Episode 96: Making the Donuts with Bradley Flowers

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.

Hey, everybody, this is Mike Stromso coming to you live from the Living Agency laboratory. I am pumped. I'm excited. I've been trying to chase this man down, get my arms around them, et cetera, et cetera. And finally, finally, the pursuit has ended. I've got Mr. Bradley flowers on the podcast. Bradley, how are you doing, bud?

I'm great, Mike. How are you today?

I'm fantastic, thank you. And I am. I'm excited to dig in and learn the latest about what you have going on because I know you are doing phenomenal things out there and not only growing your most recent agency effort, but just helping agents in general through your podcast. And I've dug out some stuff that you don't even know about yet that I want to pull out of your brain. No, it's all on the legit and moral ethical good. So don't worry about that.

That's less scary than when Scott does it.

Well, I tried to chase him down too, but he's almost even more elusive.

He's in Key west right now and is literally had dinner with. Are you familiar with Nick Swartzen?

He's a comedian that does a lot of stuff with Adam Sandler. He's literally in movies and Scott ran into him on the street and befriended him and they had dinner last night. It's like the wildest story, I bet.

Well, hey, that could be an opportunity for another follow up and learn more about the adventure with Nick.

Hey, it'd be a good opportunity for a podcast guest.

Exactly, exactly. Fantastic. Well, let's keep luked in on that. So anyway, congratulations man, on your success so far and let's dig in. But I can't imagine there's anybody out there that doesn't know who you are or what you've accomplished. But just in case, give us a refresher. Who is Bradley Flowers? And anything you want to share, man.

Yeah, so I'll give you the brief story.

I've interviewed a lot of people on my podcast and almost every single one of them says, I never planned to be an insurance agent. Well, I can state a fact that Bradley Flowers, when he was 16 years old, told us, told his dad he wanted to be an insurance agent. And I don't Come from a family of insurance agents. The reason I said that was at the time I was a big golfer and I noticed that the people that got to play the most golf were insurance agents. I was like, that's what I'm gonna do. And now I never, I never play golf and wouldn't go right now if someone was begging me to.

But I went to college, went to college for teaching.

And I was sort of running, managing, not technically the manager of a cell phone store. So down here in the south, there's a company called Southern Link and they're basically cell phones that are also act as beep beep radios, like two way radios. And a lot of farmers use them because if you're a farmer and you're in a rural area, your cell phone doesn't always get signal, but that beep beep radio would. So we had a large clientele of farmers. It was a really hard product to sell for many reasons. And a buddy of mine came by my store one day and watched me sell phone after phone after phone after phone. He was like, dude, you can sell this, you can sell life insurance. And my mind went back to 16 years old. And I was like, huh? I was like, that kind of is appealing to me. And I liked the feeling of being a professional business, professional sport coat, meeting with clients and talking about their finances and things like that. And so I quit my job. And actually I said on a podcast recently, I don't even actually remember quitting that job. Hopefully they're not still looking for me. But I went to work for Liberty National Life Insurance company and I was so Green Mike that day one, I remember asking him, what's a full life policy? He's like, you mean a whole life policy? I was like, yeah, that. And see, in Alabama you can get your temporary insurance license. And so it's a six month license and such, like a training thing. So you get your six month license. So what Liberty national do is you would get your six month license, you'd work for six months and about the three month period time you would, then you would start studying for your real test. And the way their bonuses worked is you made like the most money you were going to make per cell that first, that first six months. And so I did decently well.

Quit school. Like I remember sitting in college, sitting in a. I remember the room I was sitting in and I had made nothing against teachers, but I had made more money in six months than a teacher would that I would make teaching. And I looked to my left and I Looked to my right, and I'm like, why am I here? So I walked out. Not. I mean, I can't say that I don't regret that or do regret that or whatever. I'm indifferent on it. Started selling insurance. Did that for a year. Realized that Property and Casualty was where it was at. Not only because you have the volume, but, you know, if you and I go to the stop. Top skyscraper in our cities, Mike, and stand on the top and look out, everything we can see is insured.

Yep.

But if you go to a crowd of people at the super bowl, when they do allow crowds at the super bowl, again, not everyone you see is going to buy life insurance. So I was like, I'm going there. I'm going there. And so I went to work for a captive agent, kind of as a sabbatical. My salary was $15,000. I took a massive pay cut to go work for this agent. But I wanted to learn PNC. This was 2012. Want to learn Property and Casualty? So I did that for a year, then went to work for a company called Alpha Insurance, which is essentially Alabama's version of Farm Bureau Insurance. There's no Farm Bureau Insurance in Alabama. We were sort of semi captive, semi independent here because I'm located in a coastal area, so we run a lot of brokered business. So I kind of knew the independent game in terms of the carriers and things like that. I did that for three years. Got a message from a guy named Scott Howell who was in Alabama. Wanted to meet and chat about social media. I was doing a lot of good stuff on social media that was getting me some attention. Did an interview with the Wall Street Journal, stuff like that. Scott comes to my office. We rap on camera for about 30 minutes. He turns the camera off. He's like, we should do a podcast. And that was, like, the one, like, social media thing I hadn't done. So I was like, oh, yeah, sure, let's do a podcast. And this was when it was still incredibly hard to do a podcast. This was before Zoom and all that stuff. So we started this podcast just for fun, and it became kind of a. It became a mechanism for us to get to know people in the industry that we want to be connected with. And to be frank, you were one of those people. Paradiso is one of those people. Tyler Asher with Safeco, like titans in this industry. Like, okay, we're gonna start this podcast. We're gonna be the high school kid hosting the party, and we're gonna invite you on our podcast to get to Know you. Tom Hegna was another one. Troy Korsgaden. So we started interviewing just selfishly, people we wanted to be connected with. And then what happened is their audiences started listening to our show and I guess there was something in the show that they liked. An insurance guys podcast, if you don't know it. And the show started taking off. Well, from there I started basically. Basically I got an MBA for two years of how to run an independent agency from people like yourself and Paradiso. And I was involved at Alpha and a lot of committees and boards and advisory councils on some like inner workings of the company. And I would try to implement things or get them to implement things. And you know, the corporate game, as you know, is difficult. And I became frustrated because I wasn't getting my itches scratched and I was like, you know what, I'm just going to do this myself. Like I would rather make less money and do this myself. So I quit. Quit my job. January of 2019. January 8, 2019. I'm about a month and a half fresh out of my non compete by the way, and.

Opened portal insurance. So Mobile, Alabama is where I'm located. It's a port city. Support al Portal insurance. We are a personal and commercial lines independent, truly independent agency. No clusters, no aggregators, nothing like that. Did it the hard way. All direct appointments. We are I think seven in seven states with seven employees. So we are, we are rocking and rolling, man. We're just now two years in. That's the short version of the story.

What an amazing story and at the end of the day, congratulations on all you've done so far. The insurance guys podcast. So anybody can just, they go to Google or they go to YouTube, they can just search. Insurance guys podcast.

Yep.

Yeah, jump onto that, check it out. It's amazing. That's how we really got to know each other as well and got much deeper in our relationship and it's been an honor and a privilege to get to know you more. So two years, seven people, seven states, all direct appointments. I mean any agent that might be out there either watching and or listening to this, who is trying to get out of the gate. How did you get direct appointments with the carriers? Did you just promise them the moon not knowing how you're going to get it?

You know, in fact, no, because I actually don't have an appointment with travelers today because I wouldn't promise them the moon. All I had to do was say I was going to do something that I knew I couldn't do and they would have given Me, the appointment. So no, it was. The podcast certainly helped a ton because, and I'm not ashamed to say that because we, we built it. You know, we created that.

Because either A, the carrier reps already listened to the show or B, I was able to call A, you or a Chris Paradiso or someone of that nature and say, hey, connect me with such and such at this carrier.

Got it.

So that was kind of the start, but for us. So. So there was one carrier. So, side note, I quit my job and I had talked to exactly zero carrier reps. When I quit my job, I didn't want to. I still feel I still Alpha as a company. I still like them, I still appreciate them. They did a lot for me. I didn't want to muddy those waters and be talking to carrier reps, you know, So I had one carrier, Coastal Select Insurance, that I was their number one agent in 2018 when I was with Alpha because we wrote to them and that included all the independent agents. So I called them first the day after I quit. And she get Kelly rep there is a very good friend of mine, gave me my first appointment. And normally they don't give appointments until you're at least like a million in premium. I was lucky enough that she had actually worked as a rep at several other companies and was really well connected and she introduced me to the next person who introduced me to the next person who introduced me to the next person.

So in a nutshell, that's kind of what we did. But when agents asked me this question, the thing that I tell them is a, there's nothing wrong with the cluster group. It just wasn't for me. I had that in my head, like, hey, I'll fall back on that if I need to. But what you have to do, here's what you have to understand as an agent trying to get an appointment. 99% of the agents, and this is, I don't mean this is any offense to any agent. 99% of the agents that these reps are talking to asking for appointments are either average or appear average.

You have to show them how you are not average.

Right?

Okay, how do you do that? You do that by the way. You present yourself professionally, the way you talk, you're well spoken. You have a plan. Hey, this is what we're going to do. You show them a business plan. Know business plans are dumb and people hate writing business plans and that sort of thing. Write a business plan, write a good business plan, send that to them, even if they don't ask for it 99% of the agencies reps talk to are gonna, are never gonna be anything but one person shows. Not there's anything wrong with one person shows, but if you're not gonna be a one person show, explain to them how you're gonna hire people, how your model is gonna be different. And so that's, that's kind of what I did when I talked to them. Okay, look, this is. So here in Mobile, Alabama, most independent agencies are either your older family agencies or they are a non standard bucket shop.

Which has created sort of a vacuum for the captive agencies to write the really, really good personal lines and smaller commercial accounts. Okay. Whereas the older family agencies go after the bigger commercial, the bucket shops go after what they go after. So what I did is I came in and said, okay, here's what we're going to do for the first year and we plan to do big commercial. And we're doing that now, Mike. But for the first year we're going to go after the state farm, the farmers and the allstate clients. We're going to go after the better commercial lines. I mean, personal lines, accounts.

Right?

We're not going to do this. And we're not going to do this. We're going to do this. So I think that had a big play in differentiating us. Like they're not used to hearing that. They were used to hearing, oh, we're going to go after big commercial and. Or we're gonna, we're gonna go after the non standard stuff. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, congratulations. That's fantastic.

And I couldn't agree more.

Out of the gate. Our story is a little bit similar in the fact that when I decided to start on my own from scratch many, many years ago, I had that one carrier. I mean, I was writing business like Matt at the agency I was at prior to that. She knew what I could do and so she gave me the appointment pretty quickly. But the next one was I had to prove myself and I went into the game plan and I showed them what I had learned in the promotional marketing realm. And I'm laying, I remember I was laying it out on the desk and I was going, this is how we get new business. This is how we're going to grow our book. To sum it up, you're absolutely right. You've got to have a plan. And at the end of the day, Bradley, I believe we're in sales, are we not?

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you a funny story, man. So you know.

One carrier that we didn't get. Was progressive.

And I, you know, the perception here was at least that if you could fog a mirror, you could get progressive, right? And I hit. Hit them on their website, which was a mistake. I should have asked for an inter. That was one I didn't ask for an introduction to.

Good point.

Like, the rep calls me and, you know, basically it's like, so tell me what you're going to do. Da, da, da. And so I bought a small agency. Without going into the story, I basically bought a small agency of an agent that did not write auto insurance. He only wrote home insurance. I bought about 3 to $500,000 in premium of home insurance. I had a big opportunity to write a lot of auto. And that was six months in to my agency. And so I'm on the phone with this rep and I'm like, so here's. This is what we're going to do. Da da da da. Big, you know, you know, this $500,000 book, we have an opportunity to turn it into a million dollars, and you guys could be our number one carrier for this. That. He's like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. We're going to pass. I'm like, you're going to what? He's like, we're going to pass. I was like, why? And he was like, oh, you didn't make a good first impression.

And this was not a local rep, by the way. And I was like, this is somebody in corporate. I was like, okay, that's fine. So then I asked for an introduction to the local rep, and I really had to sell myself. Like, really had to sell myself. And, you know, this is what we're going to do. Here's the business plan. Here's this. Here's that. This is how much business we're going to write with you. We finally got the appointment. We wrote a good amount of business with them initially, and now today, we are a progressive platinum agency. So. And that's not to brag, that's to say just because they tell you no, you don't go away. And then you get that appointment and you prove to them what you can do.

Right?

You know what I mean? The other thing to Mike that I wish somebody would have told me going from captive to independent is you don't need 28 carriers. You need a couple good commercial carriers. You need maybe one wholesale relationship like an RPS or someone like that. You need three good auto carriers and three good home carriers. That's all you need, right? You don't need these These. These extra carriers over complicate things, you know, And I'm sort of in an interesting situation because I'm Coastal, A Coastal agency is going to have a few more carriers because I have some carriers that'll write in one zip code, and that's the only zip code they'll write in. You know, things like that. But I would love to be somewhere in the middle of America where I only have to have Travelers Progressive and Safeco, you know.

Yeah, well, less is more. Yeah, absolutely. So that's great stuff, and I hope everybody's paying close attention is to what Bradley was saying. Yes. We don't have to have it all out of the gate. We just have to do what we do well. And Bradley, I'm sure you know this, but let's remind everybody the definition of no.

What is that?

Not now, next opportunity.

Yeah, I said not now, but yeah, next opportunity.

Next opportunity. Exactly.

And here's one thing. The way that I sell to Mike and I do this with my carrier reps, too. There's a big carrier right now, we've been trying to woo for about a year. They just visited my office. Office recently.

If you know the, you know, as a salesperson, you know, about halfway through the appointment, if the answer is going to be no or not. So what you need to start doing at that point, you know, I worked with a gal one time that it was either all or nothing. He either sold you something or he pissed you off and you never wanted to talk to him again. One of the two, okay, that person amortized out over so many years is going to sell less than.

Somebody else. Here's how I approach that situation. Once I realize the answer is going to be no. Today, I do everything I can to turn a no into a soft. What I call a soft no, which is a no, not right now, maybe in the future.

Right.

Then what my goal is is to figure out something about that person, whether it's a carrier rep or client, that gives me an opportunity to follow back up with them in a couple of months. So, for example, if I happen to find out that they're a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, I'm probably going to call them this week and say, congratulations, this is super bowl week. By the week after super bowl, congratulations on your team winning the super bowl, the excuse to follow back up, it's a soft no. If I piss that person off and got a hard no, it's gonna be real awkward when I try to make that call. So that's kind of the way I approach my Carrier reps too, is like, hey, look, let's. I know this is. No, but let's form some sort of relationship. That way we can stay in touch.

Yeah, fantastic. Absolutely. And you know, follow up in the way that they want to be followed up with as well. Follow the platinum rule, not the golden rule. Not that there's anything wrong with the golden rule. You know, treat others like you want to be treated, but treat other people like they want to be treated. And that's part of the pursuit of you. I identified the best way to reach you and son of a gun, he responded.

Social media is the best way. Email is the worst way.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, now I know. So congratulations. Just a little over two years, your second anniversary, you've got seven team members. Just really quickly, what would you tell anybody out there listening and, or watching as far as how did you find this seven, would you consider them all solid team members?

Absolutely. We have today we have the best team that we've ever had. We still have to add to it. We still need more folks.

How did you find them? How'd you recruit them?

Yeah, so.

The general theme with all of them, they were all recruited differently, but the one commonality is they were all referred to me from someone else that.

Knew them. Hey, who do you know? I'm doing a lot of that right now because we're hiring for another producer. We're actually hiring for two producers and I'm doing a lot of that. Like, hey, who do you know that does this? Who do you know that does this? Right. So there's that.

How I convinced them to work for a startup agency that couldn't pay them. What other agencies could pay them was selling them on the vision of this. Selling them on the value add of being a portal agent, not just an insurance agent.

I think as employer and employee, everything's a value exchange. Me as the employer, I have to figure out how I can provide enough value to them above and beyond what they are providing to me. And they have to figure out how they can provide more value to me above and beyond what I'm paying them. And if you can get that value exchange right, you're going to have a really, really good relationship, you know, so for me, I understand that people aren't going to necessarily work with me forever. And I tell them that and I tell them I want one of three things to happen here. I want you to either work here and be here forever and we have a great relationship. B, work here and insurance ends up being your career forever. Whatever that looks like, or c, you're doing something else down the road and you look back and think that, wow, that was the best jumping off point I ever got. And if your goal is to go open an ice cream truck, you and I are going to sit down and we're going to set, okay, how much money do you need to do this? And we're going to put a plan in place to get you to that. And when that day comes, I'm going to be the one pushing you out the door, not trying to hold you back. I think too many agency owners and business owners in general try to hold their people back. You know, we had an employee about a year and a half ago that, that we unfortunately had to part ways with that ended up opening her own agency. And somebody asked me, are you going to enforce a non compete or da da da da da said no, I'm not in the business of keeping people from chasing their dreams, especially if I'm not being targeted or screwed over in the process. You go, do you, you know, so that's kind of our pitch to them is, you know, come, come be a part of a good thing.

Absolutely fantastic. That's a great, that's a great story. And just keep pursuing, you know, every single day. Always be recruiting.

Right? Yeah. I mean, I want this, My goal is for this to be a place that people want to come work.

Right.

You know, and that's why we do. We have a weekly vlog on YouTube called Making the Donuts that we have a videographer here on staff that we. He was in here a second ago getting a shot of us talking where we document what's going on the agency. And then we do a apologize. We do a weekly vlog of like, hey, here's what we did this week. And I've got insurance agents locally here now that are interacting with it. I'm like, all I have to do is eventually build up enough interaction with them all night, say, hey, you want to come be a part of this?

You know, that's fantastic. I was doing some research on you before we jumped on and I found making donuts. So that's what that's all about.

Yeah.

So how was that born? I mean, where did that idea come from? Is there anything specific?

I think the way you sell Mike is with stories. Right?

Could not agree more.

I was talking to an agent. Yeah, so I was talking to an agent. We do, I do some marketing consulting for other insurance agents. We got seven agencies across the country now that we're doing some more content geared marketing Consulting. And I was talking to him, he's like, yeah, I'm gonna do some videos for about workers comp. And I said, okay, you don't need to do a video on workers comp experience mod. You need to do a video on how you met with a client that had a high worker's comp experience mod and you lowered it. Tell the story.

Yep.

Alright, so there's that. I think you sell by telling stories. Two, I think the reason reality TV works because people feel like they're seeing behind the scenes, they're seeing the warts, they're seeing the real stuff. So.

Putting those two things together, I've wanted to do a weekly vlog for the longest time, just documenting what's going on in our agency. Right.

A, the insurance industry will like it.

B, local business owners are possibly going to watch it. Not a bad thing for local business owners to know us.

Absolutely.

C, potential recruits are going to watch it.

And D, if none of that happens, it will be really, really, really, really cool for my kids and my great grandkids and grandkids to be able to look back one day and be like, oh, that was cool. That was dad or grandpa doing this.

Not that they would even care, but I feel like it's like the 2050 version of like us looking back at old Polaroids of our parents, you know what I mean? So that's, that's why we, that's why we decided to do it. And the other thing is, you know, I've been fortunate enough to get to know and spend some time with Gary Vaynerchuk, who has this reputation that he films every day of his life and the few times I've been around him the most. And he has a daily vlog pre. Covid had a daily vlog. And I think, actually I think they had just transferred to weekly right before COVID But anyway, they give the impression that they're filming the whole time he's working. They're filming. They're not. They only film like four hours a day. And you get so much footage out of four hours a day it's insane. So for us we just, you know, I have him here, he's working on other projects and stuff and helping with the content or agency and some of our clients.

But, you know, hey, I just walked up and say, I'm doing this podcast with Mike Stromsely, pops in here and he gets five minutes of footage. That's five minutes going to vlog and things like that. So as long as you have that person to do it or you have the time to do it yourself. It's really, really easy to get that done. Absolutely.

And the great thing about that, it's yours, it's uniquely yours.

And ultimately, at the end of the.

Day, what you're building by doing, making donuts and whatever evolves from that is you, you're building that trust. And as we learned, you know, money follows trust. And people get to know you, they begin to trust you through that experience. And I would strongly encourage you to remember that you're talking about your kids and your grandkids and all that kind of stuff. They may or may not be interested. I will suggest they will be interested and they will be paying closer attention than you might think they are. Because I've learned I just launched something back in that pandemic, which was an opportunity for growth because we decided to grow through the adversity, not go through the adversity. We launched finally after a three year dream, cousins camp. And I've learned in that, that they were paying attention and they pay very close attention. So keep being awesome. Keep being you, man. Great stuff.

What I'll do is if I ever get to the point where I can leave them a trust fund, they'll have to watch every episode before they get access to it. But it's, it's, it's cool, man, because back to like the carrier rep thing, swear to goodness, this happened yesterday. We're kind of not, we're not really open to the public right now, but somebody was banging on the door out there and one of my guys went out there and let him in. It's a carrier rep for a carrier we're not appointed with. She's like, I'm a huge fan of making the donuts. I want to appoint your agency.

That's awesome.

Now, I'm not hard up for appointments, but if I was, that would have been the highlight of my year.

Well, yeah, absolutely. You know about the law of scarcity, right?

Yep.

Keep exercising it, brother.

And so, so there's, you know, there's, there's tons of benefits from that.

And the other thing too is it's real conversations. Like everything you see on Making the Donuts, there's nothing that's staged, right. The episode that launched normally, we dropped the new episodes on Friday. We were late last week, so we dropped it on Monday. And it's that week. Like, it's what we film that week. Like, so, like tomorrow he'll start working on this week's.

We posted a video of our, of our leadership team meeting. We're implementing the EOS system. We posted a video from that. Like that was a real conversation. Like it was a real. And we were talking about real stuff in there.

Right? You know, so that is awesome stuff, man. I could sit here and talk to you all day and probably for days about the amazing things you're doing. Congrats again and thank you for being so willing to share.

I heard you also say that, you know, how can we be the best of what we do and how we can be Amazon, like, and really make it easy for people, so simple for people to, you know, do business with us to buy insurance. How's your progress on that? And I also heard you say in a similar piece that you're moving or you try to aim towards a 66% closing ratio. How are those two things working together?

Yeah. So, you know, I feel like we. So the reason that Amazon wins, right? And I don't think, I'm not trying to create the Amazon of insurance. I don't think insurance should be 100% online.

Now. I feel like as insurance agents we tend to put our fingers in our ear and la, la, la, la, la, when we think about Amazon or Lemonade or Geico or someone like that. And just because, you know, it goes back to a lot of the political stuff going on in the world right now, you know, just because you disagree with the way someone's doing something or someone's point of view doesn't mean you can't learn something from it. So I'm not a fan of Lemonade, I'm not a fan of Geico, I'm not a fan a lot of these direct to consumer companies.

But that doesn't mean I'm not paying attention to what they're doing and I can't take a piece of it and put it in my agency. So what Amazon does, right? The reason that the majority of the people who've listened to this podcast when they needed to buy a commodity in the last month went to Amazon over other places is because it's super easy to do business with them. You know what you're going to get. Amazon doesn't have the most beautiful.

Artistic website, Right? Amazon does not stick to the story brand framework on their website in the slightest bit. But it's consistent. You know, what you're gonna get as a customer and that sort of thing, right? So like, okay, what if we took those principles to the insurance industry? You know, Amazon is customer centric. Amazon starts at the customer and works their way backwards. How does the customer want to do business. And that's what we're going to do. So that was kind of the founding principle behind Portal is that we are going to try. Mike. We work, in my opinion, the least customer centric industry on the planet.

Could not agree more. And we're a little old.

Yeah. And I don't think insurance agents will ever go away.

I think the insurance agents that don't put.

Are going to slowly go away because their target client is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And what happens when you and you can still write insurance for people that aren't your target client, that don't want to do business the old school way. But what happens is whenever you write insurance for somebody or bring someone on the client that's not your target client, the relationship doesn't quite fit and you're going to have a lower retention on that customer. Typically, if someone has a bad experience in our agency.

We can somehow point to the fact that, okay, because of this thing, we actually probably shouldn't have written them. Yeah, the people that are target client have no issues whatsoever. So for us it's trying to work with our carriers, work with our vendors. We're having a lot of conversations about APIs. There's no carrier I have appointed with that. I have not asked for an API from to try and do things to make it easier for our customers to do business. And the kind of subtext of that is we have to make it easier for our people to write the business.

Right.

To me, the biggest way and you know this implementing EOS is you set this big 10 year target, then you set a five year target or three year target and then you set a one year target. And the things under the one year target are much more actionable than the big target. You know, that's how you hit a big goal is you start with the granular things. And so for us it's how do we eliminate double entry in our agency? If you know my wife is a State Farm agent, I don't know if you knew that if you call State Farm to get a quote, the person that's taking your information enters it one time, they never have to enter your information again. And I know that because I used to work for State Farm a long time ago. Not because my wife's sharing trade secrets or anything like that. We actually don't even talk about our agencies to each other. It's bizarre. My friends that are State Farm agents will call me and be like, did you hear about this thing that State Farm did. I'm like, no, how did you not know that? But anyway.

It'S ridiculous that a prospect of mine can go to one of these captive or direct writer agencies and they have a quote in five minutes. But when they come to us, we have to enter their information here and enter it here, and enter it here, and enter it here. So what we're trying to do with our tech is eliminate double entry, want less tools that do more.

Right.

And that's gonna have a trickle down effect to the end consumer. So the big goal is make it easier for our customers, do business. And how do we do that on a day to day basis?

Less tools that do more.

That's what we need. That's what independent agents need. You don't need another shiny object, you need the shiny objects. You have to do more. If something takes your team, if it takes more time for your team to do something, that's a problem.

Absolutely. Well, congratulations on that. Congratulations on your vision. And I know some of the greatest wins that we get to have is when we're able to get out of the office and go work on our business, not necessarily in it. So I know you've got a trip coming up later this week down south to Mexico. Congratulations on that. And I know you're going to have a big stack of thought process to work on the business and maybe not.

Hopefully I don't get caught. I don't catch COVID down there and not get to come back in the country, but we'll see how that goes.

Well, if we can't find Bradley, we'll know what happened. Just, just keep telling us via Making donuts, right? That's a making donut story.

That's right. That'd be a really good making the donuts. I just hope I don't get deathly ill and stuck in Mexico. Yeah.

Can't have donuts right now.

No. So cool, man.

As we wrap it up today and I can't wait to learn more, we'll have to skip schedule some time when we can get if we can drag your partner out of his current vacation destination. And we were talking before we went on about some cool stuff that happened to him. So that's Mr. Scott Howell, Bradley's partner on the insurance guys podcast. So as we wrap it today, any last words of wisdom to add for anybody out there that might be either watching or listening?

I have no agenda. I'm just a guy that likes helping people, you know, in some, some way, shape or form. It ends up helping me. So I'm not a I'm not a me first kind of guy. You know, if anybody here wants to get in touch with me, please text me 251-237-9383. That and that are either Instagram, Facebook, DM. Those are the best way to get in touch with me. You know, I don't give advice on things that I have not done myself. If you ask me something I haven't done, I'm not going to give you advice on it. So please feel free to hit me with your questions. I love it.

That's fantastic. Thank you for that generous offer and anybody that either saw and or heard that you might want to take advantage of that great, great feedback. Bradley, thank you so much for the time today. Congratulations on your success so far. I can't wait to keep in touch further. And again, please let us know how we can help you as we previously discussed. And I look forward to the next time that we can reconnect.

Amen. Thanks, Mike.

All right, everybody. Hey, thanks, everybody for joining us on this episode of the Unstoppable Profit podcast. And if you haven't yet, make sure you go to unstoppableprofitpodcast.com make sure you're subscribed. There we are out there on all the podcast channels. Make sure you connect so you don't miss one episode. Amazing episodes like the one that we just had with the incredible, the unstoppable Bradley Flowers, who's doing amazing things for our industry and within our industry. Again, Brady, thank you so much. All right, everybody, until the next episode, get out there, make a difference. Be unstoppable and leave no regrets. We'll see you on the next episode, everybody. Take care.

Thank you for listening. If you would like to listen to more episodes or share this podcast with someone you care about, please visit www.unstoppableprofitpodcast.com. now go out and make a difference. Be unstoppable and leave no regrets.