Average Is Full: The New Standard for Elite Agencies

Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. This is the podcast for independent insurance agency leaders to raise the bar, to challenge your thinking, and to ultimately become your best version possible. My name is Brent Kelly. I am your host, delighted to be with you, and super delighted to have a guest who really needs no introduction, but I'm gonna give him a slight one here anyway, and someone who's been on this podcast numerous times, but it's been quite a while. He is the Founder and CEO of the Sitkins Group, an organization that I know pretty darn well. Also a mentor of mine. Welcome into the podcast, Roger Sitkins.

Brent, thank you. It's great to be back with you again. And I'm, I'm excited about our topic.

Well, as you could probably imagine, being the fact that I'm the president of the Sitkins Group and Roger's the CEO, we have a lot of conversations. And you said something to me that I was like, huh, that's pretty interesting. We should have a, a deeper conversation on that. And here's what you said to me, and I'll shortly share with the audience, and I want you to expand upon this. You said, you know, Brent, average is full. Average is full. So, Roger, help me and the audience understand more what you mean by average is full.

There's no shortage of average agencies. So people go, oh, we're, you know, we're, we're pretty average. And the reality is average in our business is very good. Personally, for the owners, it's a pretty good return. But the reality is it's average growth, it's average margins, it's average producers, it's average accountability. And the reality is that average is very good in our business. But average does not lead to the freedoms we talk about. The freedoms we talk about are financial freedom, time freedom, and relationship freedom. And so agencies that are average are kind of just floating along doing whatever else is doing. And when you're average, you don't differentiate. And to me, one of the big things is you don't really compete very well because they literally hear, well, you insurance people are all the same. So people have fallen into this Good results trap. Well, the good results are average, but they're not peak. They're not elite. And we want to challenge people and are challenging them now to, it's time to be elite and really get the return and the freedoms that your work is aimed towards if you'll redirect your efforts.

And, you know, again, I'm just playing along here. Average is full meaning that again, there's, there's a lot of agencies that, that play in that space. And quite frankly, they are doing Pretty well. Good enough. But, you know, I'm thinking about this, Roger. Why is it, and again, this isn't to discredit some agencies, it's just a fundamental truth. It's something that you see that I see all the time is where do you see the separator? And maybe it's mindset outside of behavior, but why is it some agencies go, you know, I'm pretty good, but I know there's even a better version of us and me. And some go, yeah, I'm good.

Well, because good is pretty good. That's what it comes back to. I had a discussion with a really great young agency owner. He took over a family business. This was middle of last week. And overall it's a nice agency. It's a great lifestyle agency, but he was really committed to getting better, which I love. You know, I want those young owners that say, okay, this is what my dad and grandpa did forever, but I want to take it to the next level. And I was asking, I said, well, tell me about your agency now. They're at $1.5 million of revenue. But he was grossly overstaffed. So his revenue per employee was not nearly where it needed to be. But then I said, well, how much money did you make last year? And he said, including my bonus, $400,000. I said, that's pretty good. And I think about it afterwards going, no real business plan, no accountability, no anything. And they're just kind of floating along. But he also said, I know, and he obviously had read our book because he said, I know there's a best version possible of me sitting out there. And I want to talk to you guys about How I could commit to get better. So that's a mindset. How good do you want to be?

Again, it's interesting. I think about this, you know, obviously, you know, we'll talk about the insurance agency perspective because that's the majority of the listeners, but you see this in all walks of business. You think that, see this in sports, right? You get to levels and go, okay, that's good. And it just always fascinates me of why some people continue to ask more questions and dig deeper and, and all these things. There might be a number of reasons. And, and, you know, I think one of the things that I was going to ask you about too, because you had, talk about not only this idea of average is full, but what does the best version, not only behaviors, but some of the outcomes look like. And I think maybe for some of the agency leaders, I'm sure they would find this interesting because I found this interesting that you have some metrics that you look at. And I'd love you to kind of go through those. You talk about these as 15, 30, 300. So you could take them one at a time or all at once. I don't care, Roger, but help the audience understand what do you mean by this?

One of the things that you and I have been sharing for about 6 months now with our attendees is the concept of standards. You see standards, individual standards. And I kept looking at that more and more, and it really hit me when I realized that the original study that I ran across said that 8% of people hit their goals. And I wonder if that's not really 8%, it's probably less than that. So let's say 8% hit their goals. But 100% of us live up to our standards. And so the reality is, is that maybe the standards just aren't high enough. And I said to myself, all right, what would an elite agency, a best version possible agency really look like? Because we always talk about the mindset, the beliefs, the behaviors, the results, but we haven't really in a long time challenged people on their KPIs. So 15, 30, 300 is something that, some of my thinking, How, how do you get to a 15% organic growth rate, a 30% operating profit, and a $300,000 revenue per employee? And of course, when you add those up, it's 3, 4, 5. So, you know, it's kind of, maybe that's our score. We could look at it and say, well, are you a 3, 4, 5 or a 1, 2, 7? But it's amazing in a good way, how, as we've been putting it out there with our agency leaders, our private clients, they're really buying in. In fact, at our, at our mastermind meeting last October in Atlanta when you led the session there and you talked about primarily just the $300,000 revenue per employee. And you talk about opening some eyes. Wow. It's really been interesting. So whole key thing is what's our standard? Let's get to 15, 30, 300.

Yeah. Well, I, I, I'd like to break them up a little bit, kind of take them piece by piece. And again, I think most people can say, okay, organic growth, 15%. That's pretty strong number. It's a great standard. 30% operating profit. Really nice standard. And as you just alluded to, we'll maybe spend some significant time talking about the $300,000 revenue per employee model, because there's so much to discuss there. But let's just start with the 15% organic growth.

Okay.

Give us an overview, because I have some people get where the best practices are.

Some people may not, but if you don't, as an agency leader, if you don't subscribe to Reagan's GPS, their growth and profitability study, the quarterly review, you should. And it's a white paper. It's available free of charge. Go to their website. They're great friends of ours. I really admire what they do. And all through up until last year, for, was it 4, 5, 6 years in a row, agencies were averaging double-digit organic growth. They were 10, 11, 12%. And a lot of that was the economy and a lot of that was rate, but it was still a real number. And now all of a sudden, as the market slowed down, as markets become soft on a lot of the You know, with the premiums now, we're seeing people aren't growing at that level. And the last number I saw from them for last year was 7.1% organic growth. Now that's still compared to most businesses. That's pretty good growth. When we look at it, we challenge our members, our private clients. As you know, right now, the average agency we're working with is at 12.48% organic growth. But for a long time, people were going 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. And, and the whole world changed. And, and I see a lot of people almost going into paralysis or panicking versus saying, okay, what do I have to do? And why am I not at 15%? And, and let's face it, Brent, as you well know, if it were easy to get to a 15% organic growth rate, everybody would do it. But the reality is that they could, I hate to say easily, because it's not easy. It takes true discipline, but the process to do it is pretty straightforward, as you know. That you can get to 15%, but you can't get to 15% doing business like you did last year to get to 7.1%. But it's very attainable if you focus on the right area. Something we talk about all the time, I know we've talked about it at least once on the podcast, I've heard you allude to it, is the concept of the ultimate growth strategy. And truly using the power of 80/20 is saying, okay, we're going to replicate something. What do we want to replicate? Let's replicate the top 20% of our customers. They're 80% of our revenue. Because when we do that, the numbers become very predictable and we'll absolutely do it. So the ultimate growth strategy, round out, retain, and replicate your A and B accounts. Pretty straightforward. Then of course, I know we'll talk a little bit more about the Sitkins principle analysis where we've taken Pareto's and gone even deeper, but it's a matter of where do you want to grow? Where are your attention? What do I have to get focused on and who am I going to replicate?

The word you said there, Roger, I can't, I can't repeat it enough, is focus. I think that's a big part. I mean, listen, I mean, The stuff that we talk about with the private client members, and you said this before, Roger, most people are like, oh my gosh, I never in a million years could have ever imagined. But what it is about focusing on the right stuff at the right time with the right people. And you talk about 15% organic growth. Well, that is a significant number. Part of this, and you said this on a program yesterday, Roger, you know, how many realize you're a part-time producer?

And we said, by the way, your part-time job's paying pretty well. What happens when we get you in the green zone 80% of the time?

So you take this idea of, well, just getting in the game more, right? And there's different strategies we talk about with agencies to do that, but just, I got to get on the court. I mean, something I say all the time, it's pretty basic. You can't score points when you're not in the game. So you got to get in the game. And to your point, Roger, then to say, hey, let's identify the top amount of clients that we have, the top 20%, or even going even to top 10%, top 5%, but taking that top top quartile or top percentage of our clients and rounding them out and putting a retention strategy in and replicating them. And then a big part of that is just identifying who you want and setting your standards on that. And to me, it comes back to something you said years ago.

What'd you call it?

The world's greatest producer recruiting strategy?

Producer recruitment program. Get your current producers actually producing. And we laugh about it maybe, but the reality is, and Certainly, we pointed this out very clearly in the Sitkins Principle report that agencies have got 3 profit drains happening. And I know I've heard you talk about it on the podcast before, which alluded to one of them. We have profitable producers subsidizing unprofitable ones. We have profitable accounts subsidizing unprofitable ones, and we have profitable internal employees subsidizing unprofitable, unengaged employees. And then we wonder why we can't get to $300,000 of revenue per employee, because most of them are not engaged. The Gallup poll, the last one, I believe the numbers were that only 30% of employees are engaged. My math is right, that means 70% are not engaged and they're kind of floating along. And, you know, we've certainly talked about some of the things we've learned already when we've broken an agency down into the 4 tiers of top 25, next 25, next 25, and next 25. It's pretty scary when you see actual revenue per employee on what's happening in the bottom 50% of the customers. Realize it.

And just one thing I'll share, I put my coach's hat on for a second here and it's something I tell myself, you know, it's, it's, it, it feels like you're doing stuff and it feels good just to find other things that might fix the problem. But sometimes you just got to look in the mirror and go, the problem is the thing that I'm most scared to fix and, or most challenging to fix or most uncomfortable maybe to fix. And what you said, Roger, that we joke about it, get your current producers to actually produce, that can be uncomfortable. But it's just the reality of it until we address it and face the facts, uh, you know, and again, this is me kind of going off the cuff here, but I guess you could just find more producers to be part-time producers too. Yeah. Right. Maybe you get lucky once in a while and find that diamond in the rough, but it's not likely. And so what are you replicating and what's your model? So I'll take my coach's hat back off now.

Well, thank you. But, you know, again, getting to organic growth and we, we mentioned this, uh, with our sales leaders program we were doing this week and one of our, one of the agents we're working with, a little bit newer with us and haven't quite got everything going yet. It takes time. They said, well, last year, because one of the things we always ask about is what percent of your producers met or exceeded their goals. And this guy was very proud of it. He said, well, right now, he said, we are 100— last year we finished 155% of goal. So the first thing I said, were the goals too low? We looked at them. No, the goals were fine. And I looked at the list of their producers, 9 producers. Guess what? 7 of them didn't hit their goals. but overall they're at 155%. What happened was two of them just, just, just absolutely crushed their goals. I mean, one year was almost 3 times revenue goal. And I think he, I think his goal was $150,000 to like $450,000. Okay. He got quote unquote lucky on some big accounts. No, he wrote some big accounts he's been working on for years. You know, the attitude we have is every great account will eventually move. When they move, we'll be the logical next choice. Don't, don't think just because you can't get them this year, you won't get them in future years. And, you know, putting my coaching cap on, people quit way too soon. They quit way too soon. They say no for the prospect. Then they wonder why they don't have organic growth at these rates. So getting to the point where they know some things they have to do to have this. Number one, they have to know how they're different. I let you always say this, you, you can't have a differentiated selling system unless you know how you're different. And when we challenge newer people that come into our program and say, what are your points of differentiation? Freight Service, Freight People represent all the carriers, you know, laugh about those before. That's not what gets you there. It's having a repeatable unique selling proposition. One that when you're out there talking to future ideal clients, not suspects or prospects, future ideal clients, they literally say, wow, no one's ever brought that up before. I've never seen that before. Huh? You guys are different. Then you win the game because you've used the phrase we hear a lot, change the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then of course it comes down to the, to the future ideal client. Do you really know who you want to go after? And are you targeting them? And are you following, in our case, the reverse referral process so that when you're visiting one of your best clients or centers of influence, you've done the research to know, you know this, I know this guy knows 4 of the people on my future ideal client list. I'm going to ask them for an introduction to them or a referral. It only works about 80% of the time, Brent, so I can see why people wouldn't do it.

Well, I'll make one last comment.

We'll move forward.

But I mean, all those things you're saying is about being intentional, right? It really is. I know it sounds basic, but there's a lot of power to it.

All right.

The 15%, the 15 stands out. Let's go to the 30, which goes back to, it's not just what you make, it's what you keep. And this is about profit. So share more about the 30 of the 50%.

Well, the 30 is about operating profits. You take operating revenue minus operating expenses. It gives you operating profit. And in other words, we're saying there's no investment income. There's no contingency/profit sharing income. It's pure operating revenues, because in an average agency, 6 to 8% of their revenue, according to best practices, comes from investment slash contingency. So the beauty of the way we look at it is that 6 or 8% of additional revenue is 100% profit because we're not allocating expenses against it because we don't consider it. So we look at this and people go, how in the heck can you get to a 30% operating profit? And you, I'll say, how many of you would like to know? How to get to a 30% operating profit? Like if I'm giving a keynote, all the hands will go up. I'll look around and say, you can only spend 70%. People will go, ah, well, the thing that we look at when we're doing planning, as you well know, is we make the bottom line the top line. So the goal is 30% operating profit. That means we can spend 70. How do we spend that 70? And most people just don't think of that. The profit is kind of like, well, that's what was left. Versus purposefully pursuing, hey, we, we're operating to a 30% profit. So no, you can't spend that money. No, you can't add that employee unless we can prove how to get the other $300,000 revenues we'll talk about here. But it's so intentional on, I could only spend 70%. I could only spend 70%. And once we get to that and people think that way and they make decisions that way, It's pretty cool because the first thing they're looking at is profit, not the last thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And I know there's more depth to go there, but it'll get into the last number. But again, what I heard there is again, something you talk about all the time, the business model. I mean, it's actually planning towards a model. And if you don't have one, you know, as you say, like, well, what's your, what's your profit? Uh, 17%. Well, we don't really have a business model. Yeah, you do. That's the one.

It's probably my favorite saying now. And you've repeated it several times, I know, but Your current business model is perfectly designed for you to achieve the results you're currently achieving. And that's when people always look at us and go, we don't have a business model. Yes, you do. It's just unintentional. So your business model is to not have a business model. It's to not ask for referrals. It's to not have a selling system. It's not to rehearse, you know, it's not to have role-playing. It's not to hold people accountable. It's not to maximize your technology, but doggone it, I'm still making a lot of money. It's a great business. But let's maximize it. Let's take what is under most situations considered a great business, because it is. By the way, even though average is full, average, like I said earlier, is pretty good. It's not elite yet. And so the key thing is when we start looking at 345, 15, 30, 300, those are elite results.

Well, yeah, I was thinking here, you know, the 15% organic growth, the 30% operating profit, you know, those are in many cases kind of the end results, which are great, by the way. But I think what we've discovered and continue to learn is this next number, the 300, the 300, which I'll allow you to expand further, really becomes the catalyst to all of this. And it's what often creates, if we don't get to that number or a higher number, at least the friction points that slow down the organic growth that certainly can sabotage profits. So I'll leave this wide open because I know we'll probably spend a number of, a good amount of time here, but 300, not the movie The 300, but 300. What's this all about, Roger?

Well, the average agency in best practices results now, not average agency overall, average best practices is right at, you know, depending on the agency size, but right at about $250,000, maybe $260,000, $270,000 of revenue per employee. The bigger issue becomes, and this comes back to where we talked about profitable producers and profitable internal employees are subsidizing unprofitable ones. So then we start looking at it and we say, okay, revenue per employee. How do we possibly get that done? And this is when we When we created the Sitkins Principle Analysis, and then in that one of the first ones you and I jointly presented to one of our private clients, a $10 million income agency, we said, all right, we've got the 4 tiers and their agency was exactly what we see. 88% of the revenue from the top 25% of the customers, 8% from the next 25%. Okay. So the top 50% of the customers are 96% of the revenue. And in that one, we said, well, let's, let's break break this down and find out what our revenue per employee is. We said, we'll just take the top 50% and the bottom 50%. And in that quick analysis, rounding it off, the revenue per employee on the employees that worked on the top 50% was $340,000. The revenue per employee for the employees that worked in the bottom 50% were $30,000. So right away, that leads to not just revenue per employee, but spread per employee. Which is average revenue per employee minus average compensation. And so when we look at this and we say, okay, that's our revenue per employee. What's our compensation per employee? We have to be making a really nice profit there. Okay. When we get down to, we have revenue per employee of $30,000. I'll guarantee you every one of those employees is making more than $30,000. So we have a negative spread per employee. So we look at this and say, is it possible to get $300,000 revenue per employee? Yeah, because right now almost every agency, not all, but almost every that's listening, certainly in certain core parts of their business, have revenue per employee over $300,000. So this gets back to, do we have profitable people subsidizing unprofitable people? The answer is absolutely. Absolutely. And so now we start holding ourselves to a higher standard. One of the things that, that I love about standards is they become easier way to make decisions. So it's a decision-making tool, if you will. So if someone comes in, let's say you're an agency leader, Brent, and you've got a $7, $8, $9, $10 million income agency, and one of your managers comes in and says, hey bro, hey boss, I need to add 2 more people in our commercial lines department, service department. Well, in the past, you'd sit there and go, I wonder how I'm going to do that. How do we justify it? Why do you need them? And one of the biggest issues, and here's an average problem. We just throw more people at the problem.

Yep.

That's what an average agency does. Average is full of just throwing people at the problem versus solving the problem. So in the past, you might have just talked through process, et cetera. Well, now if you set the standard high enough, you would say, well, tell me exactly how those two people will allow us as an organization to increase our revenue by $600,000, $300,000 each. Of course, that's when they go, what do you mean? Well, If our standard's $300,000, how will they directly or indirectly impact revenue generation and retention that gets us to $300,000? And if the manager that's come in and has made the request cannot tell you the plan for that, you say, I'm sorry, you can't have them. That discussion blows people away. And when you alluded to that at our Atlanta meeting, what were some of the responses you received when you threw the big number out there? And these are our private clients. These are people that really get it, but they hadn't heard us preach 300,000 yet.

Yeah. I think the initial thought is, well, I don't know if that's possible. You know, I mean, initially when people hear that, especially they're doing 230, 240, 250, which as you said is pretty good, like it's right up there on top of best practices. And so, well, 300, oh, I don't know if that's possible. The Sitkins principle analysis and the conversation around it and what you're highlighting, Roger, and you said this in different ways, but like it highlights inefficiency. And that's the bottom line is like, well, no, 300 is very possible if you just look at maybe reallocation or at least a different way of thinking about how you're positioning your most important asset, your people, because you have an abundance of these people working on accounts that aren't making any money and you don't have enough people working on accounts that quite frankly you should replicate. So, I mean, there's a lot there and every agency has its unique story. And by the way, Roger, I just want to highlight to the audience, uh, we're going to be adding some tools, uh, and some diagnostic tools to our, uh, to our website. So if you go to sitkins.com/podcast, Sitkins.com/podcast. We'll have some information and resources there to go check out and just kind of see how your agency stacks up and where you're at. So I want to make sure I throw that out. But yeah, I think the, the answer going back to your question is, you know, initially it's like, well, let me, let me back up before that. Sometimes they go, I haven't really thought about that before. I don't know that I've really thought about, I mean, yes, I'm aware of revenue per employee, but as you went deeper, Roger, and spread per employee, then of course what that means, what we see in the tiers, it typically becomes the first time they've really ever thought about it in that way.

I kiddingly say it's sort of like the 4-minute mile. Someone had to be the first one.

Yeah.

And, um, when agencies really start taking a look at this and they say, how do I possibly do that? And I somewhat tongue-in-cheek say, well, take your total revenue, get out your phone, get on your calculator, take your total revenue, okay, divide it by $300,000. That gives you the number of employees you should have. Who's got to go or who's got to be reassigned, reallocated early, and we could do 2-hour podcast just on this, but when agencies really say, okay, I have to raise my standard and I have to get revenue per employee up to a much higher level because that drives, you know, everybody eventually leaves their business. When they do, as an owner, you want to get a great return. And the way that you're going to get the best return, of course, is get your profitability up. So every $100,000 of increased profit is anywhere from 1.2 to 1.5, again, whatever the number may be. Where we're increasing our value all the time. And one of the things that drags down the value is excess people. So if I look at that and say, well, I've got 47 employees now, but I really should have 31. That's a lot. And maybe I can't get to 31, but what if I could just get to 40 and reallocate, you know, one of the biggest jobs, we always say this, the biggest jobs of leadership are to develop their people, but it's also to reallocate assets and resources to get the best return. And all too often we see where they say, not only did we not know we were losing that much money down there, that's where all my HR problems are. And the other big thing, that's where the unengaged employees are. That's where you lose employees because you bring in a, a young person and there's no career path for them. Okay. And they just don't, they don't see the upward mobility. And so the ability to say, we have to restructure what we're doing. We may not get to $300,000 right away, but we have a purposeful plan of how we get there. We have a purposeful plan on an elite standard, if you will, where we say, okay, we have to make profit on every account. And sometimes, and this is not for everybody, but sometimes the only profit we can make is by getting rid of customers. That means service center where we keep the majority of the revenue, but get rid of the transaction, or we sell it. And we've had our members are doing a really, a lot of them are doing a combination of both, but it's getting totally focused on the top 25% to 50% of the customers. And if you have the others, which is most agencies will, just make sure you're making a profit on them. Right.

Right. Well, Roger, I have one more main question. Who knows? There might be follow-ups, but, uh, before I get to that, a couple of things I want to highlight. I mean, you talked about the numbers of this, which of course, I mean, it's millions of dollars in agency valuation. But one thing that you did say, uh, and I'll maybe just paraphrase a little bit, is that one thing that I, I have found too is when, when agencies raise the revenue per employee, because that number doesn't like, you don't get paid more money by having a higher revenue per employee. Like it doesn't like that. That's not, but it, it leads to so much, so much else, right? It's such a great indicator of results. And outside of just results, to me, it's been a great indicator of high-level culture. And you said that, right? A lot of the, the disengaged employees, the E&O problems. The ones that, let's face it, there might be some toxic people in your agency that, that, that impact culture. When this, when you look at the revenue per point, maximizing the effectiveness, effectiveness and the efficiency of your team, it improves the culture. And so yes, there's tangible numbers and value and money, which hopefully that's enough significance for you to think about this. But outside of this is that, what do you think the number one problem for most agency leaders is?

People.

It's hard to lead people. So it's just much more of a culture piece as well. I do want to say this. I know I've said this on another podcast, but I'll state it again. I think too many agency leaders ask the wrong question. And, uh, you know, it's one of those, it's not a bad question. It's just not the best question. And what most agency leaders ask and how they think is, how do I find more people? Right? And you said it earlier, how do I throw more people at my problem? But we never address the problem. The better question is, how do I optimize and maximize my current people in the structure that we have currently? Like, that's a better question. And, uh, I think oftentimes we kind of get ahead of that because, well, more people, more people, more people, more people. And really what you're adding is more problems, more problems, more problems. So anyway, I don't know if you want to comment on that, Roger, or not, but I just wanted to throw that out there. Yeah.

Well, it's underutilization of assets and resources. So it's underutilization of your people to start with, but then take things like all the tools that they pay for, all these apps that they pay for that get underutilized. What about their agency management system, their tech, their automation system? The average agency uses a little bit less than 50% of the capabilities of their automation system. Well, we've got it, but you're not making people use it. You're not holding people accountable. All right. It's got to be the technology first, the automation first. We mentioned already about, you know, the whole kind of beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes. And you go back and say, well, gee, you know, we have too many employees. Well, maybe you're underutilizing your technology. So what would tell us that is a low revenue per employee, but then we'd have to go deeper on numbers, getting productivity reports from our technology saying, are people using it right? Yes or no? Okay. And so there's so many things out there. And we talk about this all the time that the agency's responsibility is to provide tools, assets, resources, tools. It's the individual employee's job to actually use them to provide the behaviors. And we just see because we still get good results and a lot of leaders don't like conflict, they just kind of go, well, yeah, but we're doing okay. They don't realize that at the end of their career, they need to have a lot of choices. And what happens with average agencies is they do okay, but they don't, they haven't really had, especially the financial freedom they could have. They'll get a lot of money, but they could have gotten a lot more. And to me, it's what would you do with that? And what, what would you do if you had more? And who could you help? You know, I mean, who could you support? Your church, your community, your family, whatever. There's just so many things. I see people that at the end of their careers, they have regrets. And we challenge people all the time. Look, you're going to have regrets or re-greats. And the re-great is, man, it was great and I'm going to do more. End of sermon.

It's a great sermon. And I'm going to share something here to the audience and I'll kind of lead into my last question. So maybe you can expand on this, but you mentioned freedom, Roger Sitkins, and you know, the financial impact, the financial freedom, the time freedom. You know, I don't know how many times that we hear people say, if I just had more time and it's crazy and I'm putting out fires. And of course, you know, the relationship freedom, which is to me both internal to your agency, working with the right people and that culture we talk about, and then working with the right clients, which is so important because you probably know this too. I know some rich people that are miserable. So it's not just the money, but it all goes together. And I think what I want to share to the audience is again, I know there's a lot of really good agencies. Maybe even great agencies, but you may be looking for a higher standard, right? Maybe being more strategic, more intentional, more efficient, looking to kind of take a step back and go, huh, if we could really take this to the next level and not just for me, but for my team, for our clients, for whatever the purpose that really drives you, what would that look like? We'd love to have a conversation. And part of that is, and I mentioned the resources and tools, if you go to sitkins.com/podcast, Again, we'll have some tools and resources in there, uh, as well as a way to say, hey, is this something that's worth a conversation? Because, you know, Roger, you know this, and we're very intentional, very strategic on who we work with. And we're not for everybody. Uh, we're not. And we know by saying that, somebody will be like, okay. But that's the truth. But if you are an agency, you know, we're really good, but I think there's a higher level. That's where we really can help agencies take the next level. Cause you're going to take these metrics, Roger, that you talked about. and you're gonna maximize the heck out of 'em and you're gonna look back and go, wow, um, that really was a transformation point in our agency's path. So again, go to sitkins.com/podcast to learn more about that. And so here's my final question, Roger, uh, to lead this in. Why don't more agencies hit the 15, 30, 300? What's in their way?

Well, first of all, we're the first ones that have come out with that so that it's branded. It's the— that's fair. Model. Brent, because today 720, 250 is pretty good versus 1530, 300 because, and you know, I know some people go average is full. What does that really mean? It means that most agencies are average. It's kind of like where the world breaks out and they don't have to, and they're still going to do well. But the people that we work with don't want to just do well. I mean, they want to compete at the highest levels. They want to win. I know I've shared this a long time ago on the podcast, but just flashed to my mind that one time, two of my buddies that were both weight clients were golfing. We're on a driving range before we go out. And I looked at them, I said, hey, what's it all about? Is it about money or is it about winning? And they both stopped like mid-swing and went, winning! It's about winning! If you win, you get the money. And that's the type of person that, that will take a standard like this. They want to compete. They want to see how, how good they are versus others. And people that just want to float along, They'll do okay. But, you know, Nick Saban talked about this, that, you know, there's the highest standards. He said you can be really good in that. He said, but the best standard is elite. So, you know, we, we work with people that want to become elite. It's pretty simple because they challenge us too.

100%.

That's who I want to work with. That's the people that I want to help. That's people that we want to really transform their organization and we do it.

Well, and, and the magic of that too, Roger, and one thing I love about our community and our private client group is And not just obviously the interactions and the coaching and the training and all that's great. But you know, when you talk about a community and you put elite minds in a room, woo, right? That's, that's, that's the power of it. And, uh, you've heard me say this before, if you think you're the smartest person in the room, it's time to go find you a new room.

Absolutely.

And, you know, I'd ask that to agency. I'm the smartest guy in my area. Great. Go find you a new room. It helps you grow. That's where you grow. That's where you avoid complacency. Which to me is so, so exciting. So Roger, thanks as always for being a guest.

Well, it's my pleasure to be here. And bottom line is just keep in mind, average is full. I don't want to be there. I don't want to be there. So thanks, Brent.

All right. Well, hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, other episodes, give us a follow, a share, a like, whatever it is. We're on all podcast platforms and certainly want to grow this message in the audience as we move forward. And again, Roger, thanks again. For you, the agent leader, I wish you all the best in your success. Thanks for being a listener. 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.