Episode 84: Follow the Money with John Mason & His Beer Drinking Pig

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit podcast. 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. Greetings everybody. This is Mike Stromso coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. And I am excited and pumped to have a very high performing agent that I've known for many, many years. I consider him one of the top achieving colleagues that I know and a long, long time friend over decades, Mr. John Mason.

John, welcome to the podcast MFUS. It is fantastic to have this opportunity to be on the phone with you this afternoon and all of your listeners and I'm excited to be here.

Jfum. I'm excited to have you here. And the great thing that I know is going to come out of this podcast is because of John's successes and there are many, many which we will not get to on this podcast. He's been involved in the people, the processes and the promotions over the years. We're going to pick his brain, whatever is left. Just joking my friend.

A lot about the promotional realm. But John, for the listeners who may or may not know anything about, share a little bit about your history and bring us up to date.

Absolutely Mike. Be happy. To those of you who don't know me, my name is John Mason. I come from a very tiny town in the Catskill Mountains called Hancock, New York. We're in the middle of nowhere, about two and a half hours northwest of New York City.

I'm here in the middle of nowhere. I started with a small personal lines agency over 30 years ago. Over the years I have bought up a number of retail agencies and about 21 or 22 years ago I bought a small wholesale brokerage and have grown it into a national PNC admitted wholesale brokerage operation. I bought and sold several agencies over the years and now really I'm focusing on continued growth. But while I'm doing that, working on something to help make agents lives a lot easier and at the same time I'm helping them, it's actually helping us as well. But it's a fantastic tool, it's brand new out of the box that I can already see fantastic results.

I'm excited to hear more about that and you were kind enough to kind of enlighten me just a tad before we went on. I will suggest that maybe in a future podcast once it's ready to be shared in the public sector that I'd love to share more about it in this particular forum. And we'll get to that this in just a second as well, because we were also talking about the fact that it is always better to give first. And that's one of the many, many things that I've always loved about you. You've always been very giving and open in sharing strategies, mindset, secrets, and all of that kind of stuff. So today you get to. Go ahead, John, please.

Yeah, you know, Mike, it's funny.

That's it. That's exactly how it works. The more you give, the more you get. You know, And I can't help but think that when you reached out to me a week or so ago about doing this call, it was part of a string on another group that you and I both belong to, where a newer agent had reached out for some help. And I had sent her a complimentary copy of my book because I. What she was describing sounded just about like what I had in there. And I wanted to help her. And she went, I think it was last weekend on that group social media site and publicly thanked me. And it wasn't an hour later, I'm getting an invitation from you to do this. So, you know, it's always giving. And I'm hoping that maybe as a result of this, I can help several other agents. And it's no different than when you go on a date. You really want to impress the lady. God forbid, me giving that kind of advice. But, you know, you tip the waiter first and you're always going to get great service.

Yeah. Yeah. We have a story, because I remember back in the early days when we were both working really hard to grow our agencies, we were having dinner, if you recall, down in a southwestern state.

Yeah.

And because we felt so fortunate to what we had accomplished at that point, we had a little bit of money in our pocket. Right. You remember what happened?

We did. We were very appreciative of that newfound simple abundance. And we all gave that waiter a $50 bill. And you know what? That 50 bucks meant more to him than it did to us just being there for another meal. And I'll tell you, it was meaningful to him.

Absolutely. I will never forget the look on that waiter's face and what a privilege and an honor that is. And I know most recently in the last couple of years, you've had situations where people have really come to your side as well, and it all comes back around. Does it, John? Doesn't it, John?

You know, it really. It really does. As you said at the beginning of the call, you and I have known each other literally for decades. And I certainly battled my demons over the years. And a few years ago, when it was time to face those, a couple of friends of mine who were more than happy to help me save my life, but my whole world, thank God. And you know what? Someday I'm gonna get the opportunity to pay that back.

Yeah.

And no matter what I'm doing, I'm gonna have to drop it. And that's gonna be my top priority that day or those days that it takes to make that happen for somebody else. Just what you do.

That opportunity is always knocking, my friend. And I know you will find the right time and place to pay it forward, if you will. So kudos to everything you have accomplished, including that. Very, very proud of you. Great job. So what are you doing now in the insurance agency world? What's your baby?

I spend most of my time right now doing things that I can do to help grow Shenango and at the same time.

Make the animal that we are easier for the agents to do business with us. Like we talked about, we've got the portal out there right now. We're also helping agents across the country with commercial auto. That's a big thing and I'm spending a lot of time marketing that. There's a number of agents whose books of business are getting non renewed. There are various carriers who have non renewed that class of business over the last couple years and I happen to have markets that want it. And so we're actually, we're helping agents get it placed. I've actually had agents say to me, John, that class of business is so volatile that not only are you helping us by placing that business, you're taking that and putting it on your loss ratio and you're still paying us a fairly decent commission. You've got the risk, you put it with it. You know, you've got top rated multiple carriers, you'll take it, you'll service it, your loss ratio and it's a win win for everybody. So yeah, it's just one of those things that came out of being creative over the years.

Well, thank you, thank you for always giving back if you will.

But you know, let's.

I want more information to share with the people that are either watching and or listening. What is Shenango?

Chenango Brokers is a wholesale property and casualty brokerage. We supply independent insurance agents as well as agents who maybe, you know, they've been in the captive or other parts of the industry. And they'd like to join the independent insurance ranks or world. And we provide markets to those agents in the admitted channel, not the non admitted. In fact we're only licensed for non admitted to states. It's less than 1% of what we do. We provide standard and admitted preferred personal commercial lines products to agents in 26 states. And just a few years ago that was four states. And you know, we will go into other states if it makes good business sense for the clientele. The agency, obviously the insurance company and Shenango brokers.

Fantastic. So if they just go to or.

Search shenangobrokers.com they go to shenangobrokers.Com on our website there are several different tools. One of the first things that agents usually go to is they go to our rating engine because we offer real time comparative quotes for home and auto in 10 states. We offer commercial lines rating with certain carriers in certain states. Often they go to our agency signup page because that's where we'll put the agency broken brokerage agreement, the sign up sheet as well as I think most agents are looking for the commission schedule. Also on our website is all the ways they can get a hold of us. They can email, we have texting available for instant interaction with our underwriters. They can call, they can email, they can text. And because we're doing business across the country, we knew that we we're closing at 5 o' clock in the afternoon. We were missing at least three hours of production time with our friends on the west coast. So now we actually have a limited staff that's available Monday through Thursday evenings until 8 o' clock Eastern Time so that we can service our west coast business.

Fantastic. Well that's good stuff. So if an agent wants to know what states are available through Shenango, they can just go to the website. It's all there. And they can figure out how to do business. And they can do a little test run even at 1:03am in their undies, right?

Absolutely. Depending on what time zone they're on, they might even hear from me at 1:03am in their undies. And actually on our website, Mike, on the front of the homepage is a map and all of the states are lit up that we are actively doing business in.

Fantastic. That's great stuff. So Don, I want to dive into your phenomenal promotional and marketing brain because you bring so much to the table. Thank you for continuing to bring that. And just so everybody knows, John has recently authored his newest book called Follow the Money and here's a Copy of the book. It's available on Amazon, Follow the Money. And I'm going to dig in and pull what I can out of John's brain and the time we have allowed. And we won't get to it all. So I recommend go to Amazon and just find Follow the Money by John Mason. And on the front of the book it says, now, I don't know if this is of interest to anybody either listening or watching this, but how to go from insurance agent to wealthy insurance entrepreneur and live the lifestyle of your dreams. If that's of interest to you, grab the book. Because that's exactly why we do what we do here at upp. We teach people about people, processes and promotions so they can grow their agency, create wealth, and have more freedom. So great minds, right?

That works. That's what we do.

Twenty years ago, we were learning from other agents. And now I am just so happy to share what we've learned over the years with other people.

Exactly. Let's dig in. John, I want to hear, I said to you before we went on, what is the key if we think about the people, the processes and promotion, in your mind, you immediately went to the promotional realm. We could go on, I'm sure, for hours about marketing. And you talked about starting agencies, selling insurance policies out of your trunk at McDonald's, wrestling with losers in the parking lot, and everything else that you've done over the years to grow your agency businesses, sold them successfully, reinvented them again, developed them, and now you're developing Shenango, which is growing. Make sure everybody hears this, clear. Is growing 30% month to month. So if you're interested in 30% growth month to month. John, is it the promotion of marketing that helps fuel all this?

It's the marketing. It's the opportunity. What's going on right now? An agent in March looked out the window and said, oh, my God, the world's coming to an end. It's crazy. Covid. It's over. What am I going to do? That was the wrong mistake. You led a webinar for many of us back in March. I participated in a couple of them, actually. And you told us to lead. Mike and I led.

And I remember I came back from the to my winter home. And I came back and I'm thinking, oh, my God, what's going to happen here? And I can either fish or cut bait. So we cut bait and led. And then all of a sudden, by April, we started getting busier and busier and busier. And month after month, we were up average is 30%. September was actually 38%. And it's nothing extravagant. It's commercial auto workers comp house and car. It's the general liability box. You know, the run of the mill everyday stuff that everybody needs. But we figured out how to deliver it quickly and the opportunity is out there. You used an expression while we were talking earlier that I said chaos creates opportunity. You said growing through adversity. That's exactly what's going on. And the opportunities are just.

Mind boggling.

If somebody's willing to take the steps and take the action.

Right? That's right. And I spend a lot of my time. You referenced this on the COVID of my book. I spend my time running this business. I don't sell insurance. I haven't in a number of years. Nothing wrong with selling insurance, don't get me wrong. But.

Spend my time running the business. Marketing. My day begins every day at 4 o'. Clock. I have a couple of hours of real quiet before I get going and that's when I work on my marketing. I listen to a podcast. You did it about 5:30 this morning. I focus then and I have this thing running. I have key people in place who understand what they're doing. Most of my staff have been with me about 20 years. We do have a couple of new people on because of the growth that we've had. But it's the people, the processes, the promotion and having those systems in place. Working the systems and just sticking to what you're good at over and over and over.

Yeah. So John, let me dig into that for just a minute because you have always been very dedicated, disciplined, if you will, at least as far as working on the business.

Right.

Why is that so important in an agency entrepreneurs world?

Because.

If you get wrapped up all day long in endorsements and ID cards and oh my God, somebody's policy canceled and I know them through the golf course. And your job is to run an insurance brokerage or agency. You employ people who understand what you're doing, who handle these types of things. You run your business, you compensate the people who do their jobs properly and you have a successful business, you train them, you monitor them and then you have key people in place who can keep doing that for you. So you ultimately keep replacing yourself and everybody keeps moving up from the bottom as they come into the system.

Yeah, fantastic. Exactly. And I heard you clearly say you were up early this morning. You're up early every morning. The thing that you're working on first almost is marketing.

Absolutely.

What kind of marketing is working in today's world, I mean, we teach a good mix because if you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, you need to use 100% of the ways online and offline. What do you suggest?

I use both online and offline marketing. In fact, I've been using more direct mail over the course of the last year strictly because nobody else is doing it. My junk mail, so to speak, shows up in the mailbox. It doesn't have a lot of competition. It gets looked at. But I do a hell of a lot of video marketing. I have recorded probably 40 different videos this year. And one of the things that we're starting to do with the videos that we do is because we do operate in multiple states. I learned long ago. And this can work for the local retail insurance agency if he operates in multiple towns. But I make my marketing very geographically specific, so I might record an ad 10 times, and then I just have a different footer for the state that I insert so that I can localize the marketing. So if I sent you in California a piece, I'm going to reference the fact that you're in California, probably in the headline or in what I'm talking about in the video. So we're just drilling down everywhere we can to try to be as specific as possible.

Aha.

Fantastic. I hope everybody picked up that gold nugget. And I'm sure there's many other gold nuggets similar to that in the book Follow the Money, so make sure you grab that on Amazon. We were also talking about earlier this week in one of our events that we did to grow through this adversity, not go through this adversity. We couldn't have our live boot camp, so we had it online. We shared the power of the three Ps to explode your profits. One of our speakers was talking about geo fencing, which I'll suggest is similar to what you were just talking about with the footers. Geofencing is where you geographically wrap your messaging in a specific marketplace to grab the attention of that marketplace. Great job. Thank you so much, John. I know the other.

I didn't even know I was doing it.

Yeah, geofencing is the term. But the other thing is the ninja stealth tip is, like you said so smartly, to make sure a caption or the words are running across the video. Because people are looking at videos even when they're sitting in the doctor's office or sitting in a restaurant. And if you've got the words scrolling across the screen, they can still watch it without audio Great job, my friend.

What we do to that effect is in the videos that we produce, we have the contact information, et cetera, on the screen while I'm talking about it. And in some of them, they've actually. We've actually embedded the contact information right into the video so that they can just click to call, click to text, click to send an email from the ad.

Very smart. And give them 100% of the ways to reach you, right?

Yes. Every one of them has all of the ways to reach us. Text, email, phone, sky. I even talked about skywriting one of the videos recently. And you know the videos, I used them for a long time. Our friend north of the border got me going to personality marketing about 10 years ago. And a lot of people have seen some of the things that I've done. But now I'm actually using family members. You know, I've gotten older. I have grandchildren. I've got one. I'm running with my grandson, catching his first fish. The message behind that ad is you can be reeling them in just like Sawyer did on a Saturday afternoon or his sister on her first birthday. And the message with that one is, here's my raider. You can have your cake and eat it, too. And here's the little girl with birthday cake all over, you know, so we try to run with different things using personality people. It's always worked, and I think it always will.

Yeah. And something that you and I learned years and years ago in our training and development in the marketing realm is look at what everybody else is doing and do the exact opposite, Right?

Absolutely. I run the opposite way when I see the market doing one thing always go the other way.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that's back to the personality marketing. Nobody can trump Sawyer and your grandkids because they're that.

Absolutely. Yeah, it works. And then you can use your personality marketing, Mike, in so many different ways. We talked a little bit about acquisitions.

Maybe this would be a good way to segue how I used the personality marketing in acquisition marketing.

Exactly. It helps you follow the money transition. Please. So I wanted to ask you a question out of your book about that specific subject, because dirty little secrets I've learned about buying insurance agencies and brokerages. Share some of the dirty little secrets, John. Keep it clean, though.

Yeah. My dirty little secrets on the day before Halloween are probably not something you want to come out. So in any case.

You have to market yourself to the agents that you want to purchase. You can't just decide, okay, I'm going to go out and buy an agency today, like you're buying a new car. It doesn't work that way. So when I was on the real campaign several years ago of buying agencies, I identified a list of agents who I felt fit into the parameters of what I was looking for. At that point, it was more than one different thing because we had multiple agencies then and I started marketing to them.

John, let me, let me stop you for just a minute. How important is the list?

Just like in anything else you do, your list is crucial.

Okay.

I spent, in fact, I spent a lot of time in list management myself just because I know my industry and I could pay somebody at Upwork to manage my list and I'm not going to get same result that I'm going to get from managing it myself. It's just a gift they have. But anyway, the list is ultra important. So you know, and you don't send postcards that I'm buying agencies. You've got to be a little bit creative, but yet confidential. You want to get to the agency owner. Probably the single best one that I did. And this was a sequence after I hit these people with a few different other ones.

I had bought five brokerages in the Bronx, I don't know, maybe three and a half years, 10, 15 years ago. And the one guy that I bought out was willing to write a letter. I might have helped him write it. And it went out as a handwritten letter, just a piece of yellow lined paper printed by my printer. And it was delivered in a vinyl money bag like you would take to the bank when we used to go there. And I filled it with shredded money that you can buy from the feds. And basically the letters said, call this guy Mason, he'll pay you bags of money for your agency. And they called. I've got, I bought two agencies off of that letter.

Amazing. Yeah, amazing. Again, separate yourself from everybody else. Look what everybody else is doing. Do the exact opposite, right?

What you have to do everything that you do, just be different.

We didn't talk about this, but it's almost like you build your personal brand on being different.

Exactly, exactly. Unique. Uniquely your own. But back to the personal marketing as well. You were talking about your grandkids. We've also learned over the years that kids and animals for some reason connect with people.

Absolutely.

So kids and animals, whatever that looks like. Go ahead.

Probably.

The biggest open rate video and I don't remember exactly what the numbers were, but they're good. The beer drinking pigs. The beer drinking in a bar in St. Croix where they feed Non alcoholic beer to pigs. It's a tourist attraction and I actually filmed a commercial in there a few years ago and that thing has sold more commercial auto insurance than any other ad I've ever done.

The beer drinking pig.

I feel a headline coming on.

Got it. Thank you, sir. Fantastic. The key to your commercial auto success is, you know, bring on a beer drinking pig, make it a partner of your agency and dominate the market.

Not quite what the key is. Again, it's back to being different. It's personality marketing. And you know, I'll get a marketing idea. Mike. I could be driving down the road and I see something and I just get an idea and I think, how could I use that to market?

Right.

And I don't care if I was selling refrigerators versus insurance. You can do that.

Right.

And so if I get an idea, I run with it.

Absolutely. I do the same thing. I'm driving along the road, I pick my phone up, I dictate myself a message. Bam. It becomes the next marketing campaign.

Exactly. All the time I leave myself post it notes.

So as we begin to move to wrap, any other add ons right now, other than what's in the book on dirty little secrets about buying agencies for anybody that might be watching or listening to this, who is potentially going to be buying an agency soon because I know many or is thinking about buying.

An agency, well, you definitely want to do your due diligence. There's definitely going to be agencies out there for sale. With all of the chaos and the growth through adversity, there's a lot of change going on. There's a lot of buying and selling going on. You want to do your due diligence when you go to buy, you want to. Just yesterday I was helping a mutual friend of ours who's looking at an agency and we're looking at the various questions and you know, I was looking at that situation too. And.

That'S the other thing that sometimes comes out of it. I looked at his situation twice this week and both times I looked at it, I said to myself, this agent got selected by this other agent based on his reputation in his community. Sometimes you get that after having just been around a while and always doing the right thing, this older agent getting ready to retire came to our friend and said, listen, I want you to have this. And you know, so sometimes that happens too. After you've done this a while you get that reputation. But you know, you have to be careful out there. And there are sharks out there, that's for sure. And there's a lot of things that you want to watch for. I'm certainly not the world's greatest expert in it, but I have purchased, I think between sales and acquisitions. I think I've done 12 deals now and you know, I certainly happy I've done it for a number of people that we know and I'll be happy to. It's one thing I can do to give back. If you want to run it by me. I'm happy to look at things for.

People in that realm. Since you've done 12 of them roughly, can you think of one thing that is a big gold nugget that people need to think about? Obviously you said there's sharks out there, you need to be careful.

Is there one commonality that comes to mind?

Yeah. Particularly if you're buying. I think a lot of the people that probably are listening to this are doing business in personal lines and smaller commercial lines agencies. So they're small and medium sized agencies. And one of the things that I learned the hard way early on buying agencies that you want to look for is, is.

They can tell you they're bringing in X. But make sure there's not producer contracts with employees or secret little deals that where they're paying percentages of revenue out to employees that you're not really aware of. It should show if you're buying an asset purchase, you may not see the expenses. If you're buying the whole agency, obviously you're going to look at the EBITDA, look at it anyway. But you want to make sure that you don't get trapped into any of those types of things. One of the other things that happened to me once when I bought a storefront brokerage in the Bronx.

And a couple of employees who non licensed employees mind you, thought, oh, those are my customers, they're my customers. I got. No, no, no, no, no. They were terminated immediately. It was just, you have to be really careful. And I've been fortunate over the years.

Definitely recommend never purchasing a corporation. You always want to do an asset purchase.

And I can go on all afternoon, but happy to help one on one. If somebody were to reach out to.

Me, I 100% agree with what you just said. And if you get one thing out of our time together today around buying agencies, do not buy the corporation because what you're doing is you're buying the liabilities. And I had that happen in some of my acquisition activity over the years. They call up and they say, hey, we need to talk to so and so. We need to talk to him about, well, he owes us X amount of money and we're coming after him for this. Fortunately, I was able to say, because I had learned that possibly from you also, that, no, I only bought the book. Good luck.

Exactly.

That's another reason I love you, man. So that's an insider secret for everybody out there. That's just something that.

John, I love you too, man.

Because of our relationship, we've gone through a ton together over the years. We've had wins, we've had a lot of lessons. But at this point, I know from John's heart, his goal when he gets out of bed nowadays is to give back and to pay it forward based on the incredible things that have happened in his journey so far. And I consider John one of the savviest marketers and entrepreneurial people that I know. John, congratulations on your success so far. Anything else to add as we wrap today?

Mike, first of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity to do this. I'm honored. Thank you. I want your members to understand. I'm happy to help. Best way to reach me usually is by email. Just shoot me an email. Always happy to help. I think we've covered a lot. If I can help agents with markets, if they're looking to change their current situation or need additional markets or even just some of the products that we offer, we have no sign up fee, we have no monthly fee. You own your business. When you do business with Shenango Brokers and I don't have one of those exit contracts like the Hotel California, it's easy to walk away. So we're@shenangobrokers.com and we would be more than happy to hear from you, Mike. Thank you again. I'm very, very happy that we got.

No, I am grateful. That's chapter 16 in the book, by the way. Follow the money.

If only your agency was like the Hotel California, clients would check in and never leave. So the insider secrets about the Hotel California in explicit detail are right here in the book Follow the Money by John Mason. Get it on Amazon. John, thank you for giving back today. Very grateful for our friendship and our relationship. My friend. Thank you for being on the podcast.

I am too. Thank you.

You're entirely welcome. Hey, everybody. Unstoppableprofitpodcast.com Unstoppableprofitpodcast.com if you enjoy what you see on the podcast, please share it with everybody. You know, just have them go to unstoppableprofitpodcast.com just go up to the top and subscrib will conveniently drop the next podcast into your sphere of influence. We're on all the channels out there and please tell anybody you know about the podcast because our goal here at the Unstoppable Profit Producer program is just to share what we've learned. We want to help you with the next wins and we want you having more wins than lessons and lessons in our world are failures. But the bottom line is we've been had so many right, John, and we just want to help people avoid that. We want you winning more. All right. Fantastic. All right, everybody get out there and make a difference. Be unstoppable. Leave no regrets. We will see you on the next episode. Take care now. Be unstoppable.

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