AI and Insurance: From Hype to How with Steve Anderson

On today's Agent Leader podcast, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Steve Anderson. If you don't know the name Steve Anderson and you're in the insurance industry, where have you been? Steve is a true thought leader in terms of insurance and technology. He's an author, he's a speaker. He will get you to think different about things not only in technology, but how you apply technology. We have a fantastic conversation and yes, we, we also talk about AI and how to utilize AI in your agency. Enjoy this interview. Have your pen and paper because you are going to take a lot of notes. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. This is the podcast for agency leaders to learn, to grow, to develop and ultimately aspire to become their best version possible. My name is Brent Kelly, I am your host and I am delighted to be with you on today's episode. I have a fantastic guest, someone who has been around the insurance industry for just a few years. It's been a while and is certainly has a number of, of, of things on his, his bio and things that I want to share. I'll be talking today to Steve Anderson and for some of you you're going to go, oh, I know the name Steve Anderson. Maybe if you are, you know, up and coming agency leader, maybe you're not as sure or know who Steve Anderson is. And by the way, maybe you need to get out of a, under the rock or out of the rock you're, you're under. But Steve has been doing this for a lot of years and just some things I wanted to share to the audience, he is a, I'll just say this, Steve, insurance technology expert to help agencies understand, to integrate, to leverage, to execute technology. He is a speaker. In fact we were talking before we started recording last time that I was probably face to face with Steve. It's been a few years. I think prior to Covid we were at an event and Steve is doing presentations, but of course he speaks. He's a well known keynote speaker as well as an author not only of multiple articles and blogs, but also of a book which I will bring up today, the Bezos Letters. I can't wait to talk to Steve about that. And he's a huge influencer. Why I said if you don't know Steve, come on, get out there. In fact I was looking, Steve, you only have 325,000 ish LinkedIn followers or whatever at this point.

I know, I'm working on that.

You know, I, I, I may be a bit jealous but I won't get into that today I've got. I've got some work to do to catch up with you there. Also, I didn't know this, Steve, you got a master's degree in insurance law.

How weird is that, right?

Unbelievable. And of course, last thing we'll get.

And of course there's a whole story behind that, but I get into that.

So I might want to ask you, how does this all trans. And then one thing I want to talk to Steve about, he's also the co founder of Catalyt, and I want to learn more about that organization and how they help and serve the insurance industry. So, Steve, now that I got all of that out, and I know there's way more. First of all, welcome to the podcast and if you would maybe just share a quick nugget or two about something that I missed in your bio. So, Steve, welcome to the podcast.

Brent, thank you for having me. Always fun to talk with you and love what you're doing with developing agent leaders. We certainly need that. And again, as. As more agencies are coming online, you know, crazy ideas people have about, hey, why don't we start an insurance agency? So I, I think the only other thing I would think, you know, all the business stuff, and as you said, I've been around a very long time, but kind of where the fun is, partly for me now is I have seven grandkids. Three are close, four and a little further away. And that. And I hear this a lot from grandparents. It's like, you know, I wish we could have gone directly to the grandkids, you know, by the kids, but I don't think that works too well. But anyway, that's just fun for my wife and I, so.

That's awesome. And you live in Tennessee, right, Steve?

I do. Outside Nashville.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a great area. I. I just want to mention my, my, I've got five kiddos. Some of the audience knows this. My second daughter, she's a senior in high school. She just visited Belmont, so she was in your area last year.

My youngest daughter graduated from Belmont, so. Okay. All right.

Well.

And not in music business, so that's what Belmont's known for. But she was a fine arts major, so.

Okay. Okay, interesting. Well, enjoy those grandkids. I've heard that as well for many people. I'm not there yet, although my oldest daughter is getting married, so it may not be that long.

There you go.

You never know. So. Well, Steve, again, you've got such a vast experience in the industry, and again, maybe I'll just start. Start with this and I gave you some questions to ponder on. I also told you that I just kind of meander through subjects but to me it's like it's not so much about, this is about you and of course your relationship to insurance agency leaders. But what things, here's an interesting question. What things are fascinating you right now? I mean from stuff that, what you see in the insurance space. And I know it's a broad question, but what's got your eyes and ears.

You know, and I can already anticipate some eyes rolling, but it's AI and probably a year and a half ago, maybe a little bit longer, really got intrigued and again, one of the things that I've been at least seemingly successful at is looking at trends that are coming and kind of jumping on early. And I've said for a long time it's kind of easy to do that in the insurance agent space because agencies are typically pretty far behind other industries. So you know, I can jump in but, and that's a huge topic. I'm doing a lot with it now, really helping agents understand what it is and more importantly to me actually how to use it. And the phrase I keep using is hype to how so a lot of hype around it, no question. And I want to help agents understand how this tool will really help their agency in a significant way. And I will say I really do liken it to the, the late 90s when the Internet was just really starting to get people's attention. A lot of new businesses started up around that. This may be bigger than that. And you know, that's a bold statement to make. And I think for me it's, I'll frame it this way, it's not about replacement, it's about augmentation. So it's not going to replace people, it's going to augment what they do and help them reduce, if not eliminate what I call the soul sucking tasks that happen in an agency, which are the repetitive boring stuff that needs to be done. But these are better ways to go about doing it.

Okay, so I could go down a lot of rabbit holes here.

I gave you something to work with there, didn't I?

Well, no, it, I, there's so much there, Steve. And again you said roll the eyes AI Well, I think at this point everyone's heard of it. Yeah, but I, I think you said it well.

Right.

The hype to how and I, I don't know if you've ever seen this clip, but it comes up once in a while. Was it Matt Lauer, which of course that's a whole side story with today's show, like back in the 90s with Katie Couric. And he says some phrase of, you know, what is this Internet thing anyway? You know, because he's like, what is that the AT symbol? What are you talking to people? And but you know, you kind of laugh about it and you're like that sounds ridiculous. But at that point no one knew.

No one knew.

There was this general hype that built. And then of course it becomes the way that we exist today. And you know, just to take what you said, Steve is okay, here's this AI. Hi everyone. AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. Like, well, what does that mean? What does that mean for insurance agencies? So again, I take this wherever you want, Steve, but what maybe is an example or two of the hype to how, like how do you see insurance agencies starting or utilizing AI to best serve them? And of course you gave us some idea there of the people issue.

But yeah, and I want to maybe give two different views on that. One is for agency staff. So a lot of companies we're seeing emerging tools around policy comparison, right? So renewal policy and existing policy, where are the changes? That's been a soul sucking task. In fact that's where really the outsourcing industry built itself on. Is outsourcing some of those kinds of functions with AI now and again, well trained, etc. That can be our function brought down to literally minutes and highlighting everywhere in those two policy where there are differences. So that's to me a real practical, even small things like email threads. Agency staff live on email, right between underwriters and clients and prospects and all of that. But being able to take all those threads and then summarize them, AI does that really, really well. So now either recorded phone calls with transcription or email threads and then instead of trying to write out or summarize yourself, let AI summarize it. Here's a key point. A person always has to review it to make sure it is accurate. Okay, so the human's already always in there, but. But being able then to document in their management system that conversation faster, easier, probably more accurately. So that's kind of the, the staff side of things I think where there's even maybe more of an advantage for leaders, agency owners, producers is using AI as a thought partner. Meaning let's take a producer, they get an appointment. You know, I've been working on it, right? And probably maybe face to face, maybe virtual. You know, in today's world it could be either and what that producer really should do is spend quite a bit of time researching that prospect beforehand so they know what it is. The AI tools now allow name, company name, address, website and then the tool will go out and actually generate and create what I'm calling right now a pre meeting report. So you're not asking all the questions, you're helping clarify here. Here's what I learned about your business even to the point of here are the, the risks or here the underwriting questions or here's what the underwriter is going to be concerned about or going into loss runs and doing a much better job of analyzing some of that information. So I, I think there's a lot of tools there. That was producer agency owner. Brett, how many agency owners really understand their financials? It's hard.

Not as many as you think they would.

No, it's hard. And, and again typically agency owners are good salespeople.

Correct.

Maybe not good managers.

Yep.

Or good, you know, they're learning that aspect of it and what if they put their P L into a tool anonymized. Now again I want to be clear on there are certain very strict guidelines on what you put in and, and not name and that kind of stuff but you could just start asking questions. What are my biggest expenses over the first quarter?

Yeah.

Where's the opportunity for me to reduce expenses? And again it's, it's a thought partner. Here's what I hear my goals for this year. Give me some suggestions on the best way for me to meet the goal based on my past experience or here's a new market I want to go with. So there's a whole lot of, of not replacing strategy but enhancing and maybe here's what often is happening giving you ideas you never thought about. So it's expanding what you do. It's again it's not replacing, it's augmenting so tactical at the desk and kind of strategy and you know, for example in amss I really see in the fairly near future reporting going away. There's just a data set and you just ask questions that you want to know what carrier did I have the highest commission income in the in, in 2024 and what look at my contingency agreement. What carriers can I max. I mean all of those kind of questions that we've spent time really digging in can be accelerated so that the agency owner can know more about their organization and get good ideas on where to go. Now they may say no, that's stupid, I'm not going to do it. That's their part.

Yeah.

So obviously I think there's so much potential here. I'm pretty excited about at least trying to help agencies understand what to do and what not to do. There is compliance, there's data security, there's all kinds of questions that they need to be aware of.

Yeah.

Wow.

So, so much to unpack there. And I, you know, again, I've been thinking about this and you know, again I'm not anywhere attacker AI expert, but understanding how to utilize it and what it means and my brain tries to simplify things in these conversations and what I heard, and this is my simplified approach, is that it takes minutes to hours of research and allows you to focus on relationships and, and of course that could mean a lot of things. Right. But I just think about the time that you mentioned, you know, with producers and of course the homework and the research and the prep they need to do and the time that takes and to be able to have that summarized go now, do what you're great at and do that more often.

And that's the enhancement part, right?

Yeah.

Get the grunt, I call it grunt work. Get the grunt work done. It needs to be done. And then use that. And even for staff, I mean if, if they free up time, what can they do? They can actually proactively call customers. Right. I mean it's, we say we're the relationship business and right now we're buried in day to day soul sucking tasks. I just love that phrase.

I, I love it too. And just so you know, I may borrow and, or steal it.

You can. Well, I did, I stole it from Ryan Deeds, you know.

Oh, he's a good guy. Yeah. It's just, I mean it is, it's the, and it's, it's, it's amazing because the agencies always talk about how just overwhelmed and burdened and we can't do things and you know, again, I don't want to get into some of our stuff, but we talk about, you know, the agencies. If, you know, if, if you only had these top clients, what would you do for them? Oh, we do more and more. Why don't you? Wow. We're just, we're just drained.

We don't have time.

We don't have the time. And now to be able to, to, to reallocate some of that is, is super important. I also thinking of analogy Steve, of course, March Madness just wrapped up as far as the basketball and I was thinking imagining as a basketball team is you spent the majority time just getting dressed and putting your shoes on and tiring your shoes and you never played and that's you know, soul sucking task. It's like I gotta do this and get this right and get the equip. Like no, just go play. And I think that's part of, is just getting yourself in the game more and more often to do things that really matter and really move things. And what an amazing resource. I also had to chuckle because I use AI in different ways. And just so you know Steve, I mean I know you work with agencies and producers and we'll, we'll ask producers different questions on things and well where do we find that? Whatever. And just yesterday as basic as total or true cost of risk, you know, in two seconds I put it in Google which of course AI now summarizes and I go, here you go. And they're like exactly, done, done. It's, it's crazy. Hey there agent leader Brent Kelly here want to take just a few seconds to remind you that now is the time to create your true best version possible agency. If you go to sitkins.com bookacall sitkins.com bookacall we'll get to know more about your agency, conduct an agency assessment and provide your agency with a customized plan to help you avoid some of the pitfalls, frustrations, challenges and roadblocks to get your agency to true ultimate freedom and become its best version possible. It all starts by going to sitkins.com bookacall so I'd like to know too just from again and we could take this, you know, this conversation or if you want to go somewhere else just overall I always, I always like to ask guests about agency success, you know, where you see success because to me it's how do you replicate that? And of course you know you dealing with all kinds of agencies and insurance professionals, you see it what would be an example or two and of course this could be super recent in the last few years of where agencies have really you've seen maximize success and do some of the really cool things to drive their agency forward. Steve?

Well, I think, I think a key to success and it's always been this is having processes and systems in place. So and that really touches every agency. I think most agents think of that when I say that comment. They think of procedures, right procedure guides, etc. Which are actually really important. What I, what I see the less successful agencies is that they allow their staff to do whatever they want instead of enforcing. Here's how we do it here now how you do it here. You know we talk about best practices and, and and all of that, which is okay place to start. And if you can enforce those, those step by step procedures, you know what's happening consistently. And that impacts data quality, which impacts reporting, which, you know, all kinds, it's just cascades from there. And some of the AMS vendors are getting a little bit better at really kind of helping the agency enforce step by step processes. Yeah, I think that also goes into the marketing side. So I've been an advocate, you know, I've been around long enough that I actually started using marketing automation in the early 90s. And at that time there wasn't email.

Think about it.

Yeah, I printed, I printed letters every morning based on a system that said, okay, here's the touch for this prospect. Today I printed all those letters out. I physically signed them, had a folding machine, folded and put it in a mambo, put a stamp on them, mailed them out. I had a campaign, still the same name, a campaign that would touch prospects 12 times a year. So when I first identified them as a prospect, I wanted to go after and tell three months before when the letter would go out, hey, I've been keeping in touch, you know, your renewal, best of my knowledge, comes up in three months. Let's set up a time to talk. I don't know if I can help you or not, but at least let's explore that possibility and I'll call you in a day or two to follow up or in the meantime, you know, feel free to call me to schedule a time. What was interesting is, and you know, this, I mean, this is sort of standard stuff now, but agents still don't do it. That's part of the problem is I will get calls in maybe month four. Hey, I've been getting your letters. You know, you, you, you're the only agent who ever has consistently followed up with me and I had a claim that wasn't covered and I'm really pissed at my agent and I want to talk to you. Great. Are you free? You know, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, today it's email. And actually here's what I, I think, and I don't see this very often, stop sending emails or, or stop sending as many emails when you're prospecting. Send a video mail. So we've heard about video proposals, right? But step back to a prospect. How much more likely are they to click on a link or look at your video if they get an email with your smiling face saying hi and literally a minute, 90 seconds. Hey, I'm Steve Anderson. We've identified you as A potential prospect for insurance. Know if that makes, you know, whatever the script is, you know, and it takes a little time. It probably takes less time to do that than it is to type out an email, but. And what kind of impact you get? I, I, I, I defy people to believe that a prospect won't click on the, the thumbnail that's in the email to view the video. And I, I, I'm doing it as much as I can. Even answering emails, I do it by video. It's faster, quicker, it's more personal. We say we're in the relationship business, but we hide behind email. So anyway, that's a rant.

Well, I, a million percent agree. Yeah, I mean, it's super easy to send an email. It's also super easy not to read one.

Right. And I might even say it's easier to delete it than it is to send it.

But 100%, I mean, I know you do, too. I mean, I get a bazillion, you know, market, and it's like them, it's just the same thing. And you know, even, even when I get, you know, the marketing stuff, if I get one that, like you said, has the video or maybe it's got the little clip there, the play button, and, you know, all of a sudden a little bit of work and effort of, hey, Brent. And like, oh, like you did a little work here. I appreciate it.

And it's personal. It's not, you know, again, there's some AI stuff where, you know, it's kind of.

Yes.

Allowing you to merge, you know, stuff, and I'm not there yet. I still think it's helpful to have that. It's me. I want to talk to you. I mean, it's kind of like being at the baseball game, handing your card to somebody. You've got a connection there.

Yeah, it's, you know, one thing too. I don't know if you do this, Steve, because you do a lot of video stuff. And as you said, I mean, first of all, obviously, not only is it different, but people see your body language, they hear your tone of voice. Right. That's part of communication. Even on LinkedIn. Right. Sending messages. You could do audio or video stuff.

Yes.

And it's just different. Like, quit. Could be. I'll say quit being lazy. Just step it up a little bit and put a little work into it. And maybe for me, it's the opposite. I don't know how you are, Steve, but I hate typing stuff, so it's much easier for me to pop on a camera and say something for 60 seconds anyway. But I, I think the thing I want to, I want to hit on there, maybe reiterate is you talked about processes and systems in place. I don't know if you find this as true and obviously it depends on the size and scope of the agency. But so many agencies, and you said this earlier, you know, someone that's running the agency started off selling insurance and now they're running an agency and you know, AKA they've got a producer mind. And I love producers. I've got a producer mine. Fantastic. But not always the best at processes and systems. And what I heard on here is just, you know, giving your agency some standards or some guard rails because, you know, I'm probably speaking for me here, but I think about how much time do people waste time looking or doing stuff they've already done before, then they have to go back and recreate it again. So I don't that that speaks to you at all, Steve. I just if that mindset and maybe how you help agencies just with that, some of the structure and processes themselves.

Well, something that comes to mind is when an agency grows to the point I'm, I'm becoming more convinced that maybe one of their early hires is a coo, you know, maybe called office manager at a lower level, but somebody who's responsible for running and installing and maintaining and updating those systems. Because again, if it is a producer mindset, more than likely the detail is not the strong suit. Right. So you need somebody that can do that.

Yep.

And, and the, and, and again, when you talk about more successful agencies, you know, that, that mindset of bringing in the skills I don't have, being able to recognize here's what I'm good at and here's what I'm not good at and bringing in the skills at what you're not good at so that the organization can continue to grow 100%.

And you know, I know there's scale to this. Right. And there's time involved and as you work through stuff, but 100%, I mean the one thing that I continue to see and notice is the agencies that are larger in scale and are quite frankly having higher success, their leaders do less.

Yeah. Because they stay out of the way.

They're very good. I mean very quickly. And some of that is swollen the ego and saying I'm not very good at that. So that is my next hire or that person will do that or that department. And yeah, I've got to have an overview of stuff, but not touching it Right. I get in my own way. I got to stay out of that meeting. You know, there's so many ways we could, we could go on this. So you said something, Steve, I do what I wrote down. I wanted to get more your perspective on this. And I don't know if you said it this way, but this is my word. So many agencies know they should do stuff, but they have a hard time executing on it. Now, I know that's a broad, you know, broad statement, but we see it all the time, right? And in fact, I tell people in our trainings, there's gonna be a lot of things that you're gonna hear. You go, I know that, I know that. But the question is, are you doing that? And if you are, how well are you doing it? So where do maybe you see some. And again, the way I want to word this is some, some disruptions between ideas and execution where, where agencies or professionals get, get stuck.

I don't know. Lots of thoughts. I think where they get stuck is there really is a difference between knowing what to do and knowing how to do it. So I kind of go back to, you know, that skill set that, that really is an implementation type of skill set. The other thought I had when you're talking is this is again another potential use case for AI in that record you or one of your staff going through a, you know, certificate, let's just say, easy, right? Here's how. And just talking through and literally record on a screen, transcribe that, run that through AI and tell it to create a standard operating procedure out of this recording. This is this function. I think one of the things that has historically at least been really difficult is creating those procedures. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And you know, again, a whole process around getting buy in from the staff on this is our procedure. Well, no, I think this is a better way. Okay, maybe let's talk about it. And if it is, we'll have it implemented for everybody. But that takes a real. That's not even implementation. That's change management. That's, that's managing your agency and your staff. And again, I, I don't know if I said this out loud, but I thought it. Too many agencies are run by staff, not by whoever the owner leader is, because they don't do. I said it before, and I'm sure everybody does their own thing because they think it's the right way versus this is how we do it. And that's why data integrity, data quality, all of those issues are really big issues. And they have been for a Very long time because the agency's not managed to maximize that. And, and if your data's bad, all kinds of problems arise from ENO coverage stuff, from not being able to understand and get reports and operate all of that and, and moving systems. I mean, data, you know, data conversion is a huge problem. So I, I just think it's. And, and I, I'm kind of the same way. I mean, even with, with Catalan, it was bringing in people who could do what I'm not good at. I'm good at the ideation, the vision, the. Here's what I think we need to do. And bringing in other people to execute the very specific steps that need to move that vision forward.

Yeah, no, Steve, so many great thoughts there. And I don't want to make. This isn't about me, but it's just funny because I can think back, I don't know, a year or so ago when I'm working on stuff and I said, I'll write out this process. And our, our great CDO is like, I know what you're doing. Why don't you let me work on that? Like a day later, it's all done and streamlined. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's what I was thinking. So, you know, to have someone help you with that, I'm like, thank. Thank you. My brain doesn't work that way. I, I wanted to make comment too. I mean, because you said so many important things and of course you're mentioning data. You know, we see this in our world too, whether it's a renewal or a sales process. And we'll talk to an agency early on, like, could you tell, you know, tell me about. You can just say renewal process and well, Sheila does it this way and John does it this way. And you know, you know, down the stream you go, and you're like, well, what is it? Well, there's similarities, but they're all a little bit different. And you know what I found? It's really hard to replicate that. It's really hard to train around that. It's really hard to grow the agency around that because someone new comes in. It's like, well, what is it? Well, it depends who you talk to. You. And there's just a lot of disjointness, you know. I agree.

I think the other thing too, that again, I'm thinking of a particular agency I recently worked with. When was the last time you re examined what you do? So, you know, the question always is, do you still need to. You may have made a decision five years ago. This is how we have to do it. Because something, a carrier requires, something that didn't work quite as well, but you've kept perpetuating that. And then when new people come in, you train them on what maybe doesn't even need to be done anymore.

Right, right.

I mean, so I think reviewing on a regular basis and asking the question, why do we do that?

Yeah.

And is there a good reason? Or. And, and by the way, a good reason is not because we've always done it that way. Right.

The way we've always done it.

Oh, that's. We've always done it that way.

Okay.

I was trained.

Right. Yeah. So just so you know, my, my youngest daughter's seven, so we're kind of past that. But I've been through with enough kids. Of course, now you got grandkids, Steve, so maybe you have this as well. Your kids are a great example of that. Right. How much is. As parents, do you just kind of. Well, because my dad did it and then so I started to do it. Then your kids like, but why do we do that? You're like, well, because. And sometimes you stop and you're like, why do we do that?

We do that. Yeah.

That doesn't really make any sense. And obviously with agencies, it is an important question to step back and examine that of, you know, maybe we're asking the wrong question. Right. I mean, like you said, maybe the question is, well, how do we continue to do this? Well, maybe the question is, why are we doing.

Why are we doing it? Do we need to continue to do it? And again, I would add, you know, what new tools are available to streamline or remove or reduce whatever that step or process is.

It's. Yeah. And yeah, 100%. And it just, it takes the ability to sit back and really be a critical thinker and strategic thinking and being open to new ideas. It doesn't mean you're going to accept every idea. It means maybe there is something we're missing and you know, and I think part of it too, Steve, as you said it like, well, the staff doesn't run day to day, but they're in day to day. So get feedback. Hey, what have you learned? What have you experienced? What do you think we could do differently here and take all these and then, you know, hopefully create something that, that works certainly for your entire team. So I want to make sure we have enough time because you brought up Catalyt and as a co founder, you know, I'm looking on here and I'm looking at stuff and I'm like, I know it's cool, I know they do lots of stuff. I'm sure there's insurance agency leaders that, you know, some have heard of it, maybe some have it. So tell me an overview. What is it? What does it do? What's the purpose?

Well, it was really a couple unique things. One it was the initial idea was from big I state association execs. Three different execs were had strategic initiatives to help better help their agencies with technology. And you know, associations have not done a great job of that in the past. They wanted to change that. And so they approached me, said, you know, could you help? I said yes. So we went down this path of trying to figure out, okay, what does something like this look like and how do we make it sustainable? And so what we ended up with is a platform that is really a combination of do it yourself, do it with you and do it for you. So kind of different levels, different costs associated. But basically what we do is we help independent agents understand technology. I mean really look at the landscape. Okay, what's out there? Because if somebody says like even AI, okay, I, I don't know what is all this stuff or, or who are the new vendors that do some AI stuff? Who should I look at? So we help them discover what's out there, what the universe is, we help them evaluate that, we help them select what's best for them and then we help them implement it to get the return or the benefit that they anticipate. And a lot of that's change management, et cetera. So how we do that is our website continues to be building. We really track every single solution, what we call solution providers that have a product, platform or service that might be of interest to independent agents. And that's primarily technology related. So and we track like 28 different categories of technology. So websites and certainly ams and quoting platforms for personal and commercial and Right, all cyber, all kinds of different things. So they can go in and see who's there, what we call the players. And then we've done the work on their behalf to get more information about all the players. So we create what we call a grid. So along the top are all the solution providers, along the left hand side are what do they do or questions, you know, do they, are they web? Whatever the every question is different depending on the category. And then we kind of use a simplified green dot means yes they have it, blank means no they don't, yellow means some form of it. So a quick glance and then the agent can drill down further into those that they want to explore deeper. And so connections and websites and things like that. So that's kind of the, the self service piece.

Yeah.

And then every month we do couple of events. One is live, what we call catalyt live, which is training on some topic, again, technology focused. The second is what we call demo lounge, which is we ask solution providers to actually do a demo of their product and we record it and put it in a vault. So again, another tool for the agent to use so they can go in and get a look at whatever the service is as they're trying to decide whether they want to go deeper. And so basically what we do is we help agents reduce the amount of time to find the solutions that they might need in their agency.

Yeah, it's super, super powerful and fast and obviously very well needed in the marketplace. I mean, you said at the end that I was writing down, I'm like, gosh, what they do is they reduce insurance technology decision fatigue.

Yeah.

And because there's a lot of that, should I do this or what about that? Or what's new? And it as you know, it changes so fast.

I go to a conference and I hear some agents say, this is the greatest thing I've ever had. And now I go back and buy it and it sits because nobody's implementing it. It wasn't right for me for whatever reason. So really maximizing their return. And I would say the other thing too that we do that's unique is we do two things. One is an assessment. So it's an agency technology assessment. Agency can complete it, get a report back on where they stand in their use of technology in their agency. And it's really based on four milestones, what we call on a success journey. So the milestones are basic. What's the minimum technology you need in an agency? Best is next and then beyond. So best is best practices. You know, kind of the first two are kind of two levels. You know, where do you, where do you start? And then what's kind of the next step? Yeah, and then beyond is. Okay, what. The way I think about it is what will become best practices in the future? What should you be looking at and planning for? Maybe not this month, maybe not this year, but it's on the radar. I certainly is one of those that's in that category. And it's helping agents on a organized process. So you can't do everything at once. You'll get overwhelmed, you won't do it, you won't finish. We talked implementation before, so we're trying to help them actually make good decisions that actually impact their agency. So that's the assessment and then we do what we call a tech stack survey. So what are you using and how satisfied are you? One to five stars. And that's really interesting because now I believe Catalyt has the best information on market share and satisfaction with products. And we publish that annually in a report, the state of independent agency technology report. And, and if you're listening to this, you want to see it, you can go to the Catalytic website. It's freely available and actually the, the, the next one should be coming out probably in a month or six weeks.

Okay. And that's, I was going to ask you maybe answers kind of where, where do people go? So the Catalyt website is the Catalytic.

And it's, you know, the name's a little strange. So think of it this way. It's catalyst for change, it for technology. So it's cattle lit with an it at the end. Yeah.

So I was going to ask you where you came up, how this thought of it. So it's actually we came up with.

It because the domain was available.

But you're like, hey this works and we can blend it. Then, then you realize, wait a second, we might have to explain that to everyone if they don't see it.

But no Catalytics, you know, but yeah.

It'S got a, it's got a Y and an I in there. So yeah, C a t a l y-I t.com so catalyt.com I'll make sure to put that in the show notes as well, Steve. But for agencies, I, I'm fascinated, interested. I know agencies.

And here's the other thing. So you know when you go to the site you can sign up for a free account. It gives you limited access but when you do, there are, and I don't know the number right now we are, I say we are In, I think 28 state associations. Some of those states actually provide Catalyt as a member benefit. So you may already have access and you, you can find that out on the website. We'll tell you what states then like Texas, New York, Wisconsin. You, you mentioned Matt, Matt was one of those original three that came.

I can see that.

Sure. And so yeah, so you may already have access to the full catalyt services depending on your state association. And more are coming on because again the states are seeing this is a great tool to help their members.

Yeah.

With technology.

That's, it's a great service and tool, Steve. And it really is about adding value to agencies, which you're all about. So. Super cool. So, yeah, go check that out. That's great. That, hey, I might get this. You don't have to pay for it.

You might already have it. That's right.

What a good deal. I didn't even know that it's a freebie. It's Christmas, whatever. So very good. Steve, do you have another five minutes or so?

I do, if you're willing to go. I do.

I want to hit on a couple things. And one, and this really is about you in this book. I know you're smiling here. And I showed Steve this before we started. Like, I was like, I got this book right away and I read it and I enjoyed it. It's been out for a few years now, but the Bezos letters. And I'll just read the subtitle. 14 Principles to Grow your business like Amazon. And I know for me, I'm like, hey, I want to grow my business like Amazon. So, you know, Steve, I guess where I'm at in this, I know you've had conversations. I'm curious, why did you write the book? And just what have you learned now? It's been out for a while and the conversations you had. So just, just two questions and then of course, take it wherever you want.

So the, the, again, long story. I'll shorten it behind the book. It really grew out of my work with insurance technology because a number of years, you know, again, the book's been out five years now and actually I'm working on a. An updated edition to it. So I'm. When that'll come out. But to be.

To be continued.

To be continued. And, and a potentially second book too. But I have an idea. So, so we all know technology, you know, develops rapidly, continues, has. I mean, it, it's not slowing down. It's probably not going to. And I started asking the question for insurance agents, is the biggest risk they face actually not taking enough risk? The agents who sit back and don't do anything, oh, that's a fad. Or, you know, AI, that's stupid. I'm not going to do anything with that. They may face the biggest risk because technology continues to develop. They're not, you know, and again, they don't need to be on the leading edge. They need to be aware of what's happening. So I started researching companies, two different kinds. One, companies that have. Were very successful and are gone. And we, we have a long list of those. Right. What happened? Companies that have been successful and Continue to be successful. Why? And again, we can point to several. I came across the letters to shareholders that Jeff Bezos wrote starting in 1997 and the book actually goes through the 2018 letter. He subsequently wrote the 19 and 20 letter as CEO and then he stepped aside and I ended up reading all those letters in order like a book. And I realized there were threads through the letters because what Bezos did was he certainly talked about, which is typical in a shareholder letter, how you know the company and milestones and how they've grown and. Right. All those kinds of things. What he did was that was different and frankly more like Warren Buffett. He talked about how and why and those were the threads that really intrigued me and those ended up being the 14 principles. And so my first iteration of that book was a PDF Legion, one page summary of the letters, kind of key ideas, key quote. Here's some takeaways that you might apply. Fortunately, my wife Karen is in the book publishing business and has been for a long time. So I showed it to her thinking saying, you know, I, I'm, this is really good stuff. I'm, I'm pleased with this. And she looked at me and she said that's not a Legion, that's a book. And if you. I kind of went, I don't know how to write a book. She does so she helps. So her name's on the book. But that led a probably 18 month journey of taking kind of that concept and fleshing it out and then writing the book. I've been pleased and surprised. Wall Street Journal, USA Today bestseller when it launched and it's now been translated into 21 languages worldwide. So and again Amazon Bezos people like you said, who doesn't want to learn how Amazon did it? And so, so that was somewhat strategic. But the topic I think was to me just really interesting.

Yeah, it's, you know, Steve, thanks for sharing that. And again, go go check out the book and we'll put a link in for that. Steve will try to give as many plugs as we can here. You're providing great value. But outside of the fact that I just you reiterated the fact that our wives are smarter than us is what I took from some of that.

Isn't that the truth?

Well, they see things we don't see. Right. Which is great is that I just find always fascinates me and interesting is just that when you, your story there is hey, that's interesting. I want to know more about that and you take it a step further and I'll do This and I'll do this. And yeah, that's the idea. I'm going to write a book on these 14 letters. It's. I'm interested, I'm curious about something and it develops deeper and you research and you study and now you take all of that, and this is why I love books, is that you can take. I'm not gonna, I don't know if you know how many hours of thought and research work and it goes to a book and you get to talk about, you know, there's a, there's a different form of AI. It's called a book. All the stuff that's been in Steve's mind for years and the conversations and all that, now it's sitting there and you go, huh? And of course, as you said, it obviously relates to Amazon and they've done okay.

Yeah, they've done all right. Yeah, still do okay.

So they're, they're doing, they're doing okay. In fact, I give Amazon credit. I mean, I think I bought paper, paper sandwich bags for it this morning because I was just like, hey, we got to get this in two seconds. They'll be shipped to my house tomorrow.

So, like you go, well, and, and just a few weeks ago I went. Both Karen and I went to a fulfillment center that's close to us, 45 minutes away. But it's, it's called a Generation 11 fulfillment center, which again, started with Generation 1. And they've improved as they go along, but, but primarily robotic, which is why I wanted to go there. And again, fascinating to see if anybody gets a chance. And you're really curious how a package gets from a click on a website to your front porch and sometimes hours.

Yes.

They have a logistics system unparalleled anywhere. I mean, stuff coming in, getting picked, putting in packages and how they keep track and all of that. It's just, it's fascinating. And it's fascinating to me how they've built multiple businesses.

Yeah, right.

So we think of Amazon, as you said, the retail store. Right. But AWS Prime. Right. All kinds of different things. And all of those have a story behind them that business wise are counterintuitive. Bezos didn't do things like most business owners do. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons they've been so successful.

Yeah, I, this is a. Probably a pretty far aside, but they're just, as you said, it caught my, caught my eyes and ears. I was at a, this has been several years ago. I was at an association event speaking, and a very successful agency leader Was doing really, really well and had a chance to sit down and we were just chatting. Of course, I always ask questions like, hey, what's, you know, if you say the one thing that's really contributed to your growth, what is it? And he smiled. Of course, this is tongue in cheek. But it was funny, kind of based on what you said. He looked around the room and he said, do you see most of the people in here? I said, yeah. He goes, I just generally do the opposite of everything they're doing. And. Yeah, and he laughed. And it's, you know, it's. There's, there's a lot you can learn from that. So that was my way of trying to plug in the fact that there's so much in here of thinking differently and creatively and, and yeah, and I just. It's funny, you said the logistical part of that. I think it was just last week something showed up at our doorstep. My wife was like, I just ordered that this morning.

Right?

I'm like, we live in a small town. I mean, it's like, how did that, How'd that happen? Yeah, so I have to go check that out.

How that happened is, you know, 26 years and billions of dollars.

Sure, sure. Yeah. It didn't happen overnight, but it's still, still mightily impressive. All right, Steve, I have one final question. Are you ready?

I am.

It's a question I ask to every guest. So I appreciate you taking part. Answer the best you can. And maybe you prepared, maybe you haven't. But the question I always ask is if you were today, somehow, magically, maybe it's Amazon, I don't know, magically, come face to face with the younger version of you. Maybe as you were starting your professional career years ago, and the younger version of you looked at you and said, oh, wise and good looking older Steve, if you give me one piece of advice, what would it be? What would you tell your younger version of yourself?

Don't wait to be picked. Pick yourself. Don't wait for someone to validate you. Don't wait. You have an idea, go for it. And I would say, and this, this comes from the book or from Amazon to. The other thing is, don't be afraid of failure. You know, my first principle in the book is encourage successful failure. Long story behind that, but we won't go into. But there are things I didn't do because one, I maybe didn't know what to do. I didn't feel capable of doing it. And moving forward is more important than always thinking you have to do it. Right. Oh, I love it.

It's really good. I mean, there was never a wrong answer when I asked that. But I'm saying I, I, I, I. It hit me because again, there's two things I think, I think every human's probably guilty of that to a degree. And one of my favorite quotes is that if you don't place a high value on yourself, rest assured the world's not going to raise the price.

Right.

And, and that's in essence what, what you said there. But I, it also takes me to, and this, I want to relate this to the audience for a second because I do mean this when I say this. I'm sure, you know, Steve told me this has been true for you in working with at this point, hundreds and hundreds and for you, Steve, maybe thousands of insurance agency leaders in particular or high level professionals. It's so interesting to me that I'll talk to those and they go, oh well, they must be so much more smarter or talented because of where they're at and they're usually not. Yeah, typically, no, it doesn't mean they're not smart. I don't mean that or talented. But it's interesting. Like the difference is that their mind, they're willing and able to take chances. They're willing, able to bet on themselves, put themselves out there and as you said, Steve, embrace failure, be okay with it. Yeah.

And again, I always like to say you don't seek out failure, but it's an if you're, if you're putting yourself out there, it's going to be a part of what happens. And so, you know, maybe be sad for a little while, get over it, make the next step.

Yeah, get back on the bike. Well, Steve, thanks so much and you put some extra time into this and I appreciate it. This was fascinating conversation. I knew it would be, I knew it would be fun. I knew it would be good. You over delivered. We appreciate it and I just want to thank you. Any final, final words you'd like to share before we depart and say goodbye?

Steve, thanks for having me. At first. I really enjoy these kind of conversations, you know, and I think for, again the audience is, you know, I feel like there's uncertain times now and between technology and all kinds of other things. And remember you got through all kinds of stuff in the past. We'll get through this going to the future. So keep that in mind. And again, don't be afraid of failure.

Good stuff. Steve, thanks so much. Appreciate you listening and continue to subscribe. Download all that stuff that people do with podcasts. We appreciate you Steve. Again, thanks for being here and for you the Agent Leader wish you all the best in your success. Thanks for listening. The Agent Leader Podcast is brought to you by the fine folks, the Rough Notes Company. They're publishers of the insurance industry's leading magazine and technical insurance content. Rough Notes Magazine profile successful agencies plus keen insights from respected experts on a host of must know topics. Rough Notes Advantage plus provides the tools to help your agency grow, providing authoritative information on complex coverage issues. Visit them and learn more@roughnotes.com wait, you're still here? Hey Agent Leader Podcast listeners, Brent Kelly again, I want to first of all, thank you for listening to the Agent Leader Podcast and your continued support. If you would like to have more content come your way, please help us by sharing the podcast, subscribing to the podcast, telling people about the podcast and if you as an Agent Leader are truly ready to take that next step in your agency, you're committed and want to be that best version possible. Agency don't wait. Go to sitkins.com book a call sitkins.com bookacall we want to provide the blueprint for your agency to help you create more impact with less effort. And it all starts by going to sitkins.com bookacall all right, now you can actually go. Thanks.