging. I would highly recommend that every agency get a blogging strategy. Every agency needs a blogging strategy. So all of these visuals were inside of blogs. So we had written content, usually 500 to 1200 word blogs. So all of those visuals are being put in there. So yes, we absolutely write content with the visual.

So you got Joe and Julia doing the blog or is that somebody else in your marketing team?

Well, we have Julia and Joe both writing blogs. Okay. We also do some, some high content. We also outsource. So we write an awful lot of content. My new website is going to be going live in probably 14 days. We have 2,800 pages of blogs coming off just off of paradieselinsurance.com so it just shows you we create an awful lot of lot of content.

Fantastic. I look forward to seeing that. Thank you for sharing that.

Sure.

So next question. Kris, do you invest in any commercials and advertising on TV and radio?

Yes, I invest on radio. And it's funny you say that. I'm going. We insure an awful lot of gyms. So with TV comes an awful lot of.

Power. So people that have been advertising who have big marketing budgets, if you have friends or your insurance them, make sure you tie in with them because for Example, I'm tying in with one of our largest gyms, and he buys 2,800 ads a month. So his budgets been like this for five years. So his buying power is very inexpensive. So, yes, we are going. We are going to tv. The only reason why I can afford to go to TV and be for $4,000 a month, I can get 2800 ads on, like, 40 different channels on cable. That is huge. But if you look at that and you go and you try to do that on your own, that's going to cost you $15,000. But it's all on the buying habits. So if you have a customer and you're insuring a commercial customer who's doing a lot of TV ads, ask them to introduce and be a part of your process if you want to get an ad. We do do radio. We're big with UConn, so we always support and say, hey, we support the UConn athletes. So we do do radio. But I would say our marketing budget as a whole, of our total marketing budget, 80% is pushed.

Towards social media and digital, which is through our digital customer experience, which I'm also willing to share.

Yeah, 80%.

Wow.

That's big stuff. But the little secret that I just heard you say, Chris, that I want to make sure everybody heard this, is find a commercial customer or. Or somebody else that you have an alliance with who's already doing TV and piggyback on them, not only will get you positioning, but it'll save you a lot of investment as well, correct?

Yes. We just discussed this last week, and we're going to be moving forward this week, like I said, going from close to $15,000 to $4,000 for 2,800 ads. The other key factor is when you're buying with somebody who already, who has a budget, a bigger budget, and who's been doing it, is you're getting the right spots, the prime spots. Because who wants a spot at 2:58am Right, of course. So, yeah, yeah, you're getting the prime spots and you're getting the right budget. And the other thing you're going to do is you're going to learn from them, because usually if they've been doing ads for quite some time, you can find the right person to create your ad for you, because that's very important.

Absolutely.

So the next question, Chris, is can you give us a quick breakdown? And you just did it in part. Breakdown of the 28% and how it allocates to each portion of your marketing strategy. I heard you say 80% to social media.

Yes. So what that 80% goes is we consider our two in house people that are marketing, they're doing all of our social media marketing. So their salaries are a part of the 80% we outsource. So like our calendar, we outsource to our graphic designer, who's also our website designer and we outsource SEO. But besides that, besides the salaries, they also have a budget for Facebook, they have a budget for LinkedIn, they have a budget for Pinterest, Twitter. There's literally we're buying advertising.

And we're also trying to follow people, which is our next strategy where if somebody is looking for insurance, you can actually have advertisements pop up and follow people. Another great way to generate business at an inexpensive way. So these are all different types of techniques that we're using.

We're updating our website. We update our website a minimum of twice a week. So when I talk about all this social media stuff and the budget being more online, we also do press releases which are great for backlinks and things of that sort. So the budget is being spent.

On a lot of different techniques to generate phone calls. And the phones are ringing. So we're not complaining.

Absolutely not. As a reminder, no means next opportunity. Thank you, Ed. Correct. Ed Cooper.

Yeah, please. I just want to say make sure everybody is tracking everything that they're doing. Whether it's, whether it's digital customer experience, whether it's emailing, whether it's social media. Just please track things. And anybody that has questions, you can email me. I'm happy to get on a phone call and show you how we track within a webinar. This morning when I was driving and somebody was teaching agents and saying that there's really no need to track and I'm like, if you can't track it, you shouldn't be doing it. That's like yellow pages. Why should you be? Social media marketing, it's all trackable and there's a lot of devices out there that can help you track everything. So tracking is critical and anybody that has questions on that, I can share with you. It is not complex. It is very simple on how we do it and how we collect the data and what we do with the data.

Absolutely true. The sense of many comments and the question that we just got is we've all got the same 24 hours in a day. We've all got the same seven days a week.

And use. You're motivated. I guess what they want to know is how do you stay motivated?

How do you create the mindset that you've created. And how do you keep it?

Well, I stay motivated, first and foremost for the loves of my life, which are my kids. I just. I look at my kids and I. How I was raised, I looked at my father and saying, hey, one thing he did, he was a great dad. But when he wasn't with us, he worked hard. And I believe, you know, by my actions speak way louder than my words. So my kids are watching me and they're watching me as they come and we feed the homeless. We can. We can write checks, we can do things. At the end of the day, our actions speak louder than words. And I believe in that. The most powerful people in my life were never said a word to me. Their actions were just. I mean, it gives me goosebumps just thinking of these individuals. How I stay motivated really is. I have a love for independent agents. I can't explain to you why, like I said to you, I really feel that they're the backbone of every community. But what I feel is every day I am challenged with agents saying, well, you know what? We're this and we can't spend the money and we're that. Well, we have to stop with the negativity. We also have to stop with the negativity about us competing against each other. Michael, you will never compete against me. I will never compete against you. Every day, you that you grow your business and every independent agent on this call grows their business. We all got stronger. We get stronger. And I think that that's huge. I'm motivated by creating the next program on how I can make a difference in the community. That's what I'm motivated by. I'm motivated by making a difference. And I, you know, it's. It's just who I am.

Give more to get more.

And phenomenal things will happen in your life like you've never, ever dreamt about. Kris, I'm just. I've got goosebumps going on right now. I've got. I can't even count how many pages of notes. I could not be more grateful. I could not be more thankful. I just. I agree with everything everybody said. You absolutely rock. I'm so honored and blessed to know you. Thank you, my friend.

Goes both ways, my friend.

Friends be unstoppable because we don't want you to ever have any regrets. Thank you, everybody, for investing time today. We look forward to communicating with you soon. Mr. Paradiso, thank you.

Thanks again.

Alright, guys, take care.

Thank you for listening.

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