https://www.listennotes.com/e/0d23ebab41cf4b33bfd8df2f5186b869

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

Greetings everybody, welcome to the next episode of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. And we are continuing our journey for 2025 on everything automation, technology, AI and way beyond for the independent insurance agency industry. And I'm privileged and honored as finally able to corral this dude onto the podcast because he's got something new, something very, very exciting. and I'm gonna do my very best to pull everything I can out of him to share with all of you about this new opportunity within the industry. But before we go there, Mr. Ryan Hanley, I don't know if you need much of an introduction, but just in case there might be somebody on the planet who doesn't know who you are. How you doing today, sir?

Well, I want to start by saying being able to spend some time with you last week always warms my heart anytime we get to spend time together. I mean, if there is a single person listening to this show that doesn't know how much Love and gratitude and connection you feel when you're around Mike Stromso, then I would highly encourage you to spend some IRL time with him, whether it's at one of his events or if you can catch him somewhere, because dude, you are the man when it comes to just making people feel appreciated and heard and understood. And it's such a pleasure to be here. So with that out of the way.

Thank you, by the way. Yeah.

Oh yeah, you're the man, dude. 20 plus years in the biz. eight of those years was a boots on the ground producer. I got this very valuable education in the traditional way that business was done. This was pre-digital that morphed into the digital age. I found a niche in marketing, kind of outgrew that that single location agency, became chief marketing officer, trust.com, built agency nation, put Elevate conferences on, chief marketing officer of a couple other technology companies, took a brief one-year Hiatus from the industry to kind of mercenary CEO of fitness company. It was like a turnaround job. After that, I started my own agency, Rogue Risk, grew it, sold it to SIA, exited at the end of 2023, at which point I had a bunch of angel investments. And one of them, one of those angel investments was Linkora, the company that I'm with now. And as I, you know, showed up to the board meetings and heard what they were doing and got the reports and then kind of dug in with the team a little more, I started to see a pretty incredible opportunity, something that I thought was was wholly different than other AI related solutions in the marketplace ultimately kind of started to get sucked in operationally and decided in October of 2024 to come on full time as the chief growth officer, which basically means catch all for make money. And that is the position that I currently occupy in the organization today.

Awesome. So Linkura, tell us a little bit about Linkura. What is it? Why are you so passionate about it for the independent insurance agency business? And please share. I believe it leans 100% towards commercial. And let's unpack that all a little bit and set the table for everybody because you've got some very important information that's going to help people see under the hood today. And we're gonna do something that We've done it in the past and people love it as a different way to present a podcast. By the way, before we do that, this podcast, if you're listening to it while you're driving, fantastic. Remember 9 and 3, not 10 and 2 anymore, it's 9 and 3, according to my grandkids who now drive. And so if you're driving or listening to this somewhere on an exercise journey or whatever, go back to our website, just go to YouTube, just go to Unstoppable Profit Producer, just go to the videos, and you'll find all of our podcasts. But then you can go back and watch this because Ryan's gonna do a quick presentation. Give us a peek under the hood on this. So Ryan, why are you so passionate about Linkurah and why is it so important for the IA industry right now going forward?

Before I answer that, I just wanna let the audience know I'm more of like a 12 in arm out the window guy. I drive a black Tahoe, so I can't help but think of myself as an Irish Tony Soprano. and that tends to be the way that I drive. So I'll give you the context on the course. So I've been on boards before, been awesome companies. When I started to hear what Linkora was building, I don't mean to take our conversation there, but enormous, I'm a believer in God, Christian, was raised Catholic. I tend to believe that God puts challenges in front of you for reasons.

And.

To have Linkora presented to me as both an investment opportunity and as an opportunity to sit on their board, coming off of my experience of building and growing Rogue Risk to me seems, and I don't mean to take people down this path, but for me personally, just for me personally, not the product isn't some divine intervention. I'm not trying to say that all, but for me personally as a human, When I saw what they were building, it essentially solved all the problems and pain points that I was trying to solve at Linkora when I was the founder and CEO of that company. The places where we had the most pain that I built these ridiculous analog spreadsheet, decision tree, Google documents to try to help people figure things out faster and streamline our business. They were solving those problems and it just felt very serendipitous to me if nothing else, right? I felt like the muse had stopped and sat on my shoulder for a few minutes. And particularly, now there's a lot of AI tools out there. The first thing I hear from so many people, are you gonna differentiate yourself? There's a million AI tools out there, that's 100% true. There are, I'm not trying to say that there are not. However, they took a very unique approach. And so and if I don't explain this part of it, I'm going to try not to be nerdy because I know some people don't want all the details, but and I'm not nerdy in AI. I'm not an engineer. I don't even, you know, I'm good enough to be dangerous and sell shit. But, you know, I have nerds on the team when things really need to get technical. But at a high level, what they had done was make the philosophical decision very early to not plug into large language models. So what I mean by a large language model is open AI Gemini, which is Google's model. Claude, Meta, which has Llama, right? So you may have heard of some of these, certainly most people listening to this have heard of OpenAI, right? Those are large public language models. When you put information in, they go into a massive data pool, which is what allows them to be so smart and so useful for the things that they're used for. And I also saw that this creates A minefield for our industry. We're highly regulated, regulated by state. We also have federal guidelines that we have to meet. And our industry is constantly changing and not even from like a business standpoint or an E&O standpoint, which no one wants an E&O claim, no one wants to have to deal with privacy or cybersecurity related issues. But purely from a reputational standpoint in our space, if you are looked at as a company that cannot secure your customers data or your proprietary systems, processes, algorithms, whatever, right? That reputational hit in our industry is massive because everything we do is about trust, right? And I've been talking a little bit about this on my own podcast and some of my own work is, I believe in the age of AI, we have to realign our mental filters from speed to bind to speed to trust. the bind is assumed, right? How quickly can you get your prospect and or your customer to get to a level of trust, a depth of trust with you that you become their trusted advisor and they stop shopping? That's what we were trying to do at Rogue Risk. I think like years ago, three or four years ago, I was on here with you and we were talking about the one called closed system, right? That was a talk track to build trust. I hadn't really wrapped my head around this idea of speed to trust at the time, but that's what we were doing. How do we get people to trust us?

Right.

As soon as they trust us, they stop shopping, they take our recommendations, they buy more policies, they tell their friends, right? All these things that we know are crucial to our business. So for me, the fact that these guys from the rip had been willing to make the commitment to 13 months of zero revenue development to build their own model, their own platform, which is measurable auditable and explainable, which means every piece of data that comes into our system, we know who touched it, what it was used for, and where it went, which means we can cordon off that information and guarantee that if someone uploads proprietary information into our system, say a policy doc or a customer file, right, that that information is not spread throughout the system. It's not used in a large pool that then could be prompted out or that that data could leak into someone else's account. That data is theirs and theirs alone to be used by them. Right. And that is a wholly unique value proposition for an AI tool, particularly in our industry. There are other tools like this in other spaces, but in our industry, there are very few companies that are I believe grasping the full, the full, the issue, the pitfall of where is this data going, right? Yeah, I have a private connection to OpenAI and whatever, but if you read their terms and conditions, which I have, which was incredibly boring and terrible, by the way, it basically says we won't use your data, but we can.

Right.

Okay. So that makes me nervous personally. So kind of pushing through some of this.

Back to Preston reputation, right?

Yes, yeah.

And that's the whole basis here.

That's the whole basis is, is I chose this company over other opportunities because I said, look, dude, you did too. I lived through the 2015-2016 InsureTech revolution when all these MIT dicks who had done a regression analysis in their 301 class decided that we all sucked at our jobs. We all needed to be replaced. They were smarter than all of us, right? But I was at the front from an agency nation perspective. You know, I was the mouthpiece against that for for three years, right? Trying to advocate for guys like yourself and everyone listening to say, no, these humans are incredibly important. But but in order to do that, we have to be the technologists have to be just as good of stewards of the of the the relationship and the and the systems that the agents are using as the agents themselves need to be. It doesn't work. if agents who are incredibly busy, especially agency owners who have 10 bazillion things on their to-do list that are trying to make their team happy, trying to make their customers happy, trying to run their business, trying to have some sort of personal life. And now they also have to be technologists and decide what, you know, technology tool is not gonna blow up in their face. I mean, that's why we see so many of these, these stories where, you know, an agent will believe in a mission, go down a path, and then it'll blow up. And it's because the technologist, in most cases, did not respect what we do, right, enough to not put the agent in a position where they're investing down a path that could ultimately come back to bite them. So I saw this, you know, philosophically as an opportunity to usher in, be part of ushering in one of hopefully many companies that usher in AI technology to our space in a way that I believe will always be done in a responsible manner, right? I couldn't look you in the face, you know, you're, you're, you're one of my best friends in the industry. Like the crew that we were rolling with, Daniel and Mick and Chris and all the other amazing people on insurance tech, Utah, all the amazing people at, at agents and brokers United that I was just with and et cetera, et cetera. Like, how do I look those people in the face? If I know behind the scenes, I have a tool that if one thing happens, it's outside of my control, they, they, their entire database gets spread throughout, throughout to all these people. Right. I couldn't do that. So It felt both worthy philosophically as well as from a technology perspective. Okay, so what does the tool actually do? Fast forwarding through all that.

Well, let me ask you to pause for just a minute.

Oh, yeah, please.

Absolutely. So, you know, the things that I'm hearing fantastic. It's a closed protected environment and the goal, the problem that it solves in part and you're going to show us a little bit more in just a minute. But it's like dating, right? If any of you have ever been on a date and you go, you know, first date, maybe a second date or third date and you're starting to feel like, I finally found the one. And I know this from my years in the trenches and the agency business. Your goal is to get people to think and feel at that moment, I don't need to make any more calls. I have finally found the agent, the agency that I want to hang my hat with. I don't need to make any more calls. that's in part the goal of Lancura for commercial insurance agents to get people to feel like that and when properly used, fabulous. And the speed of building that trust. I was reading an article, actually the most current Rough Notes magazine just appeared on my table. I got home late, late last night and there it was and I opened it up and there's an article talking about Speed. And I learned years ago, money and success, love speed, money and success, never sleep. So that speed of trust.

Yeah. Awesome stuff.

Take it away, dude.

Yeah. So, you know, and I've always had a problem with this thought process that internet shoppers are tire kickers, right? Internet shoppers are tire kickers. Well, I've always had the feeling, you know, everyone talks about, I work on referrals, right? And they always have this kind of snooty thing and they do this little thing with their shoulders and their head. I work on referrals and look, referrals are amazing. I'm not knocking referrals, but when I hear that, we know what goes on in my head. You're lazy. You're lazy. And the reason that I think- 80%.

Of people are with all love and respect to the nation out there.

Yes, and the reason that I say if you work only on referrals, you're lazy, is cuz what you're saying is I am unwilling to put the work in to build trust. I only wanna work with people who already trust me. that's what I hear when you say that, right? Is because a referral is great. Someone's best friend tells them that you are the guy or the gal that they should be working with, and they pick up the phone and they call you. They're 90 of the way there on the trust meter, right? If there's some fictional trust meter that exists, you know, like, they're already 90 of the way there. So of course you want to work on. You don't have to work that hard. You just have to present yourself as an expert solver problem and you get the business. That's great. But what happened? But if you want to scale, you can't scale referrals. You can't scale them. I'm not counting referrals from mortgage brokers because those might only be 20% of the way there. And frankly, I know what the what the close ratios are on a lot of those. And unless you have a Billy Wagner esque 19 point system, which essentially what he's doing is building trust. The reason we think most internet shoppers are tire kickers is because we don't know how to build trust or we don't build trust fast enough. I know for a fact nobody wants to talk to multiple insurance agents in one day. I don't wanna talk to multiple insurance agents in one day. And I have like a thousand insurance friends. So like, why would someone wanna talk to multiple insurance agents? Because they haven't found the person they trust. So the kind of fluffy ethereal goal to what Linkora is doing is putting the tools in the agent's hands at the moment of truth so that they can be an expert on every account, every time to build trust with every customer. So when they're done with that conversation, that individual on the other end of the phone does not go, ah, you know, I should probably call a couple more people. They're going, she's my guy, she's my person. That's my agent right there, her. But she just said to me, I'm good. I trust her, I believe her. Let's go. I don't need to call anybody else. I'm good. That's what we're trying to get them to, right? The mission statement of Rogue Risk at the agent level is every agent is a specialist on every account, every time. How do we put the tools in your hands so that you can focus on what humans do best? Build relationships, solve problems, and sell shit. It's the human optimized agency. I've been talking about it since 2020 when I founded Rogue Risk. this idea of a human optimized agency, put your humans in their positions to win, right? And I don't care what role you play. You do three things better than any computer ever will. Build relationships, solve problems, and sell stuff. That's what you do better than any other computer. Any AI, they will never beat us at those three things. So put your people in those positions as often as you can. All right, so we've been trying to do that for a long time. And it was the beauty of the digital age, Mike, right? The beauty of the digital age was it started to present us with tools and automations and Zapier connections that pieced together in some crazy daisy chain, right? Allowed us some more time to spend in those places. I don't need to have 50 pieces of paper on my desk and all these folders. you know, I, I mean, thankfully, I caught the very tail end of it. Right. I know, I'm, look, I've been 20 years. I know there are people listening to this. I've probably been in for 40 or 50 years, but, but I was blessed the first four years, right, before, like, crms and agency management started to get crms. I had manila folders in file cabinets right next to my desk, organized by essentially what a CRM would be, like, where they were in the talk process.

Right.

And you you got, you know, tabs and red tab is this and all these different things. Okay, so like the digital age allowed us to move into that and do well. The age of AI, what it does differently is we no longer live in a world where every tool has to be single function, right? That's one of the huge changes that most people are not talking about when it comes to AI is that we're before a single system could perform basically a single task, right? Your CRM could move people through a pipeline, send out some marketing automations and calculate how much premium sold. Okay, we'll just call that, that's kind of one function. It's your sales pipeline and communication. Okay, great. Well, why can't you have that infused data coverage in that, you know, like in the age of AI, now you can slot all these other functions into the process in one system or one tool that allows you to gain so much more efficiency and effectiveness and congruency in your data. I mean, what's the number one complaint from an account manager or CSR? Multiple data input, right? I gotta put it in this system, I gotta put it in this system, I gotta put in this system. And then if I do that 30 times a day, you know, I'm inevitably, because I'm human and fallible, gonna Miss a step here or skip a step here or, or not transfer this data properly or I forgot to copy this. So I'm pasting in something from the previous copy and now I got bad data. And then you're just, you start to get frustrated and it sucks your soul out.

And single key entry.

Yes. AI presents us with the ability to push and pull data, to infuse data, to, to pull in recommendations, to pull in best practices, to pull in our own guidelines and filters in a way that we can sculpt our process, not changing the way we work, right, but fit into the way we work so that the way we work becomes the, the, the low value or zero value tasks, right. Become almost it, it's almost impossible to mess them up, right. So that our brain isn't losing Cycles on. Did I copy and paste that information four times properly? Right? It's thinking, man, next time I talk to Betty, I'm gonna ask her about her kid because I know she just got her license and I wanna make sure that that's properly and now I can do that proactive outreach, right? And what's the number one bitch from agency owners about CSRs? They don't cross sell, they don't upsell enough. And I think for a long time the narrative has been completely wrong on why that happens. For so long it's been, well, they're just not hungry or they're not, They're not salespeople by nature. I don't believe any of that is true. The reason that CSR's do not upsell and cross-sell is because they don't have the flipping time. They don't have the time to cross-sell and upsell. Go sit in one of their chairs.

How much other, you know, how much they have to do on the side once they get done with this particular transaction. I don't wanna ask because I can't add more to my stack.

Yes, that is exactly it. There is a constant value composition and hopefully, and anyone who works on the service side of the business, hit me and tell me if you think I'm wrong, but I've sat in that chair at different periods of time and sat in that chair at Rogue, right, to feel it, right? I'm not a service person by nature. Frankly, I don't even particularly care for talking to random humans very much, but I've sat in that chair to feel the pain and the pain is, oh my God, I gotta get off the phone with this person cuz I got 30 minutes of work to do now based on their problem I have to solve, right? So if we can start to find ways of making that 30 minutes 20 and then we make it 15, right? So now they can ask a few questions. They can be proactive. They can start to cross sell and upsell. They can ask for referrals on the phone because they're not feeling so much pressure about what they have to do on the back end. that they can actually focus on these true value drivers for both the customer or prospect and the agency or business as a whole, right? And I'm talking about, you know, and I think when we can do this, service and sales aren't so different, right? They're truly not incredibly different functions. They have different responsibilities, but the process can be very, very similar. So yes, Linkora is a sales enablement tool, but we've actually found with a lot of our early users that they have as many or more service side people using the tool as they do sales people. Because the processes when you actually lay them out are not, they have different responsibilities and end functions they have to get out the door, but the process is very, very similar that they have to work. In terms of gathering data, using it, understanding what coverages are associated, et cetera. So, you know, that's kind of the core idea.

So let's go ahead and show them.

Shall we? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, okay, so I gave you permission and before you go ahead and go there, I'll go ahead and let you locate your share link because we've done this on the podcast before and people love it when we do this. So we're going to do it here today. And again, if you're listening to this only, go to YouTube. Go to Unstoppable Profit Producer and just find videos and you'll find this podcast. But, you know, the other thing that I want to interject on what Ryan was just saying, whether you're in a sales chair or a service chair in the independent insurance agency industry, if you are a professional who knows how to help people understand their insurance program, because let's face it, to the consumer, insurance is a mystery. And if you can demystify insurance for them and explain to them why this is important or why this gap exists, that's your value, that's a large part of your value proposition. And the rest of it, and you and I were talking about this last week, 65% of the activities in an independent insurance agency service chair are maybe the same seven things every single day, and all of those seven things can be done by a non-licensed person. So elevate, let's elevate, give ourselves permission to hand it down to somebody else so we can be talking to people about their insurance program. So when an agency has Lancura in their agency, Ryan's gonna show a little bit about how it works, and then we'll give you some information before we wrap up today. If you like what you see, strongly encourage you to get in touch with Ryan and learn more.

Ready, dude? Yes, exactly. So, and I appreciate that so much. So the first thing I'm going to show you guys, if you're on the YouTube channel, is actually, I'm going to go through just a few slides and talk you through the big idea. I think that'll frame a little better what we're doing. This is very brief, guys. So this isn't just like a slideshow. And then I'm going to take you into and actually show you what we're up to and, and, and what, what, how we're solving these actual problems. So, so AI or linkora is at its core, it's about growth and it's about growth in commercial insurance. We are currently not operating in personal health and benefits or life. We will be there someday. But we wanted to solve commercial first. And I'm going to give you this one piece of of context. The beauty of AI is something called transfer learning, which means once we've solved this process for commercial, applying it to personal life and benefits will be incredibly easy. So but we have to solve it for commercial first, which is why we've chosen one vein and ultimately I think commercial is maybe the most complex out of those four categories that I just gave you. I mean, health and benefits has its own complexities and but I think commercial is the most broad and and complex. And we figured if we could solve it in commercial first, then applying this kind of transfer learning idea to the others will make it done. So commercial only today, particularly powerful if you are a personalized heavy agency that's trying to get into commercial, right? Every agent becomes a specialist and every time the number one hesitation why people don't sell commercial is not because they don't have the markets, it's because they feel uncomfortable selling the product. They feel like the product is too complex or that they're not enough of an expert to give good advice. And therefore they tend not to sell commercial insurance, although it's a huge opportunity for them. So everything is commercial insurance and it's all about growth. So the problem we're solving It's too complex, it's too fragmented. And frankly, US business insurance needs are changing too fast right now for us to constantly keep up and make sure we're always properly ensuring those businesses and prospects that come to us. So right now, on average, it takes 15 systems, 15 tabs for a commercial for a commercial clown to be closed. And when you ask, you might be going, ah, that seems like a lot. Go and check. go talk to your people. I promise you, 15 might be light, right? I did this. I I went back and thought through how we did this at Rogue, and it was 17 different systems that you would have to touch to actually get the, the account closed. And that is just way too much time. It's way too much thought, and there's way too many opportunities for us to make mistakes or simply just want to get on to the next thing and not do the things that grow our agency.

Right.

Referrals, cross-sells, upsells, you know, rounding out accounts. All that kind of good stuff. Uh, so how we're going to do it, we're going to simplify submission, we're going to move fragmentation, and we're going to increase, the speed to bind by increasing the speed to trust. How Linkcore does it differently. We've already hit some of this, so I'm not going to spend much time on this slide, but we built our own models. Everything is in house, which means we know where the data is going. We know how the systems work. And we did it with a type of AI that is on the cutting edge called agentic AI. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here because I don't want to nerd out too far. If you know what it is, great. the high level idea is when it is crazy, Mike, that we're referring to it as traditional AI models now being that they came out like four years ago. But when I first hit the scene in mass market, right, if you were to run a function, you had to run all the functions or essentially one tube to the data feed with a gentec AI. What it does is say each individual function has its own model and its own pipe into the data. So the models get much they're much faster They're much more low cost and they're much more accurate because they're only doing one function. If I wanna classify a business's NACE code, right, we have one algorithm that does that, it's all it does and it's getting smarter and smarter on that one thing. So we're on the cutting edge of AI and all the models are our own. And then the second piece is we have one of the richest and deepest data sets when it comes to commercial insurance in the industry. And some people bucket that because we're young. The reason we were able to do that is 'cause one of our founders, his name is Mark Stender, he's a former chief architect of Travelers, former chief digital officer at Prudential. He was actually in charge of ran and implemented both the, St. Paul and Aetna mergers into Travelers. He holds the record for most policy transfers in the industry and knows data quality, data depth and data connectivity, I believe better than anyone else in the space. I feel incredibly blessed to be working with him. So our deep, rich, vertical data set inside of commercial insurance coupled with our models allows us to deliver functionality and insights in a way that very few are able to do. Ultimately delivering on our promise, every agent becomes a specialist on every account, every time. That's the idea. Okay.

Let me just ask you to pause there real quick because I think this is something that a lot of agents and agency leaders out there have not wrapped their head around yet. And I'm going to encourage them to do so because like you said, we're talking about, you said something about AI is becoming the norm, right? But agentic, AI. You may want to jot that down if you're taking notes. Agentic AI. Very, very important that you learn to begin to understand that and how it plays into everything you're doing from a technology, automation and AI standpoint. Back to you, dude. Yeah.

No, no. Great point. And, and open AI just dropped their agentic models three months ago. We're about two months behind them, so we dropped our first agentic models a month ago. So, so we're, we're on the Cutting Edge of this AI Tech and Again, that is a testament to our head of AI, our chief AI officer, Pyush Mishra. He's just a freaking wizard. And you get some of these people in here and the things they can do and they know are incredible. But again, blessed to be out on the cutting edge. So if we can execute on our value proposition, what we are ultimately trying to do is take those 15 tabs, those 15 systems, and reduce them down to three. I think you'll still need your agency management system slash CRM, right? Mostly for accounting and probably austerity. And you'll also need whatever carrier system you're quoting and placing the business slash binding the business in. The only other tab you should need is Linkora. That's the goal. The goal is over time we are slowly eating tabs that would cost you additional data inputs, that cost you additional time, additional brain cycles. so that you have one system to work your flow from lead in the door to proposal out the door. Right. We fill everything in between and it doesn't mean we're going to build everything in between. Some of that functionality we're going to rent by partnering with best in class organizations inside the industry, many of which, you know, you know, a good example of that would be, say, capital premium finance for for premium finance contracts. Right. like we'll have baked into our system, you know, the ability to do premium finance contracts or payment links and we'll have other partners as well, right? But, 'cause we want people to, again, I don't wanna change the way you do business. I wanna facilitate you being able to put your humans in the places that they work best, build relationships, solve problems, and sell things. So if we can drop 15 tabs down to three, you save an hour and a half of work on every account and you increase your productivity by more than 35% and give you an idea of what our ultimate goal is. So our ultimate goal, it comes down to this. In the next three years, the commercial insurance market will grow to over 500 billion. It may even be quicker than that if we continue at the pace that we're currently at, but it's estimated in the next three years will be over 500 billion. On top of that 500 billion, There is an additional 20 to 30% of premium that is uncaptured, that's just sitting out there unwritten in underinsured, improperly insured, or uninsured accounts. 20 to 30%. So that's 100 billion in premium that's available simply by properly insuring, fixing underinsurance, or writing currently uninsured accounts. Now, what does that look like from a tactical sample? Because 100 billion is an enormous number. It looks like understanding when, before you even talk to an account, that they sell things on their website. And when you look at their policies, you see they only have form one cyber included on their bop. They don't have a standalone policy. and you're being prompted to know whether you know it intrinsically or not, but you're prompted through the system to know they need form two and form three to properly cover this business that's selling things. And therefore they need a standalone cyber policy. And if you rip out the $250 form one endorsement on whatever bop you have and you replace it with a $1700 standalone cyber policy, that's $1500 $1,500 of net new premium to the industry, net new premium to your business, right? Because you've simply just been able to figure out, I'm not just gonna quote what they have and throw it back at them, right? The system's gonna prompt out for me the coverage gaps in their current policy set so that I can go back to that insured with the proper recommendations, right? So that is how our goal is to help this industry recapture 10 billion in net new premium, not just passing premium from one agency to another and back, but to actually help agents write an additional 10 billion in net new premium to this industry. That's 10 of the available upside that's going to be available over the next three years. That's where we're going. So we're going to do that, and then I'll move on and actually show you guys what we're up to through three products.

So I, I just, I've been doing some quick math. I heard you say 100 billion at 13% commission. And that's conservative in this realm, in my opinion. That's 13 billion in commission. And even at 10 billion, which you just said, that's 1.3 billion in available commission to those who are willing to make the effort and do the work. Back to you.

Yes, and hopefully make that effort minimal relative to what it is today. That's the idea.

Perfect.

So, we're gonna go there through, we're going to the market, and solving this problem through three products. The first is called Link. This is, application. You can sign up for today. You go to the website, sign up, base products, 25 bucks a seat. Um, and what that's going to do is give you, all the data that you need, the firmographic data. It's gonna give you coverage recommendations, exposure recommendations. And I'm gonna show you all this in a second, but that is pure. You can have, you know, it's per user seat. bring your producers on, bring your CSRs on. They're using the system. It's walking them through. And again, I'm going to show you in a second, I promise, guys. But the first is Link. The second two products are enterprise level. The second being Link Connect, which is essentially everything you're going to see in the application just delivered via API for organizations or institutions that want to use their own UX. Awesome. And the last is, and this is where I get like, you know, really excited is because we own our own models and we've built our own LLMs, we have the ability to carve off and essentially be LLM, an LLM hosting company where you can have your own private model that your data sits in, that only people you give access to can see, that then can deliver custom algorithms, custom functionality on top of it. Now, what does that look like? we're currently in talks with our regional carrier around helping them build an underwriting prioritization model. Right. So one of the reasons, you know, you hear, you hear a lot of agents complain, you know, man, I love writing with this company, but it takes so long for them to get back to me, Etc. Well, a lot of that time is not like the carrier is inefficient or doesn't want to get you the quote back. The carrier knows that how important it is to get the quotes back just as much as you do. The problem is they are sifting through mountains of nonsense. So none of you listening to this call do this. But some agents put, put submissions in front of carriers that are miscast, don't have enough information, you have the wrong forms, you're submitting to the wrong individual, or you have to, they have to also sort through the, the, the Myriads of Agents who just blast the market with every account they get. They send it to 20 friggin markets with no intention of writing with 15 of them. and they have to sift through all this. So what we're working on with this particular carrier is can we take in their appetite guidelines and take in their filtering system and essentially deliver back to them a submission underwriting prioritization model, which allows them to work on the highest bindability, highest lifetime value, most profitable accounts first, right? And work through that list so that the agents that write business with that carrier are getting their responses faster and more accurately. Right. And that just gives you the speed.

Of trust with carriers as well and underwriters 100%.

And right now we're currently the only solution in the marketplace for enterprise level customers in our industry that want to deliver their own custom LLM technology back to them in a non using non-public data model. So so that's that's Linkora, our goal, the market we're going after and how we're doing it. Now I'm going to take you guys over and show you exactly how we're doing it. I'm going to apologize in so much as today for purposes that were on Zoom and all that kind of stuff. I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you.

Hey, Ryan, I got a better idea.

Yeah, yeah.

Why don't we just encourage everybody, if you want to see it so you completely understand it. Yeah. They should just connect with you.

Yeah, yeah. Happy to do it.

You were one of your teammates.

Yeah, yep, yep, yep.

And you'll be happy to show them, you know, exactly what it looks like.

So, so basically the long story short is I today, what we can give you is up to 70 points of firmographic information, Transportation, OSHA data, contacts. You can ask the system any questions about coverage recommendations, exposure recommendations, mitigation, claims handling, underwriting questionnaires, etc. Etc. So you can basically just pepper this thing with whatever questions or problems you have. what's coming out probably right around the time that this episode drops is coverage analysis as well. So now you can upload policies, you can get coverage gap analysis, risk score analysis, and understand how what they currently have actually suits their needs and then find the gaps that you can go out to the market and actually get policies or coverages for that solve those gaps. So when you go back to your customer, you can pick apart what they currently have and actually ensure that risk properly, right? Because that's the idea. We all want to do the best job we can, but ultimately just like everything else, we're so inundated with stuff that oftentimes even though when we're sitting in meetings with our friends and, you know, we all say, oh, I would never quote on price or I would never just take what they have and quote it. It happens. We do it. And it's not because we don't want to be good agents or that we don't value what we do. We just, there's so much busy work and so much time to get this stuff done. so if we can inject at face value proper information, help us understand where the gaps are, etc. And then later in July we'll have comparison coming as well, where now you can compare the proposals you go out and get against what they currently have and actually have a tactical document which allows you to know here's exactly down to the legal language of the contracts why what I'm presenting back to you is a better fit for you and a better fit for your business both today and long term. So that just gives everyone the kind of verbal high level overview.

I have three very important items for you.

Yes, hit me.

So, and the first two are going to be a little bit hard questions, so get ready.

Yes.

So what about leads?

Yeah, so we have a leads tool. That leads tool is based not just on effective date, but I think we took a really interesting spin because of the depth of the data set that we have. we're constantly searching that. So it's not a static database. We didn't just do go to, like, zoom info and pay them for a license and then reskin it like some of our. I don't even want to say competitors in the lead space. I'm hoping to partner with most of them. But, you know, we took a slightly different spin since we're constantly pinging our databases and our data sets. What we're always looking for is what we call signals. So. And actually, I'll give David Carothers a shout out. He posted something last week that I was like, You know, I love it when someone else says what you have been saying, which is effective date isn't the only time that we should be reaching out to prospects, right? So if you can find a revenue increase, a location change, the addition of a vehicle, if their payroll increases, et cetera, these are signals, these are moments where significant substantial change is happening in that business and we can reach out and be true value providers. We can be proactive in helping them understand how, hey, you just jumped $1,000,000 in revenue from last year or from last quarter, right? What happened? Are you, like, is your current insurance program set up to handle that level of growth inside your business? So, so that's how we address leads is through signals.

Well, and if you're in a state, one of the 45 states that does do workers comp, and they have an experienced modification, maybe a little bit larger account, you know that six months before the effective date is the time.

Yes.

The hot zone, if you will. So, I mean, absolutely true. There's never a bad time to begin educating people and building that relationship. And I love what you said, build relationships, solve problems, and sell shit. I mean, it's not rocket science, the power of three, right? Let's talk about proposals because I heard you say that a few minutes ago. Um, and I think we were discussing this as well. So Lucira can help with leads in a sense, and you're going to continue to build that. What about their proposal?

Yeah. So in the, either the, probably be the end of August, just so everyone knows when they show up that, that you can't, this feature is not out today. It's being built while we talk. We're going to have the ability that once you compare, right? So let's say, let's say you, you have their current policies and you go out and you get three proposals. Let's just say that's the case, right? And you plug them all in and you determine XYZ carriers program has a better risk score, covers the risk needs and the price, you know, the pricing makes sense. And that's the proposal I want to go to the customer with. So, you know, and I know some people do like good, better, best. I don't believe in that. I believe if we're going to present ourselves as experts, we need to be experts and show them our best recommendation for them. That's my, but you can do whatever you want. Once you choose, the proposal that you want to go with, you'll have the ability, because we have all the data, we have all the firmographics, we have all the contacts, we have all the proposal information, we have all the previous, their previous account information. We're, we're going to have a proposal Builder with, with a video component, because I do firmly believe in video proposals, if you so choose, that you'll be able to one click right out of our system, generate a branded proposal to your agency that you can then send directly to your customer right out of the system. And now you can present to them on the fly without having to re-key information, re-plug things in, right? It'll all be customizable. And now you have this clean, branded, one-click video proposal tool that comes right out of the system and gets that, you know, all the work you did beforehand, right? Now the final deliverable is this document, which will also come, and this I think is a really, it's a small but I think important feature And I've heard you talk about it. It also comes with a declination form. So we will know what you offered versus what you, what they accepted. And now you have that E&O prevention tool, which is so key. I mean, how many agents do you know who've saved themselves an E&O claim because they had a declination letter, right? They can hold it up and go, hey, I offered it to you. You didn't accept it. So, you know, we have that, we'll have that type of deliverable that comes out the back end and makes it very clean and easy.

Again, just killing tabs. Yeah, and you just give me an idea which any agent can implement out there. So the declination forms, if you have them signed and dated, that's your follow-up tool into the future as well. Just because they sign it at that point doesn't mean they don't have the need for that particular coverage in the future. So you can use that as a follow-up tool and I have a very effective Buxell program which is converted to digital nowadays, which I used to use 29% of claims are not paid because of unreported changes in vehicles and properties, and 37% of claims are denied because of improper coverage. So, I mean, all of that's consistently in place. The sky's the limit.

Mike, I just want to interrupt you for a sec. So again, I never know how deep to go with where we're going, but guys, I hope you hear how passionate I am about solving these problems for you. Like, I fucking guarantee I'm gonna fix these things for you. Like, like, come hell or high water, I'm going to help you guys solve these problems. So every lead that you look up in the system that you input into our system, whether you zap it in, you start to lead, you buy the lead, however you get it into the system, and there'll be multiple ways to do that. We're going to those signals that I talked to you about that we use for leads. We're going to use those for the accounts that you have in our system as well. So now, what if, what if, like you said, one of your customers mid-term, gets a second location, goes out and gets a second. It doesn't tell you right now, I know there's a 90-day window and for a location change in the pot. I get all that. But why rest on that? If you've ever read that endorsement, it's pretty freaking fluffy and offers a lot of gray space. And as you described, there's been a lot of claims denied because of, well, it wasn't reported by this. If you know, right, if we can signal to you immediately, hey, we just found a second location for this business that you didn't know existed before or is brand new, you know, almost immediately. And now you can take action. You can add it to the policy. One, capture the premium that you should be capturing for that second location, you know, right away versus what on renewal. And also, you've just, you've just solved a major pain point for your customer, which is now they don't have that ticking time bomb sitting out there that if I don't report at a certain time or, you know, XYZ, I could potentially have this claim denied. You you've been the true trusted advisor. You're building relationships, solving problems, selling stuff. So all of this is very possible.

Number two of what you just said, solving problems.

Yep.

So the third item for you, Ryan, and this is the easy one. So anybody who has been watching and or listening to this podcast and they say, my interest is peaked or highly peaked, how can they get a hold of you and find out more?

So I'm, me personally, Or anybody, you.

Know, on the Linkora team to help people become educated. And to drop what you just said earlier, 25 bucks a month per user, pretty simple.

Yeah, no problem. So guys, always feel free. You can reach out to me directly. LinkedIn's probably the easiest because my email handle is kind of tough to remember. It's ryan.hanley@linkora.ai. So LinkedIn's very easy or just if you remember that email, just email me. But you can go to linkora.com, check us out. watch some videos.

Spell that, Ryan, just to be sure.

Yeah, thank you. L-I-N-Q-U-R-A. Link, L-I-N-Q-U-R-A, Linkora. You can go to the website. Yep, dot.com, yep.com, and you can also, we have a, just like I did with both agency, agency nation and rogue risk, we have a very robust YouTube channel with more than 30 videos already explaining a lot of the basic concepts around AI, around prompting, around different systems, Etc. So you can go in and check that out. But guys, feel free to reach out. You can pepper me with questions. I have a tremendous member of my team, Kyle Stender. We'll do, we'll spend as much time with you as you need, walking through a demo, show you all the things. If you want to also hear what's coming, he'll walk you down our roadmap. We're very transparent, very open what we're doing because, Mike, you know, I, I've said this before on other shows and I, and I've said it to you personally. I wanna make money and have this company be successful and all the things that come with that.

But.

This industry has given me a life and my kids a life that I could never have imagined. I grew up in a town in the middle of friggin nowhere, 900 people. We said you could leave the doors open at night 'cause the criminals lived in our town, they didn't steal in our town. There were no opportunities. And I was blessed by God at the age of 12 to have this thought enter my mind of I need to get the out of here. Like I can't be here, right? But I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I lived very poor, you know, the filled with debt, paycheck to paycheck was my life until I found this industry. This industry changed just from being around the people, financial health, stability, challenge, goals, purpose, amazing human beings that I just love spending time with. Right? Like, I feel a responsibility to try to give back as much as I can. And I honestly feel that for for the agents that are interested in this type of tool, that this will be an enormous value to them. And my promise is I'm not going anywhere. I'm here for the ride. There'll be some some changes coming in the future as well. And I think that'll be more even more solidified in people's minds as I maybe take a slightly larger leadership role in the organization. I think this can be a real help for a lot of people. And, you know, I hope they'll give us a look. And if it works for you, amazing. If it doesn't, that's fine too. But I'm always open to suggestions and we want, you know, I've said this to you and it's a life mantra for me. I don't care who's right. I don't need to be right. I just wanna get it right. So I don't care where the idea comes from, who gives us feedback. It's to me, the number one mistake that leaders make either intentionally or unintentionally is they feel like they need to be right. I don't need to be right. I don't need to be. I just want to get it right. So if you come in and you use the tool, we have a feedback mechanism. I actually brought one of my team members from Rogue Risk with me to link Cora. Her name is Clarissa. She is absolutely amazing. She'll takes in all your feedback. We read every email we get, every submission, every survey. We are constantly trying to make this tool fit the way that you guys work and bring max value. I love that.

I'm going to repeat that one just so everybody gets it. I don't need to be right. I just want to get it right. Hell yeah.

Gold nugget, baby.

I love that. And on YouTube, they can go to YouTube and just search Linkora. Yes.

Yep.

Yep.

Just say L-I-N-K-O-R-A.

L-I-N-K-O-R-A. So it'll be there. you can learn, there's more than 30 videos there already. Ryan Hanley, InsurTech Utah 2025 is where we were recently connected. And just to give everybody here as we begin to wrap this up today, and thank you again, great, great stuff. We have so much in common and age 12 is a big commonality for both of us. I didn't know that until just a minute ago. But passionate about giving back because this industry has been so good to us and you were giving back at InsurTech. Utah 2025 in the AI pitch portion of the event. And there was a bunch of agents in the auditorium that actually voted. And there was three judges that voted, all due respect to everybody that presented. They were all phenomenal, including you presented on Lyncora. But everybody there that day chose Lyncora as the best option at this event. So congratulations on that number one.

Thank you.

But I'm telling everybody that story because that's what everybody else saw in La Cora that day. So we just want to make sure we get this important, potentially game-changing information out to everybody in the industry to help them. Again, what a great way to wrap. I don't need to be right, I just want to get it right. And you are in pursuit, dude, of getting it right. Hey, Like my great friend Fred Kramer says, progress not perfection. Dude, you are the man.

I appreciate the hell out of you. You're one of the best humans I've ever met and I appreciate every second that we get to spend together. So I just want to say thank you for the time.

Thank you. And hey, if this is your first time on the podcast, welcome. My name is Mike Stromsoe and I'm widely recognized as a leading author, speaker and coach for the independent insurance agency industry. You can learn more about what we do at UPP Life. www.upp.lif.e.com and if you're interested in attending anything that we do, whether it be virtually or live, to grow your business, create wealth and have more freedom, please visit upp life.com or just get a hold of us. And more importantly than that, if you heard something on this podcast today which brought value or peaked an interest or you figured out a way where you can potentially grow and grab some of that 1.3 $1,000,000,000,000 in commission revenue or more that's coming up in the near future, just simply go to unstoppableprofitpodcast.com, unstoppableprofitpodcast.com, go up to the top, make sure you subscribe, but here's the important part. Make sure you share that link, Unstoppable Profit Podcast, with somebody else out there and help them out. Share it with anybody you know so they can learn more about this episode and all the cool shit going on at Lakewood Church. So they can also share in the resources and the future opportunities. We are grateful and thankful. And of course, the podcast is out there on all the channels, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, our YouTube channel, and Beyond Unstoppable Profit Podcast.

So Ryan Hanley, thank you, brother. Yeah, guys, I'm gonna leave you with this. There are a lot of people sharing information about insurance agency performance, success, et cetera, and they all ask you to share their show. this show, not my episode, but this show, what Mike is doing, this is one of the shows that you should actually share. Take the extra 15 seconds out of your life that it takes to click share this, you know, text it or email it or whatever. Do it. This, Mike, what you do here, the way you talk about, the way you think about this business is you've been such a mentor to me, both from afar before we knew each other well, and absolutely since we've gotten to know each other. this is one of the shows that you should be sharing, guys. I absolutely believe that.

Ryan Hanley, thank you for the kind words. All right, everybody, have a great day. Only action. Don't worry about being right. Worry about getting it right. You got this. We believe in you. Thanks, brother.

Thank you.

If you love the podcast but don't know where or how to get started, visit www. www.upplife.com. That's U-P-P-L-I-F-E.com. To learn more about our coaching and mastermind programs and how you can join our community of broker oriented agency owners today.